Random Rumination: The Superb Owl

I DON'T CARE.

 

Got that, Booboo? I don't care!

 

Here I am: the American man, leaving my mid-forties later this year. I am a US citizen (heh-heh, with German citizenship in my back pocket), I vote in every election I can get to (missed the big one in 1996 because I was overseas... but fortunately the election turned out all right), I once owned a car with fins on it, I prefer to buy American-made, I eat hot dogs in the summer and apple pie perhaps a little too often (though in the autumn, pumpkin's my downfall).

 

I am straight, reasonably intelligent, open-minded, college undergrad; I go to Mass every Sunday (and sometimes in between), I love my kids and my mother, miss my dad, try hard to listen to my boss; and if I weren't so heaven-bent on entering a monastery or seminary, I'd be on the market for one more open-minded ( = desperate) woman to finish my life with.

 

I SIMPLY DON'T CARE about bloody football!

 

I don't care that today is (let's all bow – no; you bow; I'll tap my toes impatiently) Super Bowl Sunday. I don't care about any sport – professional, academic, amateur, olympic, whatever. I grumble when the latest "Simpsons" episode is preempted by yet another screenful of overweight, overpaid men in tight pants chasing each other and a weird-shaped "ball" up and down a striped field.

 

Do please understand that I'm not anti-football; rather, I simply don't care for it, and care little about it. This has called for much patience from my mother, a brother-in-law, and my older daughter, all of whom are very sports-focused and seem happiest yelling at a fumble or dropped pitch.

 

Nor have I any desire to see this sport wiped out of our universe, or relegated to pick-me-up games in the park on fall weekends. A lot of time, money, and economy are tied up in sports of all levels and – aside from where it fills too much of many children's schedules – their loss to the powerhouse of western civilization would be of near-catastrophic impact.

 

In school, I did play some football in gym class... and fortunately the other players never looked to me for anything pivotal during our games. This was not a bad experience, folks; I didn't know how to play, didn't want to learn, and fortunately was not pressed to be a great part of it.

 

In 1996, I actually enjoyed watching a high-school game in north New Jersey with a girlfriend, whose niece (IIRC) was a cheerleader. But I couldn't follow the action, was baffled by a yellow flag thrown onto the field more than once, and totally confused when suddenly each team began defending the other end of the field.

 

Bless my daughter's heart; during one game a few weeks ago, which was being shown on one of the large-screen TVs at my brother-in-law's house, she explained some of the basics, and objectives, translated the yellow line and the blue one, and so on, with great patience and no condescension. She enjoyed being my tutor for this impromptu class, and I do have to admit that – while noncaring about the sport – I am mildly curious about it... just not curious enough to tune into a game under ordinary circumstances. So Dear Daughter Shelly's information has since evaporated again from my cranial grooves; this is not her fault, of course, and I do appreciate her effort.

 

At about this same time of year in 1991, I suggested to a girlfriend (not the one I attended the high-school game with) something for the tiny minority of straight American men like me: on this particular hallowed Sunday evening each year, throw a "Superb Owl Party", complete with stuffed, wizened bird in the corner. My girlfriend suggested the slogan: "For those who don't care a hoot about football!" We could have the usual football fare – beer, beans, bucket o' wings – and put on an action film or "chick-flick".

 

Heh; we guys would be in a delicious minority there, too, because (I suspect) most of the attendees would be the football-widow type, and nonmarried gals who've been shoved aside for the day by their obsessed men.

 

Anyway, I never held one of those parties, but every year I give it some thought, and likely will continue do so. But the point would not be to make a point; it would simply be to provide an alternative get-together with friends, and friends of friends, who care as little about football as I do.

 

But when it comes to a good football game, I'll pass.

Soapbox: Craig's Lisp

The following is from an email I sent in response to a close friend who is my diametric opposite politically. This makes for some lively emails, which neither one of us generally takes much personally.

 

I've left her anonymous.

 

 

My friend:

 

I know you understand that when I take something you send me, pounce on it, tear it apart, and demonstrate the spurious, specious, agenda-driven, blinders-navigated, narrow-minded garbage that it is… I know that when I do this to something you send me, you understand that I'm not attacking you, and not blasting you, my friend of so many years, when I blast to shreds the essay itself.

 

Let me underscore that again, while I load some heavy shells into this anti-bu||sh!t (pardon me) gun of mine. Love you dearly, my friend, okay? Now let me switch off the safeties – and this is as close as I'll ever get to slapping an NRA seal over my Buck Fush bumper-sticker.

 

(As far as I can tell, this essay was written by a commentator named Craig Smith, and appeared in the New York Times on November 20 of last year. Since then, someone's tinkered with the text. I'll strike out in red what doesn't belong, and restore in green what was excised… and in highlighted yellow, I'll correct the deficiencies in grammar, punctuation, and spelling. If someone wants to make some kind of point, with me as the audience, they had better have solid command of this language, or they lose even more credibility.)

 

I must say first and clearly that while I can't endorse Mr. Smith's sweeping declamation whole hog, I do concur with the essence, which is indeed carried in that term, "spoiled brats".

 

But first off: if a magazine employs someone whom Mr. Smith finds less than favorable, does that make the magazine of less worth? Don't we want our journals to be balanced and fair? This would mean that – besides reporting the facts as accurately as possible – they employ a range of voices that will address issues of the readers' concern from more than one angle.

 

Smith falls into the easy, lazy trap of inductive reasoning, if I read him correctly. Given a poll whose results seem to indicate dissatisfaction in two-thirds of the American populace with their president and the country's direction, he starts laying out (mostly) the many good things we do indeed have in our country, and condescendingly suggests that poll says the populace has lost sight of these things.

 

Skip the pre-analysis; let's have a look at the poll itself. Smith is not specific, but it's likely that the poll to which he refers is one referenced in an article by Marcus Mabry at MSNBC.com on Veterans' Day, November 11. A note at the end of the article clarifies further: "The NEWSWEEK poll, conducted Nov. 9-10, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. In conducting the poll, Princeton Survey Research Associates International interviewed 1,006 adults aged 18 and older." I'm inclined to think such a small number – roughly just three-tenths of one percent of the total US population – is not a wide and deep enough swath for Craig Smith to build his soapbox on. And I might add: polls aren't "true" or "false", Mr. Smith; any more than a thermometer says that the temperature IS. Well of course it is! But is the air outside cold, or hot? How much? Likewise a poll presents its own kind of degrees (pardon the pun) of measure. There will always be a segment of the population satisfied, and another segment dissatisfied, with whatever issue is being focused on. What percentage are where today?, the poll asks. So if this is the poll that got Mr. Craig to rail against us spoiled brats – an appellation with which I certainly concur, I must repeat! – he has either accidentally or deliberately misrepresented a key number, something the not-as-dubious-as-I wouldn't bother to double-check on.

 

To quote Mabry's MSNBC article: "Presented with a list of factors that may have contributed to the Democrats' success [in the midterm election], …67 percent [of Americans] cited dissatisfaction with how Republicans have handled government spending and the deficit".

 

Shame on you, Mr. Smith: no matter how I squint and fiddle with the font sizes, I can't get this to say that we Americans are "are unhappy with the direction the country is headed". It is not a general malaise or untargeted dissatisfaction, sir; it quite specifically points at Republican accomplishments… and/or clear lack thereof.

 

Let's just kindly assume that Smith simply skimmed the Newsweek article, and is no more than a sloppy journalist… rather than someone working specifically to draw people's attention away from the blamed party: the administration, and the Republican (former) majority in Congress.

 

Let me go on, then, with the remainder of what Mr. Craig has to say, after springboarding from his seemingly misread poll.

 

We are indeed "[t]he most blessed people in the world", and for nearly all the reasons Smith lays out, and then some. But I submit that most of us aren't whining and complaining, and weren't back in November either – rather, at the election we used a key democratic right (that's a small-D "democratic") and sent many bad-record office-holders packing.

 

We do take so much of what we have here for granted – and I speak as someone who saw with his own eyes the Communist guard towers on the East/West-German border during the Cold War heyday, staffed with soldiers watching to ensure that citizens not flee their totalitarian masters. Fortunately, those same citizens took democratic action themselves, sixteen-some years later…and I assume at least most of those towers are no more today.

 

Smith goes on to speak heroically of the "president who guided the nation in the dark days after 9/11". Oh, I could throw up at that! We were in free-fall for several days, running on automatic, while a few cooler heads shut down all air traffic (remember the eerily empty skies?), installed ground-to-air missile batteries around Washington DC and other cities, and tightened the border. Meanwhile, King George II sat in an elementary-school classroom (wasn't it kindergarten?) for, what, seven? seventeen? minutes, reading a book to the kids, while three thousand people were incinerated on his watch.

 

A leader with his (or her) hands on the reins would have put the book down gently, hugged a kid a moment, then stood up and announced that there was a bit of an unexpected emergency, and he needed to go back to Washington… but he would return to their classroom once things had settled down.

 

Instead, there he was, white as a sheet, utterly out of his experience and reckoning, waiting for a real leader – good or bad – to tell him what to do. Eventually one did, and Georgie left.

 

And don't give me that out-of-date bu||sh!t (pardon me again) about lowering taxes. This might have been an issue in Reagan's day, when the prime rate was, oh, twenty-something? Certainly not the under-six it's been for years. But our taxes are not too high, and weren't in 2001 either.

 

When George came into office (I still say both elections were stolen), the government had a fiscal surplus for the first time in decades. But, just as he did in Texas when he took over there, George wiped the surplus back out by returning it to the citizens, claiming it belonged to us. Well, yes, it had been collected from us… but just as with a solid savings account and good investments, it was there for use on our behalf. You simply don't cash it all out because there's too much money! You'll need it later: catastrophic health issue, severe home damage (or renovation), and other needs not as easily anticipated.

 

Sure enough, a few months later nineteen men boarded our jets and turned them into weapons to use against us, and we were suddenly at war… with little or no money to fund it.

 

Tax cuts under this administration have repeatedly favored the wealthy and powerful, at the expense of the weak and needy. When programs are no longer funded as strongly at the federal level, the burden devolves to the individual states (and commonwealths). But the pressure is now on them, too, to cut taxes. So how to fund?

 

Why, now the states, deathly afraid of raising their own taxes to take on the new, added burden of those formerly federal programs, are stuck with the unenviable choices instead of cutting funding for education, infrastructure, health, and so on. Most raise tuition rates at state schools. (George, my daughter wants to thank you personally for that one.) Some (as in Maryland) debate, or even institute, gambling, on the assumption it would be easy money… and clean. It is neither. Others (as in Virginia and New Jersey), backed into a corner, raise property taxes – and now some rates do rise too high.

 

I'm sorry; I just can't see how cutting a break to a multi-millionaire is going to help make a poor, elderly, unemployed African-American woman more able to pay for her insulin. And how will she help take care of her granddaughter? And you wonder why some people are unhappy?

 

Smith says that Bush II "has been called every name in the book for succeeding in keeping all the spoiled ungrateful brats safe from terrorist attacks". Is he serious? Or just trying to pile it on ever more thickly? It would be absolutely ludicrous to assert that the president has been criticized for keeping us safe! Is he nuts? Administration policies certainly have made it much more difficult for anything further on the scale of 9/11 anytime soon (although any half-decent administration would have done at least as well in this regard; George's team is hardly unique in history).

 

What Bush has been understandably and justifiably vilified for is the range of misdeeds by him and his cronies, impeachable offenses that amount to – as a great bumper-sticker I saw only once said – Treason, Tyranny, Murder, and Corruption. Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, and Andrew Johnson were each impeached for less. As another bumper-sticker says (you can tell I love 'em): When Clinton Lied, No One Died.

 

And the all-volunteer Army (uh, yo – Craig? There are plenty of Marines, Navy, and Air Force out there, too) currently fighting in the Middle East are not "out there defending you and me". They are defending the flow of oil (a strategic interest, yes – but that's all), and trying vainly to pull back together a country they should never have gone into in the first place. It is not for our freedom.

 

Likely you've heard all the evidence that there was no evidence by mid-March 2003 of WMD's in Iraq… while even then the evidence was more than clear in North Korea and Iran. And you've probably heard how our valiant soldiers, under orders from on high, rushed to defend the Iraqi oil ministry offices… and left the museums wide open to devastation of this ancient country's long heritage.

 

Terrorists were not tolerated under Saddam – who was, yes, a brutal, repressive dictator… but had been nearly toothless since 1991. Now, the terrorists seem to be firing out of every school-window, blowing up in every market place, and picking off every civilian they can find. Why? We took away a brutal order… and replaced it with no order. We yanked out the heavy-handed checks and balances, and made a murderer out of everyone over there with a long-held grievance, a target out of every civilian… and further targets of our own sons and daughters and brothers and sisters simply because they are there and finally within easy reach of the terrorists.

 

I think – and I may be wrong in this – most of the newest volunteers in our armed forces volunteered to fight terrorism, and have bought into the administration's lies and deceits about our purposes, and proudly and unfairly become the latest ranks of cannon-fodder. Older volunteers (and especially the Reserve forces) joined not to fight, but to pay for education, to learn a trade, and to patriotically honor this awesome country of ours… not to let out their blood in a forgettable slum far from home. And if they do "refuse to go", they lose out on money needed for their children and families… and (especially with that lousy discharge) most prospects for a better job once a better administration comes into power in Washington.

 

PS, Craig: when you castigate the media, you do remember that that includes you, right? Just wanted to make sure.

 

Regards,

 

AgingChild

 

---

 

Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2007 9:07 AM
Subject: something to think about

 

Boy, is this right on target! I love it!

 

Regards,

 

Anon E. Mouse

 

Made in the USA: Spoiled Brats

 

The other day I was reading Newsweek magazine and came across some poll data I found rather hard to believe. It must be true, given the source, right? This is the same magazine that employs Michael ("Qurans in the toilets at Gitmo") Isikoff. Here I promised myself this week I would be nice, and I start off in this way.

 

The Newsweek poll alleges that 67 percent of Americans are unhappy with the direction in which the country is headed, and 69 percent of the country is unhappy with the performance of the president. In essence, 2/3s two-thirds of the citizenry just ain't happy and want a change.

 

So being the knuckle-dragger I am, I started thinking, "What we are we so unhappy about?"

 

Is it that we have electricity and running water 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Is our unhappiness the result of having air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter? Could it be that 95.4 percent of these unhappy folks have a job?Maybe it is the ability to walk into a grocery store at any time and see more food in moments than Darfur has seen in the last year?

 

Maybe it is the ability to drive from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean without having to present identification papers as we move through each state? Or possibly the hundreds of clean and safe motels we would find along the way that can provide temporary shelter? I guess having thousands of restaurants with varying cuisine from around the world is just not good enough. Or could it be that when we wreck our car, emergency workers show up and provide services to help all involved. Whether you are rich or poor, they treat your wounds and even, if necessary, send a helicopt6er to take you to the hospital.

 

Perhaps you are one of the 70 percent of Americans who own a home. You may be upset with knowing that in the unfortunate case of having a fire, a group of trained firefighters will appear in moments and use top-notch equipment to extinguish the flames – thus saving you, your family,and your belongings. Or if, while at home watching one of your many flat-screen TVs, a burglar or prowler intrudes, an officer equipped with a gun and a bullet-proof vest will come to defend you and your family against attack or loss. This is all in against the backdrop of a neighborhood free of bombs, or militias raping and pillaging the residents., nNeighborhoods where 90 percent of teenagers own cell phones and computers.

 

How about the complete religious, social, and political freedoms we enjoy, that which are the envy of everyone in the world? Maybe that is what has 67 percent of you folks unhappy.

 

The fFact is, we are the largest group of ungrateful, spoiled brats the world has ever seen. No wonder the world loves the U.S., yet has a great disdain for its citizens. They see us for what we are.: tThe most blessed people in the world, who do nothing but complain about what we don't have, and what we hate about the country, instead of thanking the good Lord that we live here.

 

I know, I know. What about the president who took us into war and has no plan to get us out? The president who has a measly 31-percent approval rating? Is this the same president who guided the nation in the dark days after 9/11? The president that who cut taxes to bring an economy out of recession? Could this be the same guy who has been called every name in the book for succeeding in keeping all the spoiled ungrateful brats safe from terrorist attacks? The commander-in-chief of an all-volunteer army that is out there defending you and me?

 

Did you hear how bad the President is on the news or talk show? Did this news affect you so much, make you so unhappy you couldn't take a look around for yourself and see all the good things and be glad? Think about it......are you upset at the President because he actually caused you personal pain OR is it because the "Media" told you he was failing to kiss your sorry ungrateful behind every day.

 

Make no mistake about it. The troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have volunteered to serve, and in many cases may have died for your freedom. There is currently no draft in this country. They didn't have to go.; tThey are able to refuse to go, and thereby end up with either a "general" discharge, an "other than honorable" discharge or, worst case scenario, a "dishonorable" discharge after a few days in the brig.

 

So why then the flat-out discontentment in the minds of 69 percent of Americans? Say what you want, but I blame it on the media. "If it bleeds, it leads" – and they specialize in bad news. Everybody will watch a car crash with blood and guts.; hHow many will watch kids selling lemonade at the corner? The media knows this, and media outlets are for-profit corporations.; tThey offer what sells, and when criticized, try to defend their actions by "justifying" them in one way or another. Just ask why they tried to allow a murderer like O.J. Simpson to write a book about how he didn't kill his wife, but if he did he was would have done it this way….. Iinsane!

 

Stop buying the negativism you are fed everyday by the media. Shut off the TV, burn Newsweek, and use the New York Times for the bottom of your bird cage. Then start being grateful for all we have as a country. There is exponentially more good than bad.

 

WE ARE THE MOST BLESSED PEOPLE ON EARTH, WE SHOULD THANK GOD SEVERAL TIMES PER DAY.....

 

I close with one of my favorite quotes from B.C. Forbes in 1953:

 

''What have Americans to be thankful for? More than any other people on the earth, we enjoy complete religious freedom, political freedom, social freedom. Our liberties are sacredly safeguarded by the Constitution of the United States, 'the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.' Yes, we Americans of today have been bequeathed a noble heritage. Let us pray that we may hand it down unsullied to our children and theirs.''

 

I suggest we sit back and count our blessings for all we have. If we don't, what we have will be taken away. Then we will have to explain to future generations why we squandered such blessing and abundance. If we are not careful, this generation will be known as the "greediest and most ungrateful generation." A This is a


far cry from the proud Americans of the "greatest generation" who left us an untarnished legacy.

 

---

AgingChild Feb 3, 2007

Another postword from AgingChild: Blasted blogifier again put extra breaks in the middle of several paragraphs. Well, that’s not how I wrote or formatted the letter. Never mind; I’m still trying workarounds… but I’m not about to spend another hour tweaking it, as I’ve had to do with other posts. If this esthetic problem continues, though, I’ll eventually post here the location of my NEW blog-site. But I want to give WordPress a good shake first.

Regards,
AgingChild

Random Rumination: Le' Go My Ego!

During a rare slow period at work this afternoon, I tried a few googles to see if I could pull up content from this blog yet. I did, in fact – and also achieved that rarest of googlings, where you get a single result. There's a casual game – and conveniently I forget the name for it – where folks try to find two words that, googled together, yield just one page.

I did my search with "MT2mb" and "agingchild" together… neither one of which are recognized words, technically, so I might have to forfeit my crown only hours after slipping it down over my eyes and smirking foolishly. It still works, too; here's a screenshot:

Why, yes; my Google settings are in Klingon for the moment… or didn't you know that Google has some "gag" languages hidden in their settings? Haxor, Latin – both Pig and Classical – , Elmer Fudd, something silly called "Bork bork bork!" that must be part of a hilarious inside joke I'm outside of, and a couple others.

In any case, Google's link leads to a pre-search with a group called "Technorati", who at press time have found 278 blogs using the word "rumination"… which includes my entry from several days ago (second one down in their list), and presumably – later – this one too. Thanks, guys!

I leaned back in my chair, there at work, and enjoyed the feeling of power for a moment… although I'm never comfortable in the spotlight (little different from crosshairs), nor holding a great amount of power and control: as John Miles sings on the Alan Parsons Project's 1985 disk "Stereotomy": "Limelight, don't let me slip right through your fingers; there's a long way to fall!"

Still, it was quite awing to find my existence acknowledged by a third party. Occasionally (under my own name) my few posts to genealogy sites will show up if you search certain terms – this is from regular forays, last couple years, to find further corroboration on the hundreds of names and dates given in our family-history book.

One of my brothers shows up very easily, all over the internet, since he's an astrophysicist (that must be a really humbling profession, and so very worth it), and many of his papers are out there (in more ways than two!) electronically.

My other brother shows up with more modest frequency from the many road-races he's run; I show up on at least two or three of those same pages… and quite a few spots further down on the final tally. But… I did still run!

And one of my sisters, too, pops up (under her husband's last name) with any of a number of product reviews she's done over the years. Gal knows her stuff!

I do hope to be present in more places on the Web over time – but for writings e-published, this blog, and so on. It's not a delusion of grandeur… although, by definition, how would I know it isn't?

But I do know I have things to say. Some of these are – pardon my momentary ego – profound; some carry a bit of good esthetic weight, and others are worth at least a snort and/or crooked half-grin. And some things, I hope, may even help bridge the needless gap between spirit/God, and the lost, shivering human. I'll work in some spiritual themes here, too.

Right now, in the back of my mind I'm beginning something for Sunday's post… might get me my man-card revoked, since I don't care a flying fig for football, or the "Super" Bowl. But moron – excuse me; more on – that in a couple days.

Now let's see if I can actually embed a JPG without reformatting my blog. And… just a few years ago, that would have made no sense to me. Woo-hoo; I made it into the twenty-first century!

Steal My Stuff: Tripe, With Vignette Dressing

Time to break open another blog-category here: Steal My Stuff! (apologies to Abbie Hoffman, yip yip) 

In my mid- to upper forties now, I've been writing for my amusement (and for grades in school/college) for over thirty-plus years – in which time I've managed to garner one little rejection note, but another one of my pieces did appear in a popular magazine a few years later… although this was an adult magazine, and I don't dare show the kids, or my mother for that matter. And this was almost twenty-five years ago! 

The fiction I write is mostly light-science SF (i.e., no particle accelerators), dabbling occasionally into fantasy (a projected trilogy set in Mu and Atlantis; time-travel, which – see Niven – is more fantasy than SF; some slightly-more-mainstream-mystical stories revolving around a neo-Christian cult of pacifist psychokinetics; etc.) 

Nonfiction I write is essays (i.e., most frequently emails that grow too long and tax the patience of friends and relatives!), mostly on history, religion (especially Catholicism), politics, and language… but can veer off into many other realms. 

The remainder is verse/poetry ("Poems, everybody! The laddie fancies himself a poet!": that's from Pink Floyd's "The Wall" film), which is the bulk of what I've been writing the last ten years. Some of it is downright good, I have to admit… and so likely won't show up under "Steal My Stuff", heh-heh. 

Overall… what I write, there is little or no market for. SF sections of your bookstore are saturated… and who buys poetry-books by anyone other than Angelou and Chesterton nowadays? 

Of course this is self-defeatist… but the viewpoint nonetheless leaves me free to write for my own amusement (as in this very paragraph), and under little or no pressure. 

Back in college in the early eighties, I came up with the plot/question of what it would be like – as written from the inside – to have one's memories thoroughly scrambled. Picture your life as a large binder full of many, many pages of photos, letters, stories, recollections, and so on. Whoops; binder snaps open under a strong wind, and the pages go flying downfield. 

You hurriedly gather the sheets… but there's no longer any continuity between them, no progression from A to B to… Z. And you'd never dated/numbered the pages! How do you reestablish your self-identity, self-awareness, with this loose sheaf of dirtied paper? You need to read it, refer to it, use it, NOW; no time to sort and analyze… and here comes a bull!! 

I gave up after a few years of first-person vignettes, since I couldn't find a way to bring the story – by its very nature – to rise above being a dreckful hash of jumbled, disordered pieces. A good several of these pieces into the book, there was to come the fellow's key recollection/recount of how his memory was scrambled… likely several pages after the (later) conclusion of how to unscramble it all. Slowly, lurching through his lifetime, he'd rebuild himself using his emerging realization of what had befallen his psyche. This would be told in the nature of the vignettes, and the commonality that begins to emerge between them. 

Still, most of what little fiction I write now is little pieces of projected bigger stories; one in particular is a time-travel story with very good market-potential… if at least two movies and a couple best-selling novels hadn't paved the field over, painted lines, put in a parking deck, Starbucks®, and an office complex. No suites to rent. 

So here's something from the abandoned Fragments novel. You're welcome to it – I still kind of like the banter, but the whole thing is too shallow and doesn't have the hooks I'd need to fasten it firmly on to something more redeemable. (Plus I tend to be a lot less bawdy nowadays!) I wrote it in October of 1981; I was barely in my twenties, and just had to get the words out. 

I miss that innocence. But go ahead; Steal My Stuff! 

"Hey!" Bill called from near the east mirrors. "Has anybody heard about the government's new prostitution tax?" 

Heads turned expectantly, including mine; I grinned wryly. Bill always got invited to parties; you could count on him to throw in a few standup-comic type jokes. Always they were original, and never did he repeat himself. 

"Well," he sighed, shaking his head convincingly, "I guess I'll have to tell you about this. Really, nobody pays any attention to the news anymore." 

"Grunt," I said, as someone bumped into me. I turned to find Cheryl with my scotch refill. 

She was smiling broadly. "That Bill really thinks he's a wit," she commented, gesturing with my drink. 

I liberated it, adding, "Yeah, and he's half right." I had had a tendency lately to break out in Robert Heinlein quotes. I had to cut that out. Maybe Vonnegut instead. 

"You see," Bill explained, having strode to the center of the room, "now that prostitutes have been licensed, Uncle Sugar has decided to get into the… act. With, voilá, a prostitution tax." He began pacing to the fireplace. 

"The first installment of the tax is paid the moment they guy – or gal – the customer – the moment the customer gets his orgasm." 

"Isn't that a bit, uh, anticlimactic?" Cheryl asked from our position near one of the north corners. I nudged her. 

Some of the guests chuckled; Bill blinked a moment, then responded: "Would you consider writing some material for me? Never mind! I'm not done yet. See me after class." He resumed pacing. 

"Now, ladies and gentiles, jadies and lentilmen, the orgasm tax is not enough for our Infernal Revenue Service. No-o. Because after you've finished your business, gotten dressed, and are ready to leave, the second installment is paid. This is done just as you walk out the door. 

He stood still near the mirrors, huge toothy smile plastered askew across his face. He was relishing the guests' expectation. 

"Once again the Fed gets you coming… and going." 

His audience applauded him with loud groans. 

"Really!" Bill added. "There's even something called the Head Tax… but we won't discuss that. Gi' me a drink, somebody!" 

Cheryl was chuckling. "That should make him hesitate before telling any more of those around me." 

My only answer was to stroke her bare, soft back. 

"Hey, Sir William," Cheryl called as Bill stepped our way. "You're really into prostitutes, aren't you?" 

Bill laughed. "Jerry! You didn't tell me your wife–" 

I held up a warning finger. "She wasn't making an offer." 

"Damn." 

"She isn't that kind of girl." 

"That's okay; I don't have that kind of money." 

"Two reasons: Number Two: She refuses to charge–" 

"He'd be in debt up to his–" 

"And Number One: She will not do it with animals. Which leaves you out." 

"Oh well," Bill sighed, "there's always a call for a fox somewhere." 

"You'd never know," reminded Cheryl. But she continued, "Bill, I wanted to ask you what the proper name for a Mexican prostitute is." 

He looked at her. "A Frito Lay?" 

Cheryl laughed so hard she spilled her drink.