Can you imagine not only thinking of the breakfast cereal name Weetabix, but actually putting it on the box in big letters and leaving it there for 40 years? Man, that took a lot of balls.

Insert pun on Joe Trippi's name here

Can you believe Dean fired Joe Trippi? Guy raises $40 million for you, makes you a frontrunner, and you shitcan him when you start to worry that even all that may not be enough overcome your own inherent weaknesses as a candidate? (And no, I'm not talking about the much ballyhooed "meltdown," I'm talking about what caused the poor finish in Iowa in the first place-- the mediocre public speaking, the lack of focus, the disconnect with voters.) There's only so much a campaign manager can do, Howard; after a certain point, you're on your own.

This move will redound to Dean's discredit in more ways than one. Not only does he appear disloyal (and, once again, rudderless), he's voluntarily surrendered what many regard as his secret weapon. I think Dean's base loves Trippi more than the candidate knows. Maybe even more than they love Dean.

Say it ain't so, Joe

Let's talk to a typical Dean supporter. How about me? Why was I so enraptured with Dean? Well, sure, I liked the fire-breathing, give-'em-hell-Howard rhetoric, but what really impressed me was Dean's ability to create that amazing peer-to-peer effort we called "the Dean juggernaut" until about two weeks ago. Who created that juggernaut? Trippi. Would I follow Trippi to another campaign? Maybe.

It's weird, I know, but political operatives are starting to have some of the star power and cachet that used to be reserved for the candidates themselves. (Remember James Carville?) If one of the other candidates can figure out a way to hire Trippi without making the whole thing look too mercenary-- well, that would get me thinking, wouldn't it? All I've wanted from the get-go was a candidate who had Edwards' polish, Kerry's record, and Dean's revolutionary grassroots organization. I'd settle for two out of three.

Could Edwards finesse it? He never (memorably) traded blows with Dean directly, and he's not the frontrunner, so there's an outside possibility Trippi could sign on with him without looking like a bandwagon-hopping hypocrite. Would he do it? Is that a complete violation of political etiquette? Does anyone really care about political etiquette these days?

Okay, I'm dreaming. What really happens is that Trippi goes away, and so does Dean, and nobody gets the magical-internet-populist sword of striking that Dean once had. But you can bet Edwards is going to do something-- he knows as well as anybody that he only has about a week to produce the political equivalent of a dramatic surprise witness ("...and now, Your Honor, I would like to call to the stand-- JIMMY HOFFA!").

This is John Edwards' stock in trade, of course. I suspect he has something up his sleeve already; maybe we'll see it in the debate tonight. Whatever it is, it had better be gripping, or he's toast, and we'll all have to start learning to love John Kerry-- a skill, I'm told, that even Kerry's own children have yet to master.

"You can pass a garden gnome hundreds of times and never suspect that a human heart beating with hate lies within," according to this article. Man, I wish I had a nickel for every time that thought's crossed my mind.

Frankly, I don't recommend actually reading the article; it's pretty stupid except for that one sentence.

My letter to the Rabbit

Below is the text of a letter (an email, really) I just sent to Heather Havrilesky, a freelance writer I like and whose career I've been following for a few years. (Unlike me, she has an actual "career" one can plausibly "follow," rather than just a "series of bank statements" one can "laugh at.")

You may notice that in the letter, I address her as "Rabbit." Despite your perfectly reasonable suspicions to the contrary, this is not because I have finally lost my grip completely, and genuinely believe that I am corresponding with an actual rabbit. Rather, it's because Ms. Havrilesky also maintains the Rabbit Blog, where she adopts the conceit of referring to herself in the third person as "the Rabbit," and occasionally entertains correspondence from dipshits like me addressed to same. (You can also find links to lots of her work there.)

---

Dear Rabbit:

You are my wallpaper.

No, seriously-- you are my wallpaper, at least for the moment. By "wallpaper," I mean, of course, the background image on my computer screen, computer screens being what people in the 21st Century stare at instead of walls. (I admit I didn't exactly kill myself to do this; you can set your background with one click on a PC.) It's that picture where you're sitting clutching your TiBook and jutting your chin defiantly toward a shining future, like a proud farming-collective worker in a Soviet social-realist painting. You probably hate that picture.

This is a picture of a rabbit, in case   somebody doesn't know what a rabbit is.

I thought I would write and tell you about this, because, come on, how often does a total stranger write you to tell you that you're their wallpaper? I wish that someone would email me and tell me something as bizarre as the fact that I'm their wallpaper. If I were someone's wallpaper, I'd want to know about it, and I thought you might, too.

If someone told me I was their wallpaper, I tell myself, I'd be inspired to write something devastatingly clever and subtle about it. It would give me a story to tell, beyond the story about how I sat around trying to think of a story to tell and couldn't.

If I were someone's wallpaper, I could tell all sorts of stories. I could tell the story of how one man's sordid is another man's famous. I could tell the story of how you should be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. I could even channel Simon and Garfunkel and tell the story of how Richard Cory went home and put a bullet through his head, even though everybody thought he had a really nice apartment and lots of interesting friends and nobody could remember ever seeing him with mustard stains on his sweater.

As to why I made you my wallpaper, I might as well further horrify you by confessing that, while I appropriated your likeness mostly as a lark, I do to some extent see you as a role model and an insp-- stop rolling your eyes and listen for second, would you? A role model and an inspiration. I guess that makes this a fan letter. I figured that if I put your picture on my desktop, I would be inspired ("goaded" or "shamed" might be better words) into working harder to finish that deep, important work, work that doesn't come with a deadline and the promise of a paycheck on the 10th of the month after publication.

"Look," my screen nags, or is supposed to, "the Rabbit gets all bummed-out, too, and she manages to get things done. See, the Rabbit has endured setbacks, but she keeps banging out copy, and she doesn't stop till it's finished. Observe, the Rabbit is sometimes plagued by self-doubt, but I'll bet she answers the phone when it rings, instead of taking a another drag on her cigarette and staring hollowly at it until it stops, like a character in a Godard film."

Whether any of these things are true doesn't matter from my point of view, since I don't actually know you. The point is, your professional life represents something that I can aspire to. Granted, this does not pay your phone bill, but perhaps it may give you a fleeting sense of satisfaction, or achievement-- or possibly just a momentary shudder of distracted pity. At any rate, as far as I am concerned, you have not flailed in vain, and that plus three bucks will get you a cup of coffee. So hoppity-hop on, bold Rabbit, into the brave workers' paradise of tomorrow. Good night, and God speed.

It's not easy being cool

Okay, so in my last post (which is right below this one if you want to look at it) I was bitching, somewhat facetiously, about how being a writer doesn't get you any chicks. Unfortunately, this is still true. It also doesn't get you invited to many parties, nor does it make people think you're glamorous the way they would if you were something really special, like, say, a former roadie for Grand Funk.

However, right after I posted that I had to get in my car and drive to work, and as I was stopping to get coffee I saw this guy walking up Hawthorne in full Scottish drag, with kilt, sporran, tam o'shanter, and whatever they call those socks people wear if they're going to dress up in full Scottish drag and they want to have matching socks. And I was like, man, it could be worse. I could be that guy.

Exhibit B: A plate of haggis.

Granted, I had a little less room to criticize this guy's incredible display of geekitude than I normally would, since I was wearing a pretty retarded outfit myself-- namely, the uniform I am required to wear as part of my demeaning job in the service industry. But I have to wear that for work. Unless this dude was on his way to cover a shift at MacFuckity's Scottish Pizza Pub, he was dressed up like Braveheart on purpose. Full Scottish clan regalia is not something you just throw on to go get a pack of smokes while everything else is in the wash. He thought it was cool.

This invites a closer examination of what it means to be cool. Exhibit A: Bagpipe Dan here. He is not cool. He may be a nice guy. He may be smart. He may have way more friends than I do, and he probably does have way more fun than I do. But he's just not cool.

Why? Because he's perfectly happy to go down the street looking like that. He either doesn't know or doesn't care that he looks like a dork. I don't care if that outfit causes hot gamer chicks in elf costumes to swoon at his feet at the SCA convention, it's just wrong.

So what? If he's happy being the way he is, where's the harm? Well, that's exactly my point-- he probably is happy being the way he is. If he was miserable and ashamed, there would at least be some hope. As it is, he's just stopped trying-- he's just going to go ahead and accept his limitations and never make any attempt to better himself. There's nothing more annoying than a self-satisfied dork.

I may not be very cool, but at least I try to be aware of how uncool I am, and I make sure to take time every day to loathe myself for my uncool qualities.

When I'm rejected by my peers, I don't just shrug and go back to my PlayStation; I take full responsibility for my loserdom. I may listen to lame music, but if I do, I don't do it when anyone else is around to hear, and I make sure to feel guilty about it afterwards. And if I happen to find myself in public wearing retarded clothes, I don't parade around like a Wal-Mart Jezebel; I skulk in the shadows feeling appropriately mortified until such time as I can make good my escape.

That's what being cool is all about. It can be a tough road, but at least a person can maintain a litle bit of self-respect.

You know, being a writer gets you about as many chicks as winning a Battlestar Galactica trivia contest. No wonder I tried to be a musician for so long.

The problem with being a musician, though, is that they won't let you do it after a certain age. With writing, it's sort of assumed that you're drawn from a population of the kind of hapless fuckups who don't get around to even thinking what sort of career they might want to have until they're halfway to the nursing home. And even then, you need to have a lot of time on your hands, the sort of time that more socially active types have to spend-- oh, washing their sheets, I guess.

AAAAGGGHHHH!

Kerry? John fucking KERRY!!??? All I asked from this primary was that Kerry not win. This is, truly, the worst of all possible worlds. If Dems think a New Englander with balls and a personality (i.e., Dean) is unelectable, how about a New Englander WITHOUT balls or a personality? Nominating a taller Mike Dukakis is not the answer, you dumbasses. Kerry is a cadaverous milquetoast with all the charisma of-- well, all the charisma of Al Gore, and none of the brains. The guy is a walking tranquilizer who generates about as much enthusiasm as a pitcher of warm spit.

Edwards: Pretty sly for a white guy

Granted, Kerry is more or less immune to negative attacks, since he has no characteristics, good or bad, to attack. But, Christ, if you're looking for something to make Democrats stay home in droves on Election Day (assuming that "staying home" is something that one can do in droves-- I realize it's a bit like "stampeding to a standstill"), you could scarcely ask for a better tool than this ambulatory chloroform rag, John Kerry.

But the moving finger writes, and, having flipped you off, moves on, etc., etc. So... what now?

With Kerry emerging as a legitimate threat, Clark no longer has the "veteran who understands national security" playground to himself. Look for these two to start comparing war wounds while matching each other drink for drink at the Manchester V.F.W., pausing occasionally to throw peanuts and ice cubes at Howard Dean, who'll be sitting in the corner drinking wine coolers and wondering if anyone wants to see his appendectomy scar. If Clark and Kerry retire to the parking lot to settle the matter like men, Dean may have some breathing room to restore his tissues for a day or two.

Meanwhile, Edwards is looking shrewder every day. He's starting to remind me of that guy who won the first season of "Survivor"-- by the time anyone thinks to attack him, he may be hard to stop. As the primary season swings southward, being picked on by a bunch of candy-assed Northern eggheads may even redound to his benefit. (Sure, Clark is technically from Arkansas, but he plays like a Yankee. His clipped, polysyllabic speech carries damning intimations of literacy, and will fare poorly in the South next to Edwards' polished down-home drawl.)

Moreover, it's hard to imagine that victory-hungry Democrats will fail to notice Edwards' obvious similarities to a certain other Southerner, one who enjoys the distinction of being the only member of his party in a generation to formulate a winning strategy for capturing the White House. The GOP has been using Nixon's "Southern Strategy" successfully for 35 years. Democrats could be forgiven the temptation to try Clinton's own Southern Strategy again-- especially since it's the only proven winner anyone can remember.

If there's anything more boring than pottery, I don't want to know what it is.

I just found out that not only is the domain name infanticide.org already taken, it's being used by people who are totally against infanticide! That's such a rip.

Sugar blues

I was just reading a magazine ad for a prescription allergy medication. The ad mentioned that the drug's side effects were "similar to a sugar pill, and included sore throat, dry mouth, and fatigue."

I had no idea that sugar pills had side effects, other than maybe making you fat if you took a whole lot of them. I'm sort of worried now, since I have a bag of M&Ms-- which are pretty much sugar pills, after all-- on the shelf by the door to my bedroom, and I've gotten in the habit of popping a few every time I walk by.

This is bad, because I've probably totally OD'ed on them by now, and when the side effects kick in, there'll be hell to pay. By tomorrow, I imagine my throat will feel like I've been gargling razor blades, my tongue will be as dry and scaly as a parrot's, and I'll be so enervated I doubt I'll have the strength to maintain bladder control, much less make it to work on time.

What's worse, those are just the side effects they mention on the first page, which I've come to think of in pharmaceutical ads as the "good news" page-- you know, the one with the smiling lady riding her Harley through a field of ragweed, with her Rottweiler in the sidecar shedding impotently. The second page [a.k.a. the "bad news" page] contains "additional important information," probably about how all my hair is going to fall out and my gums are going to hemorrhage uncontrollably unless I stay out of direct sunlight for the next six months. It's probably just as well that my vision is already too blurred to read it.

Dumb

I am as dumb as a box of hammers. Maybe dumber. I feel as though my brain has shriveled into a dessicated husk. If you opened up my head right now, I'll bet you'd just see a sort of ashy, mummified-looking mass, like the dried-up, blackened meat of a walnut that's gone bad. I can't think at all. Does this happen to other people? I hope to God it does, and it's just a passing spell of some sort. Otherwise, I might as well be carted off to an institution right now, because I'm never going to complete any task more complicated than buttering toast in this condition.

Not only am I too dumb to have any new ideas, I'm too dumb even to work on any of the old ones. I'm afraid to. I'm afraid any residual cleverness those ideas might have in them (which probably wasn't much to begin with) will be sucked into the ravenous vacuum of my skull, where it will die immediately, eyeballs boiling and pissing blood like an astronaut without a spacesuit.

What the hell is it? I'm not tired. I'm not hung over. I don't recall having a lobotomy lately-- actually, let me check.

No, my skull isn't shaved and there are no suture marks on it, so that's not it.

I know; maybe I have Korsakoff's Syndrome. Maybe I've been writing this same post about feeling unaccountably stupid every day for the last 20 or 30 years.

But my calendar is right where it's supposed to be, and while a quick glance in the mirror does reveal me to be shockingly old, it's the same shockingly old I remember, so that couldn't be it, either.

Wait a minute! I'm not dumb; I'm a genius, because I just had an idea that's going to revolutionize human interaction forever. See, I just figured out what's wrong with me today-- I have a "brain cold!" It's a condition I just now discovered, and it's going to make me famous.

Of course, people have been getting "brain colds" for years, but nobody's thought to come up with a name for them until now. Granted, it's not a very good name, but I'll leave it to somebody else to come up with a better one-- I can't do it myself right now, because I have a "brain cold."

See? You can already see how the "brain cold" could be a pretty useful concept, especially when it comes to getting out of obligations. Here's how it works: When you have a regular cold, your body becomes sort of weak and shitty and generally unreliable, and no one expects you to go skiing with them or help them move. In many cases, you don't even have to go to work. But at the same time, everyone understands that your condition is temporary and not serious, and no one expects you to go to the doctor and get an official diagnosis.

A brain cold is just the same, except it happens to your brain instead of your body. You don't need to go to a neurologist or a shrink for it; it'll clear up on its own. But while you've got one, people will just have to deal with the fact that you're not going to be quite as scintillating as usual. As soon as the idea catches on, you'll be able to justify all sorts of stupid behavior (or just a generalized short-term pattern of intellectual torpor) by explaining that you have a brain cold, and you can't be expected to do any better until it clears up.

Man, this is great. This is going to be bigger than Galileo dropping the cannonball off the Leaning Tower of Pisa onto Isaac Newton's head and discovering electromagnetism. (Or whatever. You can't really expect me to remember all the details-- I shouldn't even be here today.)

Alanis

Last night Alanis Morrisette came to me looking for a hit. I bet she could use one, too. (It occurred to me that maybe she could have a hit with a cover of Hooverphonic's "Mad About You," but I didn't say anything.) She said that as soon as she had the money, she was going to buy a Fender Stratocaster with a rosewood fretboard-- she'd found one that was only $226. I said that if I had a piece of rosewood, I wouldn't make guitar necks out of it; I'd use it to hit people, and we all laughed.

I did feel sort of sorry for her though. I probably should have offered her like, twenty bucks to detail my car or something. Except my car is a piece of crap that's not really worth detailing, so she'd know I was just doing it as an excuse to give her the twenty bucks. That would hurt her pride, I imagine. I guess if she gets really desperate, we could let her stay in the basement for a while. There's a lot of music gear down there, so she'd feel right at home.

Block that kick

You know, it's good to get some work done every day. However, being obsessed with having a new post on the blog every day does not necessarily bring one closer to one's stated life goals, unless those goals begin and end with having a new blog post every day.

Lucky me, mine don't. I'm working on starting a new magazine with some other writers. Please, no applause; you're embarrassing me. The point is, posting a hastily-written short essay here every day does not bring that project that much closer to launch. Especially if that hastily-written short essay isn't very good, like my last one. So I'm punting again. I devoted today's blog time to work on the magazine project instead, and I refuse to feel guilty about it. So there.

And if you're one of the other people working on the magazine, expect an incomprehensible, drug-addled screed from me soon. And keep thinking of names-- I can't think of anything except Modern Despair, which, obviously, won't do.

Vignettes in consumerism

I don't know where you're supposed to get decent clothes these days, but it sure as hell isn't Old Navy.

I went to Old Navy, like an asshole, because I needed a few very basic things that you can't find at Goodwill: a few turtlenecks, which I like because they don't gap open to expose my fat stomach when I sit down, and maybe a pair of jeans, as I'm down to one pair since I learned that you shouldn't do laundry with automatic dishwasher detergent.

I know that Old Navy is a generic, big-box retailer whose name is more or less synonymous with pedestrian, fashion-backward mediocrity, but I wasn't looking for a to-die-for, one-of-a-kind vintage shirt to wow the swells at Le Cirque on boat race night. I just wanted a regular pair of jeans. How hard can that be? I bought my last pair of jeans at Fred Meyer, which is the fucking grocery store, for Christ's sake, and they were fine.

Old Navy, however, has brought the full weight of its expertise to the problem of how to make a pair of jeans, and has apparently thrown up its hands in defeat. The grocery store has them beat hands down. These jeans are crap-- the waistband is up somewhere around my neck, and the rest of the garment sort of billows out indistinctly downward from there, like a great denim blancmange.

And before you ask, no, I didn't buy the Relaxed Fit or the Loose Fit or the Baggy Fit or the Illbient Drum-n-Bass Deep Trance Fit. I bought the Regular Fit-- it said so right on the tag: Regular Jeans. You can't be much clearer than that. I can only assume that the design for jeans that fit normally is patented and Old Navy is too cheap to spring for a license.

I suppose that theoretically I could have tried them on. Theoretically. In real life, there is no way in hell I'm taking off my pants at Old Navy. You weren't there.

Anyway, I know my size, and I got Regular-- what could go wrong? The only hint I might have had that the designers were going to deviate so radically from sweet reason was the mention on the tag that the jeans were "easy through the thigh," but I assumed this was just a delicate way of saying, "Yes, we know you're fat; these jeans will fit you anyway."

I should mention that even for a guy who has to lie by seven pounds to the Body Mass Index Calculator just to receive a rating of "marginally overweight," I have pretty big thighs. (Coupled with my weak, spindly arms, these rather give me the aspect of an undersized Tyrannosaurus Rex with a drinking problem.)

But in these pants, even my clamorous haunches rattle around like broomsticks in a culvert, and what was described in the literature as a "straight leg" comprises several yards of loose cloth flapping and flaring about my ankles in a woefully unfashionable and age-inappropriate manner. I just don't understand it. It's not like they don't know how to make things tight-- the turtlenecks, for example, grip my neck with a viselike embrace that makes my vision go black and turns my whole head a sort of purplish gray.

But I won't start on that; I think you've had enough of this peevish, insight-free Andy Rooney imitation for one day. Anyway, Old Navy sucks, like you didn't already know. I'm going to go back to buying my clothes on eBay.

Advice

If you're going to take psychedelic drugs, you need to decide at the outset whether you're going to see the world as beautiful or scary. You should make sure you remember to see it as beautiful, because if you see it as scary and start thinking about death and decay and body hair and the fact that everyone is looking at you, you'll probably have a really bad time, and then you'll wind up in the hospital and, eventually, prison.

Also, remember to not think about giant insects, such as dog-sized cockroaches, 10-pound centipedes, and giant spiders that hide behind you and jump out of the way every time you turn around.

You should probably print out this note and leave it someplace where you'll see it while you're tripping, so you won't forget.

All The Names In New York City

Remember when we were going to run out of fossil fuels? Me neither, because of course I'm only 21, with a lean, toned body, a full head of lustrous, wavy hair, and melting, doelike eyes like those of some shy woodland creature. But if I were, say, in my mid-to-late thirties, I might remember a time, sometime around the late 70s, when most authorities were confidently predicting that the world had at most only enough fossil fuels to keep running for another 25 years or so, which was very bad news, because when we ran out, we'd all be fucked.

Now, as it turns out, we have enough fossil fuels to last us well into the 4th millenium. Unfortunately, this is also very bad news, because we now know that if we keep burning fossil fuels at our current rate, by 2050 or so the mean January temperature in Albany, NY will be approximately 470 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course, the Fahrenheit scale will seem quite the quaint anachronism by then, when we're all running around in aluminized heat-resistant bodysuits like that robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still. "Greetings, citizen! Hot enough for you?" "Oh, you know what they say: it's not the heat, it's the intense bursts of high-energy gamma radiation!" (Metallic laughter all around.)

So like I say, we're okay on fossil fuels. What we are running out of, though, is words. Yup, plain, ordinary words-- at least, words you can use for anything important. We live in an online world, after all, and any endeavor from a lemonade stand to a multinational corporation needs a concise, easy-to-remember domain name, which, of course, must be unique in all the world. Since any schmuck with nine bucks can buy any word or phrase for any reason or no reason at all, the stock of unused words and phrases is rapidly dwindling.

Let's say you're looking for a name for-- oh, I don't know; a new literary magazine, just to pull a random example out of the air. Every single word you could possibly want to use (as well a lot you wouldn't) is long gone, registered to some fly-by-night spamhaus in Tampa or Bangalore. The same goes for any two-word phrase that means anything at all-- "collateral damage," "unseen forces," "painful urination"-- you name it, it's been bought.

What's left? If you're something artsy and irreverent, you can just combine two words that don't mean anything-- "monkeybicycle" or "razorfish." This isn't the ideal option, but it's better than nothing. (If you're a big company hoping to get other big companies to trust you with a big pile of their money, you're even worse off: you have to make up a completely new word out of random syllables, like "Accenture." But screw you for being a big company in the first place; you deserve to have a dorky-ass name.)

The problem with these double-random names is that after you've seen a few, they all start to run together, like those emails I keep getting from "Dolloped H. Workbooks" and "Maggot Q. Shrewdly" wanting to sell me magic boner pills.

It's getting to the point where if you want to name something, you have to put two, three, or even four words together in a new way that is still meaningful, which is not easy. It's almost like you have to put thought, or even creativity, into it.

And that's just not fair.