My spleen is oddly empty, too. Oh, sure, I managed to come up with a decently fierce, white-hot globule of bile for CalTrans this morning. (Actually, last week by the time you read this column.) The bastards are, once again, playing at their "Let's Make a Traffic Jam!" game. Yes, as soon as us 237 commuters get used to one ridiculous lane arrangement, they go and change it to a more insane arrangement, probably just to prove that they can, or as part of some attempt to breach the space-time continuum via ultra-complex roadway movement. I imagine that we'll be driving in loops after the next change. But even that bile faded away, although it will certainly return tomorrow. Sure, the workers almost certainly have nothing to do with the stupid changes, and it's probably the result of some greasy little bureaucrat somewhere, but I can't see that little crack-smoking weasel, can I? No, I only see the guys in the orange vests who are busy breaking up the perfectly good roadway that we'd been speeding down just last week. Ok, there's still a little bile there, but less than I'd expect.
I'm already growing tired of The News because, let's face it, nothing much is really happening. I've occasionally constructed speeches that the president should have made, or that a better president would have made, but that's really just an academic exercise. A "Let's see what I got out of a minor in Rhetoric" sort of thing. And, really, they weren't too bad. I suppose if I wrote them down instead of making them up in the shower or on my way to work, I could change careers and become a struggling speechwriter. But I just don't think that I'd be happy with sweating my genius onto a page so that it can come out of some barely qualified elected official's mouth. Nope, I'm keeping my genius to myself.
("And doing a good job of it, too! No one would ever suspect! Har har har!" Sorry, that's the pesky Fifth Column portion of my brain chiming in. Pay no attention, that only encourages it.)
At least last week I had a filler column ready, one that I had postponed for a few weeks. Looking it over I realize that it was a very spur of the moment thing, and I'm already questioning the choices that I made a mere month ago. Ah, but that was when I was a stripling youth, a year younger than I am now. Not that I'm terribly, debilitatingly old...oh, ok, I am terribly, terribly old, far older than my years belie. I cough into a dainty lace handkerchief; momentarily overcome by consumption, I swoon. Only my stiff jodhpurs keep me from falling to the ground. And yet I cannot save my coveted collection of Byron from descending to the base earth. I weep for it, and for us all. Nature, showing a rare confluence with the human condition, weeps in sympathy. The rain falls in slow, cold droplets, streaking my tear-stained face.
Malodorous crap like that is exactly why I avoided taking any poetry classes in college, and why, ultimately, I could never be a successful goth.