The Cringe Herb

Gingko Biloba is the cringe herb. I already consider it an integral weapon in the arsenal in my battle against depression.

St. John's Wort is more of a painkiller. The pain is neutralized, followed by a feeling of general well-being. St. John's Wort is homeostasis plus 1.

My depression has eased a great bit since this past winter, thanks to my supplement routines and an intensification of my exercise program.

But now I feel as if I've reached a certain plateau. I don't hurt as much, but I still have trouble feeling. I have emotions more often now, but not enough. I'm about 50% better, but I will not rest until I am 110% better.

This is where Gingko comes into the equation. When I drink Gingko tea I feel like the old me. Like the one who used to dream of Beverly Hills when Michael Jackson was still in his prime. Gingko is known as a mind-enhancer but I find it refreshing and "visceral". 100% visceral, 0% stuffy. It is a cool, refreshing breeze.

It rushes blood to my brain and my thinking becomes clear. Then I cringe. I feel so much like the real Will Johnson that I begin to cringe when I think of some of the things the depressed Will Johnson has said and done. I see - with painful, piercing clarity - that I was psychotically depressed. I realize this to an embarrassing and cringe-worthy extent.

Then I realize I am going to die and all the erudition flies out the window and I realize what intelligence really is. Not to mention character, emotion, humanness.

Gingko Biloba: a cool mountain breeze blowing away dust, mold, and stifled air.

Michael Jackson: A true talent and a representative of a much, much, much, much, much better time.

Jon Stewart

I had a dream last night that I was on the Daily Show. I was urinating in Jon Stewart's mouth. I was standing on one end of the soundstage and Jon was on the other. I was projectile pissing. My urine was shooting up in the air and Jon Stewart - like a good little frisbee dog - angled himself to catch it. I pissed so much that my urine was overflowing his mouth and spilling over his cheeks.

How would Freud interpret this dream? I'm not Freud, but I would interpret it as telling of my disrespect for Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart's pedantry and topical humor is too much. More than that, it's boring. A comedian's job is not to care or change, but to observe and mock. He was funny when he was doing meaningless fluff for MTV, but now he takes himself way too - yawn - seriously.

As a comedian I did not know anything about performing until I studied the late, great Andy Kaufman. What I learned from Andy was this: The performer is not the performer. The audience is the performer. The performer is the audience. All the performer has to do is sit back and watch. It's paradoxical, but every great performer does it to a certain extent. Every great performer is a profound solipsist. The interesting are NOT interested. They mostly worry about themselves.

Once I learned this I always had a good time - and did a swell job - on stage. 90% of the time I had my audiences rolling on the floor with laughter. 9% of the time the audience would boo, throw beer bottles at me, and pelt me with garbage. 1% accounts for the shows that were too weird to be classified one way or the other. But no matter what my reaction I was always the audience. I performed for myself as I write for myself.

Jon Stewart either forgot that rule or (more likely) never learned it. If I were him I would set out to infuriate the American public.

For exampled I remember when he verbally spanked that economic czar: "Mr. What's-His-Name". (I'm too lazy to google him right now and the library closes in 20 minutes; more than that, who cares what the guys name was?)

Jon Stewart seemed to be blaming this poor man for our economic crisis and the abominable behavior of corporations. Long story short: Jon (the Bully) Stewart shamed and browbeat this man on national television and our lynch mob nation - hungry for blood - cheered.

If I were interviewing Mr. What's-His-Name I would infuriate the American public by asking him the most ridiculously softball questions imaginable.

I would start out thus: "So, Mr. What's-His-Name, to paraphrase Nietzsche - we are both above the petty chatter of politics, so I am going to ask you some important questions. Now, we know you are a good and hardworking man. What do you do to unwind?"

Imagine the red-face lynch-hungry Americans jumping off their couches for that one!

I'd finish the interview with the most difficult question of all: "So, Mr. What's-His-Name, what is your favorite flavor of ice cream? Tell me! Don't lie to me! Don't lie to the American public!"

If Jon Stewart had any imagination he would have conducted the interview in such a fashion. But he doesn't have imagination. He's the performer, not the audience. I'm the audience.

Now, Jon, open up your mouth. There ya' go! Open it wide!

Whizzzzzzzzz.... Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle....

Thank goodness I'm still young. I can safely navigate through all of the nonsense until I find my way. I think of someone like Al Goldstein. The wreckage of my life is about .0000000000000001% of his because I'm still young enough to do just about anything (if the world doesn't end on December 21st, 2012.

What's odd about reading Al Goldstein's blog on "Booble" is that it makes ME bitter. Or rather I identify with some of his bitterness. I think of him and perhaps someone like the Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey. Both men were somewhat contemporary with my Grandfather. Think Lawrence Welk to Elvis Presley to Charles Manson, etc... Watching interviews with them they speak in the vernacular of that time. And I think: Wow! That time was superior! I was born toward the end of that time, but by the time I was old enough to go out and enjoy for myself things had become just so bland and lifeless.

Al Goldstein certainly lived the life. He fucked over 7,000 women, hung out with Hugh Hefner, fought First Amendment battles, and made Plato's Retreat his home away from home. He watched Lenny Bruce in the Village. He interviewed John Lennon, etc... Where are all of these people today? Just a bunch of bland corporate clones. Why was I not young and viable in the New York City of the late 1970s? People of quality in my generation have missed out!!! All we have are the Pussycat Dolls and Disturbed. Not to mention bland, lifeless, soulless corporate porn.

I lifted this from Al's blog:

-------

"I just got back from a four-day trip to the Internext Expo in Fort Lauderdale where Booble sprung for my flight and a swank hotel room to press the flesh and present the Booble Girl of the Year award to Lisa Sparxxx. The plan was to make a speech, continue my run for the presidency and hopefully get laid.

Booble treated me very well and they are a great group of people but I have to say that meeting the other companies down there made me want to blow my brains out. The pornographers of today are complete bores. It was like being at an accountant’s convention without the fascinating spreadsheet macro-shortcut presentation.

Speaking to the pseudo-dead webmasters was like talking to a bunch of corpses in a cemetery. As I walked around the expo and met people, I kept waiting for a dead hand to grab my leg from underneath the floorboard.

Two years ago or so, I worked for a streaming video company and there I learned that nothing distinguishes one porno company from another. Differentiating them is like studying the anomalies in assholes and splitting asshairs.

Fuck films are identical as turds and nowadays so are the companies that produce and deliver them. Some are shaped like a snowflake and others like the letter “L” – but they both smell bad and both are still shit.

The movies are one cliché piled onto another and the men who purvey this are equally dumb and boring. The guy I worked for at the streaming video company was actually a good guy and I was sorry that I quit. I was just embarrassed by the content of the product.

Even though I still masturbate every other day, which is impressive at my age, I am still handcuffed to the same footage. The girl’s faces and bodies change but it’s the same moaning and groaning. Each girl carries on like she has never seen a cock before or looks like an emaciated Auschwitz survivor with garish fake books. To this day, and all the women I have been with, not one has ever begged me to cum on their tits, like I see in porno films every day.

Porn makes marriage and intimacy much more difficult and these knowing, cold-hard-fact webmasters are pimps in a black ghetto pushing their hookers onto unsuspecting welfare-check recipients. They are manure pushers (except for Bob of course).

At the end of the Expo, when there were just a few straddlers left, I felt like I was in a leper colony filled with young, yuppie, pimpled punks. None of them had ever even heard of me! If it weren’t for me they wouldn’t exist.

I did not get laid either but I did jerk off in my expensive hotel room to some run-of-the-mill porn. There were many 18-21 year old hot girls down there yet because my empire and to these webmasters, my legacy, no longer exists - they had no use for me."

-----

Al mentioned in another blog that he felt like an anachronism. I think anyone who ever had a heart, a soul, a belly full of guts or a head full of dreams must feel like an anachronism. I know I do.

Think of just one person from the past (Lenny Bruce, etc...) and one place from pop history (Plato's Retreat, etc...) and one will realize what horrifying times we live in.

My problem is not that our society has become decadent or depraved. My problem is that our society is not decadent or depraved enough - at least not in the proper way. At least not in a HUMAN way. Our strongest instincts have become the most soulless of commodities, as depressing as the Wall Township Kmart.

And, yes, in a Hegelian fashion, the heroes of the past like Al Goldstein have created the HELLISH anomie of today. Come to think of it, from day one Al Goldstein built his own HELL, PRISON CELL, and WORST NIGHTMARE.

Yes, nowadays porn producers are pimple-faced California jocks who have never READ A BOOK or heard of Al Goldstein. Al Goldstein made it possible for JOCKS who hate both the body and the mind to produce the ultimate oxymoron: STERILE FILTH. (That's a good one! I wonder if I thought of that or accidentally plagiarized it? Who knows and who cares nowadays? Nowadays accidental plagiarism or Anxiety of Influence should be the least of an intelligent person's worries.)

I must say that I also like Al Goldstein because Al Goldstein brings me back to when I myself was happier and, yes, more successful even! Al Goldstein saved me from the loneliness when I moved to a tiny little room in Manhattan when I was just 19 years old. I had just escaped from a horrid, brutal, violent, provincial cesspool in New Jersey and I had this whole new world of sex, drugs, and Rock N' Roll right before me. Then I had my own pitfalls.

By the time I had pulled out of that mess I was writing for metro which, unfortunately, has still been the closest I have come to any kind of mainstream or even counterculture success. When I think of what it was like to see my very original thoughts in a major publication almost every week I too have to remind myself that I am only 28 and that I can get published again. But whooey! Will I ever be able to recapture the magic of my time with metro? I hope so.

But anyway, by this time I found out Al Goldstein had ended up homeless and I wrote a metro column about him, indentifying and sympathizing with his plight. So Al Goldstein played a part in two of the happiest and most productive periods of my adult life. One before my mess and the other just as I was pulling out of it.

But then even THAT time seems like a long time ago. The summer of 2004 when everyone was talking about Bush vs. Kerry and New York City seemed like the only sane place in the entire country (most of the country was Red back then.) Now when I talk about 2004 I sound like an old fogey. I sound like Anton LaVey talking about pulp fiction and Tin Pan Alley records or I sound like Al Goldstein talking about Studio 54 or John Lennon's assassination. Even I am OLD!!! I sometimes feel like I've been aging by the second and time is somehow speeding up before we all get sucked into that black hole in 2012.

No wonder I never fit in. No wonder I was always ready and willing while the others appeared clueless or uninterested.

But are there any answers? I think of an acquaintance who wrote a poem in which he mentioned the post-postmodern. Is the post-postmodern possible? Now I suppose it is. The postmodern was roving teen gangs and orgy clubs. The post-postmodern are skateboarding black kids talking on i-Phones and Internet porn produced by brainless surfers.

Things have gotten so bad that I think the only answer is to become a Luddite.

The Sociopath Series #1: Enthusiasm Over Precision

I was a sociopath long before sociopathy became cool. But everyone copies me. Everyone imitates me. Everyone rips off my style. I wouldn't be surprised if some would attempt to rip off my own work - which is impossible anyway. I have no doubt I shall one day be deemed "Holy". One day all of my blogs will make up a Bible for a new global religion. Everyone bites off me.

Anyway, I was a sociopath long before it was cool to be a sociopath. In a way I go through my life thinking like a sociopath.

Then again I'm not a full-blow sociopath. I simply have a Neanderthal brain. Neanderthals had the "old" brains: creative and intuitive. In the fight for dominance and survival the "new" brains - practical, precise, efficient, cold, dry, unimaginative - won out. And this is the world they have created, for better and for worse.

But some of us are a bit more Neanderthal - in the best possible way. I read an interesting article recently speculating that Jews may be descended from Neanderthals. This may explain their many accomplishments in so many fields. Practical and Precise is what keeps things moving, but "creative" and "intuitive" is what pushes us and advances human evolution.

I've always felt like a Jew. There are rumors that I may have strong infusions of Jewish blood. My mother - like many extremely unintelligent people - was an anti-Semite.

I had problems with my mother, but it wasn't just because she was a cunt. It was because we were literally members of different species.

This may explain my oft-stated aversion to Herd Animals. My distaste for them may be primordial. My spirit and enthusiasm has always been in a primal fight against their practicalness.

All I know is I am grateful for imagination and I am my own narcissistic best company. I know how to amuse myself.

Margie Stimpkinfuckshit works at the local Quick Check. When I go there to buy a fruit drink and she is working I think: "There is my Porn Star buddy." My nickname for her is "The Porn Star".

Margie is about 60 years old. She weighs close to 300lbs. She has short gray hair and soft, flabby skin, like a pheasant. Deep wrinkles cut and carve out her pockets of dim-witted features: not much happens behind her bovine eyes.

For some reason every time I see her I think "Porn Star". When I see her I begin thinking like a porn casting director. Where could I MARKET her? I suppose it is only because I have seen women even less attractive than her in porn clips.

The only question is: How much would it cost to buy her? How much would I have to pay her to get her to have sex on camera? I'll bet I could buy her for $10,000 max. Most people on planet earth would slit their mother's throat for $1,000 - let alone a huge sume like $10,000. Actually, I bet I could get her for $1,000. She'd probably be so flattered she'd do it for $100.

I would like to see her become a Susan Boyle. I would like to see Margie aka Porn Star become a huge celebrity in "Porn Valley". I'd like to see her hang out at the sleazier end of a Los Angeles "beautiful people" scene. I'd like to think of her going to a pool party at a multimillion dollar mansion wearing nothing but a G-String. As a matter of fact I would like to see a poolside lesbian make-out between her and Susan Boyle.

Should I have mercy for inferior outcasts? I was always an outcast, but I was always cast out for being SUPERIOR - not INFERIOR. Should I have mercy for them. Should I be a shepherd for all outcasts? Is that my duty as a Christian? Wait - I'm not a Christian. And I'm no longer even plagued by everpresent anomie.

Oh, I'm a nice person. I don't hurt anyone. I just can't help speculating on the trajectory of Margie's possible porn career. Does having such type thoughts about everyone every second of every day make me a sociopath or just imaginative?

I'll opt for the latter.

Oh, and by the way: What does the argument of Enthusiasm Over Precision have to do with any of this?

What it has to do with this is: I am disabled by my spirit and enthusiasm. I could care less about precision. THIS IS EXACTLY THE REASON WHY IT HAS BEEN SO HARD FOR ME TO KEEP A JOB. For me it is more important to WORK HARD than WORK SMART. I love - LOVE - rowing with my oars out of the water! Rowing with oars out of the water is nobler than efficiency.

When I look at someone like Margie aka Porn Star I see a dull-witted cow who is nonetheless PRECISE and EFFICIENT. A part of me is subconsciously jealous of her.

Well, not really.

Deirdre: A Jersey Story

Deirdre Weinberg was my second crush. "What is it with you and those Jews?" my Mother would always say. To me, Deirdre represented everything my mother WAS NOT.

"Those who do not hate their father and mother cannot be my students, and those who do not hate their brothers and sisters and bear the cross as I do will not be worthy of me." - Jesus Christ, the Gospel of Thomas.

I think I'm going to make a commitment to investigate Gnosticism.

But, then again, EVERY girl I have ever loved, "crushed on", or dated, etc... has represented what my mother was NOT.

Deirdre was four years older than me. She was my cousin Meghan's best friend. She was BEAUTIFUL. Long, curly, dirty-blonde hair. And, oh her body! She always had the body of a woman. And she was known as a royal whore who - in the words of Richard Price - "fucked niggers and nazis for breakfast." Don't worry. I have no intentions of shooting up a Holocaust museum. Why would I?

Deirdre was DANGEROUS and SEDUCTIVE. YOUTHFUL and WOMANLY at the same time. She was the 80s teen movie goddess, she was Cindy Mancini from "Can't Buy Me Love", the captain of the cheerleaders.

Deirdre was also very NICE to me. I was a little boy with a crush on her and what girl does not find that to be adorable? She always went out of her way to talk to me, to chat with me, to joke with me, to even innocently flirt with me. I will never truly say a bad word about Deirdre because Deirdre was always GOOD to me, NICE to me, KIND to me. Why? Because, well, I was a cute little boy. And all of her indulgence just made me love her MORE. And if only she knew of the sexual fantasies I had about her! Oh, her dressed up as an Egyptian Empress, me sucking on her toes, fucking her, worshipping her in some palace on the Nile basin. If only she knew of that! Maybe she would have gone for it as I got older.

Ultimately, Deirdre grew to be tragic. I, of course, was not happy about this because everyone could see the folly of her ways except for her.

Deirdre developed an addiction to tanning beds. Between that and heavy drinking she looked like she was 60 by the time she was 20.

If tanning beds are a "white girl" thing then they are also a Jersey thing. It goes along with the "motorin" activities known as "guidoing". The way kids in Iowa tip cows, kids in Jersey drink cheap beer, smoke Parliament Lights, Marlboro Lights, and Newport Lights, hang out in all-night diners and use these sort of jockish/fratboyish slang words and catch phrases. The girls like to say "Hey you!"

Tanning beds are big in Jersey because what do you see when you go out to Jenk's? You see tanned girls - who look like Deirdre - drinking Miller Lites and being treated like movie stars. Deirdre just developed an addiction (I'll be the first to admit that light hitting the skin feels good) and took it all too far, to excess, like a person with a dysmorphic disorder.

What's odd is that both Samantha and Deirdre grew up to be that particular type of girl. Two girls I had major, life-altering crushes on. Maybe because they were perceived as "cool" or "hip" I saw them contrary to my mother. Now I'm no longer interested in either one of them, of course.

I would, of course, never want Deirdre to read this. I don't see any reason why she would. I don't see how she would find this. I'm sure she remembers me, but I doubt very much if she thinks of me very often. So no harm, no foul. Just a story.

Why I do what I do

Yea! The Asbury Park Press published my letter today, my letter on how absolutely nothing will change even if our country becomes "North Mexico". Yes, I like attacking white bigots, but there's more of a reason for why I do what I do.

Basically, I'm trying to build a spaceship. When I was a little boy I spent hours in the backyard hammering boards together in an attempt to make a spaceship.

Now I'm trying to build a spaceship out of meta, to sail away from this common earth to a glorious alien paradise full of sex, love, interestingness, endless novelty, and eternal individuality and subjectivity. Each piece of writing I get out there is another scrap on the hull of this spaceship.

In the end - like everything else that is any good - this is an entirely solipsistic enterprise. I care most about myself and the people in my microcosm. We can know LIFE. The others can stay here.

Diddy Bop, Shitty Pop, and the Hitler Youth

I think of a passage from the Stephen King book "Danse Macabre":

"We sat there in our seats like dummies, staring at the manager. He looked nervous and sallow - or perhaps that was only the footlights. We sat wondering what kind of catastrophe could have caused him to stop the movie just as it was reaching that apotheosis of all Saturday matinee shows: 'the good part.' And the way his voice trembled when he spoke did not add to anyone's sense of well-being.

'I want to tell you,' he said in that trembly voice, 'that the Russians have put a space satellite into orbit around earth. They call it... Spootnik.'

This piece of intelligence was greeted by absolute, tomblike silence. We just sat there a theaterful of 1950s kids with crew cuts, whiffle cuts, ponytails, ducktails, crinolines, chinos, jeans with cuffs, Captain Midnight rings; kids who had just discovered Chuck Berry and Little Richard on New York's only black rhythm and blues station, which we could get at night, wavering in and out like a powerful jive language from a distant planet. We were the kids who grew up on Captain Video and Terry and the Pirate. We were the kids who had seen Combat Casey kick the teeth out of North Korean gooks without number in the comic books. We were the kids who saw Richard Carlson catch thousands of commie dirty spies in 'I Led Three Lives'. We were the kids who had ponied up a quarter apiece to watch Hugh Marlowe in 'Earth vs. the Flying Saucers' and got this piece of upsetting news as kind of a nasty bonus.

I remember this very clearly: cutting through that awful dead silence came one shrill voice, whether that of a boy or girl I do not know; a voice that was near tears but that was also full of a frightening anger: 'Oh, go show the movie, you liar!'"

That one line: "Oh, go show the movie, you liar!" somehow sums up everything one will ever need to know about the Herd. This line contains their two best qualities: FEAR and HATRED.

Could you imagine if a theater manager today interrupted Pixar's "Up" to tell the audience that a lone 28 year old in New Jersey refuses to own a cellphone? I would guarantee you that someone from the audience would shout in fear and anger: "Oh, go show the movie, you liar!"

Imagine if I took on the average 18 year old girl as a lover/protege. Imagine me trying to explain to her why it is most important to not own a cellphone. She would regard me the way a 1950s ten year old girl would regard a brutish, hulking, alcoholic child-rapist with hairy arms. I would say "cellphones are bad" and she would say: "Aw, buzz off! Buzz off, crumb-bum! Get lost, creepo! Leemee alone! Lemme alone! Get your meathooks off of me!"

A girl today would not use those words, of course. She would say: "Yo son, step off, dawg!" but the feeling behind the words would be the same. She would consider my criticism of cellphones to be a crime more heinous than the rape and murder of a ten year old child. Raping and killing a small child is forgivable. Refusing to own a cellphone is unforgivable under any circumstances.

Needless to say I would not be able to turn such a young girl into a Nietzschean with nice legs and smooth skin. She is a bovine, a reproducing bovine. Women were always the first to burn witches and heretics. Not that I hate women. The worst are the SS of Conformity, but the best are nobler than the best men.

My problem with kids today is not that they're depraved. They're not depraved enough - at least not in a healthy way. My problem with kids today is not that they're drugged-out. Wrong. If you're lucky you will do a TON of drugs in your younger years. It's not that they're sex-crazed and sexually immoral. It's that they hate sex with a puritanical passion. They have a Will to Robotize sex. And it's not that music today is too loud or too crazy. My problem is that music today is not loud or crazy enough.

Which brings me to...

"Shitty Pop."

When I was a little boy I always used to watch Madonna's "Truth or Dare" movie on illegal Pay-Per-View. Madonna was the ultimate woman, the prototype for real-life crushes. I had many sexual fantasies about Madonna.

In one scene from the "film", Madonna is playing a kinky game of Truth or Dare with her androgynous black/Hispanic dancers. She pulls out her beautiful breasts and one of the dancers says in the lispy, lilting, sing-song dialect of a native Brooklyn African-American hipster dance queer: "Madonna's titties!'

So sometimes I'll be walking around the house and I'll find myself saying those two words - Madonna's titties - in the exact same voice, just for fun. Sometimes I'll find myself saying, in the exact same voice: "Shitty Pop!" and I never knew why. Well, now I know.

For some reason those words - a turd popsicle - were lodged in my unconscious. Why? Well, for one reason and one reason only: To attack P. Diddy and espouse my economic doctrine on blogspot.

Diddy recently came out with a song called "Diddy Bop". What does that rhyme with?

P. Diddy is unoriginal and untalented. He's the king of uns and uns are negative.

P. Diddy likes to rap about MONEY! Wow! Well, that's new! Very original!

Why are rappers so obsessed with money? What's most important is NOT making money. It's very important to remain at a moderate (but not severe) level of poverty throughout life. One should have just enough for a comfortable survival and a few material luxuries.

The problem with being rich is that the entire world becomes a strip club. You can have all the women (or men) that you want, but it is impossible to know if any of them like you for you. Right now I subsist at such a level of poverty that I know that anyone who likes me must really like ME! Being broke and having sex with two girls at the same time in a shack is better than being rich and having sex with 2,000 girls in a specially-built orgy room. Who would want a world filled with six billion fawning prostitutes? Spare me from ever being rich. If I ever "make it" I'll give my money away hand over fist. Wealth is a curse I would not wish on my worst enemy. This philosophy, of course, flies in the face of our society's most deeply-held values.

Rap, which was born from a "disenfranchised" community has become the biggest, strongest, hippest, and most popular supporter of the same system that "disenfranchised" the black community in the first place. That being said, Chuck Berry is much more "obscene" than someone like Ludacris. Subtletly is what raises the hairs on the back of one's neck and sends chills up spines. Luda is a gynecological exam - nothing obscene about that. To go back to the Stephen King passage, of course.

I want to see a rapper who raps about NOT making money. THAT would be ORIGINAL.

But P. Diddy has been just about everything but original.

Lenny Bruce was a genius because he mocked what was sacred in his time: Christianity.

I am a genius because I mock what is sacred in our time: chatter.

An Unintentionally Christian Blog

Early December, 2008. I had, arguably, never been more depressed. It's something to wake up in the morning and not know or remember who you are. I was tired, fatigued. My thinking was muddled. My emotions were flat. The pain was sharp. I was drinking heavily. Cans of beer and bottles of cheap jug wine littered the house.

I looked out my window. Someone had installed a large, blow-up Santa balloon on their front lawn. My heart swelled with hatred. People put up such ugliness on their lawns. Why does the working-class try to imitate the bourgeois? Well, the bourgeois are generally superior - a Marxist I am NOT! Or, well, they are all pieces of shit. But really, how could anyone put such ugliness on a front lawn?

The next night I looked out and the Santa was deflated. Defeated. I felt terrible. Guilty. Even mildly heartsick. I started weeping. I felt so bad. My Dad had one of those ugly balloons on his lawn - a New York Giants balloon. Yes, these people were alien extraterrestrials to me. Or, rather, I was an alien extraterrestrial to them. But, really, were they so bad? Were they so bad? Or was I bad?

I saw the man who had installed the Santa. He was just trying to be happy. He was just trying to be happy. He was just trying to be happy. I kept saying this to myself as I wept into a pillow so hard I almost vomited. He was just trying to be happy. Life's too short to be sad. And then I started weeping again. How much of my life had been wasted in unhappiness? I wept for him, for them, for myself, for those I've loved, and for the human race in general. I wept because we all have to die.

The night after that the Santa was inflated again, like a testament to the human spirit. I was so glad I started weeping again.