I think this no moving thing is what the Bible calls "sloth". I would know for sure if I looked it up, but the Bible is a great big book and it's all the way over on the other side of the room.

 

I'm just kidding. Sort of.

 

Actually I am bored.

 

It just occurred to me as I sit here watching TV, I can see history. Here's a movie made in 1983 about soldiers in the 1940's. A TV show called Good Times from the 1970's, very topical in its day. Current events. Stupid 80's movies. The whole century is laid out in front of me, and all I have to do is sit here.

 

When I compare women from all these different times, I think they're getting better looking. I think there's a limited gene pool of good-looking people who just keep getting better and better looking. Look at the Mona Lisa. People used to think she was good-looking. I look at her and I think, she must have been a really good cook or something. Sure, every so often someone comes along who is just freakishly good-looking, like Rita Hayworth or Barbara Eden or Marilyn Monroe, and we forget that women back then were not all that good-looking.

 

Look at Ananda Lewis. Ananda Lewis is so good-looking that you forget her first name is just made up. She looks like she was cooked up in a lab by some celibate geneticists. Or look at Ashley Judd or Teri Hatcher, before they went all anorexic. Or look at Britney Spears.

 

I know it sounds really shallow. They say men are more into looks than women anyway, and I totally believe it, too. I don't see how women could even be into looks as much as most guys are. Not just because guys are so much into them, even though they totally totally are, but because men are generally ugly, and I can't believe that any woman in history has ever looked at any man and thought that he was as good-looking as I think Ananda Lewis is.

 

Anyway....

 

When you talk a subject to death, it's good to go "Anyway..." and then change the subject. It makes it sound like you're talking about just exactly what you intended to be talking about the whole time.

 

Today I'm getting a new suit for work, and I want to share something I've discovered about suits. That is, cheap suits are funny. Not funny to look at (although sometimes they are), but to mention in an off-handed way. In almost any context, or any situation, just mention a guy in a cheap suit. It's almost always funny. I don't know why.

 

 

thanks or the input. I don't mean to make fun of her name, it just sounds made up.

 

More than once I've walked through the bookstore or the library and seen books with titles like Understanding The Mind of A Terrorist or Common Respiratory Illnesses in Toddlers. At first glance they might just seem to be extraordinarily boring books. Without having actually read any of these books, or even reading the book jackets, I think they could actually be more than that.

 

Let's talk about the first one, the terrorist book. Now, you and me hear "terrorist" and we think "Muslim Extremist", and it so happens that this is exactly what this book is about. What I know about Muslim extremists is that they want to affect political change and, unable or unwilling to do so through conventional means, resort to violence. It doesn't matter that they're Muslims, either: The same could be said of Quebecois Separitists or the Republicans in Northern Ireland or even those freakballs in Idaho who are waiting for the world to explode. Now I would bet a thousand dollars that I could go get that book from the library, read the whole thing, and come away with no greater understanding of terrorism than what I just already said.

 

Now let's talk about the second one, Common Respiratory Illnesses in Toddlers. This book wasn't about pneumonia or cystic fibrosis; it was about dealing with "common" respiratory illnesses. It was a book about the sniffles. A whole entire book, written by an actual medical doctor, about common illnesses that aren't life-threatening and only last a day or two.

 

Now, granted, these books don't have much in common, and like I said, I didn't read either one. But they do have one thing in common, and that is that they seem to go into excuciating detail about subjects we just don't need to know that much about. I don't need to know that much about the mind of a terrorist, or anything more about the sniffles than I just knew when I was six.

 

Have we really become this paranoid? Or just this bored? Is it that we have this much free time?

 

There's a whole section in the book store called "True Crime". I guess its called that becuause it would be too weird or embarrassing to go to a section called "Serial Killers," even though that's really all it is. I've looked at some of these books, and I'm more and more convinced that they're less help to people who want to pursue a career in law enforcement than it would be to those who just want to become serial killers themselves. Some of those books, I swear, I'm surprised they don't have checklists.

 

They always say the same things, too, about being "Inside the mind of a killer". Now, again, do we really need to be there? Do we not already know everything we need to know about Ted Bundy and that weird guy who ate people and that unabomber guy?

 

Just a thought.