Thanks, I Needed That

I am in sore need of cheering up today.

Beloved Spouse is feeling down about his continuing recovery from surgery. He's in glass-half-empty mode; instead of seeing that he was promptly diagnosed, had an excellent surgeon who performed a flawless operation, and has received caring support from a wife and daughter who love him very much, he sees a cruel world that afflicted him with a medical condition that has left him with lingering (albeit temporary) discomfort and disability. And what possible use is stupid love against intermittent mild pain?


The turkey's a little dry! Whyyyyyyy?

Also, I keep bumping up against reminders that the Web is full of writers who are far more talented and creative than I. Like Allie Brosh. And Jenny Lawson. And Robert Brockway. Just to name three whose brilliant work has slapped me in the face yet again this week. Go click on those links and check out their stuff, as millions of other people do. Go ahead, I'll wait. I always wait.



See? They're wonderfully, depressingly entertaining. And so I'm having a bit of a wallow in the self-pity pool right now.

Who am I kidding? I'll never be able to
wallow like a black rhino. That bastard's good.

To combat these feelings of inadequacy, I've turned to my usual therapy: Eating and drinking too much. Which is not actually as therapeutic as you might think. Oh sure, chugging Bacardi Silver Sangria and chasing it with cookie dough blots out the pain of inadequacy. But under the law of Conservation of Negativity, it seems that self-destructive emotions cannot be created or destroyed but only transformed from one state to another. So instead of feeling hopelessly untalented, after a night of malt beverages and raw eggs I wake up feeling pathetically weak-spirited. Also a couple of pounds heavier, which really bolsters that old self-esteem.

Bacchus may have been a god, but he was still fat,
immature, and had baste in headgear.

Don't worry: I have decades of experience dealing with feeling f'd up. And a standing prescription for Prozac. So I know this will sort itself out and all those negative emotions will go back into the small windowless cells they call home and I'll be back to my normal blissful state of denial in no time.

But still, right now, today, I'm feeling a little mopey.

Or I was, until I found something that cheered me right the crap up. Had me laughing out loud, in fact. And it felt so good I had to share it.

Oh, Fox News. I should have known I could count on you to make me spit coffee out my nose.

Now, I know that as you're looking at that headline, you're having one of two thoughts: "That's not funny, it's incredibly depressing" or "Yeeeeeeee-haw! Dayum straight!" followed by several celebratory gunshots being fired randomly into the air as is our God-given right. Either way, where is the humor in that?

To which I say: Are you kidding? It's oozing out of every line of this story by Kevin McCullough, who is some kind of conservative pundit. I never heard of him; the only conservative pundit I follow is Stephen Colbert, but this guy is just as funny. For example, the title of his article is "Five Reasons Why I Believe Texas Governor Rick Perry Will Be Our President in 2013" (hilarious enough by itself), but the actual topic is...Kevin McCullough.  Specifically, his "new best selling book, No He Can't: How Barack Obama is Dismantling Hope and Change," which he mentions way before he ever gets around to talking about, uh, that dude in Texas and oh by the way did you hear my appearance on the nationally syndicated Mancow Radio Experience?

But when he does get around to discussing the guy the headline writer named as the actual star of the piece (who I'm sure will be fired for his error), McCullough just lays on the comedy gold. Like when he says that Gov. Dick Perry (as I call him because we's tight) has created a ton of jobs in Texas. And if you don't live in Texas or have access to U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics data, that sounds pretty good and not at all chucke-worthy. If you didn't know that in the last three years Texas's labor force has grown by 660,000 people, while the number of employed people has grown by only 240,000, you wouldn't get the humor in McCullough's assertion that the man who oversaw that "growth" should become our next President.


He could do this for America!

Also hilarious: McCullough says Gov. Perry "understands...state sovereignty." The understatement alone made me laugh. See, the joke is that Gov. Perry hates the federal government. Now, he never, as has been attributed to him at length, actually said he wanted Texas to secede from America. But he's made it clear that he thinks Texas law should supercede federal law in the matter of airport security, and karmic law in the matter of just about everything else.

I actually had a chance to hear Gov. Perry speak in person a few months ago. His allotted topic was green energy technology, but the substance of his remarks was "The government is so retarded, hey?" According to Dick, Texas is too bitchin' to have to meet clean air standards, achieve educational targets, contribute to federal transportation programs, or pledge allegiance to the flag it grudgingly displays alongside the flag of the Once and Future Republic of Texas. So when McCullough says Gov. Perry should run for President of the United States, and thereby head a federal government for which he expresses nothing but contempt on a regular basis, it's a laff riot.

That's the same thing as a laff riot, right?

McCullough also cracks me up by touting Gov. Perry's conservative values. These include, as far as I was able to make out through the tears of mirth, shooting things, trampling women's rights, gutting the judicial process, and solving problems that don't exist. On a completely unrelated topic, did you know that the Governor didn't actually oppose the conservative hot-button topic of immigration law "sanctuary cities" until a few months ago? Or that he supported Al Gore in the 1988 Presidential election because he thought Gore was a conservative? That right there is the funniest freaking thing I've heard this week, so I'll say it again: Rick Perry thought Al Gore was a conservative and was disappointed to learn otherwise. That's awesome.

Anyway, when McCullough says that Gov. Perry will "bring together the conservatives," it's very ironic. The irony is that Gov. Perry will spout a bewidlering array of random and poorly-thought-out positions, and that theoretically will convince the diverse and fractured conservative constituency of the United States that he stands on a solid conservative platform. If that platform was strewn with banana peels and whoopee cushions it couldn't be any funnier.

All in all, I'm grateful to Kevin "Hey, I Wrote a Book" McCullough for penning this piece for Fox News. I so needed a good laugh. I also needed to feel better about myself as a writer, and it certainly has done that. I wonder if McCullough ever writes about whiny husbands or booze? Man, that would make my day.