“So how this thing supposed to go? We got no narrator or nobody?”

Yesterday, Dwyane Wade opened the 2011 NBA season with an honest question, at a mobbed press conference featuring an estimated 275 “reporters”—a term that nowadays includes nearly everybody with two arms and a PDA. ESPN carried it live, naturally, and after watching every painful moment of it, I couldn’t agree more with D-Wade: the event definitely needed a narrator.

A wary Wade was sitting between a subdued LeBron James and a nearly comatose Chris Bosh. They looked like three people who would rather be any place else. And, for three guys who used to wear their love for the game on their faces, it was a sober reminder to everyone involved that they will be wearing black hats this season.

On the upside, I thought they showed real team chemistry as they helped answer each other’s questions, which were all a variation of, “LeBron…blah…blah…blah…traitor?” If any of them were smiling, it was hidden on the inside. Which is my way of saying that no one was smiling.

They may turn out to be the nucleus of the best team ever, but it probably isn’t going to be fun, which I think was made pretty clear yesterday. Even folks who know nothing about the game are aware that they upset the balance of the NBA. And while what they did wasn’t illegal, it seems unfair, and the tone of the questions and the defensiveness of many of the answers belied that.

By the time they have the privilege of spending their Christmas Day with the now-cuddly Kobe Bryant, they’ll probably be wondering just what happened to the laugh-riot that they promised each other when they hatched the plan in…. so, let’s just say “early 2010” to avoid legal issues.

The season’s upside is that they play in the comfort of South Beach where they won’t have to worry about anyone paying attention to anything they do while wearing shorts. Despite their one NBA title, Miamians are more attentive to the fit of their jeans than how the Heat players move without the ball. Their knowledge of basketball consists of this: the arena’s California roll uses real crabmeat.

After a few dozen pat questions and pat answers, the press conference ended fittingly: they stood up and wandered off. Although I was sitting at a bar watching, I couldn’t help but ask aloud, “Are we having fun yet?”

The bartender looked up at the TV and then back to me and said, “Fuck them.”

And that was that.

There’s been a lot of soul-searching in the blogosphere lately. Or at least my little corner of it. It’s been a curious phenomenon, and one I really have no business weighing in on, but that’s never stopped me before.

I’ve noticed a handful of the top product and fashion bloggers have begun to publicly question their existence as spokes in what they collectively identified as a relentless promotional wheel. I don’t want to mention them by name, but it isn’t hard to figure out, if you’re like me and you spend time on looking around on the Internet for like-minded obsessives.

The crux of their self-flagellation is the nuts-and-blots of what they do daily: identify a product, digest the press material and condense it, occasionally offering an opinion as to its validity within a hierarchical formula filled with kicks, fashion, furniture and so on. But more often than not, with a lack of staffing and operating as their own tech department, the bloggers have little time to do anything other than clean it up and post it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Occasionally, however, when they’ve been able to stretch their legs and write in a lengthier style, usually about an event, opening, or something that particularly excites them, it’s really, really good. (Most also have some other written outlet that they’re able to nerd out on.) But, in general, they’ve succumbed to the velocity, and sort of gotten away from why they entered into this line of work: to write. The term “journalist” is one which I find archaic, in this day and age. I think of Bob Woodward and Seymour Hersh, not some guy who writes for GQ about a fancy pants actress. Or certainly, not one who does what we do here in the blogosphere.

I’ve read a few columns, and seen some back-and-forth on competing blogs, and felt the frustration on the pages. Yet far as I see, they’re all being way too hard on themselves. First of all they’re all really good, discriminating writers. No bullshit. And if they weren’t so busy doing nine other things to make ends meet, they could probably be able to add a more powerful filter on what they post and not feel like the Dunkin’ Donuts zombie: “Time to make the donuts.”

But, as for now, they operate businesses whose goal is to sift through the hundreds of items and stories daily and whittle them down to a few, while providing a handsome space for some advertising. That’s the only business model that exists in the non-print world, sadly and for the foreseeable future.

Granted, there’s some overlap between them in what they report on and that is unfortunate; and not every post is a home run, or even a double. Yet they all hit for a high average, in my eyes. As a matter of fact, the fashion and product blogs are, in general, of a higher far caliber than some other more esoteric web sites.

So says the guy who writes the most esoteric nonsense found on any of them.

Ever since I was young, I have written letters (mostly angry ones) to major U.S. corporations, telling them how they should be going about their business. I’m serious. It started the day I wrote a letter to Aunt Jemima imploring her to release a cherry flavored version of her breakfast syrup. I was probably seven years old. I also recommended that she release it in time for Christmas. (Timely, right?)  Then, a few weeks later, I received a letter from someone named “Pam” thanking me for my helpful suggestions. Afterward, I called her. And she didn’t take my call. But it was okay because, on that day, as Pam dodged the phone call of an excitable nerd-child, a fuse was nevertheless lit.

Over the years, I’ve written to airlines, magazines, and even Mr. Peanut because, if you must know, I thought that the giant plastic peanut I had ordered in 5th grade wasn’t sufficiently stuffed with nuts. (I wish I were joking.) Sure, I’ve had beef with trading card companies and Krazy-Glue (those a-holes), yet still most of my letters have been written to food companies. There is something about packaged food, when rendered poorly, that has balled my fists since they were tiny. Or, more accurately, medium-sized.

The reason I am mentioning this apropos of nothing is that I found a ratty old notebook of mine filled with all kinds of half-thoughts coupled with nonsensical meanderings of ramblings of an escaped mental patient, aka me. And I came across a letter I had written to Nerds in which—surprise, surprise—I sounded angry. And so here it is, in its entirety. Unedited. Please don’t judge me. I’m very sensitive.

Dear Nerds,

This one’s harder than it was with those toaster pastry freaks. Because I love you Nerds. Love you, love you, love you, love you. I don’t care who knows it. (Because everyone I know already does.)
But lately—here we go again—I’ve been disappointed with your behavior. Quite simply, I expected more. For such a dynamic candy I expected more flavors, more products, more everything. Rainbows Nerds was awesome. But Nerds Rope? When, exactly, did you stop giving a shit? Rope?
Even Twizzlers, which actually looks like rope, calls itself “vines”. It’s like you don’t even want it to work. Where are the tremendous advances that technology has afforded? Where is your cotton gin, your fax machine, your something-something cancer vaccine? I mean, I saw on TV where they can put a mouse’s brain into a turtle’s skull and you idiots cannot even add two new flavors?
These Wonka people are like bad foster parents. If I were running the show, there would be sour-stuffed Nerds, Nerds-flavored ice cream and Nerds chunky-soda (these are off the top of my head) in addition to all sorts of wild flavors like blue-raspberry-tangerine, mango-lemon and passionfruit-kiwi-pineapple. Get it together, people.
REVOLUTION, NOT EVOLUTION…can you hear me?
I don’t need to ask if you know that the other candy brands are gaining on you. Airheads, SourPatch Kids, even Skittles—they’re all laughing and your timidity and your provinciality. Hahaha. Just like that.
Shut their traps, for once. You’re Nerds, godammit! The heavyweight champion! They can’t touch you. Hell, they can’t even come close.
It starts now, Nerds. This is your wake-up call. There’s no “snooze” button in the confectionary world, jackass.

Respectfully, and with a mouth full of suspect teeth,
Tony.

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”—Macbeth

On Fox News, they’ve been referring to President Obama as a “one-term president” for months now. I’ve watched them gleefully trumpet the Tea Party Express (that’s its Christian name) as it has grown in prominence and fury. And the entire time, I’ve been wondering if perhaps the network has been misreading the situation. Maybe they missed the signs, being too busy rubbing their sweaty hands together like giant houseflies.

In my eyes, the Tea Party’s emergence, and the results of the GOP primaries, are both promising developments if we have any hope of turning this ship around. Delaware saw loonybeans, anti-masturbation advocate Christine O’Donnell beat a moderate Republican, Mike Castle, who probably would’ve netted 55% of the general election vote. A well respected voice on both sides of the aisles. A legislator.

She, who wrote a college thesis on the role of women in Tolkien’s books, will struggle to reach 45% when all the November votes are tallied. Last night I read an interview where she spoke of dabbling in “witchcraft” in high school, and engaging in a date atop a Satanic altar, and I get the feeling that this is merely the tip of a very unseemly iceberg.

The people who funded her are mad as hell at President Obama, but more importantly, at their own party, petulantly kneecapping it, with their crazy signs and angry rallies. These “We the people” people injected a dose of adrenaline into their gathering of old white folks, but like the fun guy at the party who eventually has a few too many and barfs all over your suede couch, GOP leadership must be wondering just who the hell they are letting in.

They’re actually giving the Democrats more than a puncher’s chance at escaping the midterms without losing both majorities. O’Donnell (and Angle in Nevada, and that crazy guy running for governor in New York) are so unelectable I thought Karl Rove was going to cry when they won. He knows better than anyone what it takes to win. He is, after all, the guy who got President Bush elected…twice.

They will eventually drive moderates, the real Republicans—small government, low taxes, national security—out of the party with their social platform: anti-gay, anti-immigrant, religious intolerance, etc. The reason that these candidates have won anything is because they are running in Republican primaries, not general elections. If you combine the number of votes it took for Tea Partiers to win in Alaska, Delaware and Nevada, it was just north of 156,000 votes…combined.

In the general election, these candidates will get a total of zero Democratic votes and attract a minority of Independent voters. Because, really, they are the reason the economy is in a shambles. What they are complaining about—basically, “out-of-control spending”— isn’t going to be solved any time soon, no matter who is elected. Over the last nine years, the average middle class household’s income has dropped $5,000. Economists call it a “lost decade” which followed on the heels of our nation’s most prosperous decade…under President Clinton. That is the landscape in the United States, as of five minutes ago.

Tens of millions of people are now without jobs, as unregulated industries paid for their sins by firing the rank-and-file. Tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans have gutted social programs, like education and emergency preparedness. The additional spending that has elicited such ire, is to keep one-tenth of working age people from being cast into the streets. You add dependant children and the elderly into that, and the number is closer to 15% of the country’s population. Republicans want to curb spending? They should’ve thought of that 10 years ago, when they entered the voting booth.

With majorities in both houses of Congress, the GOP grew the US government to a record size, at a record pace, dragged us into two foreign wars (both fought on credit), and had failed us time and time again, by hiring cronies instead of competence. Alberto Gonzales. Donald Rumsfeld. Goddamn Brownie.

They took Clinton’s surplus and left us with a deficit. They always run on competence, but those were the eight least competent years in our country’s history. And now they want to take the wheel again. And they think the best way to do it is to threaten and breathe fire.

I often wonder on which planet they are living. See, Earth has a recorded history, and we all know how everything went down. This is all fact, not vitriol or opinion. The problem is, it doesn’t make for a pretty sign.

So when Obama was elected, he was handed the keys to a gas guzzling Hummer and his detractors expected it to immediately burn fuel like a Prius. Except the truck is also broken. And while he’s under the hood, people are shouting at him, calling him all sorts of names, questioning his citizenship, his leadership, his heart. And then there are two Hummers. No wait, three of them. And he has to fix them all, in two years, with two wars, a cruel depression and an obstructionist legislative branch.

Now I know why Tea Party Express members call themselves a “movement.” The funny thing is: when all is said and done, it will be the Republicans, both in the midterm and 2012 presidential elections, that will be on the receiving end of their discharge.

Have at me.

——————

Addendum: I read an informative article today that Montana GOP’s platform includes the position that homosexuality is considered illegal. (Of course it is.) Here is the link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_gays_in_montana

The prosecution rests.

I was watching the roll call of those who perished on September 11th, an event that took far longer than the attacks themselves. It was a brutal three-plus hour exercise for the families and friends, who took turns reading the names and paying tribute to the fallen. It was heartbreaking and still so incomprehensible.

I saw a woman pay tribute to her deceased brother while wishing his daughter a happy 11th birthday and I thought about a friend who lost his dad and brother. And I was in a perpetual state of nearly losing it with grief, however abstract mine may be. All my relatives came home that day. Otherwise I can only imagine my hurt.

Then I went onto Twitter to see what everyone else was thinking and came across someone I occasionally follow defending her right to make 9-11 jokes, since it was okay to make AIDS babies dying in Africa and dead prostitute jokes.

Seriously. I said, “I think you need some new friends” and she quickly replied: “I think I need a new America.” I should say that she is from Europe and not from a particularly vocal country about much of anything when it really matters.

And I thought about how different people’s experiences on Twitter are from my own. I crack jokes and make observations and most of the folks that I follow do the same. We make fun of television shows and people with bad fashion sense and we try to make our lives sound a little more glamorous. And we make new friends, however slender those threads may be. It’s actually fun. At least I think it is.

But this woman made me realize that there is a whole other side to Twitter, where people try and shock each other, and play a macabre game, writing violent or sexually explicit tweets. Or write abusive tweets to celebrities.

And today, as these thousands of innocent people are being mourned by their parents, siblings, young children and friends, this woman, in her home halfway around the world, questioned why it was not okay to share a laughs with her ghoulish friends at their expense. Apparently, she was attempting to justify it by citing the geopolitics of this country.

It’s the sort of esoteric, intellectualized argument that makes people hate intellectuals. One has absolutely nothing to do with another. And these people’s grief is an emotion that cannot be picked up and played with over the internet. Because you’re bored. Not passionate about it. Just to kill a few minutes.

Again, I’m sick with grief and you would be unable to dissect why. It’s nine years later and, perhaps because of the protestors who are preparing for another round of xenopalooza today with a protest at the WTC site, I feel very much frozen in place.

I stopped following her and was instantly relieved that I don’t have to spend another minute of my life in her world. I also wanted to say, “Go crawl back into your hole” but those are six more words than she deserves.

PS No I don’t know any AIDS baby or dead prostitute jokes either. I guess we don’t get out nearly enough.

There are two animals above all others that I am obsessed with, and I think perhaps, tellingly so. The first one is Architeuthis aka the “giant squid.” I love the fact that no one has ever seen a live one, that they can grow up to 120 feet in length, have enormous beaks and eyes the size of manhole covers. They live 3000 feet below the surface, which obviously makes them difficult to pick out of a crowd of blackness. But the best thing about him/her/it is that it could strike fear, invisibly. Unlike, say, me. The only time I strike fear is when I’m squeezing down the aisle on an airplane and passengers are next to an unoccupied seat.

Recently, sketchy footage of one peering up from the murky depths has appeared on an Animal Planet show called “MonsterQuest” and it actually gave me chills. I watched it about ten times. Slow motion. Super slow motion. Then regular speed. GG, on the other hand, was unimpressed with its size. Looking up from a magazine she thought it looked “tiny.”

I became frustrated, telling her she “didn’t get it” that the shot was “from way above it” and the squid was actually “a behemoth.”

“Look at its eye!” I shrieked. “It’s the size of a garbage can lid!”

She held her hand up and I stopped talking immediately. We have an understanding in such instances.

Moving right along (for both our sakes) is my other animal obsession: the majestic Komodo dragon, from the Indonesian island of…wait for it…Komodo. Go figure.

The Komodo dragon may be the world’s crankiest animal. Like champagne hangover cranky. Like me watching the porn bimbos and smiling monkey anchors on Fox News cranky.

It has mean eyes and appears to silently judge its neighbors in the animal kingdom. That is, when it isn’t spitting its toxic saliva onto them and following them around until they drop dead. Then the dragon moseys over and eats the hell out of them. At its own pace. Literally. It never really tangles with other animals—just gets close enough to hock a loogie and then shuffle along like, “That’s right, foal. Oh, it’s on.”

The first time I heard the Komodo dragon’s backstory I knew I had found an animal soulmate. (Sorry, Architeuthis.) For fun, I researched whether or not, a person in, say, the United States, living in a city like, say, New York City, could import one to live domestically. I went on Yahoo Answers and asked the question and, wouldn’t you know it, someone responded very quickly.

Turns out they are legal to keep as pets, and much of the toxicity in their saliva is from eating decaying flesh. Great news! So if I fed the thing a diet of pizza and General Tso’s chicken (like me) it wouldn’t be super-toxic, just dangerous and unhealthy. And irritable(r).

Seriously, I wouldn’t do it. Saliva is a non-starter for a germaphobe. Now, you add the toxicity into the equation, coupled with the potential to become paralyzed and slowly consumed by your pet, and you can’t help but realize that ownership would have some serious drawbacks.

Still, I always imagined how having one would strike fear into the hearts of pushy dog owners. George’s Dog Run in Washington Square Park would become George’s Dog Run for Your Life. The balding man-dwarf with the pit bulls would be quaking and those yippy dogs would be put in their place: a little wooden shoebox. (Joking…)

So anyway, the other day, it was raining hard and for some reason I thought, “Man, I’d hate to walk a Komodo dragon outside today.”

Then I spent ten minutes surfing the net to see what kind of rain clothing you could buy for a Komodo’s body type: boxy-long, in case you were wondering. There were all sorts of ensembles, but what really stood out was this bright red peaked rain hat that had a large star affixed to the front. An odd, impractical design for such a functional item, it looked like something Gandalf would be wearing in an animated dog (and cat) version of “Lord of the Rings”. If that makes any sense. But, well, it was perfect.

By now, I had silently named my imaginary Komodo dragon ‘Wayne’ after no one in particular. The one in my head looked like a ‘Wayne.’ He projected had a 60s vibe, despite being unclothed, and I don’t like wasting imaginary animal names, as people close to me can attest, so the name stuck. And then for some unknown (or ignored to hide a painful truth) I wrote the following on Twitter, using all 140 characters:

I was interested in importing a baby Komodo dragon and naming it Wayne. Today, Wayne would be wearing a rain hat. He would be angry at that.—7:53 AM Aug 25th via OpenBeak

I decided to see how many followers I could lose with such talk. Lo and behold, someone immediately retweeted it, helping me realize that my experiment would fail. You’ve been on Twitter. People say the stupidest stuff and you don’t stop following them. Usually, though, they are either a) hot or b) famous.

Emboldened, and while I waited for the rain to stop, I wrote this:

Wayne, my imaginary pet Komodo dragon, saw a few dogs at the dog run that he’d like to “play with.” And by that, I mean, “poison”.—10:03 AM Aug 25th via web


I am embarrassed to say that I couldn’t stop laughing. In addition to being my own worst enemy, I am also (on rare occasions) my biggest fan as well. The fact that only one person got the joke both intrigued and depressed me. I continued on for a day or two, occasionally updating Wayne’s whereabouts.

It all ended early Saturday morning when, on my way to the Jersey shore to reconnect with my college friends. I dropped this gem:

Wayne the Komodo is unclear as to why we are in NJ. I explained that it’s for a fantasy football draft. He wants to draft/eat Ray Rice at #4.—9:25 AM Aug 28th via web

Shortly afterward, I got a text from a friend. It contained two simple words, a comma and a period. It was, “Dude, stop.”

And I did. I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid, although the person at Yahoo Answers with whom I corresponded briefly might disagree.