Okay, I'm crazy

I just surveyed the contents of the fridge for the fourth time in the last half-hour, and still have yet to fix myself something to eat. This habit used to drive my Grandfather mad when I was a kid. He'd look on in a kind of fascination/disgust as I'd open the fridge, move the milk and juice bottles around, open all the little deli drawers and doors, pop the lids off the plastic bowls to see what was inside, push the condiments around, and then shut the door and walk away empty handed. Not ten minutes later I'd return, open the door, move the bottles around, look inside containers, fiddle with the contents of the drawers and all the condiments on the door-rack, and close the door and walk away... empty handed. In a few minutes I would be back in front of the fridge ready to start the process all over again.

"What ARE you DO-ING?" he asked one afternoon, during my fifth inventory.

"I'm hungry." I said, peeking inside a big, orange Tupperware bowl. I curled my nose at the contents which, somehow to my surprise, were exactly the same as the last four times I looked.

"Well then why don't you make yourself something TO EAT?" he begged.

"Cuz I don't want any of THIS stuff." I said, pointing my thumb at the fridge's interior.

"Well if you don't want any of that 'stuff' as you put it, why do you keep coming back to look at it?"

"I dunno." I said, honestly.

"Do you think that if you leave the room the entire stock of the fridge will transform into OTHER food?"

"I dunno."

"Do you think that on one of your visits you will open the door to find an extended hand, magically holding exactly what you want to eat, exactly how you like it?"

"No."

"Well then why do you keep coming back to look at it?"

"I don't know. I keep thinking I'll see something I want."

"Do you know what you want?"

"No, but I'll know it when I see it." With this he threw his hands up in the air, literally, giving up on the hope that I was ever going to be able to see reason. He returned to his book.

"Someone once said... " his voice rose from behind the pages (he had put the book right up to his nose to avoid having to witness any more of my infuriating Tupperware inspections), "...that the definition of insanity is when one does the same thing over and over with the expectation of a different outcome."

I just rolled my eyes, Grandpa was always spouting that kind of nonsense, but it did inspire me to give up on the fridge for the suddenly appealing, under-scrutinized contents of the cupboards.

{Sidenote: }

[When I noticed I had gone to the fridge four times this morning (and left with nothing, and this memory popped into my head), it got me thinking about Grandpa's 'saying'. I put it into Google and found it attributed to Freud, Einstein, Rudyard Kipling and the ever-popular "Chinese proverb". Same results in Alta Vista and Yahoo... funny...each time I put the phrase in a search I got the same answer, even in Netscape, Ask Jeeves, Net One, Fathead, etc., well anyway, I'm sure if I keep looking I'll find something different.]

Hey Lisa,

Remember the time when we were nineteen and we woke up to the first totally beautiful summer day of the season and we called each other in sick to work and drove that fucked-up VW Rabbit of yours (the one that always smelled like oil and had no muffler so you had to scream to have a conversation) to Six Flags Great Adventure because we couldn't remember the last time we'd been to an amusement park and we played Beatles tapes all the way there and had to park like FIFTY MILES from the gate and then we rode all the rollercoasters about five times each and flirted with those Italian guys from Jersey because they were so tan and cute in their wife-beaters and gold horn chains even though there was like NO CHANCE we were really interested and we drank fruit juice smoothies that came in containers shaped like whatever fruit it was (I had grape, you had apple) and then we drove home singing the entire Paul Simon "Graceland" album with you doing the great throat clicks and stuff just like Ladysmith Black Mambazo and we talked about our dirtbag ex-boyfriends and how we wished we were gay because we actually have the most fun together and then laughed about the time we tried to make-out when we were fourteen and agreed that it was nice and all but sadly didn't 'do anything' for us and when we got home we made a huge pot of pasta primavera and drank shitty Gallo jug wine out of our new grape and apple shaped containers and laid on the couch and fell asleep watching 21 Jump Street a little sunburned and drunk right after you admitted you had a crush on Richard Grecko and I admitted I had a crush on Johnny Depp?

Wasn't that the best?

A most magnificent thing

A neighbor, just a few doors down, has placed a television set in his front, first floor window facing outward, toward the sidewalk. It plays a continuous tape loop of a neighborhood bombing in Baghdad, over and over...

The television is exactly the width of the window, and the point of view of the image is from the inside of a home or business, so as you turn to look it appears as though you are the one indoors watching the horror unfold before your eyes, out your window, on your street, in your city.

Brilliant.

Whoever you are in Brooklyn, New York... you fucking rock. You made me cry. Thank you.

Oh, and by the way; people were watching.

How Soon Is Now?

Operation Teenage Angst Fest is officially underway...so dig out those old journals, poems and songs...cuz you know you secretly wanted someone to read them anyway.

Operation Teenage Angst-Fest

Perhaps it's a directive from the collective unconscious, or a by-product of Spring and the search for those dollar-store flip-flops in the back of the closet... but it seems like a lot of us have been digging up old writings or journals lately. I was emailing one fellow blogger yesterday about her recent foray into the mind of the teenage her, and this morning my pal Maud had the stellar brevity of spirit to actually post excerpts of her high-school prose! I, too, have unearthed a few of my own, um, gems, and although their unparalleled mediocrity and lack of anything even resembling talent make me cringe, they also make me smile. A lot. In light of recent domestic and world events, I began thinking a genuine smile would be greatly appreciated by all.

So I'm proposing a kind of contest. I think I'll call it OPERATION TEENAGE ANGST-FEST. Submit your best (or worst) example of pubescent drivel (or a few if you like), and we, as a group, will decide upon a winner who will receive a yet-to-be-disclosed prize. (Rest assured it'll be BITCHIN'...think Duran Duran t-shirt and a two gallon drum of Clearasil.) I'll post them on a separate page, and the results will be tallied via comments. Unless, instead, I find the time to write or steal some tricky voting html and make it all fancy-pants.

Send your submissions to:

Antigiest(at)earthlink(dot)net
put angstfest in the subject line

Good Luck!

House demands Dixie Chick apology...

This great link was sent to me from my good friend Monk who, while performing his job as a Librarian at an (unnamed) large, Baby-Ivy college in Upstate New York, continues to illuminate the masses about the real fallout of the Patriot Act. His words:

This [link] was sent to the Music Library Association mail list with the
comment: "This house resolution is a hoot".

If "hoot" is defined as
"flagrant disregard for First Amendment rights; abuse of power; waste of
taxpayer money", well, then, I suppose I concur. It is a "hoot".

I would love nothing more than to direct you to his website for great political commentary, hysterical comedic insights, or more insider information about the loss of our rights as it pertains to previously privileged information...but he refuses to get an online blog or diary. (Hint, Monk, hint... okay, the last one I promise.)

Coming clean in a dirty mind

So my awful dream from last week keeps returning. The settings are different, the cast changes slightly, but the overall theme and eventual outcome of waking up screaming remains. It just occurred to me while jotting a quick email to my friend Maud (whose having her own bout with nightmare situations lately) that it's now, officially, a reoccurring dream. I can look forward to this beauty for nights and nights to come...to which I can only say, "Oh, Goody." If I'm going to have a reoccurring dream why can't it be the one where I am invisible and I own a teleportation booth and I country-hop causing Loki-like hijinks and get to see lots of people naked. That dream was the best evah.

I've always had an active dream life, but for the most part predictable, linear, almost boring really. My dreams have rarely been a big mystery, I can usually draw a straight line between my waking life and the story that unfolds in my sleep. For instance, if I'm having man trouble, I dream that my boyfriend is cheating, or is mean to me. If I feel trapped by my circumstances, I dream that something is chasing me and I can't run, or I'm locked in a (closet, room?) and no one can hear me scream. If I'm happy, I dream I can fly, or that I'm sunning myself on a beach. If I'm horny I dream I'm having sex. If I'm hungry I dream I'm eating something delicious. I've never had to be acquainted with the work of Freud or Jung in order to create a bridge between my Id and my Mother's womb, or to connect a mass of seemingly disconnected dots into a mosaic of my crappy childhood. They're mostly cause = effect, simple. At the best, delightful; at worst, harmless.

I guess that's why this dream is so disturbing. The fact that my dream life has so consistently reflected my actual life leaves me horrified at this current manifestation of my psyche... How fucked up can a person be? Jesus! It's not hard to figure out WHY I'm dreaming WHAT I'm dreaming...it's the fact that it exists as an extension of my subconscious at all. I've purged, analyzed, and registered horror, and am displeased, to say the least. Being threatened by past high school chums or hipster/ravers who take 'mean making' drugs and murder small, defenseless animals...being totally unable to get help, get out, trapped in a situation I did not invite nor can control... OKAY I FEEL PATHETIC! ALL RIGHT? I'M A BIG FUCKING LOSER WHO IS EVIDENTLY THREATENED BY YOUTH, OR MY PAST, AND CHOOSE TO ALIGN MYSELF WITH THE PLIGHT OF TRAMPLED INNOCENTS (victims) IN AN ATTEMPT TO DIVERT ATTENTION FROM THE MISTAKES I'VE MADE THAT HAVE RUINED MY LIFE.

It's disgusting, really. The ignominy. Outed by my own damn brain.

Letter From Michael Moore to the President

This has been floating around the internet for the past few days, but I had to post it anyway since it is the only thing to make me laugh since February. Anyone bored enough to read this blog may recall that February was the month my unemployment benefits, sense of humor, and overall joi de vivre were taken hostage by the fucking Bush administration. This particular version was ganked from Earthbound Disco Ball, a hilarious site hosted by a fellow Brooklynite whose rapier wit and astute observations are rivaled only by his good looks (sorry gals, happily married). And yes, that heap of (totally earnest) praise was an attempt to get "The Kid" to forgive me for the blatant theft.

George W. Bush

1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Washington, DC

Dear Governor Bush:

So today is what you call "the moment of truth," the day that "France and the rest of world have to show their cards on the table." I'm glad to hear that this day has finally arrived. Because, I gotta tell ya, having survived 440 days of your lying and conniving, I wasn't sure if I could take much more. So I'm glad to hear that today is Truth Day, 'cause I got a few truths I would like to share with you:

1. There is virtually NO ONE in America (talk radio nutters and Fox News aside) who is gung-ho to go to war. Trust me on this one. Walk out of the White House and on to any street in America and try to find five people who are PASSIONATE about wanting to kill Iraqis. YOU WON'T FIND THEM! Why? 'Cause NO Iraqis have ever come here and killed any of us! No Iraqi has even threatened to do that. You see, this is how we average Americans think: If a certain so-and-so is not perceived as a threat to our lives, then, believe it or not, we don't want to kill him! Funny how that works!

2. The majority of Americans -- the ones who never elected you -- are not fooled by your weapons of mass distraction. We know what the real issues are that affect our daily lives -- and none of them begin with I or end in Q. Here's what threatens us: two and a half million jobs lost since you took office, the stock market having become a cruel joke, no one knowing if their retirement funds are going to be there, gas now costs almost two dollars -- the list goes on and on. Bombing Iraq will not make any of this go away. Only you need to go away for things to improve.

3. As Bill Maher said last week, how bad do you have to suck to lose a popularity contest with Saddam Hussein? The whole world is against you, Mr. Bush. Count your fellow Americans among them.

4. The Pope has said this war is wrong, that it is a SIN. The Pope! But even worse, the Dixie Chicks have now come out against you! How bad does it have to get before you realize that you are an army of one on this war? Of course, this is a war you personally won't have to fight. Just like when you went AWOL while the poor were shipped to Vietnam in your place.

5. Of the 535 members of Congress, only ONE (Sen. Johnson of South Dakota) has an enlisted son or daughter in the armed forces! If you really want to stand up for America, please send your twin daughters over to Kuwait right now and let them don their chemical warfare suits. And let's see every member of Congress with a child of military age also sacrifice their kids for this war effort. What's that you say? You don't THINK so? Well, hey, guess what -- we don't think so either!

6. Finally, we love France. Yes, they have pulled some royal screw-ups. Yes, some of them can be pretty damn annoying. But have you forgotten we wouldn't even have this country known as America if it weren't for the French? That it was their help in the Revolutionary War that won it for us? That our greatest thinkers and founding fathers -- Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, etc. -- spent many years in Paris where they refined the concepts that lead to our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution? That it was France who gave us our Statue of Liberty, a Frenchman who built the Chevrolet, and a pair of French brothers who invented the movies? And now they are doing what only a good friend can do -- tell you the truth about yourself, straight, no b.s. Quit pissing on the French and thank them for getting it right for once. You know, you really should have traveled more (like once) before you took over. Your ignorance of the world has not only made you look stupid, it has painted you into a corner you can't get out of.

Well, cheer up -- there IS good news. If you do go through with this war, more than likely it will be over soon because I'm guessing there aren't a lot of Iraqis willing to lay down their lives to protect Saddam Hussein. After you "win" the war, you will enjoy a huge bump in the popularity polls as everyone loves a winner -- and who doesn't like to see a good ass-whoopin' every now and then (especially when it 's some third world ass!). So try your best to ride this victory all the way to next year's election. Of course, that's still a long ways away, so we'll all get to have a good hardy-har-har while we watch the economy sink even further down the toilet!

But, hey, who knows -- maybe you'll find Osama a few days before the election! See, start thinking like THAT! Keep hope alive! Kill Iraqis -- they got our oil!!

Yours,

Michael Moore

"Knock, knock"

"Who's there?"
"Secretary Ridge"
"Who? I don't know a Mr. Ridge"
"It doesn't matter, pack your bags."

Watching the news

I distinctly remember being invincible. My body was small then, it took two hands to manage a quart of milk, my feet were barely the width of the stairs leading to grandma and grandpa's room.

Back then I had an instinctual ability to ward off evil. I knew, for instance, that if I crossed my pinkies and sang "Mares Eat Oates and Does Eat Oats..." during the last, pitch-dark stretch of the bike ride home from Marney's, the razor-toothed gutter trolls that lived in the drainage ditch couldn't lay a finger on me. Nobody taught me that, I just knew it. And it worked every single time. Just like no one taught me that the thing in the closet couldn't open the door from the inside, or that direct light, even indirect light from the hall, rendered all stray boogeymen totally powerless.

The little me had the ability to govern everything, to the point that I would actually create things to be scared of for fun, a hand puppet on a candle-lit wall, a horror-house in my friend Herbie's basement. I would allow myself to be scared, and stop it whenever it became bothersome or boring.

I don't remember when I ceased being invincible. It's like one day I was, and the next day I wasn't. But I was, once.

Analyze My Dream

It starts in my apartment. It's intuited that it is mine anyway, the way you 'just know' things in dreams. It's a combination of an actual place in upstate NY, a little red carpenter's house just about everyone I know has lived in at one point or another, and the alien's over-the-garage apartment on Third Rock From The Sun.

I am in the living room half-heartedly tiding up, consolidating stacks of newspapers and periodicals into one large tower, putting all the dirty cups into a group on the coffee table, dumping ashtrays into an empty pizza box. My boyfriend and dog are both in the bathroom, he's having a shower, the dog is laying against the tub enjoying its warmth (as she is want to do in reality), again, I can't literally see them, I 'just know' that's what they are doing. All in all it's a homey scene; the rhythmic rush of the shower and clean-smell carried by the steam, soft brazilian pop music on the radio mixed with the 'scrwish' of slippers on a wood floor, a pot of something curried simmering on the stove.

Suddenly the front door, which is at the bottom of a stairway that descends from the living room (a la Third Rock), bursts open and what sounds like six or seven people come barreling up the stairs, nosily. They have a mangy dog with them that looks as though it may expire any second; most of its teeth are missing, the rest of its mouth is stumps.

When they reach the top of the stairs I recognize they are my friends from high school...people I have not seen or heard from in fifteen years. I was amazed... giddy at seeing them after all this time, I opened my arms, ready for a big 'ohmygodit'ssogoodtoseeyou' hug session but they passed right by me, uttering 'hey' in a short, but comfortable way. I was dumfounded, I had not had seen one of them in years, yet they let themselves in and proceeded to mill around--opening doors and poking around in the kitchen--with all the familiarity in the world, like it was old hat. I began to question my sanity...
(What were they doing here? HAD we shared company recently? Did I still live in the town where I went to high-school? Was I throwing a party? Is that why I was tiding up? This house is a mess! Oh, God, I didn't buy any food or beer for a party. What are they doing? Are they looking for something? Why won't anyone acknowledge me? Am I dreaming?)

The mood immediately shifted from lazy Sunday evening to chaos, and the dream took on that warped time scale that comes from the intermingling of the things you see, and what you intuit. I understood that they were not my friends anymore, and something was terribly wrong.

I noticed Carl, the apparent 'leader' of this home-invasion battalion (and a real character from my high school days), disappear into the kitchen, the mangy dog made a b-line for the bathroom, the rest continued poking around. I surfaced from my shock long enough to get the half-sentence "Hey, guys, what are you..." out, when a series of short barks, then growls, then whines of pain emerged from bathroom. I ran to the room and found my dog yelping and bloodied on the floor, and my nude boyfriend standing over the motionless mangy attacker. His arm was up over his head, ready to strike, in his hand a red stained loofah-on-a-stick. "It attacked her" he said apologetically, becoming aware that he had possibly bludgeoned the other dog to death.

I panicked, began wrapping my dog in towels and screaming that we had to get to a vet. My boyfriend threw on his dirty, now bloody clothes, we started toward the stairs. "Who are those people?" he asked, noticing them for the first time. "I don't know" I answered, honestly. "Where are we going to find a vet at this hour?" he said (because it was now mysteriously like two in the morning in dream-time; continuity issues like six-hour showers are not a concern to my subconscious).

"I know a vet that's open 24-7" Jimmy, another old high-school-pal-turned-? said while poking his head out from our bedroom. "And anyway, I need a ride home." He was holding a personal item of mine up to his nose, inspecting it. I think it was a figurine of some kind.

It seemed perfectly reasonable to give this guy who was robbing us, or psychologically torturing us, or whatever they were doing there, a ride home if it got my dog to a vet before she bled to death. The four of us got in the car. They sat up front, my dog and I in the back. We left the rest of them in the house, the food still cooking on the stove.

Now it was raining. We started out on a large highway that became a two-lane and finally a small side street. "This way." Jimmy said, pointing left down an even smaller street, the kind where all the houses begin right at the sidewalk. I looked down at my dog who was slipping in and out of consciousness. Her tongue was lolling out of her mouth and her big brown eyes were mere slits of white.

The car passed over something with a crunch, I turned to look out of the rear window and saw a cat that had been cut in two by one of our tires. His front half and bottom half spasmed as the life left him. "What the hell was that?" my boyfriend called out. I could see his face in the rear-view, he was already sweating with the stress of the dog, now he looked terrified. "We hit a cat" I screamed, "Oh Christ, we hit a cat and it's cut in two and it's still alive, Oh Christ, Oh God we have to get it, we have to...." Jimmy turned around and looked. "That cat is dead. Or soon to be, there's nothing we can do."

I start blathering, "What do you mean there is nothing we can do...we're on the way to a vet! Can't we bring it with us, or at least put it out of it's misery? We can't just leave it there!! Oh God! We have to do something!..." and so on.

Jimmy pointed right, directing my boyfriend to turn. We made the turn, and as the headlights hit the pavement he breathed "holy shit..." into the windshield. A loud, nearly deafening series of crunches came from underneath the tires. Ahead illuminated in the headlights were hundreds cats, soaking wet, with more appearing each second, like it was raining them. We realized the crunching was the car running over two and three at a time. I covered my ears. The car screeched to a halt.

"Fuck... fuck!" my boyfriend was hitting his head with his hands. "What are they doing here....in the road...there's, god, hundreds....I couldn't see..." I had been clutching the dog for both her safety and my comfort, I noticed her heart rate had slowed to where the beat was nearly undetectable. "We have to get her to a vet now." I said, quietly crying, in shock. "She's dying."

"What am I supposed to do!" My boyfriend yelled, pointing out the window at the thousands of cats that had filled the road as far as you could see in all directions. It was understood that we could neither go forward or back up without killing them. Worse, we realized that we couldn't even walk without stepping on one.

"Just gun it." Jimmy said. "It's only a block away...they'll either move or...well..."

"But what if they don't..." I began.

My boyfriend gunned it, turning the wheel sharply right into the houses. He crashed through the front door of the closest one then followed a series of hallways and stairwells until the car was too big to continue on. We ended up at the base of a stair that rose upward where it split into a "Y" right before the second floor. (In the dream it was perfectly reasonable that we were driving indoors, you know....)

We all got out of the car and Jimmy started to walk away. "Thanks for the ride." he said, kind of cheery and lighthearted, like we had just come from a party.

"Where are you GOING?" we both yelled at his back, which was ascending the stairs.
"Home. I live right around the corner. SEE YA!"
"But where's the vet??!!"
"Oh, right" his eyes darted down to the bleeding eighty pound animal in our hands. "It's, um.... a few places to the left. Two or three." he paused, then tipped an imaginary hat, "SEE YA, WOULDN'T WANT TA BE YA!" and disappeared behind a door.

We started walking left, as directed, desperate, knowing the person who gave us directions was probably (definitely) lying. Each door opened to a stairwell or hallway, each hall to another. It was like an M.C. Escher-land we knew was an endless loop impossible to emerge from. Finally my boyfriend opened a door that led outside. We saw the car about a half-block down to our left, headlights still on, covered with cats.

We stood in the rain. The dog had a slow, steady trickle of blood running from her mouth. I had not felt a pulse in some time.

So that's my dream. All armchair analysts please advise.

Happy St. Vanity War Day!

And we can be assured that no child will be left behind, at home or abroad. Thank you Mr. President!

Smack Me

I was listing my laundry with Dad on the phone: The fruitless job hunt, the shitty neighbors, the rotted ceiling that just caved in over the kitchen sink, and the landlord who won't do anything about it, the chest cold that refuses to go away, the poverty that stops me from seeing a doctor, the filth and garbage and decay that surrounds me, the war, the bills, fucking... I don't know, Ashcroft. He agreed things had become unbearable and suggested, as he usually does in times of crisis, that I go get some Heroin.

"Easier said than done... " I exhaled, "I don't even know anyone who KNOWS anyone who does drugs, haven't for ten years." Probably more, I thought. "But I live in New York City, right? I mean, it couldn't be that hard to find a connection."

He chucked, "Certainly not after this war gets going...there'll be oil and smack for All Americans." He said 'All Americans' in the curling drawl of a Texan, like I was on the phone with DubbleYa himself.

Yeah, it's strange, a father suggesting Heroin to his daughter as an answer to her problems, more strange if you don't know my family (which I would not recommend to anyone). What's even more weird is that, for us, it was a completely legitimate conversation. We talked about how the Taliban put an end to poppy farming after decreeing that it was against Islam, and how quickly that reversed after the Taliban was removed from control. We discussed Iraq and Saddam and shifting economies during and after war, how creative farming might be all the Iraqis have after we go over and destroy whatever is left over from our first attack in '91. Dad talked about Vietnam and Opium, and how it wasn't a street drug at all until the conflict, then it flowed like water through the Lower East Side, slipping down the steps to CBGB's and into Lou Reed's big toe. Dad and I discussed the upcoming Heroin Boom like Wall Street inside traders, planning our big rake.

And I'd like to say we're kidding, we were in part, but not totally. It's a shorthand for us. It means we understand hopeless places, when you've tried all the rational, pro-active solutions to remedy the situation, and have hit a brick wall anyway. It means that pep-talks and pearls of wisdom would not only be useless but offensive. Sometimes things just suck, and they are going to suck for awhile. During those times the fantasy of completely opting out of it all is dammed delightful.

The whole idea started with Dad's best friend Ted. Well, long before that for dad (he did survive the 60's and 70's after all) but Ted was the one that started the whole drugs-as-solution thing for Dad and I. Ted's story began with a car accident, his wife's car accident. The circumstances of the crash were typical, someone slid on some ice, she rear-ended them in an attempt to avoid them. The impact was minor, but evidently forceful enough to propel seven liter-size bottles of Stoli out from under the driver's seat and into her heels. She tried to explain to the cop who arrived on the scene that she was sober (which she was), and that she did not drink (which she didn't), and the bottles weren't hers (which they weren't) but he wrote her up for open containers anyway. Her drive home was intense. Her brain raced. She'd cleaned the whole car out only a few weekends ago, those bottles had to be new, had to be her husbands. What kind of man drinks vodka in the car? What kind of man can consume seven bottles of vodka, in the car, in less than two weeks? An alcoholic man, she guessed. However as it turned out Ted was not exactly an alcoholic. Ted, instead, had an eight-ball-a-day cocaine habit he financed by embezzling $157,000 from the insurance firm with whom he was employed, his wife's father's firm. The booze was just what he used to come down from his coke high. He wasn't an alcoholic, he explained, he never even drank and drove. He'd polished off each one of those bottles in the driveway before coming inside for dinner.

Ted lost everything shortly thereafter. His wife, his job, his house. He avoided jail because his father-in-law took pity on him and settled for restitution instead of pressing charges. Ted paid the money back by purchasing, cutting, and selling mass quantities of cocaine he bought with the firm's checkbook. Understandably, his wife and her entire family never spoke to him again.

And Ted couldn't have been happier.

Dad and I, in contrast, lived in misery at that time, Dad had a wife who was sick with illnesses the doctors could not explain, a business that was on the brink of failure, a brother who was in jail for grand larceny and fraud against his own parents (for the third time) and parents who lived so deeply in denial of their son's misdeeds they spent each penny he didn't steal from them on lawyers to get him off the charges. My husband had just left our home for good, the woman who I called "Mom", my grandmother, was slowly dying, I was losing my house, my car, I was miserable.. experiencing total emotional and economic disaster. Not to mention that since Dad and I are related our problems were each others...his brother is my uncle, my husband is his son-in-law, his parents my grandparents, etc... Everyone's life was hell then. Except for Ted. Ted was great. Well of course he wasn't really, his life was a fucking nightmare, but HE didn't know that. Ted was oblivious. We envied him that.

"It's like the mother of all consolidation loans." My Dad said, leaning over the cutting table, punctuating the last word with a stab of an Exacto knife. "Think about it...the whole grind, each tiny annoyance rolled into one big problem. No more phone bills and mortgage payments and car loans. You wouldn't have family trouble because they would rightfully abandon you, no relationship trouble because no one would be stupid enough to be with you. No job, no pets, no material concerns, well, after you've sold everything. You'd get rid of everything. Everything."

"I know." I crossed over and leaned on the other side of the table, facing him. "Your life would get a completely screwed up, but strangely effective focus. You'd have one job only. Find the drugs, do the drugs, find the drugs, do the drugs..." Then we talked about the movie Trainspotting for a moment. We talked about how you could look around the theater and know by expression who had delved into the world of drug addiction, and who had not. Those who had not looked horrified, disgusted. Those who had looked wistful and hungry. Jealous. Then I went on about how a Scottish accent really does it for me, and how listening to Looper is like ear-porn, but I digress.

I'm glad someone has something to say. I'm speechless as of late.

Beastie Boys announced today that they would be making the brand new track "In A World Gone Mad." available for free download effective immediately.

"This song is not an anti-American or pro-Saddam Hussein statement," says Adam Horovitz. "This is a statement against an unjustified war."

You Gotta Hookie Hookie Hooka Look A Lot Like Me

This makes me incredibly happy.