9 Minutes

I'm leaving in nine minutes to celebrate the New Years at several venues across New York City. I am never terribly excited by this holiday; it seems, like Halloween, to be just an excuse for a lot of people to get slutty and drunk. Also, what exactly am I celebrating? Jesus's birth? Not for us Jews, we're in the Year Of Our Lord 7,000 or something.

Part of my New Years' resolution involves going out and forcing myself to socialize, so all this falls neatly into my plans. Leaving my house is a Herculean task usually, especially to 'go out and do stuff'. Usually leaving involves going to a dark bar to get drunk, go to someone's house to get drunk or play poker to get drunk. But when I have to dress up to get drunk, problems ensue. I seem to have cultivated a comfortable 'crap' look for myself, and I truly hate messing that up.

So kudos to you, Jebus H. Christ. Congratualtions on being born and dying for all our sins. We will honor you by getting drunk and hooking up with strange women in your name. O, thank ye, Jebus, thank ye Lord. Now let's get plastered!


UPDATE:
I was informed by several people this evening that the New Years has nothing to do with Jebus's burfday. That's Christ-mass. My bad.

T minus 25 and counting.

How long do we really live for? Should I feel that 25 is a milestone? Will this sentence end with a question mark? The answer is inveriably YES, kind sir and/or madam, yes!

Ok, so in a few minutes I'm turning 25. I can't remember turning 15 (actually I can't remember turning 24), but I'm sure it didn't feel the same way. The phrase "quarter-life crisis" is bandied about among my age-set. Is your career going yet? Are you with someone who is marriage-able? How many midgets have you met? We face these questions on a daily basis.

Carpe Diem? Said outloud, it sounds like some sort of Yiddish expression involving phlegm and/or Shabbat, but it's certainly something to think about. I'm not sure what the percentage is, but I know that I've definitely said "I wish I'd have done that" MUCH more frequently then I've said "I wish I hadn't have done that". Turning 25 is just another harsh reminder that there isn't enough time in the world to say 'NO' to stuff.

Same could be said for turning 65, I guess. My dad told me recently that he stayed up all night regretting that he had said 'no' to all the women who at some point said 'yes' to him. Granted, that's a pretty disgusting thought, but he makes a point. If I have a ton of regrets at 25, I can't imagine how I'll feel at 65.

Completely unrelated to that (*cough*), I'm attending the Sundance Film Festival this year to try to schmoooze and market myself. Last week I shot a short film on a whim and I think I may be moving to LA before 2007 is over. Carpe Diem, man. There's not enough time in the world.

Long Island Jewess Drinks and Goes Home.

I have two older brothers, and the less-older of the two has never owned a suit in his life. He takes pride in the fact that up-and-down his entire wardrobe costs under 50 bucks. Anyways, that all has to change because he's trying to get a job as a professor and now needs an 'interview suit'.

I tagged along to show my support, but I'm of little help. I consider myself stylish, or at least generally well groomed - but I'm in no position to give advice about the purchase of any item of clothing that's worth more then the GNP of Kenya. I duly sat this one out.

We ended up at generic Mid-Town Expensive Men's Clothing Store number #41. I sat at a bench adjacent to the dressing rooms and pulled out my new Frank Zappa biography, cleverly entitled 'Zappa'. There was this awful mid-30's Long Island Jewess (complete with accent) sitting next to me, waiting for her equally repellent husband to emerge from the waiting room. A staff member came out and the following conversation took place:

"Your husband likes the suit, but I'm afraid it costs $1200 dollars"
"Only $1200? Tell him it's $2100, flip the numbers around, it doesn't matter to us!"
"Would you like some store-brand water, miss?"
"Imported or domestic?"

At this point, I stopped listening. I read recently that Americans give 15 cents of every $100 they make to charity. This stupid whore is concerned if she's drinking domestic or imported STORE BRAND water, while 95% of the world is wondering if they're drinking malaria infested water from a dank, putrid river.

By any definition, I am not poor. Actually, I'm extremely well off and I consider myself lucky that I grew up in a country that offers so much financial oppurtunty. But seriously, I'm pretty fucking ashamed to be an American sometimes.

What are our priorities? We pride ourselves in being the 'moral compass of the world', but where is that morality? Does it manifest itself in passing laws preventing dudes from kissing each other? Or is it giving to the needy, stopping the spread of AIDS across Africa, spearheading scientific efforts to cure diseases, ect?

Maybe after you buy that suit, you can cut a check to the Red Cross. Not because some previously-unheard-of-disaster happened half way across the world sprung you into action, but because it's the fucking right thing to do.

Hey, look, they did something right for a change.

Harry Reid instructed his minions to vote against a "$453.5 billion defense bill including $29 billion for hurricane relief, the war and border security, and $2 billion to help low-income households pay this winter's heating expenses."

That's great news!

Why?

Because right wing nutjob Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) tacked on a provision to the bill that called for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. What does that have to do with hurricane relief, border security or helping poor people pay their heating bills? BUGGER ALL! (Stevens, by the way, is the same jerk who shouted poor Maria Cantwell down when she requested that oil executives be placed under oath when they testified in front of a senate committee last month - God forbid)

Stevens and the Republican leadership hoped that Democrats would buckle underneath the pressure of having a campaign commercial next year that says "Liberal Senator Liberally McLiberalson voted, like the rest of the Liberal members of the senate, AGAINST hurricane relief, border security or helping poor people pay their heating bills. Do you want this Liberal in representing YOU? You aren't safe...a-Boogey-Boogey-Boogey!".

Drilling ANWR, not conservation and developing alternative energies, is the cornerstone to Bush's energy policy- just thought I'd put that in there.

So kudos, Harry Reid, et. al., for acting like a Republican and standing up for what you believe in. It's good to finally see a Democratic leadership with some balls. Now they just have to win the (mis)information war. That's the hard part. Unfortunately, "standing up for what you believe in" means bollocks when the campaign ads run. I'm so fucking sick of attack ads that use the word "liberal" like it means "Nazi" or "child rapist". Can't Democrats come back with an attack ad that uses the word conservative like that? Is that possible? Sigh....

Too Bloody Right!

I sweat when it comes to the small things.

Sometimes I sweat the big things, but rarely does it show.

Recently, a picture came to mind that was evocative of a thousand words; none of them were memorable.

Carpe Diem, they say. God doesn't exist, they say. Heaven's a dream, they say. Too bloody right, I say.

Cosmic coincidences abound.

Too bloody right. The world is a mass kufuffle controlled by randomness in search of meaning. If there's no God, then there's certainly someone having a right old laugh at our expense. Maybe just my expense. Whatever he/she/it might be, they obviously aren't a big fan of my writing.

1999ish

I looked in the mirror. Shit. It wasn't pleasant.

It was the dawn of a new century and I still looked like I was some suburban Grungester wannabe. Fuck. That was like eons ago. So 1991. I was too young back then to dress like that, so I guess I was making up for lost time. The long hair parted down the middle and the ironic Urban Outfitter tee shirts had to go. For once, my mom was right. I looked crap.

It was a sea change. In the past year I wrote and directed a play, got off with a model, fallen in love a few times and was accepted into NYU film school. I was shocked. I sent my application in a week late and I was a rich white Jew from New York City. I thought in order to get in, I may have to be a minority along the lines of "Black Asian Lesbian Cripple (With Braces!)", but somehow they took me.

So I did it. I chopped off my hopelessly dated haircut and highlighted the rest blond. I still looked crap, but at least I didn't know it. That oldest-member-of-a-boyband look was real cool in '99. I even allowed myself a goatee. Complete chin rubbish. The mustache didn't even connect to the bottom. But I was older and life was changing, so my look had to catch up. Oh right, I also had terrible acne. Oy. I can't even look back at pictures of myself for fear that my eyeballs might pop themselves out of my skull.

It was about a month until college when I got a letter from NYU with my roommate's name, address and telephone number. Rich Gibson, Some Shithole, Illinois. The next day he called me.

I guess he was nervous about my New York address, maybe my last name, whatever it was, the conversation was wholly unpleasant.

"Hey, so what kinda movies are you into?" He gurgled.

"I don't know. Comedies, I guess. Woody Allen's pretty cool."

"WOODY ALLEN? He's my favorite! I guess we're the perfect match! Maybe we should get married!"

Silence. This kid was fucking retarded. It took him about 10 seconds to realize it.

"...uhhh, sorry, I'm just excited about college"

A few hours later, I got an email from him outlining his personal habits.

1) I'm a Buddhist and I meditate four hours a day.
2) I go to sleep early and wake up early to meditate.
3) I've never done drugs, drank or smoked and never will. Mediation takes me to a higher plane.
4) I can't wait to meditate with you!

Not that I judge people on their habits or personal preferences, but I mean, shit: This motherfucker was strange. 18 year old kid from the mid-west who bases his entire life around meditation? How do I get out of this one?

My blond highlights and goatee needed someone cool to hang out with.

I searched for a way to get out of my predicament.

I noticed our dorm didn't have air conditioning.

BINGO.

I immedately went to my mother: "Mom, they stuck me in a dorm without air conditioning! I want to get out of there!"

Like any good superhero Mom, she sprung into action.

The next day, she told me she fixed everything and that I'd have a dorm with air conditioning.

"YES!"

"I got you and your roommate a new room!"

"My roommate?"

"Yeah, he called when you were out and we talked for 20 minutes. What a nice guy! He meditates, you know!"

I vomited a little in my mouth. I was going to be spending the next year with some Puritanical Buddhist.

CUT TO:

Four Months Later.

It was about 3:00am. Maybe 4. I couldn't see the clock because the room was spinny. No, the room wasn't spinny, it was my head. Colt 45 seemed awl-right when Snoop Dogg poured it out for his dead homies. But it wasn't when a bunch of hipster doofus white kids guzzled it like it was going out of style. It was completely nasty, but we felt so fucking cool. NEW YORK, DRUNK, NO PARENTS! ROCKSTAR!

When I got home, I flipped on the light. Rich wasn't home. The first week he kept to his Puritan mantra, but slowly fell out of it. I saw him smoking cigarettes, drinking and he was sleeping later then I was.

I brushed my teeth to get the 40OZ breath out of my foamy mouth.

CRASH!

The door was closed, but there was definitely some sort of wrecking ball on the other side. I opened it up. Rich lay, with a big fucking gash on his forehead, laughing hysterically. His eyes were dusty red pools of intoxicants.

"I couldn't find my keys. So I thought I'd knock down the door with my body."

I picked him up. The keys were in his hand.

He was an incoherent mess. He sat down and started to freak out.

He breath became protracted and short.

"I CAN'T BREATHE! I'M GOING TO DIE!"

I was too drunk to talk a paranoid down off a high, so I told him to eat some crackers.

He took a box of saltines and gleefully started chomping. One after one, they filled his cheeks until he looked like a chipmunk.

"Rich, you aren't swallowing".

Without hesitation, he spit the cracker dust all around our dorm room, tornado style and started to laugh like a fucking pathetic maniac.

"I KNOW, MAN!"

I jumped into bed and fell asleep. I was awoken less then an hour later to the sounds of gentle sobbing. I put my headphones on and cranked some David Bowie. Christ. This isn't how I wanted to spend my college years.

Rich and I survived that year together. We ended up going to London in the spring where he drunkenly confessed in a men's room that he "Loved Me" a few moments after he blurted out "I'm gay, I'm straight, I'm everything".

We've lost touch over the years. I guess everyone needs to make mistakes. I spent the majority of that year pining hopelessly for some awful Irish girl who laughed out loud when I told her how I felt. Rich is probably a cool guy now. Yeah, he was a pain, but if you don't act like an ass and screw up sometimes then you'll never learn from your mistakes. He learned that the meditation/no drugs thing is bollocks and I learned that I looked like an ass with frosted tips and a goatee. I mean, seriously, what the fuck was I thinking?

Members of Congress caught using Saudi Arabian Oil as Vaginal Lubricant

I saw Syriana last night. There's a wake up call. Sure it was a confused, 2 hour long, pretty much unintelligible wake-up call, but a wake up call nonetheless. Some message board smeg heads (are there any other kind?) are describing the film as "liberal, far-left propaganda" or "the truth about the right wing conspiracy", but the film deals with something that goes beyond party affiliations, something that runs deeper then our petty ideological divide.

Our policies are a depressingly unchangeable Catch-22. At least seemingly unchangeable.

Here are some excerpts from an interview with Robert Baer, the former CIA officer who wrote the novel from which the film was based:

BUZZFLASH: Why do the Saudis finance terrorism? From reading your book and elsewhere, we deduce that there are probably two reasons. One is that they’re paying protection money. You set up the scenario, as you discussed earlier, that if they didn’t buy off al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, they might be the target of a plane that’s hijacked into their oil processing plants, and that would ruin them for years. The second reason is that the Saudis practice what we would view in America as a fundamentalist branch of the Islamic faith that actually becomes a breeding ground for terrorism.

BAER: There's a lot that we really don’t know. There are a lot of people in the royal family that sympathize with bin Laden. There are people in the royal family that feel humiliated by colonialism -- call it what you want -- by the United States, by Israel. And they’re humiliated that they are citizens or subjects of a country that has never fought a war, and yet spends so much money on defense. They’re humiliated that they don’t take the Israelis on, because their army is worthless. And maybe they’re not humiliated but rather disenfranchised because they can never advance up the ranks of the family, and it’s a very tough culture. They sit around and they read the Koran. And they get on these Islamic websites, and they watch Al-Jazeera. And they go to the mosque, and I think they’re believers.

....

That brings me to the State Department. You’ve got ’95, ’96, and ’98 bombings that had a bunch of Saudis. The bombings in Africa [U.S. Embassy in Kenya] and the Cole [U.S.S. Cole] had a bunch of Saudis involved. And we were hit September 2001, and we still don’t have visa interviews for these people. How can you explain that? If you’re a Syrian, you have to wait 30 days. If you’re an Iranian, you have to wait 30 days before you get your visa. In Saudi Arabia, you just send your passport to the travel agent. It comes back, without an interview, without any sort of check, and you get a visa. And that’s what disturbs me.

....

BUZZFLASH: You also mentioned how intertwined business relationships are with Saudi Arabia. Another point you bring out is that the Saudi Arabians keep possibly as much as a trillion dollars on deposit in U.S. banks. So how does that factor in?

BAER: Well, Kissinger set this up in the first oil embargo. He said, listen, fine, you can raise the price of oil. You’re going to get more money for your oil. But let’s be reasonable about this. Take this money and all this profit you’re making, and invest it in the United States, which is a perfectly good policy, by the way. Buy our arms. Keep your money here. It’ll keep our economy floating. We won’t go into a recession or a depression because of high oil prices. And we’re all going to win by this. And that worked fine.

But then that goes back to the dependency. We depend so much on Saudi investments in the stock market, in Citibank and other funds. This is not just Saudi money; it’s other Arab money too. If we go into a confrontation with the Middle East, especially with oil prices so high right now, and that money is not recirculated back in the United States, it’s going to do some real damage. Or if one day, they just completely pull their money out. I mean, that’s the perfect storm: an oil embargo, the Saudis and others' pulling their money out, and having the price of oil go up to $70 - $80 a barrel. We would be hurt, badly hurt.

So it's the snake eating it's tail. We finance them, they finance us, they finance terrorists, the terrorists bomb us and we bomb them. The film suggests that any attempt to change this, bring in a reformer that pushes true democracy and self sufficiency to the Saudis, is actually against our best financial interests. The oil prices might rise and they might take some of their money out of our economy. So we'll continue to support backwards anti-reform idiots who support terrorists because it keeps oil prices down and the rich white guys pockets full.

Would having a Democrat in office make things any difference? Probably not. Maybe some regulation and more funding for alternative fuels, but no fundamental difference in our policies.

Remember when the commercials used terrorism as a way to fight the drug war ("Harmless?"). Well, it ain't pot that's funding terrorism, it's your SVU. So drive that gas guzzler with the "Freedom Isn't Free" bumper sticker. You're a driving oxi-moron and you should be ashamed of yourself. OK, not you, but someone else. I like you!