The upshot of the Michael Jackson autopsy seems to be that, under the clown outfits, he was actually ET – a hairless little thing with no obvious connection to planet earth. Well, whatever. ET gone home. But why is everyone being so nice about him, now that he’s dead? What is it about a massive coronary that brings to flood the milk of human kindness?

I once knew a guy who kept a ferret in his freezer. It was dead, and was before he put it in there (just to put your mind at ease, and put to rest any ideas you SPCA types might have). He was a big guy, with a beard and a Harley, which he kept in the kitchen during the winter. Perhaps so that it could be close to the ferret. I didn’t think of that at the time, but there it is. A theory formulated in retrospect. Out there now for consideration.

One day in January, somebody drove the Harley across the kitchen and through the wall into the garden.

I just found some old black and white prints from the days when I knew this guy. They show my sister standing in the rain by the sea, looking into the camera lens like a raccoon eyeing the business end of a 12 gauge, and some long-haired types who were in a band. One of them, the chubby one with the THC glaze on his eyeballs, was her boyfriend at the time. He played bass.

The photos were taken by the guy who drove the Harley through the wall. He claimed later that he was just trying to lay a little rubber into the lino, but that his hand slipped. No matter. It all worked out well enough in the end. The Harley was on the road come spring, and the ferret eventually got a decent burial in the garbage bin. My sister left the bass player for the photographer. No wait. It was the other way around.

Procrastination. If only I could get around to doing more of it, I’d be a fucking professional. Unfortunately my time gets soaked up playing Quake and drifting across the internet, half reading half baked bullshit that doesn’t have anything to do with anything that has anything to do with me.

So there’s this feature on WordPress that will tell you what search terms a visitor, referred by a search engine, used to find the site. Now, I’m not going to name any names, but one of you who visited in the last 24 hours found this site by searching for “amputee whores.” You know who you are.

I’m reading Adam Smith. He’s that charming little Pict with a huge big nose, eyes that bulged like a frog and a lisp who thought the lazy hand of under-worked lay-abouts was guiding his nation toward prosperity (seriously – check out his ideas on how the steam engine came to be developed). Now, chronic sloth that I am, I’m all for the idea of some kind of dictatorship of the lazy, but I find it hard to take seriously a book titled “The Wealth of Nations” that hails from an ex-country best described now (as opposed to its glory days, back when it had trees) as the Newfoundland of the world.

Apologies, of course, to our deep-fried Mars Bar-eating friends from north of Hadrian’s Wall.

Fine and fair enough. But speaking of that crowd (economists, not Scots), is this Milton Friedman blaming some already rather over-targeted people for the evils of communism?

“…the groups in our society that have the most at stake in the preservation and strengthening of competitive capitalism are those minority groups which can most easily become the object of distrust and enmity of the majority – the Negroes, the Jews, the foreign born, to mention only the most obvious. Yet paradoxically enough, the enemies of the free market – the Socialists and the Communists – have been recruited in disproportionate measure from these groups.”

Do you think Henry Kissinger missed that part?

Like Meatloaf says, “all I can do is keep on telling you, ‘I want you, I need you,’ but [sorry Henry] there ain’t no way I’m ever gonna love you. Now don’t be sad, it’s because two out of three is bad.”

Yesterday there was a photo on the front page of the local daily rag of a blond chick at a hockey gang waving a handful of bloody intestines at the players. Imagine that: you’re out there on the ice, wacking the puck around, and you look up, and some babe is enthusiastically waving the still-steaming entrails of her boyfriend. Was it just that her hands were cold? Or is it a love-offering?

Scanning the caption, it turned out to be a red pompom, but the whole thing made me happy, if only briefly.

I was loading up a bag of stuff to take to Goodwill and in the inside pocket of a jacket with a busted zipper (yeah, that’s the kind of crap we unload on the poor) I found some notes I took when we went to Mount Vernon.

“Mount Vernon.” Imagine if that was a verb instead of a noun. Where would you print an instruction like that?

It (Mount Vernon) was George Washington’s estate. It’s 20 minutes drive through a 7-11 suburb south of DC to his lil’ slave village on the Potomac. They (the slaves) are buried in a patch of woods 20 meters or so from His modest little mausoleum. It’s not too clear where exactly (George didn’t have the holes they put the bodies in marked), but there’s a sign by the path that assures visitors that the birch and maples that grow there are fertilized by genuine, if nameless, black worker types.

Regardless, a noble place. Like the little video by the entrance says: “one man, one leader, one cause.”

The place itself is whatever. A big rickety white house on the edge of a bluff above the river. We were toured around it by a tetchy middle-aged woman who seemed to have collected a lot of free samplers from the Mall Girl makeup company, and used them all at once.

We paused just inside the door of George’s dining room—a high ceilinged room, with lots of plaster wingy-dings and bright green walls—and she laced up her fingers over her tummy and told us (a motley little gang of newlywed Americans) to “consider the 18th century.” I squinched my eyes and tried my best, and missed what she said next, and didn’t write anything else down until I caught “…he had no choice—there were too many people in the pie.”

So then we toured the grounds. Tried not to tread on buried black folks. Stopped by the gift shop for a coffee mug and went to the toilet, which is decorated with a photo of Pandit Nehru giving a VOA interview outside George’s house. Went by the museum.

Good fun, the museum. The highlight of course, is a set of false teeth worn by George. They’re not made of wood, as I was led to believe as a little boy. No, only the real thing would do for George. Yep, that’s right: the man’s false teeth were real.

I’ve been wondering ever since whether, if you have to have a tooth pulled because it’s rotten, you can turn around and set it in a piece of cherry wood and poodang! you’re good to go—some rich guy has new teeth. Or whether rotten teeth (the kind of teeth you have pulled voluntarily because they’re no good) are, well, no good. In which case, where did these teeth come from?

Amr! My little friend. There was a rumor going around that you had blown off your fingers with one of those little devices you build. I had a vision of you stump-fingered and frustrated.

I’m glad you’re back though. When you first dropped by, I was hoping for regular guest appearances. An angry, crazy muppet popping up from the floorboards periodically to spit and squeal in half-English and make the audience snicker.

No coincidence I suppose that I was reading Thompson at the very moment you stopped by. Perhaps indeed this was the phrase that conjured you up:

“What do you say” the Good Doctor was asking, “about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison … ?” And being the irascible old burnout that he was by then, he immediately answered: “…if a cool spring rain on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison scum in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation.”

He was talking about the generation – mine I suppose – that grew up in the 1980s.

Are you a child of the 80s Amr? I imagine so. Sad that, because in Egypt you didn’t even have TV worth watching. I guess it’s a good thing you still have your fingers.

But thinking more broadly of Egypt and things blowing up, it looks like a couple more kids from Boulak or Sharabeya or some other cinderblock shithole have jumped the tracks and done to some French school kids what the security services have been doing to them all these years.

What do you say about a generation that never knew the crystal blue lake at all, only the black poison scum that comes up out of the gutter every time it rains? Forced to learn mindless nationalistic nothings by rote in schoolrooms without windows while the crooked sons of sycophantic regime-trusties go to school in Europe. Working mindless jobs for bus fare and an ever-shrinking loaf of tasteless bread. And fucked with broomsticks by thugs in dirty uniforms when they protest.

There is not much left to a generation to whom even relentless masturbation is denied (notwithstanding the odd bit of pocket-pool action on the Metro when a foreign girl gets into the wrong car) by sheer population density and the highlight of the television season is a dreary Ramadan special that would put Jerry Lewis to sleep. One can only imagine how attractive the mantra of “two parts ammonium nitrate, one part hydrazine” must be to a priapic seventeen-year old contemplating another night huddled with seven siblings and the neighbors to watch Adel Imam worry about the embassy next door or the car thief down the street.

NB: if you’re nuts, and you submit a comment, I’ll edit it before I approve it. But I guess you already knew that, didn’t you cheesehead?

The air this morning was crisp and cold as a virgin daiquiri and there were two crows standing on the peak of John’s house. They were puffing white smoke from their bird-nostrils and looking down on the street, watching a little gaggle of vicious fear-biting cowards trail lamely toward the temple of their blood cult. Crunching the snow in the empty Sunday quiet. Their paper-thin souls shining pure in the blue light reflecting off the icicles that dangled dangerously over them from the power lines.

I have given up praying for them to be rushed forward to the end of the light on the point of one of these. There doesn’t seem to be anyone listening.

I’m reading Craig Murray’s book. I’m not reading it. I’m letting it lay where I tossed it in a corner. He’s an insipid pot bellied fool, a pussy-crazed middle-aged bureaucrat desperate to justify his cock-led professional self-immolation with some crapulous human rights heroics. Just another angry Brit bitching about his hotel room at the end of the day.

I’m painting the kitchen. Maybe that accounts for my mood. You have to be relentlessly positive when you paint, otherwise what’s the point? It’s all about progress and improvement, straight lines and smooth edges. After an hour or an hour and a half it gets too much and I start to fantasize about mayhem and murder, picture jangled twisted lines, splattered with random patterns of multicolored blood.

We went to Next Door Neil’s house a while back. Wine and cheese by the fireplace. Talked about his childhood on the prairies. Big sky and late evenings harvesting. “I only had cowboy boots till I was ten,” he said. “Never shoes.” That completely unnerved me. My suburban compass twitches to the harvest moon. I had pictured him with taped up glasses and books in a satchel, reading on the fire escape at night and hanging about on the street corner waiting to be beat up for his lunch money.

It’s all upside down and in the end I blame Obama. Just when we thought we knew how the movie was going to end, he says it’s all going to change.

NB: if you’re nuts, and you submit a comment, I’ll edit it before I approve it. But I guess you already knew that, didn’t you cheesehead?

My inauguration highlights.

We got to the mall late—around 10.30—and parked ourselves by the big screen by the Lincoln Memorial. It was cold and crisp and everyone was huddled inside parkas pluming out steam and rubbing their hands together.

George Bush appeared and sat down. Crowd booed, except for a skinny white chick in a mall jacket standing next to me. She tightened her lips.

Obama appeared and sat down. Lots of cheering. Fifty-something black lady behind me in a fur coat started to cry and say “Jesus. Thank you. Jesus.” over and over.

Rick Warren, token Whiskey Tango god freak, praised Jesus and blabbled listlessly for a while. Probably called for the sodomites to be burned and the harlots to be strung up. I don’t know. Crowd was quiet. Mall Jacket Amened him.

Aretha Franklin sang pretty well for a morbidly obese old lady. Clearly she has had her day though. Crowd responded nevertheless.

Some kind of incomprehensible music that only Yo Yo Ma seemed to enjoy.

Obama. The big moment. The oath got mangled but nobody cared. Speech generally received with tears from the old black ladies, clapping and some cheers from the rest of the crowd. Anytime he mentioned smacking down the enemies of lifestyle and liberty, rapturous applause. Puzzled silence at the mention of Muslims though, and only spattered applause for some of the complicated stuff about working with allies and blah blah.

Joseph Lowery. Most everyone was headed out by the time he hit the stage, and there wasn’t much response till he got to beating tanks into tractors, and it seems the oddity of the phrase that caught the crowd rather than anything else. Everybody getting their own vine, however, got them going, and they swung with him into the day when the black man won’t be asked to give back and the yellow will be mellow. “…the red man can get ahead, man” got a laugh (not sure whether the irony there was intentional), and the white man doing right gets a huge chorus of Amens from some whiteys in spandex on bikes who have paused in the course of their exodus from the mall to hear the man out.

Bought an Obama toque on my way out.

As a Canadian, coming to New York in the winter is like walking into someone else’s hell, only to find out that it’s just like home. Like if Mohamed, in casting off the mortal coil, found himself somehow transposed into an Italian hell—you know, the Dante place: the nasty hot weather, the boiling oil, and the rampant buggery. “Hell? Shit, this ain’t so bad.” Hitches up his jallebeya and scratches at himself. “What’s Whitey bitching about?”

We rolled into town swathed to the eyebrows in cheap but effective winter gear. We looked like Walmart Eskimos. The White Trash from the End of the World. I imagined the New Yorkers sneering behind our backs. Them in their stylin’ double breasted wool overcoats with the big lapels and funky little hats, their ears white with cold, shivering, their hands stuffed into their nethers to ward off frost bite. Maybe they stared enviously. I don’t know.

New York gave me some very strange dreams. One night I dreamed I was playing golf in Bhutan with Charles Levinson. We were plotting to murder someone but I can’t remember who, but I think we were going to do it with a nine iron. I think it was because the place where we were staying—we were house-sitting for Mike and Kelly, friends who have two small children—was full of toys that talked. Great piles of plastic cars and model space ships and guns, keyboards, toy drills and so on and on. The alphabetic fridge magnets sounded out their sounds (“I am an A, and I sound like this…. Aaaaaaaa”), the race track in the bedroom said “Give me speed! Speeeeeeed!” and the spaceships made little laser “tew tew” noises and barked commands at one another “Break right!” and so on. It was all very animist and disturbing. The worst was the Storm Trooper helmet that looked like a severed head. I was helping Mike unload the car after they came back. It was piled high with more toys that talked. It was the middle of the night and the snow was swirling around us and we were both freezing (me because I left my coat inside, Mike because he lives in New York now and if he wasn’t freezing he wouldn’t fit in). Mike pulled the head out of the trunk and stuck it under his arm and started to trudge back up the street. It eyed me for a moment then yelled “I’ve got you covered!”

New York: My watch is running slow. It only fits 50 minutes into any given hour. The effect is enervating. I don’t have what it takes to deal with this city. Sitting here in Queens I feel like a battery hen squatting on an empty uterus.

We helter-skeltered out of our northern refuge almost a week ago. Tumbling southwards like a breeze-blown frost bunny, like a family of snowballs headed south for the winter. Shedding icy flakes and getting nervous. Watches slowing.

We over-nighted in Clark Summit, just outside of Scranton. I should have known better. One look at Biden’s hairplugs should have told me everything I needed to know about Scranton and its immediate kith. An hour at the Gourmet Family Restaurant, however, filled in the rest.

The Gourmet, just off the side of Great Army of the Republic Highway, has a certain charm. The booths still sport little personal jukeboxes, the ones with the bakelite buttons—a dime for the latest George Jones or Dolly Parton—and there are six American flags in a row in the parking lot. There’s a counter where folk too old to lever themselves down into the booths sit with their canes lined up between them like, well, like canes lined up between old peoples’ knees I guess. I dunno. Come up with your own damn metaphor.

It’s a place straight out of What [middle class] White Folk [like me] Like. It has all the class-transvestism that we like. That frisson of the cultural dumpster dive. But the food’s crap—canned gravy over canned meat. Canned veggies on the side. And the air smells of Glade and the kind of furniture polish that White Folk put on plastic wood. The garrulous old fuck at the counter, when he’s finished gumming down a piece of pie with canned filling, hauls his rickety self out to a thirty-thousand dollar Cherokee parked in a row with everyone else’s thirty-thousand dollar Cherokees and fires it up beneath that row of a half-dozen fluttering Old Glories.

It’s a place looking for a punchline but with only 50 minutes to work with this hour, I don’t have time to figure out what it is.

Christmas: it’s finally over and we go back to not giving a shit about family. Man, I hate those once-a-year phone calls to Aunty Whatshername.

I spent as much time as possible playing Call of Duty 4, which brought back fond memories of Iraq. Not the bullets zipping overhead and the shooting dogs part, but the night where I sat bleary eyed in the MWR watching half a dozen teenaged platoon mates zipped up on Rip It and Poptarts playing the multi player version.

These kids were barely out of basic training, let alone grade 8, barely out of Elbow Fuck, PA but that they were mainlined into Butt Fuck Mesopotamia on a C-130. Dropped into a grey world of gravel and c-wire, T-wall, shit stew portapotties, burning tires and towel head wackos looping out through the c-wire. Where they get to spend their off time working through … more of the same.

It made going out on patrol kind of eerie though. Like we’d all stepped out the gate, and straight into the head of the pimpled little teenaged Californian who earned a new Porsche and Spanish revival bungalow by channeling these post-modern Magyar nightmares of Saracen pillage into a little white box.

Highly instructive, though, those hours of hiding in my “office” shooting brown people with a bottle of Jack Daniels by my elbow.

Lesson #1 learned: if you’re in trouble, hang back and wait till you get an opportunity to shoot one of your buddies. Shoot him in the leg and let someone else finish it off. You’ve got nothing to lose by doing this, and his corpse is a good place to scavenge for stuff you need.

Lesson #2: Shooting those fuckers yelling “khawaga” at you as you try to do something is just about as fun as you thought it would be.

Lesson #3: No matter how drunk you get, no matter how sucked into that weird racist world of bloody meltdowns where the only goal is to mow down The Other as quickly as possible, listening to Roxette while you do it is inexcusable. It’s over the line.