HOLY FUCKING SHIT.

• "FUCK YOU YOU COCK SUCKING PEICE OF SHIT, OBAMA IS NOT A SOCIALIST AND ANYONE WHO THINKS THAT IS A DUMBASS FUCK HEAD LIKE YOU, IVE SEEN YOUR ACT, YOURE A FAT DORK WHO NOBODY LIKES, YOUR A HACK, GO TO HELL AND ROT YOU COCKSUCKING REPUBLICAN RIGHT WING CUNT!"

As I write this -- 8:50 pm on Wednesday night -- my new album is #4 on iTunes.    And not #4 in comedy -- overall.    I hoped this new album would do well, but I did not think it'd do that well.    Wow.

My baby came 5 days earlier than expected.   Today she’s one week old.

 

I had mixed feelings about even announcing this – privacy issues and all.   Some people have already Twitter’d or Blabbl’d or AssSqueak’d about it, and a few comedy websites have picked it up as if it’s some dark rumor.  So let’s make it official – on Wednesday, April 15^th, my way-more-brilliant-and-resilient-than-me wife gave birth to our first child – Alice Rigney Oswalt.  

 

I didn’t want to announce this on my website, or on my Facebook which, truth be told, I shut down ‘cuz of all the psycho messages I was getting.   I mean, I appreciate knowing that you were awake at 3am and heard a katydid chirping my name and that’s why you’re warning me that a hobo-harlequin’s going to kill me with a tire iron on Christmas, but…I mean, didn’t you get tired just reading that?

 

But MySpace has become a neglected strip mall, which is slowly going out of business because someone built a shiny new mega-mall just down the street.  Every now and then you stop by because abandoned, derelict buildings have a weird beauty to them.  Have you been over to Friendster lately?   The rats are so tame they’ll let you pet ‘em.  So think of this as me taping up a discreet flyer in the window of the sketchy Chinese restaurant next to the dollar movie theater where they’re still showing THE WILD WILD WEST.   I want to announce this, but people are going to have to pack a sandwich and drive somewhere to find it.

 

But yeah, babies.  There’s a whole cluster of us, my friends and I, having babies, all within weeks of each other.   A friend of ours pointed out that we all conceived in late July or early August – during or after the San Diego Comic-Con.  She said, “You guys saw some chick dressed as Wonder Woman, got all hot and bothered, and then went and made a baby with your wives.”

 

Which is naïve and of gross.  None of us were slinging +5 Conception Wands after seeing a chunky fan-girl stomping around in tights and a bustier. 

 

No, what gave us our Life-Spawning Hanzo Steel Trouser Swords was the early TERMINATOR footage.

 

I’m sorry if this is getting sentimental and precious.   I’m one week fresh from bringing another life into the world, and I’m fragile.

 

And I’m raw because of the sudden, early arrival.  Nothing went wrong medically.   The delivery could not have been smoother, or more matter-of-fact.  But watching my daughter get lifted into the light and hearing her first cry didn’t have a tenth of the emotional impact as the clanging un-reality of entering the delivery room.

 

Do they design delivery rooms the way they do on purpose?   Because there’s something pointedly mystical about the whole thing – a passing-through-a-shimmering-gate kind of Arthur Machen groove they’ve got going on at the hospital.   One minute I’m sitting in the hallway while they prep my wife – in my light blue scrubs, booties and mask – and the next I’m being hustled into an over-lit, creamy-white room full of masked people, all of them subtly gliding and waltzing around silvery, flickering machines that hug the walls like the ghosts of giant spiders.   I hold my wife’s hand and we make jokes but all I’m thinking is, “When you leave this room, everything is different.”   It’s a case study version of the Afterlife, one you can’t stay in – but neither can the tiny person who appears there.   You’re supposed to carry them out of a sterile, safe room where you’re both surrounded by professionals and experts and R*E*A*S*S*U*R*A*N*C*E and back out into a world you’ve been knocking around in for forty years.  You’ve seen a lot of beauty and grace out there in the world but holy FUCK are there a lot of casual, cruel, and clumsy cretins…most of them in charge of all the dangerous machinery.

 

What was also bittersweet about the whole thing was how her arrival so beautifully tore the delicate tissue my day-to-day existence is made of.  I didn’t realize, until the 2am feedings and sudden squalls of crying and pooping how, how over-structured I’d made my existence.  

 

And before I use the term “nerd” here, can we all quietly retire that term?  “Nerd” has become too narrow in 2009.   The first thing you think is, “Nerd – yeah, it’s someone who likes comic books and science fiction.”  And I do. 

 

But that term now has to be stretched to include extreme cinema, bizarre archival footage, music, travel, food, excellent TV shows like THE WIRE and BREAKING BAD and, let’s face it, most sports.  I put regular experimentation with exotic drugs under that umbrella.  And “nerd” just doesn’t cut it.

 

How about – “enthusiast”?  That covers my interests, which are too wide-ranging and rambling to satisfy my distant, bewildered relatives who thought they had Christmas shopping all sewed up for me when they heard “comic book”, and grab the nearest thing with Spider-man printed on it.  Then again, I never need to worry about running out of coffee mugs.

 

Where was I?   Oh yeah, my enthusiasms.  

 

So, between the internet and my circle of ear-to-the-ground enthusiast friends, I’ve got weeks and months and, sometimes, years mapped out in advance of what I’m going to see, and hear, and read, and what I’m rubbing my hands together in anticipation of.  And I’ve reached a point in my career where I’m given a lot of early screeners and galley proofs and screenplays, so I’m forever three or four months ahead of the curve.   But then there are special occasions.  I want to experience these fresh out of the bakery ovens, and not at the point where the yeast meets the eggs.  I want to sit, side-by-side with the masses, and bang my head against the seat in front of me, and re-visit my teenage self, and all of the things he loved.

 

Which brings me to CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE.

 

I’m sure you’ve read my earlier blog entry, GAY-THAM FOR STATHAM.   It’s been added to a lot of standardized American textbooks, and President Obama is having it added to the Preamble. 

 

So for months and weeks I was anticipating the release, last Friday, of CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE.  

 

And let’s take a moment here.   CRANK, let’s face it, was the cinematic equivalent of meth, terror, oral sex and shameful joy, delivered at the end of a taser.  And I saw the fucker on TV.

 

And nowthe writer/directors – Neveldine and Taylor, who are probably, as I write, this, having a shirtless pit-fight with a hippo full of PCP – were laying down a goddamn SEQUEL to their masterpiece.  “Yeah, remember that opium you took that enabled you to speak to the dead for five minutes?  Well, we’ve got this new stuff that’ll let you punch one dead person for ten minutes.”   That’s what the mere CONCEPT of a sequel to CRANK felt like.

 

So me and my circle of friends (let’s call us the LONErs – League of Nerdy Enthusiasms, for people who can quite give up the “N” word) were all planning on hitting the Thursday midnight screenings.   Because any dickpimple can type “First!” into a comment thread.  But to LIVE he concept of “First” – that’s where the last drops of Viking blood ended up in the bloodstream.

 

But little Alice had different plans for me, and once I saw her, in the way station of the delivery room, I didn’t want to know anything else.   At least, not for awhile.

 

We stayed in the hospital until Saturday.   I won’t go into the minute-by-minute details of the stay, except to say that, at midnight on Thursday, I was following the Twitter feeds of Aziz Ansari, Paul Scheer, Eric Appell, Steve Agee and Scott Aukerman while they watched the midnight screening of CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE and I lay on an army cot in my wife’s hospital room.  Alice was sleeping in her crib and having the cloud-flavored dreams that babies have while I read my friends’ text-bursts about exit wounds, groin trauma and Corey Haim. 

 

“It’s a whole new deal,” said Dave Grohl, who had the room next to ours.   His daughter came on Friday, and on Saturday afternoon we lugged our wives’ luggage down to our respective cars.   I didn’t say much – it was Dave’s second baby, and I figured I needed to absorb whatever advice he was giving.  Except that it was being transmitted from a sleep-deprived rocker to a sleep-deprived comedian, so that’s all I really took away – “It’s a whole new deal.”  He might have said more but I was hearing less, so that’s what I got.

 

And it is a whole…new…deal.    I’m going to be honest and say I haven’t decided, one way or another, whether it’s good or bad.   I know I’d rather sit with Alice and her mom, watching AMERICAN IDOL while we keep reminding ourselves that it’s night, and that AMERICAN IDOL may as well be our GOOD MORNING AMERICA, the way our schedule is now.   And I spend my days like one of the bush pilots in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, sitting and sipping coffee, and waiting for my wife or the night nurse to send me out on an errand.   I’ve learned to love podcasts, which make driving around feel less like an intellect sinkhole than listening to the radio.  

 

And I’m warning you, LONErs out there on the brink of parenthood – staring at your baby will become your new X-Box, your new Alex Ross art, your new Tarantino film.   You’ll stare and stare with the kind of fascination you haven’t felt since you first saw STAR WARS (or THE MATRIX – fuck, I keep forgetting I’m forty).   My gallery of otherwordly avatars – the masked killers and vigilantes and film noir sirens and Lovecraftian hosts – are still around, but they’re faded and have to wait their turn.  We’ll see if I turn into a pedantic, boring asshole, an ex-LONEr who renounces his past and tries to protect their kid from everything they used to spice their existence.

 

Except…

 

Tuesday morning I went to the first screening of CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE at The Arclight.   I went with a friend of mine, Gerry Duggan, who had HIS kid, his son, on Monday the 13^th, two days before Alice.

 

Our wives insisted we at least get out and see this movie they knew we were dying to see.  Those are the kind of super-cool chicks we married.

 

And there we were, in the Arclight, with what looked like five other random people.   CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE didn’t do well, which I think President Obama needs to address in his next State of the Union.

 

But Gerry and I sat there, happily assaulted by the seizure-inducing editing, lung-bursting pace and all-around psycho-kill-titty-scrotum-ness of CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE.  Neither of us had showered.   We’d gotten three hours of sleep between us in as many days.  We were dehydrated and shaking from coffee and junk food.

 

And, we lived the reality of CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE better than any of our friends who’d seen it the previous Thursday.  It was if someone created the greatest 3-D technology ever – Jason Statham was onscreen being sweaty, exhausted, jittery, confused and smelly, and that’s EXACLTY HOW WE WERE SITTING IN THE THEATER.  

 

Thank you, Baby Alice.   You made the first movie I saw after your birth the most immersive cinematic experience I’ve ever had.  I owe you my understanding when, at 22, you write your first screenplay – CRANK 9: PREGNANT AS FUCK.

 

And unless you see CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE after four days of screaming, poo-filled diapers and sleep deprivation, to the point where your body is emitting a swamp-ass odor that could pierce the engine block of a pickup truck, then I don’t want to know you.  CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE demands that kind of dedication.

 

In short, it’s the perfect movie for new fathers.   Because you’re going to live a version of that movie every day for the rest of your life.

 

Oops, Alice is crying.   Gotta get inside with the baa-baa.

 

By the way, this is what I see in my head when I hear Alice’s banshee wail:

 

 

I can’t wait.  Juice me! 

Jason Statham has never been in a great movie.

He's also never been in a boring one.

Statham's imdb.com profile, collectively, is a promise to you, the weary filmgoer. It's a promise that says, "I promise that you will not FOR ONE SECOND be bored during one of my movies. You won't learn shit about the human condition, or feel a collective connection with the brotherhood of man. But if you give me $10, I will fuck an explosion while a Slayer song plays".

I just watched CRANK on Showtime, and I can't understand how I missed this when it was in theaters.

I'm buying THE BANK JOB and DEATHRACE on iTunes today. After CRANK, Mr. Statham can count on my $10 every time he makes a movie. If someone figures out how to make a movie for $8, and it stars Jason Statham, then they're guaranteed a $2 profit.

I look forward to any new film by Ang Lee, David Gordon Green, Paul Thomas Anderson, The Coen Brothers, Paul Greengrass or Ross McElwee.

And now, Jason Statham. I don't know how much say he has in the films he makes. But I get the impression that he reads the scripts. And if the script doesn't make him want to drive a bulldozer through a cake store, I'll bet he punches the script through a wall.

In fact, my entire stack of Academy screeners would have been vastly improved by the addition of Jason Statham. Here we go:

CHANGELING: Jason Statham plays the kidnapped boy, who immediately beats his kidnappers to death, then fights female assassins on top of a blimp.

CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON: Jason Statham injects the backward-aging man-freak with a Sino/Chilean rage compound, and they fight in lava pit.

DEFIANCE: Jason Statham throws Hitler into a woodchipper, eats the entrails as they fly out the other end, and then shits out Winston Churchill.

DOUBT: Jason Statham drop-kicks the Pope through the core of the Earth, and the Pope's head goes up Meryl Streep's ass and then Motorhead's "The Ace of Spades" plays.

FROST/NIXON: Jason Statham pulls off David Frost's skin, drops him into a tank of sea salt, and then Statham and Nixon rent a limo and drive across country, shotgunning hippies.

GRAN TORINO: Jason Statham glowers at Clint Eastwood, who glowers back, creating a Glower Vortex which destroys the planet.

THE READER: Statham kills the teenage kid with a lawnmower, then fucks Kate Winslet literate.

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD: Jason Statham drives an 18-wheeler full of nitro into the title suburb, blows everything to shit, and then spends 90 minutes hunting down absolutely everyone involved with the making of this film, beating them to death with TV trays.

THE WRESTLER: Jason Statham, Richard Nixon, the 'roided-out Benjamin Button murder-freak, the Churchill feces-baby and Mickey Rourke drive cross country in a limo, with Leo DiCaprio's severed head on the hood, where they crash the Spirit Awards and kill everyone.


There you go. Statham! Full disclosure: I saw Jason Statham eating a salad at Joan's on 3rd, here in L.A. Really, I did. I wanted to say hello, but he seemed like he could chuck an arugula leaf through my skull.

Do yourselves a favor, Academy voters. CRANK 2: HIGH VOLTAGE comes out April 19th. On April 20th, rescind all the voting categories. There should be one statue given out next year -- a 45-foot, sentient Oscar kill-bot, which Jason Statham will fight to the death at the next ceremony.



Statham! Yell it when you're fucking!

There's a floating, secret society of movies that includes such illustrious titles as RUNNING SCARED (the Paul Walker version, not the Hines-Crystal-Smits one), ANACONDA, and the immortal, why-hasn't-Criterion-done-a-release DEEP BLUE SEA.

These are the kinds of movies where, while you're watching it, usually with a group of friends, you think (or say aloud), "Is this HAPPENING?"

"Did I just see a from-inside-the-snake-view of John Voight being eaten?"

"When did this Paul Walker action movie become a Pasolini kid-rape parable?"

"Wait -- did I just see Samuel L. Jackson get eaten by a shark? Oh wait -- now ANOTHER shark is coming along and pulling his head off while the first shark swims off with his body?"

The reason you're so brain-cracked as you watch these movies is that, unlike on-the-borderlands fare like THE STORY OF RICKY, DEAD ALIVE and ICHI THE KILLER, these are boilerplate, wide-release films put out by major studios. In thousands of theaters, all across America, for anyone to see. And yet they contain winking corpses, black-light massacres and Saffron Burrows stripping down to bra and panties so she can electrocute a genius-level shark.

Somehow, someone tricked someone else at the MPAA and, let's face it, the studio itself to let these wonderfully transgressive movies loose to roam the countryside.

Well, it happened again.

PUNISHER: WAR ZONE is THE BEST time I've had at the movies this year. I've seen better films. MUCH better films. SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, THE DARK KNIGHT, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN and RACHEL GETTING MARRIED I'm sure, someday, will influence my work and make me think twice before I let slide something hack-y and un-original.

But I didn't ever feel like standing up on my chair and cheering. None of them made me cackle like a railyard hobo who's found half a cigar and a can of beans. And none of them had a scene where Dominic West, in Frankenstein makeup, convinces black, Chinese and Irish gangs to put aside their differences and act as cannon-fodder in his hissy fit vengeance scheme against Frank Castle, aka The Punisher.

People are not shot in this film. They have holes blasted through them or are turned into sticky mist.

People are not punched in this film. They have their faces pummeled off.

Children are not threatened. They are un-fixably scarred for life.

The film does not contain a hero. It does not contain an anti-hero. It contains a glowering Brit who huffs around in a bullet-proof body canister like he's searching for the perfect toilet to unleash a ten burrito dump. He's just as awful as the villains he dispatches and, unlike scores of other action heroes, does not utter a single clever or ironic quip. He'll plug someone and already be turning away, scanning the horizon for something else to kill. He's played by Ray Stevenson, but could have easily been played by Ray Stevens. He's more a force of destruction than Jason Vorhees or Michael Meyers could ever dream on.

Keep in mind, all of this mayhem, insanity and just-plain bugfuckedness is contained in one of the most beautifully shot films I've seen this year. It's almost distracting, how gorgeous cinematographer Steve Gainer's palette is. It's like he studied BLACK NARCISSUS and THE RED SHOES right before shooting a snuff film.

And director Lexi Alexander, a former stunt woman and kick boxing champion, has just groin-punched her way to the front of the line in the Nutball Director's Pantheon. Make room, Miike! Step aside, Kounen!

PUNISHER: WAR ZONE is still in theaters. Barely. It took ten days for it to body-crawl past 7 million dollars.

Won't you make a pasty shut-ins Christmas dreams come true? Won't you call up an old friend, perhaps an unhinged asshole you've been avoiding , and take them to see PUNISHER: WAR ZONE? Or maybe the whole family, while you're still digesting Christmas dinner? How amazing would it be if PUNISHER: WAR ZONE rallied, and beat MARLEY AND ME and BENJAMIN BUTTON on Christmas Day?

It'd help an angel get his wings, I bet.

I signed a book deal this week. I owe it to the publishers in nine months.

I've always wanted to write a book. I read voraciously. Like, all the time. Maybe not as much as Brother Mouzone or Henry Bemis (fictional), or Art Garfunkel and Harvey Keitel (real), but it's close. I love the effect of the printed word on my brain -- the sounds, smells and emotions the process of reading evoke. Reading, to me, is like feeling the infinite, four or five times a page, and page after page after that.

And, except for a few "novels" I wrote in high school (a silly, post-apocalyptic mutants-with-guns-galloping-across-wastelands-conveniently-strewn-with-more-guns "epic", plus a my-suburb-has-mutated-residents-living-under-it Stephen King ripoff) I've never written a book. And I really want to write this one. And more.

Last year, I had a screenplay assignment that I bungled, big-time. I got some producers -- people I respect, and whose work I'm a fan of -- all excited about an idea I had, and then NEVER FUCKING DELIVERED IT. A lot of it was due to my usual dithering, plus me not being able to handle my travel, acting, and stand-up load in relation to my writing commitments. I've since delivered them a SECOND screenplay, which they love, but the experience of just flat-out, no-excuse NOT DELIVERING was terrifying. And, as it turned out, freeing. I'm writing much better, having stood back and, with a sickening sense of fatalism, watched a huge career opportunity burn to the ground.

All the while holding a fire hose, one I never used.

So I don't want to do the same thing with this book. And I've been in a sour, jittery funk these past few days, and I shouldn't, you know, what with my home state going to Obama and the world choosing intelligence and optimism over smug, terrified ignorance. And I realized my funk came from not having started any work on this book. And I don't want to go down the same path I went last spring on the screenplay. Because even though coming through that blazing wall of failure was freeing, it's also made catastrophic failure not so bad, at least to me.

What I'm saying is, this blog will become a bit more...terse...for the next year or so. I mean, I'll still write in it, and update my calendar and photos, but this won't (and shouldn't be) the main repository of my creative energy. That's got to go into the book. The book the book the book.

See, the thing about a blog, at least for an obsessive-compulsive like me, is you FINISH IT IN ONE SITTING. An entry, at least. You sit down, and you start blasting away at the keys, and then sooner or later (almost always sooner, another plus) the entry's finished, and you can lean back, and wait for the comments to roll in, and then start sparring with your delightful, freaky cyber-foils. It's writing turned into a game of Galaga, where you have unlimited lives.

If I wrote, say, six pages of my book (which is INFINITE JEST, in blog terms) I've basically dinged an elephant with a BB gun. I've got to pull that trigger a hundred million times before I've got an umbrella stand.

What I'm saying is, not so many updates from now on.

Or maybe not. Banging this out, I feel my juices firing up. There's butane in the blowtorch now, so maybe this blog will become the 30 minutes of jump-roping a boxer does before sparring. Not so fun to watch, I guess, but it's useful to me. And really, isn't that what this blog's all about?

With that in mind, I now present a blog which, when the idea broke in my brain, even gave me the heebie-jeebies. I certainly can't put this in a book (could I? Wait, no fucking way. No, fuck no) but I need to wring this out of my system.

It starts with Sarah Palin.

And before my spelling-deficient conservative commenters start cracking their knuckles and flipping their "rage" switches, keep in mind I come to praise Palin here. And not in a smarmy, ironic way.

I never said this during the campaign -- but I found her achingly sexy.

And not for her considerable, physical charms. No, it's a life-long fetish/hang-up I've had, and never been able to shake. I don't have a clever name for the syndrome. The best I can do is WOMEN WITH NOXIOUS IDEAS.

The turn-on, for me, about Sarah, was the fact that she believes in ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING I DESPISE. Creationism, anti-intellectualism, aggressive ignorance, American exceptionalism, and that eerie sub-category of religion called "triumphalism", where your respective God chooses YOU, and searches for YOU, instead of the other way around. George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden are our most famous, most recent advocates.

There's an actress named Christy Hartburg. Or "Christina Cummings", as she was listed for her appearances in NATIONAL LAMPOON GOES TO THE MOVIES, BJ AND THE BEAR and SHERIFF LOBO.

But under the name "Christy Hartburg", she appeared in Russ Meyers' SUPERVIXENS. She's got about 8 minutes of screen time, and she's the pinnacle of the curvy, healthy, early 70's pinup girl, before everyone started starving themselves into rib-tastic bonerkillitude:



Good Lord! Oh, where are you, Christy?

Well, turns out she's alive and well and a RAGING NEOCONSERVATIVE, living somewhere in Las Vegas. Her views on America, and George W. Bush, and the direction this country's been taking make Ann Coulter look like Janeane Garofalo.

Which intrigues me all the more. How do you reconcile ideas -- ideas which are so repellent to you -- being inside such an angelic package? "Christy Hartburg" would hate me. HATE ME. And I'd probably hate her. But somewhere in my mind, she'd still be SuperLorna, the motorist who go-go's at the gas station at the beginning of SUPERVIXENS. Sigh.

Back to Palin. I honestly don't think I'd have found her attractive if she'd supported gay marriage, believed in evolution, was humble before her God and wanted us out of Iraq. And I don't fantasize about her, or want to be with her sexually. I realized -- and this goes for Christy, and every other conservative Nexus 6 pleasure model out there -- that I want them to feel EXACTLY THE SAME WAY ABOUT ME AS I DO ABOUT THEM. To be repulsed, disgusted, and yet secretly intrigued. And then we'd mutually reject each other. That's the turn-on, in the end.

Which is why I've been thinking about female Nazis. I can't think of a group of people who are filled with such nougat-y horror. And, unlike Hartburg and Palin, most of these women aren't even attractive. In fact, the uglier ones intrigue me more. It's not often than someone's inner ugliness manifests itself physically, like a Dick Tracy villain. Who wasn't sort of turned on by Shirley Stoller in SEVEN BEAUTIES? Oh, just me?

Oh, fuck, I guess it really is just me.

So herewith, I present my Top 5 FEMALE NAZIS, and how I'd attempt to turn them from their evil ways. Think of me as Kevin Bacon in FOOTLOOSE, and they're my Teutonic Lori Singer. Eugenically bred to be my opposite, my nemesis, but...do I see a faint glimmer in their eyes? Can I find the perfect 80's dance step, one that will make them renounce Hitler, spill their secrets to the OSI, and then join me for a nosh at Ben Ash? I can dream, can't I?




1. ILSE KOCH

Like Christina Ricci with a thyroid problem, Ilse was the wife of the Buchenwald commandant. Maybe you're a Silverlake hipster who's into tattoo culture. Groovy. So was Ilse. Although, instead of desecrating her kugel-stuffed bod with ink, she COLLECTED TATTOOS BY CUTTING THEM OFF PRISONERS. Kinda makes the belly-button ring you got to piss off your parents look like a booger, huh? Known as "The Bitch of Buchenwald", she's the only one on this list who wasn't executed. She took her own life during the Summer of Love, in September of 1967, after living to the ripe old age of 60.

HOW I'D WIN HER OVER: Force her to get a groovy tattoo that says "DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLES" -- in Hebrew. I think the brutal irony of it would break her stony exterior. She'd end up living in the East Village of New York, teaching bookkeeping to disadvantaged youth.



2. ELIZABETH VOLKENRATH

Dig that New Wave hairdo! Elizabeth, along with Irma Grese (see below), trained under Dorothea Binz at Ravensbruck, before transferring to Birkenau. She and Irma were hung on December 13th, 1945.

HOW I'D WIN HER OVER: Get Fred Armisen to do an impersonation of her, then take her for a hair and clothing makeover (all set to the song "Brown Eyed Girl"). She was only 26 when captured by the Allies, so maybe she was just a mixed-up kid. Hey, I thought Offspring was a good band when I was 26.



3. IRMA GRESE

Bearing a disturbing resemblance to actress Elisabeth Moss (Peggy on MAD MEN), Irma was herself a frustrated actress who took to the pageantry and costume design of Nazism with a particular zeal. She reportedly carried a whip with her at all times, set dogs on prisoners, and took lovers from among her fellow guards as well as the prison population -- male and female. Unrepentant at her trial, she barked "Schnell!" ("Faster!") at the hangman before the trap was sprung beneath her.

HOW I'D WIN HER OVER: Make her watch THE HILLS, Ludovico-style, until her brain imploded.



4. MARIA MANDEL

Nicknamed "The Beast", Maria was directly responsible for the deaths of 500,000 inmates. She also created the Auschwitz orchestra, to accompany roll calls. And she kind of looks like James Gandolfini in a wig. She was hanged on January 24th, 1948.

HOW I'D WIN HER OVER: Color Me Mine appointment.



5. DOROTHEA BINZ

Dorothea Binz's evil hangs over our collection of Aryan death-flowers like poison smog. Irma Grese and Elizabeth Volkenrath ASPIRED to her brutality, and never came close. Dorothea and her boyfriend, Edmund Brauning, were fond of romantic walks around the concertina wire of Ravensbruck, where they'd watch prisoners flogged and then walk away, hand-in-hand, laughing. French prisoners nicknamed her "The Binz". No Fonz jokes, please. She was hung, thankfully, on May 2nd, 1957.

HOW I'D WIN HER OVER: I wouldn't. Bullet to the head. Yeesh.

Okay, that ought to give you guys enough to talk about for awhile. I'll see you in a few weeks. I'm feeling nothing but hopeful and strong, so I wanted to get this one grainy gob of evil out of my goddamn head before I walk in the sunshine of an Obama presidency. A symbolic goodbye to horrific Nazi women, I think, is a good gesture.

Who wants ice cream?

The good people at Axe Body Spray have introduced a new product. Finally, men can buy a bottle of liquid that, when sprayed on their bodies, makes them smell like chocolate.

I can't think of anything more seductive on a steamy beach in the south of France than smelling like a fat child who has made a big messy-messy with his candy bar.

But the Axe company doesn't do thing by half-measures. "We've potentially fucked up the OUTSIDES of thousands of men. But what can we do to fuck up their INsides? Especially the inside-the-head part, which is usually full of thoughts and, when you go to sleep, pleasant dreams? Can't that space be filled with unease and, at night, screaming?"

Well, they did it. Here's the product "mascot" for Axe Chocolate Body Spray:



In the commercial, this voodoo-eyed treat-demon walks the daylight streets. Only the commercial takes place in a sinister moral vacuum where, instead of cutting this sweaty, ebony monster to pieces with shotguns, citizens lick, bite and at one point TEAR HIS GODDAMN ARM OFF. I can only assume the pop-eyes and permanent rictus come from being driven past the point of sanity by the constant abuse, pain and horror.

Hey, maybe the Three Dark Davids -- Cronenberg, Fincher and Lynch -- could combine forces and make a movie called MASCOT RAMPAGE. I'd happily script it for them.

Here's the pitch. The Burger King "King":



And the Duracell Puttermans:



Are brought to life by the evil, gibbous zombie-rays emitted by Mac Tonight:



They slaughter a suburban family and use their house as their headquarters. In the basement, mixing the blood of the dead with the mud and grease and grubworms under the pulled-up basement floor planks, they fashion a chocolate golem. Mac Tonight uses his pointed, Maria Shriver-like chin to carve a sigil onto the golem's chest, and it pulls itself to its feet. They send it out into the world, to seduce bulimic women back to the house where the Puttersons...disassemble...them.

And the Burger King broods on a throne made of skinny, chocolate-smeared legs. In the background, Mac Tonight sings "Dream Lover".

Fade to chocolate-y black.

INT. – CONFERENCE ROOM – DAY

HANS GRUBER, German criminal mastermind, meets with a crew of international, professional thieves.


HANS GRUBER
Thank you all for coming. I trust your respective flights were uneventful.
(reads from a Filofax)
Your presence indicates to me that each of you has reviewed my plan for the Nakatomi heist, and that you've agreed to participate. You will each receive a generous share of the $640 million in negotiable bearer bonds we will steal from the vault.

THEO
Hate to speak out of turn, but I had a question about that.

MARCO
We all did, as a matter of fact.

HANS
Oh?

THEO
Yeah. And since I'm the one with the charming personality, I'll elect myself group spokesperson.
(he turns to the Karl and Tony)
Guten tag?

They both cock their heads, confused.

HANS
They're Swedish.

THEO
Oopsie. I keep forgetting. I owe you guys a Swiss Miss.

Uli eyes a bowl of M&Ms in the middle of the conference table. Eddie watches Uli intently.

EDDIE
(under his breath)
C'mon…c'mon, just take one.

ULI
I heard that.

EDDIE
Well, you've been eyein' them candies ever since you got in here.

ULI
Well, I'm a nervous eater. I've got a wicked sweet tooth when I'm nervous.

HANS
What is there to be nervous about?

THEO
Well, there's one hole in the plan. At least, there's one detail you've left out.

HANS
Every conceivable detail has been paid attention to.

THEO
Except the electromagnetic lock on the vault. You know I can't crack it. None of us can.

HANS
I've got that all figured out.

THEO
Well, could you maybe share it with us? That's what we're all nervous about. We like the whole blowing the roof to cover our escape, and the driving away in the ambulance during all the confusion.

KARL
But we've all invested a lot of time and money, not to mention many of us have traveled a long way.

MARCO
All the way from Italy, in my case! I am almost out of my favorite cigarettes!

THEO
So we need you to tell us exactly how you'll crack the electromagnetic lock.

Hans stares everyone down. This is a crucial moment, and will decide whether these sober, risk-averse professionals will proceed.

HANS
I would much rather surprise you with the solution during the heist.

THEO
You're serious? All of this build-up, and we're going to have to take it on faith you've got it worked out, plus be excited about it being a surprise?

HANS
Yes.

Everyone stares at Hans, then at each other. This does not look good.

Then:

KARL
Okay!

THEO
Yep! I think I speak for everyone when I say a surprise might be kind of fun!

MARCO
It's worth the risk!

HANS
I'm so pleased.

Uli finally steps back from the M&Ms. He doesn't take one.

KARL
(to Eddie)
Told you.

EDDIE
Damn, I had fifty bucks on this guy.

He hands a fifty dollar bill over to Karl, and everyone leaves the room.

I cleaned my basement today so, naturally, I thought about Jesus.

You read about the guy, and it seems like all he ever did was mingle with the assholes of his time. The weird, outcast, ill-spoken and socially awkward. Hookers and lepers.

"That Jesus guy, from Nazareth? He says he's the son of God."

Snort. "Really? Then why is he always on the hook/lep side of town?"

That was God's little joke. The man with the plan, the herald of salvation and the apocalypse -- see, he's going to hide that guy in the middle of the kind of people you want to avoid. Which means two things:

God has an over-arcing sense of irony and the innate lyricism of the human animal. Yucky vegetables are where he hid the vitamins. Experience gets hidden inside pain and failure. And The Truth is surrounded by douchebags. It's a comment on how the world doesn't just give you wisdom, humility and health. You've got to go out and search for it. Make yourself a little uncomfortable. Shake things up.

Or, God's just a dick.

But I've been thinking about where Jesus might be today, if he's truly come back (or is planning to).

Would he be hidden amongst the yowling, you-are-not-the-father victory dancing pinheads on Maury Povich?

Maybe he's a shirtless, gold-chain swinging Jersey shore Guido.

Perhaps, finally, Christ Risen is a contestant on Deal or No Deal.

Those are some pretty annoying sub-groups of sub-humans.

But they don't hold a glow-stick to commenters on the internet.

Under every YouTube video. Every Onion A.V. Club entry. Every MySpace blog and AintItCool thread. Asswipes. Worthless, time-wasting maelstroms of Why Fucking Bother. Mean, spiteful, misspelled and, worst of all, Aborted Attempts At Humor (acronym -- AAAH!).

But maybe the 492nd comment on some of these endless threads is a parable that could save the world. But who ever reads that far before shooting themselves in the head?

Or, worse yet, Jesus' message to a woeful world is, "First!"

I'm writing this from my hotel in Providence, R.I. It's gloomy out and I'm fighting a fever.

I wasn't as bad yesterday, when I showed up. I took a commuter train down from Boston. The cars were appropriately gloomy and empty, and the countryside grew more gnarled and eldritch-y as we neared Lovecraft country.

I'd booked tonight's show at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel for the express purpose of walking the Providence streets, and soaking up whatever oily ether H.P. Lovecraft must've breathed. I've been re-reading his stuff this past year, and it's clanging around in my head. Maybe a walk down the narrow lanes of downtown would put it into some sort of sad perspective. At around 6pm last evening, I ventured out:



Keep in mind, my fever was in its infancy. While I unpacked and dressed, I played Adam Curtis' excellent documentary THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES on my laptop, about the simultaneous rise of radical Islam and American Neo-conservatism. Like the war between Lovecraft's Old Ones and Shuggoth, these two splinters of fanatics, which had their roots back in the Cold War of the 50's, would eventually limn the lines of combat and stress we're all living under today.

I was finishing tying my shoes and listening to the documentary, which went into the short, apocalyptic life of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Islamist and the father of the philosophy of Al Qaeda.

"Sayyid Qutb" sounds like one of those guttural, Lovecraft-invented names. If not the name of one of his spectral beasties, then of some doomed researcher of the unknown, who left a "noxious fragment" which led others to evil.

Keep Sayyid Qutb in mind as I leave the hotel to go walking around.

Directly to the left of the hotel's doors was the most ominous Chinese restaurant I'd ever seen. The sweet-flesh smell exhaling from his portal managed to pierce my swollen sinuses. On a TV over the bar, BETTER OFF DEAD was playing. Curtis Armstrong was tapping on a jar which held a calf fetus.

Three doors further down was Cellar Stories Books:



There was a huge window display of Poe, Lovecraft, and WEIRD TALES magazine. Also, a pulled quote from Lovecraft about the nature of Yog-Sothoth:



"Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate..." While I read these worse, a weird, echo-y whoop rang out, close behind me.

In the parking lot opposite the bookstore, four or five dark, dessicated drunks had gathered around the open hood of a wounded automobile and were making nonsense noises which bounced off the brick walls of the buildings surrounding the lot. They sounded like one, collective thing, barking confusion and alarm at the strange mechanics before them:



One of the group, a squat stick of a man in a wheelchair, peeled off and headed down the street, randomly "yipping" and "yowling" while sipping a beer. He got to a busy intersection and sailed into traffic, blithely missing a speeding car:



Something from an impossible dimension, with a scribbled intellect, was protecting him.

It was growing dark and windy, and I saw an open liquor store that sold medicine. I needed Nyquil. I headed for the door. Before I could go inside, a man on a bicycle sped up to me. He wore a tan Dickies windbreaker, an orange waffle shirt and a NY Yankees baseball cap:

"Hey-hey-ha, I know you. I know who you are. On the TV. There you are. I know you."

I didn't have the presence of mind to take out my camera and snap his face, but my mind took a picture all the same. His face looked -- reconstructed. Like the bones of the cheeks and forehead had been shattered, and then re-glued. There were faint criss-cross scars on his olive skin, and he'd grown a moustache to cover a particularly nasty scar at the corner of his lips, as if his mouth had torn open in a scream.

He launched into the following monologue, which I tried to remember as he said it. Keep in mind, when he spoke all of his words had to pass through a mouth that was in a permanent letter "o":

"You're real on that show. Realer than the rest of the TV. You can't fake it. Coins under the ground, and you hand 'em out and laughs. That old man. That old man's angry and you've got the coins."

I thanked him, and he told me he wanted to tell me "something else that wasn't a joke."

"Okay", I said.

"Give me two dollars."

I didn't. I had just enough for my Nyquil gels, and I pocketed them and kept wandering, going in a crooked spiral that took me away and then back to the hotel.

Taking up a whole corner was Big Nazo, a sort od art collective/studio/factory. Huge marionettes, costumes, and statues peered from the window:



Wow! I stepped inside. I don't know if they were actually open this late on a Sunday evening, but the door was chocked open, and I wanted to look at more of the amazing creations.

Two artists, their backs to me, sat Indian-style on the floor and worked on a green head.

One of them said, "You ever heard of Sayyid Qutb?"

The other said, "Qutb, Qutb, Qutb" like a chant.

My fever flared and I left without saying a word. They never knew I was there. I'd had enough.

I washed down the Nyquil with a bowl of the hotel's superlative chicken soup, and tried to remember when I'd first read Lovecraft. But my head was full of cement, and nothing came:



The Nyquil extinguished any dreams I might have had, and I woke to church bells. There's a church near the hotel that peals out on the hour -- first orderly, flat tones for whatever time of day it is, and then a weird, discordant fistful of notes that sounds like two trolls are chasing each other back and forth between the bells.

I boarded a cab while the bells were going BONG BONG BONG for noon and headed off to Swan Point Cemetery. The driver, who's skin looked like he'd fended off daily ice pick attacks, drove us aimlessly around the grounds, getting lost. The wind was blowing leaves and blossoms off the trees and in the blue-grey light of the coming story it looked as if we were underwater.

A helpful caretaker pointed us in the right direction, and we found the obelisk with PHILLIPS on it. Behind it, on a little marker, was Howard Phillip's name, his birth and death dates, and the phrase "I AM PROVIDENCE":



Little stones, a lead fishing sinker, and coins were left on the grave. A piece of yellow legal paper had a quote from "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" written on it. It was held down by a smooth rock. A white piece of paper, nearly disintegrated, was held down by its own small rock. I leaned down, but the writing was in...Arabic.

I called Harlan Ellison, and he revealed to me he was one of the people who donated money to have the headstone erected in 1977. Before that, Lovecraft's remains were..elsewhere, and his name was simply carved on the Phillips family monument. Not enough for his haunted fans, I guess.

Harlan told me a joke about a dachshund sending a telegram. A cemetery car drove by, slowed, and the occupants pointed at me. It was starting to rain:



The driver got even more lost trying to get us out. A huge, hairless man cam out of a nearby chapel. One of his eyes was glued shut by overgrown skin tags. He told us to follow him, and he led us to the exit in a little cart, also the property of Swan Point.

The Swan Point Cemetery symbol looks almost the same as the symbol on the Swan Station hatch in LOST.

It's almost dark. I have to go do the show.

I’m hanging out with Harlan Ellison now.

Well, I’ve been to the house twice -- Ellison Wonderland, with the tower and the 5 foot door and the secret rooms and stairwells and the tens of thousands of vintage paperbacks and comics and sculpture and the charming British wife and the gargoyles overlooking the driveway and the frieze of the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars on the outer walls.

I’ve been there twice, and spoke to him a bunch on the phone. I’m not going to get into how this budding friendship started (this blog had something to do with it) because it seems too good to be true. Harlan’s been an unwitting, guiding guru in my life since the 7th grade, when I read his short story, "A Boy and His Dog", in detention. Well, in the hallway outside the classroom from which I’d been booted -- here comes an Ellisonian phrase -- ass-over teakettle.

We will return to Harlan. But won’t you take my hand, while we wander the memory corridor of the last month?

I attended Maila Nurmi’s funeral on February 17th. She was Vampira -- the original, Goth-when-Goth-meant-pariah doom-chick. As Dana Gould said in her eulogy, "Every time I drive down Melrose I see 40 of you."

Seeing her fans and friends in the sunlight around her tombstone, I realized it was the most vitamin D they’d get all year. And someone sent a jack o’ lantern filled with black roses.

The Sunday after Maila’s funeral I attended the Oscars. If Maila was Vampira, then Gary Busey is gunning to be the new Renfield. He collected a year’s worth of goody bags, gift baskets and snack trays, and ascended back into the Kodak Theatre’s rafters, where he’ll live, arguing with bats, until the next Oscar ceremony.

I know I’m zipping through the past month like a hornet but all I’m left with are fleeting sensory impressions of what I witnessed. They’re potent, though.

Like the 1st Annual Bridgetown Comedy Festival in Portland, Oregon.

It was last weekend. It was put together by comedy fans for comedy fans. I did a set on the evening of Saturday, March 8th. Two, really, in a fun, smelly rock club filled with resentful drunks wondering where the band was, and why these pasty drips with ironic T-shirts where on stage, whining about their love lives.

I love Portland...but. I love visiting there...but.

It’s Disneyland for the alternative scene. "I’ve never seen such a low testosterone level in a city," said my wife, enchanted by Voodoo Donuts and the Chinese Gardens. "I know I shouldn’t say this, but it’s hard to imagine anyone ever being raped up here."

Someone needs to set off an Ambition Bomb in front of Powell’s.

I met Brian Michael Bendis for dinner at Le Pigeon, where at least our taste buds were raped...with deliciousness!

(If the owners of Le Pigeon are reading this, feel free to put that on the message machine for your reservations).

Brian’s already let me read the first three issues of SECRET INVASION, which is Marvel Comics’ big summer dust-up.

After COUNTDOWN and CIVIL WAR, I was going to take a break from these big summer crossover thingies. But this SECRET INVASION...holy shit.

This is not a big, disposable, multi-issue donnybrook. This is a blitzkrieg from page one. Bendis basically worked out a remorseless, nothing-but-business tearing down of the Marvel Universe. And it’s clear the story has been set up...for...years. And the deaths are treated so off-handedly, with no appeal or remorse -- and this is three issues in.

So far, each issue has also ended with a shit-your-pants, ’Wait, what in the FUCK?!" moment...after, of course, about three or four what-the-fuck moments tossed off during the course of each story. As it stands right now, someone’s holding a possible key to stopping the Skrulls, and it’s the LAST person in the Marvel Universe you’d want with that info. And no, it’s not Dr. Doom.

Bendis is sending me issue 4 tomorrow morning. I can’t wait to post it over at Huffington.

Speaking of comics, one of the many wonderful things that happened when I was in Portland last weekend happened after my last show. A shy, unassuming little dude sidled up to me outside the Mt. Tabor Legacy Theater and handed me three of his self-published comics.

I get a lot of self-published stuff from aspiring artists and writers. Some, like the self-published graphic novel ALMIGHTY by Ed Laroche (http://www.myspace.com/blackhalo51) are goddamn amazing. Others, like EIGHT BALLS by this guy I met in Berkeley named Dan Cows, not so much.

But boy, did I luck out when Matthew Bernier slipped a few of his exquisite black-and-white comics in my hand. POTATO AUTOPSY was the perfect amount of sinister, sweet and funny. Don’t take my word for it -- visit his website at www.Matthew-Bernier.com. And be polite -- the poor genius has Asberger’s. And Harlan Ellison is reading his comics. I gave the copies to Harlan the last time we met, and he was bowled over.

Oh yeah, Harlan. This ought to begin and end with him. Much of who I am today begins and ends with him.

Like I said, I’ve met the man twice, and I’ve already got enough to fill a book. But I’ll give you this:

The first time I visited the house, I brought him a box of cupcakes from Yummy Cupcakes. He came to the door in a ratty black bathrobe. In the kitchen a few moments later, I struggled to tear the taped-shut box open. Harlan gently pushed me aside and, reaching into the bathrobe’s pocket, produced a switchblade.

"Kid, I’ve outlived being unprepared".

Then he cut the box open. We ate cupcakes and he told me about, among other things, Bruce Lee, the folly of religion, the importance of bedroom slippers, and the mutant residents of Great Yarmouth.

One of the top five days of my life.

Oh, and he had a little plastic plaque made for me of his favorite Gerald Kersh quote. It could not be more timely, what with the demise of THE WIRE, and all the things David Simon tried to show us about humanity in its flawless five seasons:

"...there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment."

(*OH FUCK! 11:31 p.m. update -- Bendis just sent me Issue 4. Wheeeee!)

(*OH FUCK FUCK! 12:08 a.m. Just read it. Issue 4 has, so far, the coolest line, said by the most unexpected character: "Get everyone".)

My wife twisted her ankle late on a Monday evening, so we had to go to the emergency room.

We live in Burbank ("Where boredom goes to relax!") so we figured, how bad can the emergency room be? Did emergencies even occur in Burbank?

We envisioned, somewhere in downtown L.A., an apocalyptic ER filled with gunshot wounds, severed limbs, and people in the process of being murdered by gunshot victims. We figured the Burbank ER would be paper cuts, skinned knees, and a bunny rabbit with the heebie-jeebies.

Next time, we're going downtown. Or Baghdad. Or anywhere.

The Burbank ER is a hallucinogenic combination of real, screaming trauma, and people who – I swear to God – seem to be in there just to hang out and watch television.

I went inside to get a wheelchair, since my wife absolutely, in no way, could walk. Her ankle was sending flaming pillars of pain up her leg. I wheeled her inside, and an admitting nurse gave her a form to fill out, told her there'd be a wait, and told us not to block the walk-up lane with the chair – all without looking at us.

I juked the wheelchair over to a low, dividing wall between the admitting desk and a TV area. While my wife filled out her form, I took in the people around us.

A bald man writhed on the floor, occasionally heaving himself to his shaky feet to lustfully vomit into a trashcan. Turns out he had a kidney stone. My only experience with kidney stones was Al Swearengen's ordeal during the second season of DEADWOOD. Ol' Al squeezed his stones out with the manly elan of a true villain. Then he drank some scotch, slapped a whore, and won an Emmy.

The Kidney Stone Man in the Burbank ER was the anti-Al. He bounced womanly howls off the animal wallpaper of the waiting room. His family – a mother and wife – managed to look concerned and annoyed at the same time.

With Kidney Stone Man setting the high bar for desperation and need, everyone else in the waiting room had to dial down their drama. They may have been hurt, but not rolling-around-on-the-floor-and-puking hurt.

The stench hit my wife, wincing in her wheelchair. "Oh man, that really smells foul."

It did. Poor sweetie. She was trapped in that vinyl and metal chair, unable to escape the fumes. Her twisted, useless ankle had rendered her immobile – a captive witness to the horrors around us. It broke my heart.

The animal wallpaper distracted me for a moment. Lions, and zebras, and hippos and cheetahs, all snuggled together and smiling on the African veldt. I don't even think all of those animals live in Africa. And I know they don't snuggle together in a big pile. Maybe this was a way for the Burbank ER to psychologically soothe the people in its waiting room. If all these animals – predator and prey – can get along, can't you keep your yap shut about your grease burn or head trauma?

Suddenly, Kidney Stone Man was drowned out by two young women, who were palm-banging the plastic of the admitting nurse's window. Was someone in even more distress than K.S. Man? Was this a compound fracture, or someone going into convulsions? It sounded serious – the women were yelling in Valley-speak – far louder than the man trying to pass the high school ring through his urethra. The nurse finally slid the plastic window open.

"Can we change the TV channel to DANCING WITH THE STARS? It started 5 minutes ago! Pleeeeeeease…?"

While the nurse looked for the remote control, a child whom the two women cut off began a honking, phlegm-y asthma attack.

"Oh man, that kid looks like he's dying," said my wife. "Does the nurse see this?"

The nurse suddenly popped her head up, and spoke to the two young women. "Someone stole the remote yesterday! You have to change the channel manually!"

The two women groaned, threw their hands in the air, and sat back down. The thought of walking the four feet to the television, and actually switching the channel, never occurred to them.

Kidney Stone Man managed to shriek, cry and vomit at the same time. Asthma Kid and his snotty, mini-bellows lungs added a pleasing bass tone.

I couldn't watch the nurse not react to Asthma Kid anymore, so I took in more of the waiting room denizens.

A morbidly obese man, overflowing a straining plastic chair beside me, clenched his wide face with a muffin-sized hand, quietly weeping. A young couple ate Subway sandwiches, and chatted pleasantly. They actually looked like they had come to the ER to eat sandwiches, talk, and watch TV. Neither of them has anything even remotely wrong with them. Asthma Kid struggled for breath while the nurse made his dad fill out a form. Kidney Stone man cursed several different gods.

Just as a chubby Goth girl near the snack machine started singing "She Drives Me Crazy", I heard a sound behind me.

I turned. My wife had heaved herself out of the wheelchair.

"I can't take this, I'm sorry," she said. She twisted her ankle until I heard a light crack!, stood gingerly on it, took a careful step, and then hobbled out to the car.

It was the horrible-ness of the room. The room had cured her. And I couldn't help feeling like, after we left, the admitting nurse yelled, "Take five, everyone!". And then Kidney Stone Man, Asthma Kid, Goth Girl, Weepin' Chubs and the TV Ladies broke character, and had coffee, and did stretches, and waited for the next case to work their ghastly magic on.

I got invited to the MTV Style Lounge earlier this week. It's the first and last "gifting suite" I'll ever go to.

You know what a "gifting suite" is, right? Remember, on THE SOPRANOS earlier this season – when Chris-tu-pha went there with Ben Kingsley, and then later punched Lauren Bacall? Yeah, that one. It's a room or, in my case, an entire fucking house full of free shit they give away to celebrities.

I'd read about gifting suites before. US WEEKLY seems to have a permanent branch of their reporting staff covering them. Hey, celebrities worked hard to become insanely wealthy and famous, right? Don't they deserve some retroactive free shit, to make up for all the years they had to survive on a standard living wage?

Also, the term "gifting suite" has this sinister, Orwellian quality. Like something Warren Ellis would come up with as a creepy, throwaway bit of dialogue. Come to think of it, I'll probably co-opt the term for something else I write. Maybe a "gifting suite" is a torture room, or a lab where they infect subjects with biological agents, shit like that. Hands off, Warren.

It still wouldn't be half as horrifying as the real gifting suite I visited.

First off, there weren't a lot of actual "celebrities" there. The fact that I was invited should let you know the quality level of those attending. Well, maybe there were some big, actual, photo-worthy celebrities attending later, but not when I got there. I got there at noon on a Friday.

That's when the "celebrities" consisted of asterisks like me, and people who "dress for the shoot".

"Dressing for the shoot" is something I heard Greg Behrendt say once, and good Christ, if it doesn't apply to an entire substrata of the Los Angeles population. These are people who, even though they don't have a shred of talent or even a joyful curiosity about film, music or theater, have a RAVENOUS appetite for the rewards those three pursuits bring. So they've decided -- fuck it, I'm going to fast-forward to the rewards stage. Part of the "rewards", in their estimation -- and this is beyond the goodie bags, chef's tables in restaurants, and access to exclusive nightspots -- is getting to treat everyone like shit.

Assholes. Assholes in bespoke clothing, distressed jeans and artfully faded concert T-shirts barking and sighing at everyone and everything around them. You pulled up to a valet station on Benedict Canyon, where a driver took your car away, and you boarded a huge SUV, which then took you a little further up a hill to where the "gifting suite residence" was. Well, this was paradise for the Shot-Dressed Assholes. They got to complain about having to leave their expensive cars, they got to bitch to the reception girls about having to stand in the sun, they got to roll their eyes at the SUV which, apparently, was "ghetto" and "last year". Wow.

Maybe these men and women realize how short a window they have where, coiffed and dressed, they've still got tight, young enough faces to fool people for the three seconds it takes for them to squeeze beyond the velvet rope. Hot, tan, blonde girls who are so fucking ugly. Buff, gelled, open-collared boys who can't read, and flash the SuFi.

This is not a screed against Los Angeles. Los Angeles is five of the best cities in the country, and three or four of the worst.

Blaine Capatch said that Los Angeles is eight or nine different cities, and you have to pick the right ones to live in. I was spending the afternoon in the part of Los Angeles which is Sunset Boulevard, west of Crescent Heights. It's Robertson Boulevard between Beverly and Olympic. Both of these areas could be napalmed, and the IQ and talent level of the city would double.

I hadn't even reached the house yet, and my self-loathing was bubbling and curdling my stomach as I hopped onto the SUV. "You wanna go to the gifting suite? MTV invited you." Well, I responded with my lizard brain. Free stuff! Blaaaaaaarghhhh! Give me free stuff! And I went without thinking.

Now I felt like shit. But it was too late. The SUV pulled up to the gifting suite residence, and three or four Shot-Dressed Assholes pushed their way past me from the back seat, scanning the landscape like velociraptors for someone who wasn't moving fast enough for their taste.

I got my ID from the receptionist, and found out that the gifting suite was put on by some organization trying to raise awareness for AIDS. I clung to this fact like a piece of goodness in a sea of shallowness and evil.

I was immediately led into a high-ceilinged chamber where an Adidas rep was giving away custom shoes. A flat screen TV was set up, connected to the webpage where you can design your own shoes. He shoved a pair of size 11 basketball shoes into a canvas bag and told me to, "Check out the website when you get a chance. It rocks."

The second those shoes went into the bag my brain started screaming, "OUT! I want OUT!". It comes down to this: I love money. I love success even more. But I worked very hard to get money so I can pay for things myself. That's what turns me on and makes me happy. Having shit handed to me by surly hipsters, or people whose mouths smile but eyes don't, is bad for the soul.

But no, I still had to do penance for my greed. Led around by a tightly-smiling escort, I had to visit ghastly jewelry dealers, shitty tequila salesmen, loads and loads of iPod accessories, stationary and facial cream concerns, and two sad-looking hotties from a restaurant called Pink Taco. "Pink Taco" -- get it? It's a rude slang term for "pussy"! But it's Mexican food!

"We're opening a new place in Century City. It's going to be off the hook. It'll be super-crowded and, like, the place to be," intoned one of the girls, adjusting her baby-doll halter.

Super-crowded. That's the habitat. That's where these people thrive. I was surrounded by women waiting for someone to cut in front of them. Their upper lip is permanently curled, and their jaw is always half-relaxed, ready to fully snap open and let fly with a string of righteous bitching at some perceived slight. Their lives are spent crowded in front of The Griddle on Sunset for breakfast, fighting for a treadmill at Crunch, jostling for lunch at Chin Chin, and long, pointless nights outside of Hyde or The Spider Club. I'd just discovered a Burbank bar called Bar 21. Cool, dark interior, plush booths, and never crowded. One of my favorite places to eat is BLD, which can get crowded, but there's plenty of windows of opportunity to eat and read and not be slapped against the rest of humanity like pigs.

Hell on Earth for the Shot-Dressed Assholes. If there isn't the potential for a screaming match over a shoulder-nudge, it wasn't worth it.

While I was waiting for the SUV to take me back to my car, I got waylaid by one of the producers of MTV's PIMP MY RIDE. You know what a pimp is, right? He's a dude who tricks, frightens, or flat-out bullies a woman to fuck other men for money, which she then gives to him. Just wanted to clear that up. 'Cuz there's a show called PIMP MY RIDE. Maybe they can do another show called RAPE MY CRIB.

Anyway, the producer was showing me some of the cool cars from the show, which they had in the house's massive garage. And by the way, this was not a house that people lived in, raised families, hosted friends, built memories. This was a sprawling, unwelcoming residence that was rented out for brainless rap videos, or shitty TV shows where they needed a remorseful but sexy drug dealer's pad, or equally worthless stuff. You get to see a lot of Shot-Dressed Assholes as background extras in these.

So he was showing me a "party van" they'd outfitted, with an extendable "Wheels of Steel" and mini-bar. It was kind of nice. Wow, someone had actually, you know, CREATED something. Had used skill and talent to craft something kind of new. My heart warmed for a moment.

"Yeah, we had this thing at a Ja Rule record release party, and we hired a fuckin' midget to serve drinks out of the side. And this one bitch..."

But I couldn't hear him anymore. My heart had snapped shut. Even the few good things in this world were always turned towards ugliness.

I rode the SUV back down and waited for my car. At one point, a blonde-haired nobody with perky tits and bad skin got in my face and said, "Is there a long fucking wait at the house? Or do I get to go right in?"

"You're not missing anything," I said, and she managed to sigh and sneer at the same time. The sneer made her zits flare under her spray-on tan.

I drove to the House of Secrets, got comics, and then ate a quiet, yummy turkey sandwich at the half-empty Tallyrand.

Anybody want a pair of size 11 Adidas?

Last Christmas I was home, in Virginia, visiting the family and generally having a great time.

So, late in the day on Christmas, we're dropping Grandman Runfola off at her condo. She's very old, but sweet, and extremely OCD. Seeing her is like getting a gentle warning of where I'm heading in my golden years if I don't work on myself.

I can't wait to organize and re-use my lunch napkins!

So, as she's getting out of the car -- the passenger seat -- her OCD kicks in, and she locks and un-locks the door like twenty times. And the process of doing this -- unbeknowest to us -- locks ALL the car doors. My dad and I get out to help her. My brother if already out of the car, stretching his legs. And we close the now-locked car doors, with the keys inside.

Fuck! It's freezing cold out, and we're locked out of the car. It's the shittiest Christmas ever!

Or was it?

Last year, I was feeling pretty sick of myself. I came to a realization that I had put way too much focus and energy into my own douche-y career, without contributing any money, or more importantly, TIME to some of the issues and ideas I bitch about so much as a comedian. The dearth of literacy, the shitty way the administration treats our Iraq vets, and the environment. I was all talk and no action. I hadn't done anything, in my estimation, that made this planet or the people on it happier at the end of the day.

So as I stood there, in the cold, getting angrier and angrier, something wonderful happened.

Some of the seniors who lived in the condo -- and some senior citizens in the cars behind us, honking because our car was blocking the driveway -- were beginning to gather around us. They were annoyed and angry about our car -- but not really. Because even though their faces were sour and cross, their eyes were twinkling like a morbidly obese eight-year old on Christmas morning, when Santa leaves a faster wireless internet hub under the tree.

And I realized, then and there, that I had given these seniors what they most love and cherish in life -- the chance to bitch and whine about how awful the world is now.

One old woman told me she couldn't believe that they'd make "auto-motives" that would lock you out, but that's not such a surprise in a world that, whenever you look at television, all there is is "science fiction and cuss-words".

An old man, a passenger in a car behind us, heaved himself out, and said that his son (who was driving him, and didn't get out, and actually looked relieved that he got a break from his dad for a moment) also bought such a stupid car as ours, and that it was way colder in 1942, when he saw Wheeler and Woolsey just walking down the street, and of course I didn't know who they were because you kids think comedy is all "Nanu-nanu and Flip Wilson".

Still another woman appeared to explain that she'd read that blacks in Anacostia had radio boxes that they could use to lock your doors when you weren't in the car, and when you tried to get in they hit you with a stick and put you in the trunk and then had a party.

So many other happy, wizened faces appeared to me on that cold afternoon, all angry and frustrated and delighted to be angry and frustrated. There's no greater holiday gift to give the elderly than something going wrong that they can fuss about, and then tie into how the television is all cuss-words.

Merry Fucking Christmas.

Burbank isn't just a town full of People Not in a Hurry. It's a town full of People Happy With Nowhere to Go. For example:

I went to the Rite Aid today to get some last minute Christmas stuff. Well, wrapping paper. And, hopefully, something I could give as a present. Who doesn't like eight tubes of Crest for Christmas?

So I'm in line, with my one item, and it's the only register open. And there's three people in front of me.

Directly in front of me's a man buying two big plastic quart bottles of Captain Jack. He also had a copy of Mitch Alborn's FOR ONE MORE DAY, a bag of cotton swabs, and a tape measure.

In front of HIM are two Hispanic women buying ten bags of circus peanuts, a box of tortilla shells, and some lightbulbs. They've both taken magazines off the rack, and one of them, without really thinking about what she's doing, takes a Milky Way Dark bar off the rack and begins to eat it, absently.

We're all standing there with plenty of time because there's a skeezy-looking Russian man and his fresh-from-the-crypt mother trying to buy SIXTEEN one liter bottles of orange soda. They've got a coupon they've clipped, which let's you have a free liter if you buy a liter. Wait, let me go back: they've clipped eight of these coupons and, like the slick sharpers of yesteryear, are working the old "Sixteen Liters of Orange Soda for Eight Liters" short con.

Of course, the disinterested cashier is half-heartedly explaining why they can't do this. The Russian duo, who clearly didn't even want or need sixteen liters of orange soda, are half-heartedly listening to him. It was a symphony of muttering (the cashier) and sort-of waving the coupons in the air (skeezy Russian dude).

I'm going to wrap whatever the present turns out to be in the Sunday funnies.