Come On Down!
First of all, I'd like to extend a sincere and hearty "fuck you" to the people whose job it is to predict the weather for the little sidebar info blobs on my my.yahoo.com start page. The predicted high temperature for Riverside yesterday was 108°. Just so you know, sitting there at 9 am looking at something telling you that it's going to be 108° can really mess with your psyche. It's like an official pronouncement telling me "We're sorry, but your good mood has been canceled for the day. Please begin sweating immediately." Which I did.

And then when it tops out at a very comfortable, not at all death-inducing 99°, you'd very much like to kill somebody. As I said, you'd like to, but you can't risk the heat stroke again, not since that last time you tried to stand up and walk across the room.

I hate summer.

At least it's a dry heat. But then there's no room for any moisture in the air as all the extra space has been taken up by floating particulates in the form of sweet, sweet smog.

I hate summer.

This is why it costs $2 million for a 450 square foot bungalow in Newport Beach, where it never rises above 72 degrees and the wind carries all your car exhaust away to be packed snugly into the inland valleys, but you know, who the fuck cares about those people anyway. If they were smart, they'd all just move to Newport too.

I hate summer.

No, out here in Riverside County, life is different. While they're living the good life out of a Jimmy Buffett song in South Orange County, I have to read in the paper today that about 2 miles from my house, Riverside County Animal Control people had to break into a house and remove 96 cats. That's 96 cats that they know of. [I would link to the story in the local paper's website, but I think it requires registration, so fuck them]. Neighbors had been complaining about the smell for two years before the county did something about it.

I can't even fathom how someone ends up with 96 cats; like what the series of events could be that would end with a person owning and (not) caring for 96 cats. I'm going to hazard a guess, though: they failed to spay and/or neuter their cats. My theory is (see if you can follow this one) that in between shitting and pissing on the floors and walls and creating a toxic health hazard in the middle of a suburb, there was a whole lotta cat-bonin' going on.

Someone, I think, has neglected to listen to Bob Barker. I feel vindicated now in the choices I made as a young man to do exactly as Bob Barker says. Not just about the cats and dogs, I mean about everything. It's tough to apply his wisdom to all situations as his pronouncements are sort of limited and narrow--usually involving how to bid on Rice-A-Roni or Turtle Wax--but it's not impossible to take a couple of spare sayings and spin them into all sorts of dogmatic and abstract laws and restrictions by which I live my life. People have been doing the same thing with Jesus for 2,000 years, so I know it can be done.

One good thing about where I live is that it's not that far from Loma Linda University Children's Hospital, one of the foremost children's hospital in all the world. That gives me a lot of leeway when I feel like my kids are old enough to try some of the things boys have to do before they become men, like jumping off really high stuff, swinging baseball bats in the house in close proximity to one's siblings and putting holes in drywall with your head. These are just some of the things boys do and it's good to know that we're only a short emergency medevac airlift to a first-rate pediatric medical facility.

The downside to living near Loma Linda is that the local paper picks up every extraordinary case of horrible suffering children (I mean the suffering is horrible, not the children) and runs it as local news.

Like today they carried this story about this three-month-old baby whose parents had named him Kal-El. You know, like Superman's "real" name from Krypton. My eyes caught that and I was all ready to make fun of him and his dorktastic parents, but then I read the rest of the story and--wouldn't you know it--they weren't in the paper just because of his crazy, crazy name. It was this long story about the congenital heart defect he had been born with, how he had never left the hospital in his life, how he had been awaiting a heart transplant with little/no hope and how--in a double-edged tragi-miracle--someone else's baby died at Loma Linda and provided Kal-El with his transplant heart.

Look. People. It's already hot. We got more shit blowing up in London. There are hurricanes all over the place. I don't need to be reading stories about kids with funny names unless I can make all kinds of fun of them. Sure it's nice that the kid got his transplant, but any story that involves dead babies is, by definition, fucking depressing.

I hate summer. I'm going back to yesterday's post and looking at the picture of George "The Animal" Steele again. That always makes me smile.

Oh yeah, and Jimmy Buffett sucks ass. Margaritaville... what a douchebag.



This post on the goddamn Narcissus motherfucking Scale: 8.whatever


Pops
- posted by Pops @ 10:33 AM