There's nothing in our asses that will help you and your dying planet. Life ... life ... I thank you. My asshole thanks you. Life is tough enough out there in grow country without you proctonauts downing a couple of cases of Zima and getting your moon rocks off checking on Jethro's oil.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
The Afterlife
Eventually, we all have to leave the building, don't we? It's just—what's out there, Uhura?
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but as more and more aging baby boomers peer through their bifocals at the haggard Lance Henriksen face of their own mortality, one question seems to occur with numbing frequency: Where do we go after last call at Bistro Earth?
As a forty-three-year-old man, I am starting to ponder concepts like my own endgame, not so much in a Dionne Warwick way, but as a means with which to acclimate myself to facing the inevitable. I know people say "Life begins at forty." Yeah, if you're the fucking Highlander, but, you know, the rest of us are trying to make sense out of the indecipherable babble of everyone else's best guess as to what awaits us behind door Number 3 in Monty's Death Jar.
Do we go on a journey into something more magnificent or do we merely get buried and remade into bridge mix for worms? Well, you know, we just don't know. And that question often tugs on us harder than Newt Gingrich trying to water-ski.
Death haunts us because the only guarantee that comes with the gift of life is that sooner or later you're going to have to return that gift to whatever cosmic Nordstrom we inhabit. The afterlife is a subject that's inspired more speculation than how Melissa Etheridge's girlfriend got pregnant.
You know, I would like to believe that when I get to the Pearly Gates I will be greeted by St. Peter, and he'll say that he's a big fan of the show and I don't have to queue up with the rest of the dead losers and then a big doorman with a headset halo and black leather wings unhitches the velvet rope and waves me in. That's what I'd like to believe ...
But for all I know, St. Pete is just another pissed-off DMV zombie who makes you go to the end of the stooge line behind the guy who had one tai chi lesson and went into a biker bar to test it out ... he's standing in front of you there in the crane position, with a pool cue sticking out of his ass ... Blunt side in.
Then the next thing in the eternal life is you get to review all the moments of your life. That's great—having to watch dailies of all the stuff you'd rather forget from your earlier days. Scenes like the time you figured out how to fuck your toy cement mixer when you were twelve. How about the time you ate a Castaneda-sized portion of buttons at a college party and thought your roommate was a giant suck-locust so you ran nude through a mall with a Doors 45 stuck on your penis to warn the villagers.
So while we can all pretty much agree on what heaven must be like, hell, like Winston Smith's rat cage, is a subjective thing. It's what you find most loathsome and frightening in your heart of hearts, and it is forever. It's sitting in the Clockwork Orange chair through an ever- repeating double feature of Showgirls and Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot. It's being stuck in a never-ending traffic jam in mid-August with no air-conditioning and a radio that gets only the All Rosie Perez, All the Time station.
Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said, "Hell is other people." And he should know, because he lived in France. About the only evidence we have to go on as far as the afterlife is concerned is the testimony of people who have had near death experiences. And they all describe the same phenomenon. Rushing at breakneck speed through a long, dark tunnel toward a bright light at the end. Hey, you call it a near death experience, I call it riding on Amtrak, okay. Potato, potahto, derailo, derallo.
But near death isn't enough, is it? What we really need to do is to talk to somebody with a cellular on the other side who's got metaphysical roam.
Now, when I was a kid, we got a ouija board and we proceeded to convince ourselves that we had discovered a direct connection to the world of the unseen. I realized that maybe it wasn't that precise a device when we lost the sliding thing and replaced it with a Cool Whip lid with a thumbtack in it. I was getting suspicious anyway when I noticed that all of the spirits we contacted misspelled the exact same words that my brother did.
Now, the latter-day ouija board is the channelers, and channelers, for a hefty fee, will sit you down at a table, back-light a crystal, turn on some Tesh at Red Rocks bootleg tape, and then pop in and out of characters so paper thin, they couldn't get past the table read at Renegade. And this stuff is rife in L.A. I would remind you, though, that most people in Hollywood barely have one person inside of them, let alone two hundred.
Simply put, if there were no money to be made from summoning the dead, channeling would be about as popular as Maria Maples at a benefit screening of The First Wives Club. Okay.
So if much of man's dabblings in the afterlife distill down into nonsense, why does it hold so much fascination for us? And for the answer to that question, we must go to the afterlife's P.R. firm, Organized Religion. Promising us eternal bliss and threatening us with hell and damnation are the bullwhip and chair that keep us from trying to maul our trainer.
Well, it's ironic that an argument about finality could go on and on, but that about sums it up. So let's just leave it at this. Your big three brand-name creeds all agree on one thing. Sammy Hagar was a mistake.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Gun Control
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but I think it's time we called a cease-fire in the debate over gun control.
The police have powerful weapons and the criminals have powerful weapons and you and 1 are left with eight dead bolts, a nine-hundred-dollar-a-month cable bill, and we've been reduced to asking the pizza boy as he slips the Big Foot under the door, "Hey, have the leaves turned out there yet?"
Americans are more armed than the octopus at the Chernobyl aquarium. And yet you talk gun control with anyone from the NRA and they go to the Constitution faster than SNL cast members go to their cue cards.
Listen, the men who wrote the Constitution meant it as a guideline for the law. Much like when Martha Stewart bakes botanically correct Concord grape leaves for the top of her pie crusts. You can't really go by what she says. Don't you see? You'll end up like her. Yeah, the founding fathers said we had a right to bear arms. They also said we had a right to own other human beings. Now, thankfully, we've moved on from that soupcon of divine enlightenment, and it's about time we start taking the Wite-Out to other parts of the Constitution.
I mean, come on, it's over two hundred years old and we don't usually pay attention to anything that ancient. If we did, American life could be summed up in three words: "President Bob Dole." You know, when the Constitution was written, guns were an essential tool for survival.
Now, granted, several of our Founding Fathers were probably in the dementia stage of syphillis at that constitutional rewrite session, but surely they didn't mean that this right to bear arms takes precedence over living in an orderly and safe society.
We needed an armed, well-regulated militia at the time of our country's breach-of-contract birth because we just stole it from the Brits and there was a good chance that the little bald guy from Benny Hill and a whole shitload of snaggletoothed redcoats were coming over the hill any day on the H.M.S. Richard Branson to get it back. But nowadays a citizen militia has become about as necessary as bodyguards for Peter Frampton.
You know, guns are part of this country's DNA, they're inextricably woven into the fiber of our psyche. America was founded by rebels, liberated by guerrillas, and settled in no small part by outlaws.
Now, piggyback onto that lineage an unhealthy Bob Dornan-like mistrust of the unfamiliar, fold in a heaping helping of Paranoia Helper, and you conclude, my friends, that this country is overflowing with enough leavening agents to create an uprising that is going to make Mount St. Helens seem like Vendela fake-smoking a Cohiba on the cover of Cigar Aficionado.
Now, obviously we can't ban all guns, because many of them are used for the recreational sport of hunting. And people have to hunt because it's a simple fact that deer have to die. They have to be taken out, because if they aren't, they're just going to keep dashing through the forest, frolicking in the fields, and nibbling the leaves and berries off trees and bushes. 1 mean, come on, Bambi is begging for it. The deer might as well just refuse to sell their casino to the Corleone family.
So, what are the solutions?
One recent plan is the guns for toys or guns for concert tickets exchanges. Recently I saw a promotion where for each gun you handed in you got two tickets to an L.A. Clippers game. Now, that doesn't work out too well, because after watching the Clippers you want to kill yourself and you don't have a gun. It is literally an O. Henry story waiting to be written.
New York City tried information, installing the nation's first "death clock" in Times Square. This large, lighted sign would count handgun deaths in the country, like a McDonald's sign counts hamburger sales. It didn't work because there were people in Times Square who would shoot you just to watch the damn sign change. Then they'd ask a cop to initial their score.
Okay, so information isn't working, giveaways aren't working, and we all agree it's fantasyland to believe that we can get rid of all the guns. But I think that any right- minded individual would agree that we should make guns harder to get than an eight o'clock table at Morton's on Monday night.
And what are the specifics of making it harder? Well, first off, let's light a fire under the pale, pasty, white, cellulite-ridden asses of those asses down in Washington, D.C. You want gun control? Get rid of the metal detectors around the Capitol building. Take away the Secret Service protection for all politicians. Christ, by next week the worst thing you'll have to worry about is drive-by shoutings, which, I might add, are protected by the First Amendment.
And that's fine with me, cause without freedom of speech, well, I'm just the white guy running the malt shop on Moesha.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
The Fall of the Middle Class
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but the chasm between the haves and the have-nots in this country is beginning to make the Grand Canyon look like the space between Japanese rail commuters. The socioeconomic disparity between the classes in America is yawning like George Sanders watching a fishing show hosted by fed chairman Alan Greenspan.
From birth, America was the bold new experiment. Idealism made reality in the soft clay of a burgeoning democracy. This grand nation of dreams now has the look of the worn, tired diner waitress who's seen way too much.
A shrinking portion of the population controls a growing portion of the money, and more and more of the middle class are finding themselves stuck on the high-prices- low-wages hamster wheel.
Being middle class in America today is like being George Jetson walking Astro on that treadmill. No one knows how to stop this crazy thing. I know that some of you are probably launching into that reflexive "greatest- country - in - the - world - land - of - unfettered - economic - opportunity" Irving Berlin song-and-dance number right now, but there are some very nice, hardworking people out there who just aren't making it. And they're not all teenage single high-school-dropout crackhead moms either. Regular people in unexotic circumstances are finding themselves unable to afford to own a home or send their kids to college. Dual-income families are often living a paycheck away from setting up house in the nearest Starbucks doorway. In 1990s America, you're either driving the Rolls or you're washing its windshield for spare change.
How is it that a country that hails democracy and capitalism as the only fair and just system of empowering the people has ended up more top-heavy than Anna Nicole Smith in a centrifuge?
What people lack these days is a way out of the class they started in. Short of being able to decide who your parents are, how can someone of limited means make a better life for themselves these days? People no longer work like dogs to get ahead, they work like dogs just to stay where they are and not become homeless. Take a look at what the average American has been earning during the past twenty years and you'd see more growth on Doogie Howser's face. Once you're down, trying to get back up is like shoveling while it's snowing. Either you're rich or you're poor. The situation is becoming as bipolar as the day room at Bellevue.
And what kind of toll does this steady yet dyspeptic diet of economic extremes take on us and our children? Well, all of us have become more frightened than Lance Loud being introduced to the fans at a Ted Nugent concert.
Look, I'm for capitalism. All the other systems have worked out about as well as a Lee Greenwood booking in Baghdad. But we need to start holding government, the big teat, tittie el grande, mammary avec collosso, capo di titti immensia ... boobus gigandus, titasaurus rex, the Hindenboob, oh, the humammary, anyway, government, we need to start holding it, did I mention the sweater meat mountains, and the brave sherpas who died on the north face of their aureola glacier fields, well, like I was saying, we need to start holding government accountable for the equitable distribution of the tax money they harvest.
I think the classic American equation dictates that a man should be able to keep one dollar for every one he gives away. We have to make sure that those carrion birds up on Capitol Hill get the money into the right beaks as efficiently as possible rather than siphoning it off to pay for their state-sponsored junkets to Paris to buy their wives a new set of diamond-studded ben-wa balls.
I know it's fashionable right now to take the approach that it's better to cut someone's leg off than it is to give them a leg up. Well, I know enough about history to know that we can do this the easy way or we can all do it the hard way. The easy way is everybody should PaY their fair share so we have better schools and social programs to help decent people who don't have it so g00^- The hard way is people keep being selfish and greedy and insisting on preferential treatment.
And sure as the turned-up nose on their face, they'll eventually get preferential treatment by being allowed to preboard the cart that takes them to the guillotine.
Me, I have a nice home, I provide for my family and try to make them comfortable, but I'm not a pig about it. I mean, just the other day I was lounging around my Olympic-sized pool shaped like a middle fmger and filled with Evian water and I was commanding my personal toast chef, Armando, to burn hundred-dollar bills just for shits and giggles, and all of a sudden I realized that the third-world orphan I pay to walk my solid gold dog is late, but do I have him killed? No, I don't.
I merely have the guy I hire to lick all my cars clean break his knees with one of my platinum-shafted polo mallets, taking pains to ensure that he doesn't bleed all over my mink lawn.
You know why? Because all of this hasn't gone to my head.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Friends
According to new medical research, being around friends boosts the immune system. Unless, of course, you're sharing needles with them.
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but with cable and satellite TV and the recent dizzying advances in telecommunications making it possible for almost anyone to maintain a state of continuous Major Tom-like solitude, friends have never been considered less necessary, or been more important, than they are right now.
As technology encases us in an ever-tighter chrysalis devoid of the most basic interpersonal contact, many Americans find themselves on a frantic, Tailgunner Joe McCarthy-like hunt for comrades that can leave you feeling lonelier than Marvin Hamlisch at Lollapalooza.
Now, as you might have guessed, I make friends as easily as the Swiss Family Robinson made ice.
But I was better when I was a kid. When we are young, friends give us the confidence in ourselves to do things we would never do without their influence. Whether it's going out for a team, asking a girl for a date, or hot-wiring our mom's car so that we could make a beer run to the L'il
General Convenience Mart but it was closed so we found a brick and smashed the window and stole a couple of cases and got chased by the cops but the "friend" took off in our mom's car, leaving us to take the fall for the ... Mikey, you little shithead!
Because we are so desperate for companionship, we often mistakenly believe people are our friends when they're not. Like my postman. Every day he comes to my house and gives me exciting letters, stimulating magazines, and shiny presents. You know, fun stuff, and I'm always glad to see him. So usually I don't leave the house until he comes by, because, you know, I want to see what he's got for me today. And I figure since he is always whistling and smiling, well, you know, he's glad to see me too. So one day I offer him a glass of juice. He takes it, and I'm thinking, hey, I have a new friend. But then the next day, when I invite him in to watch the showcase round on The Price Is Right, he says he's too busy. He says he has other rounds to make. And, you know, at first it felt like someone had ripped my chest right open and hacked my heart into little pieces. I tried not to let him see me cry. But then my wife sat down next to me on the curb and explained that he isn't really my friend. That these aren't gifts from him but things that other people have mailed to me.
Ranting Again Page 13
