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I want to be exactly this rich: I want to have a nice, big country house in southern Mississippi, and I want several absolute holes in other states in the middle of nowhere, holes priced like 2 year-old expensive cars. I’d like a hole with air conditioning in the desert, a cabin hole in the mountains, another cabin hole in the mountains of Alaska, and a backwoods hole in upstate New York or New England. Way out in the middle of nowhere. I want a hole within a day’s driving distance of any habitable part of the United States. A hole network, if you will. Is that asking so much?

I was trying to come up with a good, succinct definition for the term ‘domesticated animal’ the other day. I realized that the definition has to reference cats and dogs, but it also has to reference horses and cows and silkworms. We humans make a lot of other animals work for us.

“An animal that we make work for us” doesn’t quite cut it, because of cats. Cats don’t do anything, as far as I can see. So the definition I finally came up with is

“an animal who can’t eat without our say so.” We are the Kibble God to our domesticated lackeys; that’s why they stick with us.

In a way, the Government fills the same role for us as we fill for Rex and Sniffles. There are many things we can’t do without the government’s say so. Years ago, of course, it was illegal to brew beer; the government said we could eat X, but couldn’t drink Y. Many people still brewed beer, but they were bad, bad dogs.

I propose another year of middle school for kids. I propose that kids go to school 13 years before they graduate.

When I was a kid, we didn’t have homework in elementary school. Nothing except the odd project or reading. Today, second graders come home with two or three pages of homework. They’re putting in overtime, and that’s just not right.

If we added another year to middle school, the younger kids could concentrate on the basics of learning. The middle schoolers could regain study halls, so they wouldn’t have to take as much work home. The quality of children’s lives would go up.

We live longer now. We can afford for childhood to last a little longer. Graduating high school as a 19 year-old could be the last good thing we do for children against their wishes. It would be the last night of having to go to bed at 9:30, or being forced to eat vegetables.

They’ll thank us when they get older.

We, as a society, as Americans, have agreed to speak English. Therefore, as a sign of respect toward one another, it becomes necessary to speak English properly.

There are geniuses in every field, and for the most part they speak English good.

I mean, well.* They have taken the time to become educated. In fact, it sometimes surprises me (and gratifies me) how well most people who are on the cutting edge of their fields communicate. But there are a few savants out there who just don’t know how to talk or write.

I knew this in some way when I was a kid, when I rooted for the maverick in anything. I rooted for the people who spent so much of themselves on their passions that they didn’t have any time left over to become educated communicators. But nowadays, I prefer the one who pays a little respect toward his fellow by taking the time to learn how to talk. It is an acknowledgment that there are other legitimate things out there in the world that have nothing to do with one’s particular urge.

I prefer that kind of person.

*see? Didn’t that make you want to claw your eyes out?

Firemen are paid to be brave. I think that’s the only job like that. I mean, cops and soldiers are paid to be ready to be brave. That’s a lot easier than being brave. But firemen do brave things day in and day out. They don’t have to imagine how they would react in a crisis; they already know how they would react. They do it all the time.

They’re brave people. And while it’s nice to see that civilization values bravery, it’s disheartening to see how low the valuation is.

God love the firemen.

I wanted to get rid of the vast expanses of white I had before, which were hurting my eyes. I’m still trying to figure out how to format the header in blogger, though, and for a person of my nearly complete ignorance of HTML, it’s no fun at all.

Dear God,

while we commend You for acting on our petition in a timely manner, this act is not quite what we were looking for. Frankly, we expected more from You in the portents department. A giant explosion, the largest ever witnessed, was a good idea, and we like the way You’re thinking. But x-rays? Something only our machines can see? What the hell?

No, what we had in mind was something that happens in the sky that’s visibly bright enough and lasts long enough to allow everyone to see it and contemplate it. Something you can yell inside to the kids about, and they can get outside in time to see. A tenth of a second x-ray spike, albeit ‘brighter’ than the moon, is simply unacceptable.

Don’t get us wrong; the fact that the event was harmless was a huge plus. Awesome but harmless is good.

But in light of the explosion’s inherent subtlety, we are resubmitting our petition. This time, let’s not fuck around with x-rays and gamma rays and tenths of seconds and what-not, please.

Thank you,

the teeming masses

Not about his saying that only gays watch the Oscars; that’s just extravagant. But when he is supposed to have said

“Awards for art are f—-ing idiotic.”

he was absolutely right.

Of course awards for arts are fucking idiotic. It’s not a race. No one’s getting the crap punched out of them. There are no winners and losers. It’s ART, for chrissake. Picasso never secretly pined for an award. DaVinci didn’t have an emergency thank-you speech in his back pocket, like a condom.

I mean no disrespect to the real actors who go to the Oscars; they have to. We live in a world that punishes the nonconformist and the disinterested. They’ve got to go if they want to continue to work. But they know. It’s idiotic.

Appreciation of art is far too personal to be codified.

I want to start a formal petition to God, requesting a fabulous omen. I think I could get a lot of signatures.

In a way, the world has gotten much safer in the last few years, because of the internet. There are bloggers everywhere, remarking about the things that go on around them. People constantly visit sites in other countries. I think now most people have “sort of” friends in other parts of the world; people that they wouldn’t mind seeing if they ever dropped by. With that sort of network, news travels fast. And people already take it for granted, this wildly amazing thing.

With any kind of war between countries, short of Ragnarok, now good people will have ample time to do something about it.

The internet, you know?

In my speech class that I’m taking, a requirement to get a good grade for a speech is to cite a “wealth of sources.” My informational speech I’ll be giving concerns how to book the best flight when going on vacation. Nice and easy. For the speech, my root source is faa.gov, a division of dot.gov.

Many topics have a variety of sources to mine. This isn’t one of them. There are no other sources; faa.gov is root. Any fact-giving anywhere else is derived from it. Any opinion anywhere else is based on it.

But my instructor will insist that I toss some more sources in there. Sprinkle em right on in.

A speech class is built and exists to treat students like children, which, judging from my fellow students, isn’t always a bad thing. Some of these people are terrifically dull. Oh, the stories I could tell. But a speech class isn’t built to allow for the odd grown-up who wanders in for unfathomable reasons.

The other reason Speech Class exists is to discover and nurture those people who have a knack for speechifying, of course. We’ve got to have a certain amount of people around who like talking to other people, otherwise civilization would crumble. But as an appalling consequence, I have to give two brutally pointless speeches (when all is said and done) to strangers.

I’ve given speeches before for classes and in the military; some of them might have even been worthwhile to one or two people who heard them. But I already know I don’t like giving them. They can cross me off the list; I don’t care for it. This speech class won’t lead me to bigger and better speech classes.

But I’m required to take it.

When the course and the instructor require me to have a wealth of sources, even when there is obviously just one source, they’re telling me that I am not root. They’re in my face about it.

The thing is, in the things I care about, I am root. Root doesn’t mean that I know everything, even on subjects I know a lot about. It means that, if someone asks me a question, and I don’t know the answer, I tell them so. For example, this guy

“If the increased southern temperatures [of Saturn] are solely the result of seasonality, then the temperature should increase gradually with increasing latitude, but it doesn’t,” Orton said. “We see that the temperature increases abruptly by several degrees near 70 degrees south and again at 87 degrees south.

“A really hot thing within a couple degrees of the pole is something I don’t understand at all,” he said.

is my hero.

We should be bugged when an institution’s policy is to deny root to us. That should never be gotten used to.

I live in a very safe neighborhood. Nobody leaves their backyard lights on at night.

I think I can make a case that the safety of a neighborhood varies inversely with the number of houses that leave their backyard lights on at night. I think it’s reasonable to believe that if a man’s house has been burgled, he’s apt to want his backyard lit up. It stands to reason. I would. Just give me this one.

I think, because you allowed that as a given, that nobody’s house in eyesight of mine has been burgled anytime recently. And I can see if a light were shining in eight backyards next to mine. Nine out of nine houses that I can observe from my backyard have not been burgled.

The only backyard that’s ever lit up (it’s not now) is the vacant house’s directly across from mine. And I can find it in my heart to believe that that is a kindness the owners are bestowing on their neighbors, for safety’s sake.

So there’s no crime here.

One reason, apart from being Long Beach, which hasn’t really changed much in twenty five years, is that this particular neighborhood has only one entrance. Bad guys don’t like that. So this neighborhood doesn’t cater to criminals. Green Acres doesn’t either, maybe less so. That neighborhood is a confusing warren unless you know it.

On a larger scale, though, when you get down to it, there aren’t that many bad guys. We live in a society of few bad guys. I base that statement on my assumption that bad guys have to be related to good guys, and I can count on two fingers the number of relatives I have that have been in trouble as adults. I have a lot of relatives, most of whom I don’t see except at funerals, but even so.

So there aren’t that many bad guys. If you put them all together, the whole lot of them, they’d make a stadium or sixty’s full of people, true. But when you spread em out over the whole country, every little burg you’ve ever driven through, every enormous city, there’s not really that many of them.

Which is good; it means we don’t live in a Bladerunner world (here’s where the word “yet” would be, if I were in a less optimistic mood).

* which, if not the name of a towering novel by a dead Russian, should at least have been the name of a Fox Network docudrama, but it googled empty.$

$ “googled empty” also googled empty.

Ch 454 announcer: “We send you now to the top-of-the-hour ‘news minute’ with your host, Ed Smith.”

Ed: “Good evening, I suppose. Today, nothing changed. Nothing ever changes. It’s the same big ol’ bag of shit we showed you yesterday. I’m Ed Smith.”

Ch 454 announcer: “Channel 454, your All Apathy channel.”