Lifestyles of the poor and obscure

Okay, the blog is back, again, after being down for over a month, again. God, everything is such an unbelievable pain in the ass it's a wonder anyone manages to get out of bed in the afternoon.

Not that I should complain; having your blog only work about half the time (especially a blog that you never update anyway) is not exactly a travail on the order of, say, being on death row for a crime you didn't commit. (Which, by the way, strikes me as not that much worse than being on death row for a crime you did commit. I mean, either way, death row is death row.)

For you, I'll let it go for only $11,500

So having your blog go down all the time, while not as good as having your boyfriend/girlfriend go down all the time, is definitely better than being a hod-carrier on the Bataan Death March, so I suppose I shouldn't complain.

But I will. I lost my credit card and my site went away. Updating my card info with the hosting company was not enough to make it come back. I had to do a bunch of extra stuff, such as waiting for my password to be reset and...

Okay, I guess all I really had to do was wait for my password to be reset. But then I had to remember that it had been reset and do something about it. Very trying.

But back to the Bataan Death March and how it relates to my blog troubles. It occurs to me that the reason I'm upset about my blog, rather than being happy about not carrying a 90-pound sack of concrete through-- well, wherever they had the Bataan Death March through-- is this: While I am constantly exposed to the lives and antics of people who are better-off than me, I am rarely if ever seriously informed about the lives of those who are materially worse-off than me.

For example, I just read in the Star or some other celebrity rag (my girlfriend-- who I should be happy to have, by the way-- brings these home for some reason) about Tom Cruise and-- what's his 14-year-old bimbo's name? Katie Holmes? -- and their fabulous vacation at some fabulous Mexican resort. There was a photo, I shit you not, of their lunch, spread out on a solid-sapphire terrazzo with an ocean view that probably would have included Jesus windsurfing in the distance had the photographer snapped the shutter a moment earlier. Tom had a fresh-mozzarella-and-tomato on ciabatta bread, and Katie had some kind of $600 tuna sandwich (and if you've ever bought anything in Mexico, you'll realize that it would have been a $12,000 tuna sandwich here.)

From where you and I sit, it's hard to escape the nagging feeling that Tom and Katie had more fun eating that lunch than any of us will have, cumulatively, in our entire lifetimes.

And this is the problem. We know about two kinds of lives-- the ones we live personally, and the ones we read about, hear about, or see on TV, which certainly look a hell of a lot better than ours. So it's easy to come to the conclusion that the frozen-pizza-eating, check-bouncing existence that, say, I endure is about as bad as things get for a person.

Of course, this isn't true-- you can turn on the news and see piles of tsunami dead on the beaches of Banda Aceh, starving Darfur refugees, or any number of other tragedies. The problem is, these tragedies tend to be sort of anonymous. You don't get to know the sufferers the way you (think) you know Tom and Katie. Passing a random homeless guy on the street may make you feel fortunate for a fleeting moment, but hearing your Mom talk about how much money your-brother-the-dentist makes will make you feel like crap for a week.

That's why I think we should create a new class of celebrities-- miserable, doomed ones with no money and joyless lives. And we should track them, day to day, so they become household names like Liz and Britney and Christina. Then maybe the middling-off among us wouldn't whine so much.

Failing that, you know what they say-- if you feel depressed, try volunteering at a hospice for a few months. Snaps you right out of it, from what I hear, and I don't doubt it.