Travesty

- For Benjamin

Prologue

-You can’t determine how far to push the envelope until it falls off the table.

Death & Other Amusements

Getting old is bullshit and I'm roundly opposed to it.

In the grand scheme of things, I'm halfway dead. At 35 (with my current diet, predisposed life span based on the hereditary arc of your average manic depressive and the fact that I haven't had a physical conducted since my college entrance exam), there are more aspects to my mental and physical well being closing their doors rather than setting up for new business. The first half of my lifetime has been misspent drinking like a fish, smoking like a coal miner with half a brain and a full pension and eating like royalty from the Dark Ages. I'm actually gnawing on a turkey leg as I write this while smoking a cigar on the opposite side of my mouth after doing a round of tequila shooters this morning. My willful disregard for any of the natural laws of nutrition is catching up to me and without a third act of repentance after a massive wellness wakeup call, the odds are strong that I'll drop dead of a coronary within the next ten years. It's always a good idea to discuss death when dabbling in comedy. Death and humor blend with each other like chocolate and impotency. It's an unusual combination that's often incredibly disappointing.

Here's what you have to look forward to: Hair loss, your body falling apart and a sleep schedule that's conducive to psychosis or a career in the Marines among other amusing maladies. Twenty years ago I wrote about the bizarre onset of puberty and everything that a young man could look forward to in terms of hair growth. Breaking news bulletin: I am no longer young. In another twenty years I'll be on the early end of retirement age while (in all actuality) I'll be dead. Did I mention the comedy of death yet? If I didn't, it's in the last sentence.

Would you like to wake up at five in the morning because you have the bladder of a small toy poodle without the ability to go back to sleep? Would you like to wake up six hours after you went to bed because you have a biological clock that kicks you out of bed at a predetermined time regardless of what time you turned in? Are you looking forward to getting up no matter how exhausted you are because the fluttering wings of a housefly stirred you out of your fitful slumber? If you answered yes, hell to the no or absolutely not to any or all of these questions, it's going to happen anyway once you stumble onto the back half of your life.

People with kids tell me that you won't get any sleep for the first two years of your child's life and I wonder how (and if) that will be any different compared to my current sleep schedule. If it's not a car door slamming three blocks away at sunrise it's the urgent need to piss my brains out during the first occurrence of a R.E.M. cycle throughout the course of the morning. Once I'm up, that's it, I'm staying up. After taking a leak I start funneling coffee into my gullet and chain smoking at the computer. My wife wonders why I'm irritable by the time she rolls out of bed three hours later and I've already subsequently demolished a pot of coffee and a pack of cigarettes. With that sort of breakfast she's lucky I'm not foaming at the mouth and hell bent on jousting with the mailman at ten paces.

Coffee kicks my ass now. If I have a cup after five p.m. I can count on staying up until two or three in the morning. If I drink ice cream after eight o'clock I become incredibly gassy. I don't think I'm lactose intolerant but my body says otherwise when it comes to ice cream. My constitution could be faulty thanks largely to the fact that I've eaten suicide wings no less than once a week for the last twenty years. When (not if) my asshole falls out of my body and crawls into a nearby sewage drain I'll need a custom made cast iron colostomy bag. My ongoing diet would make Jack Lalanne vomit blood after two snacks.

In my early '20s I had a cute little patch of hair on the back of my head that looked unnecessarily shiny in a mirror. I also had a high forehead. Some ten years later that tiny peninsula of thinning hair has turned into a bald patch that could easily host a jumbo yarmulke during my Christmas Day outing to an opening matinee and Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet. The forehead went from a modified widow's peak to a five-head to a length of skull that you can screen an opening matinee on. Charlie Brown will be ripping on my hair loss in another five years and I won't have a comeback for that bald son of a bitch because I'll be too groggy from sleep loss and the impending coffee-crash that comes with it. I come from a family tree of high foreheads, but I've truly outdone all of the follicle challenged. It's a late Indian summer up there and most of the leaves have already left the building. After nine books and nine accompanying hair dyes (platinum blonde, black, red and green, to name a few), my hair isn't bouncing back. If this trend continues I'll have to shave my head and fasten a throw rug into my skull with concrete-bearing screws just like Elton John.

The good news is that I'm growing more hair outside of my ear lobes, so that offsets some of the bald patches and receding forehead. I always thought that I'd look handsome once my hair went gray but it's falling out or failing to regenerate fast than the salt and pepper conversion. I made the mistake of trying to shave the horizontal inch-long fronds jutting out from ears and ended up spraying blood down my neck. I told my co-workers a tall tale about our cat jumping up and scratching me on the side of my ear but I'm positive that no one believed me. Now I just pluck the hairs out with a tweezer after pulling patches of fuzz out of the inside of my nose. Do you want more hair in your nose and ears instead of on your head? Of course you don't. Good news/bad news: You're going to get it anyway. Be careful what you don't wish for on your worst enemy because biology is a filthy whore of a mistress. If I make it to 50 I'll be fashioning a comb-over from the pigtails protruding from my nostrils.

I never had allergies as a kid, but at the current trend I'll need an iron lung just to walk outside. A mild dusting of pollen leaves me sneezing up hunks of glow-stick colored phlegm and a brain that feels like a hot air balloon. If a mild cold travels through the area I'm on hospice care for three months. The last time I ate frozen fish my ass turned into a fire hydrant and I was funneling every fluid in my body out of my mouth and into the bath tub at the same time for three days. Would you like to know more about my bowel regularity? Then log in this instant to: www.tomsgoing.org. Join the other five million subscribers in ongoing chat sessions, photo albums and the increasingly popular creamed corn and cocktail peanut arcade game!

Other assorted things you can look forward to for those of you playing the home version of this game: complete and absolute short term memory loss, diminishing appetite, the metabolism of a sloth with an aberrant thyroid dysfunction and frequent bouts of scurvy, whooping cough, 'the vapors' and hysterical blindness. Mental bonus multipliers include a near-total lack of recall when running into someone you haven't seen for a few years or more, solidified neuroses on par with an average day in the life for Woody Allen and on-command impotency.

If you're going to open the show with death, there's no better follow-up act than impotence.

Has anybody seen my car keys?

Tom Waters

Heavy Load

Our general impatience with technology is largely unjustified. After waiting two minutes for a computer program to load up at work yesterday I was ready to put my head through the monitor and set the mouse on fire.

In a parallel universe, I'd still have a dial up connection and much of my day would be spent waiting for a simple web page to load or watching an hour glass while I waited for a progress report on whether my email was sent. Now that I have a cable modem I can listen to music while surfing live streaming videos while writing, blogging and social networking at the same time. We live in an amazing era that we take for granted and we're only aware of this on the rare occasions when the system doesn't work.

If there's heavy thunderstorms and my satellite dish doesn't work while I'm barely paying attention to a recorded rerun of Arrested Development, I stare at the pixilated screen and scream at it: 'Fucking Direct TV piece of whore! This is what I pay $60 a month for?! Work, goddamn you!' Again, keep in mind that when I'm watching recorded shows I'm typically not even paying attention to the television screen and the audio is barely registering while I read, prepare meals or wander into another room with a random task (for example: auto-erotic asphyxiation).

Digital video recorders are another thing, and by 'another thing' I mean that they're a technological marvel as well as a tool of the devil. I have an addictive personality (see also: beer, whiskey, scotch, comic books, frog licking, putting dissolving balloons of amphetamines into my ass, Altoids, Diet Coke, mild necrophilia and once again, auto-erotic asphyxiation), so I get a little obsessive about my recording schedule. I'll scan through five months of scheduled programs to make sure that I don't miss anything and top load my hard drive with 500 hours of Larry Sanders shows, cartoons that I may or may not watch, anything with Gordon Ramsay and obscure independent films that I might watch twenty minutes of before deep sixing the entire production.

I taped the hit comedy Funny Farm when we initially got the DVR in 2005. I haven't watched it yet, but I check once a week to make sure that it's still there in the event that I decide to. The calendar year is currently 2011. If I was going to watch the hit comedy Funny Farm (starring Chevy Chase and Madolyn Smith Osbourne), I would have by now, but I haven't. If my cable provider loses this film on my hard drive though, I will throw a bitch fit more dramatic than Ru Paul when someone has borrowed his eyeliner.

We have the ability to fast forward through commercials now and I've taken full advantage of this. I groan when I stop too early before a sitcom comes back from the break and sigh loudly if I have to watch fifteen seconds of a car commercial. Some idiots claim to watch the Superbowl just for the ads (as if they're not going to see them every single week for the next six months). In the meantime I'm blowing past them in third gear or pissing and moaning about it when I have to endure a nanosecond of the promotional endorsements that pay for the dreck that I recorded three months prior. The Prince Of Persia came out in major movie theaters thirteen months ago. I'm still watching old shows saturated with marketing for this movie. I went to the theater to buy a ticket and they informed me that it was released on Blu-Ray DVD last September. I'll make sure to tape it so that I can see it on my recorded menu fifteen years from now along with Funny Farm.

My father just got broadband access on his computer which is entirely unnecessary when you consider that he types three words a minute and spends the majority of his time online reading bad jokes that are older than Lon Chaney's corpse with tiny animated animals jumping up and down at the end of a virus-caked email that he and his family send back and forth to each other. He buys all of his computers second hand, opens every email that shows up in his mail box and then wonders why he gets viruses. This is on par with Jenna Jameson wondering how and where she could have possibly picked up a yeast infection. Ten minutes after waiting to look at a family vacation picture on his computer to load I'm already at home downloading a version of the same picture in a higher resolution. You just got pwned, old man!

My friend's husband wonders why a web site takes so long to load when he has 75 other windows minimized on his lap top. It's a lap top, genius! You can't run 94 different web browsers, forget about them and then wonder what's taking so long! We're all dumber than the machines we're operating now and incredibly impatient with them at the same time. If it takes longer than one minute for me to save this article I'm going to hurl my ashtray at the printer like some sort of ceramic discus and take out my speakers with a heavily barbed mace. How dare you take a reasonable amount of time to deliver my instant gratification and break down once every three or four years, technology?

Our sense of entitlement is near-absolute when it comes to our leisure and entertainment devices. If my iPod skips a song before it's over, I yell at it like a two dollar Vietnamese whore. I own a tiny box smaller than a pack of cigarettes that stores 8,000 songs that I can listen to whenever I want and I find it totally unacceptable that I can't listen to 'Love Shack' all the way through the one time that it glitches because my iPod is caked in grease and I've easily spilled an oil tanker worth of coffee on it after dropping it on the ground repeatedly or losing it in snow banks overnight. Get your shit together, Apple. If I spend $300 on your product it should work whether I take care of it or not. The next time I go to the Apple store I'm going to ejaculate into a seasonal employee's face after performing auto-erotic asphyxiation over the Help Desk. That's what you get for providing me with audio entertainment for every horrible taste that I have in music for going on four years.

Who's down for watching Funny Farm?

Tom Waters

Wastebook

Everyone is addicted to social networking and I'm no exception to the rule. I typically spend an hour every morning and one hour every night noodling around online and combing through people's updates when I could be doing something creative or useful with my time. There's a peeping Tom in all of us that likes to spy on our friends to see what they're up to. What pisses me off time and again are the generic and forgettable things that most of the users post. David Byrne wrote 'Say something once, why say it again?' I'd like to amend that truism. Say something unoriginal and hive-minded, cut your hands off, pull out your teeth with a pair of industrial pliers and don't say anything ever again.

If you're going to take the time to write something, make it original and quirky. Every morning that I log on there are no less than 5.3 billion people who comment on the day of the week in relation to the weekend, the weather and their gratefulness for coffee.

Three quick examples:

1. 'Only Tuesday?! This week is taking forever! When is the WEEKEND going to come around?'

(Short answer: In three more days, dumbass.)

2. 'Why is it snowing? I'm so sick of this SNOW! What's the deal with that?'

(Short answer: It's January, jackass. You've lived in Buffalo all of your life. If snow surprises you you're probably shocked by the incomprehensible slate of rain that comes along every single April.)

3. 'Thank God for COFFEE! I can't wait for that first cup! Boy, I needed that!'

(Short response: Shakespeare has officially been trumped. Your contribution to the world