Punxatawney Philharmonic

Yowza.

Sorry, wingnuts, but Al Gore was right. I'm sitting here on February 3 listening to some guy mowing his lawn next door to where I'm staying. It's like, Hawaiian shirt weather out there. Whoda thunk that Super Bowl Sunday might become one of those holidays where people celebrate by having outdoor barbeques?

So global warming, or "climate change," as the Orwellian wordsmiths inside the Bush regime and their foxagandists over at Foxaganda "News" Channel put it, is real. And, um, aside from the glee and desire of watching Rush Limbaugh get roasted by the sun in his own lard, we've gotta face the grim realization that we're pretty much in a seriously crummy place here. And we can blame our own stupidity, even if a bunch of little dicks went out and bought Hummers (thanks, Arnold!) and drove around in them.

Because we were driving, too, and we bought into the same line of bullshit as everybody else.

Anyone seen Mike Judge's new movie, Idiocracy? You probably missed it, because it came out for like five minutes in the theaters, in maybe five cities, and then it got released on video. Judge is the director of Office Space, and the creator of Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill. Idiocracy, like Office Space, is a flat movie that may not be a masterwork of cinematography, but it does contain some pretty hard-hitting jokes.

The premise is that at some point, like now, mankind stopped evolving, because the Federlines began breeding way faster than the Einsteins. By 2505, the world became overrun by garbage, and a garbage avalanche dislodged the suspended-animation casket containing an utterly average Army librarian named Luke Wilson, which was buried in 2005 when the top-secret program was shut down, the base was bulldozed, and a new Fuddruckers was erected in its place. I won't tell you much more than that, except that the citizens in 2005 are so stupid that they can't grow crops because someone decided to irrigate with Brawndo, the Thirst Mutilator (a sports drink with electrolytes, ie.e., Gatorade) instead of water. And that even though there's a pro wrestler slash porn star in the White House, Carl's Jr. pretty much runs everything, and its advertising slogan is "Carl's Jr.: Fuck You, I'm Eating."

I don't think it's going to take us until 2505 to get buried by a mountain of garbage, though. We're headed there a lot sooner.

My dinner with nobody

As I said downthread, through circumstances mostly outside of my control, I am currently homeless, and find myself surfing some of the finer couches and davenports in the Sacramento area. Fortunately, I landed that most choice of couch surfer gigs, the house sitting arrangement, through the weekend. Ah, the life of O'Reilly is mine. Time to go to the local supermarket and pick up some most excellent microwavable Dinty Moore, as in beef stew. Don't all bums just love that hot steaming mug of beef stew? I sure do.

Last night, I was in one of those funks you find yourself in when you've just sat in an AA meeting for an hour listening mostly to people whose problems are pretty mundane, and you'd neglected to eat din-din between the end of work and the beginning of the meeting, so by the time the meeting was over, when you hop in your car and start driving around, you hope the right dinner will occur to you. Jimboy's? Nah. Willie's? Double nah. Especially when your stomach feels all jinky from ongoing marital discord, or ongoing end-of-marriage discord, and you're sleeping on couches and wearing clothes permeated with the accumulated funk of several days, and you have that vaguely "Is this the onset of like the flu, or is it just that I've suddenly gone from living comfortably in a house for years to begging friends for a spot on their couches and my stomach is kinda gnarly?"-style rough patch that we of the hobo profession sometimes get.

I drove around past Taco Bell and some of this burg's other stellar drive-thru Ralston Purina outlets and ended up on Stockton Boulevard at Pho King 3, which turned out to be pho king awesome (sorry, never can resist a bad pho-related pun) as it was the first time I went, which was Christmas night with my now-estranged wife. In retrospect, she seemed kind of estranged then, too, but that's neither here nor there.

As for me last night, I wondered if I was some kind of raging sentimentalist for going there. Yeah, I am, kinda, but not really last night; I just needed a hearty bowl of soup, and Edokko on Broadway with its infamous Stamina Ramen, which would kill any virus or bacteria (but make your sweat smell like the loo in a Korean restaurant, which could incite homicide from whoever your're sleeping with, so its beneficial effects were somewhat negligible) is no longer there.

The pho was even better this time than it was at Christmas. To the broth, which was swirling with complex and enticing flavors, and the pieces of beef and thin, clear noodles, I added fresh basil leaves, chili peppers, mung bean sprouts, squeezes of lime, and squirts of plum and chili sauce. Then, the ritual of eating. Man, if you want something that will pull you right out of a bad funk, this pho will do the trick.

Not having a dinner companion kinda sucked, but that's the life of a solitary man, as I've already given up the idea of turning into some kind of ladies' ninja or middle-aged babe magnet (if you saw me with my Shaggy from Scooby Doo haircut and snaggle teeth and shambling Viking in the woodshed hillbilly lurch, you'd know what I was talking about). So next time, I'll bring a good magazine. And next time will be real soon.

Pho yeah.

Couch surfin' USA

Not my favorite place to be, but when life takes a weird turn, you kinda have to roll with where Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is headed.

This is where I get to say that I am very grateful for the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, because if I was still in my cups and going through the same set of circumstances, I'd be preaching at squirrels from an upside-down shopping cart. And those new ones are made of cheap plastic, and they won't hold your weight.

Anyway, life sucks, one day at a time. But this too shall pass, right?