Why Can't Everyone Be Just Like Me?

I drove my car for the first time in several weeks the other day. I didn’t go very far, the whole driving experience was brief, perhaps 8 miles total. I could barely justify putting the face-plate on my car’s mp3 player, but I did, just because I want to get my money’s worth out of that little extravagance I installed this summer when my radio died and I needed a new system to listen to baseball in the car. There is no baseball on the radio in these grim months so I quickly became bored with my new toy and turned it off. I have never really liked to listen to music while driving.

I worry about leaving my car abandoned for weeks at a time but it always starts right up and runs well after the periods of neglect. A bigger problem than anything mechanical with my car is simply remembering where I parked it the last time I drove. When I do find it I spend a minute or two removing the accumulation of club flyers and take-out menus from the windshield wipers. On this day I had to practically dig the car out of the pile of leaves and branches that had fallen during the last big windstorm. A few weeks ago I had the apartment landscaper hit my vehicle with his leaf blower for a free car wash.

I had to get gas along the way which cost $2.05 a gallon—not that I give a crap how much gas costs. I wish I knew the exact date of the last time I put gas in my car but I think it must have been sometime in early September. I have never figured out my car’s gas mileage but I think a more fitting measure of fuel economy would be to calculate my weeks per gallon (WPG). Most people I know probably can’t tell you what kind of car I drive—if they are even aware that I own a car—but they can sure tell you what my bike looks like.

There is a local business that I frequent one or two times a week. It is run by an immigrant guy who is probably around my age. Every time I am at his place he is there and every time I ride by I see him working. He is open seven days a week and he works every day. The other day I saw him unloading supplies for his business out of the trunk of his brand spanking new Acura coup. Instead of the normal response of thinking “Nice car” all I could think was, “You work seven fucking days a week so you can own an expensive car? Take a day off and drive a piece of shit!” To each his own, as they say.

Maybe you wouldn’t trade your car for mine and I wouldn’t blame you. I probably wouldn’t trade my cardio-vascular system for yours, so we can call it even. I think that you are either a bike person or you aren’t. I think that it is sad that we haven’t done much in this country to convince more people to become bike people. My favorite thing about Amsterdam, what I like more than the incredible architecture, what I think is cooler than the pot bars and the red light district, is the fact that everyone rides bikes. The city is defined by bicycles.

I remember sitting out on the steps of my beautiful town home hotel late one evening in Amsterdam and watching as the late night bike commuters pedaled by. Every cyclist who passed was really cranking, these weren’t people out for a leisurely ride. Ride like that every day and you are going to be pretty fit. One of the side effects of so many people riding bikes in the Netherlands is that you quickly notice that just about every woman in that country has a great ass. Drive a car and your ass just gets bigger.

Shop, Shop, Kill, Kill

THOUGHTS ON HOLIDAY SPENDING

SEATTLE, Washington – Area retailers called the first day of the Christmas shopping season, or Black Friday, a ‘madhouse’ and were relieved to hear that there were only 49 shopping-related fatalities this year, far bellow body-count predictions. “With less than 50 deaths you can’t call it a massacre so it was worth it as far as sales figures go,” reported one Alderwood Mall employee adding, “What really got massacred was our inventory. It was a beautiful day.”

Other areas of the country had less peaceful conditions at their shopping centers. At the D & M Mall in Salt Lake City, Utah desperate shoppers disguised as elves opened fire on a group of 30 department stores clerks, killing them all and making off with the store’s entire supply of HALO Xbox games. A spokesperson for the department store said that the marauding elves had “shot themselves in the foot” because they would not be eligible for the $25 mail-in rebate on the HALO games. The spokesperson was killed later in the day when an improvised explosive device (IED) concealed inside a giant candy cane was detonated near his desk.

So I made up some of this but the part about the shopping scene described as a ‘madhouse’ was on the front page of today’s Seattle paper. Without the presence of heavily-armed National Guard troops the situation at area malls could very well have turned into a bloodbath.

Christmas shopping is the most important time of the year for retailers, as you will hear about a thousand fucking times between now and the end of the holidays. You will listen to a parade of economists explaining the need for a huge shopping season in order that the United States of America shall not perish from this earth. They will say in so many words that if you don’t shop, we will all die. It is as if our entire economic system, or our entire way of life is based on the Christmas shopping season. It is like how people in pagan cultures would pray for bountiful crops. I have heard these economic prayers every year of my life.

What you never hear is the flip side to the shopping coin. What benefit is there to the individual and to society if someone chooses not to shop? Surely there must be some advantage to consumers for living within their means, of not over-extending themselves at Christmas, of not maxing out credit cards to be paid back at 18% interest, of actually SAVING money during the holidays instead of going bankrupt. You never hear these stories in the news; all you hear is how well or how poorly the shopping season is going.

The next time you hear some retailer talking about how desperately important the X-mass shopping season is to our economy think about where a lot of those dollars are going. If you think the people at Wal-mart give a shit about the U.S. economy you haven’t been looking at where most of their inventory is manufactured. With its utter dependence on Chinese manufacturers and plans for 1,000 retail stores in China, Wal-mart sees America as merely a quaint little colony in its vast imperial realm. What is good for Wall-mart is not necessarily good for America; many would argue that Wal-mart is bad for America.

Wal-mart is one of the country’s biggest employers but most of its jobs are low paying and offer little in the way of benefits, so a dismal holiday shopping season would mean a loss of jobs we can probably live without.

If you hear that this shopping season isn’t setting any records you can find solace in the thought that many consumers are choosing to pay off debts rather than falling deeper in the hole...or maybe they just have something better to do than shop.

En Memoriam

I saw a whole NY street filled with cheerleaders at the parade so I dug out two previous works and spliced them together.

Every year more than 200,000 teenagers are killed in cheerleading accidents in America--more than any civilized country on earth. Australia has over 250,000 cheerleading deaths annually but most of those are alcohol-related so they pretty much have it coming to them. This horrible slaughter of our nation’s best and brightest (and mostly sober) goes largely unreported in the mainstream media.

OK, I made up that part about there being 200,000 cheerleading fatalities but even a single death is unacceptable. Well, that’s not entirely true either. If no one dies in a cheerleading accident then you have to wonder if the kids are really trying out there, you know, pushing the edge of the envelope and all. I think that somewhere between 1 and 200,000 deaths is an acceptable amount of casualties to raise team spirit. Less than one death showing a lack of commitment and over 200,000 deaths could cause serious public health problems like a cholera epidemic. Try having team spirit in the middle of a cholera epidemic. It ain’t happening.

I can live with 200,000 dead cheerleaders a year. It’s a risk I’m willing to take for so much pep because pep is short for peppy and peppy is something you can’t put a price tag on or wrap up in a body bag. Peppy is what separates us from the animals. Not all animals because I saw a nature show on TV about otters and they were sliding down a snow bank into the water and that looked pretty peppy to me. I mean animals like cows that are never peppy and just stand around all day and eat grass and crap and that’s why we eat them. You don’t see people eating peppy little otters or cheerleaders. That would be gross. That would make me sad, but eating a big rare steak makes me happy.

I was watching ESPN and some college basketball game was on. The cheerleaders looked so incredibly upbeat. Upbeat, sure, but what if one of them died? What then? Can you even imagine a world without cheerleaders? Wake up, America! Wake up before it’s too late! Perhaps it already is too late. What have we done?

Only moments ago you were shouting words of encouragement to the team. Things like "go team" and "steal that ball" and "For fuck’s sake, can you at least pretend to play a little defense?" Now your mangled corpse lies sprawled on the gym floor, your little hand still clutching a pom-pom. But wait. You're moving. Thank goodness, you're alive. No, it's just that gross nervous twitching thing that dead things do. Can we get this body out of here? We still got another quarter to play.

The game must go on. Nobody knows that better than the lifeless heap with saddle shoes the janitor is dragging feet-first out the fire exit. What a trooper, a real team player, right up until the fatality. There will be a burial, stop being so impatient. This is the week of the state finals so right after that we'll take proper care of the body. A week or two won't make any difference, what with as cold as it's been lately.

On a recent visit to our nation’s capital I visited the National Cheerleading Memorial on the Mall. It was a bitter cold winter day. I walked past the memorial teary-eyed, and read the names of the fallen: Britney, Brittany, Britni (How many ways can you spell that, for Pete’s sake?), Tammy, Bobbi, and a lot of other names that all end in a vowel. I was overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude and wished that some guy like Tom Brokaw would write a smarmy book to recognize their obvious contribution to our modern society. The silence is practically deafening.

What Do You Expect for Free?

“His writing is the moral equivalent of a really bad, really long drum solo.” …Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“How do you say ‘Not Funny’ in French?” …Seattle Weekly

“Never have I found the words ‘The End’ to be so comforting.” …Vegetarian Times

“My only hope is that through the miracle of recycling, this website will end up as something remotely useful…like a drink coaster.” …National Review

“If Police Academy VI were a blog, Leftbanker would be the sequel.” …Entertainment

These are just some of the reviews for this website that came out this past week. As you can see most of what was said was less than favorable and I didn’t even bother to post the reviews that contained death threats. I think that my lack of popularity puts me in good company. I am encouraged by the fact that Van Gogh didn’t sell a single painting in his lifetime and had to resort to donating body parts to pay for art supplies. I already own a computer so I won’t need to trade an ear to continue my work.

Call me thin-skinned but a barrage of lousy reviews, more than a dozen death threats, and a brick with a note attached telling me to stop writing, tossed through my window are enough to put me in a bad mood. To add to these insults, someone burned me in effigy in my own yard. I don’t have an actual yard but they burned something that bore a passing resemblance to me near the dumpster behind my apartment building. I thought that the effigy made me look unfairly fat. The worst part is they stole my favorite shirt out of the dryer to make it. How can you not take that personally?

I don’t mean to change the subject but I have something that I think needs saying since no one else seems to have the guts to say it. There really is nothing funny about bulimia. Now this is completely off the subject but nothing rhymes with bulimia. I guess leukemia sort of rhymes with bulimia but leukemia is even less funny than bulimia and if it was funny I would never stoop to cash in on the humor content of a disease that kills thousands each year. No one actually dies from bulimia but it is still gross and I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot mop handle, comedically speaking.

As a comedy writer I spend hours pouring over medical journals in search of diseases or conditions that, under the right circumstances, could be funny. Spend about ten minutes looking at medical books and you will come to the same conclusion I have: The human body is disgusting. If you disagree with this assessment, if you feel that all of God’s creatures and everything about them is beautiful I have two words for you: number two. Or how about one word? Upchuck* Game, set, and match.

I was going to write a long essay about the Palestine Liberation Organization’s struggle to find a successor for Arafat but finding humor in that arena would be harder than finding a shred of human dignity in an episode of “The Price is Right.”

*In my original draft I wrote ‘upchuk’ and my spell-check pointed out the error. I was impressed that ‘upchuck’ was even in the dictionary.

Tears of a Clown School Dropout

or
ORANGE HAIR, BLUE BALLS

Good, evil, highbrow, lowbrow, snob, and slob; we all have these things within us. The idea of polar opposites is clearly illustrated in my apartment by two objects that sit side by side: my computer desk and my piano. In the competition for my butt, my desk chair beats out the piano bench by a wide margin. If I spent as much time practicing the piano as I do looking for humor on the internet I’d be the next Glenn Gould. I love Bach but I love video clips of little kids hitting their fathers in the nuts with a football even more. In the battle for my soul the wiseass has a commanding lead over the musician. The inner me would rather scrawl a funny limerick on a bathroom wall than perform with the local symphony. I am what I am.

I am athletic but I would rather make you laugh than beat you across the finish line. I would especially like for you to cross the finish line in front of me if the finish line was a length of neck-high piano wire. Try putting on the gold medal when you don’t have a neck, Mister Competitive. That shit would be funny, but only if in the next scene your head was back where it belongs. I’m a wiseass but I believe in nonviolence, unless it’s cartoon hyper-violence, with no consequences except a good laugh.

As a kid I used my skills as a wiseass to defend myself, not that I was ever shy about throwing down and kicking butt. As an adult I have attained a certain amount of skill as a martial artist, although I would rather make fun of the bully than choke him unconscious. For the most part my smart-ass armor has allowed me to keep my martial arts sword sheathed.

Ask women what characteristic they most desire in a man and 99% of them will say a sense of humor. This in itself is funny because although I have a certain talent for making women laugh I have never (to my knowledge) had a woman throw herself on me because of my wit. To be perfectly honest with you I’d have to say that my life has had a decided lack of women throwing themselves on me so go ahead, throw yourselves. I speak Spanish so I could go the rico-suave Latin Lover route but I’d probably fuck that up by over-doing the accent just for a cheap laugh. Come on, do I want to get laid or do I want to get a laugh?

Do you think that rodeo clowns get a lot of action? Are there rodeo clown groupies who go crazy for guys who fend off 2,000 pounds bulls with a bicycle horn? I think being a rodeo clown would be perfect for me because I could mix my macho side with my anything-for-a-laugh side. Or maybe I could play piano and tell jokes like that one extremely unfunny guy whose videos they peddle on TV? Maybe I could be the world’s funniest porn star? We all love sex but screwing in front of a camera crew has to be the most ridiculous thing in the world. How about a Latin rodeo clown porn star? You’d think that if they already have transvestite midget porn they could open up one more niche in their market. I’m just asking for a chance. I already have a bike horn that vibrates. Honk, honk, buzz buzz.