Funniest Man on Television? Suck it!

Few things in the last few months have made me laugh harder than the above voice over from Ted on Scrubs. In fact, I think he may be the funniest guy on television right now, and I have thoght that ever since I saw the kidnap scene depicted here.

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John and Superman

A boy and his hero on his bed spread. Is there anything more wonderful?

Reminds me of my Empire Strikes Back sheets on my bed... which my wife

won't let me put on anymore.

Shooting the Masseuse

I have only this to say about the horror at the Virginia Tech yesterday: everyone's bitching and moaning now that the cops didn't send warnings or cancel classes after the crazy guy shot the first two people in a dorm. But I can't fathom why they would. If the world shut down every time there was a shooting, we'd all be crippled, stuck in our homes (or prevented from returning to them). They had no proof he would go gunning for other people. How would they know he'd show up at an academic building almost a mile away from the first crime? They didn't. The cops did what was right with the info they had.  If they had shut down the campus and canceled class and nothing had happened, heads would have rolled for causing a panic and/or wasting people's time... Though you can bet your ass that any murder/attack on any campus in the future will mean all life comes to a screeching halt, and with it, some of the rights and liberties of those not even connected. It's just like terror attacks on planes... it's why you can't take water on the damn plane. The bad  guys love a good panic, people.

Okay, on that happy note (as there's not much to be happy about, what with the shooting, and the snow, and fact that the ratings for DRIVE seem to indicate the show won't live long, which is a god-damned shame, and Kurt Vonnegut is STILL FUCKING DEAD) I will instead tell you this:

Thoughts that go through my head while getting a massage.

(The wife bought me a chocolate massage for Valentine's Day, which I just got around to last week.)

1. "I didn't clip my toe nails. Haven't for a while. And she's looking at my feet. Ew."

2. Lots of thoughts about sexual harassment. Not because I was harassing my masseuse, nor was she harassing me, but I was thinking about something I want to write about that touches on the subject.

3. "Did her boob just graze my head? Her boob just totally grazed my head!"

4. "I should not have worn the thermal/long-john underpants."

5. "How do they get the grout between the floor tile to stay so clean?" (viewed through the face donut)

6. "Massages usually hurt more than this."

7. "She's not wearing shoes. Pink toe nails. Damn, I really should have clipped mine..."

8. "Maybe I'll get a pedicure."

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth!

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., is dead.

So it goes.

He was the author of the greatest American (or maybe any nationality) book ever written, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade. Which also, quite amazingly, was turned into a movie almost as good. The book was born the same year as me, 1969, though it gestated much longer than I.

I discovered Vonnegut as a college freshman, when forced to read Slaghterhouse-Five for my first English Literature class. It's one of those things I never thought would happen in my life: being told I had to read a science fiction novel as part of my education! After the years of Shakespeare, Red Badge of Courage, and the like, this was like present found in a syllabus.

I had no idea the book was so much more than just that. So, so much more. It's a tale of Vonnegut's own survival of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, during the waning days of World War II, but told from the point of view of a man named Billy Pilgrim who is unstuck in time (Vonnegut is, himself, a character in the background of the book.) Billy travels around his own life out of sequence, ping-ponging from the front lines of Germany to his elderly years to his days trapped on an alien planet with a porn star named Montana Wildhack. The aliens looked like green toilet plungers.

It blew my mind.

Over the next couple of years I devoured everything he had written, from his earlier, more pure (though hardly traditional) SF books like The Sirens of Titan to his more literary work of the 80's such as Galápagos. I recall especially liking his essay collection Palm Sunday. I was horrified to discover that he tried to kill himself in 1984. His mom had killed herself in 1944.

(I seem to truly admire writers with such inner self-destructiveness built in, like Spaulding Gray. Luckily, unlike Spaulding, Vonnegut botched the job. I sometimes wonder if not being damaged goods hampers my own writing and creativity, it seems to work so well for so many people. Then I remember, happiness is pretty good, too. And I don't like pain.)

As a senior, for my four-credit independent study with the IC Writing Program, I tried to adapt Vonnegut's book Bluebeard into a screenplay. I never finished it (but still got the four-credits). If I had finished, going the way I was, it would likely have been 300 pages long; I was unwilling to cut anything that happened in the book from my adaptation. I still imagine how beautiful it would be to see Rabo Karabekian's secret painting in the potato barn on screen. I tried to get the "rights" to do the adaptation, but Vonnegut's agent told me in a letter "no way" (paraphrasing) It's not like I offered him any money to make it worth his while, after all.

I got to see Vonnegut speak at Syracuse University when I was in college as well. I stood in the back, with my girlfriend and my friend Dave. It was a full room. I don't think he did anything I hadn't heard before, but it was still amazing to watch. I think he even drew his famous picture of an asshole (right, from Breakfast of Champions) for the audience. But that might just be wishful remembering.

Vonnegut used to live in Ithaca, where I live now, but many many many years before I was born. Then, he lived in Northampton, Mass. for a while years after I left it. I read an interview with him that was conducted in Pulaski Park, a park I walked through just about every weekday for five years. Had I seen Kurt Vonnegut on any of its benches, ever, I would have soiled myself with fanboy glee and fear of looking stupid in front of him (inevitable when one poos their drawers). So it's probably for the best we didn't cross paths.

"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." -- Kurt Vonnegut

How Not to Get Laid

Laid-off, that's how.

My mother-in-law got laid-off from her job last night. I dunno how long she's been there, but it's been a while -- since before my wife and I started dating, so it's well over 18 years. Her mom worked her way up from being on the warehouse floor where she stuffed paper packets with plant seeds, to helping run the office. She produced the entire catalog for all their seed and other products at one point.

For the last decade we've heard nothing but doom-n-gloom about the company and it's prospects for survival. Her co-workers and bosses went away one-by-one, cast out like yesterday's dried rose petals (i'm working the plant metaphor, go with it) until the place was a husk (see?).

Still, I know how she feels -- even after years of expecting to get the boot, it always comes as a shock. First time I got laid off, I only had about 20 minutes to get used to the idea, from when one of my co-workers saw the HR people from NYC in our parking lot and told us, to the point we started getting called, one by one, to the conference room. Redundant men walking.

At least I wasn't two years from retirement. She is. It's a shame this isn't an age discrimination suit, but this company is going to probably be out of business in a year anyway, so it's more about corporate incompetence. (Nothing would rankle more, I'm sure, than if they rebounded; again, at least all the places I've been let go of had the good manners to die either immediately or not long after.)

Easter Has Been Cancelled

Yeah, I wish that was one my dogs... but rabbits are now invisible to them.

The Biggest News of All Time

I guess it can finally be told, this news, this big honking major-ass information the wife and I have been sitting on.

News that follows weeks of furtive glances between us as we avoided telling friends and family. Day after day of the wife waking up and puking her guts out (and me saying, "Funny, I feel fine!" I am hi-LAR-ious). Night after night of us staring at the ceiling in bed and wondering if this could really be happening to us after so many years and if we're doing the right thing....

Of course, we have always denied (DENY, DENY, DENY!) that we had any interest in going down this particular road, and that has been for the most part true. It's amazing how interested you can become when you forget the condoms and forget to take the magic estrogen/progestin pills for a couple of days and mix that with too many Cosmopolitans and Mike's Hard Lemonades, and... well, this is what you get, folks. Let us be a lesson to you. Wait until you've been together for 17.5 years before you make this kind of commitment. Even then you won't be sure you're ready.

Still no regrets, right? Six months from now, everything changes. Everything. And we're telling you here today!