I’d spend my days savoring the sweet moments of youth, bathed in a perfect golden haze. My simple, heartwarming charms would be accompanied by a twinkling piano and the dulcet tones of a smiling, fleshy-voiced narrator.The warm nostalgia would flow so thickly that it would make Tom Bosley blast his genitals off with a shotgun (if he weren’t in the grave already).

Intercutting the images of me plucking ripe apricots would be mouthwatering close ups of savory jams being spread generously on perfectly toasted bagels. On and on, the jolly narrator would blather about natural ingredients and the tangled lineage of Old Man Smuckers while I smeared the Jelly of Life across my bare torso and thighs in sensuous slow motion. Viewers would smile warmly as I convulsed in syrupy bliss and the elderly narrator would ofter a soft chuckle at my unnatural perversion.

Then the music would swell, and in wistful ecstasy I would scream out:”SMUCKERS! I GIVE MYSELF TO YOU!”

The camera would pull out, a jar of Smuckers would appear, and in the distant, hazy background I would become one with a pile of strawberries.

That’s the perfect existence, right there. Of course, my Smuckers commercial would be assailed as an abomination against God and science, causing networks to reject the ad and driving angry, sledgehammer-wielding mobs to smash and smear every last jar of Smuckers on earth, but it’d be worth it.

Smuckers: It’s worth getting fired or divorced for.

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.

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.

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.

Let us drape our bodies over one another as we lay relaxed on fine leather furniture. We will coil our appendages tightly together like two boa constrictors strangling a grizzly bear, yet the touch of our skin will remain soft and giving, like a fat man dry humping a cake.

Unnatural similes aside, I beckon you to join me in a sensual, mutually satisfying lounge. My arms are open and my lips are moistened slightly in anticipation of our relaxing recline into one another. In the sweet stacking of our bodies, our two essences will pool together into metaphysical union. In our repose, we will become one, just like Reconstruction make America one again, except ours will feature no flagrant racism or carpetbaggers.

A great riddle in my life has been the lack of reciprocal lounging I have been able to entice people into. Be they friends or random passersby or Tom Bosley from Happy Days, others have shown a striking resistance to my invitations. I have tried every conceivable approach to these requests, from tearful to profane to shockingly profane, and nothing seems to work. Recently I have taken to displaying myself in an enticing manner on tabletops in public spaces. This has won me only a scolding from a shift manager at Burger King.

Now that you know my history, I will make the stakes clear: without your body warmly enveloping mine, I am nothing. Without the weight of your body pressed against my chest and your breath soft on my neck, I will almost certainly throw myself into an empty mine shaft. I have lost all perspective on this.

Just give me this one thing. Come lounge upon me. It will be glorious.

You see, my wife got sick on Saturday, and my daughter Alice has gotten into the unfortunate habit of not being able to fall back asleep after her (very) early morning feeding. She eats just fine, but then when my wife lays her down she starts grunting and squirming like a naked and bound obese man laid on a scorching-hot sheet of aluminium.

The wife and I, meanwhile, lay just a few feet away praying to Jesus that she would just fall asleep and we could catch maybe another few minutes of precious sleep before our son Oliver gets up and begins demanding banannas and body-slamming the cats, like some potassium-starved “Macho Man” Randy Savage.

Rather than luxuriating in deep sleep and dreams of pumpkin pie Blizzard jacuzzis, our early mornings have become a period of high anxiety, and this morning I ended up wandering around the house with Alice in an effort to get my sick wife another hour or two of sleep. But what was I supposed to do with a fidgety baby in a dark, cold living room at 4:45am? Without cable, the television offerings were less than ideal. Unable to choose between the weather station featuring an android’s voice or the Proactiv infomercial featuring the android Jennifer Love Hewitt, I flipped the TV off and ended up brushing my teeth for 20 minutes instead (once I started, I couldn’t stop because I hadn’t anticipated the difficult logistics of bending over to spit).

Eventually I was able to get Alice to fall back asleep, and by 5:30 I was on to my morning routine, bleary-eyed and an hour ahead of schedule. By drinking several quarts of coffee, I am now able to approximate human speech and emotion. However, equal parts fatigue and chemical adrenaline make for a strange morning, as my clammy, trembling handshakes to every stranger I see can attest.

The moral of my story? Young fathers, if your wife is sick, pretend to be sicker.

I get so excited to eat pizza that sometimes I start tasting blood! I hope there aren’t any mushrooms on it, though. (Mushrooms make me poop brown water.)

Most people eat pizza for dinner, but today we get to have it for lunch. The world has gone upside-down! First the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, and now this! And like austronaut Christa McAuliffe before me, I will soon touch the face of God.

Millard Fillmore once said, “Pizza rules and the Fugitive Slave Act drools.” I still subscribe to this philosophy, and wish that President Fillmore were alive today to provide moral clarity on the issue of pizza with fruit on it. To me, fruit-laden pizza is just as repugnant as slaves running away.

Having pizza for lunch is mind-bendingly awesome because just four hours ago, I was eating cereal, and now I’m eating pizza. That’s like celebrating Christmas the day after Independence Day, with Santa wearing an American flag leather jacket. Such pleasures combined are enough to melt my face like that guy who looked into the Ark of the Covenant.

Well, the pizza’s here. Time for me to start eating at an alarming rate until I am sweaty and unconscious, like a corpulent walrus stranded in the Arizona desert.

Like a gang of convicted felons breaking out of prison, the schoolchildren of America have been let loose upon the countryside to violate our great land for three horrifying months. And like the aforementioned sociopathic thugs, the frenzied and carnal delights of the schoolchildren will be heightened by the knowledge that their enjoyment is fleeting, and that they will be locked away back in the antiseptic world of school soon enough. Children and gangbangers cannot escape justice forever, no matter how many ice cream cones they eat or cars they break into and defacate in, respectively.

For teachers, summer break is a chance to recharge our batteries a bit and do some work to improve our classes for the next year. In my case, this involves going to workshops and doing some reading and research. In the case of some other educators, summer break means scrapbooking or going to a cabin in a remote cabin in Wisconsin and getting as drunk as possible. All are equally responsible and unassailable, according to the American Federation of Teachers.

A nice thing about summer break for me is that I get to see my family more often. According to my wife, I have a 19-month old son at home who, like me, enjoys climbing things while babbling nonsense. I look forward to meeting this little individual and implanting my knowledge and values into his brain using some sort of fast-acting mind laser, which I assume exists.

Enjoy the dawn of this summer break my friends. It is a sweet, succulent moment in the otherwise unrelentingly wretched cycle of the human experience. It’s like finding a $20 bill right before seeing a dog get run over by a pickup.

Here’s the situation: 25 teenagers, flush with academic success and the finality of high school, pockets engorged with cash, with only me and another chaperone to hold them back in the craziest city in the U.S.A. To paraphrase President James Buchanon in 1860, “Everything should work out just fine.”

It was a genuine honor that the seniors requested me as their chaperone. I’ve had this group on and off in my classes since they were 7th graders (it’s a small private school), and they’re genuinely a good bunch. I’m going to go ahead and assume that they wanted me with them because they like and respect me, and not because they think I’m a pushover who’ll look the other way if they duck curfew. I plan to preempt such notions by lecturing them about how Manhattan after midnight is patrolled by gangs of knife-wielding circus clowns high from huffing paint thinner and looking for midwestern naïfs to disembowel. I will support my case with a viewing of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, a film long hailed for being exactly accurate.

I’m not exactly certain what the administration is looking for out of their chaperones. If they’re looking for a tall, bearded man who can clearly enunciate rules and who wants to visit the Statue of Liberty, then they’re in luck. If they’re looking for somebody who can recommend good restaurants and avoid getting lost in the subway system, then there might be a problem. Let’s face it – under my supervision, these kids are pretty likely to end up stranded at a vacant Coney Island gas station right about the time our departing flight is taking off. If that happens, I might have to go to plan B: throw my cell phone and social security card in the trash and begin a new life as a drifter riding the rails with only a melody and my Master’s degree to keep me company.

Also, does anybody know if Manhattan has a Arby’s?

Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy the sweet, sultry crunch of Butterfinger just as much as the next guy enjoys kissing his wife with tongue. However, that doesn’t mean I like spending the next fifteen minutes with my finger in my mouth looking like some drooling pervert. There’s not much else I can do, though, given Butterfinger’s propensity to stick to my molars like the aforementioned drooling pervert dry humping a flagpole.

My original “save it for the dentist to pick out” strategy backfired a few years back when the ossified Butterfinger chunks built up to the point where I was getting double vision and I had to strain to close my mouth. Basically, eating Butterfinger bars made me a cross-eyed hillbilly. (I wasn’t a bad cross-eyed hillbilly like in horror movies though, I was a genial cross-eyed hillbilly like Mike Huckabee.)

Do attractive people eat Butterfinger bars? Can they?

Take David Schwimmer, for instance.

As the sweet, mopy Ross on TV’s Friends, Schwimmer won the hearts of terrible, stupid girls in college across the nation. Would this have been possible if he had been eating Butterfinger bars, and then constantly using his tongue to try to excavate the packed candy chunks out of his mouth while he should have been cracking wise and being doe-eyed? Unlikely. More likely the studio audience would have stared at Schwimmer in horrifed facination before turning on him, tearing him limb from limb as Matthew Perry looked on helplessly.

Look, I’m not saying it’s wrong to occasionally enjoy a Butterfinger. I’m just saying that doing so is likely to end up getting you beaten to death by a mob. That’s my two cents.

I was running on the treadmill, which I prefer over running outdoors because it allows me to continue watching TV. Also, it allows me to periodically stop and thrust my pelvis when the moment strikes (technically this is possible while on a sidewalk, but the neighbors get real funny about it). Lastly, treadmill running is nice because it combines the magic of the indoors with the pleasure of spending money on a treadmill.

Sitting down to write a blog post immediately following a 40-minute run is turning out to have been a bad idea. I’m dripping sweat all over the desk and my muscles are still twitching with energy, requiring extra concentration for typing these hilarious jokes. Also, now that my body is so taut and glistening, I’m less interested in humor and more interested in appearing in an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. Maybe I could do a tasteful one where the only thing covering my special area is a single stalk of wheat? That’d probably sell some t-shirts.

Well, now my computer is spackled with sweat and I’ve spent 20 minutes writing a thoroughly forgettable post. My momentum from the workout has withered and now I’m liable to spend the rest of the afternoon laying on the couch licking the cheese off Doritos and saving the licked-off chips in a separate bag for later. I should have just gotten off the treadmill and got right to work on cleaning the house or writing some Star Trek: The Next Generation fan fiction…

—

In my flash of depression, I decided to take a break and eat an entire box of Swiss Cake Rolls.

There’s another workout down the drain, but whatever. At least I got to savor the flavor of Switzerland by eating all 16 of those sons of bitches. That’s more culture in 5 glorious minutes than an entire day of PBS programming.

I hope you’re happy now, dear readers. You make me twist myself into fits for you, and now I’m fat. This is just like John Lennon being shot, except my wife isn’t Asian.

I suppose this is the natural way of things, poetic in its inexorable terribleness.

Meanwhile, my son’s week has served as a mild counterpoint to my tortured, slurred consciousness. Every gurgled groan from me has been met with his benign babbling; my sorrowful gratification made all the more pathetic by his naive exuberance.

See for yourself:

I am deservedly ashamed of myself. Spring break has shown me who I am – a wretched, Chex-eating sluggard.

The glorious and inerrant video was replete with white jeans, well-maintained mullets, and the mighty mustache of Jack Morris that illuminated the Metrodome with its sheer virility. As we watched, Brian and I ate pizza and threw our heads back in confident laughter, heartened by the shining outcome that lay ahead. Chewing our meals with open-mouthed vigor, we cracked wise and basked in the golden sports memories of our youth that now taunt us cruelly through the years. Back then, we rode on the broad shoulders of Kirby Puckett and Danny Gladden, but Minnesotans today are left looking to knaves like Bryant McKinnie and Michael Beasley for transcendence. This is like praying for the return of Jimmy Carter.

Also, Oliver was with us tonight, though I’m not entirely certain what he was doing. I put the cats in charge of feeding him and putting him to bed, and I will simply assume that this resolved itself in satisfactory fashion.

After Brian left, I went back to taking the aforementioned pictures of myself with my cell phone. I like to take them from a high angle, the better to hide my double chin. Then I post them on my Facebook page, even though they look virtually identical to the last dozen pictures I’ve uploaded. Then I play Farmville and text while driving.

In conclusion, I am drain on society.

If you guys dare me to, I will. I’ll drink all 1.36 gallons of it! Because you guys are older and cooler than me, I greatly value your opinions. (I am psychotic about getting attention, be it positive, negative, or medical.)

The label says that 91% of Pine-Sol is “other ingredients” – sounds ingestible to me! It might as well be strawberry flavored! Should I do it?

I’m seeing a lot of shrugged shoulders and looks of indifference, as if none of you cares either way because you hate me. Fair enough. Poets of old said it’s best to counter such apathy with a brazen, inspiring act of valor. I believe it was Virgil who wrote, “Drinking Pine-Sol is awesome and it will make people notice you, which is just as good as love.”

You guys probably don’t like me because of how I watch you from a distance when you’re kissing girls, but in a few short moments my wanton, wild-eyed derring-do will be seared into your memories like Schindler’s List. I guarantee you’ve never seen anybody swallow this much commercial disinfectant before. My stepdad says that when you’re drinking Pine-Sol, the pain is temporary but the glory is forever!

I see that some of you are now tearfully pleading for me to stop. That’s cool. I appreciate your concerns, but I’m convinced more than ever that gulping down all this Pine-Sol is what I need to do. After all, it’s 2011 – all decisions are equally valid and right, no matter the medical or moral consequences. Drinking 175 fluid ounces of Pine-Sol is part of my journey.

Okay, let’s do this. No regrets. Paging Dr. Pine-Sol!

I can’t say I enjoyed it. Can’t say I did a particularly good job at it. Can’t even that say I didn’t end up bleeding all over the carpet. At the end of the day, however, the button is secured to the shirt, and I didn’t end up having to beat one of the cats to death.

I’m wearing the shirt right now, and though it’s a bit askew, I’m reasonably pleased with how things look. I may not be Garry Shandling, but I look pretty good. (Confession: I don’t know who Garry Shandling is.) Everybody says that my most striking physical feature is my height, but they’re wrong. It’s this button. Second, my eyes. Third, my beguilingly asymmetical nostrils.

The most difficult part of the sewing procedure by far was the act of threading the needle. There I was, holding my breath in concentration, fingers trembling, trying to coax a flaccid little thread into a tauntingly miniscule opening. Straining matters further was the fact that my son Oliver (whom I was supposed to be watching) was running around grabbing “no touches” like a fat man in a pudding fortress. I would spend a few consecutive moments trying to thread the needle, then swat my arm blindly and offer a beleaguered, distracted grunt Oliver’s way. My efforts at multitasking failed just as surely as if I had tried to fondle one of my guy friends but then pass it off like I was just joking.

So my new button looks all right, and I’m reasonably proud of myself. I hope that you are proud of me, too. That’s really what this entire website is about, I suppose. I want you to approve of me and to offer me a nurturing backrub and we’ll see where things go. Is that really so much to ask, dear readers? After all, I did sew on a button yesterday.

On the plus side, I get to dress casual.

The bell just rang, marking the start of my execution march. Like John Wilkes Booth’s deranged accomplice Lewis Powell, a black cloth will be placed over my head as I enter the bus and I will face my destiny with stoic calm. Also like Powell, my fate will be slow, agonizing, and witnessed by multitudes of bloodthirsty onlookers.

See you on the other side…

In these dreams, I’m often trying to fight a chaotic, violent force (like Roy Scheider in Jaws) or wrestle with enormous powers beyond my control (like Roy Scheider’s behind-the-scenes battles with the producers of Seaquest: DSV). When I wake from them, I’m as sweaty and frustrated as a Vikings fan eating Thai food.

I’m not certain why I have these dreams. It could be that the stresses of my job and fatherhood are building up unsustainable levels of pressure on me that can only be released by dreaming about cracking a rabid racoon’s skull with a wooden baseball bat. Maybe it’s my subconscious telling me I need to blog more often to release these perverse impulses into the wild yonder of the internet so future employers may frown with disappointment. Maybe it just tells me that it’s a bad idea to read the novelization of the hit 1995 film Mortal Kombat right before going to bed.

Any way you look at it, though, my dreams are pretty messed up. Where most normal people dream about jumbo-sized canoes floating down peppermint rivers with childhood friends, I’m dreaming about overturning tables and throwing cats into ravines.

Well friends, looks like I’m out of time. Hopefully these dreams taper off and allow me to return to my life of serene reflection and Olive Garden gift cards. In the meantime, I’ll be off clenching my jaw and listening to Norwegian death metal at full blast.

Hold on, I just want to rub my hands together for a sec-

Man, that stings!

Surely you would agree that there’s nothing wrong with a fully grown man choosing to rub his hands together from time to time. Why, that’s as American as rubbing two apple pies together! It’s in all the big Hollywood movies. Mr. Miyagi rubbed his hands together before he miraculously cured Daniel-san’s knee in The Karate Kid, and Marty McFly did it before he was gruffly sodomized by Buford Tannen in Back to the Future Part III: The Director’s Cut – it’s everywhere!

Hold up, let me do this-

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMGGGGGGGGGHGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHGHGH!!!

You would not believe how messed up my hands look right now! It’s like they’re inside-out! I guess sometimes there’s a price you’ve got to pay for having a good time your whole life. Just ask David Crosby – he’s like a 350-pound Downs Syndrome man these days.

The keys on my keyboard are starting to stick together, probably on account of the blood and skin particles. That’s a bummer because I feel like I was just hitting my stride here. My terrible, disgusting stride. Bridgette’s gonna be so mad when she sees I’ve been rubbing again. She never understands my point about how my scabbed, disfigured hands make for an excellent icebreaker and about how it feels so good to rub them together as fast as I can. It’s as if women are a different species altogether! Am I right, gentlemen?

Also, women shouldn’t be allowed to get driver’s licenses.

White socks are for living the good life. Whether worn with a favorite pair of jeans to watch football during the crisp weeks of fall or with my workout gear when I’m out on a run, I am most myself when I wear my white socks. My white socks are soft and thick, like Santa’s beard, while also being sensible and affordable, like a Chevy Malibu. When I pull those comfortable sons of bitches on in the morning, I know I’m about to have an awesome day, same as if Kent Hrbek gave me a gun.

Brown socks are no fun at all. My brown socks are worn exclusively for work to match my brown pants and brown shoes. Brown socks are for days when I park in an assigned spot and write lesson plans and eat a sensible sandwich for lunch. While I love working with young people, my brown socks create an austere distance between them and myself. I am ever the dapper, professional counterpoint to their slovenly shiftlessness. The dynamic seen by my brown socks is like in The Odd Couple, except that in my case Felix can give Jack an in-school suspension.

Black socks are for fancy occasions. I like putting on black socks with my trim suit and a snappy tie for a nice formal occasion. My black socks allow escalate my overall level of sophistication to impress my wife and my friends and my wife’s friends. Black socks help me slip words like ouvre and sui generis into casual cocktail conversation. Members of the educated elite, recognizing me as one of their own, then pass along a knowing smile. I respond to them with a cocked eyebrow and gesture toward my socks, to which they quickly break eye contact and wander away in confusion. The black socks have done their job.

Sometimes I don’t wear socks at all. This is often at the behest of my wife who prefers me in summertime flip-flops to the raggedy old tennis shoes I would otherwise prefer. The flip flops can chafe the skin between my toes, but it is worth it for the gentle times that follow. The other times that I don’t wear socks are when I’m going to the bathroom or kicking the cats barefoot style like NFL great Rich Karlis.

There you have it, my developmentally delayed readers – 400 words on socks, and four hours well spent by yours truly. Come back in a few days, when the JLP tackles the important issue of what kind of shampoo I like.

The JLP’s Spectrum of Beards

The Rasputin

Rasputin’s beard was undeniably the greatest of all time. The man was a mentally unstable, mind-controlling nympomaniac who was seemingly impervious to death. These powers can only be attributed to his beard – a virile, tangled, oily testament for human beauty.

The ‘That Dude from the Oak Ridge Boys’

Otherwise known as ‘The Gandalf’, this beard is the pointless end result of years of patience and grooming. This is possible when you have a really low voice and can collect royalties from ‘Elvira’. An ill-advised novelty.

The Rutherford B. Hayes

I have already commented at length about our our 19th president’s beard, but I will add that it combines the power of Rasputin with the grooming of That Dude from the Oak Ridge Boys into one statesmanlike package. A fondly-remembered relic of the Gilded Age.

The Dan Haggerty

Perhaps the most famous beard of the 1970s, a decade notable for for its beardery. The look that made Grizzly Adams so distinctive is notable for its dramatic, swooping coif outward and sun-bleached tones. It exudes a rugged tenderness toward nature, bears, and you. Highly recommended.

The Ringo

Though neatly-trimmed in recent years, Ringo Starr sported an infamously scuzzy neckbeard for most of the 70s and 80s. While his face remained milky clean, his neck was obscured by a unkempt thatch of coarse unpleasantness. Sometimes fame has its downsides – few people are willing to pull an ex-Beatle aside and tell them they look like a hairy imbecile. On an unrelated note, he was cast as the lead in the 1981 flop Caveman.

The Ron Burgundy

At his unemployed nadir, legendary anchorman Ron Burgundy sported perhaps my personal favorite look – a wiry, bedraggled beard bourne of depression and surrender. Not advised for a first date, but a solid option if seriously considering suicide.

The Late-Era Beach Boys

This underrated look initially appears to be your standard mellow 1970s stylings, but beneath the obscured half-smiles lie an ocean of familial tension and mental illness. More subtle than the Ron Burgundy, but equally troubled.

The Rick Aguilera

In the early 1990s, all-star Twins closer Rick Aguilera sported a trimmed, tidy beard that distracted hitters with its respectability while he was blasting his upper-90s heat past their face. A timeless classic, I have sought to approximate it in recent years to great approval from my wife. It frames my otherwise common face with professorial refinement. Recommended for beard beginners.

Closely related to the Rick Aguilera is The Bert Blyleven

The Blyleven is an auxiliary model for the red-bearded man. It shares many of the characteristics of the Aguilera, although with distinctively rural, plebian undertones.

The Fatone

This flaccid excuse for a beard combines high maintenance times with a heavy douchebag factor. It is sure to be studied centuries from now by puzzled anthropologists. To be avoided.

It is a time of great change for my blog. WordPress turmoil created the need for a site overhaul and spelled the end for the JLP’s high period marked by a header combining my love for patriotism and dead cats.

In response to these dark developments, we have returned with a new look. The site’s new design gives readers easier access to the deepest depths of the JLP archives. The new header celebrates my obsessions with the American presidency and animal hoarding. As an added treat, Ryan designed a ’37′ into the text of the header as a nod to Rock TV, the video ministry that has provided occasional pleasure and regular marital strain to our lives.

Lastly, the JLP has adopted an official motto: Et nunc, mea porcella, moriar, which translates roughly as, “and now, my pig, you die.” This is a reference to Demon Wind, my favorite B-movie of all time (watch this clip at about the 5:00 mark for highly-edifying context). But more than that, this new motto reflects the general attitude of the JLP towards its readers.

The Great JLP Redesign is now complete! This new look will no doubt mark this blog’s ignoble decline into fallow disuse! Join with me, feeble readers, and lift your glasses to mark this dark new chapter. Let the chocolate milk drip down our beards as we drink deeply and flail our free arm at imagined wasps!

Let us together recline into oblivion!

Sorry to my six readers. I may still write the occasional entry as time permits, but otherwise I’ll return to blogging as usual in mid-August.

Enjoy your summer, fools!

But wait! Halt the proceedings! Silence the infernal bleatings of the Pleasure-Goat!

I have decided to take two college courses this summer to complete a second Bachelor’s degree. Turns out my summer will be spent reading yellowed periodicals in the musty coves of my university library. Instead of doing daredevil double-decker deeds on a blazing-fast waverunner, I will be hunched bleary-eyed over my laptop writing twenty page papers.

Let it be proclaimed across the land that this summer shall suck at the chafed bosoms of Ursula the Sea Witch. All is lost. The handsome Prince Eric must now be shot in a ditch alongside Lee Greenwood as a grotesque, disproportionate symbol of my summertime inconveniences.

When school commences again, I shall officially be a highly-credentialed educator with an gleaming résumé and increasingly sizeable debt. I will be fully versed on the powers of the executive branch and theories on women and politics, which as you all know, are completely relevant to everyday life. The only price I must pay for this professional upgrade will be a disturbing level of physical deterioration.

Seriously, by the time summer is over, I will make Tommy Lee Jones look like Justin Bieber.

And I said silence the Pleasure-Goat, not muffle him! I mean for you to shut him up permanently, using the most slow, violent means possible! If I’m going to be unhappy this summer, at least let me take a damn goat with me!

It’s a Japanese paste-wich! Now featuring real onion flavor!

Japanese onion bread loaf has the tasty paste you crave! Slam it in your face and feel the onion rush!

With the flavor of the Orient and the texture of your toothpaste, you’ll cry seppuku tears! The very act of opening the package dishonors yourself!

Now in Cool Ranch and XTREME Cherry Blossom flavors!

As you are no doubt unaware, mint is otherwise known around these parts as “what God’s tongue tastes like.”

I take my hat off to the inventor of mint. Whoever it was that decided to put a few drops of oil from the mentha piperita herb into a Dairy Queen Blizzard deserves a rugged slap on the back and an Applebees gift card from us all. That man has given the world its greatest gift since Alexander Graham Bell invented the fart rag.

Sometimes when I am eating mint things I have to just slow down, take a deep breath and barf into a drinking fountain. I barf because the mint tastes so good and because I’ve eaten too much of it too quickly. As you have gathered, I am, in most respects, like an overeager dog. Sometimes a nice lady will put her hand on my back and ask me if I’m okay. I will goodnaturedly clutch her face and scream, “MINT!” with my minty, vomity breath.

What can I say? I’m a nut for mint!

I also like Girl Scout Thin Mints, mint juleps, and loudly offering Girl Scouts a mint julep as they pass outside my house.

Sometimes I overdo it on the mint, and I have to take a break from it. I’ll try other flavors for a while like grape and whatever’s in Werther’s Originals, but I always come back to mint. Mint is like my first love, except it never dumped me the week before Homecoming. Also, mint would never defriend me on Facebook.

So here’s to you, mint. You taste awesome and you are green, like lettuce on crack.

A fully grown, Chipotle burrito man.

It all happened so fast. It was literally just yesterday that he was unable to sit up on his own power, and now he’s drowning himself in a fat wad of rice, pico de gallo, and seasoned meat like an a hyena ripping apart a common housecat.

Cherish the days with your young children, my faithful readers. Before you know it, they’re eating enormous burritos and taking online courses to become veterinary technicians.

The world is moving too fast for me. Guards, remove these readers from my presence! I wish to retire to my sun porch and be fanned by one of my faithful domestic servants.

I’m so hot! Guards, come over here and unsnap my shirt!

I, Chester Alan Arthur, have spoken!

Jonah Musto, a man of unparalleled wit and reasoned insight, read this post and went berzerk. Read it for yourself. There’s 4 or 5 death threats, but what’s even more troubling is that Jonah Musto continues to return to the site to threaten me. I can’t even tell what the offense was, other than the lack of response to his nonsensical prompts.

Either way, his response is certainly merited and appropriate.

A quick Google search showed me that Jonah Musto is a man of peculiar passions and inerrant grammar. He has posted several comments on webpages devoted to ceiling fan installation, as well as sites devoted to Harry Potter.

So basically, some Hogwarts-obsessed handiman is going to kill me because of this blog.

Here’s to you, Jonah Musto. Your deranged nonsense is an unsettling amusement to us all. Thank you for being such a stupid, stupid person.

By the way, it looks like you left your Nissan Pathfinder parked illegally in Times Square over the weekend.

Benefits: cash.
Costs: reader annoyance and irritation.
Analysis: proceed recklessly.

The way I looked at it, this website is annoying and irritating by its very nature. Why shouldn’t I profit? Over 6+ years and 1,100-some posts, it is estimated that I’ve devoted 4 million hours to this blog. Frankly, it’s about time somebody ante up.

The specifics of the particular ad they wanted to run were a bit odd. They wanted me to add a link and two lines of text to one of my book review posts (those tends to get a lot of hits from Google searches). The text itself doesn’t make any sense – the post now starts with a few lines of confusing nonsense, then delves into my review for Collapse (UPDATE: a year later, I’ve removed the ad, per my agreement with them).

Whatever. They paid me decent money to foul up an old post. Why would I not do this? If the price was right, I’d let them embed a snuff film.

So don’t be suprised if you happen to drop by the JLP at some date in the future and come across an inexplicable link to an obnoxious site situated awkwardly in my post. When that happens, you can lean back, unbutton your short, and smile to yourself knowing that I’m off laughing my way to the ATM so I can blow the money on marshmallows or some other bit of nonsense that will exasperate my wife.

This post has been brought to you by Newport Cigarettes.

Newport pleasure!

Managing myself for a week is not going to be easy without my wife around to remind me to feed the cats and discourage me from swallowing the toothpaste. Without responsible supervision, I tend to let things get away from me, and before I know it I’m out of clean clothes or throwing molotov cocktails at a city councilman.

It ain’t pretty when I’m alone. For example, moments ago I realized that I forgot to put on my wedding ring today and that my socks don’t match my pants. Why does this happen? It’s not as if Bridgette literally has to do those things for me in the morning, it’s more a matter of her being able to notice those things before I leave for the day and then mocking me for it. Sure, I might grumble about this from time to time, but the fact of the matter is that my wife quite often saves me from looking like an idiot. In turn, I repay her by approximately remembering her birthday and getting Oliver hyper right before his bedtime.

The other hard part about being alone is that I’m afraid to flush the toilet.

If any of you would like to help me feel less alone this week, you know where to find me. I’ve already laid down newspaper over my favorite booth at Wendy’s in preparation. I told the staff to keep the double stacks coming and they’ve reserved a ketchup dispenser for me. It should be a good evening, at least until I get into a fight with the night manager.

I love you so much Bridgette and Oliver and Wendy’s!

Goldstein, a rural sage, has proposed that he and his son hop into a canoe, float out into the reeking bog of excrement, and pop the bubbles with a knife. Neighbors and a local regulatory board balked at this idea, citing concern for a methane explosion.

“If that thing back there blows, God help us all for miles,” said Allen Hutchison, whose corn and soybean farm is next door. He and other neighbors worry that puncturing the bubbles could cause an explosion of manure and toxic gases.

Not to worry, said Mr. Goltstein as he stood at the edge of the manure pit, puffing on a cigarette and gazing at the bubbles glistening in the sun. “I have no fear popping them.”

The article (from the Wall Street Journal, for some reason) cited a case in Minnesota last year when a farmer caused a massive methane explosion by bursting bubbles of pulsating hog feculence. That blast apparently rocketed him 40 feet in the air.

Quite frankly, I feel ashamed that I missed the story of such an epic shit explosion so close to home. Many apologies to my readers.

Here’s wishing happy poopcanoe travels and brownbubble blowouts to all of you today!

Of course, I blew it. A few hours after she left, I pulled her shrunken workout pants out of the dryer (the ones she expressly stated not to put in the dryer) and let slip a choice phrase from my college years.

So a hearty, ironic congratulations now goes out to me for destroying my wife’s pants and failing to execute her clear, concise request. I have effectively demonstrated my need for her to nag me about simple chores, so for the time being my childish bristling will go unwarranted. If there’s anything worse than being nagged, it’s acknowledging the demonstrable fact that I need to be nagged. This is just lovely.

What’s also lovely is that because of my foolish error, my wife will be spending $25 or $30 on a new pair of workout pants, money that is likely to come out of my monthly strobe light budget (I’m converting my garage into the Chamber of Epilepsy). If the next few weeks suck, I have only myself to blame.

Excuse me now, won’t you? I’m going to go sit in a bathroom stall for a while and look at my knife.