UNREMITTING FAILURE

Things We Could Do Without

Camping (those chipmunks only look harmless), skiing, Albanian art films, Ayn Rand, American flag lapel pins, puritans. Sting. Middle Earth. Colonial Williamsburg. Mashed potatoes (those lumps! those damnable lumps!).  Higher mathematics.  Lower mathematics.  The Faerie Queene. Oprah, brussel sprouts, straightedge, cops.  Triathlons, marathons, pythons.  People who casually mention in their online dating profiles that they've been to "50 countries and all 7 continents".  Depeche Mode, work, economy class flying.  Did we mention Sting?

Entrepreneurship

People think we lack the verve and imagination to be an entrepreneur.  Ha! At this very moment we're working to create a chain of frozen yoga stands. 

Men at Job Center

"I just went to see Colin Hay," said the middle-aged man in the store to a lady friend of his, "former lead singer of Men at Work? He's had an amazing solo career over the past 10 years."  We wanted to hear more about Colin's amazing solo career--we thought he'd died of lazy eye syndrome--but the couple moved away and we'd have looked too suspicious trailing them.  But hey!  Colin Hay! Personally, we wouldn't go see him if they gave us a free ticket and a ride to the show on the back of a circus elephant with one of those little houses on top.  But isn't that wonderful, that's he still remembered? That he has in fact actual fans who are willing to take a night out of their busy schedule to go see him? It somehow reaffirms our faith in mankind.  It's heartwarming.  Colin Hay has a viable career!  Somehow we thought he'd be sitting on a roof Down Under, nailing down cedar shingling.  Whereas in fact it's only the other members of Men at Work who are actually now men at work, plumbers say, or software designers or flunkies in the Australian bureaucratic service.  Colin Hay survived the eighties! He ate the vegemite sandwich of MOR stardom and lived to tell about it! Why, Phil Collins can't even say as much.  Last we heard, he'd locked himself into an underground vault in his house (we're not making this up) where he keeps his extensive collection of American Civil War memorabilia, and was sulking. Say what you will, Colin Hay didn't sulk.  He got off his ass and kept his lazy eye glued to the prize!  And there are people out there who care!  Good for you, Colin!  Next time we hear one of your songs on the car radio we're still going to immediately turn it off, but still! Good for you!

From the look of that outfit, maybe he is actually doing some roofing on the side

Wow, If Those Last Two Posts Weren't Big Fat Bummers

You'd never guess who hasn't gotten laid in three years.  The total lack of sex does terrible things to a person.  Just yesterday, we helped an old lady across the street.  We would call it being a good samaritan, but secretly we were hoping she'd invite us back to her place for some "hot ass action."  But the wrinkleface ingrate didn't so much as bring up sexual reciprocation.  Shit, we know for a fact that she'd have at least offered a Boy Scout a blowjob.

The important thing, if you're not getting laid, is to find an outlet for all that bottled-up sexual energy.  We chose to lift weights.  But it's not a complete success.  Just yesterday, a staffer at the gym had to warn us to "stop humping the dumbbell." 

The worst part about not having sex for a long time is the fear that you'll forget how to do it.  And don't you dare bring up the "it's just like riding a bike" analogy.  The bike, if your performance is off, doesn't stifle a yawn and say it'd rather be watching Leno. 

All of which brings us to prostitution.  We've given it a thought.  But who would pay to have sex with a dinosaur like us? 

Every Day We Do Something Desperate

We continue to breathe. 

NPR

Seemingly everybody in this town listens to National Public Radio.  We say fuck National Public Radio.  We get our hard news from People Magazine.  It's amazing, really, how many of our potential datees put NPR on their list of "six things they couldn't live without."  Really?  They couldn't live without it? I propose that they take NPR off the air, and check the subsequent spike in mortality rates.  And these are supposedly our people.  Liberals, lefties, whatever you want to call them.  Coffee we could see.  Ditto cigarettes.  And sex (you'd be shocked at how few people put sex on their list).  Hershey's chocolate.  The lack of these things could send us into a coma.  And our ex-wife would burst into our hospital room and shout "Pull the plug!" to which the doctor would reply, "You want to take him off life support?" To which she would respond, "No, the plug on the TV. The Kardashians are on.  He's not in a coma, he's simply retreated into a place deep within himself where he need not confront the horror."  We've listened to NPR, and it's very informative.  It sickens us.  The caring voices of the correspondents, who always sound like they graduated from a very sensitive J-school, never fail to make us want whatever groundbreaking cooperative enterprise that's going to eliminate poverty in Sierra Bluca to fail.  They're always whispery, somehow, whispery and full of wonder and upbeat, and even their outrage emerges in such a way that you know they know that everything will come out all right in the end.  Except it won't.  Shit, we prefer Fox News, where at least they care enough to make every single Obama decision sound like the beginning of the apocalypse.  Their paranoid style of reporting is more suited to our paranoid style of being, is all we're saying.  We don't agree with a word they say, but we like the way they say it. Whereas at NPR they're always interviewing third-world do gooders who are optimistic about some new Third World pie-in-the-sky initiative that you know--but NPR evidently doesn't--is going to end in disaster, venality, heartbreak, and corruption.  They wear their hearts on their sleeves and they literally ache with optimism that by tomorrow the world will be spinning like a top.  While we agree with E.M. Cioran, who said, "To live is to lose ground."  People who listen to NPR want--no need--to believe that there's going to be a rational future that is safe for their children.  People will recycle and new energy sources will be discovered and utilized and kindness will afflict us all like a disease.  When if fact we can look forward to a future where the shits will continue to rule, the shits who voted them in will continue to whine, and the shits who really don't give a shit will continue to kill and steal and manipulate and plunder.  Oh baby baby it's a wild world, it's hard to get by just upon a smile.  Or a soft and soothing radio voice for that matter.  The end isn't near, but there are bound to be plenty of times when you wish it was. 

karma comedian

Fact: People come down with shingles, but they never come down with aluminum siding.  We think we had shingles once.  We went to the doctor, and he referred us to a home repair outfit out on Gallows Road.  They said, "You got ripped off. These aren't even cedar. And you should always go pre-stained."  We never fail to be amused by the phrase "window treatments." It sounds so medical.  "What do you think?" says the homeowner.  "Should I go homeopathic?"

We owned a home once, and it had shingles.  We had to call in a doctor.  He said, "You should have stuck with brick."

Is there no escape from this ridiculous schtick?  This is what we get for trying to blog at night.  Our mind simply throws out words, like mumps.  Now there's a stupid name for a disease.  Sounds like an early sixties British Invasion band, in shaggy haircuts and matching suits.  "Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Mumps!"

We had the mumps when we were a kid, and they were no joke.  Actually, we only had them for two days. Our friend Jimmy Carlson, who had them for real, let us borrow them for the weekend.  Mom said, "What are you playing with there?" We said, "The mumps, the mumps, my lovely lady mumps."  

Enough of that.  Go to bed.  Sleep, perchance to dream.  But first, one last look to see if we got any bites on our online dating service.  Seems every woman in DC likes to go hiking.  To get their goat, we wrote in our profile, "We'll go hiking, if forced, but we'll spend the entire time pretending we're participating in the Bataan Death March."  And we wonder why no one wants to go out with us. 

We Were "On the Hill" Today

For our noon date with the manager of a major lobbying firm.  The whole "Capitol Hill" experience made us feel dirty. We were seated outside at a Starbucks, and at the table next to us three obvious Hill players were going over a list of congressmen they "absolutely needed" to push through the Omnibus Consolidated Bullshit Act of 2012.  Meanwhile our date was telling us just how conservative she was, and how the Army had (shamefully) gone pussy and politically correct, which she knew because she'd been in the Army for eight years.  Meanwhile we sipped our coffee and tried to smile, whilst pinching the skin in our leg to keep us from screaming "Get us out of this Hell!"  Seriously, you could feel the power crackling up there, what with all the movers and shakers and players walking around in their sober suits with American flag lapel pins, all in a hurry to get things done, while we wished for a Japanese horror movie monster to appear and pick suits up at random and gulp them down.  This town, or at least that part of it, should be destroyed.  By Japanese horror movie monster preferably, but by any other means necessary if Rodan has another appointment. 

The thing that truly amazes us is that people bring their kids on vacation here.  What's to see? Well, there's the White House and the Washington Monument and Congress, all of which would have excited us as a child about as much as a trip to historic Williamsburg.  We were dragged here as a child, and we remember walking about in the heat, whilst pretending (and it didn't take too much imagination) that we were an American participant in the Bataan Death March.

God, we hate this town.  The British had the right idea in 1812, but they failed to burn everything completely.  And to salt the earth afterwards. 

The History of Tater Tots

The oddly named F. Nephi Grigg and Golden Grigg--Mormon founders of the Ore-Ida Company--invented Tater Tots in 1953, when, according to that unimpeachable source Wikipedia, they were "trying to figure out what to do with leftover slivers of cut-up potatoes."  At first they superhardened them using plastics technology, and tried to sell them to the defense industry as fragments for use in mines such as "bouncing betties."  When this pan fry out, they hit upon the expedient of forming them into cylinders and deep-frying them, and selling them to the military as bullets.  The military didn't bite, but taste testers did, and found them delicious.  The product was first offered to a potato-happy public in 1956.  Nowadays, Americans consume some 70 million pounds per year of the product.  This does not count their consumption in (oddly enough) Australia, where they are sold as "potato royals."  In Canada they are called either "Tasti Taters" or "Spud Puppies."  People in Europe are denied the joys of tater tots, after one of the Grigg's early militarized versions was accidentally inserted into a package of regular tater tots (or as the Dutch called them, "potato abominations") and exploded in the mouth of a young French boy, seriously injuring him.  In Germany, they were banned after a tater tot bearing an uncanny likeness to Adolf Hitler was found in a package in 1962.  Another tater tot bearing the likeness of John Lennon was discovered in a package in Canada in 1987, and currently resides in the world's largest potato museum, The Spudseum, in Boise Idaho.  

the infamous "Hitler Tot"--Kartoffeln Macht Frei! quickly became a Neo-Nazi chant

 

Acupunctured

Well, we got the acupuncture.  The woman who administered it was supernice and we immediately fell in love with her.  The receptionist was a guy named Tommy who acted like he'd just dropped a couple of downers.  The office was nice, soothing jazz (what, no Eastern music?) was playing and she led us into a room and had us lie down and applied the needles which didn't hurt, except the ones she put in our eyes which did hurt a little.  We said, "We can't see!" and she said, "It's only temporary" and suddenly there was the sound of a waterfall and Eastern music and she left us there in the void of our temporary blindness with needles in our legs and arms and ears and just a couple in our forehead and it was so relaxing we fell asleep and when we awoke she pulled all the needles out and invited us to get up which was hard, we were so relaxed.  Then she ruined the whole effect by bringing out what she called a treatment plan, which basically involved us giving up all meat ("the trauma of their deaths poisons your body"), fried foods, and refined sugars, or in other words our entire diet.  We just looked at her in mute disbelief (she'd remembered to remove the acupuncture needles from our eyes) and thought, "Great."  It's not enough that you turn yourself into a circus performer, you have to go vegan as a fucking encore.  She especially recommended kale and many raw vegetables, most of which we refuse to touch whether raw or cooked.  We felt like saying, "Look, lady, we're a carnivore.  A cupcake-eating carnivore. If we go on this diet we will die or weaken to the extent that stronger carnivores will kill us, and eat us in turn."  Instead we lied and said, "Sounds good," then threw the list of recommended foods in the trash outside her office.  It's always the same with these holistic freaks--one thing leads to another until you're a vegan, yoga-practicing, forever-meditating, needle-skewered victim of the belief in what E.M. Cioran called "an instant India."  Next thing you know we'll be a Buddhist.  Speaking of the Buddha, he had no trouble eating meat--in fact it was bad pork that killed him.  Keep that in mind that next time you're talking to one of these people.  It was bad pork--not bad tofu--that killed the Buddha.  If you'd put tofu in his begging bowl he'd have flung it into the bushes, and said "What do I look like, a fucking vegan?"

Oh, and the acupuncture didn't cure our anxiety.  By the next day, it was worse.  Maybe because we failed to eat our raw vegetables.  If so, so be it.  Sometimes, the cure is worse than the disease.