Life is a Zero-Sum Game

I will not attempt to torture the reader or myself with the full explanation of what a zero-sum game is. This was a particularly painful epoch in my past during my Economics major training. My professor was an in-the-closet homosexual, and also a sadist, who took out his frustrations of not being able to live freely and happily as a gay man on the students who paid him to teach them. It was not teaching, it was sadistic torture. So in layman's terms, a zero-sum game is that in which gains are offset exactly by losses, and nothing is created or destroyed. As I crossed from the west side of LaSalle Street to the east side at Adams, where my building is located, I was accosted as I am most mornings by a local vagrant. I don't know his name, but I think I know his game. He is white, has a long ponytail (which I suspect is a George Carlin-like "skullet") flowing from beneath a military beret. He usually wears combat fatigues. His face looks like someone put a brush fire out on it with a pitchfork. And also, his legs are both amputated at the knee. He tries to play the wounded Vietnam veteran who has fallen on hard times angle. I don't personally buy it, but if he can get away with it, then kudos to him. I speculate his amputations are more likely the result of shooting smack into his toes one too many times, then ignoring the stench of gangrene in his lower extremities as he chased the dragon through Honolee. But if he wants to tell people he lost the legs 50 clicks up the Danang, I'm not going to stop him. Some sample greetings (and these are real) that I have received from him are as follows:
"Good morning, have a great day sir"
"Hummnnnnaaa farfffallffffelll mmmiiinnnnggggeeeennie"
(and my personal favorite) "You're all a bunch of fucking CUNTS!"
So you never know what you are going to get. As I pass him most days I think, "I am glad I'm not that dude". Today I decided that line of thinking is erroneous. I have a warm home, a wife, a dog, regular meals. But I also have payments to make, schedules to keep. Oh, and I walk into a building each morning to sit at an ugly desk and whore myself out for 8 hours of soul-crushing white collar labor for people who don't care if I fuck off and die on my way home tonight. Meanwhile Ron Kovic out there in the wheelchair doesn't have steady meals, unlikely has a warm home or a wife. But you know what? He doesn't have to pay shit. No one squeezes his soul through a cheese cloth each day so that someone he's never met can make more money than 1,000,000 people together would not have need for. He's out there doing whatever the fuck he wants all day, and all he has to do is figure out how to get high every 12 hours or so. So I guess you could tell him that I have a comfortable condo and a car and a designer mutt. But he might, very fairly, fire back "At what cost?". Touche Ron Kovic, touche. And now I know, it all evens out. For my seeming glut of comfort in domesticity, he has an equal but opposite overabundance of freedom. And this is why life is a zero-sum game.

Oh No! The "Man With The Golden Voice" was Arrested and is Going to Rehab!?!?!?

I never saw it coming! I've never been surer of anything in my life than I was sure that Ted Williams would fly straight and only do good with his recent windfall. I mean, when you take a lifelong substance abuser and suddenly hand him a shitload of cash, you expect him to use it wisely. That is the social contract you enter into. If you can't trust a guy in a surplus camouflage jacket living in a tent with another dude on the side of the road in a metropolitan area, with wild hair and summer-teeth, then who the fuck can you trust? When you are homeless, an alcoholic, a drug addict, have abandoned your family, and are giving blow jobs to closet homosexuals in Livingston Park for money to feed the gorilla on your back, you learn certain skills such as financial planning, moderation and parenting. So when you go from that, straight to $100 bills in your pocket with no in-between period, you should know what the fuck to do with it. So come on Ted Williams, you've let a lot of barely literate christian Americans down.

***Over/Under on when Ted Williams is either dead or in prison: St. Patrick's Day, 2011

Let's Spend a Shitload of Money to Retry Rod Blagojevich

Prosecution went above and beyond the call of duty to fail miserably on the first attempt. I see no reason to not give them a blank check to see if they can fail a second time, albeit differently. Why the fuck not? We've got piles of cash of burn in the state of Illinois. I say we set the crippling debt and massive budget shortfalls aside, along with the exploding gang violence and youth murders problem, and go balls out to fry this goofy fucker and his luxurious hair.

I've got an idea: Just let it go. Trust me, I'd like to see this guy in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison just for being the staggering asshat that he is, as much as the next guy. But if you let it go at this point, another type of justice is going to play out. It is well known that this cock-chugger owes money all over town, and, well, he's gotta, you know, feed the monkey, man. So call off the dogs. If you do, then he's out of the news. If he's out of the news, he isn't selling books and the Today Show isn't paying him money for interviews. He becomes an irrelevant douche bag that owes massive sums of money. He is a career politician that will never see another day in any office. He'll go bust and eventually someone will see him in an alley next to a 7/11 taking a $5er from a closet homosexual to allow him to suck his dick. The problem solves itself. Sure Fitzgerald never gets to say "I got 'em!", but in the end he kinda did.

Why does anyone want to clean up Illinois politics anyway? Everyone in the country knows Illinois is dirtier than a hooker's jiz rag on Nickel Night, and they all love it. Its fun, its hilarious, it provides entertainment. The Fates will sort this salad-tosser out in the end, lets spend our tax dollars on something more productive, like giant shiny beans in the park.