Saving Grace.

Harnessing the spirit-power of the Native Americans from whom we borrowed our modern idea of gluttony and meat-savagery, I delivered the following address on the day of thanks:

"May our prayers this Thanksgiving go out to all the flightless birds of the world. So selfless, so unfit for life, so unnaturally selected. The poor ratites, the emu and ostrich, awkward and dinosaurian, fifteen year old girls who outgrew their peers in height and scrawniness but never developed breasts. The reasonably extinct kiwi and New Zealand owlet-nightjar who we unfortunately will never be able to thank in person. And all the millions of extinct and absurd flightless birds who, by freak genetic accident, egg-birthed their way onto the planet of men and, in their flightlessness and usually delicious fatness, disappeared forever after their cameos like Brando after that shitty heist movie with Edward Norton. Our thanks go out also to the penguin. Though you, penguin, are really no good to anybody, your unholy, shitty, miserable existence is symbolic of the plight of all flightless birds everywhere. And now to the most unnaturally selected of them all, the chicken and the turkey. Though not inherently flightless, you've been bred and hormone-injected by men to the point of unflyable obesity. And on this special day, thanks go to the turkey in particular, though, it's only by chance that so many years ago at the very first Thanksgiving the similarly unfit brown people couldn't afford quail, else today we may be able to thank a more respectable creature. But anyway, by whatever roll of the cosmic dice, we are thanking you turkey, despite the uncountable retarded things about you, because that's what America means to me."

Joyeux.

Today is the quarter-century anniversary of the day that signified the successful humping of my parents. They managed, correctly, to bump against one another in that awkward and inelegant way, mixing the chemicals that cause the reactions that make the new person. Then the man went to work to make the money to feed the lady to grow the child to spit out the baby so they could forget about it. Congratulations to them on their special day.

And, as the jillion-sided die bounces and wobbles to a stop, that baby is me. Here I am. Here we are.

Happy birthday to all of you.

Rowboat.

I must look ridiculous right now. I got biblically rained on leaving for work this morning, and I showed up for a "brainstorm" bright and early with the appearance and demeanor of a wet kitten. I've borrowed some clothing from coworkers and am now sporting a red and brown plaid shirt, an oddly-patterned black sweater and a green zippy-uppy polar fleece jacket. I look like I belong face-down in a rowboat next to a pool of post-drunken vomit and the naked body of a woman I've just killed.

At the moment, I might prefer that scenario to the gloomy halls of an advertising agency. Online advertising is on my shit list at the moment. Last Friday, I ordered tickets on Fandango for No Country for Old Men. On Sunday, a message showed up on my Facebook page that said "Evan bought No Country For Old Men on Fandango." I don't use the same email address for Facebook as I do for Fandango, so how the fuck did they make that connection? There must have been some sort of exchange of my personal information without my explicit consent. My guess is that somewhere in the Facebook Terms of Use, we inadvertently signed over all of our rights. I read that this new Facebook campaign might be illegal in New York, so hopefully someone with more initiative than myself will file a class-action suit on behalf of all of us. I want my seventy-five dollars!

For my part, I'm getting sick to my stomach about my job. For one of the accounts I work on, our "target" is fat, depressed, poor people. Even though what we're pushing might serve to make them happier, that's no excuse for helping someone exploit them to make them poorer and fucking Supercorp richer. I won't be doing this for much longer. (But how else do you eat in this town? A wise man once said, while shoving me out of the line for the bathroom at a Lower East Side dive bar, "you can't drink without pissing, motherfucker." It's true, but it doesn't tell the whole true. In this particular city, you can't drink without pissing on someone else's face.)

So I've been tossing around the idea of moving.

don't think twice, shoot thrice.

as if you don't already love america too much, enjoy the pathetic state of our media as you are forced to watch a commercial before being able to hear the details of a sextuple-murder-suicide from the wisconsin attorney general.

on that note, here's a cute little verse i've put together on just such a theme.
________________________________________________________

balance

"what do you think is worse," she said,
"being crazy or being dead?"

("who cares?" i said,)

"what matters, dear, is, by design,
we can't be both at the same time."

________________________________________________________

a thousand tiny satans.

i know it seems like it would go without saying, but i was explaining to my girlfriend this weekend that while i am made out of flesh and bone, which is made of fats and fibers and proteins, which are made of molecules which are made of atoms which are made of subatomic particles which some think may consist of infinitely small vibrating strings...she is made of a thousand tiny satans. she, being evil, took this quite personally. but it wasn't intended to be a personal attack. it was more an attempt to truly explain (in terms that a liberated, educated woman could understand) the difference between men and women. her base substance is sin. my base substance is universal truth. is it fair? probably not. but that's life. on the bright side, if a woman should succeed in manufacturing a baby, there is only a fifty percent chance that the tiny satans will be inherited. thank you, meiosis.

the saga continues. my strange cousin, between attemps at expelling body-thetans, is still communicating with me. on friday night, while i was in the movie theater (michael clayton--go see it), she called me three times. first from her phone, then from an unlisted number. eventually i answered, and she was calling to ask why i hadn't responded to her email (see previous post) and to make sure that she had the right "email number." at this point, a few things became clear to me:

1. she is not human.
2. she lives in a space cavern.
3. she sits indian-style in her space cavern all day, eating eucalyptus and reading my mind.
4. she sometimes inhabits my mind and makes me do shameful things.
5. she now goes by her space name which humans can't pronounce because they only have one throat.

i'm probably not going to survive her interrogations much longer. they will probably sick blackwater on me when i refuse to admit that each discontinuity in days of thunder was "intentional and comedic." i hear it all starts when beck's voicemail starts leaving messages on your voicemail. then you wake up on freewinds with a can of moxie where your prostate used to be, listening to jimmy buffett and being tickle-tortured until you admit that, technically, the story of xenu cannot be disproven. i'll be dead before you can count to ot-iii.

pranks against psychiatry.

so, the other day i get a call from a cousin of mine to whom i hadn't spoken in about eight years. word, as heard through the family grapevine, was that she was in clearwater training to be some sort of scientology priestess. i didn't know whether it would make her uncomfortable or not to bring this up, so we didn't talk about it on the phone. we exchanged news and the proverbial pleasantries (i don't know which proverb that comes from), and she sounded like a normal twentysomething who was doing a lot of traveling and enjoying herself. weird, yes: it was out of the blue. scientology-weird, no: an unspoken presence, maybe; the only thing a little odd about her was that i realized (as we concluded our chat by exchanging emails) that she had never heard of gmail. oh, also, "exchange" was misused there. i gave her my email. she didn't have one.

she wrote me today. not from her own email address, but from someone else's. (maybe she has to be supervised?) naturally, i googled his name. now, i've googled a lot of names in my day, and normally i expect to learn that a friend of mine shares his name with an australian soap star or college track and field champ. but this time i hit the jackpot. this guy testified in the lisa mcpherson trial. he was, according to the case file, the security guard stationed outside her door to keep her inside. at one point, he even had to hold her down while she was injected with sedatives. no doctors were present. if you don't remember this case, you should definitely read up on it. here are some tv segments as a refresher.

in other, less creepy news, the bank next door is begging me to commit vandalism. their enormous sign advertising "interest bearing" in human-sized letters makes me wish upon our very many stars for some scissors (i could probably find these at a store, also) and invisibility salve. a couple of minutes with these two things and i could redecorate park avenue with the words "interesting bear." this would make, at least, my day.

also, this morning i saw a woman fall victim to the marilyn monroe vent thing. a train went by under us and hot air shot through the streetholes. unlike marilyn, she made no effort to keep her skirt from flying up to her shoulders. also she was the fattest woman in new york.

i have other stuff to say, but alas.

jingles.

it's reasonable to assume that when i was ten i was more susceptible to advertising than i am today. a catchy jingle, some near epileptic-fit-inducing images or some genius boobs might send me running to mother with a refrain of "want" and "need." these days, an ad for taco bell's new cheesy, beefy melt almost induces vomiting. i think the difference, though, is more than just the slow erosion of my naïveté: advertisements were actually better back then. they were much less conceptual, and often trimmed down (especially ads aimed at children) to nothing but other people having a great time and yelling "awesome" while using whatever absurdist contraption they were trying to peddle. these days, you have to be the fucking duke of irony to understand any ad for car insurance. it requires at least a bachelor's degree in pop culture to "get" the commercials for what i think is some sort of keyboarded wireless device. see? i don't even know what the fucking product is! will we ever revert to this time of simplicity? is the nature of advertising cyclical or only downward-spiraling?

here is one of my favorite childhood commercials. it succeeded in doing something that not a ton of advertisements are capable of: it made me desire a product that truly, truly sucked.



you can actually witness the slow but sure gaying up of this ad over the course of a couple of years:



note: these videos are meant for entertainment purposes only. in know way are they intended to help "prove" a "point." i have a job, you know, and i don't really have all day to find fucking video links that show the gradual faggening of my entire television experience. professional bloggers do. also, they like to use fancy words like "caveat" and "ostensible" and "laconic" and "quaff" and "queaf" and they can eat poop like streetflies and sprain their face. but i digress.