Wholesome Blues

Woke up this morning

All alone in bed.

Found a note from baby baby;

Here is what she said:

"I' m off and running

Forty miles today;

Poured out our liquor

And threw your dope away.

Congratulate me:

I'm going cel-i-bate!"

Go get a sack of health foods

So we can celebrate!

I've got them wholesome blues.

Nobody's drinking hard booze.

The kids are hardly screwing;

They're bad-mouthing drug abuse.

They ain't worth killing;

They all can go to hell.

I'd just as soon to pal around

With ol' Jerry Falwell....

Little Mystery reposes in why old soaks such as myself have given up liquor, dope and determined tracking of the wily woollybugger: We had to. Our livers collapsed, our innards grew ulcers, our hangovers commenced overlapping and extracting excessive taxes in painful recovery. Nose candy making us paranoid and poking holes in our sniffers, we passed the spoon to a new generation. As for not womanizing--well, besides narrow-minded wives and the threat of herpes, AIDS and other forms of genital roulette, there comes a time when one's breath shortens and one's hair falls out; young stuff starts calling you "sir" or "Pops" even when you wear your sexiest smile, best toupee and widest belt girdle. Like aging athletes, we've lost a vital step; like old soldiers, we fade away.

But as we gum our morning milk toast or sip our bedtime Ovaltine, we at least have the satisfaction of knowing that from F.D.R. through Jimmy Carter, we indiscriminately broke bottle seals, bar stools, heads, chemical vials, hearts, marriage vows and even the occasional maidenhead. What memories are today's alleged young hellions gonna carry with them to the twilight zone, huh?

We're raising a bunch of health nuts and Puritan moralists out there. Goddamned ascetics and Spartans. Censors who won't tolerate cigar smoke even when emitted from others. Sippers of white, mineral water, carrot juice and worse. Bodybuilders and road runners. My generation ran only when something howling and hairy was gaining on us--or to beat the curfew at our favorite bar.

I ask you young whippersnappers: What good is all that compulsive running, weight lifting or other noxious forms of exercise if all those tanned, muscled, healthy, perfect bodies ain't put to the uses of fun and sin? What you gonna do, pose for statues? Where's the fun in jogging along freeways, inhaling carbon-monoxide fumes, when you could be toking refreshing essence of boo smoke or clearing your nasal passages with peppy powders?

Another thing: Every young to semiyoung woman in the goddamn world wants to have a nestful of babies. Dr. Edwin Shrake, the noted Texas midnight philosopher and sociologist, knows why: "It's the fault of those damned cabbage Patch dolls; somehow they've perverted healthy instincts, causing young stuff to prefer the nursery to the snugglery. You meet a woman in a bar these days--assuming you can find one--and it won't be ten minutes until she'll be pining over her cranberry juice and fig bar for adorable twins. But I get the notion they'd prefer having babies without getting personally involved in a lot of sweaty sex."

Right on, doctor! A few years ago, everybody to hump an ape if one was handy; now she's writing books celebrating sexual abstinence--even suggesting that if you're backed against the wall and somehow can't get out of screwing, then you at least ought to insist on coitus interruptus. Damn that woman! She'd take the fun out of a gang bang.

What's wrong with all you young and older fogies? What's going on out there? Hell, we helped start you a sexual revolution and brought in dope from all continents and lowered the drinking age and invented fern bars so you'd be able to mix and mingle and do what comes naturally. And look how you've paid us back, you Puritanical little nerds. Where did we go wrong? How did we fail you?

Used to be you could turn to those "personal" ads or "in search of" columns in stroke mags and find a little something to whet your interest. Like this:

Eat me free! Ravishing young blonde (who will change hair color should you wish) has a come-hither look she truly means. Great legs, huge boobs, soft-but-firm body, constant case of The Hots! Love giving great head! Voyeurism Ok! Light bondage and flogging Ok if you promise to hurt me gently! Group gropes Ok! Will talk dirty in your ear! Will pose for filthy pictures! I enjoy fireside romps in the raw, sucking toes, emptying and cleaning ashtrays, mopping up your vomit, laughing at your jokes, sharing good books and lazing abed until kicked out to cook your breakfast! Request occasional outing to movie or play of your choice unless it is too much trouble. Great little listener who speaks only when spoken to! Do ironing and windows. Will chauffeur if asked (have own uniforms). Not picky about age, religion, color or married men. Discreet. Come share my bed, my dope! No strings! Will work two jobs if necessary! hurry! Call Honeybunch this instant! Please!

Those ads appeared in such profusion that I passed many of them by with yawns, even when my wife was out of town, if I didn't find their tone respectful enough. But now days--my God, nowadays, a man turning to those same ads will be lucky to find one as warm and inviting as this:

Get off your ass! Run with me! Seriousminded modernist woman with small mustache, who hasn't smiled since '71, challenges you to run 30 miles before breakfast of cold asparagus tips and lukewarm seaweed tea. Light bar bells and wind sprints before lunch of dried watermelon rind. Afternoons reserved for heavy weight lifting, shadowboxing, treadmill exercises; karate, other combat arts five nights each week. No dinners or snacks! No fatties, smokers, dopers, drinkers, marrieds, Capricorns or anyone older than 23! Prefer Christian Scientist, though may consider sincere Buddhist. I enjoy week-old corn mush, cold showers, mad dogs, castor-oil enemas, chanting, sniffing used sneakers and sweat shirts. Looking fir marriage, nine test-tube babies and weekends to myself for participation in killer marathons and feminist political action. Send photo, biceps and pectoral measurements, dated cardiograph report signed by three physicians, certified time in 40-yard dash and $614.77 to pay for this ad (no checks!). Essential you have private gym with whirlpool, running track, latest Nautilus machines and basketball court. Must be on Upper East Side, equal distance between Central Park and East River. You row. Must be vegetarian, Libertarian, humorless and Scorpio. Absolutely no fucking!!! Send application, with supporting documents, to Butchbaby, c/o Steel Mamas, Inc.

This foolish wholesome kick has reached epidemic porportions coast to coast. Seventeen thousand certified idiots huffed and puffed over the course of the most recent New York City Marathon. In California, where they're supposed to be laid back and where where once you could get arrested just for taking walks--such manifestation of craziness being obvious on its face--they're taking off their gold chains so they won't be weighed down when they run. That felloe playing J. R. Ewing on Dallas looks a little pudgy, for which I've always admired him, but they tell me he carried around a little portable fan to blow your smoke back in your face should you approach him with anything other than chili sauce burning in your mouth. Film stars Jamie Lee Curtis, Linda Evans and John Travolta--to name but a few of the many--are into heavy sweat and light rabbit food. Jane Fonda's quit worrying about starving kids and is starving herself. What the hell good does it do them people to be rich and famous? Goddamn monks.

In Boston, sure, they've been turning'em out in droves to run marathon distances for years. I can almost understand that, the whole of New England's recreational opportunities being limited to eating codfish and shoveling snow. But good God, man, in California and New York? Where nothing ever closes? Where you can get a drink, a massage or better in your hotel room and a giant-sized pizza with double cheese and pepperoni around the clock? Insane. They're not only running themselves to death these days but dancing themselves to skeletons in Jazzercise classes--whole families bumping and grinding and sweating their kiddies' little balls and twats off. How come that don't qualify as child abuse? Laid-back California, my ass! Fun City, New York, indeed! Next, they'll be painting scarlet A's on everybody's foreheads and holding witchcraft trials.

•

My friends are going crazy.

They're throwing running fits,

Run till their brains get hazy

And their minds are blown to bits.

I got them wholesome blues.

Been consulting my Muse,

Trying to make some sense of it.

I think I've found some clues. ...

Right here in the nation's capital, near my home in Washington, is a green and lovely big bucolic patch called Rock Creek Park. It's got little creeks fit to bathe a hangover in an protective bushed to crawl under and sleep one off away from prying eyes. You think that's how people use it? Naw. I tool through Rock Creek Park in an air-conditioned cocoon, chain smoking and comfortably shifting my firth, and I see the woods working with runners no matter the hour--runners of all ages, sizes, shapes, colors, sexes,. Occasionally, a familiar face is spotted: CBS-TV correspondent Fred Graham, near about as old as I am, red-faced and perspiring before sunup, once grunted alongside my car in running gear, and though I waved and honked and shouted friendly insults at ol'Fred, he seemed oblivious to everything except putting one foot ahead of the other. Periodically, a robber or a rapist jumps from concealment to work muschief against unwary joggers, but such dangers seemingly do little to discourage determined health nuts: Young women run hitched to evil-looking dogs, with sizable rocks in their hands or in protective scowling bunches. Hell, I'm more afraid of those grim Spartans than I am of the criminals.

The thing I've most noticed is that nobody slogging through Rock Creek Park seems the slightest bit happy. Ain't no joy in Mudville. Expressions register pain, struggle, catatonia, fatigue, sorrow, even anger; the nearest thing to "normal" is a blank stoicism. Now you'd think that among all those born-again physical cultists you'd uncover the occasional stray grin, right? Nope. If they're so damn happy, why ain't they jumping up and down? I mean, you talk to one of those health freaks and they'll carry on with a bunch of lyrical, mystic shit like they just saw Jesus sitting beside the running path picking a golden electric banjo. (They sound, indeed, like people use to sound who'd discovered God while on LSD.) If it's all that uplifting and joyous, how come (contunued on page 225)Wholesome Blues(continued from page 120) they all run around looking like they've just finished drinking an alum milk shake?

Explanations have been offered by the learned, though they will not please the more dogged road runners. Dr. Kenneth E. Callen of Oregon Health Sciences University, writing in Psychosomatics, the journal of the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine, estimated that as many as one quarter of the persistents may be as crazy as peach-orchard hogs. Well, he put it a little different: said they may be "neurotically attached" to their grim slogging. Means the same thing, don't it? Psychiatrist Alayne Yates of the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, observes that most "obligatory runners"--those who pound out 40 or more miles per week--started running relatively late in life, generally feel unfulfilled in their professional or personal lives and use running to bring meaning to their existence. Adds Dr. Yates: "The runners in our sample shared many of the qualities of the anorectic patient; they were generally self-effacing, hard-working high achievers from affluent families who were uncomfortable with anger and who characteristically inhibited the direct expression of affect [mood]. Their singular commitment to running occurred at a time of heightened anxiety, depression and identity diffusion." When such road freaks can't run because of illness or injury, they become "depressed, angry and frustrated." Tell me them people ain't tilted.

One who fit Yates's pattern--notes Washington neurologist Richard M. Restak, writing in The Washington Post--was the late Jim Fixx (author of The Complete Book of Running), who last summer was called to Jesus at the age of 52 while wearing track shoes. Then there's marathon runner Alberto Salazar, proud of doing 106 miles weekly on a fractured foot he got pounding pavements, who once ran himself into heatstroke, a 108-degree body temperature and the joy of being packed in ice. Nothing should be packed in ice but champagne.

I've got friends, I'm ashamed to say, who've been caught up in this goddamn wholesome bunko. Mo Sussman, 40, owner of Joe and Mo's restaurant in downtown Washington, is a formerly chubby fellow who once would have a drink with you at the slightest provocation; it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Mo maybe once toked or snorted. Now, apparently, his ambition is to have a belly like a washboard. Last summer, Mo came to my house, kicked aside the Twinkie wrappers and Big Mac cartons and tried to persuade me to sign up for some foolish torture called The Sergeant's Program.

Mo quoted the sergeant's literature: "'No Jacuzzi, no juice bar, no aerobics, no dancing and no women. Just you, the soil, the sky, the sun and the sergeant. No money back. If you wimp out, tough luck.'" Mo told me the sergeant would make me a new man. I said I'd rather he made me a vodka martini. Mo's eyes shined in describing how, for only $285, the sergeant's buddies could know the pleasures of running to exhaustion, jumping tall obstacles, crawling through mud, fighting hand to hand and maybe swimming in handcuffs. No doubt in my mind: Mo Sussman today is a very sick man. Slimmer, maybe. But sick, sick, sick. (Still, Mo offered the only rational explanation I've heard for such excesses: "I'm dating a 24-year-old woman. You want I should die in the saddle?")

Then there's Jim Collins, 32, an ex-bartender who now manages a Capitol Hill watering hole and eatery called Timberlake's. Used to be you'd walk into Timberlake's and Jim would twist your arm until you drank a quart of Scotch without coming up for air; now he delivers temperance lectures. A year ago, Jim was pleasingly plump at 222 pounds and would happily volunteer tales of his latest satisfying debaucheries. Now he weighs 154 pounds; his cheeks sink in like a fashion model's who's sucking on a lollipop. All he'll talk about is the bad habits he's conquered, though--in the words of Mark Twain--the most he can expect of it is good health. Who wants eternal life if you gotta spend it pounding bricks?

Collins claims he's not one of those compulsive "obligatory" runners, in that he runs "only" a dozen miles per week. Hell-fire, that amounts to only 624 miles per year; it'd take the boy a decade to run coast to coast and back. I don't know why I bother mentioning him. Maybe it's because his diet is ... well, interesting. His bag is eating a high-fiber, low-fat diet and gulping a Japanese compound made of fibers and gelatin that looks like pieces of hay trapped in pale Jell-O. Once a week, he has his blood pressure and gastric juices checked and gets an E.K.G. to be sure his heart ain't bust a strut. When not jogging, he exercises on Nautilus machines or skips rope or improvises: You can be talking to him and suddenly he'll jump up and touch his toes until he makes witnesses dizzy. Maybe it helps him work up an appetite for that Japanese shit he eats.

Why, Jim? Why?

"I guess it started because heart disease runs in my family and a friend died of a stroke at the age of 30. But really, my true motivation isn't life extension. I just wanted to look better, feel better. It's great to feel confident and proud. I've got nine friends on the same program. We swear by it. We get cranky if something interferes and makes us late for workouts. You can solve a lot of mental problems while you're running or exercising. You go to bed with a clear mind, sleep well and wake up ready to go get 'em!"

Go get what, Jim?

"Well ... you know. ..."

Naw, Jim. I don't. I sure as hell don't.

•

I've got them wholesome blues.

Nobody's wearing tattoos.

Bar fighting passed from fashion

Once I'd paid my bloody dues.

The kids feel guilty;

They didn't fight in 'Nam,

So now they won't fight nowhere.

They ain't worth a tinker's damn. ...

Jim Collins and Mo Sussman provided the names of a few young crazies as proud of their bust measurements as Dolly Parton is of hers, though none of them officially is a girl. Given deep artistic insights, I have boiled them down to a composite figure, about 30 years old, known as Whippersnapper. Old Soak is, of course, myself. The interview was held in a fern bar over harmless juices and weird food and near a set of mirrors so Whippersnapper could admire the way he has improved on God's handiwork.

Old Soak: Why this compulsive clean-living kick?

Whippersnapper: Well, there's a certain pride in being able to say "No!"

Old Soak: I'm not too familiar with that particular thrill.

Whippersnapper: See, there's this good feeling you get in looking at your image and saying, "I made a conscious decision rather than acting on impulse." [Old Soak stares at him as if he might be a Martian] It's a form of discipline, understand?

Old Soak: You want discipline, why ain't you in the Marines?

Whippersnapper: No, no, no! It's different! I mean, so you sleep with four or five or even six girls a week. In the end, what does that amount to?

Old Soak: I'd say it amounted to about 2000 board feet of fresh nookie a year.

Whippersnapper: So what? Where's the fun in waking up every day with someone you'd rather not be with?

Old Soak: I thought you said you weren't married.

Whippersnapper: Be serious! I mean, you can get your head so fucked up with one-night stands. Once, I picked up this woman with a violin--no shit, now, picked her up in a bar--and she fiddled between fucks! Fiddled!

Old Soak: You don't like music?

Whippersnapper: What's that got to do with anything? I mean, do you call hit-and-miss encounters happiness'?

Old Soak: Sounds better than abstinence and a granola bar.

Whippersnapper: You miss the point! The fiddling woman was making a statement! She was saying, "On my scale of life, man, you don't mean as much as a B-flat!" I understood that! I felt the same about her.

Old Soak: How was she on the skin flute?

Whippersnapper: Look, if you're not serious about this interview, I could be out running! [Whippersnapper takes a hefty belt of prune juice and angrily devours a handful of sunflower seed]

Old Soak: Go check your flat belly in the mirror. Maybe it'll improve your mood. [Whippersnapper does so, smiles at his reflection and is becalmed]

Whippersnapper: You want to talk about the new celibacy?

Old Soak: No, but I'm afraid you do.

Whippersnapper: Actually, the new celibacy was started by young women. They're more thoughtful than men. Most of us--most of the guys--who've rejected meaningless one-nighters, well, we got into celibacy by knowing strong women who'd made that decision earlier and led us to it.

Old Soak: Ah-hah! The gals cut you off, so rather than resort to rape--

Whippersnapper: That is not what I mean. I mean the women taught us higher values! Face it, indiscriminate screwing just isn't fun much of the time.

Old Soak: Who says?

Whippersnapper: A lot of us who've thought it through! There's the pressure of performance and the unnaturalness of attempting the world's most intimate act with a stranger! Now, think about that!

Old Soak: There are days when I think of little else.

Whippersnapper: Look, if you're not 100 percent into sex with a given partner, then you're better off not performing. What's the good of pumping away if your mind or heart isn't in it?

Old Soak: Your problem may be one indifferent concentration.

Whippersnapper: [Sighing] We're on different wave lengths.

Old Soak: Don't ask to trade.

Whippersnapper: It's more a matter of character and substance than of physical ... rutting.

Old Soak: OK. Let's momentarily assume that report fucking is somehow debilitating; how does that tie in with giving up dope and booze?

Whippersnapper: It's obvious. If my mind isn't wasted by drugs or clouded by drink, then I'm less likely to be victimized by the old pattern of indiscriminate sex.

Old Soak: Yeah, it'd sure be terrible to trip and fall in a pussy patch.

Whippersnapper: Go ahead. Have your fun. I expect that of your generation. You old guys just wanted to be able to make your macho brags: "I screwed X or Y or Z women this week." That bullshit isn't important to us.

Old Soak: What is?

Whippersnapper: Settling down. Getting married. Having children.

Old Soak: Shades of the Fifties!

Whippersnapper: [Sadly] I just wish I didn't have herpes.

Old Soak: [Truly astonished] You catch it off a toilet seat?

Whippersnapper: [Musing] Thinking back, I guess we used to drink, dope and screw around because of the bomb and living in a poisoned world.

Old Soak: [Impatient and pissed] Oh, Jesus Christ on a stick horse, boy: You couldn't float that lame excuse at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous!

Whippersnapper: No, now, there's some truth in it. I grew up seeing the ecology befouled--couldn't fish or swim in the Potomac River or parts of Chesapeake Bay--and knowing that every two-bit dictator had the capability to release the bomb. They laughed at Jimmy Carter when he said his little daughter, Amy, worried about nuclear proliferation. But I bet she truly did!

Old Soak: So if you run 80 miles a week and refuse to sport fuck, the rivers will clear up? Qaddafi will reject the bomb? Amy Carter will be able to sleep at night?

Whippersnapper: Scoff if you wish. But in retrospect, I believe some of our debaucheries were reactions our parents--acts of rebellion against authority.

Old Soak: Jesus! Now the fault lies in Mommy and Da-da's toilet training!

Whippersnapper: I'm talking about their hypocrisy and the guilt trips they put on us. Our parents told us, "Don't smoke grass; it's bad for you!" Then we'd see them stupid drunk. Or they'd tell us Vietnam was a noble battle for freedom, and after a while, we came to see that plainly wasn't true. Or they'd tell us racial integration would never work--but we soon saw that, given the chance, it could. So we decided if they were wrong about so many important things--and hypocritical, even--then they were shitting us about other things.

Old Soak: You've spanked your parents for hypocrisy, now how about the guilt they put on you?

Whippersnapper: Well, it was a version of that old ploy "Eat everything on your plate, because there are starving children in China." Like, they stressed all the rough stuff they'd been through--the Depression, World War Two, Korea--and we felt guilty because, by comparison, we'd had it so easy. So maybe we dealt with our stresses by dissipating guilt through pleasure principles. Maybe, you know, our conduct also was a rebellion against society. The law said we could be drafted at 18 and sent to war to kill or be killed--but we couldn't vote or buy a drink legally.

Old Soak: Is it remotely possible you kids whooped it up just because it might have been fun and because it's in the nature, and tradition, of the young to sow a few wild oats?

Whippersnapper: I don't think so. I believe there's a psychological reason for every action any rational human takes. See, I think what my generation is into is so far removed from your experiences and conditioning that you can't possibly understand. But try for a moment. [Thinks deeply, furrowing brow to so signify] If you run far enough--if you push through the pain and keep going--there's this ... this glowing feeling. It's a state so pure, you can almost see God. It's so peaceful and, and, well, it's almost like looking at your surroundings through pink gauze. It's a much purer high than I ever got from any dope or liquor. It's ... well, you perceive things in flashes of light. Off and on. Off and on. Like that. You feel ... not dizzy, exactly, but, but ... something close to it. Lightheaded in a good way. Warm and toasty. It's beautiful once you've pushed past the pain. If you haven't experienced it, there's no way you'll be able to comprehend it or put a name on it, but--

Old Soak: Hypoxia.

Whippersnapper: What?

Old Soak: When you feel that way, your brain ain't getting enough oxygen, dummy!

•

O Lord, please deliver

This wretched soul from woe,

Living in a time, it seems,

When don't nobody know

The joys of drifting,

Just kicking up their heels,

While laughing through how magical

A pure old stone high feels.

I've got them wholesome blues.

Think I may blow a fuse.

New Puritans are cheering

That my side is gonna lose.

I hate to hear it:

Those most discordant sounds

Of joggers on the footpaths

And preachers on their rounds.

I've got them wholesome blues.

Somebody please bring me news

That I've just had a bad dream

And they've outlawed running shoes.

Let fools stand gazing

Into the looking glass;

I'd rather be a-grazing

On some lovely perfumed lass.

I've got them wholesome blues,

And now that you know my views,

Just ring me up if you don't mind

Old tales of dope and booze.

I've got them ho-ho,

Hey-let's-go

Do-ugly

Ho-oo-ole-sum blues!

[The Old Soak, having gathered weighty evidence, now dutifully rises in the court of public opinion to utter, as follows:]

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rise not to ask your condemnation of these foolish defendants for excessive running, faddish dieting or abstaining from sex--as unnatural as those acts may be.

There are persons who, for one reason or another, choose to shape themselves into nerds. They have that right, whether they manifest their nerdity by voting straight Republican, wearing Argyle socks or compulsively exercising while starying themselves. Perhaps evolution in its mysterious way meant some people to be nerds and so they are helpless in their genes to avoid it. These I pity but do not censure.

But it is my duty--and yours--to find practitioners of the so-called New Puritanism guilty of the worst forms of verbal quackery and of preaching heretical ballshit. They are not what they claim to be, which ranges from mystics to idealists to victims.

They are, first of all, nothing more grand than faddists. Copycats, Every time one nerd sees another nerd in runnig shoes, he falls in behind him and slavishly imitates him. Despite their high-minded rhetoric as to motivation, these people are largely keeping up with the Joneses. Remember Hula-Hoops and goldfish swallowing? This, too shall pass.

Many of these malcontent shin-splinters and stalk eaters would have you believe that wicked old Society or mean old Mommy and Da-da somehow so scared and scarred them that they were unavoidably driven to outrageous acts of self-denial. What a crock of pure unadulterated bullshit, ladies and gentlemen! What a whimpering, whining, wimpy farce of a tale! Now, I do not dispute--for we have the testimony of head shrinks to support it--that many of these foolish faddists are a bit bonkers and may be attempting to flee their own inadequacies in track shoes. I submit, however, that they can't blame Society or Mommy and Da-da and expect us not to laugh. Listen: These are pampered, affluent little Yuppie pricks for the most part--coddled and ass-wiped from the cradle, given sports cars and credit cards before they left prep school! They've had it better, softer, easier than any other generation of Americans, should you go all the way back to the Mayflower. I say if they can't stand prosperity, fuck 'em!

These cold, self-centered little fish swim in their own private seas largely for the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the water. Aye, there's the rub: narcissism. These preeners and fops worship a god who, according to Greek mythology, caused the death of his girlfriend, Echo, by spurning her and then fell in love with his own image in the water; he spent his days pining away for himself until he died. I suspect nine tenths of these so-called New Puritans close themselves in their bedrooms to kiss mirrors!

And in sweating or starving their precious images into more desirable shapes and conditions, guess what they've done. They've burned such energies, they have nothing left over to give to others. Don't believe them, ladies and gentlemen, when they prattle of the new celibacy's being founded on superiority, morality or a new sensitivity. That is pure horseshit. That is a cover-up to rank with Watergate. The ... truth ... is ... this: They're too tired and drained of juices to get it up! That's their problem, jurors, that and no other! And so they attempt to excuse their flaccid peckers of juiceless holes by professing the attainment of a moral ground so high--get this!--that it will not permit risking a roll in the sack with willing, consenting, loving strangers. Why, there are Texas stockyards not half as rich in bullshit as that cheap cop-out!

I shan't excessively dwell on the strange diets favored by the shin-splint crowd. Ancient tribes feasted on grubworms and fecal matter, so I suppose the so-called New Puritans will survive hay-and-gelatin compounds made in Japan. I do worry, yes, abaout the futures of those who raise beef, hogs, sheep and chickens for consumption in a society where many somehow prefer eating roots and bee pollen. And I foresee the day when we raise generations of children who grow up looking like Hollywood's notion of pale, popeyed, cadaverous aliens from outer space. Mercifully, before such comes to pass, the worms will be eating me--which is more than I can expect from your average Yuppie girl.

As to those who cry, like ancient prophets, that god or better is to be found by "pushing through the pain, "I wish them the full ecstasy of a swift kick to the gonads and time then to rethink their philosophy. I refuse to waste more words on ignoramuses too dumb to know the difference between hallucinations dimply seen and hypoxia visibly experienced, who prefer stewing in their own sweat rather than the perfumed juices of others.

The prosecution rests--prone and supine. Preferably with a glass of wine, a double bacon cheeseburger and a stray blonde in his hands.

"How come they all run around looking like they've just finished drinking an alum milk shake?"