UNREMITTING FAILURE

In the last ditch singing

Behind us, on the TV, Oprah says, "She got shot in the face and nearly died."  We laugh uproariously. It's Thanksgiving! Earlier we caught a glimpse of the Macy's Day parade and there was a bald James Taylor singing "America."  Boy, were we sorry we weren't in New York City!  Our sister's girlfriend's dad told a story: He was camping.  It was freezing cold.  In the middle of the night he had to get up and run to the outhouse.  He sat down, did his business, tried to get up.  His ass was frozen to the seat.  "I had a red ring around my ass for a week!"  You know what we can't handle?  Oprah's voice!  She's still going on behind us, and every time she opens her mouth the world's a better place!  Her every syllable is a springboard for universal improvement! Every life  she touches is enriched and fortified with the vitamins of goodness!  Without exception! Our brother went to the fourth game of the World Series and told us this story:  A guy in the stands is dressed like a hot dog.  He stands up at one point and, referring to rivals Tampa Bay screams, "I hate Tampa!  My mother's from Tampa and I hate my mother!!"  With this he sits back down.  Seconds later, the crowd in the rows above him starts chanting, "We hate your mother too!  We hate your mother too!!"  Have you ever heard such an outpouring of sympathy for a man pretending to be a hot dog?  No!  Only in Philadelphia!  Now the people on Oprah are crying out of sheer gratitude.  Blessed! They're blessed!  We're all blessed!  We're reading a biography of the hateful but hilarious Louis-Ferdinand Celine.  The German novelist Ernst Junger described him thus: "He has the gaze of a maniac, inward turning, that shines as if from the depths of a pit." Celine! Our Oprah! No "We're all blessed"twaddle here!  Even the Nazis, whom with he tangentially aligned himself, couldn't stomach his nausea for humanity.  An official in the Nazi propaganda arm urged his higher ups to have nothing to do with Celine, saying "He has questioned and dragged through the mud almost everything of positive value in human existence."  When barbarians are disgusted by your nihilism, you're getting somewhere! You know what?  Right now, at this moment, we're glad to be alive.  Yes!  It's true!  Life is a nightmare for so many, the world's a playground for the bloodthirsty and the vile.  And yet.  So perverse is human nature, and so utterly contrarion the human spirit, that even we sometimes feel the urge, as D. Thomas wrote, to sing in our chains like the sea!

As any scientist will tell you, smoking is a sign of a well-integrated personality.  Your average smoker is level-headed, in love with life, and a hot ball of fun in the sack.  Not that we need the experts to tell us this.  We smoke, and you won't find a more magnificent swordsman this side of the Mississippi River.  Ask a woman who's been to bed with us, and she'll tell you she'd gladly leap from a 4th floor window if there was a possibility of landing on our penis.

That's just one reason we're grateful on this Thanksgiving Day.  We have a beautiful wife who is too dumb to divorce us, two wonderful if rabid dogs, and a wonderful family, who do a workmanlike job of pretending they like us.  Maybe it's just the smell of cooking turkey talking, but we have a lot to be grateful for.  We know we give the impression of being an unrelentingly negative prick, but it's mostly schtick.  Truth is we're an unrelentingly positive prick, who may hate humanity but tends to like individuals and understands we could easily have no arms and legs and live in abject poverty and have rickets that make our nonexistent legs look funny.  We could, in other words, be truly fucked, and not just basically fucked the way we are now. 

Have a Happy Thanksgiving everybody.  As for our Euro friends, you'll just have to celebrate one of your vile foreign holidays that we Americans find utterly inexplicable.  Like St. Greasius Day, when everyone in town rubs their body in grease and tries to climb a pole atop which there's a live cow you're supposed to take a bite out of.  And be jealous you're not celebrating Thanksgiving, which we hold in honor of the day the Native Americans took pity on our starving forefathers and shared their food with them, giving said forefathers the strength to steal this whole damn country.  Amen!

We avoided raves back in the nineties

Because we could see the outcome with crystal clarity:

ER physician: What do we have here?

EMT:  Just some idiot. Took some ecstasy and swallowed his glow stick.

A Thanksgiving Message

Drew Barrymore tells us here that 25 cents can stop hunger.  Sure can.  It's called a Moon Pie.

Back off, starving kid! Buy your own!

Rant

The world's deranged! No doubt about it! Unhinged!  It's been proven! By protractor and microscope! By philosopher and census! By abacus even!  We're all part of a dream that kills! A nightmare with income tax!  And don't even bother trying to wake up!  It's even worse on the other side!  Over there they wipe their asses with weed whackers! Not that we're much better off!  We totter about on our hind legs, every single one of us, abusing our privileges!  Outwearing our welcome!  As annoying as walking bugles!  Dumber than our underwear!  Beating our puny chests!  Look at us!  Hell, look at him!  Ladies' man! Really keeps his cock on its toes!  Huzzah for him! We've all got to find some way to pass the time until we croak! It's all good! Pray! Go whaling! Rob banks! Razz spastics!  It's all the same!  Just don't try to plead innocent! Because you're guilty!  Oh, just admit it!  You were born, weren't you?  Well okay then: You fucked up! Reamed yourself right out of the vaginal gate!  Yes! Out of the pussy and into the fry pan!  You hadn't even screamed and already you'd screwed the pooch! No wonder everything turned to shit! Dumbass! You never should have vacated the uterus!  It could have been yours for life!  Rent-controlled, free utilities, the works!  Now you're here, and nobody tells you fuck-all!  They want you ignorant! They don't want you to know how over time the shine rubs off  everything, the changes of season no longer correspond to the tides of your blood, and you become capable of betraying your own breath by the mere fact of breathing!  It's all shit, every word that comes out of our mouths, a mountain of shit you can smell from other galaxies!  But no reason to beat ourselves up about it!  We're all doing the best we can!  And if we all keep doing the best we can, the world should implode in no time!

On the Intervention of Satan in Human Affairs

Every time we begin to believe we can make a "positive difference," we catch a whiff of sulphur in the air.

Exceedingly Creepy Couple Wins Dancing With the Stars

The guy looks like Reinhard Heydrich's grandson.  She has a head like Long Island.  We look at them and are frightened.  If they dance within a mile of us, we will shoot them. 

   

Art Expert Unremitting Failure Squints at: Dogs Playing Poker!

There is unanimous agreement amongst art critics that Dogs Playing Poker is the greatest painting off all time, better even than its companion piece, Jack the Ripper (or as it's sometime referred to, Scratched at Dawn).  Let's face it: next to these masterworks, Guernica is cold mutton.  How many millions of hours  have been spent poring over the exquisite detail of this extraordinary work of magical realism?  We will never know.  Suffice it to say that one can study it for a lifetime and never exhaust its possibilities. This is why we've chosen to study only a detail of the work.  To discuss the work in its entirety would take a thousand critics a thousand years.  In the fragment below, notice the oddly unidentifiable card being passed by toe from one dog to another.  He's cheating!  While smoking a stogie!  No wonder this painting holds pride of place in the pool room/art gallery located in the rear of the VFW in Littlestown, Pennsylvania.  It's stone cold brilliant. 

    

Outrage Mounts Over Obama's Choice for Budget Director

President Elect Barack Obama's honeymoon is over before it has begun.  The final straw for us is his selection of Peter Orszag as Budget Director.  No one with a hairpiece like his should be allowed in the public eye.  At first glance we thought was  a beaver-fur beret.  That Mr. Orszag thinks it looks like hair, and ought to be on his head, says everything we need to know about his judgment.  In short, the man is mad.  At meetings he will no doubt carefully lift his hairpiece off his head, lower it to eye level, and ask "What do you think?"  Or bang it against the conference table shouting, "For the last time, shut up!" 

  Party on top, party line on the bottom