Million-Dollar Idea #3

Pomegranate juice + vodka = a crimson fez.  For example: "Excuse me, bartender, I'll have a scotch and soda over here and a crimson fez for the lady."

This is gonna be SO popular.  I'm a fucking genius!

My Smoky, Little Hole

I live in a tiny one-bedroom apartment…more like a largish studio in which someone foolishly erected a wall and doorway to partition the space up 60-40.  There’s also a hallway, a kitchen, and a bathroom.

All winter long, I heat the apartment with my stove.  I’ve got a series of fans with which I circulate the hot air from the kitchen out toward the other rooms.  I just leave the stove and fans on all of the time, and my place stays nice and toasty.  The kitchen is super hot, and the rest of the apartment stays comfortable.

All of my windows open up onto (into?) a light well, around which my apartment wraps at a right angle.  I leave my windows open for ventilation, but I think that the same air is just going out through some of the windows and into the light well and then coming back in through other windows.

Ventilation is a persistent issue as I’m an avid smoker, at least a pack a day, and I do most of my smoking at home.  (Like many smokers, I find I’m more likely to indulge in a refreshing cigarette when away from the disapproving eyes of a society that’s fixated on shaming me for my tobacco habit, a habit that’s been socially acceptable among Western cultures for centuries but is now suddenly likened to the serial murder of children.  Have you seen this anti-smoking TV ad where a woman is outside smoking a cigarette on the porch of her duplex at night?  When she exhales, her secondhand smoke wafts up into her neighbors’ second story window.  The smoke moves behind and past an adult couple, who are on a couch watching TV, and travels down the hallway to a bedroom.  Then the smoke somehow pushes open the partially open bedroom door, and it rushes over to a crib in which a baby’s peacefully sleeping.  The smoke hovers over the baby, gathers itself up into a vaguely anthropomorphic form, a menacing ghost with outstretched claws and a sinister face, and attacks the baby.  It’s outrageous!  Talk about demonizing a segment of the population…it’s fucking hate speech!  And it’s on TV all the time, every day, funded with tax dollars.  First Five California is probably involved.  I blame Rob Reiner.  I hate that guy so much.  Spinal Tap was good, as was The Princess Bride, but, still, Rob Reiner should burn in hell or, at the very least, get off of smokers’ backs and pick on someone his own size, the fat bastard.  What an asshole.)  Also, I smoke loads of weed, sativa in the daytime and indica at night.  I have an impressive collection of ashtrays and when I have company I prefer that my guests smoke cigarettes (I don’t insist, of course, but I do gently frown upon not smoking in my home).  As a result of all of the smoking, my apartment is pretty much always obscured in a thick, rich fug.  Well, “obscured” isn’t really the best word; actually, it can be quite brilliant when the lamplight dances with the billowy smoke just right, like phantoms of quicksilver humping.  “Immersed”…my home is immersed in a fug.  I am enveloped by a constant fug that floats throughout my apartment.

My air quality is so poor that I get lightheaded.  I tried doing Falun Gong exercises (there are five basic positions, and they’re all designed to open up your channels and get your humors flowing freely).  But I found that after each session of Falun Gong my system would be all cranked up and I’d breathe more deeply, and so I’d inhale even more smoky air, which just made me woozier.  So now I just try to remain as still as possible in whatever position in which I happen to be.

Going outside to smoke in the fresh air isn’t much of an option.  My neighborhood is too dangerous.  The other week I got mugged at gunpoint, right in front of my building.  It was barely 9:30 at night!  They took my MacBook Pro.  They’re animals out there…best to stay inside with my door locked.  Safety first, that’s my motto.

I’ve a taste for meat snacks, like Li’l Smokies or Slim Jims, and I’m particularly fond of biltongs and jerkies.  Perhaps I could use my smoke-filled living environment to my advantage by drying and smoking my own meats at home.

I have this folding, wooden rack that’s meant for hanging wet laundry to dry.  I could lay strips of thinly sliced, salted meats across my rack and maybe I could make homemade, gourmet jerky.  If I drew chalk circles around the rack’s feet, the ants wouldn’t be able to get to the meat.  I’m hoping that high temperatures are good for making jerky as I’d want to put the meat rack in the kitchen, which is the only room that really has any available floor space.  If not, I can wait till spring, when I turn off my oven.  It’s almost springtime anyway.

Grassroots For A Level Playing Field, Inc.

There's so much bullshit going on these days…shady, lowdown, underhanded tricks being played left and right.  We've got mercury in our fish, fish in products that shouldn't contain fish, genetically modified fish…you fuckin' name it.  The FDA, the EPA…they can't do anything about it.  They're a bunch of nerds in Dockers and oxford shirts who plan projects and generate budgets.  Besides, they're buying all of their groceries from artisans and farmers' markets and tony, boutiquey fishmongers, so they don't give a shit.

Our foods are being poisoned, our environments are being degraded, and that's just the beginning.  And it's not just about the fish, which are merely examples, symptoms of a larger problem.  You know those all-u-can-eat shrimps and scallops that you get at Red Lobster?  Those things are all farmed in pods on "ranches," just like in the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.  It's fucking insanity, a sci-fi nightmare come true. There's practically no end to the ways in which the general population is getting screwed over by big businesses and governments.

It's usury, age-old and age-thick, and it's liars in public places.  Ezra Pound said it a century ago, and now all of that nasty bullshit's just another age older and another age thicker.

And it's not just here in America and "the West," either; it's global. When those tsunamis happen in Asia and Japan and wherever, the tidal waves bring schools of fish inland and then, when the water recedes, all the fish are left to die and rot.  So you've got these communities who've just been devastated by a tsunami and they're trying to put the pieces of their lives back together as they mourn their dead, and now they have to deal with piles of rotting fish everywhere. The authorities may have the power to solve the problem, sure, but do they have the will?  Of course not.  So in one place you've got these refugees in shelters without enough to eat, and then fifty miles away you've got a neighborhood where the streets are lined with fish that are all going to rot before anyone can eat them.  It makes one wonder if there's really any point to civilization.

But what's the use in complaining if you're not prepared to take action? And there's the rub: ordinary people have neither the time nor the resources to effectively fight the powers that be.  Folks are so busy with their workaday lives and their appointments and errands that, by the time they get home, they're pretty much exhausted.  Perhaps they have a modicum of energy to offer -- a few hours to volunteer here, a few dollars to donate there -- but they don't know how to channel their efforts and contributions.  And so they don't.  The populace's state of perpetual weariness all but conquers us and, in doing so, it leaves us divided, isolated in our silos, and unable to connect and synergize.

That's where I come in.  I could start a nonprofit organization that harnesses the masses' potential for activism by helping people to (a) identify their interests and (b) choose to bring their resources, individually modest but collectively mighty, to bear in some particular and focused way.

Let's say someone comes in looking to get involved.  First, we'd give him/her some sort of aptitude test to figure out where her interests and passions lie.  Maybe environmentalism's her bag, maybe gun control, maybe socio-economic justice…demilitarization, campaign finance reform, police brutality, saving the whales, regulation of the fishing and seafood industries, mortgage rates adjustments, the energy crisis, whatever.  We'd determine if she wanted to get involved with local issues or at a national or international level, whatever.  Does she want to donate money or does she want to donate time?  If time, does she have any special skills or expertise?  Then, once we'd done the assessment, we'd help her pick an organization to write a check to or apply to for an internship or something.  And she wouldn't even have to ever actually come in to receive this assistance…we could do it all online!  We could serve hundreds of people per year in this manner, maybe thousands. We'd be providers of a meta-service: we'd serve those who wished to serve.

I'd definitely want my company to be not-for-profit as I'm not in this for the money.  All I need is some nice office space, a small but dedicated staff, and a comfortable salary with benefits.  I don't care if this company ever makes a profit.  Fuck Monsanto and General Electric and their profit-centered business models!  That's the whole point.

So I'm looking for funding opportunities and volunteers with the skills to capitalize on those opportunities.  If you work at a foundation that might support a project like this or if you have ties to socially conscious investors of any sort, please contact me.  Likewise, if you're a grant writer or a lawyer or an IT person or a finance person or something like that and if you want to get involved, please shoot me a quick email.

Beef To The Chief

When Barack Obama went to Stockholm less than a year into his presidency to accept his Nobel Peace Prize, he had already killed more people (including civilian children) with drone strikes than George W. Bush had killed with drone strikes during his entire eight years in office.  (And W, as we all know, was no slouch when it came to blowing people to bits.)  So I'd say that Barack Obama is a total dick.  He's a killer, the scion of a long line of killers.

Obama, Bush 43, Clinton, Bush 41…all killers, all violators of human rights, all criminals.  I guess it all started with George Washington.

I'm pretty sure that Washington had a big reputation for killing lots of so-called Indians during the French and Indian War.  And then, during the American Revolution, he [in]famously sneak-attacked some sleeping Hessians on Christmas.  Jesus Christ!  Imagine waking up to that on Christmas morning.  "Happy Christmas, dude!  I got this bayonet for you.  I'm wrapping it in your throat."  Wtf?  So rude!  Plus, we can safely assume that Washington's support for the deadly crackdown on Shays' Rebellion wouldn't have earned him any fans at Amnesty International.  And then there's the commander in chief's actual participation in the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion....

In fact, I'm confident that everyone on Mount Rushmore was a dick. We've covered Washington, but let's not forget about Lincoln.  Old Abe may have been honest but he had communities' blood on his hands, responsibility for all the scorched earth policies his generals carried out, and he did other nasty shit, too (e.g., suspension of habeas corpus in defiance of Supreme Court).  And Teddy Roosevelt (another Nobel Peace Prize winner, btw) was an avid killer; whether he was killing people as a soldier or whether he was killing animals as a hunter, he was world-famous for shooting things to death.  And surely Jefferson was an asshole...he was a slave owner, after all, and I'm just assuming that at some point he must have been involved in killing Indians (if his Declaration of Independence is any indication, Jefferson hated Indians like Jinksy hated meeces).

Even my favorite president, FDR, was an asshole (e.g., the firebombing of Dresden, the Korematsu internments).

So I refuse to celebrate Presidents' Day.  These people are jerks.  I don't give a shit about the presidency.  If anything, it's the branch of government I trust the least.  It's about time we all stopped bowing down to these murderous patriarchs.  I'll "observe" Presidents' Day (that is, I'll take the day off from work), fine, but I'm not celebrating anything.  This is bullshit.

There Is A Parallel Universe

Sometimes I think that young people are living in a different world.  We may share words and syntaxes with the young, but we're not really speaking the same languages.

Youngsters and oldsters communicating are like two travelers trying to rendezvous in some city that's equally foreign to both.  They're in the same vicinity and they know it (both of them are certain of being "downtown" (or "uptown" or "in Chinatown," as the case may be)), and they're both walking around on their cell phones describing to each other the various landmarks around them in an attempt to orient themselves to each other's position.  They're each viewing and describing the same skyscrapers and the same parks and the same plazas, but the one's descriptions never quite match those same landmarks' aspects that the other is witnessing at the time.  And so the travelers end up looping round past each other over and again. Eventually, the sights that they're seeing start to match the descriptions that they've been hearing, and a common topography begins to emerge in their minds.  If they can keep at it, they'll find each other.  (Hell, if they wander around long enough then they'll eventually just stumble onto each other.)  But often they run out of patience or minutes or both and they give up, and so they never end up meeting up and they must forever wonder what the other would have been like in person.

I don't mean to say that language is spacial.  I was just being metaphorical.  Of course, language is practiced in space and so there definitely can be geographical consequences to linguistic expression. For instance, people in the San Fernando Valley can't see the Hollywood sign, which makes them much less cool than the people in L.A, who bask in the sign's glamor.  Conversely, the tribe whose village is out of earshot of the war drums isn't obligated to participate in the war, which must be a pretty sweet situation.  But I don't think that the fact that language manifests itself in space makes language spacial per se.

I think that language is better thought of as a story, a chronology developed over time.  And the spot where one lands on this chronology's timeline factors indelibly into one's understanding of the narrative. And these landings are arbitrary, as random as the day when your dad impregnated your mom.  Yet our respective births and their timing, these mere historical accidents, frame and color our reality and our articulation of that reality.

For example, are you familiar with this new idiom: to "jump the shark"? It's been floating around for a decade or so, and it means to suddenly go from being lightly amusing and/or comedic to being profoundly serious and/or tragic.  The term usually applies to TV shows, but it can be used to describe any ongoing creative endeavor (e.g., an advertising campaign, a comic strip, a periodical).  Well, today at lunch one of my co-workers, about 25 years old, said that Taylor Swift had really jumped the shark with her new album, meaning that Swift's musicianship and songwriting skills had matured dramatically compared to her previous work and that Swift's newer songs' lyrics carried more poignancy and depth than the lyrics of her earlier songs.  I asked this co-worker if she'd ever heard of The Fonz and of his role in the first shark jump, the jump from which the phrase "jumping the shark" was born, and she had no idea whom I was talking about.  And so, as I shall explain below, I think that it's therefore fair to say that my co-worker didn't entirely know what she herself was talking about and that she was not in the best position to say whether or not Swift had truly jumped the shark.

Those of us over the age of forty will likely remember Arthur Fonzarelli from the sitcom Happy Days, which ran for about a decade through most of the 1970s and which was set in the 1950s.  The Fonz, as Arthur was known, was a sort of lone-wolfish, young hoodlum from the wrong side of the tracks, and the show revolved around his relationship with Ritchie, a white-bread high schooler from the 'burbs, and Ritchie's bourgeois parents (Mr. and Mrs. C).

I s'pose that maybe "hoodlum" is too harsh of a characterization because I don't remember ever seeing The Fonz actually committing any crimes, at least not any malum in se crimes, but I will say that his means of support were obscure at best.  He was a street tough, a shady sort of character, hangin' out on street corners at night with other tough guys, and who the heck really knows what's going on out there in the streets?  Who can say?  (I'm pretty sure they aren't just lickin' lollipops out there, though.)  Anyway, The Fonz would occasionally pick up some work here and there as a mechanic, but he mainly just hung out, riding around town on his motorcycle and picking up chicks at the juke joint and staring down cops and squares from behind his sunglasses.

Technically, I think that Fonzie was a "greaser."  I don't mean this pejoratively; it's just that he was of Italian descent, he maintained a menacing persona, and he slicked back his jet black hair.  Also, he almost always dressed in a greaserly fashion (black leather jacket, tee shirt, jeans, boots).

Fonzie was a heavy, or at least he seemed like one.  He intimidated almost everyone he met, and the implication was that his toughness was, at least partially, the result of a difficult childhood.  As an orphan growing up during the Depression and then the war, he must've seen some nasty, naivety-shattering scenes as he roamed the mean streets of Milwaukee.  The adversity that he'd faced and overcome lent Fonzie a certain gravitas, to be sure, but underneath his stern, badass demeanor was a strong current of joyful innocence.  Outwardly, The Fonz posed as a brooder, but deep down he loved his life, and his joie de vivre was irrepressible.  And in The Fonz' happy-go-luckiness lay his appeal (at least, for the first several seasons).  He and Ritchie would get into their share of jams and rumbles, no doubt about it, but we always knew that everything would come to a happy, light-hearted conclusion by the end of the episode.  We were safe with The Fonz; his confidence and his fundamentally easygoing nature ensured that any hijinks would end peacefully.

But then, about five seasons into the show, its producers at ABC decided to change Happy Days' format from a breezy comedy to a tragic drama. Having been pummeled in the ratings by more serious and thoughtful and somber shows, such as CBS' M*A*S*H, ABC executives decided that the American viewing public's tastes had changed.  Nobody believed in Mayberry anymore, and nobody gave a shit about Opie or Beaver.  There was a widespread and growing awareness that the world was a mess.  People were pretending to still like disco, sure, but by then everyone had figured out that it was shit.  Oil prices were through the roof, Idi Amin was eating people, inflation problems, Pol Pot, the PLO…life was a bitch, everybody knew it, and facing up to that fact had become part of the zeitgeist.  The mega-hit movie of the day was Spielberg's Jaws, and this was emblematic of the culture.  Mayhem, existential threats, and shark violence were problems that folks could relate to, indeed, problems to which folks needed to relate.  People were scared, people were pissed, and people were generally interested in angst and discontent.  ABC wasn't stupid; they went with the flow and decided to give the people what the people wanted.

And so we had "the episode," the Happy Days episode that took primetime TV to the next level of dramatic artistry.  If I remember correctly, it was the season premier of the fifth or sixth season: Fonzie and the gang go vacationing in southern California and end up tussling with some surfer thugs…to defend Milwaukee's honor, The Fonz accepts a challenge to waterski over a penned shark, a confirmed man-eater…Fonzie wipes out and, to America's horror, the shark attacks him and eats his legs.

Suddenly Fonzie wasn't so funny anymore, and in a flash the show's title became imbued with irony.  The remainder of that season dealt with The Fonz' painful and bitter rehabilitation, and things got awfully real awfully fast for Mr. Arthur Fonzarelli.  All of his subconscious fears and torments had come to the surface after his accident, and so Fonzie was forced to wrestle with his insecurities around cowardice and fallibility and mortality.  His agonizing psychological self-analysis, along with all the torturous physical therapies, proved too much for his girlfriend, Leather Tuscadero, who broke up with him in a heart-wrenching episode that ended with Ritchie telling The Fonz that Leather was right to leave and that he (The Fonz) had "sat on it long ago."

This excruciating drama continued on for years.  Millions of schoolchildren stopped carrying their lunches in Happy Days lunchboxes, and it was instead their parents who were discussing the show.  This, not so incidentally, is where we get the term "a Mr. Coffee show": each week, office workers across the country would dissect the previous night's Happy Days episode as they gathered around the company coffee maker.

Fonzie, having racked up a huge debt in medical bills, sought solace in the bottle and in the needle.  The next season, he finally got clean and adopted a little orphan girl, but she died along with Ritchie and Mr. C when Mr. C's hardware store burned down.  The next season, The Fonz again turned to alcohol and drugs to ease his anxiety, but this time he got mixed up with some Born-On-The-Fourth-Of-July Vietnam vet types, who ended up rejecting him when they discovered that his disability was the result of a shark rather than combat.  "Ain't no fish scarier'n Charlie," they all said.  The Fonz argued that none of the vets had even the slightest fucking clue how scary a shark attack was, but to no avail.

Fonzie later invented and patented some assistive technology that enabled amputees to ride motorcycles.  His invention was basically a rolling stabilizer, similar to a set of training wheels, that automatically descended down from the bike's chassis whenever the speedometer went under 1.5 miles per hour.  This stabilizer, when combined with a manual gearshift and a manual rear brake, promised motorcycling's thrills and delights to legless people everywhere.

Initially, Fonzie's bike-stabilizer was a huge success, but soon he was being sued by the estates of thousands of dead amputee-cyclists, the victims of traffic accidents around the globe.  The Fonz' attorneys argued that, yes, but for The Fonz' adaptive equipment the amputees wouldn't have been riding motorcycles in the first place but that that didn't mean that Fonzie's equipment was the proximate cause of any of the plaintiffs' traffic accidents.  "If you're worried about motorcycle crashes," they scoffed, "then don't ride a motorcycle, for Chrissake."

The Fonz' best-selling model, pretty much the Model T of bike-stabilizers, had been called the Icarus 3000, and so plaintiffs' attorneys argued that this name evidenced Fonzie's knowledge that his product was inherently dangerous.  However, defense counsel countered that this reference to Icarus served as a disclaimer to all of the products' consumers, who knew or should have known of the inherent danger and therefore should be deemed as having assumed all risk.  Fonzie's legal issues still hadn't been resolved when ABC canceled the series in the early 80s, when the Reagan era was ushering out the American public's fetish for tragedy.

Now, I'm not suggesting here that Taylor Swift's emotions are somehow not real or not important or that they're in any way less legitimate than The Fonz' emotions.  I'm not seeking to trivialize or minimize or in any way diminish Swift's experiences and problems.  (Well, actually, I suppose that I'd be happy to minimize and diminish her problems, assuming that she wanted me to do so and assuming that doing so was fairly easy.)  Sure, Swift may have youth and beauty and talent and wealth and fame, etc., but these attributes can't protect a person from heartaches, especially not heartaches in the romance department, to which I'm assuming her songs relate.  So I'm in no way trying to imply that Swift's feelings aren't profound or that she doesn't have the artistic chops to convey those feelings to her fans or that her fans (such as my 20-something co-worker) can't genuinely understand and be moved by Swift's pathos.  I'm just saying that unless you were there with The Fonz when he jumped that shark, unless you witnessed that horrifying attack and its aftermath, then you can't really know Fonzie's pain and you can't really know the strength that it took for him to recover (not that anyone ever truly recovers from something like that) and you can't really know what it means to jump the shark.

My Girl, Cockroach

My ex-girlfriend, Cockroach (just a nickname), was so special (and, for all I know, she still is).  I remember how she worried about me being dressed too nicely before I met her parents for the first time, how she insisted that I change into something even more slovenly than what I was already wearing.  She was so comfortable with underachievement. I think she might have romanticized failure, and we were so heavy into each other.

Once, in preparation for a European holiday with her family, she was reading up on the Hapsburgs.  I remember her telling me some story about the Hapsburg army decimating some other king’s army at some battle.  The non-Hapsburg king was felled and was clearly dead, but his outnumbered soldiers who’d been fighting by his side remained loyal. Rather than fleeing, as they could have successfully done, they instead dove onto the king’s corpse (and toward their certain doom) in order to shield his corpse from the indignity of further blows from the swarming Hapsburg halberdiers.  Cockroach was nearly ecstatic.  She thought that story was so sexy, and I knew right then that I’d never be enough for her.

Cockroach was hella anti-Jesus.  She was pretty much down on religion generally, but she had some particular grudge against Jesus.  She had these blowdarts, and on her dartboard was an image of Jesus, one of those old-fashioned icons like in Andrei Rublev.  She’d invite visitors to play blowdarts, and she’d distrust those who declined.  “I can’t trust anyone who isn’t willing to shoot Jesus in the face with a blowdart,” she’d always say.

One time we were at my house and I was playing Big Star and that song “Jesus Christ Was Born Today” came on, such a good song, but Cockroach claimed that she found the song deeply offensive.  I suggested that she should relax because it was such a good song and because Jesus wasn’t really all that bad, but she just got up and turned off the stereo.  Cockroach was so rude, almost pathologically so, and she had such terrible taste in music.

What I never understood is how Cockroach couldn't see the erotic charm of Jesus’ martyrdom.  The very concept of the martyr, the heroic victim, involves just the sort of paradoxical interplay between power and helplessness that always seemed to turn Cockroach on immensely. How could those absurdly enthusiastic anti-Hapsburg soldiers of hers have been so sexy, but Jesus’ sacrifice not be sexy?  That never made any sense to me.

I mean, even as a heterosexual man who hovers somewhere between agnosticism and atheism, even I can see that Jesus is obviously sexy. Jesus Christ, He’s totally sexy...He's fuckin’ rock-star sexy up there, all sweaty and half-naked and delirious with His sufferings and passions. He’s the original bad-boy heartthrob, brooding and tortured and misunderstood.  You can practically see His persecuted, defiant boner poking out from ‘neath His robe or His loincloth or whatever He’s wearing.  There wouldn’t be any James Deans or Donny Wahlbergs or any of that shit if it hadn’t been for Jesus.  He's the reason for the sleazin'.  How could Cockroach not have seen that?  It just never made sense to me.

Seinfeld As An Hour-Long Dramedy Today

Jerry notices several FEMA vehicles around town and suspects that disaster is headed for Manhattan.  He decides to check in on his Nana to make sure that she has a well-stocked emergency kit, but she's not home.  His Nana doesn't use a cell phone, so Jerry visits Uncle Leo to see if he (Uncle Leo) knows where Nana might be (he doesn't).  Uncle Leo confides in Jerry that he (Uncle Leo) has been diagnosed with cancer; he's been undergoing chemotherapy for the last several weeks, which is why his eyebrow hairs have fallen out.  Uncle Leo asks Jerry to help him obtain some marijuana to help with the nausea.  Jerry recommends that Uncle Leo sign up with a medical marijuana dispensary.  Uncle Leo reminds Jerry that medical cannabis still isn't legal in New York.  Jerry suggests going to New Jersey, but Leo is worried about marijuana use ending up in his permanent medical record and negatively impacting future eligibility for Obamacare benefits.  He would prefer to score some weed on the street.  Jerry says that he doesn't have any pot connections and refuses to help.  Uncle Leo accuses Jerry of anti-Semitism.

George is returning home from a job interview; he's wearing his slickest suit, which he recently purchased (on sale, 50% off) specifically for the interview.  He walks past Zuccotti Park and is mistaken for a fat-cat banker by some Occupy protestors, who beat him brutally.  When he gets home, his fiancee mocks and berates him for having been beaten up by anarcho-hippies.  After this humiliation, George is unable to perform sexually, and to overcome his impotence he tries Viagra.  The Viagra works like a charm, but in order to deal with his near-constant erections George must continually pop into public bathrooms around town to masturbate.  Because the doors of the bathroom stalls do not extend all the way down to the floor, a pervert in an adjacent stall attempts to initiate footsies and, in the ensuing commotion, George is discovered masturbating and is charged with lewd and lascivious behavior.

Elaine gets back together with Puddy.  They're engaged in some pillow talk when the TV announces that there's been a mass shooting at a local school.  Elaine is horrified and decides to take the money that she'd been planning to donate to the fight against global warming and instead use it to support Mayor Bloomberg's gun-control initiative. Puddy, however, feels that a Columbine-style incident every now and again is a reasonable price to pay for our Second Amendment freedoms. Elaine is disgusted by Puddy's callousness, and they break up.  To forget about Puddy, Elaine immerses herself in her work.  Her boss is absent, having been recently detained by Iranian authorities while on a hiking trip in the Near East, and so Elaine is in charge at the office.  She institutes a ban on oversized sodas in the workplace (in observance of Diabetes Awareness Month), but her underlings rebel and threaten to download virus risks onto company computers.  To ease her stress, Elaine goes binge-drinking and blacks out.  When she wakes up the next morning, she must reconstruct the events of the previous evening in order to determine whether or not she should take a morning-after pill.

Kramer and Newman are volunteering at a local AIDS clinic in order to steal medications.  They figure that if the drugs can so successfully boost the immune systems and suppress the symptoms of those with HIV then they'd do wonders for people without HIV.  Word of their racket spreads, and they start selling the drugs to folks in the neighborhood, using Monk's Coffee Shop as their base of operations. In a botched attempt to use social media as a marketing tool, Kramer posts about the scheme on Facebook.  Crazy Joe Davola, who is Kramer's Facebook friend, shows Kramer's posts to the manager of Monk's, who promptly bans Kramer and Newman from the coffee shop.  Kramer consults attorney Jackie Chiles about the possibility of suing Monk's and/or Crazy Joe, but Chiles refuses to represent Kramer because of his (Kramer's) racist tirades.  Kramer insists that he's not really a racist, and to bolster his claim he later returns to Jackie's office with an African-American youngster whom Kramer has been mentoring as he (the youngster) prepares to audition for American Idol.  The young man performs for Jackie, and Jackie is so impressed by the young man's poise that he agrees to take Kramer's case.

Meanwhile, Jerry is at Mendy's Restaurant having soup with Kenny Bania, whom Jerry has reluctantly promised to treat to lunch in return for a past favor.  Bania is making Jerry critique some new terrorism material that Bania's come up with ("...what's the deal with 9/11? ...they should call it '11/9' in Europe..."), but Bania's routine is interrupted when Uncle Leo texts Jerry to let him know that his Nana has gone upstate for the week, having eloped with her longtime lesbian lover.  Leo, a traditionalist, is beside himself over the marriage, but Jerry texts back to say that he doesn't think that there's anything unlawful or wrong with it.  Jerry calls his parents to inform them of Nana's nuptials, but Helen and Morty can't take Jerry's call as they're in the middle of a Zumba class (Morty's in training to disprove Jack Klompus' prediction that he (Morty) would break his hip were he to compete at the All-Florida Zumba Senior Challenge).

After lunch, Jerry and Bania are sharing a cab and Jerry mentions his uncle's cancer and search for medical marijuana.  Bania excitedly, almost hysterically, informs Jerry that he (Bania) knows a pot dealer who sells excellent weed.  Jerry doesn't like the idea of buying marijuana illegally, but Bania persists.  "Jerry, it's medical grade...the best, Jerry, the best!"