You don't have to explain yourself to a small readership.

The smaller the audience the less I have to sell out to it.

I don't mind having so few readers, I just wished you all did not have to look like this guy.

With so few readers I write whenever I want to (which means I get to wait for inspiration.)

I guess it's a good thing that I like explaining myself.

I can't tell you how comforting is for me that you will all take every thing I say so literally. You're like my very own group of wife stoning Southern Baptists.

I know none of you care, but here is one little secret I will let you in on. I named one of my blogs (Bathos for the Misanthropic) after you.

One of the things I do is insult my readers.

I don't like my readers. Why? You aren't very nice. You aren't even nice "after we get to know you." My opinion of you is that (like me) you are a bunch of misanthropes. You are all sociopaths and you hate the rest of your species even more than you hate yourselves. You are just too pussy to admit to it.

The joke is on you though. Except when you stop reading me, and then the joke is on the local Mail Box Etc. where I bought all those business cards that say "professional blogger" on them. I bought all those cards with over drafted credit cards. I always run up the maximum credit limit allowed on my credit cards and then never make payments on them.

I do that because my parents never taught me lessons about financial responsibility. The only thing my parents ever taught me was that the landlord has to give us a 3 day notice before he evicts us.

The second thing my parents taught me.

If you cry while handing your son a a homemade wooden toy wrapped in newspaper on his 14th birthday, he will cry too and say, "Thank you daddy for taking me to Goodwill and not forgetting my birthday this year." (Unlike you do most years.)

The third thing my parents taught me was...

If you take your kid to Goodwill you can save all the money you would have spent buying stupid things like cake and presents for your kids, and spend all that money on whores and beer. Who do you think deserves it more? Of course the whores do, and my liver tells me I like beer. The older I get the better I understand Daddy.

I bought a hand mirror today and I can now confirm for you what people have been telling me for years, I am going bald.

I am mixed up kid.

I am white trash, but I like to read, and I never learned how to fix cars. Which just makes me bad at being white trash and really annoying to my middle class friends. I am so bad with cars that I don't even know how to change a battery.

I watched a video on how to change your battery and I am still confident that I am going to have to hire a Mexican or a grease monkey to come over to my house and replace my dead battery. I don't know a lot about blue collar workers, other than I think they all look like Erik Estrada, and are probably way more into "ass play" than you would think.

I guess everything would be ok if I had taken my love for reading and stuff to college and gotten a degree with it. Then I could afford to pay for the Mexican to take my car apart. As it stands now I can barely afford it, and so I will have to take the look that comes from some "macho" dude rolling up his sleeves and fixing on my car, but I can't shoot him back that look that says, "I don't do this because I can pay you to do this." My guess is that holding my career as a grocery store clerk over a well paid blue collar worker (who can at least fix the things I break) is about as difficult as it is to impress all the 15 year old girls I fuck. Sure they fuck me, but they never look at me with any respect.

I am going to change the subject to my girlfriend.

Whenever I find myself with a girl I try to imagine the things her parents (or especially her girlfriends) are telling her about me. I am sure they are asking her what she sees in me. I know I am not much to look at, so she doesn't even get points for that. I can't dance like a gay man or fix things like a He-man. When I watch movies like Rudy I don't cry like a man should. I don't choke back a few tears or a tiny sob near the climatic end of the story.

I cry throughout the entire movie like a little girl who is watching her pony get punched in the face by an on coming tractor trailer. I weep. I have to wipe away streams of tears. My face gets hot. I get flustered and my whole body turns red. I run a fever and get headaches that last all night at work.

What you would not know from that is that I have been told I have a certain kind of genius. It's not a genius that most folks would ask for. And I would have preferred something a little more bankable. You might take a guess that I am "good with words" or funny or something like that. But you are wrong. I can't make a living typing or writing anything and folks mostly laugh at me in public. I mean maybe I am funny, but lots of people are as funny as me in person. And most people think my kinda funny is mean, and that's because they think I am making fun of them. And I usually am.

To learn about my genius you would have to sit with me for a few hours at a time.

Maybe even a few weeks, months, or in some cases a few years. But then I think you would start to get it. I can be entertaining. I tend to accept you, and don't think I need to change you. I am funny. But not always ha ha funny. I don't do jokes well as you can tell, you read this blog. When you read a "joke" by me on this blog then you can bet that I am struggling with what I want to say, and I am not being very authentic about it.

I might be a disrespected genius, but I am still broke.

And since I am white trash that means I don't have health care. Which is ironic because I am a hypochondriac. A hypochondriac without health insurance is pretty fucked up.

Even though I always think there is something wrong with me, sometimes there really is.

It's allergy season and I am having a terrible time with my allergies. I think my red runny nose and bloodshot eyes have more to do with the occasional seasonal affliction of allergies which Arizona is now known for, than the Super Aids which I am most probably dying from.

I was taking Claritin until I noticed that it causes liver damage. It also gave me a few more heart arrhythmia than I thought was absolutely necessary. Now whenever I bend over my head hurts. I am still shitting green and yellow and I think that means I have Pancreatic Cancer. I hear you die quickly with that so I guess if I you still see my writing in a few months I can deduct the P.C. from my list of worries. Actually you could deduct the cancer from your probable list of my afflictions, but I still plan on worrying about it.

I have this idea to get a hold of some kind of government services for free health care. I am sure the president is working on that. My guess is that I am going to die of whatever infection I have right now before I ever get any access to any medical care.

I am about to pick on some of you in the medical profession.

I guess it's a good thing we call it a profession and not care giving. If it were care giving you might feel bad about care denying and asking me if I have insurance or suggesting that my only hope for admittance into your e.r. is if I think I am dying. I know you don't plan on admitting me to the hospital unless I am have another heart attack, but the least you can do is take a glance at me and tell me that I am not going to die or something.

Dear Hospital admittance clerk...

Not every person who walks into your counter is trying to trick you into getting free health care. They just might be overreacting to a scare brought on by a bit of paranoia and a large amount of seeping puss. Your advice to that person to have their doctor check them out later is not much in terms of advice. It's like yelling at someone to be careful right after they fall. Nobody appreciates that kind of thing, and it just makes you look like an ass.

Looking back on the time period when I had me some health care it's kinda ironic that I am now pissed off at someone getting denied medical service. The one time I had a health care "provider" he prescribed Effexor to deal with my depression and some kind of acid reducer that was supposed to help my Acid- reflux. All it did was give me liver failure and yellow shits.

I know you think this rant has had precious little to do with you how I hate you. But you don't work in the medical profession, or if you do, and you read this blog, you diagnose me with real problems from fake symptoms. But I appreciate that.

Some of you are my best friends, if I had best friends on the Internet.

I used to have the definition of Bathos on the Bathos blog:

a. An abrupt, unintended transition in style from the exalted to the commonplace, producing a ludicrous effect.
b. An anticlimax

But somebody convinced me to take it off, and that has probably confused the dumber people who read this blog. They like to pretend they know what I am talking about even though they need a dictionary just to read me. But I have already blogged about why I hate you before. Like I think you care more about dogs and cats than you care about homeless people. And I think that makes you worse than Hitler.

I got attacked by another stray dog today.

Which was bound to happen given your careless attitude towards fencing your animal and the 40 billion dollars or so that you spend on feeding them. I think I should have stood my ground and kicked it a few times as the dog was smaller than me and I was pretty sure I could win the fight. But the dog was slow running up to me and the bike I ride is really fast. So fast that I doubt you could keep up with me if you were running along side of me for too long.

Also, I think you'd rather sleep in today than do anything about all those little babies with flies in their eyes in Somalia.

I'm sorry. I don't just want to make you feel bad.

I wanted to make you feel good about the path we are on as humans. I had a long speech prepared for you about how tiny we are in the universe. But I composed it while at work and work frowns on me using the voice recorder while I ring up your stupid groceries. And I can't remember anything I told myself while you hunted for exact change.

For the most part my speech went on about how we are evolutionarily speaking still provincial creatures who have barely raised our collective heads out from beneath the muck of creation. Our sense of morality is based more on disgust of the other than anything helpful to us.

That doesn't bother me. Like its white trash cousins "Humankind" can't help where they come from. It doesn't bother me that you prefer sleeping well at night rather than face the forces of evil. I don't blame you for that. I have a hard time sleeping myself, and I know what a good night of rest can do for you.

I can't fault you for being a coward either. I don't like risking things myself. The guy who says it is better to have tried and failed, probably never failed at anything important, and if he did fail, he probably didn't get knifed in the back for trying it. If he did you'd wonder how he ever got around to living long enough to say all of those things about trying so much.

Me? I prefer the sidelines of life. I don't need to participate in full contact sports to get a rush.

I can get a rush out of just cheering for the winners.

Now that you have checked out something "old" from my illustrious archives go check out my new (just posted it even though it is listed as August 4th) update on Victoria the 15 year old girl from the Maury Povich show who wanted to have a baby.