Monday Morning Quarterbacking

Wasted. It’s Sunday, and I’m still feeling loopy after my Wednesday dental hoedown. I’m getting better, but I still feel like a good cigar and a fifty-yard dash would kill me. Usually the cigar would do me in by itself, but the run would only cripple me. Today, though, I’m coming, Elizabeth.

I don’t know what did the most damage. Was it the trauma, from the dentist’s going into my sinus through my gums, gouging out a bigger cave with a melon baller, and filling it up with corpse bone and John-the-conqueror root? Or was it the oxycodone-killer acetomenophin mix that I gobbled because I’m such a chicken about pain. I took one five mg/325 mg tab around nineteen hundred, Wednesday, before the local wore off, and half of a 7.5/750 tab when I woke up around oh-four hundred Thursday? (I keep left over prescriptions for painal emergencies). Gotta get my beauty rest. Eighty-four hours later, I’m still paying. In my youth I had friends who enjoyed shit like this, but you’d think somebody could come up with a nice buzz that takes away the pain, and doesn’t leave that unsightly ring around the inside of my goddam skull.

Meanwhile I’ve been sipping a cocktail compounded of economic terrror (the bottom line for the whole rigamarole -- for one stupid tooth -- is over three grand), and of a sixty-year old member of the youth generation’s sense of mortality. I managed yoga Monday Tuesday and Wednesday, with a weight session on Monday, but that’s it since then. No way am I exerting myself. I can feel myself going to seed, or whatever it’s called when you’re not so seedy anymore. Projecting this into the future, I can only see more and tougher medical attention to my body, and...more...missed...workouts. This is turning me into an old man.

So I missed the Bioneers Conference. I haven't made it yet, always thought it was for rich ninnies whose lifestyles were fouling the nest, but wanted green cred. Since I started writing this blog, though, I've thought maybe that was my beat, and I should go. Maybe next year.

There’s an article about topical humor in the November Smithsonian Magazine. The author was wondering what poor Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were going to do now that the White House’s politics are more to their liking. You gotta cut the Smith some slack for being a year behind in noticing that satirists are gonna have to work harder during a Democratic administration. They’re a museum, fer petessake. They’re part of the government, too, so they’re going out on a limb even admitting that anybody ever laughed at Geor...snrrk...G...mmmpf...sorry...the forty-thir...oh my God...haha...oh, no...I can’t even say the venal, authoritarian boob’s name.

I held my nose and pulled the lever for Obama last November, but I think I would have been disappointed even if I hadn’t voted for a corporate flack. Even Ralph Nader would been out-pissed by the obstructionist rabble in and out of government that a more enlightened system would have mining for mastodon above the Arctic Circle. I don’t watch television. I hit my lifetime quota back when it was in black and white. Four PM to ten PM, 1958 to 1967, plus Saturday mornings, that’s where I vegetated. I’m saturated, so I don’t know what particular strategies the writers at the Daily Show have for dealing with the perceived “irony shortage.” But if somebody wanted to give Barack Obama and his investment-banker economic advisors a break, they could start picking on characters like Bo Pilgrim.

Pilgrim is a Texan billionaire, founder of Pilgrim Chicken, who bankrupted the company in a failed takeover of Tyson foods. The company went broke, attempting a repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment in its factories, selling out to a foreign company, and compromising municipal services in the communities around them. Workers put in rainmaker hours for chicken-plucker wages. Factories closed. Tax bills went unpaid. City utility bills trebled and services failed. When a twenty-seven year-old man wrote his hit list and took his rifle for a joy ride last March, the strapped Samson, Alabama police asked nearby Army Fort Rucker for troops (in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a law that helped end Reconstruction).

Maybe there’s no irony shortage, just irony fatigue.

A few weeks ago, in a mealy-mouthed way, I called the Republicans running for governor of Minnesota “pussies.” I still haven’t come up with another word that, in common use, is as confrontational, as contemptuous of someone’s physical, moral, and intellectual cowardice. I still think those dozen or so global warming deniers are stupid, know-nothing babies, but I’m not going to compare them to half humanity’s sex organs. Like my friend Lisa says, “It’s too good a word for them.”

Infants of the world, I say these...men, like you, are capable of growth. I’ll work on my contempt.