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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"Once in a while someone will ask me, 'Samuel L. Hartwig, what's your view of life?' I'll usually say the same thing: I'm paying you for the entire hour, doctor, you should be answering my damn questions.

I do have an answer, though: Life is just like a picnic. Everybody shows up expecting a piece of the pie. Some rush the picnic table, some walk to the picnic table. Some trample and pound on your brother Goose and say it's because they worried there wouldn't be enough pie for everyone, but you suspect it's because Goose likes to flash gang signals. Then you finally get to the picnic table yourself—not the fastest, not the slowest, but you get there just the same.

And the damn pie is all eaten up! What's with that? It's a friggin' picnic, mom, you should have known everybody was going to want pie. You were making one, was two pies beyond your pie-making capacity? 'Cause that's a pretty shitty pie-making capacity, if you ask me.

Then mom tells you she did make two pies, and you feel a little sheepish and realize it was all a big fuss for nothing. You step right up and cut into your slice of the pie, that was there all along.

'This is coconut, mom!' you scream at her. What's wrong with coconut? Oh, nothing, only it fucking kills me dead. That might be a slight problem. I'm your own son and you don't know I'm allergic to coconut? Nice. Just great. You couldn't save one piece of blueberry pie that would not kill me but there's a whole untouched killer coconut pie waiting just for me. What a fantastic substitute.

No, I don't want a fruitcup. Do you want a fruitcup? I'll tell you where you can shove a fruitcup. Leave me alone, I'm going to play Frisbee with those kids. Maybe you'll get lucky and some coconut will accidentally blow into my mouth from the death pie over here and you'll finally be rid of me.

Yep. That's kind of how I see life."

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One night several weeks ago, I got home after a grueling day of communing to find a strange-assed envelope in my mail box, wedged between the usual offer for Sea Monkeys and a Carmen Electra poster catalog. At first I thought I might have won a Harley or maybe my report card from the third grade had finally shown up. No such luck. When I studied the return-address more closely, I realized it was from the Jury Commissioner's Office, and that could only mean one thing.

The game was on.

Ever since the I was in shortpants, watching my dad do battle with unseenfoes over the telephone line, I'd waited for this day. The time had come to do what any honest, red-blooded American would do when they got the call: to match wits with the American justice system and try like hell to get out of jury duty. This is what our fathers have fought and died for time and time again, compadres: the right to outsmart The Man and avoid having to find parking downtown.

I decided to warm up by trying my old stand-by dodge. I called the number listed on the back of the summons and, in a bone-chilling facsimile of my mother's voice, told the jury duty operator that Omar would be unable to make it, because he had the measles or some shit. Looking back now, it was probably throwing that "or some shit" on the end that sunk my subterfuge, because the operator said I'd have to reschedule for another date. I thought fast and tried adding on that I had whiskey-dick as well, but she seemed pretty unimpressed by that improvisation.

I knew then that the old stand-by wasn't going to cut it this time, not by a long-shot. It was like trying to carve a jack-o-lantern with a piece of cooked spaghetti: damn useless. I was pretty surprised, too, because the exact same ploy worked wonders that time when I had to get out of a date with the ugly-assed daughter of one of my uncle's business partners. Shit, by the time I got to the whiskey-dick part I don't even think she wanted to go on the date any more, but these jury duty mugs had far tougher nuts to crack.

Several subsequent calls to the jury duty line proved equally unsuccessful: it turns out that swearing like a motherfucker, being a Communist or having a thick Mexican accent are all honky-dory if you want to be a juror these days. Go figure.

I went to the drawing board and read the pamphlet that came with my summons, figuring I had to beat these hard-asses at their own game. According to the pamphlet, there were only three excuses that would get you out of jury duty: you don't speak word uno of English, you're so damned old you scare little kids, or you've already been on a jury in the last two years. Now I know what you're thinking, and believe me I thought of it first: between that wet pajama contest I judged locally and being in the audience for that taping of Divorce Court last year, I should be good for another four years at least. Not so, claim the Jury Nazis.

Since they had to be such assholes about the whole two-year thing, I decided to play a little hardball and spent the next two weeks answering the phone in a made-up nonsense language that was like some kind of cross between German and the ingredients of a Snapple. Once again, those clever motherfuckers got the drop on your friend Omar by calling at eight in the morning when I was dead asleep and had momentarily forgotten about the whole "No English" ruse. So much for project "Nein Sorbate Verboten."

I briefly considered making some kind of old-man suit out of croissant mix and talcum powder, but after a particularly nasty talcum mishap I got pissed off and just called those uptight pigfuckers and told them that it's my constitutional whoozumwhatzit to have them kiss my pale white ass, with whipped topping if you please, and that in the mean time I hoped they all choked on a turd. It was a bold shift in strategy, I admit, but for a while I thought it might have worked and that I'd scared them off.

Then one day I received a notice in the mail saying that if I didn't show up for jury duty, I'd be held in contempt of court and fined $121. Woah. Now, I don't know how they arrived at that figure, I suspect they were peeking into the old Bricks Checking Account again, but suffice it to say they were now officially speaking my language. These were some stone-cold bastards.

After a rousing rental of "A Few Good Men", I decided that jury duty probably wouldn't be that bad, and that maybe I'd luck out and get some kind of case that involved a dude being smothered by fake boobs or something. Really, any case that involved topless testimony would've been cool by me, I'm flexible.

And to tell you the truth, in the end, I actually had a good time. And man was I glad that I'd thought to wear my judge costume from last Halloween, because they treat those regular jurors like assholes. I got a much better seat and even got to give some dude the chair for eating his neighbor's horse in some kind of funny-assed cultural misunderstanding. The rest of the day probably would have been a blast too if the real judge hadn't shown up and had me re-assigned to some boring damned murder trial. Since when does it take a whole friggin' week to figure out that the dude with the chain-saw did it? I'd planned on two hours tops, with maybe a break for a romantic interlude in the middle. Some fussy sacks of juror-scat might argue that it would have been over sooner if I hadn't been playing the "Do you have a verdict?/Your honor, we have a dickfour" game with the judge, but that only added twenty minutes, tops.

And the memories, as they say, will last a lifetime. I think the taser scars probably will too.

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