Level vs Flat: The Revenge- Continuing Adventures in Home Improvement

You’ve probably seen the commercial. A pretty young woman wakes up in her young person’s cheaply-decorated apartment bedroom. She smiles, stretches and leaps from the edge of the bed and in one effortless motion she pulls off an unsightly lighting fixture from the ceiling and reveals the stylish ceiling fan hidden underneath. She returns to the room, dressed as a bride, carried over the threshold by a handsome groom. She spins out of his arms, peeling off all the ugly old wallpaper and revealing the attractive yellow paint job underneath. In a graceful cascade of never-ending movement, they flash through their lives- dad lifts the young kids off a dingy, toy-strewn rug, mom pulls up the rug and, with the help of her now-teenage boys, rolls out a new carpet and serves them lemonade without missing a beat. Her gracefully aging husband comes down the stairs and joyfully dances as he pushes the kitchen wall back, opening up the space and revealing French doors.  The scene shifts and the much older couple are hosting a family gathering on the patio. The husband asks the wife to dance, evoking the courtship of their youth, and as they tenderly move around each other, their two grown sons dance around the perfect green lawn with wives and children of their own. The camera pulls back and the sun begins to set on a perfect American day as the Lowe’s logo appears on the screen along with the slogan “Never Stop Improving.”. Throughout it all, that song keeps playing- you know the one cause it sticks in your head like gum under a theatre seat (trust me, I’m an expert): “Don’t stop doing what you do”

It’s a great commercial, right? Brilliant and inspiring and a total crock of shit.

Seriously, the guy who made this commercial should fucking die. He should be beaten to death with his Clios or forced to eat them all, so that his stomach explodes and he dies really painfully and then gets eaten cock first by a gluttonous gangster and, by the way, if you haven’t seen The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover then do yourself a favor and DON’T. It’s soooo not worth seeing just to get that reference. Wikipedia if you must or just pretend I made a Hunger Games reference or something else current and that I’m not just some weird aging freakazoid who’s pop-culture reference points are still stuck in the 90’s (“Hunger Games”­ that’s a thing, right? I can’t keep up with all these new-fangled “books” you kids are reading today. Back in my day we didn’t bother with any of that “reading” nonsense. We just watched Ren and Stimpy on VHS in our dorm rooms and we liked it!)

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Report on the Economy: Does Being Rich Make You an A-Hole?

Everything I need to know about Economics I learned flying First Class last week.

#1: There was one bathroom at the front of the plane for the exclusive use of the 8 First Class passengers sitting in Rows A & B.
#2: There were two bathrooms at the rear of the plane to be shared by the remaining 141 passengers in Rows C – Z.
#3: From my vantage point in seat A1, this was great!

From this experience I learned two vital lessons:

#1: Economic inequality is all around us in today’s America
#2: It’s only a problem if you’re poor

Usually, I’m a proud member of the disgruntled poor. Hell, I work in the theatre- we put the “non” in “non-profit”. In my field, the 1% refers to people earning a living wage or the award-winning playwrights that own dishwashers (Albee sold his for gin.) After all, if you work in a building named for a rich person you’re a broke motherfucker yourself. So, on a plane, you’d expect to find me jammed in a middle seat in Broke Motherfucker Class (not even Broke Motherfucker Plus) reading a torn Sky Mall Magazine and dreaming of the massage chairs and air purifiers that I’ll never own, and knowing that while the half-bottle of water and micro-bag of pretzels I was allotted by Cheapskate Air isn’t quite enough sustenance to “keep me alive,” it is exactly enough to make me go to the bathroom, which means I’ll have to shake loose the blood clot forming in my leg, machete my way out of my row, and slog to the back of the plane so I can wait with all the other Broke Motherfuckers for my 30 seconds of solitude pooping in the fluorescent blue water of despair.
 
This time, though, it was different. This time, when my wife and I were checking in online we realized that we aren’t in fact Broke Motherfuckers and we could afford to spring for the First Class Upgrade. This is partially because I’m one of the very lucky few who actually does earn a living in the theatre, partially because we’ve spent our money wisely and haven’t blown it on frivolities like gym memberships and children (not even those really cheap African ones you can buy on TV for one cup of coffee a day- and I mean a regular cup of coffee, not even a Latte- hell, that would buy you a whole fly-swatting family for a month ) but mostly because my wife isn’t a theatre professional and actually works in the real world (did you know that some companies have these things called BONUSES where just they like, just give you extra money for no reason??? It’s crazy right? I mean, sure we have bonuses in theatre, like finding leftover cheese from the Opening in the green room fridge a week later- but free money, I mean, hell, that’s even better than crusty old brie and stale crackers*! (*depends on the crackers- those little melba toast thingy’s are no fucking joke.))

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Hurray for February- the month of B.S. holidays!

Let’s say you’re someone who really enjoys fasting (bear with me, this is going someplace.) You don’t have an eating disorder and you’re not protesting anything, you just like to find any excuse you can to be really, really hungry. Well, if you’re a Muslim- you’re psyched- you’ve got Ramadan- a whole glorious month at the all you can’t eat buffet. If you’re Jewish, you may not get a full month, but there are still ample fasting opportunities- you’ve got Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), Tisha B’Av (commemorating the destruction of the Second Temple), Tzom Gedalia (the fast of, um, Gedaliah?) and other fast days sprinkled throughout the year.

But what if you’re a Christian? If you’re Catholic, then you might fast by giving up Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for Lent. If you’re a Protestant of some sort- well, the closest you’ll get to fasting is running out of Light Miracle Whip so you can’t bring deviled eggs to Bible study or skipping lunch after church because snake handling makes you queasy (I don’t know what you people do.).

So, clearly this doesn’t bode well for the Christian or secular fasting enthusiast- but, fortunately, there is a totally non-religious solution- the Master Cleanse. This invention gives fans of brutal self depravation a near endless opportunity to consume almost nothing save for a repulsive beverage with the sunny nickname “lemonade”, as in “when life gives you self-loathing- make lemonade!” The Master Cleanse doesn’t care what race you are or what god you worship or whether you bother to worship any at all- it just wants you to starve- a fast even Christopher Hitchens could have loved.

The holidays in February are just like the Master Cleanse- except they encourage you to fill your body with toxins rather than empty it. From Groundhog Day and Super Bowl Sunday to Valentine’s Day and President’s Day- the month is filled with special occasions that do not discriminate by religion or ethnicity and instead celebrate the All American universal traditions of rodent worship, overindulgence, gambling and exchanging Whitman’s Samplers for sex. Here’s a quick round-up of all this month’s bull-shit holidays:

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Hey Kids, Let's All Get Depressed About Turning 40!

The weekend between the NFL Conference Championship games and the Superbowl is a bad one for football but a great one for soul searching. I love football and I fucking hate soul searching. As far as I’m concerned, soul searching is like cleaning out the produce drawer in the fridge- I know that something is creating a god-awful stench in there, but the last thing I want to do is reach in to the murky depths and pull out the putrefying bag of brown liquid that used to be bean sprouts which were purchased for a salad that would never get made (I hate salad more than soul searching.) I’d much rather just hold my nose while I grab another beer and close the fridge door as fast as I can so the smell stays inside so I don’t have to wallow in stinky salad failure while I try and watch the game.  

Sadly, the only game on this past weekend was the Pro-Bowl, the NFL’s annual Make-A-Wish Foundation trip to Hawaii for really good players on terminally bad teams. As football games go, it’s only slightly less exciting than Joe Paterno’s Memorial Service, but still more fun than watching the Jets this past year. DAMN YOU SANCHEZZZZZZ! STOP SUCKING!!!!!! PLEEAAAASE!!! YOU’RE KILLING ME!!!!!!! Anyhoodles, with the Pro-Bowl as my only option for sporting distraction, I decided the time had come to face my stinky demons. So I rolled up my sleeves and got ready to clean out the festering vegetable drawer in my soul.

Let’s be clear, though- I know that I’m very lucky. I have a wife that I love, job I enjoy, dog who puts up with me and a house which I own. In many parts of the world, my problems would be considered “champagne problems” – or, more to the point, “guy who has food and whose family wasn’t butchered by rebels in a brutal civil war” problems. Still, just because I’m a couple of floors higher on Maslow’s Pyramid (Psych 101, bitchez!) (that’s all I remember) than the next poor schmuck in Darfur doesn’t mean that I don’t have real, legitimate problems. Like, for instance, I’ve got a whole season’s worth of Fringe episodes on DVR and I’m deathly afraid that I’ll run into the only other person on the face of the earth who actually watches the show and he’ll totally ruin it for me by telling me whether Peter is still alive on some alternate dimension or if he’s disappeared completely or whether there’s a huge and completely fabulous catfight between Olivia and Faux-livia when Olivia finds out about Faux-livia’s baby, if they can even remember who the father of the baby is because the Watchers totally made Peter disappear from existence after he got into the machine and went back in time to heal the rift between the universes and if you have any clue whatsoever what the hell I’m talking about then please DO NOT FUCKING TALK TO ME ABOUT IT. LA LA LA LA LA LA. I CAN’T HEAR YOU, I CAN’T HEAR YOU. I swear I’m going to get caught up next weekend just as soon as I’m done watching Castle. Oh, Nathan Fillion, you roguishly handsome devil, you. Me-ow! Huh. That got a little weird there for a second didn’t it? Let’s just pretend that never happened and talk about manly stuff, instead. Go sports! Scotch and cigars! Beef, it’s what’s for dinner!

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Tonight We Are All Massholes. My Very Brief Stint as a Patriots Fan.

Voting for Obama is 2008 was kind of amazing for me since it was one of the few times in my life I actually voted for someone. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been voting for over 20 years. I voted against George Bush in ’92 and looked on with glee as he was defeated by Clinton and I voted against his idiot son in 2000 & 2004 and then had to look on despondently for eight years as he single-handedly ruined the letter “W” forever (and America.) Hell, I even voted against Gary Coleman in the California Recall election of 2003 (plus all the other joke candidtates like Angelique and Arnold Schwartzeneger. HA! Can you imagine if that guy had won? We would have totally looked like a bunch of tools! Sigh.)

I have to admit- it was a lot of fun voting FOR somebody in 2008– the surging pride I felt when I saw his bumper stickers, the sense of self-satisfaction I felt when I donated an insignificant amount of money to the campagin and got a personalized thank-you email (with another request for money) right away, actually watching the election results come in with eager anticipation that things might get better rather than the usual sickening dread that things are about to get a hell of a lot worse. I do feel a little guilty, though, that all of us wanted him to be president so bad that none of us warned him what an incredibly shitty country we would be when he took over. As a result, he’s like a man who married his dream girl after two long years of courtship only to have her go off her meds the minute they moved into the White House. Now, instead of joining him for long walks on the beach and soulful conversations about Hope and Change on the bearskin rug by the Lincoln Bedroom fireplace (the Clinton rug), she just sits around the house in a ratty red, white and blue bathrobe with one slipper on, her socks pulled all the way up and lipstick on her teeth, drinking vodka out of a coffee cup at 8 o clock in the morning and screeching incoherently about Socialism and Death Panels and locking herself in the bathroom and threatening to flush his check book down the toilet if he doesn’t show her his birth certificate because the voices in her head (Fox News) told her he’s a dangerous Commie foreigner. Either that or screaming at him for being a total sellout because the other voices in her head (MSNBC) told her that he’s a Republican patsy.

Seriously, guys, we do need to think of a way to thank him for all the shit we’ve put him through as a country, like maybe in 2016 we could all chip in and buy him Sweden as a going-away present, or maybe just get him a really big ant farm. Since ants can work together to achieve a common goal, it’s a hell of a lot better than working with Congress.

Then again, if we all really wanted to thank him, we could decide as a country to just stop acting like COMPLETE RAVING ASSHOLES ALL OF THE FUCKING TIME. But that’s just crazy talk. Ant farm’s the way to go.

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