Pizza War. What is it Good For? Absolutely Nothing.

Do you ever pull a pizza revenge? Probably not because you're an adult and you don't see food as a form of ammunition. But just in case you're curious, it's when you start your day with something really delicious and terrible for you, like biscuits and gravy and a bloody Mary. You're feeling all warm and happy, maybe a little tired but life is good. Lunch rolls around and you're all like "You know what you want, tummy?" and it's like "No! What?" and you go "A HOTDOG!!" and it's like "Hooray! You're a genius!"

You get on a bit of a roll...someone offers you a nice cookie or a slice of cake and you go "Hey, tummy. Is this cool?" and it's all like "Define cool." and you're like "Um, are you looking at this cookie? It's totally covered in pink frosting! That's the Webster's definition of cool." and it's like "Reeeeally?? You NEVER eat the ones with pink frosting! Does that mean I get to slave away on sugar and Crisco all afternoon, on top of all this mystery meat? I cant wait!"

Such negativity on the part of your stomach not only cuts through your enthusiasm like a hot knife but just plain hurts your feelings. You want to get back that best friends, you-and-me-against-the-world feeling the two of you shared not minutes before. So you eat only half of the cookie in an attempt to appease your stomach but course, by this time you've pissed it off and it doesn't appreciate any attempt at compromise. It's like that roommate who pretends to love partying until you try to host a party, at which point it starts bitching and moaning about having to work at 7 am and could you please throw away your own beer cans for once?

So it pitches a little tantrum which forces you to back off the snacks for a few hours but at this point, you're getting a bit resentful, yourself. Isn't this your life? Shouldn't you be able to eat whatever you want without your belly going AWOL? It's so unfair! You patiently wait for the tantrum to subside so you can get back to your super fun day and end it on a good note. You've got a pizza on the way and you don't want it to get cold!

An hour or so goes by. All seems calm on the battlefront and that pizza ain't getting any warmer so you hastily seize your moment. But no! It's too soon! You just walked into the eye of a perfect storm! What seemed like a past tense tantrum is now a super volcano of anger and mutiny! It's like you broke a battery in half and ate it.

"FUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOU!!" you scream to your stomach as you reach for slice after slice of pizza, gorging yourself until you don't even know where you are anymore. You can no longer hear the cries for mercy, for you are far, far away. "YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!" Eventually you pass out on the couch around 4 am. Like so many times before, you wake up feeling bloated, thirsty and alone. Sometimes the price of battle is too high. In the wise words of Dan Folgelberg, bearded songster of the '70s:

"Lessons learned are like
Bridges burned
You only need to cross them but once
Is the knowledge gained
Worth the price of the pain?
Are the spoils worth the cost of the hunt?"

If "the hunt" is pizza and the "the spoils" is your own body, then, no. Obviously no, they are not. Eat a salad.

Bathe Different

I was watching a slasher film the other day when something very strange happened. I realized that seeing some poor girl get hacked to pieces by a chainsaw made me feel absolutely nothing. No fear, no empathy, nothing. I began to wonder if I had finally become the psychopath I always knew I had it in me to be. Then suddenly, it dawned on me that I had just been to a video arcade prize shop the night before where I was raped in the peepers by these:


If you can't tell from the small photo, they are rubber ducks with celebrity faces on them. I thought to myself "Wow. Those are the most life-alteringly fucked up things I have seen in three decades of existence." But they weren't for long. I turned the corner and was greeted by this:


If you could cook a nightmare down to some purer form, grind it into a powder and snort it up through a large straw, you could then begin to appreciate the sheer terror I felt as this stared at me from behind the plastic. What's worse is that in order to win one of these monsters, you'd either have to be some idiot savant of gaming and beat every game in the arcade three times over or blow your entire mortgage on it. They cost roughly 180,000,000 points. I think a tiny, plastic soccer ball cost 50,000 points.

Other highly prized items included seat cushions vaguely resembling the ghosts from Pac-Man. Of course, they had to be won individually so until you complete the collection, you just have three flat ghost pillows sitting out of context in your house. There were lots of stuffed animals which would start to fall apart on contact with your skin and several nearly life size, obscure characters from very outdated Japanese video games. I didn't stick around long enough to find out, but I'm pretty sure the grand prize was a framed photo of the arcade franchise's CEO flipping the winner off with both hands whilst being blown by a hooker.

So, you see, I now no longer have feelings. I'm like one of those ghost cushions, alive but not alive, waiting to see the weirdo that won me drag another child down to his basement to "play video games" with him.

The Road Home is Paved With Fruitcakes

It's Christmastime. A time for giving, a time for family, a time to reflect on the months behind us and look forward to the months ahead. But most of all, it's a time to eat weird, gelatinous grandma food. Year after year I have struggled to understand how the type of food every cell in my body begs me not to put in my mouth has come to be a time honored tip of the hat to Jesus. I think I may have finally stumbled onto a likely hypothesis:

One day, not so very long ago, everyone over the age of 70 was whisked away together to some sort of magical jellyfish planet where they lived for ten years. Everything was all colorful and special and glazed there. It was the best time of their lives. But alas, as we humans tend to do, they overindulged in the bounty of dense, rubbery foods the elderly love so much not to have to chew. The Jellyfish people grew increasingly resentful as their food supplies dwindled. Then one day, without so much as a warning, the old people were violently ripped from their gummy paradise and exiled back to Earth with nothing to eat but Earth food.

Cold, shivering and devoid of joy, they hastily pieced together a menu consisting of wobbly cakes molded into shapes, unnaturally pigmented fruits contained within bricks of sickly sweet bread, and strange, translucent gravies. Indisputably disturbing as each of these concoctions are, these pale comparisons to the bountiful fruits of a superior planet are all these poor refugees can muster up to pay homage to a golden age. A better age. Though not a one of these elderly folk dare speak of this time for fear of being dismissed as batshit crazy, they toil away each Christmas to bring these dishes to our tables and share a small fraction of unknowable bliss with us, their loved ones.

It is a mourning, a celebration, a prayer. I think these people hope to be returned to what they see as their home and who would want to deny them that? This is why you eat their food. Because even though you know it is fucking disgusting, you love your grandma and want her to get to Jelly Heaven. Merry Christmas, everyone! Please pass the fruity rum cake balls with dates and candied pineapples. And a shot of something to wash that shit down because it's not going down on it's own!

Show Your Patriotism With a Public Coronary!

How long has it been since you've been witness to a really special adult tantrum? The kind where some dude gets up from the table at a crowded, four star restaurant and sweeps his arm across it, knocking gravy, wine and pasta all over everyone's clothes and faces? The whole 1960s, alcoholic dad tantrum. Every time I feel inspired to pull a maneuver like that, it's because I'm watching the news at home, by myself, so I never get a chance to carry it out. Not that I hang out in four star restaurants anyway, more like Burger King. So the sweepy arm motion would lean toward a much sadder end than a dramatic one. But at least it would be an opportunity to see a cheeseburger fly across the room which is never not a good thing.

We should probably all buckle up for a few of these in the near future. Personally, I couldn't be more pumped about it. Decades of political correctness has left a gaping, sucking hunger in the hearts of millions for something like a country wide bar brawl to erupt. I think I might even want to participate in it. People have been holding their asshole cards so very, very close to their chests for such a long time now that it's not always easy to see just how Lord of the Flies this country has become. I want to know what everyone is really all about! Let your secret racist flag fly! Say shit like "I care more about tax cuts for the rich than making sure the 9-11 first responders can, like, not slowly die and shit." or "Our health care system is perfectly fine the way it is!" Say that one to my face. Get it out in the open! It'll feel so good!

Take a cue from Fox News. Hypocritical, asinine sentiments seemingly pulled from the Mythical Land of Jehovah's Witness Heaven are given ample representation on that network every, single day. They even make neat little graphics and charts for those who can't grasp the complexity of statements like "Global warming is a myth." I dunno. I think that one kind of speaks for itself. But if those guys can do it and get the vast majority of the American viewing public to give them the high five, why can't we? What are we so scared of? Is it that the lazy, commie, socialist lefties are going to flood the landscape with their booze and tears or is it that the insanely rich tea partiers are going to get so drunk with power that they crash their yachts into each other in an attempt to escape the flood? Don't even worry about that! For to because of the gun-toting, mustachioed NRA weirdos have built underground bunkers, so at least they will survive to once again propagate the species. So, we're cool already. Go nuts!

The sooner we get all of this hateful bullshit out of our systems, the sooner we can all hug it out. I'm just sick of waiting for the inevitable food fight to happen. The longer you let that food sit there, the more rotten it will get and the whole issue of why we were throwing it in the first place will have to take a back seat to the fact that everybody is super grossed out and covered in E.coli. So, let's get to forgetting our manners and say what we really feel. Ready...set....Go shove your tax cuts up your precious, self interested asses! Wow, that was fun!! Now you!

No, Monsieur Ghost, You May Not Have my Wallet!

Tomorrow, my very good friend, Rebekah, is flying me out to New Orleans for a few days. Though I've barely been able to contain my excitement and gratitude over the past few weeks I've been having a terrible time trying to ignore that stupid little voice in the back of my head that always says "You're totally gonna get mugged my a ghost!" every time I think about going to New Orleans. I know this won't happen, of course, because:

a) despite all of those TV shows that tell you that New Orleans is a cartoon land where ghost muggings happen, it's not.

b) even if it was, I'm sure the ghosts wouldn't use our same currency. Obviously, they'd use francs because all ghosts in New Orleans are french.

In the event that I'm wrong I have put a curse on each piece of currency I own, which will trap thieving spirits inside a snow globe of Delaware that I purchased at St. Vincent De Paul. This is a laborious, somewhat gross, definitely humiliating but potentially very useful curse to perform if you happen to be traveling anywhere largely populated by french ghosts.

Here is a list of materials you will need, should you wish to perform the curse:

-one jug of Eagle Brand Apple Cider Vinegar
-two small "Autumn Fruit" Yankee Jar Candles
-a bathtub full of holy water
-one stick of incense
-a bar of antibacterial soap
-one pair of quality running shoes
-a large, ceramic basin
-a towel

-The first step in executing this curse is to fill your ceramic basin with apple cider vinegar. Soak all of your money in the vinegar for one full day.
-Three hours after moonrise, carefully take the money out of the vinegar and place it on a paper towel. Pat dry. Set aside vinegar for later.
-Once this step is complete, light your candles and incense and place them on the edge of the bathtub.
-Next, and here is where it gets a bit unpleasant, dump remaining vinegar into your bathtub full of holy water. Jump in the tub and soak for twenty minutes. This very important step helps you to bond with your money and it's history. It might also help you to bond with hepatitis (most money's history is very, very filthy) but the holy water should at least somewhat protect you from that. Plus, I think vinegar kills germs or something.
-Get out of the tub and towel off.
-Lace up your running shoes and sprint around the block with no clothes on. All the while, try to think of a suitable object inside which to banish the ghosts (e.g. a VHS tape of the movie "Powder", a packet of Chex Mix, a copy of Reader's Digest, a stapler, an old picture of Hillary Clinton.)
-Try not to let the fact that you're naked and freezing break your concentration. It's very important that you focus on this object.
-Should you get back to the safety of your own home without being arrested, jump in the shower immediately and wash away the vinegar, hepatitis and shame with very hot water and anti-bacterial soap. Scrub hard.
-Curl up in a corner and cry for an hour.

Completing all of these steps to the letter should keep you safe from any and all ghost attacks involving money in New Orleans. It will not protect you from live muggers, actual french people or ghost attacks of any other nature. You will have to research these curses on your own. I can't recommend this precaution more highly because the sense of security you will feel as you stroll without a care down Bourbon Street is like a vacation of it's very own. Happy spending and safe travels!

Plants Can't Cry and That is Good.

I had an idea today that I was so convinced, for about forty-five minutes, was my big million dollar idea. I was about ready to patent it until I started thinking about it in the larger, global sense and realized it was the worst idea anyone ever, ever came up with ever. Much like the nuclear bomb and the flowbee, this thing would have been a most perfect double edged sword. No, make that a triple edged sword. Alright, fuck the sword, it would be like another nuclear bomb. It's such a bad idea that I'm going to sabotage it thoroughly by telling everyone about it. I'm sure some dick out there will be all like "Wow, what a great idea!" and rip it off but I hate the idea so much that I want this moron to invent it and make millions of dollars just before it turns on him and destroys whole populations, making him the Biggest Dick in the Universe. I super hate this idea.

Basically, the genesis behind this monster was a dying plant. See, my house is filled with them. Every once in a great while, I like to tell myself that I do possess, somewhere in my hollow frame, a capacity to care for things. I don't. My husband and I have two cats and they are still breathing. This is something I love to pat myself on the back for. But the thing is, they wouldn't still be breathing if not for two very important facts. For one thing, they can cry. For hours. Only after about hour three will I arise from my slumber, grunty stomping all over the house, cursing their names for being too stupid to feed themselves. Half the time, they're faking it anyway. How dare they want a snack??

The only other thing keeping these poor creatures from starving to death in a pile of their own excrement is my husband, a man who has more maternal instinct in his middle finger than I have in my whole body. He cleans the litter box, not out of disgust but from a place of genuine concern for their hygiene and well being. He gets up in the middle of the night to give them snacks and comforts them when I callously brush them off my favorite spot on the couch. I love my cats as much as I can love anything but, truth be told, they are sooper dooper annoying and loud and they break what feeble hold I have on concentration at very regular intervals throughout the day. Plus they eat whatever is left of the plants and barf them all over my already hideous carpet.

Which brings me to my invention.

What if someone were to create a small device which could detect when nutrient or water levels are depleted in plants and give off a beeping sound to let plant owners know? What a freaking brilliant idea, right?? Yeah, totally. Let's create another thing that makes using your brain a complete waste of time. Why don't we make carpets that beep every time they need to be vacuumed? Or an alert sound for when the lights need to be turned off? Perhaps when we leave the window open for too long, we can have it beep and shut automatically. Let's make pans that beep whenever your water boils.

Think about what would happen if six or seven of these little plant thingies were going off at random points in time, along with all of your other beeping mechanisms. Every day would be like the Starship Enterprise being ambushed by Klingon warships. You would soon lose all perspective on stressful situations. If a fire alarm went off, it would go unnoticed or at the very least be counted amongst the many mundane sounds surrounding you at all times, leaving you to die in a very boring fire.

Another potential catastrophe to consider would be product malfunction. What happens when the batteries run out on all of your little alarms? What if there is a partial power failure? Since you have become conditioned like a trained puppy to only respond to beeps and whistles, you will no longer possess the coping skills to decide if your pancake is done or if the bathtub is about to overflow. You will be utterly screwed in every possible way.

So, if you don't want to rely on memory alone, I invite you to create a feeding chart for your plants. I probably won't because as I've mentioned before in other posts, I'm extremely lazy. But I refuse to be responsible for the demise of my entire species. I'm sure that some As Seen on TV clown is inventing something similar to what I'm talking about here anyway so it's not like I'm laying out doomsday blueprints or anything. My conscience is clear. But don't say you haven't been warned. Your GPS is but the first stumble on a very slippery slope down Pudding Brain Hill, and the body count at the bottom of that hill is growing by the day.

Godspeed, friend. Oh, look. A peanut.....

The Raw, Healing Power of Sweatpants

You know that thing that always happens when you tell your friends and family that you haven't left the house or showered for a week? That thing where they whisper amongst themselves about it until concerned whispering escalates to a climax of judgey whisper yelling over a conference call your house, demanding that you explain yourself? Some people are a bit more generous and will say things like "Good for you!" or "You deserve it!", provided that you are ill or are genuinely suffering from exhaustion. As far as I know, there has never been a healthy person in written history who has gotten away with three or more weeks without a unanimous cry of "Gross!" from their entire community.

It seems as though some prejudices need to be dispelled here before things get out of hand. Clearly, a few people are drinking the anti-sweatpants Kool-Aid. Fear of sweatpants and what they represent hold so many of us hostage to stringent laundry schedules and stiff, belted work suits that people have forgotten what comfort feels like. Comfort often leads to more comfort. If one isn't careful, they might inadvertently hit the snooze button one too many times and miss work. For a week. And before you know it, BOOM! Their job has been given away to some energetic young buck from the other side of town, leaving one to wander the streets in their pajamas, searching for heroin and Funyuns.

But people need to see that this is not necessarily a punishment! No! It's an opportunity. One can never truly reap the total benefit of a pair of sweatpants in any period less than full month. So few people have ever been brave enough to test drive a pair out of the parking lot, much less take them for a scenic ride through Beauty Sleep Valley! It really is a wonderful valley and if people stop napping, it will disappear into nothingness just like Fantasia in the Never Ending Story.

It's important to start thinking of extended periods of R and R as horizontal meditation time. Time to formulate a rock solid plan for your triumphant return to the land of the living. Why do you think they call it "beauty sleep"? It's because when one endulges themselves a long and lustrous slumber, they burst forth onto the world, glimmering like a newly polished ruby! Razor sharp and creatively inspired through hours of quality television, they razzle and dazzle all they know with brilliant sounding pop culture references memorized over multiple viewings. Loss of muscle tissue will soon give way to a slim new figure and lack of sun exposure will keep your skin as pale and as the day you were born. You are ready for anything. That young buck who stole your job will drop to his knees at the sight of you, shielding his eyes from your blinding beauty and hand your job back to you inside a golden chalice. And you will say "I no longer need this job. I have laser eyes now." and walk away peacefully.

Take a lesson from our friend, the caterpillar: hard work and cooperation may help an ant contribute to it's greater, social good. Patience and cunning may help a spider capture it's prey but what caterpillar ever worked it's way into a set of totally fabulous rainbow wings with sparkles and dots that look like giant eyeballs?? I would hope that you know the answer to this question but just in case you don't, it didn't. It spun itself some rad silk pajamas and hung out in them for weeks upon weeks until the wings sprouted themselves. And then it flew around.

This same analogy applies to humans, just unfortunately not literally. You won't develop flying powers by lying around in your own filth for a month. But you will learn something about yourself. I have no idea what that is. It's your journey. So next time you get the urge to avoid the outside world for a really, really long time, give it a whirl! I dare you. Unemployment rates are at an astronomical high right now so if you tell everyone you got laid off, no one will suspect you of lying. But if you decide not to do it because you're better than that or whatever, could you please stop bad mouthing sweatpants? Cozy pants are not to blame for your inability to embrace life's more unconventional adventures!

And on that note, sweet dreams!! I just drank half a bottle of Ny-Quil!

A Chimney Full of Gluttony

People are a little bit inconsistent. Perhaps that would explain how trick-or-treating in the traditional sense has become a thing that many parents consider negligent to a point of abuse. You know, because leading children on a supervised door to door run for pre-packaged candy is essentially begging strangers to fondle or poison them. Yet, from the mere age of three, we have been taught to enthusiastically await the arrival of an old, obese man with a preference for the meekest of us. Every year, on Christmas Eve, he sneaks into our homes in the dead of night, eats our food and watches us sleep. If we allow this to happen without interruption or protest, we are then showered with gifts.

We find this idea so universally appealing that decades after our little hearts have been shattered with the news that this man isn't real, we've forgiven the lie. We then, in turn, have let Santa take a great deal of the credit for Christmas gifts we purchase for our children, making an often thankless holiday season even more thankless by default. All in honor of a man who, were he not omniscient and immortal would have been someone's jail wife a thousand times over by now. Or dead from the diabetes. And so the cycle has continued into an era where money is sprouting wings and flying off into deep space before we even know it's there.

It's almost as though Santa Claus is one of the last little vestiges of hope and innocence that the Western World has chosen to cling to. Isn't that sweet? We still have one. Kind of an odd choice, though really. The drunk, bearded dude at the mall who we stand in line to hand our screaming children over to so he can then prop them onto his lap and breathe all over them? Why don't we just hand our kids over to a junkie we see passed out on the sidewalk? You don't have to stand in line for that. And if you really must document the experience, take a picture of the pair of them with your cell phone. That way you won't have to stand awkwardly in a cardboard representation of the North Pole while a stranger photographs one of your children being traumatized for the first time. We should just have Santa give the really little ones a flu shot right there, just to kill two birds with one stone.

Why do we still love this guy so much? It's not as though Santa Claus has really been holding himself up to the standard that we do anyway. How often does he make good on his promises? You were a kid once. Remember that bag of tube socks you got when you asked for a Tonka truck? You cleaned the gutters every, single week that year without being asked and even earned straight As. What do you think happened there? Did Santa blow your truck money on some more rum or perhaps a space heater to keep the tiny people he has working for him in the tundra from freezing to death? Maybe getting what you want for Christmas is like getting into Heaven. You have to be the perfect child. But then why did Santa give that rich kid in gym class who held you down and farted on your head a flying, robot bike that year? That didn't really jibe with all that "naughty or nice" Christmas justice you were taught about, now, did it?

Maybe Santa is simply some parents' idea of a scapegoat. An entity at which to deflect blame when the ridiculously opulent ideal of Christmas cannot be matched by their pocketbooks. But this can only temporarily bandage the inevitable scar of resentment that gouges it's way across every parent's heart when they realize that for about ten years, their children have hated them for a lot of really stupid reasons. And you can bet your ass that your children will add perceived Christmas failures to their list of stupid reasons why they hate you. It doesn't matter if you beat them within an inch of their life or bought them a football stadium full of ponies. Teenagers are vengeful little vortexes of need that cannot be corked by any force, natural or otherwise. And if there is one talent they all equally share, it's an ability to remember the ways you have failed them. If you have somehow produced an exception to this rule who has not yet reached the age of 25, a toast to you, my friend! You are made of miracles and rainbow sunsets and should be President of the World.

But what's to stop us all from beating our children at the pass? Break at least one cycle of imminent resentment this year by creating your own mythologies around Christmas! Ones that have more to do with giving than receiving. Dress up a giant box in a Santa suit and have your kids throw presents they got for each other into the box. Throw some random presents in there yourself and have your kids unwrap them and give them to each other. Make a Santa piñata filled with small, fun things that your family can enjoy together and bash the hell out of it. Let Santa absorb some of your kids' misdirected hormonal rage for once!

Get together as a family unit and write anonymous, threatening letters to known child molesters in your neighborhood and leave them on their doorsteps, attached to bags of homemade gingerbread cookies. Or hey, if we're gonna do the traditional Santa thing, let's get back to the Burl Ives version with the wooden, handmade toys and thoughtful sentiments instead of the increasingly perverse, wasteful, debt perpetuating one we have allowed Macy's to convince us that we love. It's getting icky and it doesn't really do a lot whole lot to promote the spirit of giving. Neither does picking through candy to see which pieces are poisoned but at least that's something we can all do together! Besides, you can always buy more candy because unlike football stadiums full of horses, candy is one of the few fun things left in this world that is CHEAP!!

So, here's hoping for a happy Christmas for everyone this year! If you're walking your toddler along and she screams bloody murder at the sight of a big, rosy cheeked bearded guy in a red suit, you should probably consider it a blessing that your child has well honed survival instincts and just run with it. Don't convince her to be this dude's friend. You may be saving yourself years of back peddling!