It's pretty much been an Instapundit day for me, including this gem of a headline run in the Chicago Sun-Times: Rosie weds longtime girlfriend, slams Bush.
Well, some people are sticklers about waiting until after they're married to. . . well, you know.
Inspired by Joshua and his gruesome tale of refridgerator discovery, I feel I must share a similar experience that happened to me a few years ago.
My mom and dad live in Tokyo nine months out of the year, and that's a damn long time to leave an empty house back here in the states, so I go to check up on it once in awhile.
Well, one winter, every single time I went back, I was accosted by gnats. Gnats kept appearing out of some secret place, and they were EVERYWHERE. They would be in the sinks, and in the toilets, and on windows, and basically buzzing around every goddamned room in the house in truly staggering numbers.
I sprayed the entire house with RAID many, many, many times, but each and every time I came back to the house, the gnats had staged a triumphant comeback. I couldn't for the life of me find the source. It was driving me fucking CRAZY.
Finally, one evening, I was going down the basement stairs to check on the furnace, when I heard a rustling to my right, sort of like a plastic bag in a wind. I moved the recycling bins out of the way to reveal an old bag of potatoes, or they had once been potatoes, but they had, in the months that elapsed since my parents left town, devolved into a strange dark mushy potato sauce that was absolutely teeming with gnats and gnat larvae. . . and one dead mouse.
I tried to ever so gently pick up the bag without spilling its contents, but I wasn't able to prevent the bag from burping forth a gasp of the most foul-smelling air ever concocted. I never ever smelled a smell that smelled like that smell smelled. The smell actually scared me.
With my heart racing and my throat retching, I ran outside with the defiled bag of potato mush and threw it high into the air, and it landed smack-dab in the middle of the driveway, where it made a sad-sounding splat and ejected a massive plume of gnats into the cold winter air. The gnats quickly dispersed, apparently nonplussed at having been so cruelly ejected from their happy potato juice stink factory home into the cruel cold air that almost certainly meant their death.
I went back into the house and finished off the remaining gnats with another heavy spraying of RAID, and the gnat problem ended right there on that fateful day.
But, I still remember that smell. That's the type of smell that sticks with you until you fucking die.
At the risk of losing a valued reader. . .
Mr. Rhodes. I'm e-mailing you rather than commenting on your site because it would probably just become another chew toy for you and Joshua to pass back and forth until it doesn't even resemble the original argument. I read you for your humor content, but your political leanings just make me sick. How can you continue to support the Bush administration when their actions have so completely turned the rest of the world against us? How you can sleep at night knowing the blood of so many came as a result of U.S. action over the past four years is beyond me. It's almost enough to keep me from coming back and reading you. Almost.
First off, I should point out that I don't, in fact, support the Bush administration. Most of its domestic policies seem like they were found in an old trunk in an attic that hadn't been opened since 1930. Bush himself I find about as inspiring as a clod of dirt, with oratorical skills to match. But, ultimately, none of that really matters.
When it comes to domestic concerns, most of the hot button issues simply don't resonate with me.
I put money away for retirement on my own, because I genuinely believe that social security simply won't exist any more by the time I'm 65. I think that the generally indifferent actions taken by both Democrats and Republicans indicate that both sides are adopting a "let it slowly die" approach to social security. Does it bother me that social security is still taken out of my checks? No, because I'm perfectly happy knowing that the current generation of retired folks can at least rest a little easier thanks to monthly checks from the government. And, I live just fine without that extra bit of cash, so it's really a non-issue for me.
Education? I don't have any kids, so I don't really care at this point. Besides, my thinking right now is that home-schooling is more and more the right way to go, with the exception of athletics, which I strongly feel every child should experience, particularly wrestling.
Environmental policies? Feh. There was a time when it made perfect sense to me to think that the migration habits of Alaskan caribou would be destroyed by the presence of oil wells. Then, one day, I realized that the caribou will probably just find an alternative route to get to wherever they gotta get to. I mean, they may look dumb and all that, but they're not THAT dumb.
As for our overall dependence on oil, sure, it would be great if we finally discovered a cost-effective way to exact cold fusion, thus being able to fulfill 99.9 percent of our annual energy needs from a single glass of water. That would be super. But, I'm also realistic enough to know that you just can't chop the legs out from under an oil-based economic structure without sending the world into an economic tailspin. In other words, patience people. Patience. Weening is a process, not an amputation.
So, the domestic issues of today basically don't mean poo to me. I make good money, I'm in a job I enjoy, and I have health and dental insurance, and pretty much everything is just great for me on the homefront.
Except for those terrorist dudes. They kinda bother me.
I had a very vivid dream awhile back, and it scared the living shit out of me. In the dream, I was standing by a pool, outside of a hotel, talking with a group of people. Suddenly, there was a bright flash of light in the distance, and when I eventually looked up, I could plainly see a mushroom cloud pluming upward. My initial instinct was to run into the hotel and just keep finding stairs that go down, trying to beat the shockwave and seek whatever shelter I could from the radiation sure to follow. I remember thinking, as I ran, "oh my God, they actually did it; they actually did it" over and over again, and there was a terribly empty feeling in my chest knowing that humanity had basically been delivered a death blow.
And, the thing is, terrorists, given the means, actually would do that. They'd do it right now, if they could. Instead of planes, they'd use nukes. Absolutely.
Strangely, the rest of the world, or at least those nations not of the 20+ that make up the coalition of the willing, don't seem to understand that. Those that sympathize with the causes of the likes of Hamas and delve so minutely into the causation of why they hate us and why we should try to understand them and work with them to ensure world peace, seem utterly oblivious to the reality that terrorists and terrorist organizations would gleefully sign agreements with one hand and press a detonator with the other.
So, I'm not terribly distraught if France, Germany and Russia are busy tut-tutting us. As far as I can tell, their supine approach to stamping out terrorists and the regimes that harbor and support them illustrate everything that was wrong with American foreign policy leading up to 9/11. Ooh, we got a bloody nose in Beirut? We'll leave. Dead soldiers dragged through Mogadishu? We're gone. Embassies bombed? We'll send a couple cruise missiles your way, but that's it. Cole bombing? Little or no response. In other words, we continually refused to acknowledge just how far terrorists would go until it was too late, emboldening them, and then the towers came down.
Therefore, how can I sleep at night knowing the blood of so many came as a result of U.S. action over the past four years? Easy, because I'm fairly convinced even more blood would have been shed through U.S. INaction over the past four years.
Foreign policy and the war on terrorism are the election issues that matter most to me, and right now Bush and Co. seem vastly more qualified to keep making the tough decisions in that realm, whereas John Kerry right now seems more intent on making nice with everyone.
UPDATE: Then again, John Kerry may have a secret weapon with which to fight the war on terror.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. . . . They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.
They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn't done enough for -- yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part -- something that we could correct.
And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.
The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason -- it is his reason, and not ours. -- Lee Harris in Civilization and its Enemies, a book I own but haven't yet read entirely, but was reminded of by Instapundit.
AND YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Instapundit is on a freakin' roll today. This gem by Tony Blair says it all and says it damn near perfectly.
I don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about the size and fullness of my penis. I'm genuinely happy with its overall form, function and size. It performs as expected or, as Data on Star Trek: TNG might say "It's functioning within established parameters."
I bring up Data and my penis in the same paragraph because I watch a lot of Spike TV, a cable station that ensures I can easily quench my thirst for TNG and Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. The thing is, though, that Spike TV, which touts itself as the first station dedicated entirely to male-oriented programming, apparently firmly believes that all the men of the world must desire "male enhancement." I say this because, on any given evening of Spike TV programming, you'll see that as much as 85 percent of its advertising is made up entirely of Enzyte commercials.
Enzyte, for those unfamiliar with the product, claims, quite repeatedly, that it is "The once-a-day tablet for natural male enhancement." I am in no way speaking ill of those men in the world who require supplements to get their old Evinrude's cranking. I understand that age can wreak havoc on bodily functions, and the penis is not spared the wrath of aging.
Rather, my problem lies with the commercials themselves. They just creep me out. There's this guy, and his whole acting requirement is to smile the most God-awful ear-to-ear smile, and he has to maintain it throughout the commercial. It's hideous and horrifying and most of all just kind of sad.
I hope that acting gig pays well, because after these commercials have run their course and mercifully die out, he'll be forever known as "The Enzyte Guy." No company would want him as their spokesman, and no sitcom would want him to try out for a pilot, because you just can't have the creepy-smiling Enzyte guy as a cast member. It would be too difficult for the audience to escape into the fiction of the sitcom, because in the back of their minds, they know that THAT'S THE ENZYTE GUY.
Oh, and I should also point out that a couple of the commercials thus far wallow in some of the most obvious racial stereotyping this side of Huggy Bear.
And, the worst part, THE WORST PART, is that one of those commercials features a little whistling diddy in the background that is just freakin' impossible to get out of your head. So, today at work, I keep finding myself whistling that damned Enzyte tune. Oh, yeah, there's also another Enzyte commercial featuring Japanese businessmen and, of course, THE ENZYTE GUY, and it, too, features an annoying little diddy that sticks in your head like gum to a table.
None of this, of course, would be a problem if I wasn't addicted to Star Trek: TNG reruns and Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. But still, I'm really getting to the point that I actually kind of hate THE ENZYTE GUY. That little dick.
POLITICAL UPDATE: To all those Deaniacs out there who encouraged Howard Dean to re-enter the presidential race after he handidly won Vermont last night, I feel I should really point something out to you. . . This is Vermont. This is California. This public service is brought to you by the good people at common sense and perspective who say, in all seriousness, you people are crrrrraaaaaazzzzzyyy. YEAARGH!!
I keep a notepad and pen next to my bed, just in case I wake up in the middle of the night with some profound thought that I think should be shared with the world. I do this a lot. My notepad is full of nocturnal scribblings. The problem is, roughly two-thirds of those freakin' scribblings are either illegible or unintelligible.
It's a crying shame, really, because I like to think I'm pretty intellectually gifted at 4 a.m. The world will never know, I guess.
Last night's musings, though largely unreadable, do consist of a few sentence fragments I was able to decipher, and I was eventually able to remember what the hell it was that was bouncing around my skull when I woke up to pee at 3:23 a.m. (or so I scribbled in the margins).
Last night, apparently, my fevered mind was in deep thought about shower cleaner. . . and Iraq. It makes sense, I suppose, because before I went to bed last night, I spritzed my shower and toilet with Scrubbing Bubbles With Bleach and then logged online quick to see what was new with Healing Iraq. Maybe the Scrubbing Bubbles fumes were playing with my olfactory nerves and eating away very specific areas of my brain but, for whatever reason, my brain conjured the following incomplete paragraph last night at 3:23 a.m.:
"Shower being clean is important. . . bleach works. . . kind of like Iraq, but not really. . . a good toilet cleaner would be like Saddam. . . my toilet has been Saddamized."
I'm sure there's something very important in there somewhere. That's the problem with hazy, half-awake thinking: all your neurons are still firing all at once, almost as if you're still in a dream-like state, and all your conscious cognitive functions are dedicated to trying to get you to shuffle successfully to the bathroom to relieve yourself.
Once you get to the toilet, with your arm braced against the wall (this only applies to males, and for a very select few females), your mind just doesn't care what kind of ancillary musings may be jostling for most-favored status. Therefore, you get a Saddamized toilet, and it makes perfect sense, so you write it down and drift back into slumber thinking you're a brilliant punster, when in fact you're really not.
29. Feels like 28, but it sounds more ominous. With 28, I still had a grace year at my disposal. Now, I'm disposing of that grace year. The big 3-0 looms like a gathering storm. Now, I'm in my 20s. Next year at this time, I won't be. It's like birthday purgatory, really.
Okay, I kid. I'm not nearly that bleak. Hell, I could be 50, and I'd still consider myself pretty dang young. Provided that, by 50, I've accomplished a whole lot more than I have up to this point. Well, that's not fair, either. I'm doing pretty well for myself. I have some money tucked away in the bank. I'm healthy as a horse. . . well, a horse with high blood pressure, but I always knew I was genetically programmed for that fate. I have a wonderful girlfriend who I love, who, despite all dictates of common sense, apparently loves me back. I have lots of friends. I have a great family. And I have a turquoise blog.
And, today, I go to see if I can secure a mortgage. It's sudden, I know. I toured a house this weekend and, for a raised ranch, it's HUGE (2,500 sq. ft.). It was built in 1958, and I don't think the decor has changed an iota since its construction. We're talking vast amounts of thick, green carpet, painted doors, a pink bedroom (including the ceiling), and a bathroom that screams "decorate me! Modernize me!" I want the house. If I strip out the carpet, revealing the beautiful hardwood floors beneath, paint the walls, and put in some new doors, we're talking a whole different home. And it features a porch so unbelievably huge, it would easily accommodate a hot tub AND an area for me to work out with my heavy bag and. . . and . . . and . . . I want the house.
Unfortunately, so does somebody else, and there are indications they're further along the process than I, so I'm scrambling today to go through all the unknowns of mortgages and prequalifying and God knows what other aspects of buying a home. It starts today, and I know nothing: tomorrow I should know more. Even if I don't get it, at least I'll have learned a thing or three.
Here's to 29 and whatever the year may hold.
