We are in trouble...

• The population of this country is 300 million.
• 160 million are retired.
• That leaves 140 million to do the work.
• There are 85 million in school.
• Which leaves 55 million to do the work.
• Of this there are 35 million employed by the federal government.
• Leaving 15 million to do the work.
• 2.8 million are in the armed forces preoccupied with killing Osama
• Bin-Laden.
• Which leaves 12.2 million to do the work.
• Take from that total the 10.8 million people who work for state and city
• Governments. And that leaves 1.4 million to do the work.
• At any given time there are 188,000 people in hospitals.
• Leaving 1,212,000 to do the work.
• Now, there are 1,211,998 people in prisons.
• That leaves just two people to do the work.
• You and me.
• And there you are,
• Sitting on your derriere,
• At your computer, reading jokes.

THE BIRTH OF A CANDY BAR

One Payday Mr. Goodbar wanted a Bit O'Honey so he took:
Miss Hershey back in the Power house on the corner of Clark & Fifth Ave. He began to feel her Mounds and that was sure Almond Joy which made his Tootsie Roll. He let out a Snicker and his Butterfingers went up her Kit Kat and caused a Milky Way. She screamed "O Henry" and squeezed his Zagnuts. Miss Hershey said you were even better than the Three Musketeers. Soon she was a bit Chunky. Nine months later she had a Baby Ruth.

HEY MERCEDES "Bells" Lyrics

Is this the best you have to offer us?

you genius, your hair mussed

by now you must have heard about the whirling world outside

twist a knife in it, i don't care

drain the life from it, i don't care

if you can fake it you can take them like a photograph.



with a coy sigh in time

your girlfriend's waiting on the line

can't you wait to make her cry?

and they'll remember you alive

as that pain in their unkind invitation tonight

so here's your credit for the lie

that you've been hanging

and over awaiting your reply.



is this the worst you have to peddle us?

scandalous! oh spare us!

by now they must have heard about your worried world inside

pull the covers up, i don't care

call all your lovers up, i don't care

if the fates sing to your face queen of the raincloud club.


I lied when i said we were alike

your best friend's waiting on the line

to compliment your new shine

I can hardly stand to stand here now

to be your stare to admit to all

the pain that you've been painting

and over and i can't bear to stay.

so come on!

sing along!



aren't we bridges aren't we bells?

aren't we chuckling through our curls?

up to heaven and down to hell

say it again pal, aren't we bells?



aren't we statues in a story

where we choose our goals of glory

over family and over friends

say it again and again.


aren't we bridges aren't we bells?

aren't we sighing in our cells?

up to heaven and down to hell

say it again pal, aren't we bells?

aren't we bells?

American Psycho Excerpt

I make no comment, lost in my own private maze, thinking about other things: warrants, stock offerings, ESOPs, LBOs, IPOs,finances, refinances, debentures, converts, proxy statements, 8-Ks, 10-Qs, zero coupons, PiKs, GNPs, the IMF, hot executive gadgets, billionaires, KenkichiNakajima, infinity, Infinity, how fast a luxury car should go, bailouts, junk bonds, whether to cancel my subscription to The Economist, the Christmas Eve when I was fourteen and had raped one of our maids, Inclusivity, envyingsomeone's life, whether someone could survive a fractured skull, waiting inairports, stifling a scream, credit cards and someone's passport and a book ofmatches from La Cote Basque splattered with blood, surface surface surface, a Rolls is a Rolls is a Rolls. To Evelyn our relationship is yellow and blue, but to me it's a gray place, most of it blacked out, bombed, footage from the film in my head is mindless shots of stone and any language heard is utterly foreign,automated tellers, women giving birth through their assholes, embryos frozen or scrambled (which is it?), nuclear warheads, billions of dollars, the total destruction of the world, someone gets beaten up, someone else dies, sometimes bloodlessly, more often mostly by a rifle shot, assassinations, comas, life played out as a sitcom, a blank canvas that reconfigure itself into a soap opera. It's an isolation ward that serves only to expose my own severely impaired capacity to feel. I am at its center, out of season, and no one ever asks me for any identification...

American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis

Sudelbuch ‘J,’ No. 392

A great speech is easy to learn by heart and a great poem is easier still. How hard it would be to memorize as many words linked together senselessly, or a speech in a foreign tongue! Sense and understanding are thus critical to the function of memory. Sense is order and order is in the final analysis conformity with our nature. When we speak reasonably, it is our being and our nature that speaks. When we want to incorporate something into our memory, we always search for a sense or another kind of order as a tool to that end. That is why we utilize the notions of genus and species in the case of plants and animals. The practice of forming hypotheses must be considered in this same light: we are obliged to have them because otherwise we would be unable to retain things. And while this is frequently observed, we must return to it again and again. The question is whether everything is legible to us. Certainly experiment as well as reflection enable us to introduce a significance into what is not legible, either to us or at all: thus we see faces or landscapes in the sand, though they are certainly not there. The introduction of symmetry belongs here too, seeing silhouettes in inkblots, for instance. Likewise the gradation we establish in the order of creatures: truly, all of this is not to be found in the things themselves, but in us. In general we cannot recall too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.


– Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbuch ‘J,’ No. 392 (1789) in: Schriften und Briefe, vol. 1, p. 710 (W. Promies ed. 1968)(S.H. transl.)