There wasn't any joint: 2007

LI has been reading over our 2007 posts with some disappointment. In 2007, we were much more verbose and much less witty than in 2006.

The main thematic difference between this year and previous ones is political. From 2001 until about June of 2007, we emitted a constant stream of howls. Notably, about Iraq, and the crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush years. But in June we looked back and realized that, for all the denunciation of the feebs, the psychos, the deepily and creepily murderous D.C. set, it mattered not a wit. When the Democratic majority calmly let itself be immobilized and zombified by the Petro Gun club, displaying the same kind of acumen and forward looking spirit which infused the halcyon days of Bremer’s rule in Iraq, it answered the question that foamed on our lips: can this governing elite be saved? At the moment, grassroots politics in the U.S. is a sick joke, if not completely dead. It consists of what, four vegetarian Quakers? It is scary how dead. The slack jawed peckerwood and the cretinous investment banker, that unlikely duo that always emerges in true coup regimes, have so kicked the ass of the angels of our better nature that they seem down for the count. LI’s animadversions on this situation had become less critique and more the bad habit of a man in middle aged psychological meltdown. Fuck it, and fuck them.

In place of politics, LI’s posts became big, boggy steps on the way to our project – tracing the rise of the happiness culture and its tragic flaws. Plus we mixed in the usual welter of LI’s kinks. The language of the posts became self-dealing, inward looking –and rebarbatively explicative. But what can we do? It is in our nature (as the scorpion said to the frog) to be a village explainer, a crackhead on a cracker barrel.

Looking ahead, we doubt we will avoid picking at the scabs of politics completely. Next year is an election year, and that is always like shootin’ time in the shithead factory, as we get down to that rawest strata of the American Volk, a shared and beloved bozoism, mc-ed by a millionaire press squad compounded of sycophancy and hair oil. Fun for all!

So, this is the bad news. The good news is… well, LI has made some steps in the right direction, that is, as far as our happiness project is concerned. My image for this project is of a subterranean groping forward in a great darkness, the exploration of long lost passages clogged with the marbleized detritus of forgotten civilizations, upon which I can shed some flickering little light. The twentieth century, don’t you know. LI is, at least, an intrepid conceptual spelunker. So intrepid that the further I advance, the more I get the feeling that I’m alone down here, and nobody knows what the fuck I’m talking about.

“I knew a man once did a girl in.
Any man might do a girl in
Any man has to, needs to, wants to
Once in a lifetime, do a girl in
Well he kept her there in a bath
With a gallon of lysol in a bath
...
This went on for a couple of months
Nobody came
And nobody went
But he took in the milk and he paid the rent.
...
But here's what I was going to say.
He didn't know if he was alive
and the girl was dead
He didn't know if the girl was alive
and he was dead
He didn't know if they were both alive
or both were dead
If he was alive then the milkman wasn't
and the rent-collector wasn't
And if they were alive then he was dead.
There wasn't any joint
There wasn't any joint
For when you're alone
When you're alone like he was alone
You're either or neither…”

Okay, so much for confession. And contrition, I think I’ve been contrite. I've apologized, here, god damn it! And also, to be frank, I've written some hot stuff too. But I will do better, people; I vow to be funnier in 2008. Honestly. You’ll see.