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My Dentist's Name is Dr. James Spalding

WILSON!!! WILSON!!!

Sleep Walk

Rather than my usual rant about something stupid, something irrelevant, or something I know nothing about, I will, for once, discuss what's really making me so angsty. I hate my life. At this moment, I can't fathom one positive thing. There is no joie de vivre, no pep, no pleasure, no anticipation. The idea of one more conscious minute is agonizing. I want for everyone in my life to stop caring about me so I can be done with it, so I can take my farewell ride with no regrets and no teary-eyed maidens at my back. None of the people to whom I've ever pledged my heart has ever wanted it. It is expected that we should cling to life, but I feel I am instead shackled to it. Perhaps this will change, but it's a deep, deep well I've excavated, and I'm not gazing up for want of a lifeline.

We Four Kings

Well, in about six and a half hours, I'll be experiencing my first ever surgery. Intravenous stuff goin' all up in my arm, electrodes stuck on my trunk, reciting up to "E", maybe "F" before I pass out. An then they're gonna cut my head open and pluck out all four of my crookedy wisdom teeth. Funny that wisdom teeth should try to come in sideways. I gotta say it; I'm a little noivuss about this whole scalpel and pliers business. When they start going over all the possible flubs, bloopers, and too-hot-for-TV accidents that might happen as I lie oxygen-drunk under a towering pavilion of dental enthusiasts, it's starting to sound less and less like the Vicodin-motivated skip across the park I'd been hoping it would be. They could puncture through to my sinus, they tell me, and I could have snot dripping out of a hole in my mouth. They could puree my nerve-endings, and I could lose all the sensation in my jaw and lip. Excuse me, but Mister Philip Jones Hart has some out-making to do before those crooks take his feelings away. And then there's always the risk of cardiac arrest and death.
My surgeon is a hairy Republican. I ask him how long till I can smoke and he says "oh, about fifty years". Ha-ha-ha very clever, but really now, how long I says to him. "Oh, about fifty years." This wiseguy thinks he's gonna lord his homefield advantage and his little plaque that says he's certified to put holes in people's skulls over me; like I need a doctor to tell me smoking's bad, you should quit. So now, because this jokester won't gimme an answer all straight and hippocratic-like, I gotta turn to a less scholarly pool of knowledge on the subject: my friends. I guess I could smoke through my nostrils?
I gotta eat a lotta mashed potaters and applesauce in the next coupla days, and after that I can't drive till I'm off the opiates. Not that I'd wanna drive anywhere lookin' like a big pink chipmunk with a cigarette hangin' out of his nose. I dunno if I should go back up to Minneapolis, where hardly anybody knows me, where I don't gotta impress anyone, and I don't hafta leave the house for days, or if I should stick around be bored with my mom and be a swollen, drugged-up chump in front of my friends. Some of 'em I don't know if I'll ever see 'em again, and I don't want this to by their last impression of the old codger. Of course, I could die this morning and not have to worry about any of that. If that's the case, well color me deceased. N' if I don't make it, all you folks mourn me real good, hear? In the likely event I do pull through, though, I'll likely be back and eager to write under the influence of prescription cures.

All the Noise, Noise, Noise, Noise

And the Grinch, with his grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow,
Stood puzzling and puzzling: "How could it be so?"
"It came without ribbons! It came without tags!"
"It came without packages, boxes or bags!"
And he puzzled and puzzed, `till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before!
"Maybe Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a store."
"Maybe Christmas...perhaps...means a little bit more!"

And what happened then...?
Well...in Who-ville they say,
That the Grinch's small heart,
Grew three sizes that day!
And then the true meaning of Christmas came through,
And the Grinch found the strength of ten Grinches, plus two!

And now that his heart didn't feel quite so tight,
He whizzed with his load through the bright morning light
With a smile in his soul he descended Mount Crumpet
Cheerily blowing "WHO WHO!" on his trumpet,
He rode into Whoville, he brought back their toys,
He brought back their floof for the who girls and boys,
The brought back their snoof and their tringlers and fuzzles,
Brought back their pantookers and dasslers and wuzzles.
He brought everything back, all the food for the feast!
And he... ...HE HIMSELF...!
The Grinch carved the roast beast!

Welcome Christmas, bring your cheer,
Cheer to all Whos, far and near,
Christmas day is in our grasp,
So long as we have hands to clasp,
Christmas day will always be,
Just as long as we have we,
Welcome Christmas while we stand,
Heart to heart, and hand in hand.



Merry Christmas, all, and a soon to be well-enjoyed New Year.

Merry Christmas, Pep-Pep

We'll Meet Again

Last night, I was told that Bettie Page, one of my great idols and celebrity heartthrobs, was dead. It's difficult to explain her importance to me. Given my history of unreasonable jealousy toward the beautiful and famous, it doesn't make very much sense that I should idolize one of the beautifulest and famousest of them all. But for me, Bettie Page was always somewhere outside the boundaries of consideration for the so-called Cult of Beauty. She was always too curvy, too naughty, and too brunette for that patently Aryan affair. She was always somewhere outside the boundaries of social acceptance, and yet she remains one of the most photographed people in history. Everyone wanted to see her, to soak in her surprised glances and to ogle her lusty proportions. But she was the kind of girl most of us prefer to keep buried in a shoe box at the back of the closet. She was the world's guilty pleasure, chattered scandalously about in select company, stared at by countless shamefaced but bewitched men and women of every demographic, and used for the pretty face she undoubtedly was.

But for me, she was and will always remain the most beautiful woman in history. Her perfect face, her bold hips, and her exquisite breasts all aid in this opinion, of course; but it is her fragility, her subjugation by the sexually hypocritical world she was forced to live in, and her place as a proud outsider which cause me to feel an honest warmth whenever I am witness to her image. She wanted only to give herself, in all her splendid glory, to a society which wanted only to cast her down with one hand and to grope her with the other. Nothing could make me love or respect her more than her ability to retain a flirty, playful smile throughout.