aw enforcement officials are bursting with pride this week over the results of the first annual Bring Your Drugs to Work Day, an unqualified success that nabbed over 3 million drug users at their places of employment nationwide. The controversial sting operation, brainchild of DEA wunderkind Dickie Milkweed, snared millions of Americans who thought the “holiday� was a long-overdue relaxing of uptight social mores and restrictions about showing up to work as high as a beautiful kite.

“Gotcha, stoners!� celebrated Milkweed, sipping a virgin club soda triumphantly, giving a mocking thumbs-up to the camera and performing an awkward little dance obviously not benefited by any groove-enhancing drug use.

“This is a great day for Tootie,� slurred commune editor Red Bagel in agreement, drunk as an ox, upon hearing the news.

Wishing to capitalize on the success of this week’s traditional Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, federal officials granted the DEA’s wish by quietly passing the new holiday into law, clamped onto the ass of the innocuous “Puppies are Beautiful� bill passed by congress in February.

However, several women’s groups have already protested BYDWD, concerned that the bummer drug-bust holiday will taint the public’s associations with Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, most notable among them the feminist groups NORML Chicks and Women for Reggae. The original, non-Fugazi holiday was instituted in 1993 as a way for parents to expose their daughters to the dangers of the workplace and to drain office productivity for the month of April.

Since then, several painfully politically-correct groups have lobbied to change the name of Bring Your Daughter to Work Day to the less-offensive Bring Your Daughter or Son or Whatever You’ve Got to Work or Some Place Else if You’re Unemployed Day, with little success due to counter-lobbying efforts from calendar manufacturers, who claim that printing a holiday name that long would force them to retool their entire operations at incredible expense.

Others have argued the highly controversial point that there’s nothing wrong with drug use in the workplace, unless it adversely affects job-related performance.

“Man, this is total bullshit waaaaaaaaaa…� trailed off temp worker Justin Penrose from a holding cell outside Chicago.

Still others, however, have pointed out that anyone who was dumb enough to fall for Bring Your Drugs to Work Day has obviously had their mental faculties dimmed heavily by drug residue of some sort, and is likely costing their employer billions in lost productivity and time spent having to explain things six or seven times.

“God I feel stupid,� lamented 79-year old Eloise Hartford, who misunderstood the nature of the holiday and brought her extensive collection of prescription medications to work on Monday instead. Most of Eloise’s co-workers were arrested for marijuana possession, leaving the lion’s share of the 14-person office’s tasks on the frail shoulders of Hartford, who tires easily.

“I should have claimed some of that reefer was mine,� complained Hartford. “I hear they have some pretty soft cots in prison these days. No beds of nails or anything anymore.�

In related news, commune editor’s-brother Gay Bagel has recently spearheaded an aggressive initiative to increase Internet access to inmates in America’s prisons, a move some have called a ratings ploy since a large proportion of the commune readership is now behind bars.

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It's the holiday time here at Child Star headquarters, and that always means one thing: I'm fucked.

Yep, our annual tradition of me being fucked is steady and true on this end. It turns out they lost the house, mom and dad. I kept telling them you have to pay for a house even when you're not living in it, you can't just come back there and live in it any time you want. On the plus side, it's the first argument I've ever won.

Regardless of how it happened, Christmas is being held in my apartment this year, by default. Who needed that headache? As if seeing these people one time every year wasn't enough psychological damage.

I tried to get into the spirit, I honestly did. I even started drinking bourbon the day after Thanksgiving, like dad always does, only I didn't do it right up until Thanksgiving like he does. It was a nice relaxer, I almost didn't even freak out when they dragged in the top of that Rockefeller Plaza Christmas tree in here. I don't care if it's so big they'll never notice the top is gone, dad, it doesn't make it right. The thing won't even fit through the door.

I made him take it back and got that plastic tree. Dad went all "real tree" on us a few years back, so fortunately I had the plastic one from when we were growing up. I didn't even notice it was made out of recycled army men he burned together until I was about 9 or 10, and by then I was so cynical I didn't even believe in Santa. But besides the sharp points and the horrid misery of war we're constantly reminded of when we look at it, it's a charming little tree.

Then I saw this after school special where this kid made his own Christmas presents for everyone and they all said they liked them more than if he had bought them—suckers! Wow, that shit is rich. Some dildo totally stiffs you on presents and hands you some shit he made at a county fair table and you bawl all over it and even give him a little pity. I said I got to try that. My only problem was I don't make anything too good, a few pounds of crystal meth and fine-cut heroin, maybe, but that's hard to wrap. Plus, dad's on probation, and he may be a pain in the ass, but he's still my dad and I don't want him getting fucked by some "3 strikes" rule.

So I decided to make everybody hatracks. But I kind of came out the loser in the end, since we only had one broom and that's what I make hatracks out of. I had to steal the commune's broom (the mop was some foreign guy who made a lousy hatrack) and still that left me having to buy extra brooms just to make a hatrack. I could have just given brooms as a gift, I didn't come out ahead at all. Oh, shit! I just now thought I could have stolen the commune hatrack. That would have been sweet. What was that guy's name anyway? Paulo?

The big news, what may make all this hooplah worth it, my sister and her butch friend Steve said they were coming over for Christmas dinner. My sister might bluff her way out of dinner with my parents, but she never lies, so I have a good feeling about it. They've never met Steve before either (she insists her name is "Stephan," but you look at her sometime and call it) so I guess they'll be getting a big serving of "your daughter's a lesbian" for Christmas. Then again, Steve isn't the most feminine of broads, so maybe the whole thing will go undetected.

Of course, there could be a major free-for-all between my sister and Steve and my parents. What do you know, I'm getting in the Christmas mood already.

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There was a midget named Fidget and a carcass named Marcus and when it rained the two would sluice through the juice that ran down from the hills and take all the pills they found on windowsills. They would tell each other stories of Reginald Voorhees and the liquor he'd sick up when the moon's in full bloom. And in a rented room they'd zoom zoom zoom around the bed on bicycles and tricycles and roller skates that were Michael's. But since they were two and their feet were few they had to switch off and swap off and top off and trip off to keep it all in motion like a Laotian promotion. Sometimes they would crash and from his bubble bath a doctor named Proctor would shout all about it. He'd bang on the wall and make the Velcro balls fall and threaten to wet them with disappearing solution that would make them go away like a bay on the day the ocean turned to lotion.

But he never did.

On the twelfth day of May, which was May eleventh because of a quirk in the work of the calendar constructor and the fickle heart of a tart the day after he'd… uhm, plucked her. But on the twelfth day an elf may or may not have got sick with elf rot and feeling all hot and brimming with snot stumbled and bumbled and flopped in their room, spelling the doom of their womb of zoom zoom. So, forgetting to groom in the gloom like a tomb, Fidget and Marcus packed up their belongings with no wish of prolonging this awkward encounter, Fidget's Geiger counter going off like sentient meat at the meat counter, because it was broken, just a token from Hoboken. But in their rush and bluster and fluster, they packed up the elf and an old feather duster from up on the shelf that had been sitting there for twelve years all by itself.

And they were off like a shot, but a shot shot quite slowly, all tumbling and rolling like the gun was too oily, like watched water boiling or temp workers toiling or a sloth bent on soiling your favorite bandana. And man, Marcus ate a banana like Princess Diana driving to Montana—it took forever, so you know he didn't do anything quickly. So sickly as the elf may have been, and prickly as Fidget was when wearing all tin (and forget that side-note, it's too long a story and hoary and the end's much to gory and it cribs half of Glory, so just accept he's dressed in tin), they still got going like throwing a Boeing: Way slow.

But once they got moving the UV rays worked in their favor and they savored the flavor of a kiwi Life Saver they passed all around the car and the trunk, but the taste was all sunk after the elf got his chunk. So they pulled right straight over and kicked the elf to the curb, thinking a blurb in the paper better than this Elvin bedwetter, but he bounced! Not just once, and not twice, he bounced like rubber dice or like mice on dry ice, up the street, up the block and off of the clock and the dock and a rock and a Varsity jock as he tried to talk to a girl named Burl and the world began to unfurl as the elf binged and bopped off the top of a cop and a chop shop and a mop and a sign that said STOP but the elf did not stop. He dinged off the wing of a bird and a spring and a turd and a smear of milk curd that had spelled the word nerd.

The elf continued to zip and volley off the side of a trolley and the tip of a collie and your sister Molly. He bounced and he smashed off six tons of trash and an ounce of pounce decanted from a cat. And a hat and a rat were smashed just like that as the elf let out a yelph that he couldn't help himself. And yonder and way by the end of the day the whole damned world was broken and curled and beat-up and crimped and neutered and wimped and a high-flying blimp was the only thing skipped.

And that's where I sit as I write about it on the scraps of a strap that used to wrap maps. But our gas it has passed and our blimp is wrinkled and limp so won't you give us a hand or a small scrap of land or a righteous ska band? On second though, skip the ska band, we should probably just land.

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