drew (toothpastefordinner.com)

wheelz
So I am sitting in my house looking at a huge pile of garbage. Well, I mean, it's not really that huge. It's kind of huge. I mean, it's bigger than me, but smaller than my car, and my car is a sensible four-door sort of thing. Just over a year ago I used to live in an apartment whose largest window looked directly onto a dumpster, and trash was piled (blown? dumped? abandoned?) against the side of the building with no windows. Also the side of the building where my desk and computer are.

One day I came home and saw a bum directly peeing on the wall of the apartment. So there was actual pee just six inches away from this website, because I make this site on my computer. Just think about it. The pee was so close.

The dude just did not care about it though. I guess if there is a pile of trash there in the alley, you figure you might as well pee. I mean, if I had to pee pretty badly I would probably do it there too. Why not. The thing is, though, I used to live near campus here and everything was surrounded in, and covered in, trash. Nobody bothered to pick it up and so it looked kind of like Tijuana.

Well, better than Tijuana, but also worse, because nobody would try to sell me prozac and valium when I walked down the streets of my old neighborhood. They would either ignore me, or stab me with their eyes. They gave me kind of look where you lock eyes with a person for a brief moment, just long enough to get a vivid image of the dude coming towards you and just stabbing the crap out of you. I have been to Tijuana, on my honeymoon, and I didn't get stabbed, but a man actually yelled to me as I was walking away from his storefront, "Hey! Come back man! You know you want to buy this crap!"

Also, I had my picture taken on top of a donkey painted to look like a zebra. I'm not sure how I feel about that practice, but I was kind of overwhelmed with being in Mexico. I was really out of touch with my liberal outrage at that moment. If I had a clearer head I am sure I would have said something like "I will not support this industry!" under my breath, as if the donkey-zebra-sales-photographer-guy was a co-subsidiary of FOX NEWS and Wal-Mart. But I just sat on the donkey and the guy put a sombrero on me that said "MEXICO" and raised the price by five dollars in between me agreeing to do it, and me paying him.

I went to the post office yesterday, speaking of liberal outrage, and there was a booth set up outside of the office with Lyndon LaRouche merchandise. I am going to allow you to google that and see what you think of that guy if you want, since I don't really know all of the ins and outs of his whole platform. But the Lyndonites (Can I call you that guys? It sounds better than LaRouchies. Or LaRouchebags.) were calling out to everyone who walked by, "Do you want to put Dick Cheney in jail?" And, actually, to my surprise, every single person said yes. I mean, I thought maybe one person would just be like "SHUT YER HOLE AHM MERKIN" but EVERYONE WHO WALKED BY said yes. I thought this was wonderful. I donated a few bucks, I couldn't help it. If I can keep a fringe group on the street for one more day asking passersby to put the vice president in jail, I think the world is a better place.

A merkin is a pubic wig, by the way. I would make some joke about it, but maybe there is a reason for a person to have one. I don't want to make a pubically bald person cry for hours because of my laser-guided sarcasm. SENSORS LOCK ON!!! TARGET SIGHTED!!! TARGET HAS PUBIC ALOPECIA.

The huge yellow trash truck just backed up to my house which reminds me. The dumpster. The trash. Nobody peed on my trash in my new neighborhood. Nobody stole the water cooler out of my car, even though I left it in there for a whole day, just in the back seat. Because nobody goes to my neighborhood because it is small and middle-class and full of trees, and there is nowhere to put your trash, and nowhere to pee, and nowhere to stand and ask me for cigarettes or change. My neighborhood is like teflon for the homeless.

It is also sweet, sweet honey for the aspiring worker bees of the middle class. "Darling, let's buy a house with a lousy adjustable-rate mortgage that will blow up in three years! We'll never be able to afford it when prime rate goes up a quarter-percent!"

"Lovely! Do we have enough room in the budget for spinners for my Bronco?"

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