A friend tells Sarah Beth that she should really buy a cassette tape adapter to play her MP3 player in her car stereo

I know you want to talk to me about how cool your wireless FM transmitter is for your i-pod, but let me stop you. For one thing I am familiar with your 1987 Volvo 740 turbo station wagon and that means I know you still have a tape deck in your car and you are probably still listening to "harden your heart" by Quaterflash whenever your husband lets you drive the car by yourself, because it is the only tape you have left from you "rock out" collection.



Sure the only time you get to leave the house with the keys to the car that you bought yourself is when you offer to take the laundry to the local coin op alone because your boyfriend promises to help you fold it when you get back. Of course we both know that you aren't going to drive all the way home with your clothes wrinkling in the backseat when you could just fold them at the Laundromat yourself.

At least your new boyfriend Kyle offers to help you with the folding. Your last guy never offered and he actually expected you to keep up with the laundry every week. I am not sure if he ever caught on to how dirty you would prefer to be. I do remember how pissed he got when he came home from work that one time to find all the clothes strewn over the floor, and you worried for a second that he might hit you even though he never did, but his temper was bad and made you cry a lot, and Kyle never gets pissed he just gets high when you take the kids out to do laundry, so I guess that is what we call a step up in this world. Score 1 point for you sweetie. Life ain't all bad.

I want you to have a good day today.

1. Remember how good it feels to wash the grease out of your hair with shampoo?
2. Cassette player adapters for mp3 players. I know you can't afford an i-pod like the one you bought your boyfriend, but the crappy 1 gig you turned your nose up at that your mom bought for you on your birthday would sound great blasting in your station wagon with the windows rolled down. (By the way wasn't it great that Kyle totally remembered your birth day and tried to warn you not to swallow if you "didn't want to" because respect is way better than anything you can buy in a store. I guess it was just too bad that you didn't hear what he said until the last second, because you still got a tiny squirt in you, but don't worry I think mouth wash cures genital warts. Anyway, those little cassette player adapters that you think only work for cd players or Walkmans can work for those knock off mp3 players and then you can listen to all your music. I could tell you that the sound quality is pretty good and I was going to try and impress you with how I looked up the "specs," but we both know we don't care about that stupid shit.

Well, I gotta go. I think Grey's Anatomy is on somewhere.

My internet girlfriend is a fox and is way more foxey than your real life girlfriend and that should be BIG news on the internet

But I know the big news on the internet is that Miley Cyrus took a topless photgraph by some big name artist photographer who likes to take kiddie porn pictures. I am sure I read somewhere before that Annie Leibovitz had her kids taken away from her because she was mixed up in some kind of celebrity child porn ring.

All I know is that I don't see what the big hubub is all about as Miley isn't actually topless she has a giant bed sheet wrapped around her. I thought some of the pictures of Miley lying the the lap of her "father" Billy Ray were a little more creepy as they seem a little too comfortable with each other in such close proximity.



When I think about how foxey my internet girl friend is I wonder why you bother having a real life girlfriend. I GUESS you can just look at videos of Miley Cyrus and imagine that one day your real life girl friend will have her cankles removed.

I am sorry. I bought my man ego at that garage sale for 99 cents and I think I overpaid for it

Bravado is the male cover up to sensitivity to pain. Behind the pain is insecurity. Insecurity is fear of rejection.

I am way too nice now to give you a lecture on the passive-aggressive interplay between the sexes

I am on this new kick where I am exposing myself to the world for the nice guy that I really am. I am talking to you about my sensitive side, because I don't want you to think that if we were in a relationship and you brought home a kitten I would really train it by lighting your bottle of hairspray on fire and spraying it at the cat.

I mean I would light the can on fire and and spray it every once and a while just to let the cat think it is possible that not just water comes out of spray bottles and it better behave itself. I think it is important to exert dominance over animals otherwise one day they may get it in their heads to to eat you if you forget the kibbles and bits.

Speaking of me being nice here are some pictures of Britney Spears looking less fat than before. I guess if you are like Britney then you used to be cute but then you got pregnant and decided eating was way more fun that getting looked at by boys. I don't blame you for your over eating as men are assholes, and the mean truth of it all is that if Britney lost her high paying job and fame she'd just be another single mom at the community pool hoping to play house with some reformed gangster who just got out of jail for selling dope.

I don't know why you go after reformed gangsters, because gangsters don't take care of their own kids, so what makes you think he's going to take care of your smelly brats? The sad truth is he is just using you for sex and the sadder truth is you know it, but just can't help yourself. Your last boyfriend was so bad in the sack and had such a tiny disappointment for a penis that you will do anything short of shoplifting cucumbers to feel something in that stretched out womb of yours.

I applaud your life affirming decision. Most people in your situation have given up on life and have lost all their enthusiasm, but not you. It doesn't matter how much weight you gain you still feel entitled to an orgasm. I guess taking all those feminist classes in college wasn't a complete waste of money for your dad. I bet he rests at night easy knowing that your fat ass is getting hammered by a big black cock.

And I know that the reason I don't have a girl person, even a girl person like you, is that I am slacker and somehow being a slacker is worse than being a drug pusher. "At least drug pushers have ambition" and your biology compels you to mate with men who can take care of you. I understand that part of the psychology of women. What I don't understand is how you mix up the ideal of a 'man with ambition' with the current incarnation of man you are with who drinks all of your Budweiser and replaces it with the Natural Light that he steal from his pot head friends.

What makes even less sense to me is that most of the women who read this blog have money and don't need a man to take care of them. Even if they didn't have money, our modern society allows you to exert control over your own finances. But women are filled with the funniest anxieties. You all wonder how a man will react to you ending up in a wheel chair. Even though most people will never become paralyzed you constantly quiz your man over his desire to remain with you if "something truly awful ever happened to you."

The truth is most people bail in those situations, and you aren't being any different to me in my situation so stop being so judgmental. You aren't paralyzed, or horribly disfigured, but I am poor which is the male equivalant. I am a bonafide slacker and therefore I will be unable to care for you. You don't need to worry about the possibility of me running off on you as you get older and ugly, as you are already bailing out on me faster than K-fed after he gets a girl pregnant. So the real question is not if I will stick around if you get deformed, that is a difficult mental equation invlolving my emotional attachment to you that has to be balanced by my future ability to acquire someone better. I make that calculation every second I am with you and asking me to turn that unconscious mechanism off is like asking me to stop breathing. I can try for a while but all it will do is is leave my blue in the face.

No, the only real question here to ask, is are you going to look past my inability to earn to see the real human being I am? Stop obsessing over hypothetical questions about the future. Ask yourself how you feel right now.

My guess is you can't, because deep down inside women are not liberated enough yet as a species. You ask questions like that because you don't assume you can take care of yourself. You aren't really looking for a partner, just a substitute for daddy in the bad times. Plenty of men date ugly women, thereby violating the state of nature that our male gender bequeaths to us, but most homeless men have to make do with raping shut ins- no matter how witty and clever they may be- because so few women have any real confidence in navigating life by themselves.

I am nice and if you don't believe me I will punch you in the face (metaphorically) because that's what writers do

I know you wonder why I never write anything nice about women. I know I am not a writer just a blogger, but you get what I mean because for some reason you actually read this blog, and you can't blame me for that, you have only yourself to blame, and whatever happened to you in your childhood.

You probably read all my jokes about fat chicks and assume I am either the misogynistic asshole I hold myself out to be, or you assume that I a jokester and all my jokes can be wrapped up in the tin foil of chub.

I have to admit that writing jokes about fat chicks is easy and I like taking the easy way out most times, but so do you. That's why you don't call your mom except maybe on Mother's Day and then you make a big thing about how you remembered her special day and sent her flowers and bought her a copy of Funny Girl, because what doesn't brighten Mom's special day like a Barbara Streisand movie?

I know your mom appreciated you sending her the flowers and she will will probably wear out the VHS in the tape you bought her. Personally I think it is about time your mom went digital. You can get a cheap DVD player for 20 bucks at Walmart.

I wrote this post to show off my sensitive side and I realize that I am not doing a great job of that but being sensitive is risky and tuff and I don't know that any of you have earned me divulging things like that to you. Even if you did I can't say that I would have done a better job of it than this and you are just going to have to accept that. The good thing is only 10 people read this blog and only 3 people listen to the podcast I work on so I won't be disappointing too many folks out there.

Disappointment is one of those things you have to learn to live with as you get older as you realize all your dreams don't come true and god in whatever infinite wisdom he claims to posses doesn't think the world revolves around you even though he gave you a momma who told you it did and he gave you the vanity to seek it out. I'm sure you momma didn't mean to lie to you, but the really cruel part of it all is that god blessed you with just enough talent to recognize how talentless you really are.

I know you may be devoid of any real talent but that never stopped a lot of people ask Rachael Hunter. Have you ever seen any of Rachael Hunter's movies? She can't act and she can't pick a script or a director and she isn't even pretty anymore, but she sure as fuck isn't going upstairs just to sit in an infant nursing rocking chair and cry about it all the while trying not to listen to the sound of her husband's rock star persona dissolve like the fake smoke plumes from a miniature train set.

No. She went up and stairs and divorced Rod Stewart and now she fucks her boy toy on the beach. All Rod Stewart does is make all those boring Christmas Albums you love so much and play with his gold plated choo choo train.

I am not sure how to make that a really happy ending for you as Rachael Hunter will continue to make those god awful made for TV movies for the E-Network. But one day God will judge her for that, and he will get his sweet revenge. I can't wait for that day, and I hope I get to heaven just so I can watch him enact it.

Me? I don't really see happy endings, but then again I am not paid to write happy endings. I am not paid to write this. There is no such thing as rainbow brite. There is no such thing as happiness. I don't like telling you that because I stay unhappy as a protest until we all get to be happy, because that is me being sensitive to your feelings, but I guess I just don't like it when you all go being happy even though that was our agreement for you to be happy.

But don't try to be happy. It's like trying to be interesting. Some of you do interesting things. It doesn't make you interesting. It just means you might be aware (unconsciously) that you are boring. I know this because some of the most interesting people do nothing all day and some of the shiniest people doing the busiest things make me want to vomit on their couch and tell them that their Labrador did it. I know the next day the Labrador won't get fed, because you plan on taking him for a ride with you in the car to the park, and you don't like throw up on your Saab's interior, but that Labrador is old and fat and could stand to miss an meal. And, yes, this means I will write fat dog jokes if you don't like me writing fat girl jokes.

I hate you and I will not stop hating you until you make yourself a better person

I don't have any readers and I don't care. The smaller the audience the less I have to sell out to it.

You don't have to explain yourself to a small readership.

With so few readers I get to write whenever I want which means unlike you, with your giant fan lists and hungry blog roll, I get to wait for inspiration.

I guess it's a good thing that I don't like explaining myself, because nobody ever writes to me demanding that I tell them all the secret symbolism that I hide in this blog. I can't tell you how comforting is for me that you will all take every thing I say so literally. You're like my very own little group of wife stoning Southern Baptists.

I know none of you care, but here is one little secret I will let you in on. I named my blog Bathos for the Misanthropic after you.

You aren't a good person.

You aren't even really nice "after we get to know you." My opinion of you, is that like me, you are a bunch of misanthropes. You are all sociopaths and you hate the rest of your species even more than you hate yourselves. But most of you are just too much of a pussy to admit to it.

The joke is on you though. At least most of the time on this blog it will be. Except when you stop reading me, and then the joke is on the local Mail Box etc. where I bought all those business cards that say 'professional blogger' on them. I bought all those cards with over drafted credit cards. I always run up the maximum credit limit allowed on my credit cards and then never make payments on them.

I do that because my parents never taught me lessons about financial responsibility. The only thing they ever taught me was that the landlord has to give a renter a 3 day notice before you evict them, and that if you cry while handing your son a wooden toy wrapped in newspaper on his 14th birthday, he will cry too and say "thank you daddy for taking me to goodwill and not forgetting my birthday this year like you do most years," and then you can save all the money you would have spent buying stupid things like cake and presents for kids and instead spend all that money on whores and beer. Who do you think really deserves it more? Of course the whores do, and my liver tells me I like beer. The older I get the better I understand my daddy.

I guess I really shouldn't complain about the newspaper wrapping my daddy put on my toy, as my toy was wrapped in the sports page, which just goes to show you that my daddy did love me, as I would have picked out the sports page myself, if I were to wrap my own present. I certainly would not have fought over the comic pages like all brothers and step sisters did, even if I really wanted them and it was my birthday...

I bought a hand mirror today and I can now confirm for you what people have been telling me for years, I am balding.

I am mixed up kid. I am white trash, but I like to read and I never learned how to fix cars. Which just makes me bad at being white trash and really annoying to my middle class friends. I am so bad with cars that I don't even know how to change a battery. I googled it and watched a video and I am still confident that I am going to have to hire a Mexican or a grease monkey to come over to my house and replace my dead battery. I don't know a lot about blue collar workers, other than I think they all look like Erik Estrada, and are probably way more into ass play than you would think.

I guess everything would be ok if I had taken my love for reading and stuff to college and gotten a degree with it. Then I could afford to pay for the Mexican to take my car apart. As it stands now I can barely afford it, and so I will have to take the look that comes from some "macho" dude rolling up his sleeves and fixing on my car, but I can't shoot him back that look that says, "I don't do this because I can pay you to do this." My guess is that holding my career over a blue collar worker (who can at least fix the things I break) is about as difficult as it is to impress all the 15 year old girls I do. They fuck me. But they never look at me with any respect.

I am going to change the subject to my girlfriend. Whenever I find myself with a girl I try to imagine the things her parents (or especially her girlfriends) are telling her about me. I am sure they are asking her what she sees in me. I know I am not much to look at, so she doesn't even get points for that. I can't dance like a gay man or fix things like a He-man. When I watch movies like Rudy I don't cry like a man should. I don't choke back a few tears or a tiny sob near the climatic end of the story.

I cry throughout the entire movie like a little girl who is watching her pony get punched in the face by an on coming tractor trailer. I weep. I have to wipe away streams of tears. My face gets hot. I get flustered and my whole body turns red. I run a fever and get headaches that last all night at work.

What you would not know from that is that I have been told I have a certain kind of genius. It's not a genius that most folks would ask for. And I would have preferred something a little more bankable. You might take a guess that I am "good with words" or funny or something like that. But you are wrong. I can't make a living typing or writing anything and folks mostly laugh at me in public. I mean maybe I am funny, but lots of people are as funny as me in person. And most people think my kinda funny is mean, and that's because they think I am making fun of them. And I usually am.

To learn about my genius you would have to sit with me for a few hours at a time. Maybe even a few weeks or months or in some cases a few years. But you would start to get it then. I can be entertaining. I tend to accept you, and don't think I need to change you. I am funny. But not always ha ha funny. I don't do jokes well as you can tell, you read this blog. When you read a "joke" by me on this blog then you can bet that I am struggling with what I want to say, and I am not being very authentic about it.

I might be a genius, but I am still broke. And since I am white trash that means I don't have health care. Which is ironic because I am a hypochondriac. A hypochodriac without health insurance is pretty mixed up. Even though I always think there is something wrong with me, sometimes there really is. It's allergy season and I am having a terrible time with my allergies. I think my red runny nose and bloodshot eyes have more to do with the occasional seasonal affliction of allergies which Arizona is now known for, than the Super Aids which I am most probably dying from.

I was taking Claritin until I noticed that it causes liver damage. It also gave me a few more heart arrhythmia than I thought was absolutely necessary. Now whenever I bend over my head hurts. I am still shitting green and yellow and I think that means I have Pancreatic Cancer. I hear you die quickly with that so I guess if I you still see my writing in a few months I can deduct the P.C. from my list of worries. Actually you can deduct the cancer from your probable list of my afflictions, but I still plan on worrying about it.

I have this idea to get a hold of some kind of government services for free health care. I plan on blogging how that goes. My guess is that I am going to die of whatever infection I have right now before I ever get any access to any medical care.

I am about to pick on some of you in the medical profession. I guess it's a good thing we call it a profession and not care giving. If it were care giving you might feel bad about care denying and asking me if I have insurance or suggesting that my only hope for admittance into your e.r. is if I think I am dying. I know you don't plan on admitting me to the hospital unless I am having another heart attack, but the least you can do is take a glance at me and tell me [I mean that person] that I am not going to die or something.

Not every person who walks into your counter is trying to trick you into getting free health care. They just might be overreacting to ascare brought on by a bit of paranoia and a large amount of seeping puss. Your advice to that person to have their doctor check them out later is not much in terms of advice. It's like yelling at someone to be careful right after they fall. Nobody appreciates that kind of thing, and it just makes you look like an ass.

Looking back on the time period when I had me some health care it's kinda ironic that I am now pissed off at someone getting denied medical service. The one time I had a health care "provider" he prescribed Effexor to deal with my depression and some kind of acid reducer that was supposed to help my Acid- reflux. All it did was give me liver failure and yellow shits.

I know you think this rant has had precious little to do with you how I hate you. But you don't work in the medical profession, or if you do, and you read this blog, you diagnose me with real problems from fake symptoms. But I appreciate that. Some of you are my best friends, if I had best friends on the Internet.

I used to have the definition of Bathos on this blog:

a. An abrupt, unintended transition in style from the exalted to the commonplace, producing a ludicrous effect.
b. An anticlimax

But somebody convinced me to take it off, and that has probably confused the dumber people who read this blog. They like to pretend they know what I am talking about even though they need a dictionary just to read me. But I have already blogged about why I hate you before. Like I think you care more about dogs and cats than you care about homeless people. And I think that makes you worse than Hitler.

I got attacked by another stray dog today. Which was bound to happen given your careless attitude towards fencing your animal and the 40 billion dollars or so that you spend on feeding them. I think I should have stood my ground and kicked it a few times as the dog was smaller than me and I was pretty sure I could win the fight. But the dog was slow running up to me and the bike I ride is really fast. So fast that I doubt you could keep up with me if you were running along side of me for too long.

Also, I think you'd rather sleep in today than do anything about all those little babies with flies in their eyes in Somalia.

I'm sorry. I don't just want to make you feel bad. I wanted to make you feel good about the path we are on as humans. I had a long speech prepared for you about how tiny we are in the universe. But I composed it while at work and work frowns on me using the voice recorder while I ring up your stupid groceries. And I can't remember anything I told myself while you hunted for exact change.

For the most part my speech went on about how we are evolutionarily speaking still provincial creatures who have barely raised our collective heads out from beneath the muck of creation. Our sense of morality is based more on disgust of the other than anything helpful to us.

That doesn't bother me. Like its white trash cousins, Humankind, can't help where they come from. It doesn't bother me that you prefer sleeping well at night rather than face the forces of evil. I don't blame you for that. I have a hard time sleeping myself, and I know what a good night of rest can do for you.

I can't fault you for being a coward either. I don't like risking things myself. The guy who says it is better to have tried and failed, probably never failed at anything important, and if he did fail, he probably didn't get knifed in the back for trying it. If he did you'd wonder how he ever got around to living long enough to say all of those things about trying so much. Me? I prefer the sidelines of life. I don't need to participate in full contact sports to get a rush.

I can get a rush out of just cheering for the winner.

Today's Poop Watch is green or brown. I really need to get better lighting in my bathroom. Also, "I was Raped" makes a great T-shirt idea.

I have a lot of theories. Most of you think I just make them up, but I don't. I read the science news and pay attention to the world, and then I incorporate what I learn into the heuristic structure you see before you posted on this blog. You should try it sometime. I realize women don't have the same access to deep logic and rationality that men have access to. That's because logic requires shutting down the primitive emotional brain.

Women are hard wired by evolution to be tapped into a more grounded universal and inclusive set of values that takes into account feelings and humanistic perspectives. It's what makes women better people than men, but lousy at being philosophers and scientists. [ed. note I can't find that article anymore]

Take today's lesson: Confusing sexual interest with friendliness

Men are easily confused by women. We confuse your friendliness with sexual interest for evolutionary reasons. We have no idea why you are talking to us. We can only assume that you are talking to us for the same reason that we are talking to you. Sex.

But if a man talks to you only about sex that doesn't make him a pig. We'd talk to you about other things, but you aren't very interested in the upcoming NFL draft. You don't give a shit that the Cowboys need help at the 3rd cornerback position. If you knew football you would point out that the 'boys have two of the best starters in the league. My reply to that is both of the men have suffered from injuries in the past and the Cowboys lost their 2 primary backups to free agency, but then your eyes would glaze over the way mine do when you bring up how cute fluffy-the-cat is for scratching your eyes out whenever he decides you have not been petting him enough.

Sex is the only thing most men have in common with women. Don't forget that ladies. I don't care how cute the guy in the hall way is, or how sweet and nice he seems while he talks to you. He is just thinking about how he wants to bang you, and how maybe you want to bang him, because you did not run away from him after he made eye contact with you.

Women confuse men in a variety of other ways, and sometimes they confuse themselves. It seems some women can't determine when they've been raped. I can't understand that. If I was raped I think I would know it. But not chicks. They are too complicated emotionally to give an easy answer to an easy question.

"Corrina says when she was raped years ago, she didn't even understand exactly what had happened. "

I guess that's why she invented a t-shirt. To remind herself that she'd been raped. I don't think wearing a t-shirt that says "I was raped" on top of some juicy boy shorts when you are headed out to the grocery store for some ice cream sends a good message to anyone. Especially little girls. But then again I am guy and I like sex.

Rape is one of those words women don't like men to use. We aren't supposed to talk about it. Except when we are apologizing for looking down your shirt into your ample cleavage. I am a liberal feminist when it comes to defining rape, unlike the Italian Supreme Court that says a women in tight jeans can't get raped, and unlike the almost elected official in England that said rape without "force" isn't really rape.

"Rape is simply sex (I am talking about 'husband-rape' here)... Women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal…To suggest that rape, when conducted without violence, is a serious crime is like suggesting force-feeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence.”

I guess like that guy I am just saying that if you like chocolate cake, jog around my apartment building, and wear one of those "I was raped" shirts and some cute boy shorts that say juicy on the ass. I will rent one of those windowless gray vans and follow you around. I want to tie your body up in green plastic garbage bags, and dump you into my closet over the weekend. Then I could splash ketchup on your arms and pretend to cut into your body and eat it. We could really get to know each other that way.

Raping and abducting young girls into vans ain't as easy as it used to be. I mean just check out these psycho cheerleaders courtesy of Fredrick Schwartz.