...I got 99 problems, but a war ain't one.

[ludickid]

1. The music industry, which has a 100-year history of subjecting its artists to penury and which continues to charge $18-20 for a CD that costs 39¢ to manufacture despite two successful price-fixing prosecutions, is making sure that if you buy a record and share it with someone, you will go to jail.

2. Also, there is that thing they show during movie previews that implies if you (illegally!) download a film, you will be responsible for the death of a stunt Indian.

3. People pronounce the word “football” as if it does not have a “t” in it.

4. And non-Scottish people who pronounce the word “golf” as if it does not have an “l” in it.

5. America, which is richer than every other country that has ever existed since the dawn of humankind, which has enough money to keep the billion-person Chinese economy afloat by paying them to manufacture Bratz-themed lunchboxes and light-up shoes, believes that enriching insurance company executives is a much, much higher priority than making sure that you don’t die if you haven’t got enough money to go to a doctor.

6. It’s one thing to complain that we pay CEOs or baseball players more than schoolteachers. But there’s many worse things. At least CEOs allegedly stimulate the economy, and baseball players play baseball for our amusement. Worse than that is the fact that we pay people more than schoolteachers to actually harm the country (for example, tobacco company PR spokespeople and advertising executives).

7. Almost as bad as that is that we pay people more than schoolteachers to do nothing at all. There are thousands of professional heirs in the country, and that’s fine, but sometimes we as a society just seem to get a wheeze out of taking someone, like Paris Hilton or Pauly Shore or Rush Limbaugh, who has no discernable talent, ability or skill at anything, and making them a multimillionaire. Because, really, what else are we going to do with all that money?

8. There are a lot of people for whom “the market” is the answer to any problem or question.

9. There are even more people for whom “Jesus” serves that purpose.

10. You hear an awful lot about how Wikipedia sucks, just as if the rest of the internet was a font of reliability. I have in my possession an encyclopedia from 1959 that calls rock ‘n’ roll “jungle music”, but that was okay, because the person who wrote it was an academic.

11. Anytime someone says that someone (for the sake of argument, let’s say the President) cannot possibly be a fucking dumbshit because, after all, they went to college/Yale/Harvard/West Palm Beach Veterinary College!, I know I am dealing with a total fucking dumbshit. The notion that going to college makes you smart has been discredited since about 1946, and yet here we are, with ads for short-sleeve-and-tie office monkeys having a degree requirement.

12. On the other hand, boy howdy has America embraced anti-intellectualism lately. Being smarter than the average dirtpounder is no longer a goal to be worked towards; it is an affront to decency and Americanism no more tolerable than wiping your ass with Old Glory.

13. This strain of anti-intellectualism is especially unbecoming when it comes from people who have advanced degrees from Ivy League schools, in much the same way it’s hard to take a lecture on the purity of the NASCAR/Wal-Mart-lovin’ heartlander and the snobby effetery of the coastal elite from a guy who pays the rent on his Upper West Side condo by writing op-eds for The Atlantic.

14. In fact, reverse snobbery - the idea that if you like artsy highbrow stuff or (especially) don’t like low-grade beetlebrained lowest-common-denominator horseshit on TV, you are an horrible person who should be ashamed to move about in decent society - is on the fucking rise, and it irritates the shit out of me.

15. Why in the living cock are we still arguing about gay marriage and flag-burning? Are we really that fucking stupid? I think…I think we are.

16. I still have 83 of these to go.

17. I don’t really understand disabled pride. I mean, okay, I get why disabled people don’t want to be ostracized or patronized, and I even get why you wouldn’t want to be ashamed, necessarily, of your disability, but why would you be proud that you’re blind/deaf/autistic/crippled/handless? Why would you be happy about it, or talk about it like it’s a superpower? I’m not necessarily ashamed that I’m fat, but I’d give it up in a second if it didn’t require me to get off my fat ass and do something.

18. Why in God’s name are white people always trying to co-opt oppression? Why are they always saying that they, as white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male heterosexual Americans, are being discriminated against? Not only is that not true - such persons are, by merely being born, the most privileged people who have ever existed - but why would you want to be oppressed? You don’t hear actual oppressed people bein’ all happy about it, do you? When was the last time you heard a black guy saying “Hallelujah, I live in the Robert Taylor Homes! I sure am looking forward to my next police beating!”

19. We’re annihilating the environment and running out of resources, and once they’re gone, they’re gone for good, and we’re all fucked right up the ass. And yet we just stumble around like Pepe Le Pew floating on a cloud of perfume, assuming that everything’s going to be okay. We’re addicted to denial.

20. I don’t trust for a second these transgressive assholes who say they don’t think we poor little fucking monkeys, in our awesome egocentric presumption, could possibly damage the Earth permanently. The Earth is billions of years old! We are but bitsy little gnats! Sure, we may die off, but the planet will survive. Yeah? Fucking tell it to Hiroshima, asswipe. They could tell you a thing or two about what humans can do. Ask the millions of extinct species in the last hundred years; I bet they all thought the party was just getting started, too. Plus, as a human, I kinda care if we die off.

21. The people, by the way, who say they don’t fear death, that it’s all part of the great circle of life? They all have one thing in common: they’re alive. Ask them again when they have bone cancer.

22. Back to the whole anti-intellectual thing: whenever someone tells you that they are the biggest fool, that they know nothing, that they are dumber than dumb, but they do it in the context of showing how they are in fact wise beyond reason at best and at least a lot smarter than you, flee at once.

23. Is it just me, or is Zen just a big fuckin’ dodge? Maybe it’s that I’m intrinsically distrustful of anything that tries to disguise a lack of rigor as profundity, but despite its elegance and beauty, it still seems like someone spieling a bunch of nonsense and then pretending that it’s revelatory. What’s the difference between that and “God works in mysterious ways?”

24. In fact, Eastern wisdom as a whole. Hush that noise. It gets cred only because it doesn’t come with the ugly baggage of Western religion; I have yet to see anything even remotely more convincing in Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism or Islam than I do in Christianity or Judaism.

25. If there’s one thing I hate worse than Jews, it’s anti-Semitism.

26. I’m serious. Over in Egypt, they made a mini-series about the goddamn Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s fucking 2006 up in here. I try to defend my peeps, but then…madrasses. Goddamn assholes. Drinking is fun!

27. Speaking of which: you don’t need an excuse to drink. You wanna drink? Drink! You’re a grownup. We know why you’re doing it: you want to get a buzz on. Don’t act like you wouldn’t do it in a perfect world.

28. I still can’t get any fucking Gatorade gum.

29. This is going to veer slightly into the realm of generalization, but chances are that if you don’t like any rap, or country, or classical music/opera, you are a schmuck.

30. If you don’t like any music recorded in the last five years, there’s no maybe about it, schmuck.

31. I hate being wrong about things for, like, thirty years. The older I get the more alive this possibility becomes.

32. Being called racist is not worse than racism. Here is a good way to avoid being called a racist: do not say or do racist things.

33. Also homophobia.

34. Let’s throw sexism in there, just for a giggle. The notion that we live in a post-sexist society is just exactly as funny as reading through a big long list of rape statistics. Also, if you go out of your way to say that you aren’t a feminist, go stick a monkey up your cooze.

35. People spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about whether or not artists that they like are decent upstanding citizens. This is really stupid. First of all, they’re artists. We pay them to be terrible drunken reprobates no respectable human being would want to associate with. That’s what they’re for! Also, you don’t have to be their best friend; just listen to their goddamn records or watch their goddamn movies and stop worrying about it. They don’t spend a fucking second worrying about whether or not you’re a decent person, I’ll tell you that much.

36. No artistic endeavor, fashion trend, or teenaged piss-off-my-parents behavior has ever heralded the end of civilization, or cause the destruction of a great society. Let’s drop that one right away.

37. You know what? Fuck Godwin. Nazi analogies are fine with me.

38. I like Coca-Cola. You might even say that I love Coca-Cola. If I wasn’t worried about spending the remaining years allocated to me as a 664-pound diabetic, I would probably drink two or three Coca-Colas a day. But why is it that you can’t go fucking anywhere in America and not be able to buy a Coca-Cola? Especially given that we drive goddamn everywhere, there is pretty much never a time when you are more than two minutes away from an icy-cold Coke, so why do we need Coca-Cola coolers in the hardware store, the pet shop, the garage? Are people that fucking thirsty, that they need a Coke machine every fifteen feet to tide them over until the next Coke machine? We’re running out of fresh water, and I don’t wanna be dying of thirst 20 years from now and explaining to the kids who are about to cut my head off and drink my blood that we used to have a lot of water, but we used it all for Strawberries & Cream Diet Pepsi Jazz.

39. Almost as much as I hate being wrong, I hate being right, because I’m usually right about things that are really depressing. Like my prediction, when they moved in, that our neighbors looked like a Jerry Springer family? Yeah, that one turned out to be dead fucking on.

40. I’m moving to a state where Arnold Schwarzenegger is the highest elected official in all the land.

41. I guess this isn’t really a problem of mine, since I don’t buy the fucking magazine, but what is with Women’s World? I see the thing in the checkout aisle every time I go to the grocery store, and am freshly amazed that they are, each month, able to take the most beautiful women in the world and make them look like dumpy, ugly hags.

42. There’s really only one important thing in America, and that’s the ability to make money. AND I SUCK AT IT! Goddamn it.

43. A two-fer: sometimes perfectly attractive people say they are not attractive. Cut that shit right out.

44. You don’t have to come up with justifications for why you like crap. If you want to like crap, like crap. No one’s going to arrest you, and if someone thinks you’re an asshole for liking crap, fuck them! Who the fuck are they, the Taste Patrol? But don’t come up with these elaborate justifications for why you’re allowed to like something that is beneath you, or whatever. You gotta be kidding yourself, because you ain’t fooling anyone else.

45. On the other hand, it also helps to know the reason you like something, just as you should always have a reason to hate something. If you just like something because it’s intellectually unengaging, you’re probably approaching it in a really lazy way, and since you only get out of art what you bring to it, you’re probably better off masturbating, because you’ll get more out of it in the long term.

46. Another birthday coming and the White Sox aren’t in first place.

47. But the fucking Yankees are.

48. On that topic, not liking sports doesn’t make you smart. It’s nothing to be proud of, any more than not liking macramé. I am the first - fucking believe me - to admit that sports culture, and American sports culture in particular, is rife with some of the shittiest behavior known to humanity, but to go around trumpeting how you don’t like sports, as if that makes you a better person, makes you one of those shitheels who confuses the medium with the way the medium is sometimes used - you know, like the fuckershoes who mention every five minutes that they don’t watch television.

49. If there is one thing that pisses me off more consistently than anything else about guy-culture - and believe me, pretty much everything about guy-culture pisses me off - it’s tough-talk. 99 times out of 98, the cocksucker who talks about kicking peoples’ asses, and what a tough motherfucker he is, and how if this or that thing happens he is totally gonna smack a fool? That is one weak-ass prick who is going to fold up into a shaking ball that smells mildly of urine the first time someone clocks him in the side of the head. Real threats, as it has been noted often and often and often again, don’t speak.

50. How is it that Atmosphere gets a free ride for misogyny? I mean, I like the guy okay; he’s not the second coming, but he’s better than most mainstream rappers and he gets props for creating such a rich climate for hip-hop here in the Twin Cities. But he drops as many bitch-bombs as Ice Cube in his prime, and talking about how “conflicted” and “tortured” he is doesn’t give him a free pass for the giant mad-on he has for women in my book. Bitch got issues, is what I’m sayin’. Is it, as I suspect, because he’s good-looking?

51. “Collectibles”. Honestly, people.

52. The whole notion of a writer as a celebrity is preposterous. No one reads books, and writers are and should be a hideous lot only attractive to other writers and people who are mentally deficient. Hollywood treats writers like lepers, paying them an obscene amount of money to make up stories and then not letting them within a hundred miles of the set, and that’s the way it should be. I don’t want famous writers. I don’t want writers who appear on the cover of fashion magazines. I just want good writing.

53. Writing feuds are also pretty ridiculous. They’re either a PR stunt, or, if it’s sincere, they’re totally fucking stupid. Writers are a bitchy lot, and it’s expected that they all pretty much hate each other, but the idea that they have these overblown rivalries, like Dave Eggers was the fucking Iron Sheik or something, is comical. But not funny.

54. And this is just me being pissy, but why is it that everybody and his untalented schlub of a fourth cousin calls himself a writer? You know why? It’s because people think anyone can be a writer. Fuck, you just come up with some dingbat idea and type it up, right? It’s not like it’s hard, like being a musician or a sculptor or a goddamn supermodel. You got some fuck-knuckles who wants to be more than a seat-filler in the awards show of life, he starts calling himself a writer. Now, on one hand, what I’m saying here is, anybody can be a writer, but not everyone can be a good writer. So you might think, here is Leonard, being defensive about the one thing in the goddamn world he doesn’t completely suck at. But it’s more than that: my gig is the only one people co-opt in such a blasé fashion (though “actor” is a close second). No matter how much you suck, you can call yourself a writer; but you don’t see guys who can draw unconvincing stick figures calling themselves artists, do you?

55. Here is someone you should punch in the teeth: anyone who responds to a disaster, war, or humanitarian crisis by asking why those people don’t just move someplace else.

56. Elvis: who the fuck cares anymore? He’s not putting out any new work, folks. Also, while we’re on the subject, I have come to a newfound appreciation for the guy, but can we, as a people, admit that Bob Dylan does not shit gold?

57. In fact, we really need to stop rewarding people for simply not dying. There is no reason on God’s earth that anyone should be paying any amount of money to see the Rolling Stones. And I know, there are people who say, well, they aren’t going to be around forever, and this way, I will get to say “I saw the ROLLING STONES!” But these aren’t the ROLLING STONES; the ROLLING STONES were a band who did the last of their really interesting work over 20 years ago. By that logic, everybody should be lining up to fuck Lauren Bacall, because fucking an 82-year-old woman is the same as fucking that same women when she was 20.

58. I say this now as someone who helps take care of a three-year-old: there are some things - many things - that should not be for kids. And, quite especially, not everything in our culture has to be regulated with an eye towards protecting our children, because good parents are more than capable of choosing their battles and keeping the worst of the worst things from their kids. The wholesale possession of our cultural landscape not by children, but by adults who use their children as a justification for the watering down and leveling of every aspect of life, is completely obnoxious. If you want to keep your children safe from every possible harmful influence, the best thing is not to have them.

59. Then again, the fanatic childless people - and I say this as someone with zero interest in having a child of my own - are, well, kinda fanatic. Hating kids is not a virtue; no one would finding it amusing if someone said “Ha ha, man, I fucking hate old people! Goddamn useless stupid old shitbags!” And yet there are entire movements of people who say that about children, to the approving hoots of their dimwit brethren and sistren.

60. Hey, you know what all you douches who have gotten really, really into poker have accomplished? You’ve made a handful of professional poker players very, very happy.

61. I know I keep not shutting up about this, but I can barely hear myself foam at the mouth over the deafening yawns of the American public over the grotesque looting, corruption and profiteering going on in Iraq by American contractors. It was the biggest corruption scandal in dollars in American history last year, and it ain’t getting any better. So far, the number of congressional hearings into the subject has been one less than one.

62. If you are a “purist” about anything, you are a dick. Especially about “authenticity” or “credibility” in music. Because, well, WHO THE FUCK CARES, I guess is my question.

63. Except about Caesar salads. You can be a purist about those, because they have raw egg and anchovy and an oil-based dressing, and fuck you otherwise.

64. Also pizza. If it doesn’t have tomatoes or cheese, it might be a perfectly delicious concoction, but it’s not a fuckin’ pizza, because pizzas have tomatoes and cheese on them.

65. I hate it when I’m making a list of 99 things that bug the fuck out of me and I contradict myself entirely between #s 62 and 64.

66. Hey, New Times Media, thanks for buying up all the independent weeklies in every city in America and then syndicating the same content throughout them all! Not only does it throw a bunch of people out of work, but it increases the uniformity of culture that the very existence of independent media is supposed to oppose! You do Phoenix proud.

67. Speaking of Phoenix, there is no goddamn reason my hometown has to be so fucking big. It’s the sixth-biggest city in America now. That’s absurd. When I grew up, we lived across the street from a bean field, and next to another bean field. Where the fuck is all the goddamn energy and water to keep places like Phoenix and Las Vegas and San Antonio supposed to come from? Naturally none of these places have an even remotely decent public transportation system, so you have to drive everywhere. I KNOW I’M MOVING TO L.A., I’M PART OF THE PROBLEM, SHUT UP.

68. There is no constitutional right to a major league sports team.

69. I go to very great lengths to avoid being an old fucking prude, but the ever-increasing sexualization of young girls is getting to be pretty gross. Dressing up six-year-olds like the sort of 19-year-olds who get you long prison terms is enough to turn anyone reactionary. I would even understand the impetus behind stuff like Purity Balls if they, themselves, were not spewing volcanoes of repressed pederasty. There’s a lot of be said about integrating your children into social norms, but come the fuck on. And don’t even get me started on Lazytown.

70. I mean, juvenile sexuality aside, the whole freaky love-angle between the 10-year-old girl and the Lucky Pierre jock who jumps around everywhere like a Kansas City faggot aside, if Robbie Rotten, who is lazy, is the town’s villain, and they constantly try to thwart his plans to make the town more lazy, why the fuck is it called Lazytown? Shouldn’t it be called Activetown? The very existence of this show makes me question the cultural desirability of the Icelandic people, just as Benny Hill makes me question that of the British.

71. If you are a homosexual and you are offended by my use of the phrase “Kansas City faggot” or my frequent use of the word “cocksucker”, I invite you to blow me. But only if you’re my kind of cute.

72. Likewise, if you are a straight person and your reaction to the item above was to think “Yeah! Stick it to those fuckin’ queers!”, I invite you to have a queer stick it to you. ‘It’ being his dick, and ‘to you’ being ‘up your asshole’.

73. Seriously though, what is with me and the word ‘fuck’? Maybe it’s that I’ve been listening to too much Lewis Black, or maybe it’s that my girlfriend told me that I don’t curse a lot and now I’m feeling wimpy and overcompensatory, but I’ve written it forty-three times already in this piece. That’s fucking ridiculous.

74. This administration, as I noted in my last post, is allergic to admitting that it can make, or has made, a mistake. But worse than that, it is immune to the entire notion of the appearance of impropriety. If you want to deny any wrongdoing, that’s fine - back it up, prove me wrong, shout your innocence from the rooftops. But when public opinion has it that you are a total fuckup who has done things that are wrong, wrong, wrong, you at least have to make your case - or graciously bow out and let someone who people don’t think of as a complete prickhole step in and do the job. When 90% of the world told President Bush his idea of invading Iraq was a pretty stupid one, he needed to say “Let me convince you that I’m right”. What he did was say “Yeah? Well, if you aren’t with us, you’re with the terrorists, so you can climb on board for the big win, or you can run down the mud path with a dick up your ass.” When Abu Ghraib became a household word, what Donald Rumsfeld needed to do was say “This is a horrible, shameful thing, and even though I am innocent of any wrongdoing, the right thing to do is step down so that our military effort can continue unclouded by having someone associated with Abu Ghraib overseeing it.” What he did was say “Hey, you know what? I’m stayin’, so all of you can just go E-A-T a D-I-C-K.” When Dick Cheney became vice-president, what he needed to do, especially in light of the fact that he would be heading America’s energy policy task force, was to give back the tens of millions of dollars Halliburton gave him as a going-away present. Especially since, as both the VP and a multimillionaire, he didn’t need the money; especially since it was a choice between being rich and (relatively) scandal-free and being even more rich and a totally sold-out fucking scumbag. What he did was say “That’s my money. Blow me.” UNACCEPTABLE.

75. Not everything has to be flavored. Peanuts, in particular, are a very fine thing and need no tarting up.

76. Did you know that, in addition to cow-tipping (which is exactly what it sounds like) and frog-gigging (which is also exactly what it sounds like, if you think ‘gigging’ sounds like ‘stabbing to death with a sharp-tined fork), there is something called corn-diving? Which is, well, likewise exactly what it sounds like? This sort of thing might have been acceptable 40, 50 years ago, but nowadays, yokelized teens have satellite dishes and the internet and shitty beer. They don’t have anything better to do? Go get laid, bored rural teens. Leave the cows and the corn alone. I don’t want to eat anything you pushed over or jumped on.

77. Here are some things that are not required courses of study in any grade school or high school curriculum I am aware of: critical thinking, rhetoric, consumer finance, foreign language, current events. Bad enough that plenty of public schools think teaching evolution and sex education is optional.

78. If you are a state - and who among us is not? - and you think that it makes you cool to resist things like speed limits and helmet laws and installing disabled access, then you are the governmental equivalent of the 22-year-old tenth-grader who thinks he is sticking it to the man by huffing glue on the merry-go-round.

79. Guns are not magical.

80. A lot of the things that make my blood burble like someone replaced my heart with an electric percolator have to do with flat-out selfishness or self-centeredness, but a lot of them have to do with the societal manifestation of that: a kind of blinkered solipsism that makes people infuriated if they have to recognize that they live in a society with other humans, and are not just independent actors who stroll, fully empowered and as alone as Adam, in a world in which no one matters but them and everything happens by individual and unlinked acts of will. This is the whole basis of Objectivism, for one thing; for another, it’s the massive flaw in traditional market economic theory, it’s a gaping lack in much educational and social study, and it’s the downfall of most reactionary thought about crime, punishment and group dynamics. So much of our thinking could be positively redirected if we just admitted we were a society and stopped pretending that we were just seven billion completely unrelated individuals who just happen to all occupy the same physical space.

81. Our neighbors are doing something, I don’t know what, that is making my internet access drop out about every five fucking minutes. This displeases me. By example, I actually wrote this entry three weeks ago and am just now finishing it.

82. Okay, hippies: you like to talk about how Mother Earth should be kept clean, and pure, and not have a bunch of trash and shit dumped on her all the time. Fine. We’re in accord there. But how about this: TAKE A FUCKING BATH! Take it in recycled rainwater if you have to, but get yourself clean! Every public event, street fair or concert I go to, there’s some self-righteous hippie there, picking up everybody’s empties and throwing away everybody’s used napkins, and he has feet that smell like anything goes. Steward, clean thyself; good luck with no fuckin’ soap.

83. I hate how irrationally I hate hippies.

84. Speaking of which, I really despise people who fetishize smoking marijuana. I’m all for medicinal marijuana, but let’s be honest: the majority of the people behind it are just lookin’ to get baked on the easy. Likewise, can we write off all this goober talk about how it’s a spiritual experience or a mystical phenomenon? This is just like the jackoffs who have to come up with some highfalutin explanation for getting drunk. If you want to get high, fine! I love to get high! I’m not gonna step on your mellow! Just don’t tire me with the elaborate high-flown justifications.

85. Similarly, let’s give it up on marijuana prohibition. This is asinine. You want to know something? I have a lot of smart friends. I have a lot of successful, responsible friends. I even have a couple of rich friends. What I don’t have is one fucking friend who has not, at some point in his or her life, gotten zooted. Most of my friends have done so more than once. Many of them still do. If we can be honest, and admit that marijuana prohibition is just an excuse to lock up more black people, fine. Otherwise, I think it’s gotta go.

86. Americans are in a serious state of denial about how their predecessors on the continent pretty much wiped it clean of natives, which is why I find it so hilarious that every dipshit white person between the coasts claims to be part-Indian. And, just like the self-deluding para-snobs who always claim to have been a warrior in Atlantis or a French king and never an Italian cobbler or a Westphalian stable-shoveler, they’re always related to a Cherokee ‘princess’ or a Sioux ‘brave’, and not to an Snohomish fish gutter or an Apache dirt farmer. Hey, asshole, since you’re all of a sudden one-quarter Navajo, how about we get someone to shoot one of your legs off and burn down your living room?

87. I am entering my 20th year of not understanding why I have so many smart friends who believe in astrology.

88. I am entering my 37th year of being a fucking asshole jerk.

89. I know I’m the last guy on the boat here, but I’m really tired of movies, TV shows, comics, and every other form of popular culture that wants to have it both ways in regards to violence. I understand the need for relaxing, crypto-juvenile escapist entertainment, but I am tired to the bones of people blowing shit up, beating the pee-wine out of other people, firing guns and rockets and lightning bolts hither and thither, and engaging in torture and mayhem with no negative repercussions whatsoever. Hey, they didn’t die! Or wind up crippled and ruined for their entire lives! Or psychologically damaged! It’s all good in the violence ‘hood!

90. Is it okay to say that we, as a culture, probably have enough poems about penises and vaginas to last us a while?

91. I’m pretty ambivalent about the idea of ‘reclaiming’ negative language; I feel like the question of whether or not it’s okay for blacks or gays to use the words ‘nigger’ and ‘faggot’ isn’t really mine to answer. But I do know this: there is something deeply disturbing about the whole notion of being proud to be a bitch. “Ha ha! I am obnoxious, unpleasant, domineering and hard to be around! AND I AM PROUD OF THIS! For some reason!” Also, those sweat pants with a word written on the butt do no one any good.

92. Have you noticed that we’ve convinced ourselves that there’s a really important debate to be had over how much - not whether or not, but to what degree - we should help rich people become richer, based on the theory that if we allow them to become richer they will eventually, somehow, make poorer people richer too? Not up for debate, however, is whether or not we should just cut out the middleman and give poor people money. Because they will just spend it. Unlike rich people.

93. In fact, no one at any level of government is seriously arguing that the most basic things necessary to modern human survival - food, transportation, shelter, medical care, and higher education - should just be given to poor people.

94. They’re comic books. And that’s okay. They don’t have to be graphic novels or sequential art or narrative visual storytelling to be good. Calm down.

95. You know what’s really neat? Is that we all agree the Cold War is over, and best of all, American WON! And now we’re all safe from the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the worst-case scenario is some crazy Muslim fuckhead gets hold of a cheap-ass ‘dirty bomb’ he put together behind the dumpster at Arby’s and kills a couple thousand people, tops. And the reason it’s neat is that, to my knowledge, not a single solitary nuclear bomb, rocket, or missile was dismantled after the fall of the Soviet Union. They’re all still out there, and in fact, things are worse, because instead of one country being in charge of them, about 50 countries are in charge of them, and many of those countries don’t have any money, and are led by vicious mutated cockroaches. Plus, there are now even more nuclear weapons than ever before, with India and Pakistan and North Korea at the very least having gotten in on the fun and Israel and the United States both making new ones. I dunno about you, but I’m way more scared than I was in the 1980s.

96. Take a tip from someone who was once in the natural foods business and still writes about it for the trades: go with “organic”, or select based on ingredients (no caffeine, no sugar, no preservatives, etc.), but forget about the word “natural”. It don’t mean shit, because it don’t have to mean shit. Also, buying some natural products is a total waste of money - soda pop, for example, is just fuckin’ sugar water no mater how natural or organic it is.

97. Here is something that pisses me off even though it is of direct benefit to me: with a lot of publications, you can get regular work, even if you are not a particularly skilled or original writer, simply be being reliable -- that is, by turning your work in on time and in compliance with the minimum formal requirements an editor sets forth. This is one of many, many problems with this industry/business/art form/whatever the fuck it is: you can become successful and renowned simply by turning your homework in on time. This works for me, because I’m a stickler with deadlines, word counts, etc., but for Christ’s sakes. A little professionalism, you cocksuckers.

98. Time keeps moving forward. Can’t something be done about that? Seriously, we can put computers in soda cans. Are you telling me we can’t stop me from getting old and dying, or turn the clock back so it’s still Monday and I can get some more goddamn work done? I want most of my mid-twenties back, and frankly, if we can get chili inside a hot dog and make cars that look like hot dogs, I don’t see why I can’t have my mid-twenties back. I’m frankly getting a little pissed at our continuing inability to defy the laws of physics. THIS IS AMERICA, PEOPLE. We can do anything.

99. But a bitch ain’t one!