well, hard to contemplate doing anything at all when your day starts off like that, so i've been contemplating other things instead...

like if apple really wanted us to think different, they'd be running ads for smith corona....

and if two thirds of the old guys in the senate still had at least one functioning testicle, the nuclear test ban treaty would've been approved by a lop-sided majority...

and if russia really is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, why is it so cold there 11 months of the year?

but most of all, i've been contemplating halloween and what to dress up as this year.  in the past i've gone as my long-lost twin brother, donned the garb of my clone, and tried to pass myself off as The Lone Smartass, but that's not what halloween is all about, is it?  no, it's about scaring people so that they'll actually give you their chocolate so you'll go the hell away, right?  not annoying 'em to the point where they'll politely paste a fake smile on their faces and secretly pray for you to shut up...

that's what family reunions are for.

so, how does one scare people in this day and age?  frankenstein's monster and dracula are cute-scary, they're the worn-out scary of another time and place and mindset...  they're relics of a simpler, more conventionally religious time when "damn you" reigned as the supreme profanity and "fuck you" wasn't yet so much as a glint in an appalachian mother's eye...  to really scare people today you need to be a slasher or a shooter, something that draws blood because as different as we all are now in the head, we all still have more or less the same bodies, and bodies are our temples...  dracula threatened our souls, but visa and mastercard already own those... the real battle now is for our limbs and torsos, and trying to decide whether or not the epa should be allowed  impose a fine on the guy who separates them and tosses them into a ditch without filing an environmental impact statement or whether this might prove to be a drag on an economy that has come to depend so heavily on disposable temp workers.... 

but slashers and shooters are now so ten minutes ago...  there are times when it looks as if everyone in america wants to be or has been a slasher or a shooter....  so what's left?  it seems i have two choices...  i can be really scary by going door to door as your first husband with those photos i said i destroyed, a dedicated irs auditor, or a rampaging, 401(k)-eating bear market, or i can be disgustingly scary by dropping by unexpectedly wearing the mask of AIDS (rather tacky), breast cancer (a natural choice, given our local chemical plant), or your wildly ticking biological clock (if only i had the springs for that!).

enough.  i'm getting a headache and that distant neighbor of mine has just cast aspersions on my biological clock dreams by casually glancing at his watch and sighing.  i still have a few days to decide.  it's good enough for now if i just narrow my choices to two.... ummmmm....

a sore that doesn't heal, or windows' blue screen of death.

there.  that's it.

time to go clean someone's clock with a few more choice words.

all those emailed requests i've been getting from regular readers for retroactive epidurals will just have to wait another day....