Monday, November 11, 2002
Sorry, pardon the bad attitude, but I’m fresh out of condoms. What really pisses me off is that it probably won’t make a difference. Think about it for a minute, if running out of rubbers is going to change your day at all and you’ll probably get pissed off, too. So let’s both get pissed off and dig in.

I probably wouldn’t be so dang incensed if I had actually used it in some fashion, even heroin smuggling, but no, I gave it away out of the goodness of my heart. Just some kid who gave me a hard-luck story about not having any money and needing a prophylactic, so I loaned him one—to be paid back with interest. I thought I was doing a good deed! No, turns out this kid just puts it on like a hat and runs off and I find out later he’s some lunatic who’s scammed sixty free rubbers off of suckers like me. The world’s a sad place sometimes.

Oh, I just saw jackass: the movie, by the way. So what’s the big deal? Seems like any normal weekend with your buddies and a trunk full of beer to me. Putting a taser to your nutsack and jumping out of a tree with a bungee cord attached to your underwear isn’t even a memorable weekend on my block. Those jackass guys should bring me aboard as a consultant or something. I have a brilliant idea for a sequel, and I’ve tried it before so I know it works—it involves two hundred chocolate bars, a bag full of marmosets, and a high school bully who works in a hospital burn ward lately. That’s all I’m saying until we ink a deal, this cow don’t give away milk for free.

This just fresh in from the list of things that pisses me off: You’re sitting there, trying to enjoy a Captain D’s shrimp dinner with hush puppies and some pre-teen priss in a pink sweater materializes on the TV and asks, “Can we talk about something personal?” Not if you want this shrimp to stay down, Sabrina. There is no way, no matter how loud you yell, to cut this discussion off before it starts. I don’t know why these nasty tarts are asking me if they can talk about it when they know I can’t answer, like they just want to taunt me. Mark my words, if I ever see one of these stuck-up debutantes sitting in a restaurant enjoying snails and squid I’m going to pull up a chair and start talking loudly about that bout of crabs back in 1993.

I’ve been watching TV Land all this week and had a scary thought: If aliens were receiving our broadcast signals and watching only TV Land, they would assume Scott Baio held a very high position in our government, like a world leader or something, mayhap even a god. Between Charles in Charge and Happy Days there is a vast over-representation of Scott Baio in our TV history. It keeps me up some nights thinking about it. Our best hope, if this were the case, is that all those commercials for scrubbing bubbles would scare the aliens into thinking we had nano-technology that would destroy them.

I’m developing my own take-off on that Kevin Bacon game, and I’m planning on calling it “Stu Umbrage’s Six Hyperlinks to Amazon.com.” Your friends come over, they all write down various word strings and dump them into a bowler hat, and people draw the word strings and search Yahoo or Hotbot or something for them, then they have six hyperlinks to get to Amazon.com from any of those sites. First person wins it all! In case you’re wondering, I plan on selling the bowler hats for the game and I will make a killing. I’ll be like that Pet Rock guy nobody remembers.

I had planned on launching a political diatribe concerning the recent elections, but you can see where all that ranks in the Stu Umbrage animal kingdom. Frankly, I’m bored with voting and supporting candidates. They started generating politicians out of a machine a few years ago and none of them are interesting to watch or listen to anymore—which is how they get elected, I guess. I’m looking for a political firebrand to earn my vote. If anybody wants to take care of insane condom bums and the Scott Baio TV Land inundation, I personally promise you a write-in vote the next go-round.

The Myth of American Constipation
Knock on wood and hopefully I’m not screwing myself here, but is constipation really the big national problem these TV commercials make it out to be? Who are these poor suckers who are getting so desperately plugged up on a regular basis?

The Dating Game: Ages 10 and Up
When you think about it, once we started demanding that everybody should look like ten year-old girls with abnormally accelerated breast development, it was only a matter of time before people would start hacking out their ribs and having botulism injected into their faces and eating seaweed.

Spare Me the Summer Love
Give me a break, you hit a kangaroo with your jeep and a couple of bullion cubes rubbed on its ass qualify the whole damn thing as “beef flavored” as far as the law is concerned. It’s a shady business to the core.

Chug a Lung
They say that writing angry letters to people and them burning them is good therapy. Now, if I understand that line of reasoning, then blowing up a scale-model of someone’s house has got to be even better. Hypothetically, anyway.

Lube the Tuber
Few things are more unsettling than waking up in the middle of the night and finding yourself floating naked in the middle of outer space, like the baby at the end of 2001. The movie, not the year.