“You down wit OCD?”

“Hold on, I’m washing my hands!”

Ah yes, here we find ourselves again, another day, another Dolf Lundgren. I sit here, striking a dashing pose, young restaurateur (that means brave, right?) with a devil-may-care grimace and a flinty stare that reminds many of the unbridled Amazonian beauty of Larry Flint himself. You, I can just picture you there, commune readers. Sitting in class (not to mention in school), dreamily scratching your rump in a way that reminds many onlookers of Katherine Hepburn, when her ass itched. These are the draconian days of our lives.

“You down wit Oppenheimer Pension Plan?”

“Yes, you are familiar with my customary mode of behavior.”

If I could save time in a bottle, I’d probably forget to poke holes in the lid and it would end up dying, its lifeless corpse lying there, feet up, staring accusatorily for weeks until I remembered that oh yeah, I saved time in a bottle, and went to check on how it was doing. That’s probably why you can’t do it.

Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered conference calls. Some hillrod told me that once.

BTW, I’ve come to be mildly obsessed by the term “hillrod” lately. Since moving to New Mexico my speech is frequently punctuated with phrases like “Hillrods! Twelve o’clock!” and “Arrr, there be hillrods afoot.” The hillrods down in shipping are busy making voodoo dolls out of mud and chocolate, they don’t find this sort of thing the slightest bit amusing. They also say “nuclear” funny.

I went to a day spa the other day, I thought it was a brothel but they waxed my Mason-Dixon line instead. That’s between your toes, commune readers, you sick and physiologically challenged individuals. I’d hoped deep in the deepest recesses of my elementary school education that the place’s design (“De sign, boss! De sign!” “That’s right, Tattoo, my troll-like friend. It says ‘Keep your midgets leashed’.” “I no like puns, boss!”) was merely a novel backdrop for exotic Korean handjobs, but by the time the big hand said six and the little hand said six too I had to give up the ghost on that expensive little fantasy and swallow the hard truth that I’d just dropped a hundred bucks to have my face wrapped in avocado and bacon.

When that bill comes due, you’ll come over and find me perched on top of the coffee table, floating in a sea of tears that has nothing at all to do with the fact that I tried to flush a cowboy hat down the toilet. I look forward to it; I'll be waiting with Belgians.

Did I mention my apartment is also serving as a half-way house for mice? Even in the desert, you’d think I would have scorpions or Spaniards or something instead. My landlord may be a Spaniard, there’s no question he’s a worthless turd, which rhymes, sort of. He still doesn’t believe I have mice, in spite of the perfect arc-shaped hole at the base of the wall in my kitchen, the “Home Sweet Home” mat which sits just outside that hole, and also the cat-face-shaped dent in my big frying pan.

I’ve been trying to smoke the little bastard out by blowing second-hand cigarette smoke into the hole every time I remember to do so. At this point it may just be a race to see which one of us gets cancer first, but I heard something about second-hand smoke being more deadly, so I think Vegas should favor my odds. Plus with his small size I’d have to be smoking like one of the Golden Girls to get the same cancer-causing effect per capita.

Truth be told, I’m not sure how many mice are in there, or how I’ll even know if they’ve passed on to Mousehalla. When I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night I swear I can hear them scattering in the kitchen, yelling “SHIT! IT’S THE FARMER’S WIFE!” in their little high-pitched voices. Could that really just be a dream? Maybe I dreamt it all; maybe I don’t really have any mice.

Badgers, on the other hand. We’re thick with badgers.

All right commune readers, it’s time for Stu Umbrage to duck off into the belfry to lunch upon sweet artichoke-hearts and New-Mexican-grown peaches. The Democratic Party keeps calling in an attempt to get me out to the polls this year, and I no longer feel safe downstairs. Could this be yet another sly ploy to get me under a tuna net? We shall see...