So, thanks to the witch doctor’s inept uterus-finding, we got to have a wholly unnecessary and completely cool ultrasound experience.

 Heartbeat was nice and strong… 

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I came home today and Jen was totally pregnant.

Completely, irrevocably, and utterly neat.

Listen to my shows - Or else you’ll be taking food out of my kid’s mouth!

Lindystars suggested that I run for office, and I formed an exploratory committee immediately to determine the feasibility of such an endeavor. The initial responses are in, and sadly, I will remain a private citizen, simply due to the long, long list of ex-girlfriends with vendettas/restraining orders/axes to grind. Again, my apologies to:

• I. P.
• E. D.
• S. H.
• J. M.
• A. L.
• K. R.
• T. R.
• C. B.
• H. K.
• V. W.
• S. B.

You girls deserve a medal… Or at the very least some cats and prizes.

I am not proud of the fact that every woman I have ever dated has either changed their number and moved, run off screaming in the night, or mentally blocked the time she spent with me. It is somewhat off putting to run into somebody you once dated for four years straight and have them say “I’m sorry, do I know you?” I kinda wish I left more of an impression on chicks. I seem to have no problem doing so on couches.

I was attempting to put together a list of the planks to my platform, and where I stand on “teh iss ewes”. Here is a brief analysis:

1. Evolution: The fact that I still see stupid fucking kids wearing jnkos (JNKOS FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!) proves that Evolution is an art, not a science.

2. School Funding: I think that 50 percent of all money earned in this country should go to education. Seriously.

3. Iraq: Do Over. For real. This time, I say we canal the fucking desert, and get these people some goddamned agriculture. Farmers tend to be less angry all the time, and seriously, who can stay mad around cows?

4. Gay Marriage: If gays are dumb enough to want a contract that legally binds them together, with financial punishment should they decide to “go their own way”, I say get up on it, Justin. (All men named Justin are gay).

5. Economy: A teensy secret, from me to you - The douche in office has no power over the market. We had an idiotmonkey in office, and the Dow posted record profits and losses. We had a boner-thumping hillbilly in office, and the Dow posted record profits and losses. The economy is simply the output of all the goods and service we produce and consume. Even under Stalin, beets sold well.

6. Manifest Destiny (Swiping land for the public “good”): All ownership is fake. I think that if a government wants to build a road through some dude’s land, that dude gets to set up a tollbooth. We’ll call it “Jake’s Booth”, and Jake gets all profit from that motherfucker. That, or the seizing agency needs to pay five times the street value of the land, adjusted for 10 years assumed growth. So a 1 acre plot, seized, should cost no less than 15 million dollars.

7. Abortion: This is a tough one. As a man that once agreed to abort his child, I know that there is no more harrowing and debilitating experience, other than having your next child die 6 hours after birth. Abortion is terrible, and frightening, and heartless, and permanently ruins your soul, psyche, and spirit. And yet, in some situations, it is utterly necessary. I demand post-abortion counseling be mandatory. I demand that any woman getting an abortion do so as early as possible. And I limit any woman to one abortion. If you are in line for a second one, you get forced sterilization, period.

8. Pornography: Strangely, I am against it. Too few women get in touch with their sexuality, and too many men develop bizarro fantasies because of porn. Yes, if I want my nuts yanked on a little at the moment of orgasm, or some biting during my sodomy, or a nice pastrami on whole wheat when I get down to it, I expect my wife to be there with some mayo and lube. Porn is only legal for single guys, and must be purchased for the guy by a woman. That’d make for some interesting conversations. “Hey mom… while you’re out…”

If you think of any other issues, do let me know. I desperately need to figure out where I stand, so that I can get behind me and light a fire, and stuff.

And behold, a garage did open, and a fat man and a woman beckoned me close, saying “Come and See, Come and See…”

And I saw…

We participated in the Great American Tradition of the yard sale this week. A week of prepping; digging out assorted awful artifacts, piling them onto hastily erected folding tables, and slathering them with fluorescent price doohickeys. We started early, 7:00 AM, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday… I have learned so much about the secrets to G-Commerce, and I intend to share them with you -

Rule #1 - Nobody Buys the Fucking Sodas

I had the brilliant idea that if I loaded two coolers with ice and coke and pepsi and water and faygo and other assorted cold drinks, the masses would pile on, supping deep from my well of high fructose corn syrup and or aspartame. Turns out, not so much. We hit a SAM’s Club and grabbed a metric ton of pop.

• Total cost of ice and sodas: $70.00.
• Total net sales of soda: $10.00.
• Amount of “free” water and soda consumed by me and friends: $30.00.

A definitive fatty failure.

Rule #2 - Do NOT advertise on craigslist.

Listen, I thought it was a good idea. Hit up an ad, refresh it daily, and watch the masses drive up, their hands tightly clamped around a sweaty stack of ones, visions of LOTR figurines dancing in their heads.

Turns out, we got one guy from craigslist. A complete and utter creepy-douche, who stood, whistling, for 7 minutes, then argued with my wife, her friend, and me, ON THREE SEPARATE DAYS. over the pricing of our DVDs and comics. Here’s the rub about craigslist… The internet, for the most part, is filled with creepy, scabby, awful people. People that type all in CAPS WANTING TO KNOW YOU A/S/L AND ETA YOU’RE PU$$ W/FORXORZ!1!!1

Why would you ever invite that onto your property? Avoid these people like the plague. They really have no money to spend, unless mom slipped them a fiver on their way out of the halfway house that morning. Freaks. Stick with the newspaper, or just put clean, well directioning signs up, period.

Rule #3 - Summer=Hell

OMFG BOMFG! - It’s just hot. It’s so hot. It’s incredibly hot. It is far, far, far too fucking hot. You know that hot where your neck and face and forearms and calves are dripping with sweat, and you sit in front of the fans, begging for some kind of cool down, and the fans can’t even pierce the three inch glaze of perspiration that encircles you, and you just sit, in a salt crust mold, grilling to pinkness in your own juices? I am chafed on folds I did not know I had. I actually lost weight drinking soda and eating doughnuts, because I sweat 3 pints of blood from my ass alone. Dude. Seriously. Do this shit in Autumn. And the November side of Autumn at that.

Rule #4 - Utilize The Chicken Sandwich All Day Principle

I get emails asking me about the C.S.A.D.P all the time. It’s very simple. If you have a frozen chicken sandwich, you sell that bitch for $2.99. If you have a cooked, but not “finish fried” chicken sandwich, you sell that suckah for $1.99. If you have a fully crafted, completely assembled, mayonnaise-starting-to-yellow, limp-lettuce, hockey puck bunned chicken sandwich - You move that fucker for a nickel.

In other, less savory, terms, the longer into the endeavor you go, the more you need to be willing to drop the price. Friday AM, you can get a dollar for your old VHS tapes. You can get 5 bucks on those unforgettable chili pepper table placemats. You can even get rid of that stupid fucking winnie the pooh glass for a dollar. But there is a property in effect here, the inverse ratio. As goods absorb sun and the weekend wanes, your prices need to adjust accordingly. That exercise bike you haven’t seen in motion since Cobain was crooning at Kennedy? $50 on Friday, $30 on Saturday, $10 on Sunday. Just put on a bad toupee and make like a car salesman, because, seriously, “EVERYTHING MUST GO”.

Otherwise, you are going to be surrounded with all that stupid shit again on Monday. We priced on the fly, and made $660.00 (after soda recompense) off of stuff that, honestly, I could have awoken tomorrow and found on fire and not shed a tear. Trash-Treasure. Rubbish Relics. Crap Collectibles. Get rid of it all, baby… Then you can head out and start filling in all that space you just emptied out.

Rule #5 - Play Johnny Cash.

You’d be amazed. I put on a Cash album, sales quadrupled. People universally like Johnny… What can I say?

I end this entry with a photo tour through my wife’s camera. I still am AMAZED the Simpsons puzzles would not sell. Not even for a dollar. Nobody likes photomosaics.

Oh, there was so much more. It was heaven, if your idea of heaven is a huge pile of crap with dog hair and dust on it.

Let me say this: It’s best if you enlist competent friends. More stuff, more help, and more fun, sitting in the psuedo shade, sipping sundry sodas, and laughing at the good folks coming by to haul away your unmentionables. Memories, indeed.

Sorry it took a while, I have many irons in many fires, and many of those irons are actually cats. Blazing, angry firecats. Meowcracklehiss.

When last I left you, it was July 4th and I was spent, home from a day in the wild at a wedding.

So, the blitzkrieg of Independence Day came and went, my friend and her man got their forever on, and the world moved happily about. Driving home, under the stars obfuscated by clouds, listening to Flogging Molly, my eyes glazed and raw, I was afflicted again with the misties.

I had three overwhelmy moments that day. The first came when I listened to the “minister”, and his eloquent words, and ate their content. So much of my life was spent seeking someone else to make me happy. Vainly seeking to generate happiness in another’s embrace, chasing skirts and seeking a reason to get up every day. The reality is that your life is your own. We all begin and end that way, and now would be a pretty good time, if you haven’t already, to spend dedicating the rest of yours to doing right by yourself. It isn’t selfishness; it’s fucking sanity. Of course, I had to learn that the hard way. Finally, after years of rooting around, I discovered my reason for being.

Dogs. The whole point of being alive may in fact be the care and feeding of dogs. Oh, and then I met my wife, and she’s pretty awesome, too. But, yeah, Dogs. Go get yourself some.

I really like watching people get married. Maybe I am a chick.

The second overwhelmy moment happened when I arrove at the house for the wedding. We walked out back, and saw more flora than you could shake a leafy green, dew encrusted rainforest stick at. It was Foliagic Bombardment. I know you have been to a person’s house, and they might’ve had a “green thumb”… Coupla zinnias, a few azaleas, maybe even a tufted bird of paradise. These people use that stuff for compost. I saw massive oaks encircled with elephant ears, 80 feet tall, creeper lilies of every persuasion, more ivies than a blood mobile parade, and flowers and trumpets and foxglove and star gazers and banana trees and squash and whatever flower that guy turned into after staring at his reflection for weeks on end and just holy black kow, batman. I realized that I had failed my property, and with a resolve of newfound hippieness, I seek now to gird my land’s loins with plants aplenty. More on that another time.

The third time I was overwhelmed came that evening. We had spent several hours, talking and gift-giving and bantering in a large circle (any circle I visit is immediately enlargened) and the time to leave had done did come. Piled into the Black Running Shoe and plowed home with all speed. As we straightened out onto SR 46, the skies erupted with hundreds of fireworks. Such a simple concept, I had never really considered it… With 2 million people living in Greater Orlando, approximately 1,700 pretty goshdarned huge displays of explosiveness can be seen by simply driving around. I alternated between nearly smashing the guy ahead of me on the road and idling down to 25 mph so I could see the last vestiges of each finale. So, road safe, no, but damn cool? Yes.

I may have a new tradition now, instead of spending hundreds of dollars shooting my piddling load in a cul de sac, I will take to the streets and witness the spectacle of others. And no, I am not cheap. It will cost me $702.43 in gas, most assuredly.

Okay, so you cannot tell Mickey, but… I was listening to some Flogging Molly on the way home. Specifically, “What’s Left of the Flag”, which is just an incredibly evocative tune. Best lyric:

walk away me boy
walk away me boys
and by morning we’ll be free
wipe that golden tear
from your mother dear
and raise what’s left
of the flag for me

That’s about as Patriotic as I can get.

Okay. Sleep, and see you again soon. By the way… I have a bunch of film negatives of our trip to paris. I seek to digitize them. What is the safest, cheapest, best route to go on that? My thanks in advance.

I had a wonderful time watching friends get hitched tonight. I will devise a blog that sums up my emotions on that, and the 4th of July, and many other things both sundry and silly… But for now, I need sleep, in large doses. I did want to leave you with this, the heartfelt and eloquent words of the Jizzustice of the Pizzeace Minister Dude or whatever…. I got a bit misty. Showing here:

“Many will tell you that marriage is all about sacrifice. Let me be the one to tell you - nothing could be further from the truth. Sacrifice by definition means “the destruction of or surrender, for less than its presumed value, of something prized or desirable”. The fact that you have decided, of your own volition, to share your lives demonstrates the enormous value you find in each other. Cherish every moment spent together because to do otherwise devalues that time. To do otherwise epitomizes sacrifice.

A famous philosopher once wrote, “I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live my life for another nor ask another to live for me.” Each of you: Live your life for only you. Always remember because you chose to share your lives each minute of it is a tribute to the pleasure, joy, intellectual stimulation, character, and honor you have discovered in the other. You trade value for value, virtue for virtue, and you both profit.”

Pretty neat. See you tomorrow, sexy beasts.

I have suffered from very few male role models in my life. My father, my mother’s boyfriends, George Carlin, Sam Kinison, Ernest Hemingway… All fell short of the mark in some way. It’s just tough to find a good man, a guy you can trust, a go-to, a wingman, a Goose, a guy to hold the tarp as you lower the stripper’s body into the hastily dug grave.

The essence of being a male is frustratingly hard to nail down.

Look to nature. Male lions on the Serengeti do not seem to hang out with each other past early adolescence. Dude lion finds himself a nice patch of broken earth, sets up a few girls working the corners for the antelope-johns, and rakes in the beefy profits. When another Leo comes sniffing around, he is pimp-pawed or clawed into submission and sent packing. While we sometimes suffer those base characteristics, for the most part, guys aren’t that territorial.

How about wolves? Their societies can be matriarchal or patriarchal, and yet there is always a top pooch.There are no committees, and disputes are settled with the wolf equivalent of a playful rear naked choke. Some guys are like this, but usually they fall into the Laborer/Contractor relationship, where some guys spread out from one Alpha Male and perform his bidding while he barks encouragement and flexes.

Ants? I have spoken at great length about ants. Fuck ants.

Dolphins do a neat thing. I don’t know if you know about this, but… Dolphins. Wow. They just….

Here. Let me describe a scene:

Two men get into a car and drive to the mall. They stop at the food court, snack up on some Sbarro or Flamers, and on the way out the door, they snatch up a 15 year old girl. Biting her on the shoulder, they walk out of the mall and into some nearby woods (this story takes place before urban sprawl, when you could still find more than a copse of trees in your commercially zones areas). When they arrive in the woods, the guys begin a sexmarch, which is similar to a deathmarch, in that violence and fear keep their victim walking with very little rest for weeks at a time, but instead of eventually killing the victim, these guys just take turns raping the poor kid, ALL THE TIME. Sounds like fun?

Well that is how many unmarried male dolphins get their groove on.

Dolphins may be more fucked up than ants. Definitely not where I am looking for my male relationship templates.

Perhaps there is no steadfast, reasoned path to the male/male relationship. It’s just one of those fascinating and truly special moments when guys, not at odds for a prize, not forced upon each other by a situation, and perfectly able to value the other as a man, can sit and mock the world at large in a beautiful way together.

Maybe that is proof of our superiority. Not the thumbs, not our cities and wars and technology and language and harnessing of the environment… Simply our ability to stand on a construction site, or in a foxhole, or in a laboratory, or a class, or a bar… And cut wise with a good friend. Preferably while drinking that motherfucker under the table.

Women simply cannot touch that. Poor things. Probably cause they are socially scarred from all the raping and shoulder biting.

Two days ago, the squirrels won a major skirmish in the War of Nutrition. They leapt from on high and ripped through my pool deck screens, thrusting their tiny knives into the sailcloth of my patio deck, and gouging deep holes that left $200 worth of netting billowing in the wind like a threadbare pair of red sweatpants. We talked about these squirrels on the show a while back. 

Cursed rats. Their lust for vandalism is matched only by their thirst for high dollared quaffery.

 Well, it appears that my straggling citrus trees are attracting more than just these Rodents of Unusual Size. In the past week my yard has been infiltrated by two stray dogs, a buncha hoppy frogs and toads, a plethora of pissed off cardinals, some weird burrowing white thing (possum? albino mole? Shoggoth?)… and now a gopher tortoise. You musn’t call it a turtle, or else you marginalize their struggle.

Here is Dale.

I call him that because he goes around our yard looking for food/an exit/sponsorship in left-turning circles, occasionally making a dispiriting and kinda loud :THWOMP: when he runs into the walls. Or she. Musn’t marginalize…

Photo courtesy of Jen. Today is her birthday. I gave her a camera, with which she is now flitting around the yard and house busily snapping dozens of pictures, effortlessly documenting the world at hand.

I have struck one, wherein I torture myself with Atkins for days, eating salads and lean meats… And then I cheat for a meal, and then have to reenter the weird physical state that lets my body burn fat again. Three weeks, stuck at 50 lbs lost. I am supposed to have field work to do all week, trudging down roads in the 102 degree sunshine. Maybe I will wear double pants and jog the whole time. I gotta do something to get over this hump.

Had a good time tonight, spent with friends drinking at Tom and Jerry’s. The owner insulted me a bunch and made me a nice french silk martini. It totally complimented the iced coffee, martini, brats, and rum and diet already sloshing around in me. That’s some diet! I do not know why I insist on getting girl drinks whenever I go there. Pink Squirrel, Mudslide, Vanilla Vodka… I am a fruity fruit.

We are a strange group. Our conversation mostly centered on who we would cast in a live action Thundercats Movie (Carrot Top for Liono, dude is so cut it is sick) and Ving or that big guy from Green Mile for Panthro. Someone suggested Matt Damon for Snarf. I am not sure Matt has the range.

Also talked about who our favorite movie Satan was. I really liked the leather jacket guy from Prophecy, the Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate, and that Czech/German VDubb Satan in Constantine.

Maybe you could vote in the comments: Who is your favorite Satan?