Dan Bialek Loves Kittens

Happy Valentine’s Day. May all your romantic dreams come true. I’m making my girlfriend dinner when she gets home tonight somewhere between the hours of 7 and 9 pm. She has a 70-hour-a-week dayjob that is slowly eating her soul. I tell dick jokes in bowling alleys at night for free beer and nachos and spend my days on my perch at nearby Starbucks coffeeshop/world music emporiums reading the news online and judging strangers from afar. The American Dream is being lived.

As cushy and awesome as sleeping until noon and having to reread Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sissyphus” repeatedly for the last 3 weeks in an attempt to convince myself that there is a shred of meaning or purpose in my life in order not to throw myself under the nearest rapidly-approaching bus everytime I walk down the street, my life is not always the cotton candy handjob party that I make it seem in my blogs.

The day before New Year’s a Russian taxicab driver changed lanes into my Honda Civic causing $2,000 of damage to it. For the first two weeks of 2007 I was tooling around Los Angeles in a beautiful fart-beige 2005 Dodge Stratus while my car was being repaired. My insurance deductible was $500 and my insurance company assured me that since the accident was in no way my fault I would be reimbursed within weeks of my car being repaired. I received a special delivery letter last week from my insurance company informing me that they would not be repaying me any of my deductible because the guy who hit me had a witness (another Russian cab driver who not only didn’t see the accident but who also only spoke the Borat language) give a tape recorded statement saying that it was I who changed lanes into the guy who hit me. That guy’s lie just cost me the equivalent of an 8-ball, a copy of Guitar Hero 2 and at least half my metric weight in Heineken keg cans. Awesome.

Money isn’t everything. A lot of people would say that it’s family that really counts. Last Wednesday my father finally completed and finalized the divorce proceedings between him and his wife of 9 and 1/2 years — a former Hooter’s waitress and current methamphetamine addict more than two decades his junior.

How did he celebrate this momentous occasion? Well, of course by going down to the Orange County court house the following morning (Thursday) and marrying the 23-year-old Chinese mail-order bride that he has been living with for the past 6 months and who he stole from another man from Portland, Oregon at a Mexican food restaurant less than a mile from where he met his crank-addled previous wife.

I stopped by his house last Sunday afternoon to see if my father had that “newlywed glow” that I’ve read so much about in Cosmopolitan magazine over the years. To my surprise (or lack thereof) in his living room were a group of 13 to 14 of his new bride’s relatives and family members huddled around my father’s 60-inch projection television set watching a rerun of the World Series of Poker on ESPN2.

My dad must have been feeling pretty comfortable around his newfound family members because he had his dentures out (he had his teeth pulled last year due to a diet regiment over the last 15 years comprised solely of Snickers candy bars washed down a constant stream of Absolut vodka and Sprite chasers). At one point I turned to him and said, “Hey, man, just because you lost your teeth doesn’t mean you couldn’t fuck white chicks anymore.”

In know, in know. That sounds crass and racist doesn’t it. Well, the crassness was intended, the racism was meant to be ironic. As evidence I offer up line of dialogue a few moments later in the conversation when my father turned to me and said, “We’re all going to eat gook dinner at this gook restaurant in Placentia tonight. You can come and eat with me and all the gooks if you want.”

He wasn’t saying this for ironic effect. It’s how my father really thinks/speaks/feels in regard to Asians.

Before bidding my father and his new clan adieu I made sure to explain the word “gook” was really supposed to be a reference to people of Vietnamese descent (although it was actually coined by US soldiers during the Korean Conflict of the early 1950′s). I elucidated my point by clarifying that the Chinese are most commonly referred to as “chinks” but that in a pinch the phrase “zipperhead” can be applied to pretty much any Southeast Asian people lacking the epicanthal fold of the eye. I felt for a second that I was treading on territory already covered by Margaret Cho on one of her early HBO specials. Then I felt sad that my dad couldn’t even go out and do something equally annoying but somewhat newsworthy like marrying Maragret Cho.

There’s a scene in Apocalypse Now where Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) turns to Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) at the end of his “naplam in the morning” monologue and says, “Someday this war’s going to end.”

He means it wistfully because the war ending is the worst thing he can imagine because his only purpose on this planet is to fly around in helicopters, shoot up gooks and bask in the Milton-esque fumes of naplam and burning flesh.

Monday I got home just in time to go up at the Hollywood Comedy Store at 9:15 pm in front of two audience members while Pauly Shore sat in the back of the room text-messaging and wearing a sideways “Pauly Show Is Dead: The Movie” trucker hat.

Someday this war’s gonna end. Just not anytime soon as far as I can tell.

When I’m not busy writing lazily-constructed, poorly-written blog entries making light of current event news articles such as the catastrophic damage that the human race is most likely wreaking upon the planet and the passing of rotund would-be heiress/former supermodel exotic dancers I spend a lot of time asking myself:

1. What in the fuck is wrong with me?

2. What am I doing with my life?

3. Does everybody else feel like this, too?

Then I just kind of mumble the word “fuck” to myself as I mope around the house deciding whether to masturbate or play Halo 2 on X-Box 360. I usually end up doing both. But never at the same time. That would involve talent — something I clearly do not possess.

I think I’ve been clinically depressed for at least the last 2 or 3 weeks. I haven’t been sleeping and then when I finally do it’s for like 12 to 14 hours at a time. I’ve had no appetite, no sense of purpose in life and I’ve been having a lot of dreams about dying. I’d call the dreams “nightmares” but the deaths involved usually aren’t that painful or unpleasant.

Like every other person in our society worried that they might be suffering from a medical affliction that they don’t understand I searched for the topic on Wikipedia. I used to use Google or WebMD for such searches, but with the advent of the wiki in recent years I use it to look up everything from Albert Camus to toenail fungus to the Parnassian Poets to the history of the Powell Memo to the rap music group The Geto Boys to clinical depression.

The Wikipedia entry listed a complete of symptoms according to the DSM-IV-TR for clinical depression:

-Depressed mood, or
-Anhedonia (<-- this means "the inability to derive pleasure from normally pleasant events (e.g. eating, sleeping, social interaction.)" I learned a new depressing word today! Is it weird that I may have derived pleasure from that?)
-Feelings of overwhelming sadness and/or fear, or the seeming inability to feel emotion (emptiness).
-A decrease in the amount of interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, daily activities.
-Changing appetite and marked weight gain or loss.
-Disturbed sleep patterns, such as insomnia, loss of REM sleep, or excessive sleep (Hypersomnia).
-Psychomotor agitation or retardation nearly every day.
-Fatigue, mental or physical, also loss of energy.
-Intense feelings of guilt, helplessness, hopelessness, worthlessness, isolation/loneliness and/or anxiety.
-Trouble concentrating, keeping focus or making decisions or a generalized slowing and obtunding of cognition, including memory.
-Recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying), desire to just “lie down and die” or “stop breathing”, recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt or a specific plan for committing suicide.
-Feeling and/or fear of being abandoned by those close to one.
-Other symptoms often reported but not usually taken into account in diagnosis include:
-Self-loathing.
-A decrease in self-esteem.
-Inattention to personal hygiene.
-Sensitivity to noise.
-Physical aches and pains, and the belief these may be signs of serious illness.
-Fear of ‘going mad’.
-Change in perception of time.
-Periods of sobbing.
-Possible behavioral changes, such as aggression and/or irritability.
-Depression in children is not as obvious as it is in adults. Here are some symptoms that children might display:
-Loss of appetite.
-Irritability.
-Sleep problems, such as recurrent nightmares.
-Learning or memory problems where none existed before.
-Significant behavioral changes; such as withdrawal, social isolation, and aggression.
-An additional indicator could be the excessive use of drugs or alcohol. Depressed adolescents are at particular risk of further destructive behaviors, such as eating disorders and self-harm.

If you’re like me you’re saying to yourself, “Dude, I have almost all of these!”

Me, too. Me, too.

The problem is that I don’t really know what to do about it. I’d go to a shrink or doctor, but I really don’t won’t be put on Lexipro or be told to jog/exercise more and to smoke less cigarettes. I’ve made it this far without being all hopped up on meds (which is a fucking miracle considering what little hyperactive shit I was as a child. If Ridalin was around when I was in elementary school my parents probably would have petitioned to put me on an IV drip of the stuff.).

Also, I’ve tried exercising but I fucking hate it. I don’t want to drive 20 minutes to go hike up-and-down some lame-ass canyon in the Valley (wow, a canyon in a valley, that’s a deep canyon) or the one above Fuller and Franklin in Hollywood that’s glutted with C-List soap opera, basic cable and reality television stars (that’s a shallow canyon).

This is what it looks like when I get 2/3′s into writing a blog and quit.

Fuck.

P.S. Who has so much displaced hatred and anger towards hiking/themself that they refer to a canyon as “lame-ass?” That’s just sad.

Anna Nicole Smith: Dead.

Looks like the Apocalypse has been put off for at least another 6 weeks.

It should take all of three hours until the mainstream media starts making their comparisons between hers and Marilyn Monroe’s career and mysterious death. My money is on Greta Van Susteren. She’s got moxie and journalistic integrity to burn.

BTW, at least three dozen people will lose their lives today in roadside bombings and sectarian assassinations in Iraq today. Guess which story will be leading off your local newscast tonight at 11 o’clock.

I just saw March of the Penguins a couple of weeks ago when it was on tv. Penguins in Antarctica spend the better parts of their lives standing in bitter freezing wind and blinding snow huddled up on polar ice shelves hundreds of miles from food and the sea while they wait for their eggs to hatch. It has to be the most miserable existence on the face of the planet.

Yeah, so humans probably are the cause of global warming, the rising sea levels and the melting of said polar ice shelves.

All I have to say to the penguins is, “Penguins, you’re welcome.”

Hopefully FoxNews.com will have the courage to report on this much overlooked (by the bleeding-heart liberal media) aspect of this story.