Bad News?

Not really. This blog is done, but I'm moving over to a new website called Zombie Zebra, where I will continue to regularly post.

Read my exit/entrance interview here: http://zombiezebra.com/2009/02/25/please-allow-me-to-introduce-myself/

This was fun, I'm moving it to my own .com because of how much I'm digging it. I'll miss you most of all Mr. Scarecrow.

Holidaze

I should have had a pretty shitty week. I worked 8:30 AM - 10:00 PM most of the week, came in on Saturday, worked from home a bit on Sunday, and so I pretty much didn't have anytime for myself. But in a weird way, I find that comforting and I can usually make the most of the time I have when I'm super-busy. It enables a kind of focused clarity that otherwise is impossible. So, in my mind, I actually had a pretty good week. I mean, I still had a good time Friday night with a bunch of friends, got some shit off my chest that I needed to talk about to someone, relaxed a bit on Sunday, got my deposit back from my last apartment, and I think later today I might go buy a new TV. Also, it was Valentine's Day yesterday. I have no problems with that holiday.

Valentine's Day is a weird holiday, because (apparently) it's supposed to be a day of forced romance if you're in a relationship and it's supposed to be depressing if you're not. Personally, I never minded the holiday either way, single or not, because some people have a good spirit to them regardless, and I'm really into holidays with spirit. So what if you're single? Is it really that bad? There are so many wonderful things about being single and you should celebrate that; there are so many people in this city and this world that are single right along with you, and this holiday is for you too. Being in a relationship on this day is good too, guys may complain that they "have" to do this or that, but really? Really? Most of you love it. I think it's pretty awful when I hear about people that needs days like this to remember a little romance; by necessity the Super Bowl can only be one day a year, but you can cherish your Valentine all year. Really, boil it down to the purest components and this is a Holiday about Love, and who can't get behind that? Whether you're single, married, or anything above or between, isn't there something you could have celebrated? Personally, I think the world would be a better place if every once in a while we were all able to come out of our shells and just embrace and love love. It doesn't need to be just romantic love, but also love of everything and everyone, to give love to your fellow man, to just take it in and realize that what we have here is a pretty sweet deal. I don't know, maybe I'm just wearing rose-colored glasses today.

There are a couple of particular things about Valentine's Day that I would like to talk about more specifically. First off, I've begun taking a more scenic route to the subway (walking to a further stop) that takes me right by this church, and Saturday while I was walking to work I noticed that they had all these balloons that said "Happy St. Valentine's Day" on them and it hit me that this actually is/was supposed to be a day celebrating a saint. Now I don't claim to know what St. Valentine is or what he did to achieve sainthood, if I had to guess I'd say it has something to do with killing gangsters, but I'm not sure. It started getting me wondering about how many other holidays have really lost their true meaning and became a "thing". I'll come back to this in a second, while I bring up the other thing, which is a family tradition. On Friday, I checked the mail, and saw that there was a large package for me. It was from my mom, and I was not expecting it. I should have. It was, as she's sent every year since my freshman year of college, a Valentine's Day package with a card and a box of heart-shaped chocolates. The fact that it never occurred to me that this would come, despite the fact that she does it every year, brought a little extra joy to my world. It reminded me that I really do love my mother, and again, isn't that what this day is about? Love of all kinds? Well, it's about that, and it's also about chocolate. Along with Halloween, Valentine's Day is one of the most candy-centric holidays. It really makes me wonder if before candy and card companies got involved if this was ever a serious religious Holiday, and it got me thinking about the other holidays we typically celebrate in modern American society:

Valentine's Day
What it's supposed to be about: Love, showing affection to those that you care about.
What it's really about: Special lingerie, expensive dinners, getting just drunk enough (on wine, of course) to get a little freaky but still sober enough to really enjoy it. OR, getting depressed, eating an entire heart-shaped box of candy by yourself while watching clips from "Models, Inc." on YouTube.

Presidents' Day
What it's supposed to be about: Celebrating the great leaders of this nation we call home and how they have enriched our culture and history.
What it's really about: up to 20% off at most department stores.

St Patrick's Day
What it's supposed to be about: Being Irish.
What it's really about: Getting completely shithoused. This one is actually pretty close.

Easter
What it's supposed to be about: Jesus dying for our sins, coming back, spring, renewal, jew bashing
What it's really about: Finding colored eggs, jelly beans, marshmallow poultry, fake plastic grass, other candy, rabbits, and in my family's case presents. It wasn't until about a year ago I found out that not everyone got presents on Easter Sunday. This blew my mind, it was like a second Christmas in my house growing up.

Memorial Day
What it's supposed to be about: I'm going to go with people dying, or something like that? Am I close? Is this exactly the same as Veteran's Day?
What it's really about: the start of the Summer Movie season. Spider-Man or Wolverine are likely to make an appearance. This year we get Terminators. Oh... I get it, it's a memorial to all the people that died in Judgment day after skynet launched. Makes sense.

Independence Day
What it's supposed to be about: the adoption of the declaration of independence and the formal birth of our nation (and essentially modern society).
What it's really about: Fireworks, Barbecues, Baseball. To me, that is America, so I'm totally ok with all this. Bonus points to this holiday because (I think) most Americans actually do know why we don't work on this day, even if they think "The Forth of July" is the actually name of the holiday.

Labor Day
What it's supposed to be about: working? I don't have the slightest clue.
What it's really about: parties hosted by Puff Daddy, the last day to have a summer party, wearing white for the last time for a few months.

Jimbo's Birthday
What it's supposed to be about: peace on earth and good will towards all men.
What it's really about: people always eff this one up and make it all about me. Seriously, I'm not like that, you shouldn't celebrate me, you should celebrate that you all get to share a world WITH me.

Columbus Day
What it's supposed to be about: Christopher Columbus "discovering" the new world.
What it's really about: apparently being Italian.

Halloween
What it's supposed to be about: Candy.
What it's really about: Candy. Egging houses. Channel 11 showing scary movies for "Shocktober".

Veteran's Day
What it's supposed to be about: See "Day, Memorial". I have no idea what the difference is. Is memorial day for those that died and this is for the guys that didn't?
What it's really about: no clue. I don't even think I have off this day. I had to look up when it was. I'd be willing to bed department stores have sales for this, but not as good as Presidents' Day.

Thanksgiving
What it's supposed to be about: Acknowledging the fact that different people can give thanks to each other and celebrate that only through unity can we endure.
What it's really about: Getting drunk and over-eating, fighting with family, starting Christmas shopping and getting an extra day off from work after Thanksgiving, because fuck it, that's why.

Christmas
What it's supposed to be about: Jesus being born.
What it's really about: Santa giving presents. I'll cede that most people PROBABLY know what the real reason for Christmas is, but I'd wager most don't really give two shits and just like the presents part. Especially kids, who I think we can all agree is who this holiday is mostly for. Whatever, I have no beef with X-Mas, I love it even if it is a painted whore of a holiday at this point.

New Year's
What it's supposed to be about: The arbitrary designation of where a year "ends" and a new one "begins"
What it's really about: Getting super-duper drunk, kissing someone at midnight if you're sober enough, and then deciding you're going to start or stop doing something for the rest of your life and then following through with it for anywhere between 2 and 60 days.

Martin Luther King Day
What it's supposed to be about: Celebrating human rights with specific emphasis on a man who taught the world that Knowledge is Power and that all men truly are created equal.
What it's really about: Having a quick holiday to recover from having a whole week of work after the Christmas/New Year 1-2 punch. Seriously, his birthday is 1/15, yet we always celebrate it on a Monday. Doesn't that seem suspicious to anyone else?

Groundhog Day
What it's supposed to be about: seeing whether nature's great forecaster thinks we're going to have an early spring or long winter.
What it's really about: getting drunk and making babies

I think that covers the major ones, but I suppose it's possible I forgot one if it's even more obscure than Veteran's Day (Father's Day and Mother's Day don't count). I think we're about due for a new Holiday, it seems like we don't really celebrate half of these at this point anyway, so let's mix in some new ones. Like, shouldn't we have a day celebrating the invention of the Internet or something? I think we have enough summer movies at this point that we need another weekend in the summer to get a bunch of these, maybe we could take Boxing Day and put it in the summer or something? Well, that's all the time I have for now, hopefully I'll stay too busy to watch entire movies so that I can instead take 20 minutes to write blogs.

My Bucket List

OK, I had an idea the other day that I would make a "Bucket List" on the blog. I never saw the movie, so I'm just guessing that it's a list of things you want to do before you die. Well, here's my totally reasonable list:

• Learn to play at least one decent Billy Joel or Elton John song on the piano and be able to sing along to it. The whole song.
  
  
• Go whale watching.
  
  
• Finishing writing one of my stupid screenplays and actually send it around for honest feedback.
  
  
• Watch every episode of “The Wire”
  
  
• Bet enough money on a hand of poker that losing would ruin my life and win.
  
  
• Come into a sold-out baseball game in the bottom of the ninth inning to record a 1-out save on a three pitch strike-out (the third of which MUST be swinging).
  
  
• Read “Maus”
  
  
• Get bitten by a radioactive spider and gain the proportionate strength of a spider and some other more-vaguely described super powers.
  
  
• Get to Pakistan when they finally corner Osama Bin Laden. While all his men are in a firefight with American forces, slowly enter his dark cave quarters smoking a cigarette. After a deep exhale, look up and tell him “You know what they say... smoking will be the death... of YOU!” and then somehow murder him with the filter.
  
  
• Grow a mustache.
  
  
• Play a game of one-on-one with an also mustached David Lee, who is at that time second only to myself in being the toast of New York.
  
  
• Marry a gorgeous woman that allows me to see other women while she's pregnant because she knows I think that's gross.
  
  
• Leave her after the kids are no longer cute/fun/interesting.
  
  
• Get banned from a country (either my person, or my work)
  
  
• Start advertising on blog.
  
  
• Rescue a beautiful, busty woman from thieves, get rewarded with mind-blowing oral sex.
  
  
• Rob a bank in broad daylight without harming any customers.
  
  
• Hold an entire nation (somewhere rich but small that I've not year heard of or barely know) hostage with some elaborate scheme where I will use my powers and genius to lower the entire land mass by 2 meters, thus flooding. Thwart any attempts to stop me.
  
  
• Learn enough French to be able to competently order from an authentic French restaurant.
  
  
• Buy the Eiffel Tower with nation-hostage money. Use it only for public displays of love making, if you can even call it love after all the filthy things I will have gotten into at this point.
  
  


• Record a #1 Selling Rap Album, earn the respect of the entire industry.

• Develop an arch-foeship with a do-gooder. Use lots of good puns when bantering with him.
  
  
• Have my son (now in his 20's) track me down and confront me about leaving. Tell him that his mother drove him away and that I'm proud of him and then try to mold him into becoming me exactly.
  
  
• Conduct experiments on son to get him super-powers. If it works, then have him be my #2 until he's too powerful and then strike him down as an example to the others. If it doesn't work, discard body in a way so that no one knows if he ever found me.
  
  
• Go back to school for writing.
  
  
  
• Win a World Championship of boxing, retire undefeated.
  
  
• Be on my private boat when it's attacked by a giant Sea Monster, the last of it's kind and realize that I don't need to be who I was anymore and go out to battle the great beast as everyone else flees below deck. Light a cigarette, look up and deadpan “only one of us is walking away from this... and I'm the one with legs” before running and leaping onto the creature. Battle it for 2 days straight before it falls beneath my hands, dead.
  
  
• Try at an open mic and/or audition for a comedy troupe
  
  
• Ride the serpent corpse down to a hidden underwater kingdom, learn to breathe underwater and take a potion that allows for live forever in this kingdom, where I am loved by throngs of beautiful mermaid women that live only to bring me satisfaction and never ever die.

The Whistlepig

OK, so I've been super-duper-uper busy lately, and I don't mean just my usual "only 1 movie after the Knicks game before my pre-bed episodes of 30 Rock" either, I'm actually watching less than 2 hours of TV a day and everything. Crazy. Also, I'm coming down with a little something. I was feeling a little cold coming on, then I accidentally turned on my A/C during the night so I woke up frozen. Then I got out of the shower and immediately went into the snow. I never said I was smart. OK, I say that all the time, but I'm a stupid kind of smart, I think.

Anyway, I know I'm a little late for Groundhog Day, but I'm unvailing my latest Holiday-themed poem for you to all enjoy ahead of my annual Gala of the Groundhog occuring this weekend. Why am I doing this? Well because I don't have time for a real entry (let alone either of the beasts I spoke of in the last one) and I like to update regularly AND because of a little truth you might not be aware of -- every blogger tries to be funny enough for people to come back and maybe give his weary attempts at prose a whirl because he always thought he could make it as a poet and secretly hates his father for making him get into "computer stuff" in college.

So without further adon't...

The Whistlepig

Awake from the slumber, the first great sleep of his young life, the whistlepig rises.

Inside him, something yearns, a sensation that cannot be denied.

The den must be abandoned as he climbs out of one of his diligently burrowed tunnels into the open world.

He is sluggish but aware, there are those that would try to catch him, he must make it to surface.

The cold wind greets him more harshly then he would have thought, but he must persevere.

Never losing sight of his surroundings the majestic chuck compiles the fresh berries he can muster.

Masticating upon his ambrosial fortunes, he never looks down or loses his awareness.

As threats abound in the wondrous landscape so too does opportunity, and soon enough the land beaver will claim that which roused him.

Avoiding predation, a simple task, but his charge requires other dangers of the prodigious rodent.

His peers are brutal, nasty, aggressive; attempting to assert dominance to no avail.

Finally the exalted beast lays his eyes upon the ineluctable and is able to savor his corporeal destiny.

As the world was borne anew so it too falls, as the whistlepig retreats into the tangible earth beneath him once more, shadow and all.

Get it? Adon't? That's not a word! Genius!!!