Russ Kick (Editor), �You Are Being Lied To�
Did I mention that I hate moving? Christ, I finished 35 books last month, and this month I�ve finished five. Five! Ach! I�m still in the middle of moving, but I think I�m down to the last four to six trips in my little car. My future room is just packed full of stuff, since all I did was throw it all in a corner and move it closer and closer to the door.
And after that, I still need to clean everything up. Ugh. And I have to go to school. And I need to finish more books, because five books in a month will not stand.
I finished this over a week and a half ago, but wasn�t able to get around to writing anything about it until now (really, I still don�t have time � I should be bringing another load over to the house right now). So my memory may be a little hazy.
This is one really huge book with a lot of essays dealing with politics, religion, history, world affairs, and lots of other fun topics that aren�t polite dinner conversation. As would be expected with any collection of essays, some rule and some bore me to tears. There�s some really good stuff about The Troubles in Ireland, evidence of support of other attackers during the Colombine massacre, and Howard Bloom is one crazy motherfucker.
Thankfully, nearly all of the pieces weren�t tired rehashes of things we�ve (or more specifically, I read before. And I started laughing maniacally on campus at my little bench that I stake out when I read this:
�We must continue our commitment to deter the demand inside our country, stop the supply on and beyond our borders and increase the accountability within drug fighting programs. We must win the war on Drugs by 2003.� �House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Il). Feb. 25, 1999
Or what? You�ll concede? Turn the house over to the drug lords? Throw a party?
But speaking of lying, you remember the crazy ex-girlfriend I speak of occasionally? She wrote me again. I couldn�t fucking believe it. I mean, the last time she contacted me, I told her that when her diabetes makes her feet fall off, she could do me a favor and shove them up her ass. Now, if that�s not going to get a person to stop talking to you, what can it possibly take? So she wrote, and I responded, which two people have already told me was probably a bad move. But the response went like this:
- Well, it's actually pretty cool that you've contacted me, because I had a dream about three weeks ago and I thought I should share it with you, particularly since you were in it.
See, I was standing in a hallway talking with a group of friends/acquaintances and you happened to walk up behind me. Since I was talking, I didn't notice you at first. When others started to look past me, I turned to see what they were looking at. And there we were, face to face.
�Hi Dean,� you said. �How have you been?�
Without even skipping a beat, I answered with a question: �Can you hold on a second?�
I walked a couple of steps to the side, opened a closet door, pulled out an enormous clown hammer and whacked you in the head with it. The sound it made as the soft, nerf-like fabric hit you square in the head is hard to recreate, but it was somewhere between �MWEEEP!� and �KLONK!� hitting a high and a low note simultaneously. And as soon as I heard the sound, I woke up, immensely happy.
First and most obvious, I was happy because I just had a dream with a fucking clown hammer in it! I mean, really, how fucking cool is that? When I can remember, I start chanting �Clown Hammer, Clown Hammer, Clown Hammer� before I go to sleep, hoping to induce the suggestion into my subconscious, but no dice (and no clown hammers).
Second, you don't need to ask Jung for his take on this one. To expect that we can just start up a conversation again � as if nothing had happened and we could begin as if we just hadn't seen each other in a while because we'd been busy � is absurd. So absurd in fact, that the only possible response is just as absurd - hence the clown hammer with the squeaky noise. There was no violence in the act, not even any malice. There wasn't even really a point.
So you can see my quandary. After having that dream it would be pretty silly to contact you to say, hey! I just had a dream that said it was pointless and ridiculous for us to speak to each other! Neat, huh? Besides, after my last comment about the diabetes, the feet, and a certain part of your anatomy, I was pretty sure that I wouldn't hear from you again. But now that I have, I can say this without compunction.
�MWEEEP!/KLONK!�
P.S. You misspelled disillusioned, you dumb broad.
You would think that would do it, wouldn�t you? Well I thought it would, but I also thought the comment about her feet would do it as well. And she�s already written back. So, assuming you�ve read this far, what suggestions do you have for me to do? Huh? Huh?