Tonight El Chupacabra Eats Someone's Baby

Descending the hills on its way to town, the chupacabra is in transition.  As it moves, propelled by hunger, it forgets its fearfully cautious nature and assumes an aggressive boldness.  It's getting pumped up, if you will, psyched.  It becomes ferocious.

The loathsome beast spends most of its life hiding from the world of man, shivering and starving in the wilderness, terrified at the treatment it instinctively knows it would receive at the hands of civilization.  It spins in circles biting at its hindquarters and tail; its fur's in tatters wherever its jaws can reach.  The bald patches, along with the lesions over much of its body, give it the appearance of spots.  (Well, actually, I suppose the appearance of spots *is* spots.)

It lives its life in lonely isolation.  But a couple of times each month, on nights like tonight, it must eat.  And so it comes to town to find a baby, which, to the chupacabra, is the only delicious thing.  Whose baby will it eat?

Whose baby is it?  Do individuals belong to themselves?  Autonomy's supposed to be so great so perhaps they do but, still, it's hard to say that if we leave aside the baby itself then nobody's baby has been eaten when a baby gets eaten.  It was somebody's baby.  The chupacabra just ate somebody's plump and juicy little baby!  The parents, the state, the community, the tribe, the church...?

Personally, I think a baby is the baby's generation's baby.  After all, those are the people with whom it's going to spend the most time (or with whom it would have spent the most time, as the case may be).  Time spent is pretty much what life's all about, and so perhaps it is our contemporaries to whom we belong.  The great thing about this theory is that we're all babies when we lose our babies, and so it doesn't impact us emotionally because we never remember it...we didn't even know it was happening at the time. Babies have no idea what's going on.

It's important to recognize, though, that getting eaten by a chupacabra is not a "victimless crime."  The victim, of course, is the baby who was eaten.  That baby loses everything.  The chupacabra may have never injured us personally, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't despise it.  It is a despicable thing.

Yeah, that all sounds great, but what if God IS a grammar nazi?

You know how people sometimes say, "God only knows [about this or that]"? Usually it's when you've just asked them a question about something and they don't know the answer and they shrug or sigh and say, "God only knows." It's grammatically incorrect. Well, it's either grammatically incorrect or else it's doctrinally incorrect. It implies that [this or that] is the only topic about which God has knowledge, but we all know (or should know) that God is omniscient. Omniscience is part of His definition and so He has to have it (that's Cartesian, right?). So people should rather say, "Only God knows [about this or that]" or "Only God knows."

A dollar to a doughnut says that God's not at all happy about people so often misspeaking this way. It'd piss me off if I were Him. (I wish I were God so that I could just write, "It'd piss Me off.") And it's such a simple thing! And the stakes are pretty high, too...might wanna try getting it right.

Home Of The Brave New World

Smokers' Rights Are Human Rights

For Pete's sake, Californians, today's the day to do the right thing.  Vote "no" on 29, please!  The smoking community has suffered enough.

Honestly, a dollar a pack is no joke.  That's hundreds of dollars per year!  What the hell?

I really will be so disappointed if you people decide to screw me out of several hundred dollars each year.  I'm already subsidizing your children's early childhood educations.  What more do you want from me?

These past two decades of ever increasing marginalization and oppression need to end.  It's time to recognize this hateful campaign against smokers for what it is: a vicious assault on our civil rights.

Seriously, I think you're all a buncha fuckin' nazis.

Let's Not Get Physical

My friends all tell me that I'm fat and weak and that I should exercise. They say that working out would give me increased energy, and I believe them. But what do you think I'd be doing with all of that extra energy? That's right, you guessed it: I'd be working out. It sounds like a push to me, a wash, a big waste of time.

Exercising for longevity's sake is wasting time now to buy time later. My friends say that it isn't about longevity specifically or even about health generally but, rather, that it's about looking good. But I say that if you're good-looking then you'll still be attractive when plump, and if you're ugly then being thin won't help you.

Most people are ugly; they should try not to worry about it. Besides, I could be gorgeous as all get-out, but what good is that going to do me at the gym? How am I supposed to get laid in a gym? It might be different if I were gay, but I'm straight. There's no way. You'd need a unisex steam room or sauna or something.

Secrets

Good Friday Weekend

When I was a youngster, we'd always get a nice vacation come Eastertide. "Easter vacation," we called it. We'd get a week off from our studies, either the week before Easter or the week after Easter. Then -- for reasons of political correctness, I suppose -- they changed it to "spring break."

At first, the change was merely terminological: they continued to schedule spring break during the week immediately before or after Easter. By the time I got to college, though, spring break didn't necessarily coincide with Easter time. In fact, it usually didn't. It was truly no longer an Easter vacation.

I never cared what they called it, though, so long as I got my week off around early April. For me, the name of the holiday was totally irrelevant.

Then I finished my schooling, and suddenly I no longer got shit with respect to any time off in April. The nomenclatural issue had become irrelevant in a whole new way.

Without this time off, I became bitter (as those deprived of leisure are wont to do) and disgruntled, and for decades I considered strategies for building some sort of a socio-political movement that would bring a week-long holiday to all working people, laborers and professionals alike, in late March or early April. Why should the students have all the fun?

Eventually I realized that my dream of a spring break for adults was never going to be a reality. There was simply too much work to be done. Sure, it was all well and good for young people to take a week off in order to go drink beer and do drugs and hump each other till chafed...let's face it, they probably wouldn't have been attending that many classes that week anyway. But if the nation's mature, employed citizens were to stop reporting for duty for an entire week, well, then that'd be an entirely different story. Civilization would grind to a fucking standstill.

Somebody has to bring the butter to market, you see. Someone has to chop up all the cows, and somebody else has to squeeze all the oranges to make juice. And it's not like hot water and electricity and the Internet are going to just magically pump themselves to us. No, people need to show up each morning around 9am; otherwise, none of this shit gets done.

My vision of a universal, week-long spring break was a chimera, and to continue pursuing it would have been madness. I let it go.

Still, April's the perfect time of year for a new three-day weekend because April is, quite arguably, the bleakest of months. First of all, it's a holiday wasteland. You got your Cesar Chavez Day (if you were lucky) in March and then there's Memorial Day in late May, but in April there's nothing. The glow of Yule has long since faded, and the warmth of summer is still but an inchoate promise. Plus it's tax season, and so April is a sad, dark time that groans in its misery and begs for relief. Of course, I now understand that it isn't feasible to give everyone an entire week off, but I'll bet that society could afford one more three-day weekend.

Unfortunately, since Easter Sunday always falls on a Sunday (duh) it has no potential as an anchor for a new three-day weekend. Who needs a day off to celebrate a day off? That's why we who would effect change should all stop emphasizing Easter so much and why we should start taking Good Friday a lot more seriously. Besides, Good Friday's where all the action is anyway. After all, it was on Friday that Christ took the hit for us (praise Him!). It was Good Friday when His glorious sacrifice absolved us of our sins. It was Good Friday when His sufferings set humanity loose from the chains of damnation. After Friday, whatever happened to Jesus was pretty much Jesus' problem. I mean, I guess everything worked out okay for Him in the end, which is great, but whatever....