I don’t mean to date myself here--

--and when I say “date myself” I mean “inadvertently reveal my advanced years,” not “sequester myself in the bathroom with a bunch of Victoria’s Secret catalogs"--

--but I remember when the Baby Jessica story was on the cover of newspapers all across the country.  The toddler was trapped in a well for over two days, and her rescue was broadcast on every single channel.  It was a national sensation.

Well, she’s now nineteen years old and she just got married.  And the thing is, her new husband is 32 years old.

I think it’s creepy that this dude was basically watching television when he was thirteen, saw Jessica get hauled out of the well, and said “Whoa, check her out.  She’s got the stuff.  Some day she will be my bride.”

And it’s not like he can avoid the topic, either. He’ll constantly be bringing up the age difference every time he has to introduce her to someone.  Why?  Because I’m sure she still goes by “Baby Jessica"--so he’ll be all “I’d like you to meet my wife, Baby Jessica,” and people will be all “Yeah, we can see that.  So much for the half plus seven rule, eh partner?”

Togo Boy was leaning on the counter and relaxing.  Togo Boy didn’t notice me until his co-worker nudged him and motioned silently in my direction.  Togo Boy looked about 18, with tats running up his arm and cropped, dyed hair.  Togo Boy made me a Togo’s sandwich and said “Now how about my tip?  Just kidding!”

I looked down at the little empty brown basket on the counter in front of me.  I said, “Is that what these things are for?  But you must not be doing a very good job, because it’s empty.”

“No way, man, I just started here.  But yeah, I have no idea why they use little baskets. People don’t know what to do with them.”

“Let me give you a hint.” I took a dollar out of my wallet placed it in the basket.  “Put one or two of these in the basket at the start of each shift.  That way, people know it’s for tips--and they also think you’ve been kicking ass and therefore deserve tips.”

He looked at me and appeared to be wondering if I was going to take the dollar back now that I had finished my demonstration.  I could see the gerbils running away in his little short-cropped brain: That could be a downpayment on a new tat.  Let’s humor the strange man.

He said, “Huh...really?” His tone of voice was exactly the same as if a science teacher had just asked him, “Togo Boy, do you realize that light has both wave and particle properties?”

I started to use the words capitalism and entrepreneurialism, but realized it would probably make more sense to try to teach a raccoon to lambada.

I smiled and left, thinking that maybe, at some point in the future, Togo Boy would think back on my advice and realize that he’d make a lot more tips my way--as opposed to the deft, sophisticated methodology that Togo People all over the globe know as the “Now how about my tip?  Just kidding!” Stratagem.  I could wait until that day for him to see the light.  I could wait until that day to receive his sincere gratitude.  I could wait until that day for him to realize that I had taught him to think outside the basket.

Of all the supernatural concepts I’ve ever heard, the one I’m most likely to believe in is karma--at least, in regards to there being some kind of balance in the universe.  For example, my brother emailed me and said that my niece had requested my presence this weekend--and when she was told that I wasn’t going to be there that day, she promptly threw a tantrum.  Later in the week, someone at work held a meeting and threw a tantrum when I did show up.  It’s almost enough for me to convert to Buddhism!  Except that in my theology, the Four Noble Truths are a little different than theirs:

1. All worldly life contains suffering, as a result of not drinking beer
2. There is a cause of suffering, which is attachment or desire related to lacking sufficient quantities of beer
3. There is an end of suffering, which is to drink beer
4. There is a path that leads out of suffering, known as drinking another beer

Aside from that, I think it’s cool how we’re molded by invisible metaphysical forces, and stuff.

I hate it when people say things like “I don’t have a racist bone in my body” and then follow up with a remark so inane and uninformed that you want to smack the person into the middle of the INXS revival tour.

I don’t discuss my medical history on this site, but I can tell you from personal experience that the whole concept of “racist bones” is a myth.  Racism doesn’t reside in the skeleton, for the most part.  It’s in a variety of body parts that’s determined by each individual and his or her genetic makeup.  In my case, for example, racism resided in an ingrown toenail.

Some time ago I found walking very painful.  I went to the doctor, and he said “You have an ingrown toenail. I’ll have to cut it out of your skin using these tiny scissors.  On the bright side, though, it looks like most of your racism is also in there so we can get rid of that as well.”

I said, “That’s great!  So I’ll never be racist again?”

He said, “Well, you have to be careful or it might grow back.”

I said, “Right--so I shouldn’t tell racist jokes, and stuff.”

“Well, no, that’s not necessarily true.  For example, Sarah Silverman tells racist jokes but she’s not a racist.  She has a joke that goes like this: ‘Christians blame the Jews for the death of Jesus.  Jews blame the Romans.  I’m the only person who thinks it was the blacks.’”

“That sounds racist to me, Doc.”

“No, it’s ironic. She’s exposing racist attitudes by exaggerating them until they appear ridiculous.  You have to listen to what she says, and then pay attention to the subtext.”

“Wow, that sounds like a lot of work for the listener to do.  Are you sure she isn’t inscribing racism back into public discourse under the guise of postmodern commentary?”

“Not a chance.  She’s a woman and Jewish.”

“Oh.”

“But she is hot, so that is a strike against her.”

I said, “Doc, you’ve completely confused me.  How do I prevent my ingrown toenail from growing back?”

He said, “Your shoes are probably too tight, so try to wear looser shoes.  And walk around barefoot when you can.  And try to recognize the privileges that have been conferred on you as a result of your personal ethnic background, and that not everyone receives such advantages due to various confluences of race and class--an insight which is no way detracts from or contradicts the power of the individual to make his or her own way in society.”

“Great, thanks Doc, I get it.  But listen--I know that the whole ‘racist bone’ bit is silly, but it would be nice to know that I don’t have a racist bone in my body.  Is there any way to tell?”

“We’d have to take an x-ray to give you a definitive answer. But I’m afraid you wouldn’t like the results.  We’ve found that everyone has at least one racist bone in their body.”

“Really?”

“Yes, for some reason, the clavicle is a racist bone across the board--regardless of race, color, or creed.  It gets all high and mighty because it’s so important, and completely fails to recognize its utter reliance on the sternum.”

Ain’t Nothing’ But a G Thang Although I Usually Go By “Greg” To Be Honest

Mama Said Have Some Milk and Cookies

Bitches and H0s (I Have Neither/Nor)

I Know Someone Who Knows a Friend of a Friend Who’s Chillin’ on Death Row

Ready 2 Take a Nap

Roll Me a Blunt (Now What Does That Mean Again?)

The Best Tastee Freezes are In My Hood

Y0 Gangsta (Do You Know How to Get to Napa Valley?  I Appear To Be Lost)

I Like Medium-Sized Butts....I Mean, It’s Great if They Have Some Dimension But Let’s Not Get Carried Away, But On The Other Hand It’s No Good When the Legs Just Shoot Straight Up To the Hips and There’s Nothing Else There, I Hate That

Smack My Fax Up

So this person was all I’m going to go home now, and I’m all Let me walk you out to your car because it’s dark outside, and she’s all Listen I have a green belt, and I’m all What the hell does it matter how well you can accessorize? We’re talking about self defense here.

---

Online error message recently viewed: “Please try again later, or contact us if you feel there is something else going wrong or need assistants.” Why yes, I do need assistants--but preferably not from your secretarial pool, as I prefer that my assistants, in addition to fetching lattes and buffing my nails, are able to, y’know, proofread.

---

Scariest haircut ever: I’m sitting in the chair and “Hella Good” by No Doubt starts piping through the speakers and my barbertrix starts humming and tapping and then even dancing a bit.  Listen, if I wanted a Gwen Stefani-inspired ‘do, I’d commute to Los Angeles every two months and get one from her personal stylist.  Put the scissors down and back away from my chair.

A few weeks back at my company’s holiday party, I won a one-night stay at a hotel near Union Square.  I have no use for a hotel.  I live twenty miles outside the city, and when I do get involved in gang fights or pass out in alleyways, I can always just stumble to my brother’s place and crash there.  So I upgraded to a one-bedroom suite with a view…

...and set up an Ipod with a playlist featuring everything from Spoon to Aqua, guaranteed to make even the most jaded, cynical listener perk up and say “Boy howdy!  Your taste in music sucks.”

Then I added some friends and drinks.

At the party, my friend Sacha (on the right) said that I never post photos to this site.  I think we can all see the truth of her words.

Drinking in a hotel room for hours is fun but entirely juvenile…

...so the next day I resolved to spend some time with the greatest mind in the city.

But all she wanted to do was drink, too.

Pulled like red-hot charcoal briquettes from today’s headlines!  For example, if the headlines were helping start a fire in a barbeque and the briquettes were underneath them, you could actually pull the headlines from the briquettes!

Kathy Griffin and the Temple of Doom: Comedian Kathy Griffin made a joke about child star Dakota Fanning going to rehab, and received retaliatory letters from Spielberg’s lawyers.  A spokesperson for Spielberg said, “Obviously, to Kathy Griffin it was a joke, but why make a joke out of [Fanning]? She’s a terrific young lady who was there with her family, and it was very upsetting.” Eyewitnesses agree, stating that Fanning was so visibly upset that she wouldn’t calm down until she went and did three lines of coke.

Lowe profile: Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe have separated after eight years of marriage.  Divorce proceedings are apparently moving slowly because the lawyers keep asking Hilary “Wait, who’s Chad again?”

Charity begins at home:  Tom Cruise has fired his sister from being his personal publicist, following a year of bad press and widely publicized missteps.  Lee-Ann Cruise now oversees Tom’s charity efforts, and her first move was to send a memo to the starving children under her watch: “If you want food, find a couch and jump on top of it until someone pays attention to you.”

I wish I could split you: Utah theater owner Larry Miller has pulled Brokeback Mountain from his megaplex, citing the film’s immoral content.  No word on whether Miller plans to attend Church this Sunday following his theater’s matinee screening of splatter-gore hit Hostel.

At my friend’s Red Egg celebration, I decided that if I had a daughter I’d name her Posterity.

After all, don’t we do everything we do for the sake of Posterity?  Don’t we want to do right by Posterity?  Don’t we want Posterity to remember us?  This way I could be literal about the whole thing and cut out the metaphorical middleman.

But then I realized that this name wouldn’t pass the Playground test. It’s very important that parents to choose a name based on how easily it can become a playground taunt.  It’s a short hop and skip from “Posterity” to “Posterior,” so forget that idea.

I actually have a theory that the world’s perfect baby name is “Asshead.” Any kid with that name would be invincible on the playground.  I mean, there’s absolutely nowhere for bullies to go with it:

“Let’s go pick on Asshead!”

“Good idea.  Hey, Asshead, you...uh...hmmm...”

“Eh, later for this.  We can’t do anything to him that his folks didn’t already do.”

“You’re right, screw this. Let’s go beat up on Gaylord.”

In the case of my friend, he had an additional layer of complexity to deal with: he had to choose a name for his daughter that wouldn’t be mangled by his Chinese relatives.  He didn’t quite succeed, either; “Haley” is often referred to “Harry” in his extended family.  But his first choice for a name had to be discarded altogether, because--I am not making this up--"Madison" was being pronounced as “Medicine.”

That could potentially lead to a disastrous situation.  Because it’s pretty much understood that if you’re an aging Chinese relative and you give a shout out, you’re happy when someone sticks a beautiful bundle of granddaughterly joy into your arms.  But in an emergency, when you’re actually asking for your heart pills, you had better goddamn well get your heart pills.

At first I was surprised when my friend decided to have a Red Egg ceremony to celebrate the first month of his newborn daughter.  I was surprised because although he’s Chinese, he’s practically more Americanized than I am.  After all, my first impression of him was when I walked into his college dorm room and saw a Debbie Gibson poster on the wall.

Back then, it wasn’t necessarily disturbing to have a Debbie Gibson poster, just lame.  But we couldn’t really fault the guy.  Listening to Debbie Gibson is like taking a tour through the nine circles of hell in poor fitting shoes, but you figure she had a lot of money and could easily buy beer for underaged people like us, so what the hell? Go Debbie.

However, we’ve all doubled our age since then and my friend still listens to the same crap Top 40 music.  Pink.  Avril LaVigne.  It’s as though his body has aged but his taste in music is frozen in time.

At one point we tried to stage a musical intervention:

“Listen, have you heard of the Half Plus Seven rule?”

“Sure.  That’s when you can only date someone who is half your age, plus seven years.”

“Right.  Well, the same thing applies to music.  You can only listen to singers who are half your age plus seven.  Otherwise it’s just creepy.”

“Shut up you guys.”

“We’re serious.  You’re one step away from the F.B.I. placing you in a database of Musical Offenders.  Your neighbors will all be notified.”

Somehow my friend managed to get married.  And it’s not like he was a ladies man.  In college? His strategy for being around women was to pretend the girl didn’t exist when she was standing three feet from him, and then pretend he didn’t exist, and then pretend the entire room didn’t exist, and just hug the wall and grin stupidly until she went away and he could relax again. Somehow, this modern-day Casanova found a tiny girl with a big laugh who saw all the qualities in him that we saw, plus one additional quality that none of us ever saw: studliness.  And then she one-upped all of us by giving him a daughter.  That totally trumped the Top Gun special edition DVD we gave him for his last birthday.

And their marriage seems to be pretty good, although at one point I witnessed a conflict over expectations that had been set in the courtship process and were subsequently never met.  My friend loves movies as much as I do:

“When we were dating, we used to go to the movies. Now you never want to go to the movies.”

“Movies take so much time.”

“But we used to go to the movies.”

“That’s when I was younger and I had nothing better to do.  I can’t afford to waste two hours in a dark room anymore.”

“Well, what do you want to be doing instead?”

“Shopping.”

So anyway, I’ll be glad to go and celebrate the Red Egg ceremony--whatever it is--to see how my friend managed to splice off a piece of his DNA with his little pretty wife and create something that will eventually walk and talk without even using batteries.  And I said that I was surprised that, after all I knew about my friend, he had decided to go with such a Chinese-specific tradition.  That is, until he sent an email yesterday clarifying the ceremony.  And in doing so, he made me relax because it was abundantly clear that he was still the same person I’ve known all these years:

“Dear Friends: I have received a few questions about Red Egg ceremony.  So I Googled it, and here is a little about the tradition...”

I have to go to Curacao next month for a work thing.  I know, tough life.

In surfing the official web page, I noticed that they make a point of advertising themselves to gay tourists--

--and I love how this section of the site is called “Alternative Curacao,” as though it’s a place where you can not only be openly gay but also wear black and listen to Interpol--

--and actually, another link that points to this section is called “Widespread Tolerance,” which is funny because it sounds like a weather report: “Today will be sunny and balmy in Curacao, with widespread tolerance, so haters might just want to stay indoors and knit"--

--anyway, I wondered why all those gay cowboys go to out-of-the-way mountains to conduct their secretive affairs when they could go to Curacao?  If you’re going to deny your identity and fill yourself full of guilt and regret, you might as well do it where it’s really nice outside.  Imagine the arthouse, Oscar-ready dialogue that might result:

“I ain’t queer, you know.”

“Me neither.”

“No, I mean I really ain’t queer.  I just come here for the fruity tropical drinks.”

“Oh yeah?  Then why don’t you bring your wife out here whenever you come see me?”

“.......”

“......”

“....I wish I could quit you.  And then maybe go windsurfing.”

I haven’t actually seen Brokeback Mountain, but I love Annie Proulx’s short story.  The final line is just beautiful: “There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.” Which is a tragic, heart-rending line that underscores that point that I’m making here.  If you have to stand anything, you might as well do so on the beach.