Really, this whole weekend was about questionable choices.

This morning, for example, after walking to work in the rain, I attempted to close up my umbrella. But the latch seems to have broken. I spent a few minutes trying to force the damn thing, but it's just busted, and sat open all day. Every now and then it would catch my eye in the office, sitting in the corner not closed and a fresh wave of irritation would wash over me. Fucking umbrella, I'd think. I even bought a nice one with a LIFETIME FUCKING GUARANTEE because I was sick of all the cheap ones breaking. It really burned me. Lifetime guarantee, my ass. Like I'm going to go through the trouble of finding an umbrella-sized box for the thing and then cough up the dough to ship the bastard back to the manufacturer--by that time, I could have just bought a new fucking umbrella. It ate at me all day.

So when it was time to go home, I stared at the umbrella for a minute and then thought, Fuck you, umbrella! And marched right out the door. Into the heavy rain which was still falling.

Stay with me here. First, I let a broken umbrella turn into a grim psychodrama starring ME! And a broken umbrella. Then, in order to cause the broken umbrella emotional pain, I spurned the thing and left it in my perfectly dry office, where it is presumably still stewing. Then, despite the fact that the umbrella was only broken in the sense that it would not close--in other words, that its normal rest state was now one in which it was perfectly capable of serving its only function, that is, keeping me dry, I instead chose to leave it behind to walk out into the pouring rain, which was clearly visible from out my office window.

Oh, and the whole walk home in the rain, I also managed to anthropomorphize the rain, which was clearly in collusion with broken umbrella in a campaign to break my spirit. At one point, I actually thought, Fuck you, rain. I'm glad I didn't bring broken umbrella. That's just what you would want. Take that, you . . . weather!

This whole thing might have been influenced by another poor choice made earlier in the day. Our office had a little pizza party to celebrate the May birthdays (that we didn't get around to this until the last day of the month should tell you something, but I'm not sure what), and I noted with private gloom that they had ordered from Domino's. Have you ever read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich? It's a harrowing book about a guy in a Russian gulag. You know what he does all day? He eats Domino's pizza.

I'M TELLING YOU RIGHT NOW YOU PROBABLY DON'T WANT TO READ THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH.

But I was hungry. I ate two slices of the wretched stuff. And worse, I chose the "all meat" pizza, guaranteeing me my RDA of poisoned pig and stretched cat. Nummy! Needless to say, two hours later, my guts were roiling and my skin felt too tight on my face. I groaned and clutched my addled stomach, and my revolted brain began torturing me with foul hallucinations. Ugh, god, that tasted like shit, I thought. Brain took over from there, and--God help me, I am not making this up, and you're going to be really sorry you ever read it--I suddenly imagined an entire digestive process gruesomely reversed. I spent a good ten minutes or so hellishly picturing my greedy ass gulping up excrement, reverse-mouthed, cheeks writhing in an awful approximation of mastication, then a two-hour interlude where mysterious, awful things happened in my body, and then finally me opening my mouth wide and disgorging a perfectly formed slice of pizza.

I'm sorry, I had to stop for a moment there to laugh as I wondered exactly how many of my tens of readers just read that horrible paragraph and swore off this site forever. I blame nobody but myself.

And to take things further back, I'm not sure that my febrile rectodental reveries cannot be tied to another rotten choice earlier in the weekend, which was my fateful decision to watch Ladder 49 on pay-per-view. "Honey!" I sang. "There's a shitty movie on cable!" What is wrong with me? Because she is a good and loving wife, she cried, "Let's watch it!" And so we did. And it was a lot like eating shit with your own ass, in some ways: you will be filled with awful garbage, but you won't taste anything, and it will probably take hours.

I really need this image out of my mind.

Anyway, Ladder 49 is one of those tough films with a difficult message: firefighters are heroes, man. Hey, they might drink too much sometimes, and maybe the life is hard on the little woman, but when you get right down to it, there's nothing like sitting around for days on end eating with other men, showering with other men, and darn it, just being with other men. In other words, it is a courageous gay film, but without the gay.

SPOILERS HERE!

Ladder 49 is, of course, unspeakably bad. For one thing, Joaquin Phoenix is utterly useless, as he has been in everything he's ever done save for To Die For. John Travolta does his usual teeth-baring hissing routine, and Robert Patrick seems content to sit back and let his really hilarious moustache do the heavy lifting. There are moments of comedy, though, such as when Balthazar Getty falls through a roof and gets cooked like a hot dog. As befits someone named "Balthazar." No word on whether he plumped when you cooked 'im, though one wonders if that's what's happened to Travolta.

If I had only watched Elektra instead, this whole series of events might have been avoided. On the other hand, watching it might, oh, I don't know, give me lupus.

I really can't wait to find out.