A dead pig. Gutted from stem to stern, its legs splayed and pointing upward as if in some sort of porcine supplication. It grimaced hopelessly at the ceiling like a distressed, eviscerated prostitute. It was like a scene out of Se7en, except I wasn't repulsed. I was suddenly hungry.

Will and Eric had earlier that day picked up the freshly dressed pig and painstakingly rubbed it down with a mixture of cumin, brown sugar, cider vinegar, garlic and cinnamon, all of which were crawling eagerly into my nostrils. Despite its ghoulish appearance, it smelled divine.

"Eric tried to hold it up while we rinsed it off before rubbing it," Will explained. "But it weighs over 70 pounds. He couldn't hold it. You should have seen us trying to jam the garden hose into its asshole." I was suddenly less whetted.

"It's disturbingly like human flesh to the touch," Will continued. "It was really weird putting the rub on its tongue." Okay, not hungry!

But it wouldn't last. I would succumb. You see, this Sunday I celebrated my 40th birthday. (My actual birthday isn't until, well, right now, but I wanted people to actually attend the party.) And now that we've cleared out the vegetarians--I'm sorry, you guys--I think it's clear that in said celebration, we roasted an entire fucking pig.

It was Eric's idea. He started with the idea of a barbecue--"Maybe some ribs"--and soon escalated the idea into SPD (Singular Pig Destruction), which is a well-known variant on Mutual Assured Destruction. Will signed on shortly afterward, as Will is also a tremendous fan of putting various animals to the sword and to the torch. An unholy alliance was formed, and in the weeks of planning that intervened between the germ of the idea and its (literal) execution, I was to be treated with the sight of Will and Eric absently, evilly stroking their beards and talking about various rendition techniques with a certain unnerving gleam in their eyes.

A roasting box was procured for the big day, and invariably, as my friends arrived, their pupils would dilate as they beheld the giant box. "There's a pig in there?" they'd ask with wonder. If I were wearing suspenders, I would have snapped them insolently against my chest and rocked back on my heels and said "A-yup." Will and Eric, in the meantime, fussed endlessly over the entire operation, nattering to each other like barbarians discussing the finer points of skull-crushing implements. Inside the roasting box, the pig abided in peace, rendered fat pooling placidly inside its chest cavity.

The guests continued to arrive, most of them pretending to genuinely like me so they could sample their taste of giant pig. Some even brought gifts, despite my invitational directive that gifts were wholly unnecessary. "Unnecessary for you," some of them seemed to say, as the many bottles of whiskey I received were quickly dispatched, some of them by me. Dusty and Kirk, responding to an old, stupid running joke of mine, brought me an alarmingly enormous, veiny dildo and an autographed photo of Stockard Channing. It's best not to ask.

Towards the end of the cooking process, it came time to flip the pig over to crackle up the skin. As Eric and Will attempted this procedure, the pig's feet came off, and the nicely caramelizing carcass thunked back into the box. Eric and Will stared at the feet (in their hands--this was rapidly becoming an Abbott and Costello routine as imagined by Artaud) for a moment before declaring, "Well, nobody was gonna eat any fucking hooves anyway." The unfooted hog continued to stare without comment into the slate-gray skies, figuring, probably, Well, it's not the worst thing that's happened to me today. As if sensing emotional collapse on the part of the dead pig, Will took this opportunity to jam an apple into its mouth.

And after a while, Will and Eric declared the beast to be well and fully cooked; they pulled it from the box and took it into the kitchen to rest for a while. It looked like a giant, pig-shaped Rollo candy; the onlookers--everybody--gasped and oohed and ahhed. Upon setting it on the counter, Eric promptly tore off an ear and gave it to me; his first offering to the (near-) birthday boy; I wondered idly if they had irrigated the ear with the same assiduousness that they had spent on the thing's asshole. I wandered outside into the throng and held it up triumphantly.

"I got an ear!" I yelled witlessly. People cheered, because I know only slavering, brutal maniacs. My social life is like a Rob Zombie movie. I bit into the ear.

It was delicious. The skin had formed a lacquerlike finish, concealing inside a ridiculously luscious admixture of cartilage and fat. Never had hitting bottom felt so much like rocketing to the top. I passed the ear around to the assembled heathens, and they fell on it like starving hyenas. Orgasmic moans began to fill the air, and I briefly thought about Stockard Channing before returning to my senses.

Thanks to Will and Eric, of course. Thanks to my wife. Thanks to all my friends. Thanks to the luckless hog. Thanks, I guess, to time itself, that merciless fucking shit. Thanks for reading for all this time.

Thanks, Stockard Channing.

But I'm only human. A human heterosexual male. And normal, human heterosexual males tend to notice things like when random girls happen to be wearing their pants hanging halfway down their asses. Which is what was happening here. There was a good five inches of ass crack staring at me, and, once I gave up the idea of trying not to stare--which happened almost instantly--I also clinically noted a distinct lack of any evidence of underwear. I honestly found myself cocking my head to the side (why do we do this?) to verify that there wasn't even a hint of a thong strap concealed somewhere. Nothing. I continued to stare helplessly at the pistoning half-globes and stepped up my pace so I could pass her and make it all end. I felt terrible. I'm not voyeuristic at all, really, but Jesus Christ, how can you not notice?

As I passed her, I spied another detail. She had one of those front-loading baby slings on. With, of all things, an actual baby sitting placidly inside it, bouncing against her chest. Those dealies always make me think of baby vampires, where the child is poised at any moment to lash out at mommy's neck to feed on her lifeblood. This wasn't helping AT ALL. I caught part of the mom's phone conversation, which seemed to involve some complaining about a guy named "Davey." The child coldly contemplated the mother's unprotected neck. The mother's exposed ass presumably kept bobbing behind her exuberantly. I hastened my pace yet again, trying to put this unwholesome thing behind me, literally and figuratively. The third party continued to receive cellular castigations of the unknown, unloved enigma named Davey, and I scuttled forward, feeling like I had committed some mental form of frottage.

She gave me an inexplicably dirty look as I sailed past her, which made me feel even worse, for some reason. I wondered if I was, at that moment, a proxy-Davey, or if her half-ass had strange ocular talents that I'd never experienced before. The child on her chest stared at me liquidly, probably wondering how adroitly he (or she) could go after my jugular.

I'm turning 40 next week, as it turns out. I'm aging, yes, but I'm not decrepit or creepy or horrid. I mean, I'm working on it, but I've got a ways to go. I'm looking forward to hanging out with around 40 of my good friends while roasting a fucking pig for dinner.

What I'm trying to say is, lady, if you want to wander around Capitol Hill with your undead baby jouncing off your damn chest and your asshole winking at me in the sun, I'm going to look at it. Sorry, honey. But you'd look at it too.

Yes, this was an entire blog post about some insane woman's exposed ass. The internet is improving your life.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Leaving aside the perpetual embarrassment that John Travolta has become; leaving aside the goodwill that Denzel Washington seems insistent upon squandering; leaving aside the residual greatness that Luis Guzman continues to exude despite appearing in one out of every three movies ever filmed including Hey, Don't Fuck My Butler!; the inescapable fact exists that this is a Tony Scott movie, and so it will be intolerably awful.

Scott has made approximately one and a half entertaining movies during his zombie reign--True Romance, which my friend Rory probably wisely suggests that benefits from a Tarantino boost, and Crimson Tide, which is a risible submarine movie that is more or less rescued by the nearly unbelievable straight-faced performances that are loaned to Scott interest-free in service to a patently ridiculous movie.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, I am almost positive, will continue to drain my sympathy for Denzel Washington, and will also probably fail to feature a scene where John Turturro is doused with robot urine. And really, what other use is there for John Turturro?

Moon

I like Sam Rockwell, but it's a little precious to shoot a feature film where he just presses his ass against the camera for 87 minutes. Also, it's sort of irritating to give your movie a title that obligates asshole humor bloggers to say things like "M-O-O-N, that spells box office failure!"

What's that? Yes, I do hate myself.

Imagine That

FUCK YOU, HOLLYWOOD! That's YOUR job! I work too hard and too long to imagine things! That's all well and good for the French, who work like 8 hours a week, but we Americans demand you imagine shit for us!

Except that you imagined something with Eddie Murphy and Thomas Hayden Church. Say, would it be okay if I worked sixty hours a week until this film isn't in the theaters any more?

Year One

This might be the most awesomely bizarre collection of comedic talents ever assembled. Will blank-faced Michael Cera be able to withstand the incredible onslaught of muggery that will be brought by Jack Black, Oliver Platt and David Cross? Or will he succumb to the pressures of a John Turturro-like tsunami of robot-urine comedy-face? (Forgive me if I'm stretching this metaphor. I can't seem to let it go.)

You know, I actually like all of these actors, for all of their various foibles. I even have serious affection for Harold Ramis, who, for all his crimes, has made the world a better place with some of his earlier films. But this just looks like a catastrophe.

Tetro

Hey, a chance for Francis Ford Coppola to redeem himself!

Vincent Gallo--Tetro

Or a different thing.

"Look at your hair!" he cried. He seemed to study Warren's skull for a moment. "Look at your ears!" This might be my favorite male-to-male comment ever documented. "Look at your ears!" Hey, you can't! Anyway, then Will challenged me to shots of Stroh, an undrinkable rum brine that the Austrians have perpetrated upon society. I of course accepted. It made for a lousy following workday, and my mouth tasted like ants had set up shop there.

I love bar talk. This was not, technically, bar talk per se, but I'll take it, because it 1. happened in a bar, and 2. made me laugh pretty hard.

But let's define our nebulous terms. Bar talk does not necessarily have to make you laugh. It is enough that it makes you uncomfortable or embarrassed. Let me explain.

Warren again. He recently wrote a piece for the web in which he defended the movie Predator 2--against whom I am unsure--and argued that the movie qua movie was actually the best movie ever filmed. Now, this flies in the face of all sense and wisdom, of course. Predator 2 is actually an embarrassing pile of shit that is not worth the thousands of maggots that feasted upon its utterly unwelcome presence in Hollywood. But Warren would not be deterred, and thus regaled us at a bar recently about the unheralded merits of this terrible film. Even Eric, the bartender, was having none of it. I should point out that one of Eric's very favorite films is Cliffhanger, the noisome Sly Stallone mountaineering pic.

"Warren, you are full of fucking shit. Predator 2 is horrible," said Eric. "FUCK YOU!" screamed Warren. Warren likes to point his finger a lot; he was pointing at Eric, just in case Eric was unsure as to whom it was being suggested be fucked. Eric laughed.

Warren then treated us to his latest treatise on film, listing for us his top ten movies which were "ruined by women." Number two on the list was any iteration of Romeo and Juliet. ("Without fucking Juliet, you've just got guys kicking each others asses!") "You are fucking insane, Warren," Eric moaned. The wife by this time had her forehead in her palms. "Warren, you can never talk about this list to any woman you want to sleep with," I said. "The misogyny is horrible. Are you crazy?" Then I informed him, "Anyway, you really fucked up by leaving out Gangs of New York."

"OH FUCK! How could I miss that?"

Bar talk is important. It shows you your friends' true faces.

The other day, my friend Jonah was preparing to leave the bar. For some reason, the word "nutrageous" was uttered in the course of conversation.

"I haven't had a Nutrageous in a long time!" he exclaimed. "I'm totally going to buy one." I farted moodily into my barstool.

Twenty minutes later, I received a text from Jonah. "Operation Nutrageous was an unparalleled success." I read this and whooped. I immediately texted him back to explain that "nutrage" was going to be my new euphemism for a male orgasm. I also explained this latest strategic plan to Eric and the wife. I provided hypothetical examples.

" 'Feel the fury of my nutrage!' is what I'm going to say." Eric chuckled and gripped the bar a little more tightly. The wife was back to cradling her head in her hands.

This says something about me, I suppose. I just prefer to not think about what that is.

We had a couple options as the date approached, both of which we'd done before: Oregon Coast or Whidbey Island. We opted for the latter, mainly for this reason: it was a lot closer. It's clear we're getting old. "You want a refill on your glass of wine, or would you prefer to stay motionless?" "I prefer to remain sedentary." "I concur." (They do not move.)

We did splurge a bit on accomodations and made reservations at the Inn at Langley, a magnificent establishment that welcomed us and our credit cards with a room with a fireplace, a windowed whirlpool tub, and a hardwood patio that with its three-story beachside view practically invited us to dump a body over the side, which we promptly did the first time housekeeping bothered us at 10:30 AM, wondering if we were ever going to leave so they could give us more toilet paper.

Apart from the gorgeous inn, our stay did not really get off to an auspicious beginning. The two-doors down tavern was shuttered with a mysterious "CLOSED UNTIL SUMMER" sign. Langley is nothing if not capricious about business hours, but that was a bit much. We pounded on the doors energetically, but were rewarded with nothing but a muffled silence and possibly slight creaks as angles were bent out of true by the coastal winds. The building dates to something like 1908 and looks like your grandfather's teeth; a spirit level is nearly required just to get your beer to the table. I hope someone's going to fix the old place up before it just slides into the ocean.

We instead made our way to the Edgecliff Bar & Grill just up the road a ways. A couple of local duffers were watching the Mariners play their peculiarly dumpy brand of ball (the AL West: May Require Goggles) and commenting acidly: "Who the fuck is this guy?" (Guy grounds into a double play.) "Never mind." I can't tell you how much better it is hearing stuff like this rather than hearing Mike Blowers' run-over oboe intonations.

But this was only a momentary respite. We then went off in search of food. The tavern being closed, we were denied salty fried things, and also giant squid attacks, and so we went across the street to the innocuously-named "Mike's Place." You know, I can't say we weren't warned right from the start. For one thing, Mike's Place has its own generally deserted ice cream counter. There is almost nothing more depressing than a completely barren ice cream counter. I imagined Archie Andrews sitting there, desolate and alone, raising a pistol to his head.

Our waitress greeted us at our table. "Can I get you something to drink?" The wife asked about their wine selection. "Oh, we don't serve alcohol here."

Don't even "family" restaurants--which Mike's assured us it was right on the menu--offer a fucking beer for poor Dad to drink so he doesn't run out and fuck his secretary on his new motorcycle? We sagged a little. (Our bartender friend Eric contends convincingly that they must have been busted at some point and lost their liquor license; the fact that they run a "trivia night" in the back--on the night we were there, actually--sort of backs him up. Who does a bar trivia night without alcohol?)

Wife sensibly ordered the fish and chips, but did also ask for a garden salad; I ordered the french dip (or, in Mike's grandiose parlance, the "Prime Dip"). And a couple of soft drinks.

The waitress reappeared seconds later to explain that they were sold out of the Prime Dip. This made complete sense to me, as we were two of the six people who actually were in town at the time. Whatever. Mike's menu mentions that you can get breakfast "all the time," so I had a "fuck it" moment and just asked for bacon and eggs and toast and hashbrowns and purple melted crayon jelly and also my original salad, which no longer made much sense, but, oh, fuck it, as I said. The howling emptiness of the ice cream counter was starting to weigh on my psyche.

The salads came out first. Fine. Dressing came on the side in the little plastic cups that always make me think of prostate medicine (for some reason; I'd like to emphasize that my prostate is, as far as I know, stupendous). We gnawed the begreased leaves agreeably.

Then the entrees came. I sighed at the sight of my bacon, which resembled tiny deck planks; the eggs, however, looked just fine. Then I looked over at the wife's alleged "fish and chips," and felt myself falling down the rabbit hole.

Here's all I can figure: the waitress must have interpreted the wife's garden salad order as "instead of the chips," because there were no fries at all. What she received was a tiny little saucer with about six little fried fishlet chunks dumped unceremoniously atop it along with a little cup of tartar sauce. She stared at this meager spectacle while the waitress asked, "Can I get you anything else? Salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard--" because, mmmm, fish and mustard; "--vinegar . . . "

"Yes, vinegar, please!" cried my girl. I rapped my bacon against my plate rim and contemplated its implacable juicelessness. "We are not seasoned at all," my hashbrowns trilled to me, and they were unfortunately correct. The wife continued to wait for her vinegar. "Maybe if I eat this really slowly," she said, chewing delicately.

We never saw our waitress again.

I don't want to sound like we had a bad time; we didn't. I mean, Mike's Place wasn't great, but it got better. We ended up having a nightcap at a really splendid place called Prima. And the Inn at Langley, while pricey, is really fantastic. We also fucked a lot, and that always seems to improve one's mood. It beat the hell out of Volunteer Park.

Human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) virus infection have been identified in the United States. Human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) virus infection also have been identified internationally. You're all going to die, probably tomorrow. Everyone is encouraged to masturbate before the end times arrive. Hail Dagon, the fish-god! I dreamed that whole hideous crawl, and can yet feel the ooze sucking me down!

An investigation and response effort surrounding the outbreak of swine flu is ongoing. But we've got nothing. [Image of CDC investigator turning out his empty pockets and shrugging.] See? You're fucked.

CDC activated its Emergency Operations Center to coordinate the agency's response to this emerging health threat and yesterday the Secretary of the Department Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, declared a public health emergency in the United States. So don't worry, citizens. We have deployed someone named Janet. But what can she do? She's just a girl.

It doesn't matter. [The CDC begins openly weeping.] I want a lollipop, mother. [The CDC pulls itself together.]

CDC has issued a number of interim guidance documents in the past 24 hours. Take that, flu! Documents! In addition, CDC's Division of the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) is releasing one-quarter of its antiviral drugs, personal protective equipment, and respiratory protection devices to help states respond to the outbreak. So one quarter of you will be given debatably effective drugs, and the other three quarters will be given not-debatably useless cloth masks and ossified chicken legs. In these stressful times, Janet recommends voodoo prophylaxis.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO STAY HEALTHY

Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it. Do not eat used tissues. Do not rub the tissues into your sister's eyes, unless it's pretty funny.

Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. DO NOT wash your hands after you take a shit. Dude, that was your ass. Don't even look at your hands. Pretend you have no hands. Type with your chin.

Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Also your spouse. You don't know where that skeeze has been. And finally, Barry in HR. That fumbling man-whore would fuck a rotten peach. Barry is also a profligate drooler.

The 1918 pandemic strain has polymorphism from swine and human H1N1 in all eight gene segments. Similar swapping of polymorphism in human co-infected with season and swine H1N1 can lead to rapid evolution. Avoid swine, humans, evolution and polymorphism. Jewish isolationist Republican werewolves may be immune to H1N1.

Don't forget to masturbate! We all die alone. It's okay if you're a little sticky.

Anyway, this is the sort of brain damage that leads someone to post vicious comments about movies that he has no intention of seeing in the theaters. Let's roll!

Earth

When did polar bears become a common trope for piously earthing shit up? I guess we're starting at the beleaguered poles and working our way up to the Equator. Makes sense, I guess--penguins and polar bears, SAVE THE EARTH!--but of course that just makes assholes like me go "Well, wake me up when the otter die-offs start."

Look for 2011 for the sizzling sequels "Wind" and "Fire." Say, how come Air always takes it up the ass?

Obsessed

Here's an example of a film that they just should have folded with the name, like Unfaithful. What more do you need to know? I think I'd be more intrigued by something called Bowling or Mumbly-Peg. So someone is obsessed. WHOO! It doesn't help that that someone appears to be Beyonce, and even less so that Jerry O'Connell appears to be involved in the equation. I'll go ahead and advance my argument--which I have been developing for years--that in any Jerry O'Connell equation, he comes out as negative b. Solve for x and you get Ali Larter. This is why everyone hates math.

State of Play

This is sort of the flip side of something as terrible as Obsessed, title-wise. Trading in thunking obviousness for dimwitted nonspecificity, State of Play opts for a faux-moodiness that, semi-formidable cast aside, it probably will not earn. The producers could have easily opted for the title Plate of Stay and retained the same amount of unearned gravitas, but then again, that was probably the working title when they were filming Marley and Me.

But who knows? I'm happy to be wrong. Tony Gilroy is one of the writers, and he has given me much joy with his Bourne movies and the estimable Michael Clayton. On the other hand, he has drained joy from my life with such atrocities as The Cutting Edge and Armageddon, which is perhaps the most aptly named movie ever made. Then again, he also wrote The Devil's Advocate, which is so frothingly insane that it makes me think of other insane things, like "BJ and the Bear," which contains neither 1. blowjobs nor 2. bears. Basically, people like Tony Gilroy are why I don't sleep at night and instead pace around while screaming.

The Soloist

CHECK THIS SHIT OUT, YO

Robert Downey Jr.
Catherine Keener
Jamie Foxx
Stephen Root

That's three really talented white actors turning up to help out a schizophrenic black cellist! Most films would only spring for one noble white person. I commend the filmmakers for their commitment to really mobilizing caring white people who only want to help the black insane musical homeless community. It's almost as if it's straight out of Hollywood.

Fighting

Sleeping.

Crank: High Voltage

I have been chewing my hands off waiting for this fucking thing. "He was dead . . . but he got better." COME ON! If you don't want to see this, then you are dead inside, or possibly Amy Smart's immediate family. But seriously, what's not to love? It has BAI LING! If you don't read Go Fug Yourself, you rightfully might not know who she is, but all you need to know is that if you put her names together, you get "bailing," and that's pretty fucking awesome. What? You need more? Okay, well try this on for size, cowboy: it also has David Carradine playing a character named "Poon Dong." Still not sold? Two more words: Corey Haim.

*screams*

FOR GOD'S SAKE, PEOPLE! You lapped up defibrillation parties like Moulin Rouge like nobody's business! Jim Broadbent gets played in gay disco bars thanks to that! Does that make any sense to you? What the fuck are you sneering at? You don't want to see Jason Statham fuck Amy Smart in a hippodrome? You're damaged. I can't even talk to you.

Go ahead. Go watch The Soloist. You'll be the only ones there. We'll catch you next time at Iron Man 2. That's the one where Robert Downey Jr. gets gobbled by Gwyneth Paltrow at the county dump. Sweet!

Last Friday, we had round two. It was, by and large, the same lineup as the last time with a few exceptions; a couple guys from the first one had been driven clinically insane by their absurd, existential loss to me before and were chewing on their arms locked up in Arkham. Joining us in their stead was Will's girlfriend Julea, a fairly driven woman who had been playing thousands of hands online, including her phone. Present as well was Jake, the affable dealer; Tony, who plays with a kind of stoner gentleness that almost makes you forgive his supernatural knack for sucking you out on wildly improbable river draws; Warren, a voluble and volatile ur-competitor who is given to howling epithets like "You're going to taste my shoe polish in the back of your throat when we're done!"; Kevin, another gentle soul who should probably take up some other game not involving cards (he went out holding absolutely nothing--I mean it; his final hand, when revealed, was like a terrible pointillist painting. It was utterly senseless close up, but even backing away from it, it still looked like a chaotic mess. He might have actually had a Rules for Contract Bridge card in there, I think).

The game began horribly enough, with the glitteringly predatory Julea staring us down like a hyena regarding several abandoned corpses. She took down an early huge pot with a miserable pair of sevens (I had nines, god dammit), and then later fixed me with a truly frightening smile as she called my fairly massive bet based on my made flush. She turned over her full house, and I thought, You are being killed by a tiny little girl, but fortunately, it's the sort of thing you're used to.

In the meantime, Warren spent a wild three hands in a row with Tony, and Tony ate his fucking lunch on every one of them. Now, you have to realize that Warren is an intense, competitive fellow even when money isn't on the line. So you can imagine how well it went over when Warren turned over a Q-5 to make trip queens and Tony then lazily flipped over hiis Q-6 . . . and the kickers played. Tony blinked owlishly, not sure what the outcome was. "Is it . . . is that a chop pot?" he asked innocently. "NO, YOU FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER!" screamed Warren, leaping up from his chair and, for reasons best not inquired about, embracing a nearby bookcase. He looked like a surrealist's Pieta. "QUEEN SIX, MOTHERFUCKER! ARE YOU BLIND?" Warren hopped around a bit and then paced, as if nervous motion would turn back time and allow him to pull back his chips and poison Tony before the previous deal.

Eventually Warren sat back down and adopted the red-eyed stare of a man preparing to climb a bell tower. "Awkward," whispered Will, and then Julea promptly sacked the room again with yet another hideous straight. I stared at my dwindling chips and sipped a whiskey; Will hollered encouragement to his girlfriend; Warren sat tightly, his entire body a series of mistuned piano strings. Tony, unconcerned as ever, murmured something about having to go see his girlfriend and said he'd be back in a few minutes: "Just go ahead and take my blinds." Kevin, long since having nonsensed his way out of the game, was content to occasionally cut the deck when needed.

Eventually, I got knocked out on some terrible hand that I felt obliged to go all-in on and was called by approximately every person at the table and some random telephoners from New Hampshire that had learned of my awful hand; I got slaughtered. Fortunately, we had decided that everyone was allowed one re-buy back in that would give you half the chips you started with. Everyone at the table ended up using the re-buy except for Julea, who continued her implacable mission to destroy us all; only laconic Tony and his preternatural life-draining draw luck could match her; I suspect he is an incubus.

For my part, I had to be cautious. Facing such strong chip stacks, I became, for a time, very conservative, playing only strong hands. Fortunately for me, right about this time, I started catching cards again. Ace-queen brought me some money, as did a blessed pair of kings. Grotesquely, around this time, I also managed to catch a grisly quad sevens, which provoked dark muttering; fortunately, Warren was not in that hand, because I think he might have bled out of all of his orifices and then destroyed Tokyo.

Then I knocked out Warren. Warren had been drinking nothing but Amstel Light all night, citing past poker failures as being caused by his profligate intake of whiskey. Warren, it must be said, took it as amiably as possible given the circumstances. "Is it time for whiskey now, Warren?" we cautiously asked. "Yes," he replied. "Yes, it fucking is." His mood immediately improved.

A funny thing was happening. I was building my stack quietly, still catching pretty decent cards. I folded when I wasn't in the blinds, for the most part, unless I had some monster, and Julea . . . her stack was slowly being reduced. A few hands later, Tony bit the dust, his stoner luck finally ground out when someone switched out one of his hole cards with the six of cups from a Tarot deck and he didn't notice. This left Julea and myself. And a few hands later, she was out.

Yeah, I won again. Two for two. And I again want to reassert this: I'm terrible. I generally have no idea what I'm doing, I am never reliably sure of what my opponent might be holding, and I'm pretty sure I'm about as difficult to read as a billboard. And yet I've lucked into two wins in a row. This won't last, if only because if it ever happens again, my fellow poker players will mount my head on a pike and hang a sign on it out in the yard which reads: "OH MY FUCKING GOD FUCK THIS TOOL."

So I am loathed. I am also $150 richer. It's so totally worth it.

Anyway! So there Eric and I were, feeling like complete frauds, wandering amongst the Monopoly-looking dudes, many of whom, we noted, had actually brought their own tasting glasses. Some of these snifters were--I'm not kidding--the size of fishbowls. Eric sneered at them and I just felt embarrassed. These snifters would literally hold a liter of liquid, and we were at a tasting event where pretty much every bottle had a pour regulator on them so that they would dispense only a few milliliters of liquid; some of the scotches there to be tasted go for upwards of $200 a bottle. So these dumbfucks were carrying around these ridiculous tanks only to have them occasionally splashed with a tiny amount of liquid whose aromas would struggle vainly to reach their noses.

We got to brass tacks quickly, immediately picking up our non-aquarium sized tasting glasses and dashed giddily into the first of three tasting rooms. Eric spotted a table for Famous Grouse. "Have you ever had that?" he asked me, and I said that I hadn't. "That shit is all over England. Order a fuckin' scotch in London, you're getting Famous Grouse." I've been to London a couple times, and that's never been my experience, but I didn't care. "You want some?" I asked. "Fuck no," he replied. "That shit has killed me a thousand times." He stood there for a moment, staring silently at their sign. "All right, let's go over there," he said eventually.

He's right; it's not too good. But of course there was much more.

I won't give you the whole laundry list of scotches, but maybe just a few. We did spend much of the night searching for the Glenmorangie table with increasing anxiety; it's one of our favorite distilleries. We finally located them--they lacked signage for some reason--and sampled their ridiculously heavenly Nectar D'Or, which gets finished in Sauternes barrels. Glenrothes' 1985 vintage was like getting thirty-six handjobs from a mermaid all at once. Japanese distillery Suntory brought an 18-year Yamazaki that we kept furtively coming back to sample, like teenaged boyfriends returning to visit dextrous, indefatigable, willing mermaids. I may be stretching this simile too far.

Oh, and there was swag to be had. When we registered, we got a little poker chip that was exchangable for a Ziploc bag that contained three cigars, a cigar guillotine and a box of matches. Now, I don't know shit about cigars; they've never really been my bag, and so apart from bachelor parties and various Vegas trips, I hardly ever have them. I have no idea about them, but we received one Romeo Y Julieta, one Saint Luis Rey, and one Playboy branded cigar. This I found amusing. I don't really have any opinion or comment on all the familiar psychosexual jokes that arise from sticking a large cylinder in your mouth and then sucking on it for a long time, but it's hard not to think about when you're lighting up a Playboy penis. In fact, I lit it up on Sunday night, just to, you know, experiment, man. I sucked and sucked, and then I left it on our patio and it got rained in. So I don't know what that all means, but I'm COMFORTABLE WITH MYSELF.

Throughout the rest of the night, we simply wandered like the happy children that we were, sampling our way through 80+ scotches. At various points, Eric recognized other bartenders in attendance, greeting them warmly--Seattle bartenders are all apparently well acquainted. And not that they were tough to spot: many of them took the loosest possible interpretation of the phrase "jacket required." One guy was wearing a windbreaker; another was wearing a hideous vintage houndstooth horror that I'm pretty sure he peeled off a cadaver; the overall effect was like Holden Caulfield after spending a night out rolling in filth.

Oh, there was also the buffet dinner. It was like every buffet dinner ever given out in the history of man, despite the relative opulence of the Rainier Club, which features a fireplace of a size suitable for a Viking funeral. Long tables piled with warmer trays filled with dispiriting things like dour penne in cream sauce, vegetable medleys and grey surrendered pork loin. Eric had rounded out our table with the variously disheveled other bartenders he had found, and, unsurprisingly, they ate like starving Huns.

Eventually, after a couple hours, things had to come to an end. We finished up at the Dewar's table--whose rep had supplied Eric with the comp tickets in the first place--and sampled a surprisingly good blend that apparently you can only get by performing twelve heroic tasks, such as altering a river's course, or eating eggplant. The guy kept it under the table so the plebes wouldn't grab at it. As things were wrapping up, we made plans to meet the fellow at Vessel, a downtown Seattle bar a few blocks away.

Here's the thing about downtown Seattle. After about seven o'clock, it rolls up and dies like a mayfly. Downtown Seattle is simply not your kind of destination neighborhood, even on a Friday night at nine o'clock. So we had the upstairs sitting room all to ourselves. A bunch of the guys from Vessel had been at the event anyway, and so came up to talk to Eric about the various scotches and to discuss cocktail minutiae. I clinically noted that one of Vessel's gimmicks is that they have a machine that will carbonate virtually any drink--I resisted the bleak, twisted urge to ask them to carbonate a Bailey's or something, and instead ordered a Toronto and listened idly to the bartenders prattle on about arcane drinks like Grimacing Apes and Take A Dump In Purples or whatnot.

We weren't drunk, despite all the booze talk. The scotch samples were way too small for that . . . or so you'd think. After about fifteen minutes, the bar began to fill up. Funny; lots of assholes in suits! Yeah, it was all guys from the scotch tasting. They were wasted; they must have utterly blitzed those tables for two hour straight. That or they were the most pathetic lightweights ever to be beheld. One of them fumbled with the drink menu while the server stood by patiently; he stared at it owlishly for a time.

"What's yer scotches here?" he asked. "You gonna carbonate that shit, or what?" he joked.

Eric passed me a look and then flagged another server. "We'll tab out now."

I tried not to have a stroke. "Yes," I replied neutrally.

"You available next Friday?" he asked. "Yes," I said again. I continued to sit quietly.

"Okay."

This last Friday, I went to the Single Malt Scotch Whisky Society of America, Ltd.'s Seattle get-together held at the fancy-schmancy Rainier Club. Co-sponsored by the "Robb Report," whatever that is. "Regular" tickets are supposed to go for $130.

It was, wonderfully, a "jacket required" affair, which, on the West Coast, is a complete joke. Over here, you wear shorts to funerals. But there we were, me and Eric, who met up at a McCormick & Schmick's for a beer, attired in suits; we might as well have been wearing zebra costumes. Eric is six and a half feet tall, so he was looking like a superhero; I am nearly a foot shorter than him, meaning that I looked like an unemployed shoe model.

Once at the event, things proceeded alarmingly apace. When Eric presented our credentials--mine completely falsified--we were directed to the "center lane." There was nobody else in the center lane. We breezed by sixty or so people in one quick dash, and bathed in their appalled gazes. Eric jerked his shoulders proudly, and then we were in the maw of the beast, surrounded by strange besuited beasts and their appalling trophy chicks.

I heard things like this (okay, not really)::

"My cravat is unstoppable.
"I really think that monocles are coming back.
"Smile! Your tits really bounce when you smile."

More later.

I started this thing back in 2002, and I posted my balls off. Seriously, this blog was my orchiectomy. FIVE DAYS A WEEK I POSTED. Man, I posted poetry satires that were thuddingly inexpert; I posted fantasias about what it would be like if elements were high school students; I posted ranting nonsense about computer crashes that I understood nothing about. I had so much energy, so much to share! Then I stopped posting every damn day. Probably because I didn't have balls any more. I gave you my balls.

So I stopped posting every day. I cut back to three days a week, mostly writing cheap shots at movies I hadn't seen and probably will never see, God willing. Still I remained ball-less. They weren't growing back. You didn't care.

Eventually, I got down to posting once a week. That's enough for those unslavering creeps, I thought. Now my balls will gloriously return. You remained silent. Oh, sure, every now and then you'd leave a comment. "LOL" you would listlessly type into my famously obstinant comment box. "I liek it!"

Then--then!--I got sick for a while and my posts dropped to nothing. And so what happens? You bitch me out. "Hey, fucko, what's with the nothing? Give us our something! GARRRRR, OUTRAGE!"

Yeah, well, fuck all y'all. Here, let me check on something. Oh, yeah! Still no balls! You fucking sack-thieves.

What do you want from me? You want more takedowns of horrible movies that I can't be bothered to actually watch? (Exception: any Nic Cage movie.) Another greasy rip on CSI: Miami? (Okay, tonight's episode was even more deliriously insane than usual. An air marshal colludes with a stewardess to smuggle French sleeping aids into the country resulting in the death of another stewardess who winds up in a baggage carousel! MWAH!) You want more tortured fake poetry? Fine! Try this on!

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.

Okay, so that's actually Philip Larkin, but you see my (and, to a lesser extent, Larkin's) point. That point being, I'm still smooth like a Ken doll down there. I mean, I've still got wang, and plenty of it, but what good is wang without the wheels? It's like having a car jack without a tire iron, or a different, much better analogy; perhaps involving my parents.

You see? I'm spinning my wheels here, and all you want is blood and profane critiques of Axe body spray ads. Or tirades against rotoscoping, or just me mashing my keyboard with my choad. I give and very occasionally give, and two or three of you just demand more! It's unbearable.

I've just about mined every tedious childhood memory I can stand to recall. Oh, sure, there was that one time my mom made tuna casserole and forgot to put in the tuna. Jesus fucking Christ, that was awesome. (Full story: one time, my mom forgot to put the tuna into a tuna casserole. It was hilarious because without tuna, it's not really a tuna casserole, and also because I fucking hate tuna. Oh, and also, my mother had early-onset Alzheimer's, and I stole all her pills and sold them to the guys who smoked in the parking lot. They beat me savagely anyway. Don't worry; I killed them all long ago, and as far as I know, my mother is drooling comfortably into a government-bought pillow, so that's all good.)

I don't mean to sound bitter. I just want to make you happy; but more importantly, I want to make me happy, and that means making you cretinous bastards . . . happy. It's confusing to me. I can barely get out of bed in the afternoon, or sometimes late evening. Sometimes I use a cane.

This is all coming out wrong. A little bit of writer's block is to be expected every now and then. I guess I just really miss my--if I may say--pretty awesome balls. It's not your fault to want things. I want things. I'd actually say that I want all things. But mostly my balls.

This isn't your fault. It's my fault. It's nobody's fault. It's Nic Cage's fault.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm sorry.

I really gave her the eyeball, too; she was just a damn ringer. It was so stop-in-my-tracks obvious that it wouldn't surprise me. In fact, I hope she noticed; it might have thrown a charge into the old broad's day. Say! she'd think. That ugly little fellow is, as the kids say, checking me out! I've still got it! Then, if she really was like my grandmother, she would go on to distractedly say something really racist.

(It would always kill me when I'd visit my grandmother in LA when I was a kid. Driving around the Valley, every time she saw any graffiti, she'd mutter darkly, "Mexicans," and shake her head.)

Then, last night, one of our dining room lights blew.

Bear with me here, people!

So, yeah, when the wife turned on the dining room lights for dinner, a bulb--though, I found out later, not a bulb at all, but some ridiculously tiny little transistory-looking thing that frankly never had any business putting out that kind of candlepower in the first place--went pop! and scared the shit out of us, as it always does to everyone in the history of light bulbs. Well, whatever; nothing to do about it now. I wasn't about to climb up and fuck with removing the glass shade and all that, especially since we likely didn't have any extra bulbs around (and as we know now, we also don't have any alien technology in the house to replace the not-bulbs-at-all). We ate in the semi-dark and pretended to be cavemen.

Later, around 12:30, the wife was preparing for bed, and she began to turn out some lights. The dining room light refused to turn off.

"Okay, the light isn't turning off," she said. I turned and saw her poking at the light switch. Being an excellent example of the purposefully ineffectual husband, I immediately strode over to the recalcitrant light switch and poked at it authoritatively a few dozen times. The light remained on.

"God fucking damn it," I said, and stared at the fixture with a familiar blend of determination and hopelessness. You're going to climb up and fuck with that stupid ceiling light, and you're going to fail, and then you're going to get even more pissed off, I thought.

Which I did, in the process discovering the bizarre little not-bulbs that were clearly made by Thai children who bend wires with their teeth. The not-bulb continued burning furiously, and was too hot for me to remove, even when I tried wearing my very handyman-ish black leather gloves. The wife at this point had retired to the kitchen, where she rooted around for the little fire extinguisher that we keep handy in a bottom cupboard behind a Dutch oven and a stockpot. The nonresponsive light switch was on a dimmer; when the not-bulb went, it apparently took the rheostat with it. Our electrician Josh came out this morning to take care of it.

Why are you on a first-name basis with your electrician, you ask? WELL, I'M NOT. My wife is, and not only because she is fucking him on the side.

We met Josh about a month ago when on of our track lighting units croaked. Josh came over, briefly fucked my wife, and explained. A summary:

Prior to Josh's visit, one of our six-halogen tracks had a few dead bulbs. Being incredibly sedentary, we just sort of lived with the squinting half-lit existence until one of us broke (the wife) and went and bought some new bulbs. We had noticed on each bulb housing the label informing us that the max was 50W. Sweet! So finally one night we loaded the track unit with a bunch of shiny new 50W bulbs and basked in the shocking illumination suddenly brightening every corner of our living room.

"You can really see the cobwebs!" we cried. Then the lights began to flutter and wow in a kind of disco sequence, and then they all went out together.

We found out later that while each housing was definitely up to snuff for 50W bulbs, the transformer for the track was good for only 150W total, and we had tried ramming nearly twice that through the miserable little beast, and it kicked its electromagnetic legs up in the air as it died.

"Probably ought to put 20W bulbs in this track from now on," said Josh laconically. "See you Thursday," he said to my wife as he left. This was a month after the actual unit died, which was how long it took Josh to locate a replacement transformer sufficiently underpowered and puny to fit within the housing unit; Josh magnanimously took 15% off the bill total, which the wife later noticed actually turned out to be 10% when calculated. "No more front-butt for that guy," she said sourly, and I stood a little taller in the once-more illuminated room, angling myself so that the repaired lights fell most flatteringly upon my goiter, but I don't think she noticed.

So what does any of this have to do with anything else? How is this all supposed to hang together? Why are you reading yet another interminable blog entry? These things, while all stupid, have nothing to do with each other.

So you say. I have a better explanation. Poltergeists. Go ahead, call me crazy. I don't care. I'm clearly being haunted by malign spirits; I offer these vignettes as proof. You need more, you say? Fine. It lies in what I haven't seen, and here's what I haven't seen:

I haven't seen Josh fucking my dead grandmother. That would be crazy.

So it's got to be poltergeists. Nothing to do now but call Tangina. Great--another professional.

Man, she's going to fuck my wife, isn't she?

So there we were, hanging out in the back of someone's pickup, shooting gophers. The adults were drinking beer out of cans; I probably was sucking on a lolly or something equally nineteenth-century dandyish. On the other hand, I was killing the holy fuck out of some gophers; for whatever reason, I've always been an excellent shot. It might have something to do with my ex-Marine father and growing up surrounded by guns. Or it might be my utter disdain for anything covered in fur, which would also explain why I shot my first three girlfriends in the vagina, but we don't have to bring up unpleasant mistakes of my youth.

Presently, in the midst of our rodent holocaust, a dust trail appeared down the road. It turned out to be a local cop--yes, it is true, rural Idaho cops often have nothing better to do than to patrol rural farmlands, looking for ne'er-do-wells or occasionally finding the odd near-death gopher to resuscitate. He pulled up to the truck, completely nonplussed by the fact that the truck bed was full of half-drunk men with rifles and one improbably lolly-sucking waif out of Dickens.

"You fellows got permission to shoot in that field?" he asked. Everyone laughed, but the cop didn't seem to mind. "You oughta get permission, fellas," he said. Then he noticed me, cradling my .22.

"Son, how old are you?"

I flicked a look at my father, who betrayed nothing. You were supposed to be 14 at the time in order to be shooting firearms.

"Sixteen," I warbled. The cop couldn't help but roll his eyes. So I shot him in the face. Fucking pigs!

Oh, wait! That wasn't me, that was a Joseph Wambaugh novel! (Wambaugh's middle name is Aloysius! Here at Izzle Pfaff, I'm all about dropping the knowledge that you never cared about.)

To make a long story even more endlessly boring, nothing happened. The cop warned everyone about the complicated gopher-slaughtering laws of Idaho state, and then drove off.

This was my first nominal experience with anything close to "hunting."

A couple years later, as every Idaho boy does, I took "hunter's safety," an extracurricular course that was required in order for one to obtain a hunting license. There really was never any question that any lad who wasn't plainly feeble would ever not take hunter's safety. You might as well have said, "Well, I've thought about it, and I've just decided not to grow a dick."

And soon enough, hunting season came along, back before my father's knees hadn't completely betrayed him; back when we were poor enough that bagging a deer or an elk in the fall meant the difference between a lean winter and a relatively hale winter in terms of meals. It was important. My father, for years, would (illegally) obtain hunter's permits for himself, my mom and me, just on the odds that he'd pull down more than one animal (though that never happened).

I hated every moment of it. I hated getting woken up at 3:30 in the morning, I hated being told weird, unsupportable things ("Don't eat so much snow--it'll fuck with your stomach"); I hated traipsing all over hell and fucking gone. I was a lazy little shit who wanted to sleep in. Shooting those fucking gophers was a lot less work.

We went out all the time during hunting season. (By the way, poachers are regarded as something less than human by actual hunters, and violators are subject to some really eye-popping punishments when caught.) I also learned one of the most venerable, weird maxims of hunting: your first kill should be a buck. I'm sure there's some juicy psychoanalysis going on behind this, but as I said before, I didn't really give a fuck. I went out because my dad expected me to.

One morning, driving out to the hunting ground of Dad's choice that morning, a deer flashed across the road while we were driving. My father skidded to the side of the road and grabbed his rifle.

"Let's go!" he breathed. "It doesn't matter if it's a doe." I was really confused now. "It doesn't matter," he repeated.

We loped as quietly as possible through the trees, following the doe's path as best we could figure, but she was gone. I was sort of disappointed, but for all the wrong reasons: I really wanted to shoot that deer just so I could get the thing over with, to pop my cherry and have done with it. I had been extensively schooled on where to shoot the deer; I could see it in my mind. I had aced my hunter's safety course; I had received a rather nice hunting knife for having the highest test scores.

Some days later, we were driving home at night, back to our place out on the prairie. And, again, a deer flashed in front of the car, missing us by mere feet. This was a buck--not much of one, really, but a handsome three-pointer for all that. Dad reamed out the brakes pulling over, and I whacked myself a good one on the dash, and then he was out of the car, screaming "Fuck!" I was still dazedly fumbling for my 30.06 when I heard a shot ring out.

That stupid deer. It got about thirty feet towards some undergrowth before my dad killed the beast; we were able to pull the truck right up to it so it lay dolefully in the headlights. I don't know what the fuck it was doing out in the open.

There in the headlights' yellow glow, my father instructed me. "We've got to clean this guy," he said, and smoothly pulled out his hunting knife, and then opened a large incision in the animal's belly. The deer's guts fell out onto the ground, and I immediately turned around and retched.

I still to this day recall my father's look when I could turn around. It was one of disappointment and, worse, contempt.

He never asked me to go hunting again.

Along with the Super Bowl, of course, you also get the ads--oh, the ads! You don't want to miss those, either, so the Super Bowl presents real challenges to the average smoker. I don't even want to dwell on the ads, though--Seth Stevenson has that niche pretty much covered, although I was disappointed that he neglected to mention the cut flowers telling the crestfallen cube worker "Nobody wants to see you naked."

A couple of other ads carried fell portents: Transformers 2 is apparently in the works, hopefully--please--featuring even more robotic micturation upon John "Heineken Shaman" Turturro; and, not to be dismissed lightly, Land of the Lost, featuring one of my many nemeses, Will Ferrell. May he be eaten by Sleestaks.

(A lot of my friends--many of whom are sketch comedians--adore Will Ferrell. I emphatically do not, but I only mention this to say that I understand if you think I'm a complete toolbox for thinking this way. I only want to say this: Will Ferrell is not any kind of actor. He's just Will Ferrell. Say what you will about Robin Williams or Bill Murray [to pick a couple easy examples], they are capable of turning in nuanced performances [especially when matched with good directors]. Will Ferrell could dig up Kurosawa to remake Throne of Blood and still find a way to make sure the Macbeth character had a scene in his underwear. Fuck Will Ferrell.)

(I also don't find him terribly funny when he's trying for pure comedy, though he is a gifted mimic and seems fairly fearless, which is a good trait in any performer. At any rate, ask yourself, even if you're a fan of his: is mugging in front of CGI dinosaurs your idea of the best way to exploit his talents?)

I don't promise that I will stop with the parentheses, but now I'm aware of them. Anyway, let's see what else is coming to the movie theaters soon, and let us declare them terrible before even seeing a single scene.

The Pink Panther 2

Speaking of comedians who are capable of layered, complex performances, I am certain that Steve Martin will pull off a bravura performance in this film, much like he did in The Spanish Prisoner, Shopgirl and Cheaper By the Dozen. Plus that movie where dwarves shit on his back for a couple hours; I think that one was an Errol Morris flick.

Jesus Christ, what do you even say about this? Who watches this? Here's a few other prominent slummers in this thing: Jean Reno (okay, he slums professionally), Lily Tomlin, John Cleese, Jeremy Irons, Alfred Molina. WHAT THE FUCK, ALFRED?

There's a common joke/folklore that men sometimes, during sex, think of things like baseball statistics or the quadratic equation to stave off premature ejaculation. I'm a little different; I think of these things as a sort of mental bunker I can retreat to when ads for The Pink Panther 2 show up.

He's Just Not That Into You

Maybe if you bend your ankles back some more. HEY-OH!

This just kills me. A date movie featuring emotionally distant men. Sounds like a winner to me! Perhaps a double feature with "Playboy Presents the All-Shawl Girls."

Incidentally, girls, do you really want Ben Affleck or Justin Long into you? In any sense?

Push*

Thanks a fucking lot, Heroes. I know you're trying to unsuck, but movies like this aren't helping your cause.

This is just Doug Liman's catastrophic Jumpers updated to include more flying cutlery. On the other hand, it might be kind of fun to watch just because of Dakota Fanning. Now listen, I used to hate Dakota Fanning, but she's grown on me as she's, well, grown. This is mainly because that I like to think of how awesome it would be if in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button that Brad Pitt would gradually transform into Dakota Fanning. I think that Charlie Kaufman could script this in like three days.

Friday the 13th

For the fans who have been waiting for the directorial reappearance of Marcus Nispel (the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, 2004's "Bone Thugs 'n Harmony: The Collection Vol. 2"), he's back!

I don't know about you, but I sure can't get enough of the remakes of old, shoddy, nihilistic 80s slasher flicks being remade into shiny new shoddier, more nihilistic, ghastlier films. I mean, don't get me wrong: I'll watch them. I won't enjoy them, but I'll watch them.

On cable. These movies are basically like spending a night drinking Natty Boh and staring at a bug zapper.

*Not to be confused with the OTHER Push, which recently won over Sundance audiences, and which frankly everyone should see. This harrowing yet ultimately human movie features over twelve hours of footage of my mother's excruciating labor. At the movie's climax, I am seen emerging from the womb, clawing at the nurses and wailing "NO! NO! CORD BLOOD IS SO DELICIOUS!"

It's directed by Marcus Nispel, of course.

It turns out that recuperating took a little longer than I anticipated. Yesterday a co-worker remarked, "Hey, you've got your color back." My color. What color? I'm as white as any piano key, except for the black piano keys. But it's true, you apparently don't just bounce back from pneumonia just because the pills are all gone. (I've still got the ativan--interested parties are encouraged to check Craigslist.)

But I think I'm back in the game now. I actually have proof of this; yesterday at a supervisor's meeting at work (the venue at which co-worker informed me I had achieved whiteness again as opposed to, I guess, wan translucence), I won a plushie armadillo for being the only person in the room who knew what Twitter was, and it wasn't a hallucination. Also, the context of the meeting was our new payroll compensation policies, and I didn't scream out, "OH MY FUCKING GOD, I'M CRYING BLOOD!" and rush out in search of whiskey.

I also had a nice moment with the CEO, who was sitting next to me at the meeting when talks turned to the challenges of catering to the wishes of young workers. "What do you say to young workers who want to work 'alternative' hours or expect more than you might be used to being asked for?" said the consultant who was running the meeting.

" 'You're fired'?" I offered.

"That's what I was going to say!" exclaimed the CEO. The consultant gave us a wintry, alum-mouthed look. I didn't fucking care. I had the CEO behind me and a plushie armadillo in front of me.

But like I said, it took a while getting back. A couple days ago, I pulled on a shirt before work without, as usual, paying much attention to what I was wearing--I'm basically jeans-and-whatever-I-grab shirt. Once I got to work, I looked down and realized I'd never seen this particular pullover zip-top thing in my life. When I got home, I asked the wife re: shirt, "Is this yours? I grabbed it out of the closet by accident, I guess."

"I gave that to you for Christmas," replied the wife. "You wore it for three days when you were sick." Jesus. I really had--and continue not to have--any memory of this goddamn shirt. Then I immediately dashed out the door and went downstairs to our garage to check out the brand new sports car I had obviously forgotten as well. The wife followed me down, puzzled, and found me staring at our parking space, occupied by the same 2000 purple Plymouth that we've had for a while.

"Where's my convertible, you fucking goblin snatch?" I cried. "Don't tell me you parked it on the street."

"What the fuck are you talking about? What convertible?" She had brought a kitchen knife with her, and she waved it unconsciously at her hip in graceful ovals.

"The one I forgot you gave me for Christmas!" I screamed. "Like the shirt!" I pulled the shirt-front up over my head and ran around in small circles, emitting piercing shrieks to emphasize my point, and when I had to stop to catch my breath, the wife had gone back upstairs. I didn't have my keys on me, having left them in the apartment with my pants, so I slept in the car that night, stacking the floor mats on my naked midsection to stave off the cold of the unheated garage, and in my fitful sleep, I heard raccoons saying frankly defamatory things about my uncle Sparky.

So what I took away from that whole thing is that you don't necessarily bounce right back from a serious illness. And, if I'm honest, I didn't help myself out much either in a lot of ways. When you're immunocompromised, dehydrated, and just plain old fucking wiped out, one could do much better than to put on movies such as these:

Wanted
Max Payne
Death Race

But then again, these may have simply been my wife's attempts to kill me once and for all. (You know, now that I think of it, the phrase "kill me once an for all" is basically stupid. As opposed to killing me a few times, halfheartedly and temporarily? Actually, now that I say that, I should write a movie treatment of that and pitch it to Lionsgate.)

Now I feel stronger for enduring them, really. You couldn't show those gray, humorless idiocies to bone marrow transplant patients for fear of destroying them. I don't think Mark Wahlberg is even allowed inside hospitals.

So, sorry it's been a while. My life is pretty dull, but it's a really contented sort of dull, and I think I'm ready to start complaining about it again. Quietly. Stealthily. I still haven't found my fucking sports car, the wife keeps that goddamn knife with her all the time, and you know what? Car mats are shit for keeping you warm at night.

And what you hear about uncle Sparky from those slanderous ball-gnawing raccoons? He was acquitted.