And Now For Something Completely Different

The blog has been under the cone of silence for nearly a week, and the explanation can be traced to fear. Ernest Hemingway called writing facing the white bull, and although Hemingway can be accused of being overly dramatic in his posturing and his extravagant liberations and runnings about, and particularly in his choice of exits, he did have a gift of turning an illuminating phrase. Sometimes a blank, empty page can seem daunting. What if I have nothing to say? What if what I do write pisses someone off, not some random stranger, but someone I know and love and need? Ideally the blog is free range writing, and we have to be free to forage and feast and peck on any seed of inspiration we unearth. But what looks like a tasty morsel to me can strike the reader as a disgusting bug covered with dirt. Well today we are going to dish the dirt, and let the dust and the disgust fall where they may.

Kate Gosselin is on the cover of People magazine this week with a new $20,000 hairdo and a $4,000 makeup job. Here is a woman who is fake from the top of her head to her boobs to her belly, and famous and admired for practically nothing. Shakespeare named his famous shrew Kate, and Kates (at least this one) have been trying to live up to the name ever since. Kate Gosselin repulses me, for she is the epitome of the empty celebrity-worshipping culture that is America. She parents eight ill-advised children badly (no one as immature as dysfunctional as she and her husband should have one child, let alone eight induced and created by the use of powerful fertility treatments.) The Gosselins are famous for nothing, living right down the celebrity street from the Kardashians and the Hilton sisters, with a talent for nothing other than a willingness to display all their messy embarrassing immaturity in public, and wear expensive pretty clothes on red carpets. Kate's getting a talk show now. Maybe her first guest can be Tiger Woods.

I don't like watching people fight on TV, because I hate myself when I'm angry. I don't like losing control. I hate craziness and the loss of rationality, the place where arguments turn into scenes and everything becomes hurtful and personal and your guts start to churn and you find yourself fighting the urge to fight or flee. My mother was an amazing woman in many ways, but something that will always stay with me was her painful and acute ability to cut you when she was angry, with wounding words, withholding affection, sarcasm and humiliation. I have a deep, visceral reaction to people who talk like Kate, who try to get the upper hand in a negotiation with belittling remarks and hurt. Jon was a spoiled, self-indulgent teenager, but his wife humiliated and emasculated him on national TV week after week. His mid-life crisis and train wreck carrying on were sad and predictable. Like Tiger Woods he seemed to have a very low standard for what comprised "hot chicks."

It will be interesting to view the sequel to this sad celebrity tale. For Jon now the money is gone and his fifteen minutes are nearly over. His life is taking on the bloated remember me quality of faded minor television actors, and, after the TLC lawyers are done carving up his office-above-the-liquor-store mouthpiece, he'll have severely limited prospects for rebuilding his brand. He'll no doubt wind up doing shows like "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here" or "Dance Your Ass Off." His wife's prospects are brighter. Somehow in the whole mess she comes off as the sympathetic and responsible one. I know better. I've been in those kinds of arguments, so I know where the verbal weapons were hidden, where the hand grenades of shame were tossed. She broke him down. They destroyed each other, and turned eight little lives into tabloid curiousities, all for a little bit of money. I love that line, the closing words of "Fargo." The Coen brothers should take a stab at the Gosselin saga, but it's probably too bizarre even for them.

I'm writing cranky and bitter today, because circumstances here at blog central are getting under my skin. Most of the news is bad, especially at the personal level. Marie's employer called her this morning and her temporary assignment ends as of today, and that plunges us into a new round of financial uncertainty. We had another global thermonuclear fight, and this one was all my fault. I was the one who got irrational and flew off the handle. Fortunately she was quiet and understanding and waited for me to calm down. We need a miracle. We need our own reality show. I've always said we would be good rich people. We would enjoy it far more than they do, and we would be more generous.

My own job has taken a turn for the worse. I spend my days talking to drunk, pissed off people who don't know how to operate a TV remote or connect a cable wire or read a bill, and now the global communications giant is instituting a 2% sales quota, meaning that 20 of the thousand calls I take in a month have to end in the sale of a new product, which sounds reasonable except that nearly all of my calls are from people who are furious about their existing products.

It's a weird job environment. All of the communication is by email and on a typical day I get 30-40 emails, some about service issues or lost ipods and at least six that are of the "Office Space" TPS report variety, something about a policy that is changing or a new code is being instituted, or this campaign is being revamped and that one is ending or a new work order error is being created. My eyes glaze over when I read them. I'm literally bored out of my mind and want to stare off into space, gut a fish at my desk just to break the monotony. Lately I've being taking my laptop into work, to play Bowl Bound College Football and Pokerstars.com between calls and the really even more bizarre thing is that my supervisor is okay with it. He hasn't expressed anything other than mild curiosity about it. "Are you playing with real money?" he asked. I assured him that I am, although lately I'm not winning any. It's amazing how many ways wired aces can lose to a pair of eights or deuces. I'm having new nightmares just thinking about it.

I'm basically an optimistic and positive person. I never set out to be such a bitter old man. But I've come to the stage where I need something good to happen, or I may have to take matters into my own hands and go a little crazy. I've done that before, however, and it didn't come out well. If only I could get a job writing a blog, watching Duck football, playing poker and exercising. Then I would be the happiest man in the world. I wonder if we have any cheese curls.

In other news, the smart, funny and beautiful blog daughter is having a baby, on June 8th, dangerously close to her beloved, now-deceased Grandpa Prunehead's birthday. The ultrasound was last week and it's a girl. We have a surplus of girls but I consider that an embarrassment of riches. Marie's son just a had a baby in December, Madilyne Rose, and she as pretty and sweet and pink and perfect as a baby could be. These are the compensations for growing old. In another 14 years the government is going to pay me for doing absolutely nothing, and I'm sure it will be everything I ever dreamed it would be, and in the meantime there are beautiful, pink, perfect grandchildren, who only want to be held and loved. Just like all the rest of us.