Those People

Posted on 1/19/2012 by peter

You know those people who are just unpleasant to be around? People who are convinced they’re always right, and constantly tell loud anecdotes that end with them getting the upper hand over somebody else? Do you know the kind of person I’m talking about?

Don’t you just want to mutilate them?

The arrogance of those people really gums up my guts. I hate how they’re constantly disparaging others and how their moist, fleshy tongues anxiously lick the spittle from their lips. I think it’s so rude the way they never really listen to other people and the way their ill-fitting shirts hang open at the bottom, exposing a hairy bowl of corpulent belly skin.

I think it’d be terrific if we could just hang those people from a bridge overpass.

Have you ever noticed that people who are arrogant and smug are also usually the same people who smother bunnies to death with American flags? What kind of sick political statement are they trying to make, anyway? I wish those people would just give us a break from their conceited snobbery and First Amendment-protected bunnysmothering.

Wouldn’t it be great if those people were paralyzed in a snowmobiling accident?

I hate how imperious and aloof those people are around the rest of us, as if being in our presence is somehow a burden. I also hate how they huff permanent markers and experience constant hallucinations that a swarm of bees is attacking them. It’s so obnoxious the way they shriek in inexpressable horror and tear away their own skin. I wish they’d give us a rest and incinerate themselves by standing behind a jet engine.

Also, in case you couldn’t tell, I’m talking about Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton.

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Dance With Me by Winifred Madison

Posted on 1/15/2012 by peter

As you are no doubt aware, the greatest book of all time is Dance With Me by Winifred Madison.

Russ or Gary

It is the timeless story of shy, lonely girl named Jennifer trying to find love in the compromised world of high school in the early ’80s. Somehow finding herself in a tangled love web between the steady, blowdried Russ and the adventurous, blowdried Gary, Jennifer eventually learns to follow her heart and properly condition her hair. Along the way, she kisses them each on the lips and lets them touch her exposed shoulders but otherwise remains as chaste as a cross-eyed nun.

Look again at the majesty of that cover. The faraway beam in Jennifer’s eyes belies the turmoil below the surface as she wrestles with her feelings for Russ and Gary and the knowledge of her secret pimple. Meanwhile, Gary’s confident charms are evident in his ruffled cuff and the subtlety of his pelvic leaning. That one, simple image tells conveys the emotional truth of the story’s turmoil. It’s like something out of Casablanca, except with better fashion and fewer Nazis.

It goes without saying that Winifred Madison is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Her work in Dance With Me makes To Kill A Mockingbird look like a retarded person’s grocery list. The fact that Dance With Me isn’t mandatory reading for all schoolchildren and that the Lincoln Memorial hasn’t been torn down in favor of an 80-foot high statue of Winifred Madison is pathetic. We’ve got a long way to go as a country to overcome the equal sins of racism and ambivalence toward this book.

In conclusion, Dance With Me is a good book. Read it, and be racist no more.

Posted in Meh, Scholarly Reviews | 4 Comments

The New Year

Posted on 1/1/2012 by peter

New year’s day is here. 2012 has begun.

Today

The world is awakening on this gray morning from a night of debauched, unnatural carnality. Glittering cocktails were consumed with abandon and the taut, glistening bodies of strangers found low pleasures in one another. Snowmobiles were driven at reckless speeds into mile-deep canyons. Peoples across the globe moaned in hot-blooded celebration throughout the night only to awaken to a new year, wet snow, and malaise. The world’s adrenalized gyrations have given way to ulcerous sores and loose stools. Irony’s a bitch.

Now, in 2012, fearsome packs of feral rottweilers scavenge our neighborhoods for sustenance. Menacing vagrants prowl our streets, feeling up our dogs and vomiting into our mailboxes. Oranges that were once juicy and tart are now putrid and teeming with centipedes. Is this what you wished for when you watched the ball drop last night? Are you happy now? This miserable fate is retribution for your throbbing intemperance!

Tonight, when you are being undressed and held down by squealing, perverse trolls, I hope you think back to last night’s revelry with remorse. As their ruddy, pimpled faces spit barbaric obscenities at you, perhaps then you’ll understand what your animalistic overindulgence hath wrought. No repentance or dietary cleanse will be able to save you from your fate then. Your best bet will be to keep your mouth sealed shut, your sphincter clenched, and let the rest of your body go loose.

So happy new year, everybody. I hope the end comes swiftly for your you. Thanks for reading this blog and making judgements about me as a person based on it!

Posted in Ramblings | 2 Comments

On Having Two Kids

Posted on 12/20/2011 by peter

By now all of you know that I’m the father of two children. (If you didn’t know this, please leave this website and delete your browser history.) They are lovely kids, as children go. The older one likes to jump while shouting in a low, hoarse register and the younger one regularly spills milk all over her face. In these ways, they are identical to me.

Life with two kids has definitely been an adjustment. Most moments around the house are spent comforting a crying child or having my crotch pulverized with a plastic baseball bat (by my wife, for doing this to us). There’s noticably less peace and quiet and considerably more time spent vacantly staring in the distance amidst the chaos. My wife Bridgette represents the eye of the Welle household hurricane, while the rest of us relentlessly whip around her – Alice crying, Oliver getting into mischief, and me offering unhelpful, unsolicited jokes. She is a beautiful, smart woman and an assured mother. She does a great job of putting up with my behaviors and redirecting me to clean the toilet again.

One of my favorite things about Alice joining our family has been watching Oliver enjoy being a big brother. Whether he’s poking his finger deep into her mouth or dropping to dead weight and laying on top of her, he is truly infatuated. Often as he is positioning my daughter’s feet behind her head, he turns to me and explains, “Helpful!” In those moments, I thank him for his servant’s heart and gently return her to a customary human position.

Things have changed quite a bit for me the past couple years. I eat alone at Wendy’s a lot less often these days, and I only rarely get to watch Minnesota’s fine sports teams on TV. The fact that those activities were about as good as it used to get for me demonstrates how far I’ve come. I’ll gladly trade those for my new family, even if it means that I get less sleep at night and must carefully apply various creams to my children’s anuses.

Posted in Sincerity | 2 Comments

Michelob

Posted on 12/17/2011 by peter

Relax, friends, and enjoy a Michelob.

Beaten down by Christmastime worries? Not sure where the next paycheck’s coming from? Scavenging for food from a dumpster behind Perkins? A cold, tasty Michelob is the cure for what ails ya! Join me on this bean bag and imbibe!

I regularly turn to Michelob’s classic bottle shape and crisp, amber refreshment when I’m in need of a pick-me-up. Sometimes after I run down a cat with my Hyundai, I need a way to slow the adrenaline and feel the emotions of the moment. That’s when I reach for a Michelob. Cracking that bottle open, I feel like a man applying clown makeup for the first time in his life: purposeful and renewed.

In case you didn’t know, Michelob is a kind of beer.

There’s just something about Michelob (beer) that makes me want to live a vigorous life. It makes me stand up and dance – not the effeminate sort of dancing you might see on television, but a Michelob sort of dance: standing in place in front of a full length mirror and thrusting one’s pelvis while biting’s one’s bottom lip. Michelob brings out the best in me; it is the Stephen A. Douglas to my Abraham Lincoln.

Me, beer

Michelob is like Stephen A. Douglas in other ways, too. Both are short, squat, and advocate popular sovereignty.

Setting the issue of slavery in the territories aside, my offer of a stout, frosty Michelob still stands. Though you brusquely declined and left the room several minutes ago, I will continue my entreaty indefinitely and keep a bean bag warm for you. There’s a whole case of Michelob where this one came from! Drinking it will make our friendship blossom!

Michelob: casually racist beer for lonely men.

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Vanishing Tinsel

Posted on 12/15/2011 by peter

Hey, what ever happened to tinsel?

Unless you’ve lapsed into a egg nog-induced coma (henceforth to be referred to as “nogbrain”) you’re no doubt aware that the Christmas season is here. This is a glorious time of year in which children become ulcerous with anticipation and adults hazily reminisce about the disappointments of Christmases past.

Also, aunts are briefly spoken with.

Sadly, in recent years I have noted a general absence of tinsel. Once upon a time, tinsel was synonymous with Christmas. Its shiny brilliance signaled the splendor of the savior of the world coming to Earth and its cheap artificiality made it available to everyone from the portly plutocrat to the lowliest Irishman. Today, however, trees are rarely draped with tinsel. Instead they are debased with a smorgasbord of crafty knick-knacks and pop cultural twaddle. Our Christmas trees now look as if a Hallmark store vomited all over a Balsam Fir. We have traded the nobility of tinsel for fickle tchotchkes, like a man trading his Buick Regal for a single night with a Cambodian street woman.

Like all things true and pure, tinsel came from Germany. Emerging in the 1600s from the black forests of Bavaria, tinsel found favor as a simple, shiny distraction from the Thirty Years’ War and unspeakable Hessian godlessness. Much later, a single strand of tinsel was then brought to America by a doe-eyed orphan boy. The tinsel-bearing urchin was received at port by the corpulent President Grover Cleveland, who rewarded him with mustache-tickles and a pony. Newspaper accounts of this memorable encounter delighted Americans and popularized tinsel itself. All of this information and more is available in my new book, This is My Truth: The History of Tinsel & Everything Else.

I guess we’re left to try to somehow enjoy a Christmas without tinsel, which is like an Independence Day without hot dogs or a Columbus Day without scolding editorials. I’d say we’d all be better off nogbraining ourselves.

See you in my coma dreams!

Posted in Best of the JLP, Rants | 5 Comments