New feature: DeeJayKay's oddities.

One twin swaps places in jail with the other twin -- and then quickly realizes that was a dumb thing to do, since jail isn't fun.

The Kids Are Alright

I do not have a child, and to tell the truth have not yearned much for children in my years. When I was younger I regarded children as an albatross -- the path chosen for me, a clever and successful male, by society (not just by the parents and the aunts and the uncles and the cousins but also the citizens, folks who would regard my ambition for public office as a little cold, a little naked and self-serving, if it didn't come wrapped up in a family, a pretty wife and some smiling tots in tow.) Sometime last year a friend sent me this essay from the Web site Salon.com, and I remember thinking that the writer summarized perfectly what I felt:

The daily depredations of child rearing, though, seem so viscerally real that my stomach tightens when I ponder them. A child, after all, can't be treated as a fantasy projection of my imagined self. He or she would be another person with needs and desires that I would be tethered to for decades. And everything about meeting those needs fills me with horror. Not just the diapers and the shrieking, the penury and career stagnation, but the parts that maternally minded friends of mine actually look forward to: the wearying grammar school theatrical performances. Hours spent on the playground when I'd rather be reading novels. Parent-teacher conferences. Birthday parties. Ugly primary-colored plastic toys littering my home.

The horror this female writer feels is not very different from what I've long felt as a male.

But -- but but but how to put this? The heart is a curious thing, friends, and recently, to my surprise, my heart has ached. And after considering for a while the possible reasons for this hurt I realized with a start that the ache I feel is for children, for little ones of my own. It's a dull, ever-present hurt, not unlike the pain attendant at the death of a loved one -- in my more introspective moments I see it clearly as the pain brought on by the closing of my options before me, the setting of the sun upon my wasted fertile years, and with it the sudden realization that I would have been an especially good father, that my children would have become very successful, that the world would have smiled upon their faces.

This morning the bus was filled with children and their happy mothers on the way, I imagine, to shop for Christmas. As I sat there amidst the cherubs I tried to make my through the bitter, serious news of the New York Times, but I cannot tell you that I was successful, I cannot tell you that my mind didn't wander to thoughts of children and what might have been....

Goin' down to South Park....

There is nothing more to say than this: South Park's season finale Christmas special, which I just caught on TiVo, is a work of genius. Can any more be said? Can I extrapolate on the brilliance of the conceit, to dress up the show as a boring old kid's special featuring saccharine "woodland critters" who dance and sing the most repetitive holiday songs but then to suddenly twist that conceit Into itself, to have those critters become the devil's spawn, to have Santa wielding a shotgun, to feature an extended lesson on how to perform abortions ... can I extrapolate on that brilliance? I cannot. No writing could justify the brilliance. Folks, trust me on this: Watch this show. You'll thank me for it.

Who am I? Why am I here?

"Dennis, honestly, did any good come out of your campaign for the presidency?" I hate this question. I hate it because I'm an honest man and when I'm asked it -- as I am every now and then -- I'm forced to answer honestly, and to my embarrassment the answer is no. I came to this conclusion immediately, just after the returns were in on Nov. 2. There I was at the I asked myself this question. "No, old fellow, not a bit a good came of it," I was forced to admit, and I determined then to find a better way.

And that brings me to another question I've been getting with some frequency over the past couple days, in response to my intensely personal posts on this blog: "Dennis, why are you doing this? Why are you writing about yourself so casually, with so little regard for how it sounds, for how it will play?" Why am I blogging?

I'll tell you why: Because Americans need to know who I am. In the past two years we saw virtually unknown people and candidates -- the folks who run the fine blog DailyKos, or the pundit at Instapundit, or the foul-mouthed guilty pleasure Wonkette, and even my old, misguided rival Howard Dean -- become national sensations on the strength of their witticisms online. They sold themselves to the people on the Web, and thanks to that they managed to effect actual political change. Markos of Daily Kos was even invited to the Democrats' convention, which is more than I can say for myself!

So that's why I blog. The American people are not in love with our president, even if they reelected him. Indeed, as far as I can tell, the American people love very few people -- there's Bill Cosby, there's Ray Romano, there's 50 Cent, Warren Buffet, there's Colin Powell, there's John McCain, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods and Mohammed Ali and Eminen , and at the head of the class there's Oprah. How did these people do it? How do they manage to seduce us, to intrigue us, to disarm us, to get us to trust them?

They did it through sheer force of personality. John McCain is always honest with us, and for that I love him, can't keep my eyes off him, even if I disagree with him all the time. And that's what I intend to do on this blog. People, here, online, I'm a new man. I've got a personality that I'd like to express, I've got a human side I'd like you to know about. I will pull no punches. I will make no bones about it. When I see something that must be taken down, I'll take it down. When I see something that needs a heads up or someone who would do well from a shout out, I'll pass out that heads up, and I'll shout out that shout out. This is what you can expect from me here: No exceptions, guaranteed.

Now let's get on with the show.

Can't live with them, can't live without them. (Pesticides)

Much as I'm disgusted by pesticides I've got to note here, for the record if for nothing else, that the substance known as Raid is a miracle unto man. Every year 'round these times my kitchen becomes a staging location for a battalion (or is at a platoon? a company? I'm not familiar with much military lingo.....) of invading ants. From here, the corner of my well-worn larder, where I've done some of my best thinking, the ants take aim upon my entire abode -- they send out light, maneuverable, highly successful sorties toward my bedroom, my bathroom, the cats' playroom, and by the time Christmas falls the whole place has often been captured, conquered, occupied. Everywhere you look you see nothing but the spindly little legs and the uncaring faces of this invading force, and of course there's always the marching, the constant hup-two-three-four in a formation so disciplined, so precise, so ordered you'd think you were watching a Leni Riefenstahl film.

You'd suppose that I'd be able to ignore these tiny creatures, but you'd be wrong: A man's heart is not settled when his land's been violated. How can I ponder the finer points of democracy when I've been usurped in my own home? As I've said a million times before, freedom does not flourish under occupation.

Over the years I've tried many weapons in my rebellion against these ants. Non-violence has been my paramount concern: I've caulked shut the window openings, I've used a Chinese ant-repelling chalk hailed for its pseudo-magical powers, I've invested in a home-wide, high-pitched sonic device designed to keep away pests of all sorts. All of it in vain (and my cat Disraeli developed a quite-painful tinnitus as a consequence of the last one.) So this year, despite, I'll admit, my better ethics, I took the advice of my once-a-year housekeeper Mrs. Lopez (no relation, I've determined after much intrepid inquiry, to the other more famous (and more fabulous!) Ms. Lopez) and purchased a can of Raid.

God in heaven, what a thing you have bestowed upon us in this unassuming can! Just one spray in the larder upon the marching enemy and like that, faster than you can say IED, the rebellion was on. (To be sure, cat lovers, I kept the area off-limits to the felines.) Invisible, virtually odorless, and so painless -- killing was never meant to be so easy, but here we are.

And so, the upshot: The ants, succumbing the long-lasting power of this magic substance, have packed up and gone away. Self-determination has once again prevailed.

Goodbye to all that.

Here we are, brothers, here we are at the end of 2004, another year another beer, and what do we have to show for it?

Or let me ask you, man -- what do you have to show for your time on the planet these 365 days? You spent your hours bellyaching world affairs -- Rummy this, Condi that, Dubya screwed this up, Blair screwed that up, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Scalia, Frist, Lott, Rove, Delay, yada yada yada yada -- ENOUGH! I say. What'd you do besides complain?

And don't say you voted. Good for you, you voted. Great. You want a medal? A shiny certificate? An honorary doctorate from Harvard? You're supposed to vote, maroon. Don't claim any prizes for voting. And not for phone-banking or canvassing either. So you left your moist, windowless basement apartment in Brooklyn to spend a week in Miami -- you think that's some kind of civic sacrifice? You think that's on the order of Give me liberty or give me death? No. It's kid stuff. And as we saw on Nov. 2, fat lot of good it did, too. All your blogging and your MeetUps and your ACTing and MovingOn -- heh, that worked out well, didn't it?

Friends, I'm not trying to sound mean-spirited. I understand you meant well. But I think you've got a problem, and I don't think we're going to win unless I intervene. The problem is this: you've gone soft. You claim to be a liberal but I fear that what really thrills you is looking like a liberal, thinking you care about the world's ill, the dying, the disaffected, etc., etc. But go home tonight and set a chair in front of a good, clean mirror and look at yourself deep in the eyes and, if you dare, ask yourself this: If you were asked to make a really hard choice, to sacrifice something of real value in order to better this world, would you do it? If a man asked you to give up your iPod so that a boy in Nepal can eat a good meal this evening, would you squirm? Be honest with yourself. If a man asked you to throw out your TiVo to spare the life of a Chilean Sea Bass, would you politely walk away? How many hours of HBO would you do without in order to get our troops out of Iraq? What if I asked you to boycott Desperate Housewives until the Saudis abdicate their throne? Would you look at me as if I'd keyed your Audi?

Goodbye to you, I say. Goodbye to all you softs. We don't need you in the movement. When Dennis J. Kucinich decided to change the world, I stopped wearing shoes. I stopped eating meat and cheese. I did without. I've done without women, without love, without children. I may even have to give up my cats. I've put up with the slings of our jokeaday society, our angry, angry world. I've given up my dignity, my pride.

And until the rest of you do the same, I say: Goodbye to you, and goodbye to all that.

My first post!

Hola, compatriots! It's Dennis DeeJAYKay! My first post, just testin' the tires on this thing, will rap wit ya lates!