Well, I cautioned readers of this blog that I could, at times, be full of shit. One such moment is upon us. I recently posted a blog about the Super Bowl suggesting that watching it is a massive waste of time and that I was going to buck the trend and host a “What Super Bowl?” party. The idea was to ignore the game and spend the time more wisely, engaged in real interaction with friends and neighbors. That is probably a fine idea. It’s politically correct, and the world would indeed be better off if we focused our energy on personal growth rather than on passive observation of an overblown sporting event. I am here to now say: Fuck that! I’m watching the game.

I would like to explain my change of heart and mind. To begin, there is no way to anticipate the flash flood that Super Bowl Sunday generates in the River of Manhood. It’s a white-water rapids of compulsive adherence to a dying code of borderline boorish conduct. What are normally housebroken and duly-trained husbands and boyfriends become mannerless gourmands at the table of excess which is annually set in early February. Women react with head shakes and tsk-tsk’s as they watch their men, barbecue sauce dripping from their fingers and chins, fawn over twenty-something gridiron heroes with a drunken persistence not witnessed since the wedding night.

You see, there are those of us who were raised in the 1950s and 1960s. We learned about our male roles in this culture from the Greatest Generation. These are the men who endured depression, world war, and thankless hours on the assembly line, all so they could school their X-chromosome offspring in the arts of door-holding, jar-opening, and bathtub arachnicide. Around 1970, that shit went out the window with the advent of the giant chip which became the conventional shoulder accessory of the modern female . Suddenly, we had to adapt to a whole new ethic of inter-gender behavior, one which women were making up as they went along. In this new dynamic, sliding a chair out for a woman could be alternately viewed as an insult (if you did it) or an insult (if you did not). Like the Industrial Revolution dictated the retooling of America, the Feminine Revolution begat the need for the retooling of the American male. Men (ugh!) were responsible for every foible and sin of the race and were exhorted to “get in touch with their feminine side.” I have been in touch with my feminine side on a regular basis, but she really pisses me off on Super Bowl Sunday.

I really don’t care about the outcome of the game. I have no connection to any professional sports organization nor do I harbor any misplaced loyalty for a group of privileged millionaires, even if they do know how to defend against the run. The point is that here in the form of this much-hyped contest, we men are afforded the opportunity to reconnect with the beer-swilling, leisure-weekend reality which we all once mistakenly assumed was our privilege and future. Such fools!

There are women who also enjoy the game, some even watch it with their men. An unexpected product of the feminine revolution was the masculinization of the American woman. This was manifest in women speeding along recklessly in their cars, flipping the bird with abandon, cursing like drunken sailors, and raising their hands over their head while they shouted, “Wooooooooooo!” I personally maintain that the first time a woman said “Woooooooooo!” in a celebratory sports-related display marked the beginning of the end. At that point, men not only had to regularly restrain their cruder tendencies, but they also had to watch their women proudly display them. Sweet irony.

So, as promised, I am going to host a small party tomorrow. There will be rules, although they will not be spoken, only silently understood. First of all, in order to attend, one must possess sexual organs that dangle helplessly between his legs. There will be no one checking this anatomical I.D., but we will know. There will be no crudites, no ranch dip, no whole-grain crackers. In fact, the day’s menu can be summed up in one handy phrase of my own creation: pork ‘n’ beer. All meat served will be of porcine origin. If it moos, quacks, or clucks it will not make a table appearance here (sorry, I forgot to buy the wings). Vegetables will be but a memory. All liquids, whether served as a beverage or used to cook, will contain alcohol. The beer will provide the grain portion of the day’s food pyramid. There will be prolific epithets, off-color jokes, pointless arguments about whose secondary is stronger, and most notably, frequent urination from an upright position: a veritable testosterone tsunami.

In short, ladies, move over and go shopping. Don’t worry, on Monday, you will again be able to stand over your man, his fingers swollen from animal fat and rice beer, and resume kicking his ass. We know how to act, you have trained us so well. But for one glorious and fleeting afternoon, we will be able to raise high our hands, each clutching either a bottle or a backrib, and join in that time-tested chorus which we ourselves originated: “Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”

I love a good joke. I love a bad joke. My friends will tell you that I do, and that at any given moment, I am capable of telling either. We just don’t seem to have time for storytelling anymore. With that in mind, Here are some good old jokes, some even more juvenile than others. In the interest of being succinct, I offer only the punchlines. You know the rest anyway. Don’t hurt yourself laughing.

1 If I fall out of the tree before the gorilla does, shoot that dog.
2 Help me find my keys and we can drive out of here.
3 You’re supposed to put the potato in the front.
4 Where’s my toast?
5 That’s okay, I have a spare engine in the trunk.
6 A candy bar and a pat on the head usually does it.
7 Out of what?
8 Those nails are for the other side of the house.
9 I thought you meant today.
10 I thought that was your ass, everything else in here is so high.
11 What team does she play for?
12 That’s not my dog.
13 What do you think I’m doing with them, sticking them up my ass?
14 All right, bomba this guy to death.
15 Because this is a hardware store.

I just witnessed on television the inauguration of the 44th U.S. president, Mr. Barack Hussein Obama. It is history indeed, because everything that happens is history. What significance future generations will attach to it and what importance historians will someday bestow upon it are questions yet to be answered. I really don’t want to get caught up in savior worship over this new man on the job. He is compelling, and it is such a refreshing treat to hear intelligent words and complete thoughts come out of the man standing behind the presidential seal. He does engender hope, and that is something that I do not deny we desperately need at this moment. I especially enjoyed the part of Obama’s speech where he spoke of regaining moral standing in the world and never subjugating our ideals to expediency, even and especially in matters of national security. I enjoyed it because the cameras caught Mr. Bush with that smug, supercilious smirk which has so embodied the vision of his regime.

That brings me to the real point of this post. I have watched with bittersweet amusement as the commercial news outlets have scrambled to salvage the legacy of Bush 43. They have done so almost as furiously as the man himself, as if his designation of the biggest marine sanctuaries in history can erase eight years of an unbridled assault on the environment. Fred Barnes, a seasoned Bush apologist, wrote a column in which he not only lists ten major accomplishments of the Bush administration, but also strongly suggests that history will look on Junior favorably. Mr. Barnes, it seems, is suffering from oxygen deprivation caused by his bowtie cutting off blood flow to his brain. Only from the perspective of “what’s good for the empire” can any of his points be seriously considered. However, even some of Bush’s harshest critics have begun to soften, looking at his reign of terror with some sort of sick misplaced nostalgia.

I am happy to see that President Obama is more concerned about the agenda to move us forward than he is about recriminations against his predecessor. That kind of thinking reflects a pragmatism which is necessary at this time. It also seems that Mr. Obama realizes that the job of sorting out the tangled mess of the Bush legacy and its forays into lawlessness truly belongs to the legislative branch, and eventually the courts. While I respect our new president’s choice of priorities, I cannot accept the current soft-focus-lens photo shoot of the past two terms. So while Mr. Obama retains his presidential dignity in his refusal to Bush bash, I will take one last swing at the bastard.

A dim-witted, coke-sniffing, hard-drinking, party frat boy whose ineptitude is matched only by his ego has allowed our nation and the world to be taken for an eight year ride on a rickety roller coaster, just to prove to Daddy that he was man enough to do it. The damage done to our economy, our environment, our relations in the world, our definitions of morality, our path as a nation and the stability of the world is staggering, sobering, and infuriating. The significance of Bill Clinton’s ill-advised blowjobs pales in comparison to the wreckage from which Mr. Reborn Twelve Steps strolls into the sunset. While I am not naive enough to believe that one man can be blamed for so many monumental problems facing mankind, I hold him responsible for allowing said problems to continue to grow and fester. His choice of his brain trust was evidence of the fact that he barely has one himself. He entrusted our ecology to the robber barons from Texas, leaving the energy industry fox in charge of an already dilapidated henhouse. His smug assertions and shoulder-shrugging dismissals of concerns about corporations and their fundamental disregard for truth in favor of the bottom line set a tone for the Darwinian capitalists to have an eight-year picnic. His ignorance of the world and its cultures allowed foreign policy to be shaped by the paranoid neo-cons, all with axes to grind and investments to protect. His chicken-hawk eagerness to go to war and watch thousands die over a lie is evidence of an emotional disconnect. Don’t be fooled by his assertions now that he kept us safe after 9/11. It is well documented that the invasion of Iraq was both a regime agenda item and a forgone conclusion long before the towers came down. His supposed fiscal conservatism, perhaps the biggest distortion of his true political colors, saw him veto bills destined to put money to work for Americans while he squandered endless billions in pursuit of the war without end, the new strategy for our future designed by the permanent Republican majority he so desperately wanted to build. Oddly, when that kind of government exists in other countries, we call it one-party rule and history has seen us fight wars to end such totalitarianism. In short, George W. Bush was not only perhaps the worst president in modern history, but also a shallow, ego-driven lout whose hunger for influence blinded him to his own unsuitability for the job he twice stole at the polling places. History will prove his failures and sins, but we should not wait for history to take him down a notch. Here is a man ripe for investigation, subpoena and prosecution. If such an undertaking is too costly or difficult to document, then perhaps we can rely on civil suit after civil suit, leveled by individuals whose civil rights as citizens were violated as a result of executive orders to ignore the constitution. Wouldn’t that be beautiful? The man becomes victim of the system he sought to suppress and good old capitalist jurisprudence ends up hurting him where it hurts the most, in his head and in his wallet. In Bush’s case, those two locations are in incredibly close proximity.

Goodbye George, and good riddance. To paraphrase another sleazy scumbag who once held the office, “You won’t have George Bush to kick around anymore.” No, we can let time and the gradual uncovering of the truth about the Bush presidency do that. To paraphrase yet another pol, a one-time candidate for the vice-presidency, “I knew an asshole, and you, sir , are an asshole.”

Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is covered by water. The rest is knee-deep in bullshit. Where you find man and woman, you will find bullshit. It’s as essential to the survival of the race as food or beverage. Without bullshit, mankind would be forced to endure the consequences of honest communication. We simply cannot have that. To paraphrase an old axiom, “Oh what a tangled web we weave since Adam met his main squeeze, Eve.”  When the Lord said “Don’t eat those apples”, Adam and Eve said, “Okay, we won’t.” Bullshit. When Moses went up the mountain and told his people, “I’ll be right back, don’t worship any golden calves or anything”, his peeps told him, “Oh no, Moses, not us, we’re the chosen people for God’s sake!” More bullshit. Even God himself gets into the act on occasion. When the Lord ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience, no sooner had the old man pulled out his blade than God said, “Oh Abraham, I was only bullshitting you!” You simply cannot escape the flow of this stuff called bullshit. I personally think that it should be added to the Periodic Table of Elements. After all, with the exception of nitrogen and carbon, bullshit is the single most abundant component of the planet. As a matter of fact, if bullshit is left undisturbed in the earth, it eventually turns up as carbon. And to make the inclusion even easier, it’s symbol as an element has already been defined: Bs.

The history of modern man is a road paved with, you guessed it, bullshit. Just look at some of the quotes attributed to our statesmen. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, arguably one of our most insightful presidents said, “The torch has been passed to a new generation of bullshitters.” As if to confirm those words, William Jefferson Clinton, an admitted emulator of JFK, took it a step further with his avowal, “I did not have sex with that woman.” From Josef Stalin, “No seriously Adolf, I promise I won’t attack you from the East” to Richard Nixon “I am not a crook”, from George H.W. Bush, “Read my lips, no new taxes” to George W. Bush “Mission Accomplished”, our modern history has distinguished this as one of the eras most prolific in bullshit. Granted, the shit flies much faster in modern times. Where it once took months-long ocean voyages to bring bullshit to the New World (the Native Americans had a lot to learn about bullshit, and boy, did we teach them), we can now receive an instant message loaded with bullshit in mere seconds.

Bullshit is not confined to the famous either. While recorded history is one large fecal fable, the day-to-day lives of the never-famous produce enough bullshit to reach to the erstwhile planet of Pluto and back. “I’ll be back by ten, Honey, I promise.” “That was my sister who I was talking to on the phone.” “Oh, did you need help with the dishes?” On the surface, all possibly honest statements. Scratch that surface of any one of them with a fingernail and you will expose its creamy center: 100% pure, 24K bullshit.

As the presumably dominant species of the ecosystem, we have over the centuries developed languages, technology, systems, and devices to explore our world and uncover the truth. Where did we come from? What is the nature of life? What is the purpose of our existence? These are profound questions which mankind has pondered for as long as he has walked these plains and valleys. We spare neither expense nor risk to delve into the unknown and emerge as discoverers of reality, creeping that much closer to the godhead. At the same time we try to satisfy our burning curiosity about the cosmos, we also continue to uncover new ways to bullshit each other. It’s the nature of man.

Have you ever seen a squirrel with a phony ID? Have you ever seen a bear (other than Pooh) hide the honey jar behind his back when surprised? Have you ever seen a shark pretend he doesn’t smell blood in the water? Animals live in the reality of their environment, they rarely if ever suppose that their peers are stupid enough to fall for fakery. As human beings, we seem to delight in presuming that we are surrounded by idiots who can’t wait to swallow our tales hook, line and sinker. Here is my vision of the world: Six and one-half billion ostriches, each with his head in the sand, each thinking that none of the other ostriches can see his gigantic feathered ass pointing heavenward against the bright blue sky. Herein lies the ironic twist. No creature on earth is more capable than man of identifying bullshit, yet no other creature places such a high priority on disseminating the same. We are simply full of it.

In this time when man is desperate for new sources of fuel, just imagine if we could burn bullshit to supply our energy needs. The sun would expire before the last pile was mined. I would continue, but I am too depressed about the magnitude of the bullshit factor. Besides, I’m growing tired of reading my own bullshit. It’s time for all this bullshit to stop. With that, I urge you to ponder the omnipresence of bullshit in our lives. We are the only ones who can control its flow. And that’s no bullshit.

For those of you who are too busy to read or watch today’s news in its entirety, I offer this headline news update, direct from the AOL news page.
1) Couple Weds at Taco Bell (Chihuahua serves as onion ring bearer, catches the bridal gordito)
2) Convicted Sex Offender Wins Lottery (Chooses only numbers under 16 and cashes in)
3) Salma Stuns In Sexy Strapless Gown (She pulls out a taser on the Golden Globes red carpet)
4) Mouthwash Brand Linked to Cancer (I use the same brand and I’m a Leo)
5) Britney Slashes Her Home’s Price (I’ll bet you thought I was going to say she slashed her wrists)
6) Two Peanut Butter Brands Recalled (Ah yes, I remember Peter Pan…and Jif too!)
7) Free Whoppers at BK – With a Catch (They throw the sandwich at you, if you catch it, bon appetit)
7.5) Angry Bush Sounds Off (I wonder if this is a Biblical story)

The bold-faced entries are actual, the follow-ups are my courtesy to keep you from having to read the whole story. Don’t bother checking the site to see if these are real, by the time you get there, the headlines will be new ones. AOL truly has its finger on the pulse of America. The lingering question among the pundits is how Barack Obama plans to address these pressing issues.

I am big. As long as I can remember, I’ve been big. I know that this observation is accurate because my memory is big, too. In my life, after I achieved full-grown-adult-homo-sapiens status, I always ranged from big to really big. Even when I was younger and skinny, I was still big. I don’t bring this up to highlight my size/weight issues. I am thinking of the fact that when you are physically big, you pass a milestone in your life. You don’t see it coming, you don’t recognize it as it is happening. You can only realize it in hindsight. That milestone is the one moment when you are picked up and held in another’s arms for the last time.  A child can be comforted in the reassuring embrace of his father or mother. A petite bride can be carried across the threshold. Even a smaller man can playfully jump into his friend’s arms for a zany photo at the reunion picnic. But when you’re big, you’re just, well, too damned big!

This is problematic for the massively endowed. I firmly believe that after we first emerge from the womb, we spend the rest of our lives wanting to crawl back in, particularly during Republican administrations. Having your physical incarnation hoisted lovingly or playfully and suspended above the terra firma is one small exercise in that direction. So what do those of us to whom weightlessness is a distant memory do to counter this harsh reality? Well, for one, you can become an astronaut. Even if you never actually man or woman a spacecraft, you can still experience the phenomenon in training. But for those of us who are too old to consider this option, I believe I have found the answer. It is water.

Look, I don’t even profess a belief in a supreme being, certainly not one who would trivialize his omnipotence by having a human-like consciousness and its resultant linear thinking. If I believed in such, I would say that the Good Lord covered two-thirds of the planet’s surface with water to quench the beasts’ thirsts and allow the larger members of his flock to float in the very fluid from whence they first came: And the Lord saweth his creation and it was BIG! So he saith unto the heavens and earth, let there be water so that my chunkier chosen ones can drinketh once more from the fountain of float. Instead, I will look at it in a more Darwinian light and assume that there is a primordial relationship between the abundance of H2O, its essential nature in our ecology, and the genetic predisposition of certain humans to attain unliftable mass.

Michael Jackson had the right idea. He spent many hours between reconstructive surgeries in his hyperbaric chamber, suspended by water in dark weightlessness, his chimpanzee patiently waiting for him to emerge from the tank, renewed and reborn from his silent baptism and ready for some big-screen cartoons. For those of us who can’t afford such self-indulgence, there are oceans, lakes, rivers and swimming pools. I live in a very small town and we are lucky to have a health club right in town. They have what is called an endless pool, kind of the aquatic equivalent of a treadmill. It is roughly 8′ x 12′ and at one end is a device that pumps water in a simulated current, allowing you to swim in place. When I first saw it, I scoffed at this carrot-on-a-stick contraption. Once I tried it, I realized that as long as you are completely surrounded by water, mission accomplished. You weren’t really going anywhere anyway, even in an Olympic-sized pool you just swim from one end to the other and back again.

I was hooked. It now is a daily ritual of a thirty minute swim, preceded and followed by five minutes of just floating. The formless arms of Mother Earth engulf me and suspend me as I scoff at the impotence of gravity. I am free, I am safe, I am again cradled in the stuff of my source. Thoughts as well as pounds are suspended in temporary freedom from weightfulness. It’s the closest thing to Mama that I have found outside the kitchen of an Italian restaurant.

If you are small enough to yet be held in the arms of another, then count your blessings. If not, head for the pool, any pool, as long as it’s full of water. As a matter of fact, I should wrap this up. I have a swimming time reserved in just a little while. Wait for me Mommy, I’m coming home!

I’d like to offer an alternative plan for the upcoming commercial feeding frenzy called The Super Bowl. I neither know nor care which Roman numeral follows it this year (I chuckle at this affectation of using Roman numerals for contemporary creations) but it sure does pull in some cash. All across America, not only will both the hoi-polloi and the high rollers be watching for the final score of the game, but also for the new round of commercials annually unleashed during the telecast. There will be another watercooler-worthy flurry of slick, deeply funded ads for some of the biggest names in American consumerism. These spots will cost the advertisers multimillions, thus making this whole fiasco possible.

Around this telecast will unfold the annual ritual called the Super Bowl Party. This is generally a beer-soaked orgy of food, intentional displays of boorishness, and noisy armchair quarterbacking. Many a hairy navel will be shamelessly scratched and wiped clean of barbeque sauce. Chickens who prefer their wings to remain attached are already bolting from the barnyard. Nachos will be the coin of the realm for four or five hours (if you count the pregame and postgame shows, that’s fourteen or fifteen hours). A nation which proclaims its vigilance against the onslaught of unshaven Middle East terrorists and job-grabbing Mexicans will essentially become dormant and vulnerable for the better part of the day.

This is where my plan unfolds. I am going to host a party on Super Bowl Sunday. There will be a television in the room, but it will either be turned off or will have one of those blank blue screens. There will be no game. We will simply be taking advantage of the temporary hypnotic haze hanging over the majority of our friends and neighbors to have a gathering where people actually interact. A chance for a few friends to laugh, talk, eat and drink. All this without anyone feeling the urge to throw a foam rubber brick at a two-dimensional image of overpadded, overpaid neo-gladiators celebrating because they just gained three yards. The name of my party is: What Super Bowl? The question of the day is not Who’s playing? but Who’s playing what?

I highly recommend this party planning option. I’m probably not the first one to come up with the idea, although I’ve never been invited to one. It’s so simple: Have a party, ignore the game. No high-fives, no groans of disbelief, nobody yelling “Woooo!” Encourage your guests’ disinterest in all things Super. There is great liberation in not giving a Super Shit. Just think, the next morning when a co-worker asks “What did you think of the game?” you can answer with pride “What did I think of what game?”

We survived the party. Those of us still standing after last night’s festivities face the new year on this January 1, the cheesiest of all holidays. The crux of the New Year’s Eve celebration is ringing in the New Year at midnight. After that, it’s all downhill. Even at the party, by the time the clock strikes twelve, most of the food and booze are gone. So are most of the guests, either literally or figuratively. Then everyone stumbles home, bleary-eyed and auto-intoxicated, ready to awake on the first day of the year and begin a fresh calendar with – college football. Boy howdy! What do you think Michigan State will do against USC? Who will get the Heisman this year? Who’s program is going to have to change before they can win a championship? What time does the next bowl game start? Do you think Coach (fill in the blank) will be back next year? Blah blah blah blah blah blah?

Remember when Bowl Games were Bowl Games? You had a handful; the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, and the Granddaddy of them all, the Rose Bowl, complete with a wonderful parade (Look, Honey, the skyscraper on that float is made completely out of roses!) Then more bowl games were added to the mix. Now there are more bowl games than actual bowls. Not only that, they all need a sponsor now, a sponsor who will slap their name onto the marquee. So you have the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, the Outback Bowl, the Capitol One Bowl, the Tidy Bowl, etc. Additionally, the bowl season is no longer restricted to one or two days, it’s spread out over weeks. Yes, the last forty years have seen a veritable Bowl Movement.

Why are there so many bowl games? That’s easy, there is a sustained and ever-growing interest in college football. Why? Only God knows, and he’s got tickets to the Eternity Bowl. I will never, even if I were to live for another century, understand this massive concern with college athletics. I understand that gambling accounts for some of it. But why in the hell is some guy sitting in a trailer park in North Carolina so fucking hyped-up about what Duke does in the post-season? Here’s a guy who’s never been closer to a college than a TV ad for DeVry, and he’s got some fierce loyalty to a school whose interior he’ll never see but whose sweatshirt he proudly spills pizza sauce on. Correct me if I am in error, but aren’t these supposed to be institutions of higher learning? When did they become farm systems for professional sports? Only a select few players rise to the level of professional sports anyway. The rest of the team members go on with their lives and show pictures of themselves in uniform to their friends, reminiscing about the ever-expanding legends of their college careers. Millions, no, billions of dollars are spent on everything from advertising to parades, from recruiting to TV rights, from food and drink during game day to team souvenirs.

I always am tickled by irony, and here’s the one contained herein: We have in America, for all of our wealth and resources, some of the dumbest-ass people you can ever hope to meet. I’m not talking about shepherds in Mongolia who have never seen a school. I’m talking about privileged citizens of the USA, home of state colleges, junior colleges, private colleges, prestigious universities, correspondence degrees, abundant public libraries and an untold amount of information available at the stroke of a computer key. So why aren’t we smarter? Another no brainer: because instead of availing ourselves of the wealth of opportunity to expand our consciousness, we sit in front of a big-screen HDTV, inhale chips and salsa, and wash it down with high-fructose corn syrup solution and watery rice beer. And what is it that we are watching? College football. And this is the lifestyle which we so adamantly defend and spend billions of dollars and thousands of lives disseminating and protecting?

Happy New Year. We start it off like we ended the last one. Sitting on our ignorant rah-rah asses watching some twenty-year-old throw an inflated pigskin downfield, hoping that it will land in the arms of another twenty-year-old with the same color shirt. It looks like yesterday’s resolve to improve has already disappeared along with a lot of our hard-earned money – right down the Lysol Toilet Bowl.