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!)

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.))

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:

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!

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.

In general, I’d rather have a stranger show me his penis than talk to me about God. I mean, my actual preference is that he doesn’t do either and just leaves me the fuck alone or gives me a foot massage instead, but if I had to choose between god-talk or penis- it’s penis almost every time. Unless it’s some kind of extreme situation- like if the stranger is one of those Yogis who spend their whole life tugging at their penis until it’s so long they can wind it around their forearm like an extension cord; or if it’s one of those Super-Distrubing-Sleepaway-Camp-Crying-Game-I-Think-she’s-a-Chick-til-I-See-Her-Big-Dick sort of scenarios unless that chick is Michelle Bachman or it happens during a WNBA game and ends up on SportsCenter (Worst of the Worst- five weeks running!) (BTW- even if Michelle Bachman had a penis, the Tea-Party crazies would still like her more than Romney. In Evangelical circles, Chick with Dick trumps Mormon with Healthcare Plan every single time. Especially if she pledges not to actually use her penis, like Gingrich.)  I mean, if Tim Tebow were to pull his pants down and his cup off after scoring a touchdown and holler “this is for Big Willie and the Low Riders” (or whatever he calls his organs- “Frank and the Beans”? “Jonah and the Whales”? “JC and the…” too far?) I would think of him as rakish and charming rather than a dangerous, evil religious fanatic (unless he shaved John 3:16 down there- though that would be a absolute boon for Evangelical manscaping professionals throughout Colorado.)

Don’t get me wrong- there are some types of god-talk I really enjoy. I’m a big fan of the up-all-night pseudo-philosophical college-freshman style bullshit sessions. The kind of conversations you have when you combine an eighth ounce of kind bud, a really clean bong and a semester of Intro to Comparative Religions so that you’re ready to unleash such earthshaking revelations as “Did you realize that all religions basically say the SAME THINGS???” (gasp!) (“If you think about it, man, Jesus is just Buddha with six pack abs and a guilt complex. Are you going to eat that Pop-Tart?”) and you quote such noted religious authorities as Jonathan Livingston Seagull and XTC to support your arguments (“Did you make mankind after we made you? And the DEVIL, too??? Dear God!”) What can I say? I’m a sucker for this kind of talk. I guess I’m just an overgrown college freshman at heart- even though when I try and hang out with college freshmen they flee in terror like extras in the 50’s sci-fi classic Attack of the 40 Year Old Lame-Ass

I’m one of the lucky ones. For a lot of people out there, 2011 didn’t turn out as planned. Last January, Muammar Gaddafi figured he’d be spending New Year’s Eve 2012 like he does every year, drinking hot cocoa with mini-marshmallows and tiger blood (Charlie Sheen’s recipte) in his fortified compound as he is lulled to sleep by the dulcet sounds of tortured prisoners and Ryan Seacrest, safe and secure in the undying love of the Libyan people. Turns out instead, the Libyans threw him out of power, killed him and sodomized his orpse with a knife (keepin’ it classy, Tripoli!) so he’ll be spending this New Year’s Eve dead in a ditch with no hot chocolate or mini-marshmallows in sight.  With any luck, though, he’s in hell, so he’ll still get to watch Ryan Seacrest.

It was a tough year for people who aren’t homicidal dictators, too. 2011 sucked for movies, television, music, weather, politics, sports, the global economy, American democracy, Barack Obama, compromise, sanity, rationality, science, the environment, the Americans Formerly Known as the Middle Class (broke is the new black!), Japan, Turkey, Joplin, Springfield, Chile, North Dakota, Iceland, Alabama, Memphis, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Thailand, anywhere in the path of Hurricane Irene and for the ridiculous number of birds and fish who kept showing up dead because they just couldn’t handle living in this world anymore (It Gets Better videos for Birds? Come on Big Bird, hop all over that shit- you could be the feathered Dan Savage. Aren’t you sick of Bert and Ernie hogging all the attention like a couple of puppet queens? Get down with your big yellow self and keep those squeaky little fuckers in the air!). You know it’s a bad year when you need to Google “Natural Disasters 2011” just to put together a halfway complete list at the end of the year and your realize you don’t even remember half of them (oh yeah, right- like you totally remembered the New Zealand earthquake- don’t fucking judge me) and then you have to figure out which ones to leave out so the list doesn’t get too long (SPOILER ALERT: China didn’t cut it. I guess they had mudslides or something- but who the hell knows what goes on over there? It’s their own stupid fault for keeping Facebook out of the country. Hell, I didn’t even know there were trees down in Pasadena until everyone started posting damage photos instead of videos of their cats. And, no, Californians- a tree knocking your fence down isn’t considered a natural disaster and neither is your patio furniture blowing away. Go to the East Coast and get some perspective, you spoiled little weather brats.) If the Mayans are right about 2012, then 2011 made the perfect prequel year for the apocalypse

Author’s Note: Uhm, yeah. So…Hi there. Is this thing on? Yeah, uhm, well, this is awkward. I actually have nothing to say. I’ve just always wanted to be refered to as “Author”. I think you’ll agree it’s a way better title than “Arts Administrator” or “Local Oaf” or “Really, really angry guy on the back of the bus who scared all of those ‘special needs’ teens when he screamed at the driver for missing his stop” (at least, I’m assuming they were  “special needs” because they were taking the bus and if they weren’t “special” they would have been driving. It’s LA, after all, every bus here is the short bus) or “World’s Youngest Cranky Old Man” (it’s supposed to be an actual world record by those anti-semitic Irish mamzers from Guinness won’t officially recognize it. Stupid kids! Get off my metaphorical lawn, whatever that means in this context!) or, god help me, “Blogger.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with being a blogger- somebody’s got to keep shoveling out content into the gaping maw of the insatiable shiksa bitch goddess that is the internet and there’s only so many cat videos humanity can make before the cats all rise up as one on two legs and adorably claw all of our eyes out. Still, “Author” has a much better ring to it than “Blogger.” “Blogger” sounds like some smarmy, unshowered nerd banging out filth on his laptop late at night in his soiled sweatpants while he eats Fruit Loops out of the box and half-watches reruns of Psych on TiVo (Oh wait, it’s the shark one! I love this one!) while “Author” – well, that sounds dignified, respectalble- like someone with a pipe and a drinking problem who uses words like “deconstruct” and “semiotics” and actually fucking gets paid for the stuff he writes. How sweet would that be?

Of course, I really have no business complaining about how internet content isn’t worth anything since my entire music library was downloaded from Napster in 99 & 2000 (I was “working” for the Jewish non-profit sector at the time- they were practically paying me in non-dairy creamer and bandwidth.) I suppose that generating free content is my karmic reward for all the times I said something like “Dude, the Bloodhound Gang is so rich, they’re totally not going to notice if I download their album” (Yeah, I downloaded the Bloodhoung Gang  album. It was the late 90’s. DON’T FUCKING JUDGE ME!)

If you were to go back in time and tell some poor schmuck schlepping across the country in a covered wagon that in a century’s time he’d be able to make the same journey in a matter of hours in an enormous metal flying machine, he’d probably be shocked and amazed. He’d be even more shocked and amazed when you told him how much it totally sucks to travel that way and that he’s probably better off with the covered wagon.

Even though the wagon trip takes many months and he’d probably freeze to death or get scalped along the way, at least he doesn’t have to pay $80 to check a lousy suitcase or wait in line for an hour for the privilege of taking his shoes off and getting his anus x-rayed by moronic TSA agents that shouldn’t be trusted to guard the Monopoly bank, let alone to make sure that no one is trying to blow up the airplane, before being crammed into a seat in Guaranteed Blood Clot Economy Class and spending $6.75 on an ass-and-cheese sandwich on a hard roll every bit as stale as the germ filled and lightly puke scented recycled air on the plane because for $475 the cheap cocksuckers running the airline can’t even throw in a really shitty meal for free or give us something remotely worth breathing. It is, in fact amazing just how effectively the airlines have stripped away any sense of wonder from what is, when you think about it, the rather magical act of flying, as though forcing you to step in huge piles of Pegasus shit before letting you ride the mythical beast or a theme park forcing you to sign a waiver that you’re not gonna sue if the alcoholic midget child molester in the Micky Mouse costume grabs your son’s winkie while taking a picture before letting you go into The Happiest Place on Earth.

The Ancient Greeks didn’t worry about whether God loved them. They didn’t wring their hands over the fact that God allowed evil to thrive in the world and didn’t struggle with the way that God permitted the righteous to suffer while the wicked prospered. That’s because, in Ancient Greece, the Gods were a bunch of dicks. Zeus was particularly nasty- he lorded over the universe like an omnipotent frat boy with lightning bolts. He was far less concerned with the meek inheriting the earth than he was in changing into a swan and fucking the meek’s wife (they had a pretty loose grip of zoology, as well.) The rest of the gods were no better- just a bunch of mean spirited, petty, vindictive, narcissistic, spiteful bastards who absolutely didn’t give a shit about humanity. It must have been wonderfully liberating in a way- like having a Republican president. After all, when Bush and co. were in power, we didn’t wring our hands and wonder WHY they were leading us into one pointless war after another for the sole benefit of their rich cronies or WHY they were making disastrously short-sighted fiscal policy decisions. We knew perfectly well why- they were dicks. They did irresponsible, self-centered, evil, destructive, selfish things because they were irresponsible, self-centered, evil, destructive selfish cocksuckers- plain and simple. All we had to do was fear them, loathe them and mock them. With the advent of Judaism, though and the election of Obama, things became more complicated. Now we have to wrestle with thorny and difficult philosophical questions like WHY does God allow bad things to happen to good people, WHY does God turn his back on his supposedly chosen people a