Whoever thought of Chicken Pot Pie? Was someone eating a cherry or apple pie or something, and say to themselves, ya know, this would be a lot better with some meat in it? What about bread pudding? Someone must have really loved pudding a lot and just been out of chocolate and butterscotch. It just sounds so weird "bread pudding". It's like two things that DON'T go together, like a Spam Dacquiri or Broccoli Pop-Tarts.

Pudding is really good to eat but its also fun to fill up baloons with and drop off roofs onto people. When I was a kid, I mean. Not now that I'm a grown-up.

A lot of things were funny when I was a kid that aren't funny anymore. Like, Cheech and Chong used to be funny, but drugs haven't been funny since I saw a girl blow her mind out on acid. Well, I take that back, because pot is still funny. I mean, it's not funny to grow it, or sell it, or buy it, or even to smoke it, but it's funny to deal with people who have been smoking it.

It's funny to me that people think you can study Kung Fu and you won't have to worry about gravity anymore.

When I was a kid, I used to write horrible, horrible poetry about how miserable I was. It was all about orphans crying in the darkness and stuff like that. I think I would have done better with girls if I didn't show my poetry to them.

I used to feel things so deeply, and be so sensitive....not like now, where I'm just shallow, sarcastic and bitter. I think my main problem was that I thought that everyone was at heart sensitive and romantic, when in reality almost no one is. Its weird because we are bombarded by messages telling us to be sensitive and in touch with our feelings, and we as a society seem to value these things so highly, but 1) almost no one really has these qualities, and 2) if we ever meet someone who does, we tease them until they develop an eating disorder or give them wedgies and stuff them in a trashcan.

All these songs and poems and movies and books and TV shows, they tell us its good to be caring and sympathetic, and that guys should always put women first, and that men shouldn't be afraid to cry, and that all women instinctively love it when guys are like this. Or at least guys who express their feelings and care about stuff.

This is almost always shown in songs and books and movies as a good thing. But in the real world girls always went for the cute guys who handed them some BS line and lied to them and cheated on them and ignored them, and sometimes even beat them up. And even the decent guys who didn't beat up their girlfriends still found time to beat up the guys who wrote poetry.

And you know how sometimes in school the prom queen grows up to be a cow and the dorky kid in band winds up with a record deal and a supermodel girlfriend? Well, that's not how this thing works at all. The girls who got treated badly by their boyfriends usually wound up marrying some guy named Brock who sells used cars and only hits her on the weekends, and the dorky poetry guys wind up "best friends" with the supermodels and just listen to them whine and cry about how miserable they are with their 80-year-old millionaire husbands.

Here's the worst part, though. No one ever admits it. No one. Every woman in the entire universe says that they LOVE sensitive poetry guys and CAN'T STAND abusive jocks. Every jock douche-bag in the whole world says there's nothing wrong with being senisitive and showing how you feel. And yet the sensitive poetry guys never have girlfriends and always get beat up by the jock douche-bags.

And so, having stuffed the sensitive poetry-guy in a trash-can and lied to and cheated on his prom queen girlfriend, the brainless jock always got in their 70's muscle cars and drove off listening to....what? LOVE SONGS! Written by....who? DORKY POETRY GUYS!

Not all the jocks were bad guys. Some of them watched out for the smaller kids and were right decent most of the time, you know, like Charlie Sheen in "Lucas". And some of the dorky sensitive poetry guys were so snotty and superior, they would mouth off all the time with abbsolutely nothing to back it up, and they deserved to get stuffed in trash cans. The point is, anyway, that everyone always talks about being sensitive and showing how you feel, but no one really wants you to.

So anyway, I used to write this horrible poetry, which I of course took as evidence of my own genius. I don't know how old I was when I realized that it sucked, but the last one I wrote was probably 1983 or so. I'm thinking of writing some more, though, because there are some things I feel strongly about. I'm not, of course, talking about romantic love. I'm too cynical and misanthropic for that.

They say the concept of romantic love is relatively new, anyway. They say it started in the Middle Ages with the troubadors and all that, and before that all marriages were arranged. I've heard people say this before but I think it's crap. I think men and women have naturally always had feelings for one another, I mean, it's not like something that somebody had to teach you how to do, or just thought up one day. Even back in old-timey days boys and girls got crushes on each other, it's just that they had to marry the one with the most goats or whatever.

These days it seems like everyone is obsessed with it. You turn on the radio and people are always singing about it. Why? I mean, it's important and people enjoy it and all, but there are so many other things people enjoy. People enjoy football and no one writes songs about it. People love food but you never hear anyone singing about it. Well, except Weird Al Yankovic.

I think the reason people write so many songs about it is because most rock stars are ultra-bajillionaires whose average relationship lasts like four days because they are always looking for that rush of "first love" that never seems to last. It's always so exciting and overwhelming, it's the kind of thing people write songs about. And when it wears off, they just date another supermodel or another boy-band or whatever.

Generally, men get confused about love, because they get it mixed up with sex. I'm not saying that the physical act is all that men are ever after...even though for most guys this is true. But even when they want a long-term relationship, most guys want a sexy supermodel, because if that's not what most guys think love is then they at least consider it a large part of it.

Women think it's money. Looks are important, too, but mostly women want security and stability. I'm not saying all women are greedy gold-diggers...even though a lot of them are.

Anyway, people seek romantic love all their lives and prize it like gold. Until they get it, that is. Then they feel trapped and they worry when they don't feel the same way after a year or two. Because "being in love" and "being in a relationship" are two totally different things.

For a guy it's like being one of those wrestlers on TV all yelling and screaming and carrying on about how HE'S in charge and HE makes the rules. And then he gets hit on the head with a folding chair and he finds out it's not as easy as all that. For a woman it's like Hogan's Heroes; the guy is Colonel Klink, strutting around thinking he's got everything under control, and the woman is like Hogan with bugs and tunnels and cameras everywhere getting just what she wants.

O my gosh! I sound so bitter and angry. I suppose I might be, if I even cared the slightest bit. It's not that I'm angry, or lost my faith, it's just that I believe that most people, when left to their own devices, will behave like self-serving pigs.