Novice educators often make the mistake of thinking that the process is simple and put together some alphabetical monstrosity that torpedoes any chance at learning. A good teacher building a seating chart is like an iditarod racer selecting a hearty team of dogs for their grueling cross-country journey. They must make choices that maximize their team’s strengths, minimize their weaknesses, and forestall violent, cannibalistic insurrection.

Look at this classroom’s seating chart, for instance.

This is the mark of a master teacher – a work of rigid, fearsome, symmetrical beauty. It is impossible to tell whether these children are waiting to receive mathematics instruction or to witness a public execution. The classroom environment is spartan, the pedagogy is severe, and the technology is nonexistant. In other words, educational paradise.

In constructing their seating chart, a good teacher must first know their students. Who are the alpha males? Who’s the queen bee? Who smells like old popcorn all the time? Once assessed, the mixing and matching begins. In a way, it’s like being secretary general of the United Nations. Do you think Israel and Iran are seated next to each other? Do you suppose the Serbs and Croats are allowed to mingle freely? Hardly. A good teacher places obnoxious delinquents like Sudan in the front corner to minimize their distration while chatty butterflies like Italy are seated next to quiet, serious South Korea. Canada is a teacher’s dream – they’re responsible, pleasant, and can help defuse trenchcoat-wearing weirdos like Russia.

Properly placed, the classroom becomes a harmonious, symbiotic whole. Mishandled, the classroom becomes a flaming heap of overturned desks and desecrated bulletin boards. This is the difference between being a highly qualified educator and being a Taco Bell shift manager or combing the bears at the zoo or something else dumb.

Educators of America, you’re welcome.

The Feast of St. Valentine is upon us!

Today we celebrate the glory of St. Valentine, who offered himself to be devoured alive by wild beasts for the pleasure of the drunken Roman circuses in AD 269. We do this by displaying fanciful pink balloons.

I say this is no way to honor a fallen third century priest. Let us instead mount the severed head of a wild warthog on a pike! Let the black warthog blood drape us in its putrid essence! Children will flee in terror from our celebration, young lovers will vomit in disgust, and all will be made right.

You there! You shall be the one who procures a warthog for our services! Off with you now, into the dark woods. After a short time, you shall find a family of the filthy snout-beasts rutting in their own feces. Set upon them at once, hacking them limb from limb as their unholy squeals fill the sky with a cacophony of animalistic horror. Setting your broken and bloodied hacksaw aside, return the perferred portions of the warthogs to us with great haste. We must begin our writhing, debauched ceremony before nightfall.

For our part, we will remain here and set out the paper plates.

Do you hear us, St. Valentine? It won’t be long now!

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!

My summer has been most wonderful, filled with lingering naps and indulgent glasses of rich, warm milk. I spend my evenings enjoying the cool breeze that passes through my sunroom and reading books about men from long ago with beards of finest grooming. When strangers pass down the sidewalk outside, they greet me with a friendly wave, and I reciprocate by telling them my name and warning them not to read my mind.

On Wednesdays I am visited by Colten, a young man with flaxen hair and slender knuckles. He helps me to balance my checkbook and shop for groceries. He is a functional conversationalist, and, I suspect, a skilled masseuse, though to this point he has refused to touch me, even on my neutral area. We have a private joke where he admonishes me to treat him with basic human dignity after I dip his shoes into containers filled with my own urine. I do not believe he has read my mind yet.

Wednesdays with Colten aside, the days pass aimlessly. I awaken with the imagined sound of a cat saying my full name with perfect enunciation. Sometimes in the evenings I drink more milk and make anonymous threatening phone calls to area businesses. Though my words are obscene and hateful, I assume that the targets of my harassment receive my calls with good humor. I think that having a sense of community spirit is very important.

I received the canister of your hair, and have placed it upon my mantle where it will remain until it is removed. Thank you for shearing yourself.

I hope that this humble note finds you in bright spirits. I will call on you when the weather cools and the world dons its collective sweater with an airbrushed wolf on it. Until then, I hope you enjoy the enclosed jar of mouse preserves.

Sincerely,
Rembrandt

As the days continue their inexorable march toward human oblivion, I acknowledge that I have failed to keep the sub-sentient readers of this blog appraised of my ever-noteworthy actions. For this and many other things, I shall never apologize.

Such unpleasantness aside, I will now take this opportunity to make a few irresponsible remarks about recent events in my world.

-My much-anticipated trip to Manhattan chaperoning some of my newly graduated students was a total success.

Not only did all 27 of us return to Minnesota alive, but we did so having seen dozens of advertisements for MTV’s Teen Wolf. Also, I ate at Red Lobster one time. It truly is the city that never sleeps!

-The summer days have been sultry, as they are wont to be. As a result, my home ends up feeling as hot as a Southern courtroom (my insistence on wearing full length judge’s robes hasn’t helped matters). To beat the heat, I usually stuff a bag of frozen peas down my pants.

-I am always working to bone up on topics that I teach about in my classes. Specifically, I have boned up on the topic of bones, and how hard it is to break them with my wooden baseball bat. Preliminary results show that cat bones are the most fragile.

-I continue to eat breakfast cereal at an alarming rate.

-To combat the crippling illness of boredom, I have consumed medicines of all varieties: herbal and chemical, syrups and gelcaps, legal and illegal. None of them have been prescribed. The end result has been crippling nausea and a magical mystery tour of new colors and shapes that won’t stay still. My reasons for this are opaque and my methods have admittedly involved violence, but you will certainly agree that my actions are nonetheless above criticism.

As you can see, my summer has thus far been startlingly immoral. I have no explanation or justification for this, other than to pointedly note that there is a Democrat in the White House.

Look at me. My face is caught in some remote grimace, with the tensions of the day and this particular McDonalds drivethrough evident in my flat, strained expression. Meanwhile my son smiles with the apple-cheeked innocence of youth, his mind no doubt alight with fanciful thoughts of racecars or Berry Berry Kix or the color yellow.

Though physically we are separated by only an arm’s length, emotionally we are miles apart. He, the bouncing naif, and I, the stooped and pockmarked warhorse. If he is the galloping colt, then I am the toothless old stallion on my way to a lunchdate with the muzzle of a shotgun.

My point in showing you this photograph is not to go on again about how life has left me a morose, vacant-eyed automaton. That much is self-evident, and I take comfort in knowing that it will likely all be over soon when I get clipped by a city bus while out on a jog, or meet some other similarly pointless and arbitrary death. Instead, my point is to show off the sweetness of my boy and the sleek interior of my sensible Hyundai.

I order to you to look upon both with a faraway smile, your lips slightly parted in tender amazement, and your eyes slightly crossed with bitter envy.

Well, that’s all the time I’ve got for tonight. If any of you would like to send me a photos of yourself going to the bathroom, I’ll be happy to post them here and offer some accompanying philosophical ruminations. I think that’s going to become a hot new thing on the internet.

Now I’m off to go raise my son to become a man of sturdy morals and stout character, as soon as I find where he wandered off to.

Here’s what I found when I searched “Unicorn Fondle“:

Look at that sick little freak. All he ever wants to do is fondle unicorns and experience the low depravity of interspecies love. Too bad he’s got no arms. That poor unicorn is just going to have to go fondle itself, I guess.

“Forbidden Shampoo”

Having a cat lick your hair clean would certainly qualify as a forbidden shampoo in my book. This is what happens when single women get lonely and experiment.

How about “Bramblefuss“?

Dear Lord! What sort of awfulness is this? My new nightmare is that I wake up in a dank pit waist deep in a writhing pile of these red-eyed sons of bitches.

“Turtleneck Riddle”

Wow, Roseanne Barr has really let herself go…

“Pitstick Exuberance”

I see polite smiles, wood paneling, and a mirror inexplicably placed directly behind a couch, but I don’t see much exuberance here. I only see profound social discomfort. (I will grant that the pitstick is implied.)

“Sadness Mouthwash”

It’s time to visit the grandparents in their new condo! I have to stand because their damn dog refuses to get off the chair. Christmas cards are still hanging in the doorway even though it’s May. Grandma can’t sustain a conversation because she refuses to stop watching the Hallmark Channel. Grandpa brought us cups of coffee, but he doesn’t seem to realize it’s just hot water. This is sadness defined. Time for some mouthwash to get drunk and forget our memories.

The springtime morning is filled with the sounds of birds chirping their hellos! Flittering and fluttering about, they cheep their chipper greetings to the world. It’s a colorful symphony of happiness just outside my window – no further away than that homeless man’s poop he left on the sidewalk!

I love the sound of birds as they call out to each other. It is the sound of summertime purity and the boundless possibilities of a new day. Listening to their early morning trilling, I feel renewed, like a homeless man pooping on a sidewalk.

This morning’s birdish earfeast has awakened a desire within me to become a better man. No longer will I sit inside slurping watery oatmeal and muttering Republican talking points while nearby birds twitter their majestic aria. Inspired by the sweet nectar of birdly melodies, I will instead rush out to join in their 5:30am chorale. Standing heedlessly in my yard, wearing only an undershirt pulled low to preserve the innocence of the neighbor children, I will join with them in the majesty of song. Though my voice is haggard in the morning and my mastery of the bird language is negligible, the birds will certainly welcome me into their flock as they would a finch of similar size and intelligence.

Perhaps after several weeks of unsolicited, half-nude morningshouts the birds will allow me to finally become one of them. I believe that it must somehow be possible for me to free myself from this fashionless, fleshy, flightless body I am trapped in. It has become clear to me that I am a bird trapped in a social studies teacher’s body. It is not worth living another day trapped in the lies of my marriage, my career, and my membership in the human species.

If modern science can’t turn me into a bird, then the sum total of all human knowledge and scientific discovery across the ages are totally worthless.

I deserve to be happy too.

I did not run atop a treadmill, as is my fashion. Instead, I stepped outside the cozy, fragrant confines of my home and went running down the sidewalks of my neighborhood, like a common vagrant. I set a brisk, confident pace for myself by imagining I was being trailed by animals of unimaginable ferocity. I find that allowing myself to vividly imagine the horror of my body being clawed open for the filthy snouts of these beasts to feed upon ensures that I won’t get lazy and start walking.

My run that afternoon was particularly enjoyable because along the way I happened upon several of my friends. My old adversary Tom Hipps slowed down as he passed by in his car. Shouting from the street at me like a retarded man on vacation, he startled me and caused me to break my stride. I sidled over to say hello, but our halting conversation made clear that the lingering tensions from the breakup of Three String Chord have yet to heal. I will never forget the fury I felt in early 2009 as I sat in impatient silence while Tom and Craig exchanged farts and giggles.

A few minutes later, I came across my friends the Goodwins and their two kids. As they enjoyed their family walk, I lumbered by in my sweat-drenched shirt and grunted unnaturally. The combination of my wrenching physical agony and longstanding inability to make comfortable chit-chat conspired together in one wholly strange and unsatisfying encounter. I’m sure to them it just seemed like some open-mouthed, sweaty degenerate had brushed by while shouting something slurred and indecipherable. Indeed, I imagine this is how I come across most of the time.

Soon enough, I was home to the fatigued arms of my pregnant wife (who is repulsed by my perspiration) and my son (who is generally more interested in the cats). I retired to the basement to recover in cool, dim isolation. The workout had been a success – my assymetrical galumphing managed to simultaneously burn calories and bridges. This is my gift.

Most days, World War II is my favorite. It featured flamethrowers and Mussolini, which are both tremendous. Hitler gets most of the attention these days, which probably makes Mussolini mad. I bet they argue about it in hell.

At the same time, it’s hard not to love mustard gas attacks and the spiked German helmets from the early days of World War I. I’ve also always enjoyed the utter pointlessness of that entire endeavor and how it ended with Woodrow Wilson scolding everybody for several years. I bet he’s scolding Mussolini in hell right now.

Well, that’s my two bits about the horrors of the 20th century and hell’s citizenry. Hope it helped to clarify your thoughts and bring meaning to your day!

When I was a younger man, the world was my oyster (or Wendy’s Value Meal, as it were). Life was flush with opportunity, a blank page ready to be filled with the finest Korean calligraphy. I was strapping and headstrong, like an untethered stallion with a bazooka mounted to it. Cocksure, I brayed a hearty laugh at fate and dispensed the finest varieties of chewing gum to multiracial children. I defied social norms by popping wheelies and wearing white after Labor Day. I was Fonzie flying the Millenium Falcon.

Now in the gray days of my nearly-mid-30s, I am surrounded with the shattered fragments of my unfulfulled potential. My face has been pockmarked by failure and my hips shattered with malaise. Like a mentally ill drifter who smears his face into a dog’s anus, I have tasted the bitter tang of life and come away smellier and more insane. It didn’t need to end this way, but this is where I am.

Besides my wife and son and career and friends and cats, I have nothing. Every day I wake up to a Hyundai Sonata and death and the moral vacuum in between.

Don’t weep for me, dear readers. My disappointing decline into undistinguished anonymity doesn’t really hurt. Once upon a time I had the potential to be something special, but instead I spent too many years wearing turtlenecks, changing toner cartridges and not eating Thai food. Now I can’t remember what I lost and instead I drift in circles aimlessly, like Neil Young, post-1992.

If you think of me again, someday, remember me as I was: hale and robust, snatching rainbow trout out of a mountain stream with my bare hands and a mighty shout. Maybe that way, my withered soul can be reborn.

I’ve been thinking about that movie a lot lately. Maybe too damn much. My grandparents had it on VHS growing up, and for some reason I ended up equating going to my grandparents house and having fun with The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again. Now all my moments of happiness are measured against the feelings I got from that movie. Nothing ever seems to make me as happy as I was watching that movie when I was a kid. Nothing. It doesn’t seem right.

Granted, the movie was a cinematic masterpiece that enraptured audiences around the world. It added mild old west hilarity with G-rated romance to create my Citizen Kane. These days, when I close my eyes to go to sleep, the only thing I want to see is Don Knotts doing the bug eyes and Tim Conway doing the sleepy eyes and Don Knotts and Tim Conway breaking expensive things. You could say it’s the screensaver to my subconscious.

My wife has been very understanding about my condition. She overlooks how often I try to shoehorn The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again into everyday conversation and the cross-stiched tablecloth I made of the scene where Don Knotts and Tim Conway dressed like old west strippers.

My wife knows better than to remove my DVD copy of the movie from its lighted mantle in the center of our bedroom. She knows how I feel about the movie, and I assume she’s content to be the consolation prize winner in the sweepstakes of my heart.

It’s a hell of a thing to realize that my life is never going to get any better than it was when I was a kid at my grandparents house, and it’s an ever more bitter thing to accept the fact that my own son will likely never make me as happy as the creator of Dorf once did.

In short, everything in my life today is but an imperfect reflection of The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.

There is something sinfully indulgent about the feeling of that washcloth being massaged firmly across the unblemished skin of my thighs while just outside my window squirrels manically frolic with acorn pleasures. If those squirrels knew of my dishrag delights, they would surely overwhelm me with numeric superiority, rip out my eyes, and implant their diseased eggs in my hollow sockets.

Fortunately, the squirrels carry on obliviously as I redouble my efforts by dipping my washcloth in bleach.

I have found that by rubbing my thighs with chemical-soaked rags in a series of concentric circles, I can keep my skin as smooth and pure as organic soy milk. Though she finds the smell noxious and has repeatedly insisted that I stop the practice, my wife appreciates what I do to make my upper thighs more beautiful for her. After all, it’s the little things that make a marriage strong. Some men say thoughtful things or remember their anniversary, I present my wife with a set of sterile, perfectly sculpted thighs.

Well, the the taste of blood tells me it’s time to stop. I’ll just put the turpentine and wading pool back in the garage until tomorrow. The battle for beauty is a never-ending one, but it’s mostly worth it, except for the fact that I went color blind thanks to the harsh chemical agents.

Thanks for listening to my informed and reasoned thoughts on personal hygiene and squirrel biology, everybody! As usual, stay beautiful and please don’t call the police on me!

I didn’t use too much shampoo this time. My hair is pretty short, so I just put a little dallop in my palm and then rub my skull up until it’s good and sudsy. Then I let it sit for a while. If you do that with Denorex it starts to burn, but not with the off-brand stuff I use. My shampoo is pretty second rate. I think it’s intended to wash up pet hamsters, but I bought it on clearance, so who cares?

You know those showers where you just lean back slowly and led every warm bead cascade down your taut, lithe torso? That’s basically what I just did. It was like Patrick Swayze in that one movie, except that Whoopi Goldberg was mercifully absent.

One thing my cats hate is when I grab them tight and take them into the shower with me. It gets them grumpy! Sometimes I just let them scamper off wet and sassy, and sometimes I take the hammer to them. Either way, I’m a responsible person.

If I ever win the lottery, I’m going to install a chair in my tub so I can sit on it while I take a shower, and I will hire a manservant named Bisquick to bathe me with a warm, soapy washcloth. He will silently scrub me down in a pattern of concentric circles until I dismiss him. This will be our nightly routine. At the end of my life I will release him from servitude on the condition that he never bathe another adult male again, lest my memory be defiled. Also, I would buy a motorcycle.

Thanks for reading my earnest thoughts on showering. I hope that none of this will prevent you from hiring me at some point in the future.

I assume he has come to bring toys and Spanish happiness to us all! What a glorious day this is!

What’s that, Francisco Pizarro? When you say, “the time of the JLP is over,” what do you mean? Do you mean that you have brought us all fake mustaches so we can prance about in a spirit of frivolity?

Why are you holding aloft a Bible, Francisco Pizarro? What do you mean by this? Are you requesting a brief moment of silent prayer before we hold hands around the mirthberry bush and sing songs of friendship and innocence?

Look, JLP friends, Mr. Francisco’s friends with the silver hats are gathering together in a line facing us! They want to play red rover!

Let’s send little Billy O’Houlihan on over!

NO! The Spanish men with beards cut little Billy O’Houlihan open with their steel blades and have thrown his severed, red-haired head back to us!

This is not fun at all! Why would the gods turn against the JLP like this? Our blogprophets who foretold apocalypse were right! I should have heeded their word instead of spitting half-chewed Cap’n Crunch in their faces!

My precious JLP friends are now scrambling for their lives from Pizarro and his men mounted atop their terrifying demon-steeds! The JLP’s hubris is collapsing down upon us all like a stone pyramid of whimsy!

I suddenly feel cold and feverish. My skin has grown sallow and is newly blemished with pustulous sores. I am about to die a pitiful death at the hands of Francisco Pizarro!

I will throw myself into the ravine instead!

Franciscooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Though my inclination would be to greet each of my returning students with a friendly handshake and a playful hair-tousle, for litigious reasons I have chosen instead to welcome students with a faint nod as I vacantly stare off into the middle distance. This will help my school avoid damaging lawsuits and disabuse my students of the notion that I am a caring and reasonable person.

Now, as I listen to the teenaged babel of the hallways, I rock back in my chair and knowingly stroke my beard. I know what is to come over the next ten fateful months, for I am the bearer of the pacing charts. Better to ration my energies now for use in the dark days of February, when the days are short, the cafeteria food is gray, and the lesson plans about the legal and political systems of the Byzantine Empire are hopelessly dreary.

School is, after all, a largely miserable experience populated with terrible people. I accept this with stoic dispassion; if I should lose this equilibrium, I will have a faithful 8th grader take my sword and run me through. Better to be dead than plunged into unacceptable agitation. This is the life of a social studies teacher.

That’s right, I turned 32 today! Now I’m old enough to rent a car and drive it through a window at a bank! Take that, G-8 bastards! How do you like me now that I’m 32?

As you can infer from my crazed non-sequiturs, I’ve had a wonderful day. My wife took us out to Key’s Cafe for breakfast where I feasted on toast (French style) and jellied sourdough muffins while loudly announcing the various thoughts that entered my head. After consuming four times my recommended daily caloric intake, we went out to a children’s swimming area to teach Oliver about the miracle of chlorine. Chlorine takes the germs and our sadness away, I told him. Specifically, it takes them to the hinterlands of Manitoba, Canada to be stored deep underground for future generations to study.

After the sunshine splashes, we returned to our warm cottage in north Minneapolis where neighbors greet each other by eyeing one another warily and littering on each other’s yards. I sat back in my sunroom, strummed my guitar, and sang a song of thanks for my beautiful wife, my adorable son, and my sensible Hyundai Sonata. Later my brother Brian visited, and we celebrated my birthday as well as his recent acceptance into law school. I thanked him for also agreeing to financially support me and my family in perpetuity upon becoming a lawyer, to which he offered a strained, silent smile. The bonds of brotherhood are strong, probably!

All in all, I’d say it was probably the best birthday experienced by humankind since the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Bald celebrated his 50th birthday in 873 by personally beheading a dozen Saracens as nubile maidens writhed to the rhythms of a frenzied lyre.

Also, I scored some BOGO DQ Blizzard action.

The new version of WordPress doesn’t mix with the JLP’s most glorious, inerrent programming, and now nobody can read the comments! Could this be the end for your favorite website?

As I see it, I’m left with three options:

1) Hire some dumb idiot to redesign the site for me, perhaps with fewer alcoholic beverages and dead cats prominently displayed, as there is some question as to how well such images play with potential employers.

2) Continue on half-heartedly with the broken design where nobody can comment until this blog finally dies an ignoble death with one last post promising to get back in the blogging habit. I would thus bumble my way into oblivion, like Gerald Ford.

3) Kill myself with bees.

I’m not sure yet as to the logistics of #3, but I assume that it is possible, swift, and not traumatic at all for child onlookers.

I would ask for reader input, but that’s now impossible. Perhaps if you, dear reader, were to speak your preference aloud in a calm, clear voice your wishes might somehow reach me telepathically and influence my decision-making.

I think it’s working! Did somebody just say something about going to Wendy’s? Man, Wendy’s suddenly sounds so good to me. I’d get a Double Stack and a Frosty and three more Double Stacks. Is Wendy’s open at 8:30am? Do you think the shift manager might be cool and let me in early? He probably would, Craig’s cool that way.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand – my broken blog. I don’t know what I’ll do. Frankly, if I lose this blog, I won’t have anything left. I’ll only have my wife, my son, my house, my career, and my extended network of friends and family. That’s it. Without this blog, my life would be an endless loop of muted smiles and wary chuckles and disgusting Double Stack binges. Death by bees is looking better and better all the time.

Have a great day, everyone! Everything is terrible now!

Somebody has written the names of my body parts all over me, and I cannot get up until someone completes this child’s worksheet. Oh, won’t somebody please help me? Pleeeease?

Don’t look at me too long though, children, or you will begin to have inappropriate thoughts! Do you see how my sturdy thighs lay sensuously open? Do you appreciate the way my makeup and gloves make me resemble a Parisian woman of the night? Have you noted my crudely-drawn tail and wings, which are not a part of my copyrighted image?

My Kermit has gone away, and now I am all by myself and very lonely. Will you be my friend, little boy? Will you be my special friend? Come lay down with Muppet Baby-version of Miss Piggy and label my body parts for me! It will be oh so fun!

This leotard is chafing me! I could use a hand from a helpful little boy. Please put down your crayons and help a helpless little Piggy!

It’s good to see you again, my old friend! You look as stout and rosy-cheeked as ever. Let me take hold of your shoulders and size you up properly…

Yes. Yes, you look lovely. You look very good indeed. Your skin is comely, your eyes are beguiling and your Adam’s Apple is firm and ample. Your dignified, wellborn handsomeness makes my loins quiver and my lips part.

How I wish it had not been so long since our last encounter! Since then, my face has grown gaunt and my forearms feeble. You would not even recognize my upper thighs anymore. I look like Willem Dafoe with leukemia.

Do you remember our travels through the dark lands of the Orient? Can you recall the hours we spent on horseback laden with prized spices? We were so young and fresh with vigor in those days! We straddled the world and wrung life from it like the common Irishman treats his wife. Those were heady days of conquest and passion, my old companion. They are now long since gone.

It is good to be in your presence and look back with you, my dear friend. You are perhaps the one person in this world who truly understands me. You don’t mind, do you, if I let my hands fall where they may across your body? Let us take flight of reason together!

Don’t resist me! Tousle my hair and count my freckles as you once did! We can be young again!

No? You’d rather not, in the presence of your wife and children? Very well then. As I said earlier, our moment has passed. It was foolish and impetuous of me to think otherwise. It’s just that these years have been so cruel to me, and I am so lonely. I beg forgiveness.

Are you on Facebook?

A fourteen course meal indulging every perverse, insatiable lusting of your craven flesh has been prepared! Seat yourselves around my table and prepare yourselves. Make certain that the waistbands of your pants are fashioned from the finest elastic, because the gratification we are about to partake in will be an affront to the natural order!

My servants, dressed uniformily in indigo silk gilded with pearls and shoes of the pointy-toed variety will now parade before us the dishes of our imminent feast. Salted cod! Wild boar slowly roasted over a flaming spit! Iberian peacock boiled in cherry preserves and stuffed with rose petals! Cheese quesadillas!

Now my dancers will gyrate about us as we lift high our goblets of reasonably-priced red wine! Imbibe deeply, my readers! See how my dancers are plumpened slightly, according to midcentury fashion. See how they undulate their hips toward you in a sensuous manner while maintaining a professionally provacative eye contact. All this according to my instruction, and aimed toward your pleasure!

Let us conclude our evening by watching the Detroit Pistons battle the Orlando Magic in a relatively meaningless Eastern Conference matchup! My team of technically-proficient eunuchs will prepare the home theater system! 5.1 Surround Sound for all!

Lean back, my supplicants, and savor the pleasures I have brought you tonight. I have lavished you with the luxurious indulgences of the Orient at great personal expense. No doubt these fleeting moments are the greatest you will ever experience. Never forget that it was I who brought them to you. Without my generosity, you would be desperately sucking the marrow from the bones of stray dogs.

Now, who will accompany me and the cats to my silken-pillowed bedchamber for dessert?

I hope I finally see a werewolf! I’ve always wondered what it would be like to see a werewolf in person. I bet it would be like the time I shook Kirby Puckett’s hand when I was 14, except the werewolf would be taller and I would have less acne.

Maybe the werewolf will approach me tentatively, and I would have to coax him toward me by offering him food – some bread crumbs, or a severed rooster head perhaps. Once the werewolf got near, I would offer him my hand so he could sniff it and make sure I’m friendly. Then he could give me a backrub. I bet his coarse, hairy knuckles would tickle the sensitive skin along the sides of my rib cage. With all due respect to my wife and son, the day I get a werewolf backrub will be the best day of my life by a mile.

Werewolves are sometimes misunderstood by the media. They want us to believe that all werewolves only want to rip their swarthy snouts into the steaming entrails of newly dead children, or slam dunk basketballs. I know that werewolves are a lot more than that. They have feelings too. Sure, they’re tormented by hot-blooded, animalistic impulses to down warm human blood like it was Snapple, but they also like friendship and dancing and holding hands. I have spent countless hours doing research in my dream journal about this.

Once I’ve lured the werewolf toward me, and the werewolf is giving me a backrub, then we can be free to open up to each other. We will have a deep and meaningful conversation, filled with poignant silences and unbroken eye contact. I can tell the werewolf about me hopes and disappointments, and he can tell me what a human spleen tastes like.

See you soon, my new werewolf friend! I can’t wait to meet you!

Ben Franklin, having been denied the affections of his masters since the arrival of their son, took a firm grasp on his feminine friend Mona and attempted to take things to the next level. He did this despite the fact that his precious testes were callously tossed into a veteranarian’s dumpster several years ago.

Like the real Ben Franklin, our cat is not one to let biological futility or marriage vows stop him from seizing the rough love that he so cravenly desires.

After a swat and a scold from my wife, Ben Franklin scampered off the bed and down the hall for an extended, vigorous session of groin-licking. Mona remained still all along, as disinterested as she always in all manner of interaction that doesn’t involve birds. If she were a thoughtful companion, she would recognize that brusque, silent humping is Franklin’s love language. However, she did not reciprocate. Their relationship is a passionless arrangement, like Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Here’s wishing some one-sided cat love to all of you today!

Wow! Don’t you just want to put that fat, wrinkly son of a bitch in your mouth and suck it? It’s even better than normal since it has brown sugar all over it! It’s like slathering a delicious Wendy’s Double Stack in Miracle Whip – the best of both worlds!

One of my favorite things about raisins is how they taste vaguely like grapes. Why is that? I suppose we’ll never know. Thanks a lot, science.

All this talk of raisins reminds me of the timeless music of Big Raisin, who rocked the upstate New York region from 1990-1991.

They were, without a doubt, the voice of their generation. Their terrible, artistically bankrupt generation. Let’s lift a pail of raisins and toast Big Raisin – their song “Rock Patrol” lifted the spirits of a nation to new heights of adult contemporary refreshment, and their lead singer’s hairdo makes Art Garfunkel look like a reasonable person.

But back to the subject at hand, which is raisins. They’re awesome and I love to eat them every day. For some reason, raisins always taste best to me at 3am, right about the time my anxiety medication wears off.

Hooray, raisins!

Come over here, ’cause we got a message for you!

That’s right. You are ugly.

Listen up, we should know ugly. After all, we’re a cow and a pig. You ever seen either of us eating from up close? Trust us, we know ugly when we see it, and you are ugly.

Even the fact that we’re simplified childrens drawings isn’t enough to mask the sheer misanthropy of the insult we just sent your way. Check out the look at the pig’s face. It’s called sheer disgust. Seriously, friend, have you showered lately? Your greasy hair and swollen neck-zits suggest you’ve been neglecting your grooming in favor of more quality time with the dumpster behind the Hostess bakery.

So take it from us, a pair of filth-encrusted barnyard animals, you are ugly. You should go away from everybody for a while to regroup and take a bleach-soaked rag to your armpits and crotch. It would do the world a favor. Better yet, ask Farmer Troy if you can borrow his shotgun. He uses it to put animals out of their misery. I bet it would fit pretty good in your mouth.

Seriously. Kill yourself.

Hope you enjoyed your visit to my blog today, folks!

Here’s a favorite that I read to him three times in a row because I couldn’t quite get over what I was reading:

Goosey goosey gander,
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs
And in my lady’s chamber.

There I met an old man
Who wouldn’t say his prayers,
So I took him by his left leg
And threw him down the stairs.

Yes. Justice.

Certainly all of us agree that the protagonist in this tale took the proper, prudent course of action. He came upon an elderly man and ordered him to pray. The man refused. The old man was then tossed down the stairs to his death. John Calvin himself couldn’t have done any better.

I did a bit of research about this and it turns out it dates back to the days when Oliver Cromwell and his boys were driving the Catholics out of England (the old man in question didn’t say his prayers in English, he said them in Latin like a common, cross-eyed papist).

No matter. The fact that this story is printed in children’s books in 2010 without context is amusing enough for me. For now, I will put my little Oliver Cromwelle to bed with a lovely rhyme about intolerance and violence to the elderly.

Best dad ever? It’s too early to say.

(But I’m probably in the conversation.)

Are you a silly goose? Yes you are a silly goose! You waddle and frolic in the sunshine puddles! You love to eat bread don’t you, you silly goose? All you ever do is eat bread and squawk and befriend children of all colors!

I love you, goose!

Woah, calm down, goose! Take a chill pill!

Let’s calm down and discuss this rationally, man to goose. I can see you’re upset, and I’m seeing a lot more of your disgusting goose tongue than I ever want to see again. Now that I’ve seen that, I can imagine what it would be like to make out with Satan.

Now take a deep breath and tell me what it is that you’re mad about.

Now you’re chasing me! Leave me alone, goose! I don’t deserve this goose grief!

You have suprised me with your nimble footspeed over this short distance, goose! I’m not getting any separation! That’s the last time I underestimate an angry goose!

I hate you, goose bastard!

Hey, goose! Leave that man alone! He worked hard today and he deserves a restful nap here on the grass in this park free of your nudging goosenags.

I am going to come back here tomorrow and shoot you, goose. I’m going to blast your goose face away. I have soured on you.

I hope you get fondled by a hobo tonight, goose. You’ve got it coming.

Estimated by scientists to measure more than 15 feet in length and weigh 75 pounds, this icicle embodied all that is mighty and pure about the USA. Like George Washington’s chiseled jaw, Rutherford Hayes’ immaculately-groomed beard, and Lyndon Johnson’s fertile groin, this icicle projected America’s rugged strength and dignity that has justly subjugated the planet earth. That it should sprout up here in North Minneapolis is certainly divine affirmation of mayor Rybak’s half-million dollar initiative to install designer water fountains across the city. In fact, I would posit that this icicle is a herald of Rybak’s inerrancy.

Emboldened by patriotic fervor and sub-zero windchills, I approached the gleaming icicle. With trembling fingers and moistened lips, I reached for it and removed it from my garage with a mighty “CRACK!” At that moment, thunder rolled across the heavens and Hugo Chavez’s living room curtains tore in two.

Resplendent in my workout gear and disheveled hair, I posed with the excalibur of icicles and felt its shimmering American power pulsate through my body like an electrical charge. I was suddenly vivid and alive. It was as if was imbued with the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt after 12 cups of coffee. Mine eyes had seen the glory of the coming of the Lord! Glory, hallelujah!

Then Bridgette made me come inside and fold laundry.

My assigned challenge was to name all 44 U.S. presidents from memory. I accepted the task with a messy clearing of my throat and a gutteral summoning of my knowledge from the most depraved recesses of my mind. I was called upon to name the 44 men who have led this country, from the brave (Washington) to the bumbling (Ford), from the dandies (Buchanon) to the slobs (Taylor), from the great (T.R.) to the “like Hitler if you think about it” (Bush 43/Obama/Whoever Is President Next).

Like a machine, I began rattling off names like an patriotic auctioneer on speedballs. “Lincoln, both Johnsons, Pierce, Adams…” The names of perhaps 35 came to me as easily the secret code for infinite lives in Contra. After a minute or two, my pace began to slow as I labored through the obscure, ineffectual presidents like gray Ben Harrison and fat Chet Arthur. In the end, when the buzzer went off, I had named 43 of our 44 presidents. A valient effort indeed, but ultimately a failure, like Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to smile once in 1917.

The president I missed – none other than the spectacularly mutton-chopped Martin Van Buren.

How could I have forgotten poor Martin? He, of course, was cursed to follow Andrew Jackson, in that his lukewarm personality paled next to Jackson’s, and more significantly the fact that Jackson’s economic policies (namely dismantling the Bank of the U.S.) led to economic ruin in the Panic of 1837, thus crippling his successor’s presidency. It’s as obvious and relevant as the pulsating, oily blemishes that cover my fat face! I can’t believe I forgot Van Buren’s loveless marriage with his cousin, predating FDR’s more famous loveless marriage with his cousin by over a century! How could this have happened? Only a drooling imbecile wouldn’t immediately recall the presidency of Martin Van Buren!

Long story short, I’ve written a lengthy letter to the procurators of the Van Buren estate explaining the situation to them and extending my profuse, profane apologies. It is my hope that they will respond by sending me a lock of his hair and a t-shirt.

Sorry, dear Martin Van Buren. If you’re reading this from your cage in hell, please forgive me.

Little Benito got caught with his fingers in Santa’s enchanted pickle jar, and now it’s up to him to save Christmas!

Santa can’t help! He is chained down to Satan’s Throne of Skulls until Mussolini can make the orphans of the world believe in the joy of Christmas!

Can Mussolini pull it off? Can he magically slaughter 400,000 Ethiopians one last time? Can his secret police silence domestic opposition with a campaign of beatings and ruthless suppression? Can Il Duce save Christmas?

Little children around the world lay awake at tonight with their hopes in Benito Mussolini, wishing that their klutzy hero is able to pull off an unlikely miracle finish, like when his fascist blackshirts consolidated power in Italy during the 1920s! Without little Benito’s help, their stockings will be swallowed whole by the Rattlesnakes of Torment! Don’t let the children down, Benito Mussolini!

Christmas is wonderful!