Is that a Milk-Bone in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?

Looks like Rick Santorum's worst fears have been confirmed. You've gotta love any news article that contains the following sentence:

Bow-chicka-bow-wow

"Jailing him, Judge Alistair McCallum told Hoyle, 'Never before in my time at the bar or on the bench have I ever had to deal with somebody who voluntarily allowed himself to be buggered by a dog on the public highway.'"

Well. Looks like somebody's led a pretty sheltered life. In my time at the bar, your Honor, we used to see this kind of thing six, seven times a night.

Seriously, I've heard of beer goggles, but, as the cliché goes, this is ridiculous.

By the way, if you're an acquaintance of mine and you happen to know of my ever having done anything like this, please, please, don't tell me.

Blonde redhead

Sometimes it seems like I've spent my entire life taking orders from women with long, strawberry-blond hair. My mother had a head of it. It's been cut short for a while now, but then again, it's been a while since I did anything she told me to do-- besides maybe smoking the carton of cigarettes she sent me for my birthday, which, frankly, I was probably going to do regardless.

Then there's my longtime editor, patron, and all-around Medici, whose good name I won’t sully here. Same deal. Granted, her blond hair doesn't have much red in it, but maybe that's why I've always run my deadlines a little too close to the wire.

Last year, I dated a woman who suffered from the same personality disorder as Courtney Love. She had long, reddish-blond hair, and she tormented me mercilessly with Fatal-Attraction-level craziness for two months. It occurs to me now that not long after I convinced her to cut her hair short, we broke up. And by "we broke up," I mean "I fled in mortal terror and spent six weeks worrying every day that my cat would be boiling on the stove when I got home." (If she's reading this, she should bear in mind that cyberstalking someone for over a year is a pretty bad sign.)

My current girlfriend also has long, strawberry-blond hair. Of course, everything she asks me to do is such a good idea that I'd do it anyway without being told (emoticon, emoticon, don't kill me).

Finally, the editor of Kittenpants magazine must be growing her hair out, because I finally submitted a piece to her that I've been putting off writing for, like, a year. I'm pretty sure she's blond, though we've never met, and given her latest online business, I'm starting to wonder if there's something in the blood of these flowing-haired Nordic types that tends toward the bossy-- for 77 cents, she'll give you something to do, which sounds suspiciously like "I like ordering people around."

Hitting the wall

This is not the first time I've tried to post to this page in the last 24 hours. I don't know if you'd call it writer's block-- a term I've always disdained-- or something more akin to a hardening of the creative arteries, but the truth is I've scarcely been able to write a word for weeks, and it's starting to frighten me. God knows I'm not in position to fall back on a secondary career in male modeling.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not convinced I've got what it takes to make a secondary career out of, you know, having a job. So when the writing thing starts to go as dry as an Objectivist's tears, it puts the wind up yours truly to a considerable extent. My writing, such as it is, is the rock upon which I have built the church of my self-esteem-- really more of a drive-through wedding chapel of self-esteem, frankly, but it's all I've got-- and when the bells of that church start tolling, in that ask-not-for-whom-etc. kind of way, I start to feel like maybe I'm in deep shit.

Take Rickey Henderson, the baseball great who is now, at the age of something like 49, not so great anymore, and is currently playing Triple-Z ball for a team that might as well be called the Modesto Brillo Pads.

The Brillo Pads play in the kind of league where most of the other players have to make sure their shift at the Circle-K is covered if they want to play a night game. Rickey, though, still thinks he's going to get called back up to The Show any day.

The guy's washed up, and he doesn't know it. This is the kind of story that makes aging writers whose production has been dropping lately start reflexively checking their shoulders for skeletal hands protruding from flowing black sleeves. Time's up!

Or maybe not. I'm technically not yet 40, and it's hardly unheard of for writers to maintain their chops well beyond that age. But then again, most funny guys do their best funny work young. So all this panic, while certainly neurotic, isn't necessarily for nothing. I can think of three explanations for what's going on here:

1. I'm toast. Washed up, over the hill, standing stupid on the platform with a one-way ticket to Palookaville in my hand. If that's the case, there's not much I can do about it, I gues.

2. I'm depressed. You'd think I'd know if I was, wouldn't you? But not so fast. I grant you, when you're young, you can't miss it-- a great, yawning existential despair, often leavened with a generous mittenful of I'll-never-get-laid-again.

But when you're older, it's more like you look down and say, hey, I'm pretty sure I've been wearing these same pants for the last three weeks. Oh, and I haven't left the house or talked to anybody in a month. And now that I think about it, I've been living on Triscuits since before Rehnquist died.

Which is all true. But I've always been depressed; why is it taking so much out of me now? Hmm, food for thought-- maybe I'll put it on a Triscuit and chew on it for a while.

3. I'm embarrassed. I mean, look at this shit-- all I ever write about is me, me, me. I would be bored if I were you and I were still reading this, which is a lot of ifs.

The thing is, I think I've always only written about me, me, me-- the work that I'm looking back on as my "best" was mostly on the same subject. At the time, I was so completely lacking in self-awareness that I didn't notice, but now I'm noticing, and trying to write stuff that isn't so self-indulgent. But maybe I was never able to write stuff that wasn't self-indulgent. Yay, I'm not a has-been; I'm a never-was.

4. Malnutrition. This was my first thought when I came out here tonight-- I'm trying to write humor and maybe fiction, but all I ever read is hard news and political blogs. And I've always been the type who more or less barfs back out whatever kind of stuff I'm reading at the time. It's like trying to make a cow give milk when all you ever feed her is gin. (Which I assume doesn't work, although I'm not a dairy farmer.)

Maybe I just need to read some better books. I mean, some books, period. Anybody want to recommend some that sound like me? I have a library card now.