I have never been a fan of the comic strip Wee Pals. This admission doubtless marks me as an insensitive slob (at best) or a jackbooted racist scumbag (at worst). I don’t care; I just can’t take it any more.

For those of you who have never had to suffer through a reading of this tiresome strip, Wee Pals is a strip whose noble goal is inter-ethnic harmony. Often, though, this is simply spun as "whitey is always wrong". The token WASP male, Ralph, is usually depicted as crass and ignorant bigot. Whitey just don’t get it; he’ll always be an asshole, even if racism has to be imagined where none exists, such as this farce that went out on Christmas where poor, stupid white Ralph suffers yet another browbeating:

Sorry, Wee Pals, but fuck you on this one. You’re messing with Bing, motherfucker. Nobody fucks around with Bing. Not on Christmas. Take your rainbow homies and celebrate Kwanzaa somewhere the fuck else, because Bing wasn’t singing about burning crosses and George Wallace. Call me stupid or cruel just for being white, and that’s fine; I get the whole "400 years of oppression makes a brother bitter" angle. Being white, I will probably never grok your perspective, so keep hitting me over the head with the injustice inherent in racism. That’s fine. I understand that Morrie Turner (the author of Wee Pals) lived through the racist years of the 1940s and 1950s, and saw the race riots of the 1960s, and that can’t leave a man’s Weltanschauung unaltered.

But trying to use Bing to lay a guilt trip on me? Fuck you.

I had considered myself pretty well prepared for the Christmas weekend. The supplies for the enormous Christmas Eve feast were laid in well in advance. The bicycle for the little one was assembled, the tree watered, and the gifts stowed under the tree. I even had a huge stockpile of AA batteries ready. Last Christmas had taught me to expect an onslaught of battery-powered toys sent by malicious relatives.

If you don’t have children, then you don’t know the agonies that toymakers have been busy inflicting on parents since the 1970s. A trip through a twenty-first century toy store, as told by those who have survived the experience with a modicum of sanity still intact, subjects you to a cacophony of electronic noise. All sorts of toys now emit bleeps, boops, horrible digitized children’s songs, voices, and music loops so irritating that normally rational people are driven to snatch the infernal things out of the hands of their children, and smash the offending devices into flinders using their bare hands.

Perhaps because it’s getting to be nigh-impossible to find any bauble that isn’t controlled by a chipset, uncounted battery-powered toys will invariably find their way underneath the Christmas tree of every parent. Whether the senders choose to purchase them out of rancor, or merely because they’re just phoning it in and grabbing the first undamaged toy they find, I don’t know. Since nothing is a faster Christmas buzzkill for kids than a toy that doesn’t work, parents quickly learn to stock up on batteries to feed these plastic yuletide monsters.

Over the last couple of years, it seemed clear to me that the venerable nine-volt battery, long a staple of toys and handheld devices since I was a boy, had finally been supplanted by the AA battery. Nothing we recieved from well-meaning relatives used the boxy little energy sources. Accordingly, I purchased a large quantity of AA batteries, and began drinking heavily to try and preemptively kill the pain. Smart move, I thought.

The toymakers, however, had forseen my feeble attempts to keep up with their advances. Meting out strepitous injustice to innocent parents is not enough for these diabolical fiends. No, every single electronic toy we were sent this year required nine-volt batteries. The same kind of batteries I was sure had been discontinued by toymakers. The kind of batteries I didn’t have. Toy after toy was ripped from its packaging in savage, gleeful abandon by tiny hands, and handed to me, where, upon examination, I had to tell their anxious new owners that no, they couldn’t play with them today, because we had no batteries. In an instant, I went from sainted purveyor of holiday bliss to unwitting Grinch. For want of a battery, Christmas was looking lost.

Ultimately, two things saved my sorry ass. The first was nap time for the three-year-old, who, by noon, was increasingly irritable for no discernable reason, and generally making everybody homicidal. The second was a small package of two precious nine-volt batteries from my aunt Lisa, which went undiscovered under the morass of shredded wrapping paper, ribbon, and packing material until I stepped on it with bare feet. It’s remarkable how sharp the edges of modern plastic packages feel. Howling with pain, but detecting none of the geyser of blood I was sure would soon issue forth from my ruptured sole, I found the batteries. Sweet, sweet batteries.

I spent the rest of the day moving the batteries from toy to toy with the aid of a jeweler’s screwdriver, since our six-year-old was neither expected nor able to constrain himself to playing with any single new plaything. Still, Christmas was saved. Thank you, Lisa.

For next Christmas, I plan on buying a dozen batteries of every type sold in North America, just to be on the safe side. Watch batteries? Check. D cells? Got it. If somebody is selling it, I’ll buy it. If nothing else, I’ll be able to distract myself from all the racket by touching lantern batteries to my tongue once the eggnog runs out.

My paean to our office manager caused a brief stir in the cube farm when it was posted. Over a week later, I’m still hearing some people mention it here and there. One of the engineers suggested that I take it a step further and solidify my position as the chief office suck-up by putting her image on t-shirts and other items.

I thought it was certainly amusing, but the source image of her that I had to work with was very small, pilfered out of Apple Directory. It didn’t scale well to t-shirt size, as one might imagine, so I abandoned the idea, regardless of its potential to generate mirth.

Since then, though, two other people have asked me about it, indicating there might be an untapped, if small, market in devotional fetish objects featuring our beloved office manager. Whether people will buy such products out of respect, fear, or adoration matters not; my greed and egotism ensures that I am happy to provide them. Here, then, is an item freshly minted in my cubicle-cum-atelier: The Office Manager Mug. No denizen of our labyrinth should be without one. Besides the powerful and moving iconography presented on its obverse, the other side lists five of the most important Commandments governing life here in our office. Learn them. Live them.

If that doesn’t sell you on it, I would like to point out that this item has many miraculous qualities, such as the innate ability to constrain potable liquids to an extremely handy cyndrilical shape, easily transported wherever your creative shirking takes you; it can also be used as an analog desktop accessory to store writing implements, paper clips, and other such detritus. This mug, of a reasonably heavy construction, can also be used as an impromptu bludgeon, such as is sometimes necessary to stir one’s colleagues into action through either its direct or threatened use. Drinking from it will cure insomnia, rickets, and the gout, and is said by some to transmute ordinary coffee into the very ambrosia of the gods.

I am a citizen of the United States of America.

The President of my country, on his sole authority, can detain me indefinitely in a military facility, incommunicado, and without charging me with any crime. The military is quietly but busily creating a new organization reminiscent of the many-tentacled internal security ministries of othernations, that Americans used to shake their heads at in pity and consternation. I can be spied on without court oversight or legal reason, again at the whim of whoever occupies an increasingly imperial Presidency, and am told that any attempt to question these policies is seen as disloyal, feckless, or both.

Does this really sound like an America we want to live in?

I am constantly told that these actions are necessary to protect me, and that laws which solidify this nascent police-state mentality must be passed immediately, and without debate. When voices are raised that express concern and alarm over a growing erosion of civil liberties, they are dismissed by those in power as frivolous and unwarranted, yet what government has ever voluntarily relinquished any significant tools of control and power over its citizenry?

I prefer to be better-protected against tyranny than against terrorists, be they foreign or domestic. No government bent on security at the expense of law and liberty will truly have the best interests of its citizens at heart for long. Without fail, those citizens will become subjects, and eventually even the pretense of liberty is lost.

Don’t just bitch about it, though. Contact your senator or representative today and let them know that the expansion of police powers must be checked. Your freedom is in your own hands. For now.

To all my coworkers: I blew it on Friday. The big public fuck-up? That was me. I’m the idiot responsible.

Have you ever been at work and answered the phone with your previous employer’s spiel instead of your current one? Sent a dour sales prospect a proposal with your “personal” e-mail signature (the one with the crucified Elmo image and the Marilyn Manson quote)?

Ever sent a customer the wrong or conflicting information? How about three thousand customers? That’s what I did on Friday. Just before the weekend was about to commence, capping off a glorious week of successes and progress in the office, I fucking blew it. I’d created a relatively slick PDF version from a very plain announcement for our big annual customer-training shindig, and distributed it internally to much praise. The manager of the Support department decided to send this nifty document to our customer base via e-mail, along with a little text blurb describing its contents. Easy money.

Unfortunately, my text blurb stated that one of the sessions was to be held in San Diego (where it was in 2005) instead of San Francisco (where it will be in 2006), contradicting the PDF document, which was, mercifully, without error.

Not minutes after it was sent out, the e-mail queue “exploded”, according to one of the support engineers, with messages customers demanding to know which one was correct. One of the movers and shakers from the training department burst out of her office trying to find out how the bogus information got sent out, and there was a general hubbub while I frantically drafted a correction. The administrative assistant who actually pulled the trigger on the message reported getting “hate mail”. I quickly drafted a retraction and correction to be sent out, but the damage had already been done. I’d blown it, and just before my annual review, too. Sure, yes, two other people didn’t catch it before it went out, but I was the moron who made the mistake.

People here were largely supportive, or at least politely declining to call me out for being a fuckhead in public, but I felt shitty enough about it to flirt with the idea of finding employment elsewhere, just out of sheer embarrassment and shame.

Argh.

No sooner did I complete writing the previous post than a friend from southern California called with the news that a mutual friend, Dave Straup, was dead at the age of 47. It wasn’t a complete surprise. While I don’t know the exact reason he died, it was an open secret that he was drinking himself into an early grave, and had been since before I met him in the 1980s. Only one member of my circle of friends ever confronted him about his drinking, and the hostile response this provoked scared the rest of us off of the topic. It didn’t help that we were all in our twenties, with fewer cares about either ourselves or our fellow men.

We let him drown by letting his alcoholism work its evil. It just took longer than we thought it would, and by the time it finally happened last week, we had all drifted hither and yon, and hearing from him even via e-mail was a rare occurrence. I don’t know that any of us really made any attempt to reach him, though since I only kept in sporadic contact with a few my old friends, I might be wrong. I hope so. I hope he did not die lonely, but my heart is heavy with the suspicion that he did. He could bluster and curse at the world like no other man I have met, but he was a good man. We all knew how sad he really was. It was obvious. Sometimes he’d even admit it.

Suddenly blog posts about liquor aren’t funny at all anymore.

Rest in peace, Dave. You were weary long before you left us.