The Pleasures of a Laborious Day

The following post was scheduled to"air" on Labor Day, but has been delayed until now due to contract negotiaions between our brothers and sisters of Local 1100100011 (The International Alliance of Web Masters and Coders) and Inventor of the Internet, Al Gore, Jr.

The home woods are as dry as I've seen, but my eyes are wet with tears for the world. Both kinds of tears, of course: Country and Western.

If someone leaves your windows open, stay and linger for awhile when it rains. How else will you wash off yesterday's dust?

In September, the kids stock up on #2 pencils, the deer get ready for the rut, summer packs up for its annual migratory trip to Australia.

Lose 20 lbs. You'll feel better.

Stagehands are descended from sailors (pirates, really), whose rope skills were ideal for moving scenery in pre-motorized theatres. It's one of the myriad reasons why we swear so fucking much.

Couple things:

Treestands are the new studio apartments.

Volume is the new truth

Pretzels are the new caviar.

The Rutabaga is the new "It" vegetable

Intimacy issues have made ourselves the new controlled substances

Democrats are the new punching bags

If Gary Stein ousts the Republican incumbent in the New Jersey 2nd this November, he could then craft legislation with the junior senator from Minnesota, and it would be known as a Franken-Stein bill. Totally hot.

I'd rather eat dinner with Lon Chaney, Jr.'s cold corpse than serve an appetizer to the former U.S. vice president...

The auteur of this blog will now relocate himself to a secure location and wait for the all-clear signal. You'll be sure to let me know when that happens, right?

Thanks for reading, and please remember that even if the Republicans retake the U.S. House of Representatives this fall, it doesn't mean we should excoriate a vast quantity of our blue-collar Americans for voting against their best interests. It might possibly mean, however, that we should all be stocking up on rutabagas.

Big Bird, Trilliums and Mothers Day in Heaven

Today the Red Sox are a half-game out of Second Place. But there are three teams ahead of them. How should I feel about that?

More important, Tim Wakefield goes for career win #190, and in a related move, there's a real good possibility I'll get to meet Big Bird this afternoon...

He's 40, too. We should compare notes.

I have white man's overbite guilt/envy when I dance to R & B records.

On Sunday, I saw a snowflake in Scranton. It was Mothers Day, and in the local paper there were more than 20 "Mothers Day in Heaven" memorials to dead mothers. My mother is still alive and well, in Florida, so I sent her flowers and took myself out to brunch at Chick's Diner on Moosic Street.

Ron Paul has introduced legislation to once again legalize hemp farming in this country. Party on, Garth.

I propose we merge April and May into one month in which all the poets bike to work.

Thank g-d Whole Foods has sprouted stores in expensive neighborhoods. Before that, I'd only partially eaten foods for which I had underpaid.

If I only write ny with lowercase letters, can I reasonably expect never to have to spend time in Albany?

The single largest donor to the Democratic Party made his fortune from "five retards in Spandex." I don't think he's a nice man.

I wonder what the career advancement opportunities are for the guy who wears a diaper and lies on a bed of nails. Does he look over at the guy who walks on hot coals and think, "That's my two-year plan, Inshallah."?

Is Inshallah Arabic for "yo" or is "yo" Jive for "God Willing"? *

When a thing is televised, its head is actually held motionless in the retractable steel jaws of fiction.

If you ask a McDonald's executive where you should eat lunch, betcha he won't say, "Burger King."

Recently I walked in the woods amongst the destruction wreaked by the natural gas companies, in their disheartening prosecution of making profit from the Marcellus Shale. Hundreds of trees had been knocked out, and bulldozers had carved a road into a mountain side -- my hunting grounds. At the edge of this road, where busted roots were flayed open like the broken bones of  so many freeway pileup victims, I discovered a tiny little trillium erectum, a protected wildflower that was illegal to pick, in my youth, and may still be. In that moment--a tenuous cling to the roughly ploughed earth--this fragile forest jewel stood proudly against the arrogance of man, as if to say, "You may tear up my home and gouge my garage, but you cannot stop the tumescence of even the smallest living thing. You Gunkies!"

Thanks for reading, and here's a question to ponder on your trip home: Does forcing the Earth to fart  constitute a safe, sane or sustainable energy policy?

* I know. Most fakirs are probably not speaking Arabic. I'm just sayin'.