Filling the Gap

Bloggy Dearest, sometimes I'm inspired to write, sometimes I'm not. This is one of those "not" weeks. So we're going stream of consciousness.

Boy are people pissed about this bailout. Finally, something we can all agree on, Democrats and Republicans. Extra! Extra! Read all about it! The American taxpayer is getting screwed by Wall Street! Open up the cliche box. It's Main Street v. Wall Street. Joe Six-Pack, Joe Lunchbox, Joe Smith is getting robbed blind by those smarmy, Armani suit-wearing CEOs with their golden parachutes and multimillion dollar payouts. They run their companies into the ground and expect us to pay for it. I vented a little while ago, so I'll only make one observation here, and that is, I think it's pretty interesting how this economic turmoil has deflated the Sarah Palin balloon. Her 15 minutes are up. People are finally getting back to reality. Wonder how long that will last?

Speaking of bad decisions, this political ploy of John McCain -- trying use the current economic crisis as a pretext to postpone Friday night's debate -- is going to blow up in his face. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that not even George Bush, our current President, ran a more cynical political campaign than John McCain is running right now. Every single thing he's doing, from picking Palin to coopting the change mantra to trying to delay this debate has an obvious political purpose. I don't mind the political part, I just think he's really bad at making blatantly political decisions look honest and sincere. He should study Bill Clinton. He was really good at it.

Who is David Blaine? What does he want? Last night, I watched him catch a .22 bullet in his mouth. A friend of his, another magician, lined up a shotgun from a few yards away, teed it up, and shot a bullet directly at Blaine's pie-hole. Now Blaine didn't catch the bullet with his teeth, mind you. I think that's impossible. He caught it with a small steel cup. Still. You could lose an eye doing that. Or some teeth. Or uh, your life. And that was just the warm-up. The main event was him jumping from a metal scaffold after hanging upside down for 60 hours. Like most of his stunts, I didn't really understand this one. He didn't sleep for several days, okay, I get it. But what's the big deal about jumping four stories? Regular people do more daring things, bungee jumping, skydiving, what have you. What makes him so special? He does the weirdest stunts too. Lived in ice for a month or something. Then he did something on London Bridge that one time. Who remembers? Okay, so he jumped, they rolled the cable back up, and.... He supposedly disappeared. Except I couldn't see it from the stupid camera angle they used. I'll just take their word that it was amazing. Yawn.

What is up with cops and Tasers? If you so much as look at them with a crooked eye these days, they're bringing out the electricity and zapping your ass. I thought Tasers were only supposed to be used in dangerous situations when someone refused arrest and they couldn't be subdued. Yesterday the NYPD killed a man who was standing 10 feet above a sidewalk, naked and obviously troubled. Without waiting for an inflatable bag to catch his fall, or taking any other precautions, they Tased him for no apparent reason instead of waiting him out. The man died when the electric shock propelled him off the ledge and he cracked his head open on the sidewalk. What is wrong with these people? Were they in a hurry to get home for dinner? Did they think it would be fun? My view is that any punishment they receive should involve them being Tased at the same elevation as the poor man they killed. Naked too. Let's see if their skulls are any more durable. Then we can put the whole thing on YouTube.

Facebook is starting to get on my nerves. Do people who live thousands of miles away seriously expect to maintain a pseudo relationship via email and Skype when there is like a 1% chance we're ever going to meet? Shit, I've wasted most of the past ten years playing games like that, and I'm tired of jerking myself around with online bullshit. If you're not in a five (okay, ten) mile radius of me, chill the hell out. I'll write when I feel like it and won't when I don't, which is most of the time. I get two days off a week if I'm lucky and the last thing I feel like doing during my furlough from jail is planting my ass in front of a computer for hours and doing the happy dance. Jesus.

I had a dream last night that I was playing football for the New York Jets. I caught a touchdown pass from Brett Favre by holding the football against my helmet, just like that Giants player who beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl last year. I was wearing the number 12, my favorite number growing up. Then I was trying to impress this girl I went out with a couple of times over a year ago by showing her my amazing catch, which I somehow had recorded on my iPod Touch. She was nonplussed. Dreams are wacky, aren't they? I don't even like the Jets.

I'm in an ornery mood. I got some really bad news two weeks ago about someone I care about (which I can't go into at the moment) and it's got me out of sorts. Depressed, even. And I still have depositions to take, crotchety opposing counsel to deal with, and a personal life to create out of paper clips and Scotch tape. I manage to get it out of my head a lot of the time, but when the lights are off and there's no one around, there's no getting away from reality. Fucking sucks. We're all living on borrowed time, people. Then one day the tape measure runs out. Sometimes it's quick, sometimes it's slow. I'm not sure which is worse.