Heh.

Just one more reason to fall at the feet of Sean Casey:

Sean Casey walked in the clubhouse door Thursday, hours after hitting his 100th career home run, and found -- nothing.

Two days earlier, the Reds had been greeted by 500 red balloons on the ceiling of the cramped room as a Nike-conceived celebration of Ken Griffey Jr.'s 500th homer.

Before long, though, Casey got his due.

"Look what Nike sent me!" Casey shouted across the room, in the general direction of Griffey.

In his hand, he held a mostly deflated balloon left over from Griffey's stash, with a black "1" written in marker where the "5" had been.

-The Cincinnati Enquirer

Shut up, Bill

First line from Nixon's memoir: "I was born in the house my father built."

First line from Clinton's memoir: "Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana."

Not to say Nixon was any great President, not by a long shot, but seriously, which page would you rather go on reading?

As one of my writing professors said of The Mists of Avalon, "This book would have benefited from some judicious editing."

I know in the previous post I had a bitch-fest about editors, but I can't even call My Life "edited," because this thing should be maybe a quarter of the eighty billion pages he rolled off. (Dear Lord, all those dead trees! Where art thou, environmentalists?) Whoever gave this the editorial A-OK merely checked for periods and apostrophes and sent it off to press. I mean, Knof didn't have to Maxwell Perkins the thing, but damn. Did he even consider the poor people who had to type and galley this crap?

One of my radio buddies read a passage on the air. It took him maybe seven minutes or so, and involved some sort of anecdote about Clinton driving up to a house to meet some guy with a McGovern sticker on his pickup truck. Then when Clinton was President he invited him to the White House. And then later on the guy died. And the host put the book down, paused, and said, "People, that was one paragraph."

argh! at blondechampagne@hotmail.com

sigh...

I mentioned P.J. O'Rourke recently, and I've been thinking about him lately as he totally has my dream job (beloved commentator who both writes and lectures and has absolutely nothing to do with engineers.) When I met him at a post-presentation reception, I had to fight my way through teems of people pressed adoringly against him: "I really enjoy discussing your articles with my parents."

"Can I buy you a drink?"

"You've changed my entire outlook on politics!"

"How many books have you published now? Eight?"

I stood at the fringes of the crowd absorbing these declarations of brotherhood that writing had wrought, a profound realization zipping through me: If you become a successful writer, people will give you beer. To hell with joining the Air Force and becoming an astronaut! You can't fit a keg into an F-16!

Nonfiction writing is easier than fiction, in which you have to make up a completely original storyline, which is basically impossible since there are only about five plots in existence and Shakespeare already got four of them. It's more respectable than free-verse poetry, which allows you to scatter about 17 words around the page and call it a day, but then you have the problem of convincing people to give you money to do this.

Column writing in particular isn't a tremendously stable occupation. Rarely do people offer to buy you a drink when you really need it, which is when you're actually attempting to write. And it's an extraordinarily dangerous line of work.

That's no joke. Here's a random sampling of major humor columnists: Dave Barry. Will Rogers. Mark Twain. Erma Bombeck. P.J. O'Rourke. Lewis Grizzard.

What instantly leaps out at you from that list? There you go: Four of those writers are dead, for a kick-off rate of approximately 67 percent. (It could be more. This figure involved math, so somebody double-check me on this.) And the ones left standing — Barry and O'Rourke — are prime candidates for Charter Health System commercials. Dave is on something like his ninth wife and is currently running around promoting a work of fiction that apparently involves an alligator. O'Rourke was a Vietnam-era radical who smoked hashish and God knows what else before suddenly deciding to become a very loud libertarian. Grizzard wound up unbalanced AND dead: He married his fourth wife just days before reaching his expiration date.

They say that Grizzard suffered complications from major heart surgery, Will Rogers went down in a plane crash, and Mark Twain died of general crotchetiness, but clearly they were actually killed by editors.

Written humor, like spoken humor, hinges upon timing. And in writing, timing is dictated by precise word emphasis, paragraph breaks and punctuation. Colons, for instance, are WAY funnier than exclamation points. Capital letters are HILARIOUS. And when editors start tinkering with your timing — two paragraphs forced into an arranged marriage here, a comma benched for a period there — life as we know it ceases to exist. It would be as if Griffey Jr. watched the pitcher heave the ball, waited for George Steinbrenner to fire somebody, bought a Lemon Chill from a passing vendor, hung around watching the first baseman scratch himself and THEN swung the bat. You simply wind up looking like a total pothead. So, when a conglomeration of fuel-clogged writing hits the general public beneath your name, the first thing you do is start looking for a plugged-in hair dryer in a body of water.

This happened to me with an essay I had published in a webzine. I clicked it open to find that poor, unwitting sentences had been rammed together, the — what the hell is this? — the opening paragraph had been rearranged, and OH MY GOD THEY COMPLETELY CHANGED THE ENDING NO NO NO NO!

There it was: A horribly timed wad of the English language, credited wholly to me, circling the whole entire Internet. So the only logical course of action, from where I was sitting, was to e-mail a copy of the original, unedited column to every person I had ever met (all eleven of them), explain what had happened, and ingest about eight gallons of Draino. And although the reaction of all the people I have ever met was comforting and sympathetic ("What essay?") I try to take comfort in the fact that at least I was published-- if only in a craptastic manner.

WLDB UPDATE

Do you know that I came home from work and that little bastard was sitting OUTSIDE the Dustbuster, STILL ALIVE?! God I wish I were making this up. It wasn't going anywhere, but the antennae were still moving. So I tried to Dustbust it up some more, which didn't work, so finally I got out the broom and swept it out on the porch and shoved it under the staircase-- a drop of about fifteen feet. I ran down after it to make sure it was really, really dead-- and the antennae? Still waving. So I started shrieking and whacking it with the broom, because really, this was getting scary beyond regular bug-scary. You know what, screw the atom bomb, we need something that will take care of the cockroaches. I don't care if I'm a flaming husk, I just want to be sure the bugs are dead.

I'm pretty sure Pierre has assumed room temperature now, because although the antennae were still moving every now and then, it appeared to be the work of the wind. I think. Even in death, the sumbitch mocks me.

Fear and Loathing In the Bathroom

I'm scared a lot these days. What if the new day job just isn't out there? And if it is, will I have a three-month honeymoon and then immediately hate it as I have almost all the others? How am I going to get by this time?

Fear has forced me to the second floor of my apartment complex. I live above the world for two reasons: 1) this lessens the chance of becoming robbed and beaten in the night, which is always a bonus 2) bugs must be avoided at all costs.

So far I've met with success on Goal One, but Goal Two was foiled last night when I flipped on the bathroom light and found the World's Largest Disgusting Bug sitting there looking at me. It was so nasty, you guys. It was just yooge. Pat Day could have thrown a saddle over this thing and ridden it in the Belmont.

I just-- I cannot stand bugs, and I cannot stand killing them. This is not out of some sort of unitard-wearing sensitivity to The Circle Of Life, but because I become completely yicked out by the sight of the smushed bug parts and that huge revolting crunching noise. As opposed to Flipper, who is an animal trainer and does loathsome things on behalf of rodents and fish on a routine basis; who I once saw very carefully pick up a spider off her living room carpet with her bare hands and then gently set it outside. Go forth and multiply, repulsive, disease-carrying spider! Born free!

So my solution is to Dustbust the little bastards. This makes for some interesting chase scenes, and yes I simply toss out the Dustbuster once a year or so and just get a new one rather than even contemplate the process of changing the bag, but at least that crunching is not involved.

Well, last night when WLDB made his appearance I happened to be on the phone with Flipper, who had a front row audio seat for the following: "EW! Oh, God, ew. The World's Largest Disgusting Bug is in my bathroom. Hold on a sec. (roar of Dustbuster) EW! Shit! Get over here, you little-- (sound of Dustbuster crashing into wall) Oh, crap, he went in the closet." Whereupon I settled the issue by slamming the closet door and pretending the whole thing never happened. The Dustbuster, however, remained at the ready.

And damn me if WLDB didn't grab a pair and wander back out of the closet. The process repeated itself maybe eight more times, me Dustbusting this thing behind various closets and filing cabinets. I wear cowboy boots with regularity but I couldn't herd this thing that was like 1/7000th my size. I sat on the floor of my bedroom and sorted through my credit card bills, always keeping one nervous eye out for The Trump Of All Bugs. I began to very seriously consider sleeping on the futon in the living room. You win, WLDB. You win the bedroom for the night.

But then he moved into the living room. Okay, now he was just taunting me. Once he wound up near the door, and I flung it open and actually stood there before the world in my nightgown trying to Dustbust him out onto the porch, ready to truce it out as long as he just left, but he would have none of it and scuttled behind a bookcase.

I faced up to it at last.

It was time for the shoe.

You have to choose carefully, when it comes to this. Using a book was out of the question. I have too much respect for books. And I didn't want to use a shoe I wear with regularity, as this procedure stood the chance of scraping bug guts onto something that would be actually touching my body, and I didn't want to use my work shoes, as it's tough enough to keep them in presentable shape anyway, so I grabbed the left version of this ugly pair of pinchy slipons I never wear anymore and yet fear giving away because you never know when life will call for such a thing. Women worry about this stuff--that the instant we toss something, our wardrobe will suddenly develop a desperate need for it-- which is why we hang onto plastic fuschia purses purchased in the waning edges of the Carter administration.

He re-emerged before long. I approached with the shoe. Gave him a whack. He ran away. Oh, it's a French bug. I trapped Pierre against the doorjamb and whack whack whack whack oh God this is so disgusting ew ew ew EW come on Tink be a woman get him!

He fell to the floor, upside down. There was a skittering noise as he kicked and spun almost as bad as the crushing, crunching sound. I administered one more blow, part of him flew across the floor, and it was over.

The Dustbuster was retrieved to clear the battlefield.

There! There. I did it. I put my hands on my hips. I would have spiked the carcass if it wouldn't have been so repulsive. Stupid nasty little thing, I beat you. I WIN.

I put away my credit card bills. I went to bed. The new day job awaits.

blondechampagne@hotmail.com