A Calm and Rational
Analysis of Winter

Goddamn, I hate winter!  I’d rather do fucking anything than spend yet another goddamn winter here in the fucking Midwest!  Fuck!

I’d rather be a bulimic in a restaurant that has an all-you-can-eat buffet but no restroom.

I’d rather be a vegetarian who’s so devout he won’t even eat the bearded clam.

I’d rather be a prison inmate with a sensitive ass.

I’d rather plan on writing a self-help book entitled How to Put Off Procrastinating but never get around to it.

I’d rather be forced at gunpoint to watch daytime TV.

I’d rather drink a chronic pot smoker’s bong water.

I’d rather check another guy’s oil with my dipstick.

I’d rather that a gang of “gardeners” plant their “carrots” in my “backyard.”

I’d rather be a man with a three-pronged plug for a penis who’s married to a woman with a mere two-pronged outlet.

I’d rather that one of my critics say that I’m nothing if not imaginative — and I’m not imaginative.

I’d rather that my “friends” refer to me as an “idiot-savant, minus the savant.”

I’d rather be the campaign manager of a dyslexic politician who keeps kissing hands and shaking babies.

I’d rather be stuck in an elevator, all afternoon, with a bunch of compulsive masturbators.

I’d rather be married to a “vegetarian” cannibal who — while she does eat people — only dines on those who are comatose or brain-dead.

I’d rather that my doctor tell me I’ll feel a little prick when he injects me with the anesthetic before surgery, but within minutes, I won’t even feel a big prick — at least, I didn’t last time.

I’d rather be a door-to-door salesman trying to sell vacuum cleaners to people with dirt floors, or condoms to conservative Catholics, or Catholicism to sensible people.

I’d rather slip on a wet floor in a hotel lobby and fall dick-first into a Thai hooker.

I’d rather that a friend of mine hook me up with a girl who has “an ass that just won’t quit” only to find that that was merely his euphemistic way of saying she has chronic diarrhea.

I’d rather suck raw anchovies out of a dead hooker’s vagina.

I’d rather bathe in hydrochloric acid while balancing a rabid squirrel on my nose — while reading Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea — while juggling two viles of nitroglycerin with my right hand, two single-volume encyclopedias with my left hand, and two radioactive chickens with my other hand — while piloting a Boeing 747 over Kentucky — while simultaneously trying to persuade alien invaders that they really don’t want to take control of Earth, use humans for slave labor, and initiate a worldwide ban on literature written by iconoclastic wankers . . . and, besides, they have a more pressing problem — namely, a swarm of sex-starved mountain men who are out to avenge some friends (playmates?) of theirs who were abducted by these very same aliens; and the members of the Organization of Mountain Men Who Don’t Much Like the Stereotypical Notion Most People Have about Us — That We’re All Sex-Starved — When in Fact We Just Don’t Like Being Bound by Bourgeois Social Norms, Such as Heterosexual Sex (or the OMMWDMLSNMPHUTWASSWFWJDLBBBSNSHS, for short) are vehemently opposed to the aliens’ use of anal probes, which are, to quote one drooling mountain man, “excruciatingly painful — yet strangely pleasurable.”