And when we go crashing down we come back every time

This Is Why People Have Kids' Parties at Kids' Party Places Like Pump It Up or a GodDamn Bowling Alley: A Partial List

• 16 fairies, with wings
• 2 little brothers
• 1 babysitter who was so helpful I should have paid her $500
• 1 parent who was so helpful I probably embarrassed her with the effusiveness of my thanks
• A fairy house painting craft (fucking Pinterest, goddamn) that was actually rather a success
• A cake parade (18 kids marching through the house shouting CAAAAKE! CAKE CAKE CAKE CAKE CAKE!!!, much like drunken adults at a bar when that "Shots" song comes on)
• A fairy dance party (primarily to Taylor Swift's entire 1989 album,* purchased online for the occasion, on repeat)
• The pin the wand on the fairy game (I forgot both the eye covering -- eventually using a scarf that, well ... I just really hope none of those kids had lice that night -- and the fact that there's supposed to be a prize for the winner)
• A fairy egg hunt in the gloaming, which served as the distribution for and stuffing of goodie bags 

Mr. Gleemonex and I are exhausted, but the party was a hit, and Kid Gleemonex was thrilled and grateful (oh my heck, one only turns eight once, doesn't one, after all?), and we are NEVER DOING THAT AGAIN.

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*Here's how you know a person is An Old: They still call it an album and honestly can't think what the fuck else they're supposed to call it so shut up 

Oh, yew've had PLENNY a honeymoons -- ya have one every time ya meet a boy!

Men I Have, at Various Points of My Life, Been Certain I Would Marry: A Partial List

--Kevin Bacon (1984-85)
--Matthew Sweet (1990-93)
--Andre Agassi (1988-91)
--Charlie Sheen (1989-92)
--Christian Slater (1989-91*)
--Michael Jackson (1983-86)
--George Harrison (1987-89)
--David Bowie (1986-88)
--this guy Tim that was my mom's friend and almost certainly gay as a tangerine (1980-90)

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*Entry appears solely because of stuff people wrote in my yearbooks. I do not remember feeling this way about him at all. But apparently I did, for awhile? 

Upon reflection, I'd have to give this one a pass.

23/40

One of the fun things about being my age and having small kids is getting to revisit a lot of the stuff you knew about three or three and a half decades ago. There's a lot of WTF involved.

The Revisit: Peter Pan (Disney, 1953)

We watched this over the xmas break on family movie night, figuring it'd be OK for both kids (ages 6 and 2) and the grandparents. Well ... yes and no. There was no cursing, sex or violence, but yikes, that thing was NOT what I remembered from the once or twice I saw it as a kid.

The story itself is pretty thin -- it'd be about 30 minutes if they told it straight. But then they go and add all this crap about the whole family tiptoeing around this blustery clumsterfoot of a domineering dad, which makes me not like the Darling family much. And then and THEN they have this really long (like 15 minute) super crazy racist scene at a "powwow" with what Kid Gleemonex, bless 'er, called "Native Americans" -- big old red hook-nosed Injun "braves" and nasty "squaws" and one suspiciously pale young princess (because only light-skinned people can be pretty), all this "How!" and "Big Chief smoke-um pipe" business that just went on for god.damned.EVER. Plus there is this longer-than-necessary scene with the deliberately pre-pubescent/latent Peter Pan and these clearly adult and super, SUPER-cunty mermaids who get their mer-vajays all stretched sideways over the amount of attention he pays to young miss Wendy -- it's pretty fucked up, honestly. Not Judy-Garland-as-Dorothy-Gale fucked-up, but close.

White History

10/40 

A little filler item I am 90 percent sure I wrote, from the February 8, 1983 edition of What's Up Elementary?, produced by me and my posse in Miss B.'s 3rd grade class,* a class-time-eating project I'm certain we badgered the kindly Miss B. into:

George WashingtonGeorge Washington is the Father of our country. From the time he was 20 to the time of his death, Washington was a great man. If Washington had not had the courage he showed, we would not be here today.

Now, it's not the writing I'm annoyed with -- I've seen worse by college-degree-holding adults who are paid to produce content for a living, right? (Although it does kind of make you wonder, hilariously, what kind of lesser-man shenanigans GW was up to before the age of 20.) No, it's the one-sided, whitewashed version of history it presents. Kids, then and now, are/were taught such white-hero-worshipping bullshit, completely lacking in nuance and perspective. And I don't know how to resolve this, even as it's becoming an issue with my own kids. 

For instance: The other day, Kid Gleemonex asks me on the way to swim practice, "How do you get to be Native American?"** I say it's not something you do; it's a matter of being a descendant of the peoples who lived on this continent before European "discovery" (yes I used air quotes) and colonization. "So they're still around today?" Yes, but in much smaller numbers than they would have been otherwise. "Because the Europeans killed them?" Yes ... "On purpose?" Well, yeah -- "But WHYYY?" [Ten-minute monologue on how the Europeans decided they liked this land and wanted it for themselves, and it didn't matter that there were already people living on it, and they said to get out and if the native people refused, they would fight and kill the native people, and they won most of the battles because they had guns and the natives didn't. Also smallpox, which may or may not have been on purpose.] Kid Gleemonex ruminates on this in silence. 

Then she has to go join her class in the pool, and I think I've just had a brilliant idea: A series of Real History books for kids. We don't have to go deep on the genocides, it doesn't have to be gory, but I'm deeply uncomfortable now with e.g. the "story of Thanksgiving" that they are taught, as if that's the whole story and everything was jake forever afterward between the colonists and the native peoples, la la la. I hate the lauding of Christopher Columbus (eeesh), the uncritical presentation of Manifest Destiny, the entirety of the way that the Civil War is taught. Gaah. These are the kinds of things I felt like such a fool, such a dupe, such a naive chucklehead about when I got to college, and lots of people never are forced to confront other ideas and narratives, so they keep going through life all "Christopher Columbus was a brave explorer! Wheee!"

Annnnnd ... I'm done writing but have made no point. Go fetch Gramma some more bourbon. 

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*Incidentally, in several ways revealing a lifelong tendency to put me and my posse front and center in whatever journalistic enterprise I undertook, from this slim news volume to the high school yearbook to this very blog.

**At least now they're teaching them the term Native American, instead of Indians like back in my day.

Well, at least we got Samantha Mathis goin' for us.

Shatner bless the teachers, parents and administrators who put up with my ungrateful bullshit back in the day.

This was my nametag from the UIL Academic State Meet in 1991 (with my actual name redacted to protect myself from dying of shame). I wore this for two days straight, throughout the competition, the social events, the actual contest, the awards ceremony. It was my way of givin 'em the what-for, showing my speshul youneekness, letting everyone know how badass I was -- I might be competing in an extremely nerdy academic event at the state level, it snarls, but I am an iconoclast who cannot be contained in your straight, uptight, matchy-matchy little boxes! I'm destroying the System from the inside! Look on my nametag, you sheep, and despair!  

Change a hawk to dove, stop a war with love

We really need to talk about Wonder Woman. I bet you're all, "Girl superhero! Awesome! Kick his ass, Sea Bass!" But no.

First, like I said a couple of weeks ago, that origin story of hers is complete bunkum. And what lame superpowers she has: spinning, lassoing, talking to animals, flying an invisible jet. Super strength is pretty good, I guess, but there's not enough of it.

Secondly, OMFG was the 70s TV show horrible. I mean -- I watch a lot of bad TV, but this? This is ... outrageously fucking bad. Stupefyingly craptacular production values, even for 70s TV; tons of unironic blaring from the brass section of the made-for-teevee orchestra; worst theme song ever ("in yer satin tights / fightin for your riiights"); amazing long stretches of not a goddamn thing happening. And Lynda Carter -- oh honey. Lynda, if you've Googled yourself and this post comes up, you should stop reading right now, cause I'm sure you're a real nice lady and I don't want to give you a hard time but this is gonna hurt your feelings: I'm pretty sure Shatner's ballsack could out-act her, all by its grey-curly-furred lonesome. It's like she's not a native speaker of English,* and has learned her lines phonetically, with the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LAH-bles. Dig this, in which she's getting a new assignment -- putrefaction has set in. And Debra Winger as Wonder Girl -- the younger sister of Wonder Woman, doncha know -- might be even worse. They've got her made up as some sort of bobby-soxer (the series started out set in the 40s, for completely unknowable reasons), and it's possible she's a prototype of the singing dog/lion animatron thingies at Chuck E. Cheese, because I can't find a spark of genuine humanity in there at all.

Finally, in the kids' picture books they have nowadays, featuring all the superheroes, she looks like a porn star who's trying to go legit but she doesn't really know how the legit world acts and -- heartbreakingly -- all her office clothes for her respectable office job are from Victoria's Secret. She works out with her friends Batman and Superman -- training and such -- and then has brunch with them. Brunch, yes -- in which B&S look like a couple of really cut young dudebros who are totally into each other in a committed life-partner way (not that there's anything wrong with that -- I'm just not sure it's canon).

Why do I know all this? Oh, you know why. The kid's obsessions (who could have imagined how many thousand clips and mixes of this fucking show would be on YouTube? WHO???) respect no mental boundaries.

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*Which, incidentally, is the code by which we used to refer to Hispanic job applicants back when I worked at the high-end nanny agency in San Francisco. That hell-cunt of a boss of mine would be all, "Does she have English as her first language?" And that answer would be how the applicant got placed in the pool, salary-wise and posh-job-wise. That was FUCKED UP. 

M is for Mrs. Scott Strauss, which is also my name.

Movie Boyfriends of the Golden Age of Teen Cinema, As Assessed By Teenage Me and Grown-Ass Woman Me: The Third In a Series.

7) RANDALL "PINK" FLOYD, Dazed and Confused

---Teenage (well, 20-year-old) Me: Hey now! Great hair, hips look real nice in them jeans, social chameleon, athletic but not beefy, stoner but not dangerous, nice to kids, music fan, stubborn streak a mile wide -- this right here is the guy for me.

---Grown-Ass Woman Me: Indeed. I mean, he'd grow out of adoring his own teen rebelliousness bullshit, right? Surely. He did have the kind of clarity about peaking in high school that your popular types usually don't, so I'd double down on young Mr. Floyd here.

8) BRYAN, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead

---Teenage Me: AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH DEAD POETS SOCIETY! So cute, so sweet. I will go on a date with him and then I will put my mouth on his mouth!

---Grown-Ass Woman Me: Srsly. Dead Poets Society. Future marine biologist. Goofy, fun date ideas. We don't have to live in the same house as his megabitch sister, so: this'll work.

9) FERRIS BUELLER, Ferris Bueller's Day Off

---Teenage Me: "He's going to marry me." [swoons, dies]

---Grown-Ass Woman Me: Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want? Yes, still. God, what a great high-school boyfriend Ferris would've made. Not sure about the long game, but were I Sloane in that moment, you goddamn right I would've married him that day. It would've made a great story, even after we went to separate colleges and got divorced. Totally worth it.

--------------------------

Still to come: Knox Overstreet, Jake Ryan, J.D., and more ...

This a Barksdale joint, yo.

Movie Boyfriends of the Golden Age of Teen Cinema, As Assessed By Teenage Me and Grown-Ass Woman Me: The Second In a Series.

4) DANNY POPE, Running on Empty*

---Teenage Me: River Phoenix. Tears. Longing. The courage of his convictions! He's a musician. Christ would you lookit those eyes. That hair! And he loves Martha Plimpton! WANT. MUST HAVE.

---Grown-Ass Woman Me: River Phoenix. Tears. Longing. The courage of his convictions! He's a musician. Christ would you lookit those eyes. That hair! And he loves Martha Plimpton! WANT. MUST HAVE.

5) BRAND, The Goonies

---Teenage Me: You mean the guy who’s all het up about Kerry Green? She’s way too much prettier than me, I can’t have him, plus he’s old, so forget about it.

---Grown-Ass Woman Me: Well well well, what have we here? Classic older bro – busy with his own life, dismissive of the kid brother and his dork friends, but good-looking and in the end, heroic and a really stand-up guy; deals well with failure (just gets back in the saddle); gets to kiss the pretty girl finally. And turns into Josh Brolin later. Hmm. Yes, yes indeed.

6) JOHN BENDER, The Breakfast Club

---Teenage Me: Bad-ASS!!!! Kind of scary, but really funny. Tempting, verrry tempting. Still – too far outside the boundaries in general. No way he goes to church. We can sign each other’s yearbooks, though, and I’ll parlay that one kiss into a much bigger mythology about myself that I can tell people for the next few years.

---Grown-Ass Woman Me: Son, you got a lot of Issues you need to deal with. Seriously.

Still to come: Randall "Pink" Floyd, Marty McFly, Edward Scissorhands, Ferris Bueller, Jake Ryan, and many more ...

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*It could be argued that Running on Empty is not a "teen movie" in the classic sense, in that there aren't a lot of hijinx and it's actually a pretty serious movie that got a lot of critical attention -- but it has River Phoenix so shut up.

What's with these homies dissin my girl? Why do they gotta front?

Movie Boyfriends of the Golden Age of Teen Cinema, As Assessed By Teenage Me and Grown-Ass Woman Me: The First In a Series.

1) BLAINE, Pretty In Pink

---Teenage Me: Wow he's pretty. Nice hair. Doesn't embarrass me like Duckie, and OK, he waffles sometimes, but we got to dance together at prom in front of that bitch what's-her-name, Kate Vernon, so: Yay, Blaine!

---Grown-Ass Woman Me: Jesus, you are a weakling. Can't even be man enough to tell me whether we're still going to the goddamn prom together? Willing to ditch me because I'm A Poor? Totally under the thumb of your boy Steph the once and future date-rapist? Get the fuck outta here.

2) KEITH, Some Kind of Wonderful

---Teenage Me: Ohhhhh, what an awesome date he planned out for us! And what a romantic gesture, those diamond earrings! [swoon]

---Grown-Ass Woman Me: IDIOT. Jewelry? You drain your college fund for DIAMONDS to give to a HIGH-SCHOOL GIRL? That's the only thing worse than that awful painting, although, you know, bless you for the effort there. [hairpats] On the plus side, who knew you'd age so well? You turned kind of hot sometime in the last 20 years ... hmm. Still: IDIOT.

3) Mark Ratner, Fast Times at Ridgemont High

---Teenage Me: No. I'm not dating anybody smaller than me.

---Grown-Ass Woman Me: Ehhhh ... on the one hand, he at least isn't a date-rapist like two other dudes I know. But he's the kind of high-school dork that you can't tell whether he's going to grow up into a semi-dorky but awesome guy, or stay hopelessly dorky forever. Tough call ... I guess he'll do, for now. As a sort of friend-boyfriend. We'll practice kissing, he won't knock me up, we'll sort of drift apart when he gets really heavily into some Dork Activity and I finally figure out how pretty I really am* and start owning that instead of letting it get me into bad relationships with crappy guys.

*And by "I," I mean Jennifer Jason Leigh/Stacy. Not I, Gleemonex.

------------------------

Still to come: Randall "Pink" Floyd, Marty McFly, Brandon Walsh [Goonies, not 90210], Danny Pope, Edward Scissorhands, Ferris Bueller, Jake Ryan, and many more ...

Just wait till YOU need a favor from Ferris!

Note to self: When you see a handful of very clean, bright-eyed white late-teen/early-twenties semi-hipsters dealing out brand-name chewy granola bars + engaging, friendly grins before 9:00 a.m. on Market street in San Francisco, California, your assumption should be that the little cards accompanying the free granola treats are Jesus-related, not granola-bar-coupon related. For shame, eager consumer, for shame. Clean people don't just hand you free stuff in San Francisco. There's always a catch.

"His brain is squirming like a toad." What? Srsly. What?

OK, this I got via a link from the inimitable Sars:

Morrison was immortalized first by death at 27 and then by three generations of college kids who needed a poster to cover up a creepy-looking stain in their dorm room. That voice plus thirty pounds of extra flab wouldn’t have gotten Jim Morrison past the cattle-call round of “American Idol.”

And I laaaaaaaaaughed and laughed and laughed. Because y’all, Jim Morrison is the most jive frontman of the most jive band ever (Buddyhead says that title actually goes to Courtney Taylor of the Dandy Warhols, but in this instance and ONLY in this instance, they are wrong. I love the Dandy Warhols. Suck it, Buddyhead!).

I had my Morrison/Doors phase. If you are a straight female, a gay male, or a nascent music person of any gender or orientation, you had your Morrison/Doors phase too. Some of you may still be in yours, and for that, I’m sorry (unless you’re still fifteen, in which case you’ll get over it I hope, or you’re coming out of a lifetime of repression in some weird religious subculture, in which case you just go ahead and do what you need to do, old kid old sock).

Mine coincided with the release of the Doors movie (which my friend Lebowski was an extra in! woo!), and that only fueled the fire. The stupid, stupid fire. Plus also the still-awesome Danny Sugerman book, Wonderland Avenue. That shit had me writing Doors quotes all over my textbook covers and in yearbook signings for sure,y’all. Lizard King, Jesus H. Shatner with long locks, leather pants and a hairless chest … oi.

And with the exception of “People Are Strange,” which is truly a cool weird awesome little song, the music … ugh. Blow City, USA.

Thus has it been written, so let it be told across the land.

Three days of hairy a-holes boring the t**s off of you.

Woodstock. Can we please stop fucking talking about Woodstock? When I was a teen in the 80s with a very murky but wistful sense of what the 60s were like (formed mostly by Time-Life Books, the Freedom Rock commercials, and stuff lying around in my parents’ attic), I thought it would have been sooo cool. But eventually I sorted the cultural wheat from the cultural chaff, and realized Woodstock was bullshit – everything I hate about festivals (and holy hungover bong-hitting SHATNER do I hate festivals), plus rain, acres of hair minus hair product, and a bunch of people who felt or came to feel that they were participating in something Rilly Rilly Important. It was a concert, people, with a couple of bright spots in a middling-to-terrible lineup, just like every other all-day outdoor music orgy ever in the history of ever, so can we please quit acting like it Changed The World, and just let it fucking GO?

Gleemonex fun fact: My parents tolerated my endless teenage fangirl prattling about the 60s – which they LIVED IN – quite gracefully. Then a couple of years before my dad died, the subject of Woodstock came up in conversation, and he goes, “Woodstock was for amateurs.”

You could come back next year as, like, a completely normal person.

Internets, I went to summer camp. Three times, a week each, over three successive summers (after 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th grades) because I DON’T LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES. It was a YMCA yute camp, with all the usual activities and swimming and campfires and shit. I went because I had latched on to the idea of camp as something kickass, via, I’m sure, some of the YA novels I used to read, and but primarily because the week always concluded with a dance on Friday night. With boys. Who did not know me from school. They would only know the Invented Me, the New Jan Brady, who totally always wore cool clothes and Designer Impostors fragrance and knew who Depeche Mode was and was not overshadowed by her pretty, popular younger sister or rock star older brother. You see where this is all going? Yeah, it’s on the express train to Sucktown, no stopping except briefly at Crapville and Dirtburgh to take on more freight. So, less talk, more blog:

Things That Sucked About Camp

It was hot. No surprise – North Central Texas, July. But at home I got to go to my cousins’ pool all day, and hide out at my grandmothers’ houses and drink root beer floats (with Blue Bell ice cream) in sweet, sweet air conditioning. These fools made me be OUT. SIDE. in that shit. Christ was it hot.

There was singing. A lot of it. Sing-a-long, my least favorite kind of singing, after Earnest Teevee Singing.

There were a million bitchy Metroplex girls there. All of whom were cuter than me and had actual boyfriends and knew how to use makeup and talked about their periods all the time (which I was flat not willing to do).

There was a pond. And I had to fucking turn over a canoe in it. On purpose, as part of the lesson in canoeing.

I was homesick as fuck, from minute one till I could see the place in the rearview mirror of my mom’s car on Saturday. Crippling, devastating homesickness, 24/7.

The food tasted like something expressed from a large dog’s anal glands, but they kept us so fucking busy all the damn time that we were hungry enough to eat it up and ask for seconds.

Wildlife. Eight-legged hairy Shatner, y’all – bees, spiders, wasps, hornets, snakes, fire ants, cicadas (which sound cool but have you ever put your hand down next to one of their vacated shells? O god!), all manner of flying nasty beasts and bugs, and the cabins were not shelter enough from the plague.

I only got to ride a horse once, and it took a dump during the trail ride.

The lame, annoying dances didn’t last long enough.

Where are the Frog Brothers when you need them?

OK Internets, goddammit, can we please talk about Twilight for a second?

I know, you’re like, “JESUS H. W. SHATNER, not you, too?!” but take it easy. This is not one of those demoralizing confessions I sometimes throw out at y’all, thank the Pompous, Corseted One. This is where I ask you, seriously, what. the. fuck.

Over the year or so since I first heard of it, I’ve gone from “Not interested, thanks, I’m well past fourteen,” to “Huh, it’s that big a deal, eh? Whatever,” to “Guess I should check it out; after all, I scoffed at Harry Potter till I read it, and that shit fucking rules. Besides, I like YA fiction, done well.” So I had half a mind to stand around in a book store reading it when next I had the chance, but a girl next to me on the bus -- a cute 28-ish Asian woman in professional attire -- unwittingly spared me the effort. She was deeply into what I gather is the first of the series – and given the print size, I joined in with barely a need to conceal the fact that I was reading over her shoulder.

You GUYS. Come ON! Leaving out the fact that it’s about vampires*: There’s all this striding down corridors** and sighing and staring and abrupt turning*** and my god with the ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS! It read like fanfic written by a teenage virgin – just leaden and overwrought and cringe-inducing, the kind of stuff a normal person would find buried in a footlocker in the attic of her parents’ house while home for her 20th high school reunion and realize with shocked and terrified glee that she had a GOLDEN GEM to present at the next Sarah Brown joint -- but instead, this Stephenie Meyer person (who can’t even spell her own name properly) is a multi-millionaire off of it. Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!


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*Which, for fuck’s sake, ladies, can we give this up as a Thing that’s supposed to be sexy? Didn’t Tom Cruise prove beyond doubt that it isn’t?
**Corridors? Seriously, corridors? In millennial America?
***On one’s heel, naturally. Is there any other way?

The harder they fall

OK, there's excess, and then there's excess, and then there's Ski Dubai, which is just fucking ridiculous.

I've long been aware of this bullshittery, but we were watching an episode of Extreme Engineering about it last night so we got the full story, and I almost couldn't stand it -- I was so ... offended. This is a crime against nature, it's a symbol of absolute filthy reckless excess, it's a monument to hubris so gigantic it makes the Titanic look like a modest little rowboat.

Skiing. In the desert. With hundreds of miles of pipes full of caustic chemicals and god knows what labor and energy-suck to keep it cold -- this makes me feel INSANE. It's my generalized Mall Anxiety times about a million. Where are the comets when you need one?

Three days of unholy misery

To the silly bitches talking about your superkewl weekend plans this morning in the cafe, like it makes you Hep or something: You know, I’d LOVE to spend $500 to stand around getting sunburned in the wind (or freezing my entire nipular region off in the windy fog, or perhaps both in the same hour) enduring annoying band after annoying band all goddamn day with a bunch of hippies, hipsters, mouth-breathers from Hayward, attention-whores from all walks of life, entitled rich kids, small yappy dogs and the various human riffraff of the San Francisco Bay Area, in order to not hear (thanks to crappy PA systems, sound bleed from other stages, aforementioned wind & fog, Talky Mc O’Chattersons all around) the music being played by my favorite bands, whom I can not see on the stage two hundred yards away (without binoculars and a sudden surge in my own personal height from 5’5” to at least 7’2”), take the occasional nature break in a port-a-potty, and spend three hours trying to exit the park along with 100,000 other people when it’s over, I really would. But, you know, I’ve got, like, this … um … thing I gotta do that day. Or something. Gosh darn it, sucks that I’m gonna miss it. But you kids go have fun.

PS: yeah, sorry, I wrote this post already in March, and better ... Grandma tends to repeat herself. So what. At least I stick to my convictions.

The only thing that could make it worse is if the pieces are Civil War figurines.

The list of my true hates has been static for a long time. Various things have threatened to climb on the list (Emily Fucking Dickinson, puns, Mensa, douchebaggy professor beards, etc.), but most of my hates occupy the vast second, third and fourth tiers. But it’s time now to add a third item to the two that make up the top level, and that item is: chess.

Chess. Shatner’s unclean UNDERPANTS, do I hate chess. Reasons include but are not limited to:

--Board games should be played either family-style, with kids & adults hanging out and having fun together, or friend-style, with booze and rampant skullduggery. Chess lends itself to neither, and thus, I have no use for it.

--The overused strategery metaphor. If a writer or director for print, stage or screen wishes to convey two opponents outthinking and outmaneuvering each other, a battle of wits and street smarts and moxie, chances are, they’re gonna bring in chess sooner or later, either verbally (“This guy’s three moves ahead of us, Chief!”) or actually (recent episode of Monk) or sometimes super-extra-literally (second season of Twin Peaks). And seriously: Must we, really? Are there no other metaphors, or is there just the one?

--Its use as cultural shorthand for “very smart person, probably a genius.” You don’t have to be smart to play chess, and you aren’t stupid just because you can’t or don’t want to. It helps if you have a touch of the Asperger’s, or just an engineering mind, but for instance, my social-retard freshman roommate could play, and that crazy bitch was as dumb as a dented box of stale corn chips.

--Obnoxious kids that play it. Nothing is more obnoxious in the world of Kid Obnoxiousness than the kid who’s good at chess. In-fucking-sufferable, these little twits. And it’s sad, because they’re obviously making up for an inherited lack of social skills which probably isn’t going to get better as they approach adolescence, but that doesn’t stop their smugness from making me want to give them a super atomic swirly, eight years old or not.

--The fact that I do not understand it and cannot play it (like with magic – you can show me, in intricate, painstaking detail, how a goddamn magic trick works, and I will still stare at it, baffled and angry, still not getting how it fucking works).

Capricorn is an Earth sign, doncha know.

The Official Damn Kids Ranking: Bodies of Water and Whether I Will Swim in Them or Not

1.) Ocean. Turquoisey and bathwater-warm near Miami, bracingly cold off Long Island, clear and fresh on Maui, super-salty and gentle in the Gulf of Mexico, chilly but swimmable in the south of France – I’m scared to death of the ocean’s power, but I love it (them?) best of all.

2.) Swimming pool. Must be outdoors, well-maintained, have absolutely clear water and no weird stains anywhere, must have unblemished white shell (no tiles, designs, or colors below the waterline), must not have overly large drain; any one of these factors renders the pool unusable to me.

3.) River. I don’t do whitewater, but a lazy river is at least a possibility. If I’ve got a good raft or a bunch of people and innertubes. And beer. Because then I can forget about slimy things lining the riverbed, and snakes, and deadly whirlpools.

4.) Lake. Ugh – never again, except maybe Tahoe (where you can see to the bottom). I have a crippling fear of lakes – they’re pretty when viewed from the deck of your lake house, but no way would I swim in one again. Cottonmouth snakes, water you can’t see through, murky stuff underfoot, bacteria soup, eeeegh. And that’s in the good ones; there are those that advertise themselves as “bottomless,” which gives me the Level Seven Super-Meemie Howling Fantods.

5.) Pond. I used to love ponds so much as a kid, I dug my own in our yard, with a spade. I wanted to row about in a pond, in a little boat, under a parasol. But then I realized how they’re basically breeding grounds for mosquitoes, algae, leeches, snakes, water spiders (shut up, I know it’s true), and stench, and the dream died.

6.) Water park. The summer of 1991 is the last one that saw me anywhere near a water park. Holy sunburnt pisswater blubberfest! Well, OK, I was pressganged into going to Schlitterbahn with the yute group for whom I was pressganged into acting as chaperone in the summer of 1996, but I didn’t actually go into the water. Speaking of yute groups, the 1991 trip was with one as well, only I was one of the yutes, and it was actually pretty fun, as I was trying to get something going with A Boy at that point in time, and hell, when you’re 17, a lot of things seem fun that don’t later in life, am I right?

I gotta take it easy or I’m gonna throw a clot.

Two things brought to you by the happy-fun-outrage box lately:

$2.99 gas
Friday night, we were stuck watching live TV because the Yankees game was on and TiVo was recording BSG (an ultimately frustrating episode, because I begrudge every single minute that that lawyer twat is onscreen, especially with only one ep to go, but that’s neither here nor there). And but so it being live TV, I saw a bunch of commercials for the Jeep/Chrysler/Dodge $2.99 gas bullshit, and it just about made my head explode. This is hey-look-over-there! whizzbang gimmickry at its very worst – robbing Peter to pay Paul, fiddling while Rome burns, three-card-monte shell-game shuck-the-rubes-and-send-‘em-home-penniless, wake-up-in-a-bathtub-full-of-ice-minus-a-kidney craptaculosity. Seriously, numbnuts American automakers – instead of using all this famous American ingenuity to figure out how to make a more fuel-efficient car (and/or get in on the Next Big Thing fuelwise, from which you can make your next $100 billion), you’re tryna get me to buy one of your ugly, poorly-made gas-guzzling behemoths by offering me three-dollar gas for a couple of years? Fuck all y’all, right in the ear, and double fuck whichever dumbasses are stupid enough to fall for it.

Comparative moral values
During the A&E Movie Event: The Andromeda Strain, Mr. Gleemonex and I observed that apparently it is perfectly OK to televise in great detail such choice moments as a guy cutting his own head off with a chainsaw, a woman pouring gasoline over herself and lighting herself on fire, and a guy murdering three people with a handgun at close range, then putting the gun under his own chin and pulling the trigger. Fountains of blood, screams, ultraviolence – all thumbs-up from the network censors. On the other hand, the words “shit” and “ass” (among other mildish curses) were bleeped out.

To recap: OK to show horrible homicidal and suicidal violence in prime time. Not OK for a scientist charged with saving the world to mutter “shit” under his breath. Goooood to know.

Now, DRINKING outdoors -- THAT'S something I can get behind.

Internets, I went for a quick run on my lunch break along SF’s famous Embarcadero (which used to be a hellhole under an elevated freeway [see Dirty Harry] before the 1989 earthquake fucked the freeway up real good and thank the merciful Shatner, the people of this city said now let’s wait a minnit here – do we HAVE to rebuild an elevated freeway? and answered themselves: no. no we don’t.).

Lots of outdoor eating places along the Embarcadero. Some moderately priced, most hi-toned. And because it was the kind of day that makes me want to run outdoors (86 and sunny), everybody and their co-workers and their sister visiting from Yonkers was sitting outside to eat.

Let me state this for the record: EATING OUTSIDE IN SAN FRANCISCO TOTALLY BLOWS.

No, shut up, it does. It always SOUNDS like such a great idea -- the town is sunny and not prone to temperature extremes. It always LOOKS like a nice day to eat outside. People always want to eat outside on the 7th-floor terrace of my office building. The outdoor parts of restaurants are always full up. People always believe the lie.

But goddammit, one day in about seven hundred is actually the type of mild, windless day that it looks like it is, and meanwhile the other 699 of 700, you’re either roasting or freezing (or both, simultaneously), the wind is whipping your fucking hair across your face so you keep getting mouthfuls of it with your lunch, hot food gets cold while the sun melts the ice in your drink, the fucking pigeons know no fear (nor do the homeless people), little tornados of used paper napkins and sand and cigarette butts dance around between the tables, and meanwhile you’re getting burned by the deceptive-ass sun shining fully down on your un-sunscreened face as you try to keep your goddamned plate from sailing into the bay and taking your fucking fifteen-dollar sandwich with it.