Catgut Diplomacy Strikes; Iraqi Water Baron Surrenders Decorative Batman Garter Belt to the UN

Let's subtitle it: Lamentations of a Bush League Word-Smith. Though we'll try to keep it low on the Shakespearian tragedy monologue scale (somewhere between a Hamlet and a King Lear).

Picture if you will our beloved anti-hero in his current exile, apartment skirting the edge of the ghetto near the Quarter, waking daily to the off-key farting of an amateur trombonist living next door. The city has been vomiting New Orleans atmosphere on me lately, and shows no signs of repenting for it. Random block parties and seemingly impromptu parades keep springing up, shaking the building with the throbbing bass tones of the worst kind of pop garbage music imaginable. I've fended off the advances of two crackwhores now just trying to get in a cigarette, and been verablly parrying an invasive Jehovahs witness for months. She's just shown up again this morning; I keep hoping my constipated grimace will ward her off, but something makes me too polite to flat out refuse the watchtower. Maybe with my telemarketing background I identify with someone cold-selling a shitty product; sorta like a moment of unity, one kind of parasite to another.

And there's the proud black downstairs neighbor with a gaudy tiger painting over his mantle; a man given to hazy generalizations for the cause of all this social deterioration. "People been fucking up my world" he's said to me on more than one occasion. Which people and how is unclear; he's deaf enough that conversation is nearly impossible. Given my flair for melodrama, I like to think of him as a refugee militant black panther, still on the lam from a violent terrorist act against the man back in the late 60's. I think he works for the cable company actually, but you never know. It could all just be misdirection to cover for some sort of resurgence movement.

You give up careerism, oppose the idea of a conventional lifestyle, shedding materialism like a snakeskin all for the sake of art ... and what are you left with? Sure I've got the free money for being batshit insane, the book I'm desperately trying to slave away on. But it doesn't leave much room for a serious relationship. In the words of the immortal William Shatner, Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids...in fact it's cold as hell. I find myself thinking now and again of the fictitious family lifestyle I've given up. The son I never had, little Billy or Johnny or Michael, out in the local park to torture the neighborhood animals with his trusty pocket knife. Reading Nietzsche while the other kids are watching Finding Nemo, and succumbing to the cold depths of budding sociopathy. Or faithful Martha, kegeling as she bakes the amazonian drug concoction ayahuasca into an apple pie for the family; a woman who could crush a walnut with her vulva. And won't the PTA meeting be caught off guard when the three of us start babbling about space elves?

That's it for now. I'll try and play mammy for your amusement more in the near future.

Faithfully yours,

Hubert Humphrey