I've been reading the surrogate daughters' blogs. Number One is in her junior year of college, Number Two is in her senior year of high school, Number Three is in high school too, and I've lost track of the year.

Number Three is all about boys and friends and I have to bang my head against a wall when I read it. It's just so jejeune and sophomoric and mostly so badly spelled that it takes all of my loyalty to her mother to read it. Cause, you know... Mom can't read it, and someone has to keep track.

It's Number One who makes my heart hurt so much. I am reminded of the story of Gertrude Stein telling F. Scott Fitzgerald "Oh, we are ALL a lost generation."
My N1SD is wallowing around in those deep and heady days of being away at school, drinking and getting stoned. She thinks that her generation invented ennui and depression and philosophical angst. "Oh," she laments "The world is so lousy, the job market is so lousy, what's the point of it all?"

Imagine, if you will, this being said by a facially-pierced young woman with fuschia streaks in her hair and an English major, whilst posturing with the back of her wrist against her forehead, and you will know why her mother and I want to slap her senseless... except that she's pretty senseless right now anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I love this girl. She is smart, and talented, and utterly, utterly lame at this moment in her life. She is cynical and jaded, only without the experience to back it up. She is scornful of her peers, but exhibits the same lax habits and mental shortcuts she disdains.

I love her to death, and I want very much to slap the bullshit out of her. She is, and it pains me to my core to say this, turning into a female, less libidinous version of her wasterel father... a companion of my own salad days, when I was young and green.

Except, stoned as I was, drunk as I was, I maintained my GPA. I graduated cum laude and was in an honors fraternity. I rarely, if ever, skipped class and I never, ever went to class high. I worked enough to pay for my own bad habits, and never had to call my parents for more money. I lived in the dorms, despite that I rather would not have. I ate in the cafeteria, and managed just fine on tuna melts and gallons of coffee.

I was not, nor do I pretend to have been, perfect, or even good, but I was always punctual about turning in work and getting to class, and meeting my deadlines. I learned a lot in school, and being responsible for my own vices was one of the most important lessons. I hope N1SD learns that one thing before she graduates.

I received a call today from one of the guys I used to work with. They couldn't wait to tell me the news. The PR director from hell has resigned to take a new position with AvMed. To which I can only say, pull your money out of AvMed now, before she wreaks havoc on their image.
I hope it was as voluntary a separation as mine was. I'd like to think that someone finally told her that things DO have to be done right, and not just done. That it was about the quality of her work, that it was about her, personally.

I'd like to think that, but I doubt it happened that way. No, it happened like everything else has happened at the hospital: ass backwards and inadverdently.

This woman, this incapable, ignorant bitch managed to ruin lives and destroy institutions that I worked hard to build (the publications office, the web) and now she is simply walking away, with no compunction and utterly no comprehension of the harm she did to the hospital with her incompetence.

Ah, fuck 'em anyway. I have a new puppy, and a new batch of lox brining away in the back of the fridge. On Friday, this miserable year will come to an end, and I can pin my dreams on 2005.

To the marketing geniuses at Burger King:

How DARE you give out free hand cleaner with every order (even just coffee) that disolves nail polish? Are you people mad? Do you know how much a manicure costs?
And here in Miami, home of the shallow and the vain, do you know how much it means to keep your manicure maintained?

So, yesterday, while the RLA and I were running around doing errands, I noticed that I had puppy schmutz under my nails. Knowing that I had those free BK hand wipes in the car, I opened one up and used it.

What a surprise to discover that my two-day-old manicure had the top coat dissolved right off, leaving me with pitted, matte nails on a few, but not all fingers.

I was livid.

But not so livid that I was unable to make the following observations about the drivers and driving rules in Miami.

The far left lane is now the designated "slow" lane. Where in my youth, I was taught it was the fast lane or the passing lane, it now seems to be where you drive if you are lost, unsure, under the influence of drugs, or simply can't bear to go above 25MPH.

The word "merge" in the merge lane means that the people in the lane you are trying to merge into are trying to make you merge into the guard rail.

Holiday spirit has come to mean a viciousness and meaness of spirit only dreamed of by Mr. Scrooge. People are ugly, irritated and irrational to degrees heretofor unseen in city known for its crabiness and bad driving.

But I have a puppy, and that makes everything better.

As I was trying to wedge my little VW into half a parking space with the word COMPACT painted in it, I'm guessing that here in Miami it means anything smaller than the full-sized Hummer.
On my left, filling every inch of width between the yellow lines, was a full-sized Land Rover. It was suitably ostentatious, with a name plate on the back that indicated this was no run of the mill, ordinary Land Rover, but an exclusive, distinguished, limited edition Westminster, or Buckminster or some other la-di-da-minster varient.

I was really impressed, and did my best to impress the edge of my driver's side door into their passenger door.

On the other side, taking up two spaces, straddling that little yellow bumper with the words "Compact Only" was some flare-sided pick-em-up truck.

Once I squeezed out, and got into the book store, I had a short dialogue with the clerk, explaining why I didn't think that buying a discount card was any deal. He kept telling me that it would pay for itself in no time. I kept telling him that it was the principle of paying to get a discount that annoyed me, and I didn't care how fast it paid for itself, I wanted them to give me an incentive, not make me pay for it. He didn't get it, he just kept shaking his head and telling me it pays for itself.

No. It doesn't. I pay for it. Give it to me free, and then it'll be worth it.

The woman behind me was sighing in exasperation with my bull-headedness, so I slouched off, and tried to chip the paint on the Range Rover again as I crawled into my tiny, little, used, economical car.

I clearly don't belong here.

In the never ending "will they? won't they?" of my job life, the newest news -- only two days old -- is that there WILL be layoffs in my department. Because the first round of layoffs, that aren't really layoffs, didn't save the hospital enough money.
Yeah. No shit, assholes. How could it? What happened is that a manager is "laid off". Meaning that they don't have their job anymore, but based on how long they've been with the institution, and what they were doing, or what they did 15 years ago, they can go down the food chain and tell some other poor schmuck that that schmuck's job is now the manager's job, and the person who really loses their paycheck is the poor schmuck, and not the manager.

Sometimes this results in the manager taking a cut in pay. Other times it doesn't. In my own department, we had managers reclassified, and theoretically demoted, but in reality, they just had their job titles changed, and the money and the power remained the same.

So how does that, how can that, save money.

Over in the PR office, Loogie, my web editor and the only person supplying content for my site, had her position eliminated. Now we are on hold for new content. Forever, no doubt.

Six years ago, when my position of graphic designer was eliminated from that office, the director told me that she had every intention of cutting Loogie, too. She told me she didn't know how or when, but that Loogie was next on the list to go.

In what is, I am certain, merely a coincidence, Loogie and I were the only two Jews. With the cuts in staff, the PR department is now white and Hispanic. Gone is the last Jew, and the last two women of color.

I'm sure it's only a coinky-dink, aren't you?

Yesterday we had another department meeting. Our VP showed us a video of some random Civil War epic. I think that it featured Jeff Daniels, hard to tell under all that bad facial hair. He was giving an inspirational talk to a group of potential Union deserters, just prior to the Battle of Gettysburg. It was supposed to motivate us to fight for the life of the hospital while at the same time throwing our jobs away to save it. He told us we had to look at the big picture, that the hospital was what we were fighting for, not our own livelihoods. Because the hospital is a representative of the greater good. We serve the uninsured and the poor. Well, I kept my mouth shut (for once and it was a fucking miracle) and didn't point out that without our jobs, we would be the poor and uninsured.

We were told to suck it up and love our jobs, and put on happy faces, because people can't think that this is a bad place to work. People shouldn't see our dirty laundry airing and choose not to come here to be healed. Dude, nobody chooses to come here, whether the worker bees are happy, shiny, smiling drones or not.

And nobody wants to wear the happy mask anymore. We don't believe in our leaders. We don't believe in our managers. We don't believe in our government, who gives us more responsibility for the county's healthcare, but cuts the dollars we're supposed to do it with.

It is, in microcosm, what happened on Tuesday. We don't care about the economy, we don't care about healthcare and education, we don't care about the future.

We care about keeping our small piece of the status quo, and fuck everyone else.

Rome is burning.

I spent yesterday with my head in my hands, crying. Crying like I have never cried over an election, not even when I was a hormonal teenager and thought that Richard Nixon was the Anti-Christ.

Of course, in later years, I married the real Anti-Christ, and he didn't look anything like Nixon. And, in retrospect, compared to Darth Cheney and Karl Rove, Nixon was a rank amateur when it came to evil and deceit. But I digress.
Yesterday, I cried. And then I trolled the web for inspiring words. I found them, and I'm going to share some of them with you. Most of these folks are in my blog links, and once you read these passages, you'll know why.

From Bryan Adams' Blog

"Mr. President:

Over the last 24 hours, I've been hearing an endless news loop about how I, a liberal, need to make more of an effort to understand "the heartland." Well, since two of the three branches of government and 51% of Americans are Republican, I think that, actually, you need to make an effort to understand us. The heartland needs to try to understand the brainland.

Unlike you guys, I'm not going to make any effort to wrap our core tenets in false piety or tired cliche. I will tell you who we are, plain and simple. My understanding is that you like oversimplified, one-page memos, so let me give it a try."

Keep reading Bryan's letter.

From Margaret Cho's Blog:

"The Bush administration will be sorry they won this battle, for they now look forward to losing the war. Ultimately, a government cannot defeat its people, no matter how much power they assume or how corrupt they are. Even though today feels like a defeat, there is no loss. There is only opportunity. Now we have the chance to challenge everything, fight everything. The possibilities are tremendous. All the polls, all the posturing, all the opinions that we endured during months leading up to the election provide us with a valuable education on how we think and act as a country."

Read her whole essay.

From the Rude Pundit:

"We are a nation of savages. That is what we decided last night. We belong to the "most advanced" society in the history of the world, and we decided that we would rather be barbarians, hunched over fire pits, ripping meat off the bones of our enemies, raping our women, howling out at the gods for peace in the afterlife."

Read what he has to say about "American Values"

With worry. Obsessively clicking on the elector vote predictor. Flipping back and forth from yesterday's report to today's. I'm all over Salon's War Room, constantly refreshing the page to see the newest bulletins.
So tonight I'll go light up the endorphins with Nic Cage and settle in with a bottle and the RLA to watch the returns.

This is killing me.

I had to pick up my college transcripts the other day, and in reviewing them, I discovered something I'd long forgotten: in my first semester, when I was living la vida loca and dropping classes and skipping classes and generally flunking out, I still managed to pull an A in deductive logic.

This despite the fact that I wasn't straight or sober for much of that first semester. University of Miami, 1972. Yeah, right. Like anyone there at that time was. But I digress.
I bring this up because all these years later, faulty logic still rings like a gong in my head whenever I hear it. Here's a sample:

A. The PR department says that our historic patient base doesn't use computers.

B. The PR department says that we shouldn't advertise our private doctors' office on the web because if they saw it, our historic (charity, non-paying) patient base would try to access care there.

If our "typical" patients don't have or use computers, then what difference does it make if we advertise a private patient office on the web? If we are attempting to attract more private pay patients to our health system (and in theory, these people do use/own computers) then why wouldn't we advertise our specialty office on the web?

See? Faulty logic. It just drives me crazy. And at this point, it isn't so much of a drive as a short putt.

Yeah, so you know how I feel about politics. Time to rant about something else for a while, I think.

Today I'd like to talk about this article. An artist was commissioned to create a mural for a library in California. The concept was enlightenment. The artist is a former school teacher here in Florida. The finished mural contains 11 misspelled names, including Shakespeare, Van Gogh and Einstein.

The artist is furious with the public for focusing on the mistakes, and not the big picture, which, she says, is that if you follow the words into the library, you can learn something.

Huh? A mural advertising enlightenment and education has eleven mistakes (a mural, I need to remind you, that was produced by a former school teacher) and the public (who paid for that artwork) is supposed to just say: OK. Kewl.?

I just want to bitch slap that woman into next week. And I can't even tell you what makes me crazier: that she can't spell, that she didn't even think to look up the names if she wasn't sure of the spelling, that she thinks her mistakes are negligable, that she is so arrogant in her ignorance, or that her whole attitude buys into the popular myth that artists are inferior intellectually.

Mistakes don't matter? I shouldn't have to correct them, because someone else should have seen them? (Well, she has a point there, someone should have seen them, but that doesn't relieve her of her own responsibility.) The point isn't about spelling, but about art?

Am I the last person in America with a sense of pride in my work?

Remember this entry? From back in June, when I told you the story about my Senior VP telling us that the hospital was losing a trillion dollars a day, but that there weren't going to be lay offs?

And I said it was like the old joke about the cat on the roof? And our jobs were on the roof?
Yeah. And then there was three months ago, when they said there would be layoffs, but not in our department. Then last month, there was the announcement that there would be layoffs in our department, but only managers.

Today, the Veep announced that we were beginning to research outsourcing the entire department in an effort to save all our jobs.

Yes, you read that right. They'll outsource the entire department to some firm that will then hire us to do our jobs, so we won't lose them at all!

Repeat after me: These are not the droids you seek.

Or, if you prefer that I keep the same metaphor I started with (and you know how much I love consistency) The cat has now fallen off the roof, and broken many bones. The cat has gone to the vet. The vet has done everything it her power to fix the cat, but...

The RLA and I watched the "debate" last night between Darth Cheney and Dennis Quaid look alike John Edwards. Isn't that boy just the cutest little thing, bless his heart?

The RLA pointed out that Cheney's suit was so dark that it absorbed the light and made it difficult for the television cameras to focus on him. I said that the Prince of Darkness is called that for a reason. The RLA also noted that once Edwards found his stride and really started to spank the puppet master, that Cheney seemed to fade. Oh, sure, he was still spouting vitriol and venom like Mt. St. Helens on a good (or is that bad) day, but he didn't really seem to have his heart in it.* It just seemed like the starch was starting to go limp.

*And does he really have a heart?

The thing that struck me the most was how much that liver-spotted old pile of dung looks like another old liver-spotted selfish wretch:


Yeah? What do you think?

I came in this morning, and my boss walked into my office and closed the door. Never a good sign. Especially bad sign when the Herald ran a front page story yesterday about the layoffs.

Our VP saw "the list" and was "very surprised" by the names on it. Remember this is the VP who swore on his mother's honor that not one person would be cut from our department. The names themselves have not been revealed, merely that they were a surprise.

My boss then extended this advice, which came from the upper middle manager above him, but below the VP.

"We in this group should mind our Ps and Qs and do whatever we are asked by whomever asks. This is not the time to make waves, or enemies. The PR department is in full charge of the web. Do what they say and no back talk. Of course, this means that you can still point out to them mistakes in spelling or whatever. But..."

I've been watching Shogun for the past few nights. And all I can think of is the various daimyos telling Blackthorne that he'd better behave or else ... "Do you understand?"

Hai. I understand. I'm fucked in the ear with no oil. Or as the PR department is so fond of saying "It doesn't have to be done right, it only has to be done."

My fan in Ottawa has sent another death threat. I filed a report with the local police, who were less than helpful. They suggested that if I didn't want to receive death threats, that I shouldn't write bad things about people.

I let that slide, because the first ammendment is on shaky ground these days, anyway. Why argue your right to free speech with the police? Never, ever, going to win that one. So, grudgingly, it seems, they wrote a report and gave me a case number.

I asked if they would be contacting the Mounties and they said, in a word, no. If I felt so strongly about it, I could.

Well, for some odd reason, I do feel strongly about it. Call me crazy, but dying over a bad film review just doesn't seem worth it to me.

Here's today's question: Should I remove my rant about David Lynch and hope that satisfies my threatener?

As I start this entry, I don't have a title for it. Eat the corn from my shit was my first thought, but that's the punchline, and I need to save it for later.

Another idea was "Threats Will Never Silence Me", because that's what this is all about. Over in the other part of my website, I have a short stack of rants. They are, or are not, in utter seriousness. I have, on occasion, been known to argue for the sake of argument and not because I feel strongly (or even weakly) about the topic at hand.

One of my rants is about how I despise Paul McCartney. It generates a fair ammount of hate mail. Another rant is about the nano-second people: you know, those folks who NEED to push ahead of you in any line, who honk their car horns the microt the light changes from red to green, and who merge ahead of you, rather than behind you when the highway narrows. Still another is based upon my disdain for the talent and reputation of the film maker David Lynch.

It is this last which has caused some asshole loser in Ottowa to come unhitched. For the last year or so he has been sending me death threats. I've reported him to my local authorities, his local authorities, and to every web mail service he uses (as you may imagine, that changes with some frequency). I have blocked him from my e-mail, but when I changed blog servers, my e-mail server changed as well, and sure enough, not a full week in, there is another threat from this one-handed typist. (Oh, come on, you know what I'm getting at there.)

I know, believe me, I KNOW that I'm not supposed to engage in dialogue with someone so unbalanced, but tonight... well, tonight, I'd had a drink, and there he was and I just replied without thought.

I quoted the late, great Leapin' Larry Greene. The complete text of my e-mail is below.

"You loser, you can, to quote my old pal Leapin' Larry, eat the corn from my shit."

I know that this is going to end badly. I don't think that he'll actually show up here and do as he threatens: put a bullet behind my ear, but the way this year is going? Who fucking knows.

Anyway, if any of you would like to entertain yourselves by sending hate mail to someone who must not get any other kind, feel free to address it to:

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

And as far as I can tell, Mark Fleischhaker is his real name. He is a singer, it would seem, for some random punk rock band in Canada that doesn't have a web reference more recent than 2002. (XL Birdsuit, if you really care. I know that I don't.)

And that, except for a rather evil session with Nic Cage, was my night.

Many years ago, part of my workplace's corporate mantra was something about a single standard of care, regardless of one's ability to pay. It was a shining example of truth in advertising, because we did have a single standard: we treated everyone like shit.

We still do, but now we have taken it to higher (or lower, I'm not sure how that works) standards. We treat each other even worse.

Today I received a request for assistance from some poor schmuck in a fly-over state, who was looking for a medical expert to back up a cock-a-mamie theory of his in a (probably) frivolous lawsuit.

I sent the request over to our official designated responder to all web-delivered questions.

After a few hours, I got a response from her. In its entirety, the response said "I'm not going to answer this jerk." (Yes, boys and girls, the official designated responder is none other than our own dear Loogie, of the PR office.)

I sent her another e-mail, and asked, "Not even to offer the courteous reply of Sorry, but we cannot help you.?" It shamed her into doing just that, only without the word "sorry" and with a touch of condemnation in her tone, as she stated that we could not help him with his lawsuit.

I'm thinking of designing t-shirts that say "Demand Civility." What do you think? Would they sell?