This was actually part of the previous post. I suck at this.

If CNN was the way I want it to be, the announcer would have flat hair and crooked glasses and look like Beth Ditto and the news would go like this:

"Good evening ladies and gentleman. Today in Crapistan a lot of people were protesting fraudulent elections, so their government called them terrorists, because right now we're all totally waging war on terrorism, and locked them up, and then right in front of everyone Crapistan stole a glance at the U.S. and muttered out of the corner of its mouth, "This is how this works, right?", and the U.S. tried not make eye contact, which Crapistan, not unreasonably, took for a yes, and then Crapistan security forces proceeded to pull out the protesters' toenails one by one, which hurt more than anything that you or I can possibly imagine and probably bled a lot. Which frankly, Crapistan, really fucking sucks, you bullies.

"But then, instead of saying something helpful, like "Free Money for Bleeding Crapistani Protesters," the European Union and the United States government waited until some famous activists got on TV and were like, "Honestly? I dare you guys to be bigger hypocrites." This precipitated a totally fucking novel move by the leaders of the free world, who announced this afternoon that democracy is a pillar of democracy, which is a nice sentiment but too bad we already fucking KNEW that democracy is a pillar of democracy, you stupid shits.

"Also this afternoon, the right-wing spindoctors held a press conference pointing out what an asshole socialist our president is, and how incompatible his values are with theirs and how there can be no compromising on this right and wrong stuff. Although, just a couple of years ago the same politicians thought Hussein had totally cooperated with the 9/11 terrorists (Yes I'm STILL talking about this. Fuck you.), and so by extension, even though Republicans are apparently made of sugar and spice and Democrats are made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails, which are totally incompatible, they should still be able to work together. And I don't even know what the implications of this analogy are, but let me just say that if you go splitting the world into bad and good you're basically going to end up with the half the world hating you and the other half pretending to like you, which, DUH, we totally just did last century.

"Also, maybe we should all just shut up and simmer down for a hot minute because studies show that all the hating is not going to bring back the polar caps OR the aborted babies.

"On the other hand, really the whole distracted, sound byte presentation of misinformation is my own damn fault because I love being invited to lunch so much and I love it when politicians call me, because frankly politicians are the best-dressed people I know, so no way am I ever going to do what I would do if we were honest, which is call bullshit on basically everyone. Including myself and the rest of the media. But frankly? My attention span is even shorter than yours. We're all just working here.

"Thank you for your kind attention to the news. You may now return to our life-renewing programming. Up next, the remarkable fable of Silky Clam and Thundernuts the Sea Cucumber, which features a lot of real life lessons. Good night."

In the long run, maybe that isn't preferable to the real eight o'clock news at all. I would watch, though.

P.S. If you click on the picture then when it opens in another tab it twinkles. I would make it twinkle here, but I have no idea how to do that.

Thundernuts the Sea Cucumber

The same number of people who watch that show will read this blog, which is fair enough because just look at the size of this entry

Today was a long freaking day. At the end of it, on the tram home, I sat behind a woman who looked like an adorable button but who probably has tuberculosis because she was hacking and wheezing the whole way. It is arguably possible that she just has a cold, but I think at the very least it was swine flu, because this is the type of thing that happens to big-eyed old ladies with crinkly smiley faces just when you least suspect it. When the old lady coughed, the lacy thing that held her bun up vibrated, and she hunched her little button shoulders over and made tiny button fists with her hands.

I was fairly sad that she had consumption and I hoped that she had a husband and a daughter or a son to take care of her, but then I figured that probably her husband was already dead and her stupid ungrateful kids never write unless they're mailing her brochures for retirement homes that look like Santa's workshop in the pictures but where really they beat old people and make them thread tiny needles all day long in a poorly-lit room. I might be confusing retirement homes with sweatshops. Either way the old lady is pretty much screwed, because she has the wasting disease. (I'm not going to lie, I just looked that up. Did you know that tuberculosis is also called the King's Evil? Fact.)

So anyway, after my incredibly exhausting day of being a normal professional grown up, all I wanted to do once I got home was sit down and chill out. So I threw my keys and my bag on the couch, and kissed Daniel hello, and then I fell to my knees and slowly keeled over, and then my body melted into a thin soup and I seeped into the cracks in the parquet. That's what it felt like I should do. Actually, Daniel handed me a glass of wine and I curled up next to him to watch TV. Even though going to the gym and working on my novel (I don't have a novel) would have been more righteous, I was digging the wine and the couch. And the TV.

Only, you know what was on TV? C.S.I. . If you've never seen C.S.I., even by accident, then either you have a really fancy cable package or you actually spend your evenings stretching and reciting poetry. Since no one will ever read this, it's probably important for me to explain that C.S.I stands for crime scene investigation (I'm pretty sure), which is a terrible title, but then they just turned it into a snazzy acronym, which adds some zip but is confusing, because it could stand for just about anything. Crackheads snore ickily. Anyway, I shit you not, this episode was about some guy who hung himself at a ritzy rehab clinic with a rope that some depressed brat had knit together out of dental floss because she was raped and on heroin and was planning to hang herself. Also, in the end it turned out someone else killed the guy because he was beautiful but gay, and the killer just set it up to look like a dental floss suicide. No, seriously.

Then on another channel was a detective show that is about people who are raped and then murdered under extra fucked up circumstances, because normal murder is so yesterday. So then Dan and I skipped to a kids' channel which had some show about how to make super fun rabbit faces out of cream cheese toast and raisins. Then we found some movie that was just starting.

Which turned out to be about a group of Russian prostitutes that thought they were selling out to become strippers in a foreign land, only it turned out that actually their pimp stole their passports and then sold the women to a bunch of fat, ugly old men. It's on right now. It's twenty minutes in and I just watched a scene where one of the girls has to pee but now she's locked in a room, so she's banging on the door screaming, and then her new fat ugly owner opens the door and says, "You pee, then we have sex?" and she screams "Sex no!" and there are tears running down her face, and then he screams: "NO SEX, NO BATHROOM!" and slams the door in her face and locks it, and she sobs and sobs and, finally, pees in her pants.

I don't want to harp on this, but for real. What is wrong with television? I don't actually want to tell you what I do for work in case one day an actual living person reads this, but basically I get to hear about fairly depressing things all day long that make you want to save the world with an enormous silvery-white sword of awesome righteousness, and kill all the bad guys, but you can't because we don't live in that world. Instead we live in the movie where mostly the bad guys win most of the time, and all of the people that are totally cheering for the good guys have to savor a couple of rare victories that are sweet but relatively short-lived, like a tic tac.

Given all of the perfectly fucked up shit that goes down worldwide on an hourly basis, you'd think that most people, like me, would want to go home and watch well-crafted dramas about unicorns and dinosaurs and ancient Amazonian tribes that probably even still exist somewhere. TV could be so fabulous. Entertainment would consist of hour after hour of cute furry animals engaged in witty conversation. Sometimes, when that's too much, there would be a channel where you could watch a koala bear suck on a cheerio until it turns to mush. Thrillers would be whimsical beetle adventures. (I just realized that this is basically what children's tv is like, only clearly is really isn't most of the time, because the only children's show I found was about making a frightening bunny face out of cream cheese and raisins and celery, which probably tastes like cream cheese with raisins and celery. Gross.)

Anyway, in my happy universe, shows wouldn't skim their feel-good factor off of my hopelessly middle class superiority complex which is based solely on the fact that I don't know anyone as fucked up as the guy who was murdered in a fake dental floss suicide.

But obviously, no one else wants to watch Mongolian tea rituals and pygmy shadow puppet dramas about horned lizards. Which, to conclude, is what all the wine is about.

P.S. This blatantly cribbed photo comes from this site