Welcome to suicide season! 

 This is the time of year when the most Americans take their own lives. 

Odd, what with all the loving family get togethers, what?

My sex and death obsessed friend DZaster is on the road this week, taking a left coast week.  I’ll bet she’s got facts and figures about suicide this time of year that would make our heads spin if we let her get going. 

I had a few friends over for Christmas Eve a couple years ago and we all told our horrible family Christmas story.  They were so pathetic that we couldn’t help but laugh, and laugh we did.  Until tears came to our eyes, our cheeks burned and our ribs ached we laughed.  Each story was worse than the last and completely true — which was the key.  The worse the story, the more we laughed.  That wasn’t enough.  We RETOLD each other’s story to even more hilarity.  A bunch of Scrooges indulging in “aren’t you glad we’re past that now”.  One of my very best holiday memories.  Sincerely, one of the very best.

Part of the party is the high expectations we all have in direct and SIMULTANEOUS contemplation of the reality we know and blow up into loathing and dread.

To the most part, my friends take their dysfunctions and use them in some socially acceptable way.  I, for example, have a big “knight in shining armor” thing going on and I try to use that people pleasing stuff as part of my profession.  That doesn’t work when you’re immersed in your dependent/co-dependent, neurotic, psychotic, actual human being family.  You have your flaws, they have theirs and some of the drama is very ancient and revered.  Family roles have a way of being replayed no matter how much sobriety and sanity you have on board in the rest of your day to day life.

One of the best things that has happened to me in my sobriety is to learn how fruitless it is of me to expect my family and friends to act the way I want them to and to feel and think as I do.  All I can do is change my attitude about them and their behaviors.   I can also change my own behavior and try to do the loving thing instead of the defensive thing or the offensive thing.  That is SO much easier to say than to do.

I won’t be perfect this holiday, my dear family, friends, loved ones and the ambushed.  I never have been and I’m not likely to get there this year.  I expect that I’ll come to a time when I’m frustrated by the music and the traffic and the bad weather and I’ll have some kind of breakdown in which I profanely bitch loud and long and pick apart people and ideas.  I’ll probably break down and quote Dickens another year: “If I could work my will, every idiot with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips would be boiled in his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly in his heart.”  Glad to get that one over with.

I am doing my best to just surrender to the whole thing.  To just let happen whatever happens and go with it.  To make Christmas be about giving and loving and doing that on my own part and letting everybody else do whatever they want. 

This Christmas, I’m not going to particularly decorate, but I think I’ll try to keep a fire in the fireplace and maybe put a little something bright, cheery and seasonal out somewhere I’ll see it a lot.

I must confess I’ve not shopped even a little bit yet this year.  I’m leaving Friday to go to So. Car. to see my neice wed, maybe I’ll try to pick up a little something here and there while I’m being a tourist. 

since I’m on a cash only basis this Christmas, it’s likely to be a little spare compared to some years in the past, but I’ll do my best for the good old american economy and I won’t be shopping at Wal-Mart, so it’s a two-fer even if the holiday crowds make me very very very crazy. 

Can you believe they’re predicting snow for Thursday?  Damn. 

Not a word about politics.  Aren’t you proud of me?

Anyway, I hope you guys had a great Thanksgiving and I’m looking forward to your mass produced letters and tube sock presents.

A plan to roll and smoke the world’s largest joint was cancelled at short notice in Amsterdam when the organizers realized they could be breaking the law.

“We have now read the small print and realize there could be problems,” Thijs Verheij, one of the organizers, was quoted as saying by ANP news agency after consulting Dutch drugs laws.   

The group had wanted to roll a five-foot-long pure-weed joint, stuffed with more than a pound of marijuana and containing no tobacco, and smoke it in a bar.

It had initially thought the attempt would be legal if 100 people each brought along the five grams of the drug tolerated by Dutch authorities for personal use.

“Unfortunately it looks like this will not be possible,” Verheij said. The attempt had been planned for Wednesday.

A police spokesman said: “We would definitely have investigated this. If you make a single joint with half a kilo of cannabis in it, it would cross the line.”

Verheij said the group had hoped to beat a record set with a joint containing 100 grams of marijuana.

Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.  

Dude!  Sez here this shit could be against the law.  Wow.  Bummer.  Let’s have a toke and think this one over for awhile.  Put on Led Zep II, will ya?  Someday I gotta get rid of this lame plaid couch, but not today.  We can play some frisbee with Scout later, right?  Pass that.  ‘Ere.  Don’t bogart that heeheehee  … hack … hack … shit always makes me cough when I try to laugh …

On Monday, the federal office that oversees the nation’s family-planning program got a new boss who doesn’t believe in birth control. Eric Keroack is a Massachusetts obstetrician-gynecologist who argues that abstinence until marriage is the only healthy choice for women. Until recently, he served as medical director of a pregnancy-counseling organization that runs down contraception and gives out scientifically false health information—for instance, that condoms “offer virtually no protection” against herpes or HPV. Keroack also promotes a wacky piece of pseudoscience: the claim that premarital sex disrupts brain chemistry so as to create a physiological barrier to happy marriage.

Here’s the whole story at Slate Magazine online:

http://www.slate.com/id/2154249/?nav=tap3

One of the reasons Iraq is so FUBAR today is that the Bush administration sent in a bunch of ideological neo-conservative true believers right after the fall of Saddam, rejecting people with actual experience and expertise in rebuilding war torn countries.  Second only to that, what this administration has done in the domestic arena, especially in the science areas of the EPA and FDA where ideology trumps logic and facts for the Bushies, is a staggering blight on our civic life.  I believe history will look back and judge “W” as one of the worst presidents America has ever suffered and this appointment is one piece of evidence supporting that view.

“W” has become a political Rodney Dangerfield.  He gets no respect.  I mean, one day you’re the virtual dictator of the most powerful empire on earth and you lose one lousy election out of six and they’re kickin’ dust in your face at the beach, like you’re some sissy boy.

Think I’m kiddin’?

On their way back from their Asia trip, the President stops in Hawaii.  The acting director of the White House Travel Office gets beaten senseless outside a Waikiki nightclub and his money, passport and satellite phone are stolen.

Meanwhile, the twins, Barbara and Jenna Bush, are vacationing in Buenas Aires.  Jenna’s purse and cellphone get snatched while she’s in a nightclub and the Secret Service agents don’t have a clue, didn’t see a thing.  Possibly they were worried about one of their colleagues, an agent who got clubbed and robbed on his day off while they were there for the girls’ 2 week vacation.

Nobody loves you when you’re down and out.

(© 2006 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

Breaking News from ABCNEWS.com:

FOX CANCELS O.J. SIMPSON INTERVIEW AND WILL NOT PUBLISH HIS BOOK, CALLING IT AN ‘ILL-CONSIDERED PROJECT’

 STFU, OJ

From Our Science Editor, Dr. M. Higgonator:

A major research institute has just announced the discovery of the densest
element yet known to science. The new element has been named “Bushcronium”.

Bushcronium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and
224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 311. These
particles are held together by dark forces called morons, which are
surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. The
symbol for Bushcronium is “W”.

Bushcronium’s mass actually increases over time, as morons randomly interact
with various other elements in the atmosphere and become assistant deputy
neutrons in a Bushcronium molecule, forming isodopes. This characteristic of
moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Bushcronium is formed
whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical
quantity is referred to as “Critical Morass”.

When catalyzed with money, Bushcronium activates Foxnewsium, an element that
radiates orders of amplified energy, albeit as incoherent noise, since it
has half as many peons, but twice as many morons.

Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

It’s the phrase of the new century.

STFU.

Here’s a big STFU for O.J. Simpson’s “If I Did It”, a “fictional” confession of how he might have killed his wife and her companion, IF he were guilty.

All together now:  “Shut the fuck up”!!!

Nope.  The mass of men no longer lead lives of quiet desperation.

Their desperation is now cacaphonously announced by means of a variety of ringtones and instantly followed by conversations about their desperate search for meaning in the grocery lists they make during the cinema and the yeast infections analyzed in grocery aisles and the familial backstabbing they do sitting next to your table at a restaurant.

It’s enough to make me hope that it’s true that excessive cell phone use causes lower sperm counts and head tumors just so those who are perpetually on the phone will have less chance of polluting the gene pool.

I’m glad to know that driving while talking on the cell phone is as dangerous as drunk driving for the same reason.  I only wish there were a Mothers Against Talk Driving, although it seems that every mother I see is on the cell phone while driving her SUV.  I’m still pissed at the b***h who backed out of her Nichols Hills Plaza space, barely missing me without even seeing me there, and sat crossways in the lot so no one could pass whilst she driveled on about whatever. 

I recall well the era of the “bag phone.”  I thought it spectacularly excessive at the time.  “Hey, look at me!  I’m so important I have to have a mobile phone!”  At least I could understand how some physicians and even some lawyers and stockbrokers might actually justify such a thing on capitalist grounds, even if I was contemptuous of their greediness.   Now, however, capitalism and technology have democratized the mobile phone to the point that grade schoolers carry the infernal items.

It is a lesson in the fact that just because you CAN do something, doesn’t mean you SHOULD do something.

Have we as a society really thought about what we’re doing and whether it’s something we want in our everyday lives?  Is this constant contact between teenagers really a good thing?  Do I really WANT my office/boss to be able to contact me on vacation? Did you know that we have a new malady caused by cell phones:  text thumb?  (“Text thumb” is a repetitive motion injury caused by incessant text messaging between cell phones and is spreading like wildfire across the country.  How should we regard an elective injury?)

I am neither a Luddite nor a curmudgeon.  I simply believe that the unintended consequences of widespread cell phone use is one of the signs of the coming apocalypse.  That’s all I’m saying. 

I’ve been tuckered out for about two weeks now with the flu, or something mightly like the flu, and you don’t want to hear me whine about my symptoms, but I haven’t much been on the job just lately

(I know I’m profane, but jeeezzzz, readers, did you really think it was just a typo?  Get. Your. Minds. Out. Of. The. Gutter.)

So, I figured as long as I was s-tuck all by myself at home, I’d try to make things as comfortable as I could.

Stoked up the fireplace, although I’m still too cheap to burn the real wood I bought a month ago and waste it on just little ole me.  The gas burner under the fake logs was plenty pretty enough  … {for the likes of me, he said in his best self deprecating tones, shuffling his feet like he might burst into an “aww shucks” and sticking a strand of straw into his teeth. 

 (That was pretty convincing, right?)

  shut up } .

 I hauled out a couple three books I’ve been meaning to read and just never got around to and launched into a Michael Chrichton, “State of Fear”. 

Tucked myself right in with that green plaid wool throw that Debster always gets in the TV room on Wednesday Paseo dinner and movie night.  Sat under good light on the couch and listened to jazz instrumentals all the way through the book.  Nice.  Good times.

Unfortunately, the book is a failure on almost every level.  It’s about climate change and how the science isn’t there to show a link between “greenhouse gases”, principally CO2, and a distinct global warming phenomenon.  It paints ecologists as terrorists, greedy, money hungry, manipulative of media and politicians.  Doesn’t play.  The characters and action are clearly afterthoughts and just plain not thrilling,  as thrillers are expected to be.  The science was also pretty boring.  In Crichton’s view, the climatology science of ecological crisis simply isn’t up to snuff, not academically rigorous enough for proofs of the theory.  He goes so far as to compare “global warming” to eugenics, the pseudoscience of the early 20th Century that morphed into Hitler’s “Final Solution”.

I ate some comfort food tucker over the weekend as well.  Hot soups and such.  Lots of hot herbal teas with local honey.  Uhnhhhh, do I have to mention chocolate?  Yes?  OK. Yeah, some chocolate, too.  Bad kitty.

The biggest tuck of all, though, was in the bedroom.

(“Ah Ha!”, you are thinking to yourselves.  You knew it would come to this.  WRONG!  Get. Your. Minds. Out. Of. The. Gutter.)

I exchanged my white high thread count summer sheets this weekend for the honest to goodness cold weather is here flannel sheets.  Rich burgandy for the Christmas season.

These are sheets with substance and not the gossamer of the past several months.  If you don’t have flannel sheets, baby, try some.  It’s cozy when you come to bed and not cool or cold.  I like the way these sheets feel over you, like an extra half blanket, with some heft.  Yeah.  Tucked ‘em in all tight all around.  Bounce a damn quarter off ‘em, you could.  Yeah.

So, this was the weekend I got tucked.