Yesterday, at twelve I had an appointment with a doctor, and she kept me waiting in the reception area until a quarter to one. There I was getting quietly bored, examining my fingernails, admiring the inside of my eyelids, counting the number of hair on the second joint of my left ring finger (two). You know, fun stuff.

Now, you may say, “Rajneesh, weren’t there magazines for you to read?”

And I would, with a sad smile on my face reply, “Yes there were.” And then I would shake my head and stare off into the distance, an expression of muted sadness on my face, the face of a strong silent man who has seen horrors that he cannot, will not talk about.

The look that the Lone Gunslinger gives in every western, as he contemplates the time, when as an innocent kid he out drew the Lone Gunslinger and became the Lone Gunslinger.

So that’s the look I’m giving you. Squinting off into the distance, desperately hoping that my contact lenses do not pop out of my eyes. I tip my ten gallon hat back, draw my trusty six gun and dive to the left. And then we cut to bullet vision, like the Matrix, or Max Payne, and I shoot the toaster.

Um…Yes. So the reception had magazines. Tons of them, a veritable cornucopia of magazine-osity. It was like the magazine fairy had, in an orgasm of generosity spread her bounty all over the office (Ick!). What I am trying to say is that there were tons of magazines.

Let there be no grounds for ambiguity. Magazines were profusely present. Magazines were profoundly present. Magazines were doing the horizontal mambo with nary a care.Magazines peeped at me from under the chairs; they waved at me from the racks. Some of the more adventurous ones were hanging out near the end tables, doing body shots and playing drinking games. Verily, ‘twas like the reception area that launched a hundred thousand magazines.

And.

They were all women’s magazines.

Specifically, Women’s Health and Healthy Pregnancy. Every fucking issue from the beginning of time. When people hadn’t thought up of pregnancy. When stuff used to reproduce by splitting itself across a diagonal. (One of the halves would go off to sleep and the other half would fume because the sleeping half did not want to talk about its feelings.)

There also was a book of nursery rhymes. It informed me about Jack and Jill, who apparently went up a hill. To fetch a pail of water. (No indoor plumbing). Jack fell down and broke his crown (tiara?), and Jill came tumbling after (Clearly a follower and not a leader. This will reflect badly upon here during her semi-annual review)

In sheer desperation I picked up Women’s Health, and made an astounding discovery. A happy astounding discovery. Women’s Health has more hot semi-naked women in it than Maxim does. Do women enjoy looking at hot semi-naked women? (I hope so!). Does this make them healthy? Is this why the name of the magazine is Women’s Health and not Hot Semi-Naked Women Monthly?

Um, yeah so, don’t judge a magazine by its title.

I’m wasting time while I should be doing something important. Like typing up this important document that I need to submit tomorrow.

And this is what I come across on um a place where people give themselves stupid taglines.

…And smile a lot it Cost Nothing (FREE)…

Now I suppose I should be charitable and give the person who came up with that the benefit of the doubt. But, I’m not a nice person and hell, that all uppercase free absolutely slays me. …It Cost Nothing, (FREE)… the uppercases fill me with joy. It brought a smile to my face. And the smile cost me nothing! (FREE!)

…The hills are alive with the sound of FREEEEE (It Cost Nothing),
The definitions they have sung for a thousand years.
The hills fill my heart with the sound of FREEEEE (It Cost Nothing)…

(To the person whose website had those lyrics. Embedded fucking MIDI music is not a good fucking idea. It was a bad idea when Hotmail was an innovation. You know, the early nineteenth century. Hunting through multiple Firefox tabs, looking for that one page with the tiny little pause button to stop that atrocious rendering of the hills are alive with the sound of FREEEEE (It Cost Nothing), is not pleasant)

I’m a bad person, and if a hell existed I would go to it. To be tormented by devils who would insist on making me read the Da Vinci Crap, or would use z instead of s in plural forms. (You know who you are, you evil degenerate person you.).

(I like brackets)

Or maybe they would recruit me. I could be sadistic to the bad folk. “Paint your “own pottery” studio” or “Paint your “own pottery studio””, I would ask them, and no matter what the answer, I’d force them to do nasty things. Like watch soccer.

Unless they like watching soccer. In which case I’d sadly shake my head, and give them up to someone vastly more qualified at torture than me. Perhaps one of those twisted researchers at Gillette who have come up with a razor that now has sixteen blades.

I’m not exaggerating. It has sixteen blades. However, to avoid ripping a hole in the fabric of space time, only four of them will appear in this reality at any instant of time. The rest are stored in a pocket reality inaccessible to normal humans. The one that has wayward socks and all the contact lenses that I ever lost. And contact lenses Cost Something (NOT FREE).

And no, the title does not suggest that you do a deer, unless of course you are a stag, in which case whatever rocks your boat man. It is pronounced Doh a deer. From that little-known Simpsons episode, where Homer saw a deer and exclaimed, “Gadzooks, a deer. Come Watson, the hunt is on.”

This week’s issue of Time magazine has an article about the Freedom of the Seas, a cruise liner. The title of the article is, A Whale of a Boat. And so as you may imagine, the article is all about how large the boat is.

They compare it to the Statue of Liberty. (Twice as high!)

The Titanic. (Twice as wide! Nothing about sinkability, but twice as many life boats.)

A Large Chocolate Cake. (Twice as Tasty! And creamier)

Fine, I made that last one up, but it does not come close in sheer stupidity to the next comparison that the writer used. A comparison that was so breathtakingly idiotic that it, well took my breath away.

Are you ready for it?

He stated without the slightest trace of irony or sarcasm, “…the ship is heavier than 12500 Elephants.”

No one could have up with that comparison without being seriously high on some chemicals. Or being seriously idiotic.

Honestly, when did the elephant become a unit of weight? Even a pound is more logical than one metric Elephant. Do people go into stores and ask for one hundredth of an Elephant of potatoes? Or do you go on a diet to lose that one twenty fifth of an Elephant that you have around your waist?

And when was the Elephant standardized? Are all elephants now the same size? Where was the international conference on standardizing the Elephant held? Were there representatives from both the Asian and the African sub-species? Did they get along? Was there alcohol at the after-party? Did a temple elephant get drunk and disgrace itself by dancing on the table and waking up naked and sore the next morning…With a post-it note stuck to its trunk, saying, “You were fantastic. Call me xxx-xxx-0843.”

Will thin elephants be forced to eat a high calorie diet to pack on those um…not pounds…but sub-Elephants? Will overweight elephants have to go to aerobic classes? Jazzercise? TaiBo? Run on the treadmill? Get up at six in the morning to go running? Will teenage female elephants have to starve themselves to conform to the media’s portrayal of the ideal female elephant?

Who did frame Roger Rabbit? Where in the world is Carmen San Diego? What’s the good word? One small step for man, one large leap for mankind? Is there a Santa Claus in Viginia? Who the fuck is Alice? “Paint “your own pottery” studio” or “Paint your own “pottery studio””? How many chucks could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? I before E except after C? Will these questions ever end? No? Yes? Maybe?

Will we have more inappropriate comparisons and/or units of measurement?

As long as Three Hundred Bottles of Wine? ( This amount varies depending on whether the bottles are full or empty.)

As bright as Sixteen Sixty Six Fireflies swinging the Salsa in Spring ? (Quantitative, poetic, and alliterative.)

As young as one fifteen millionth of Mount Everest? (Quantitative and poetic, but not alliterative.)

Will this post end abruptly?

The problem with living in a place for any extended period of time is that you cannot get lost anymore.

I moved to New Jersey eight months ago, and three months after that I acquired my car. (And a huge ass debt to the evil capitalist bankers. Vive La’ Revolucion. You can call me Comrade Rajneesh. I’ll be communist like Psmith, who believed that practical communism involved grabbing as much as a person could and then sitting on it.

I could be a good communist. Not the riff-raff proletariat, but a member of the politburo. One of those who defend the masses from the corrupting influence of capitalism, using their bodies to insulate the proletariat from luxury and decadence.

And it would allow me to do one of the things that I have longed for ages to do. Kick a door in. I’ve always wanted to kick a door in. I dream at night of doors that I could kick in.

I’m not quite sure what one does after kicking in a door. I fear I would probably be embarrassed and apologize to the people on the other side of the door. Or I might whistle nonchalantly and point unobtrusively to my dicey looking sidekick.

You need to have sidekick if you are kicking in doors. I do believe that not having one would cause a rip in the fabric of space time. They have to be dicey looking. You cannot have a sidekick who looks like a fine upstanding member of the community. We do not want Dr. Jeykll, we want Mr. Hyde.

I’d prefer a silent sidekick, not the one picked for comic relief. I’d rather have a grim brooding one. One who looks like his wife just ran away with a randy toaster. No quick quips or amusing eccentricities from my sidekick. I’ll be doing all the quipping and the eccentricity-ing.

We’d be a dynamic duo. Just no tights, and no homo-erotic undertones.

Maybe a female sidekick. Naturally hot. Because I’m a sexist pig. She’d still have to be silent (Desperately stifles urge to make incredibly sexist joke), because I insist on doing the quipping and taking care of the banter. She can do the whipping of the bad guys or the re-education of the proletariat (Though the proletariat may like being whipped by a hot sidekick. I know I woul…Never mind.)

(Boy, this is a long ass digression.))

So…getting lost and stuff. Good Shit.