I Stink, and I Don't LIke Me

Holy crap, I’ve been sitting here in front of my computer for over two hours attempting to come up with something to entertain the dozens of friends and enemies who claim to eagerly await my weekly rant.
Sorry, folks, but I’ve got nothing! I’ve started and stopped writing more times than Julie Chen says “but first” on that awful Big Brother show. It’s not that I don’t have plenty of targets. I could whine about the idiots who run our city’s government, but it’s been done. The daily paper is always an easy target, but the only person that really comes to mind is actually a pretty nice guy…and appears on the station that I recite these diatribes.
I’ve thought about a lengthy bitchfest regarding the Canaries, but the season’s been over for a couple of weeks. My complaints will probably still be relevant next season.
The fallback is always the local television stations, but is there anybody left for me to attack? Name one newscaster who doesn’t have fantastic legs that I haven’t kicked to the curb. Ok, maybe there’s a couple at KDLT, but so few people watch them that nobody would know who I’m talking about.
It’s now a couple of hours later and I’m now relying on outside sources to assist me…namely Lord Calvert. If I wasn’t such an outstanding, law-abiding citizen I would have possibly utilized some herbs and powders…but I wouldn’t know how to acquire those items even if I was willing to risk arrest.
Again, I have nothing but the handful of Lord-Cokes may have helped me realize the problem behind this week’s rant. It’s been a bit of a manic-depressive week. Last Friday I actually made it out into public to join a few thousand friends (or 20,000, if the Jazzfest crowd was doing the counting) at the Bob Dylan show at the awfully-titled Birdcage.
Despite what you may have read, Dylan was really on this past Friday. This show ranked among the best of the dozen or so times I’ve seen the Old Bard…which was also the opinion of everybody that I talked to that attended the performance. He was in as fine of voice as I’ve ever seen, and his choice of material and arrangement was as straightforward as he’s been in many years. Even my son and his friends were raving as we finally found my Jeep six blocks away. It was also very cool that for one of the only times that I can recall we had the reigning number one biggest selling artist appear in our fine city.
This euphoric glow was tempered the rest of the weekend by two events that loomed large on the horizon. Monday was not only my birthday but the fifth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Centers. Like everybody else, I woke up that day expecting it to be like any other day. The only real excitement was the fact that Dylan was releasing Love and Theft on my birthday. But the world changed as I made my way down Minnesota Avenue to my office.
Five years later, the focus again was on the events of that day whether we wanted them or not. CNN reran their broadcast from that day, as did, believe it or not, Howard Stern. Every channel had their own hanky-worthy slow motion tributes and recaps. ABC even showed a fictionalized people-in-crisis docudrama lying about the events leading up to the attack.
It was not a day for celebrating the meaningless life of a loser dweeb such as me. So here I am tonight with nothing but a half-gallon of Canadian whiskey and a channel remote that can’t believe the networks have nothing better than Dancing With the Stars and Rockstar Supernova. God, my life sucks.