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Bowing to popular pressure, I have decided to describe my performance art idea in the blog. Everyone I’ve described it to agrees that it surpasses all other performance art ideas they have ever encountered. Almost everyone. Okay, the only person I’ve described it to, Brian, immediately denounced it as the single worst thing he’d ever heard of, but I could tell he was only being brutally honest. Here it is:

1. 4 folding chairs, occupied by 4 people.
2. the folding chairs are placed in someone’s yard, right next to a 4-way intersection, facing it. Could be Brian’s house’s yard; let’s pretend it is so.
3. the performance has a beginning, a middle, and an ending.
4. the beginning is at 2 in the morning, when the 4 people drag the folding chairs to the corner of the yard facing the intersection. The chairs are in a row. The 4 people sit in the chairs, facing the intersection.
5. they don’t speak to each other.
6. any time a car comes to the intersection and leaves it, the people comment on the adequacy of the driver’s stop.
7. hours drag by.
8. the middle of the performance happens at 3 or 4 in the morning, when no car has been by for a long time.
9. it is permissible to comment on a pedestrian’s choice of dog breed if one walks by, but only if the comment is loud enough that the pedestrian hears it.
10. the end of the performance happens around 6 or so, just as day people begin to enliven the mind-numbingly boring event.
11. at the end, around 6, the people get up, fold the chairs, and go back inside the house, which we’ve already agreed for the purposes of this blog entry, is Brian’s.

Sliced bread, move over!

I really hope this becomes a turning point. I don’t care if it makes W somehow look good. It’d get our people the hell out of there.

I’m a practical guy. When I proposed to my wife, while it wasn’t exactly out of the blue, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I mean, I didn’t bide my time, calculate, buy an engagement ring, and all the stuff a man is “supposed” to do. So I didn’t have an engagement ring to give her. I didn’t have anything to give her to symbolize my love for her; I gave her my love, I didn’t need any symbols.

But my wife has let it be known once or twice over the years that she misses not having an engagement ring.

Like I said, I’m a practical guy. So, when I look at somebody’s big ring on her finger, I don’t think “Why, isn’t that lovely!” I think “My GOD! They could’ve put a downpayment on the Biltmore with the money that thing must’ve cost!”

The whole thing the DeBeers people spew about how a man should spend 2 months’ salary on a ring fills me with loathing. They are evil, calculating bastards. I remember, years ago, the DeBeers people used to say that a month and a half’s worth of salary was adequate to do the job. I remember vividly when they changed the commercials to reflect their escalating, filthy lust for my money: it was in the 80’s. Do you remember that? It really happened. The DeBeers people are filthy.

There are ways to show you love someone without lining the pockets of the already super-rich. And I don’t mind symbols of love, until someone starts making a business out of it.

I’ll probably buy my wife a ’substitute ring’ someday to make up for my crass refusal to make the diamond people richer. Who knows, maybe I’ll put a downpayment on the Biltmore for her.

ps: she does have a wedding ring. I’m not totally heartless.

I do have a religion: I’m an environmentalist. I’m not a perfect environmentalist, by any stretch. If I were perfect, or close to it, I’d be eating cold, soaked beans and corn harvested from my backyard instead of ordering pepperoni pizza from Domino’s.

Global warming’s happening. Some people know it, some people don’t know it, some people don’t care. 50 years from now, the people who knew it and cared about it will be sad and angry. The people who didn’t bother to educate themselves will be sad and guilt-ridden. Then there’re the other people, the ones who could’ve really done something about it if they’d cared to.

To those of you who finally strut out of the world without feeling sorry for what you did, fuck you. You won’t be missed.

I’m taking this “macro economics” online course at JD this semester. I was kind of excited about being compelled to take it. I’d never taken an economics class before. I’ve been sometimes keenly and sometimes not so keenly interested in the financial news ever since I became a grown-up, and I’ve heard and read all the buzzwords of economics and money for a long time now. I was looking forward to finding out what it is the economists are really talking about when they talk.

I was sort of depressed when I realized that I actually had had a pretty good understanding of what was going on before I took the course. That means that economists really are just guessing when they tell us why things happen.

It’s weird; I majored in psych, which has been until very recently a backward, clannish science, operated by squatters. I never knew that economics–also a social science–is even more backward and clannish. The main difference is that psychologists want to find out what makes people tick, and the economists couldn’t care less.

Anyway, despite everything, I’ll start bringing this around to my actual point, which concerns “efficiency.”

If you don’t believe that efficiency is always a good thing, then you cannot belong to the economists’ club. Efficiency is their God; all the charts and graphs assume that you want to maximize it. You can’t have enough.

Economists forget that people are human. They forget that stuff. If they could chart and graph a company that’s allowed to work its employees twenty four hours per day, they’d be in heaven. Fortunately, though, they can’t, because we the people have a government.

Part of a government’s job is to create inefficiencies. That’s just true. Without a government, corporations would force their workers to work longer—to be more efficient. The government keeps them from doing that.

An over-awe or over-adulation of “efficiency” is dangerous and de-humanizing, but that’s where the economists are coming from.

Wouldn’t it be great if John Kerry was President? Wouldn’t that be fine? The news is almost always loathsome nowadays, and it produces a kind of low-grade fever in me that I feel all the time. That would be gone! Replaced by something hopeful!

I’d open the newspaper in the morning with a lot less dread than I feel now.

I’ve read way too many articles about what Kerry did wrong and what he could’ve done better. What are these people talking about? Weren’t they here in November? That was a fucking close race! And we almost won!

And we’re supposed to reach out to a broader spectrum of people? Well, fuck that. Let those people come to us. There’s been one fiasco after another, and the public need to start using their melons. If this isn’t a country where people can use their own melons, life will get hard.

There are so many splendors in the world, but it’s not enough for most people.

In a way it’s sad, but in another way it’s offensive that most people feel the need to make shit up. The world isn’t wide enough or mysterious enough or awesome enough for them. Making shit up is a response, I suppose, to a desire to know more about what’s going on. People want to know what’s going on. But there’s so much going on already, that we know about, that maybe these people should just sit back, relax, and digest the information that’s already out there.

Because it’s a blizzard out there, in case they haven’t noticed. Shovel out from the stuff that’s already on the ground before praying for more, frchrissake.

This headline is on CNN, not The Onion.

(ps: link may break in the future; CNN doesn’t archive their stories as well as they should. The story comes on the eve of W’s horrendously expensive inauguration. $40 million. He just doesn’t care!)

Santa Rosa, CA (AC)— The late Charles Schulz’s comic strip “Peanuts” has been placed on a two week online delay by United Feature Syndicate due to contractual obligations, said syndicate spokesman Tad Bowman.

“Even apart from the contractual reasons, it just makes sense to reward the newspaper reader with an up-to-date ‘Classic Peanuts,’” stated Bowman. “The newspaper reader has spent his or her fifty cents to buy this right. Online readers, in contrast, have been viewing these 5 to 54 year-old strips literally for free, in effect being subsidized by those who buy newspapers that run comic strips drawn by those who are long dead. No longer.”

“It’s about time,” stated Marigold Evans, subscriber to northern California’s Sacramento Bee. “I can’t tell you how annoying it is to bring up the latest classic antics of the Peanuts gang at the office, only to find out that others are reading the same strip for nothing on the internet. It’s a disgrace.”

“Delaying the online version of the strip seems very reasonable to me,” said Viki Monsanto of Chicago. “The net people want to have their cake and eat it, too, and that’s just not right.”

Added Franklin Gautier of Pass Christian, Mississippi, “When I’m talking about a funny joke I read in ‘Classic Peanuts,’ I want to know that the people I talk to paid to see it like me. Like, remember last week [when] Snoopy and Woodstock were dancing a happy dance, and then stopped to say ‘I hate cats,’ and then started dancing again? That was cool.”

Others interviewed, however, expressed different opinions. “Peanuts?” said Albert Haversham of North Brunswick, Iowa, “that’s the one with the dog and parrot and the round-bodied guy, right? Or am I thinking of ‘Ziggy?’”

“Classic Peanuts,” as the strip is now called five years after the death of creator Charles Schulz, appears in some 2,400 newspapers around the world. The Peanuts empire still accounts for $1.2 billion in annual sales worldwide, though most reasonable people are at a loss to explain why.

I want a country that doesn’t tell its citizens not to talk about something. Our country and its government empower themselves to tell the citizens what is and what is not valid to discuss: These things you can hold an intelligent conversation about; these things we frown on.

I want a country in which it’s okay, legal, and not frowned upon to hold an intelligent conversation on anything. I think if that were true, all else would follow.

“Habib’s more than three years of incarceration came into sharp focus this week, when the Bush administration agreed not to charge him with any crime and to repatriate him to Australia. Once home, he will be free, Australian officials said Wednesday.”

The mere fact that this guy wasn’’t disappeared gives me hope in the USA. That’’s a line apparently no one in authority has been conditioned to cross yet. In the story, there’s all manner of outrageous behavior coming from US government agencies and agents (to say nothing of the Egyptians’), but at least they didn’t disappear the guy.

I know it’s a fairly rude and pitiful thing to hang my hopes on, but they’ve got to hang somewhere.

Remember that scene in Aliens, where Ripley is telling the marines that Paul Reiser had planned to kill them all except for her and the kid, who were too valuable to kill because of the baby aliens which should have been gestating in their guts? How Bill Paxton, for every macabre revelation concerning Paul’s evil intentions, keeps intoning “Fuck! Fuck!”? And Michael Biehn, the head marine, finally can’t take it anymore and decides to waste him, only to be diverted by an attacking wave of aliens? You remember: as the aliens attack, Paul is able to escape unnoticed into another room, where he gets his comeuppance at the claws and teeth of a surprise alien about a minute and a half later.

Yep. That is a good scene. Any scene where Paul Reiser gets his comeuppance is almost by definition good. But the thing I want to point out is the way Bill Paxton portrayed rising revulsion and outrage. That was good; I feel exactly that way from time to time. The latest time I’ve felt that way was the day before yesterday, when I found out that Armstrong Williams was surreptitiously paid a quarter of a million dollars by the Bush administration to advocate W’s education plans. That was good for the first “Fuck!” The second “Fuck!” bubbled out when I read that the DoE said publicly that they did nothing wrong by giving Williams money, that it was a “straightforward distribution of information about the department’s mission and (the education law) – a permissible use of taxpayer funds.”

Fuck! Fuck!

I’m not totally divorced from the people who outrage me. They’re not aliens. I know them. For instance, although sheep de-assing enrages me, I don’t whip out my check-signing pen, either. I’m not buying a ticket to Australia to have a go at the evil sheep ranchers; I’m not protesting down on the steps of the Capitol. I could, but that would impact my way of living. Also, and of course it’s a cop-out, but shaking my little fists on the Mall would change nothing but the amount of money in my bank account. So I allow them to do what they do, which is what they count on.

When I’m not poor, I give to the Sierra Club, the WWF, and similar organizations, to keep myself from dying of embarrassment.

So I know these people: W, de-assers, and so on. They are people with a core belief. They do have something I don’t, though, which is the time to act on their core belief, which is to make money. It’s an outrage, but I’m also outraged at my own lackadaisical behavior.

If I were independently wealthy, I might act on my beliefs instead of just believe them. I’m not, though, so instead, here’s an entry in a weblog.

Universal Pictures has announced a plan to make the first movie about the current Iraq War. “The Battle for Falluja,” will star Harrison Ford as General Jim Mattis, who led the first assault on Falluja before the White House abruptly halted it.

What’s up with a war movie? Have we no fucking decency? We are still fucking with those people, and we have the gall to begin post-mortem now? I’m pretty sure we paid more respect to the people of Grenada.

This movie isn’t “Apocalypse Now,” either. It’s going to be “The Green Berets,” with Ford as John Wayne. Of course it’s about making a dollar first, but second it’s about propaganda. Somebody in hollywood has decided it’s time for us to watch our military swashbuckle on the big screen.

When I become depressed about the state of the world, and muse on the idea that all of the real living was done long ago, and we’re here on earth now just to fill the place up in an efficient and dull manner, I come across a story like this, and I feel much better.

Sea Gypsies, man! We’ve still got it!

Another New Year. People were up at midnight celebrating, shooting off their fireworks. Some of the bigger fireworks sounded like mortar rounds. I saw several pretty bursts almost directly over my house. Pretty.

It was also very irritating. I mean, I’m always awake at midnight. It’s a nice time; quiet and very sparing of car noises or people. It’s my time.

On New Year’s Eve, though, day people impinge on my solitude by loudly carrying on. Why do they do it? It would be easy to just declare that ‘the New Year’ starts at 9 am on January 1st, so these day people could celebrate it in a sensible day fashion, with cookouts and volleyball and egg-tosses or something. But no; they raise a ruckus on my time.

I was talking to my next-door neighbor yesterday, for three or four minutes. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. The subject happened to be the air travel industry. My neighbor said that he thought it might be a good idea to re-regulate the industry, for the sake of the nation’s economy. He said that, even though it reeked of socialism, it might be a good idea. Then his wife called him back inside.

My next-door neighbor thinks differently than I do. He is a chief navy petty officer, and a policeman, yet somehow he thinks he’s also a full participant in capitalism. And by saying that he thinks the airline industry should be re-regulated, he’s saying that there is some minimal right that a citizen has to rapid travel; that somehow a broken system of air travel will impede his rise to affluence.

My neighbor lives in a fantastic dreamworld, in which televised rags-to-riches anecdotal evidence is evidence. I think most people live in that world, where an honest worker can depend on one day retiring to his mansion and the commies only come out at night. It’s a fantastic world, yes it is.

The right to air travel doesn’t even register on me. What citizens should have a right to is free health-fucking-care, Junior, and the right to work for a living wage. Get those cleared up, and we’ll start talking about your right to jet to Gramma’s house on All Saints’ Day.

Also, I hate to break it to you, pal, but you’re never going to be the rich man of your dreams. You’re going to die an industrious worker who yearns to be the rich man of his dreams.

Industry should be rewarded. Someone who works harder than some other one should have access to more things. If the opportunity to have more things wasn’t available, fewer people would be industrious. I know that. I’m not for total redistribution of wealth.

But redistribution of wealth, to some degree, is a necessity, and already happens. That’s what progressive taxation is all about. Progressive taxation is why there are not riots in the streets. Listen up, y’all!

The current American system is not set up to see to it that each citizen’s basic necessities are taken care of. It’s set up to insure that the degree of misery experienced by the weak never rises to the point that they openly revolt. Ostensibly, our system is set up to insure that we each have a clear run at life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It says so right there in the owner’s manual. But they didn’t really mean everybody, even from the start. Don’t kid yourself.

That’s our current system. When you’ve got some people buying yachts to store their caviar on, and you’ve got some other people dying of poverty and addiction because they don’t have food or can’t get treatment, you’ve got a system that hasn’t quite found the wealth redistribution sweet spot.

It’s remarkable. What a profound crock of shit. That shit crocks profoundly.

Neighbor, you’ll never be rich enough so that, in a just system, you’d lose more value than you’d get back. Ain’t gonna happen. You have a terrifically misplaced sense of your own destiny. I’m surprised I have to tell you this. Get your ass to thinking.

A just redistribution of wealth has been done, or nearly so. Look at Scandinavia. When my neighbor looks at Scandinavia, he thinks about the tax burden. He thinks about how much harder it is to become rich there. News flash, Neighbor: you’re never going to be rich here, either.

Take a dollar, buy a lottery ticket, clutch it in your trembling hand, and dream your dreamy dreams. The rich thank you for your support.

I’m 41, so I think it’s time I take vindictive pleasure in being here to see another year rung in despite all my enemies. HOO HA HA! Take that, forces of evil! I made it to another year, despite everything!

I have many enemies, all of which would have taken pleasure in seeing my obituary in the paper last year. Osama Bin Laden, for example, would have liked nothing better than to have thwarted my ability to write ‘2005’ on my checks. Take that, you scum! Also, the manager guy down at Choice Supermarket, who always gives me a stern evil-eye when I come in there to sniff through his beer selection, and two times out of three leave empty-handed because I find it wanting… I’m still alive, you bastard! I’ll be in there in January! Hoo Ha Ha!

Yes, I have a long list of enemies who would like nothing better than to see me reduced to ashes in an urn on somebody’s mantle. Many of my bitter enemies technically don’t even know I exist, but if they did know, they’d rather I didn’t. George Bush, my bitterest enemy, has no clue that I work tirelessly at despising him. I take umbrage at everything he does. Sometimes I go out of my way to seek out his image on the net, just to gaze at him, at his yam head, in revulsion, in order to take umbrage more fully. I do!

I’d like nothing better than to be alone in the same room with him, so I could slap the jesus out of that yammy head.

Also, the kid down the street who picked on my kid last year, who knows I exist, whose name is Caleb or Jebediah or Methuselah; I have a tall-boy of head-slapping jesus with his name on it. It’s next to the pony keg of head-slapping jesus I reserve for the night I’m alone with Rumsfeld.

I made it to 2005, you lousy bastards! I have thwarted you all! HOO HA HA! HOO HA HA!*

From here on out, my New Years’ resolutions will always be the same: to foil my enemies by living to see another year.

*the editors would like to thank Scott Adams for the exclamation “Hoo ha ha,” which connotes just the right mixture of power-drunkenness and diabolism appropriate to mean-spirited New Year’s resolutions. The editors flirted briefly with “Ah hah hah,” but found it lacked a sense of evil intention and depended too much on stark insanity. The simpler “Hah hah” was also considered and rejected.

So props to Mr Adams, even though he’s probably going to find himself in our “Big Book of Bitter Enemies” one of these days, because of his “charming” use of faux guilelessness when he says that he’s only in it for our money. He re-states that in every forward to every compendium he’s ever produced, “charmingly,” and the editors are getting tired of it.