Love and personal hygiene

Three out of four dentists agree,
My love for you reduces plaque above the gumline.
In a side-by-side comparison with the leading brand,
It washes dirt clean away
And never leaves a soapy film.

When we love, it is like new Q-tips
With fifty percent more cotton softness;
Or no-tears baby shampoo —
Gentle enough to use every day.

Fear not, my sweet, the unavailing arrows
Decay slings at my affection for thee.
I repel them, as antiperspirant repels body odor,
As antibacterial spray repels household germs!

I will remain, forever and always,
Your fresh-as-a-spring-day douche;
Your extra-absorbent pantyliner;
Your ultimate feminine protection.

Eight (other) things you can do with shave cream

1. Lemon meringue pie, hold the meringue. Then add shave cream. It’s a healthy portion of country goodness, with a soupçon of stomach pump.
2. On Halloween, leave a tube of shave cream on your neighbor’s porch and ring the bell. First, substitute the shave cream with dog crap … and the tube with a flaming paper bag. Take that, you heretic bastard!
3. Shave your girlfriend’s cat. Or her kootchie. Whichever one doesn’t end in a trip to the hospital.
4. While your roommate is sleeping, fill his right hand with shave cream and gently slip his left hand into a bowl of warm water. Then drop a charged electrical appliance into the bowl. Just be sure to hide his body where the shave-cream-sniffing police dogs won’t find it.
5. For a time-honored knee-slapper, it’s the old shave-cream-in-the-Blu-ray-player gag. Imagine your friend’s face when he slips in his favorite film. Imagine yours, when he beats you to death with a flashlight.
6. Squeeze a dollop of shave cream on your forehead and visit a restaurant. “There’s what on my face? No, miss, I picked that up in Southeast Asia. The doctor says it’s probably not contagious.”
7. One jumbo cookie spatula + one catapult-sized blob of shave cream + one unsuspecting grandmother = hours of hilarious nursing home mayhem.
8. Two words: nipple frosting!

Please allow me to introduce myself

It’s not enough to say the Internet has changed our lives. That’s an understatement, like describing my mother’s gas-passing as a localized atmospheric disturbance. The Internet defines a generation. My sons, 20 and 16, would be adrift without it. Lost, in the same way I’m lost when one of them hands me an Xbox game controller and then proceeds to kick my ass while he chats with four hundred of his closest technopeers. Lost, in the Borg-disconnected-from-the-hive meaning of the word. Without center, without community, without sense of self. No purpose. Gone.

That’s a tough nugget for anyone over the age of 40 to swallow. As a kid, whenever I was bored with the three network-television channels piped into our living room via my father’s spindly aerial antenna – more to the point: if my mom had locked me outside for the afternoon – I’d network the old-fashioned way: bike to some other punk’s house, knock on the screen door, and timidly ask his unsmiling, hair-roller-festooned hausfrau of a mother if he could come out to play. I’d get halfway through the first syllables (“Hello, Mrs. Grubb, can B—”) and she’d toss him onto the driveway like a Glad Kitchen Catcher stuffed with moldy stew and used tampons.

These days, our lives are interior. There’s too much good stuff happening – too much of that extreme, adrenaline-in-the-pit-of-the-stomach, teeth-gnashing, migraine-inducing virtual adventure – to ever do anything so foolhardy as to set foot out-of-doors. My boys shrink under direct sunlight. Their preference is to hole up in their bedrooms, blinds drawn and lights off, cowled Unabomber-style in hoodies, hunkered over keyboards with the ghastly reflections of YouTube videos, scrolling chat interfaces, and RPG warfare flitting across their pallid faces. They consume information, as if it were needled into their veins. You want to talk about a generation gap? Its new name is multitasking. They can do it; I can’t.

And yet, even we Baby Boomers aren’t able to hold our breath against the vacuum suck of cyberspace. The Internet is everywhere. We don’t telephone; we video conference. We don’t mail letters; we remit digital one-liners, pass along saccharine motivational tomes that challenge the gag reflex, exchange cell phone images of gummy-faced newborns, SMS needy Where R U MYSM missives while simultaneously fumbling a coffee mug and steering wheel. The Internet transforms corporate trademarks into verbs: we Google information, MSN acquaintances, PhotoShop our images. Behind a nearly impenetrable veil of anonymity (through which only the CIA peers), we fire off vitriol to Bangladeshi customer-service reps whenever our Amazon.com parcels arrive a day late and inconvenience us so immeasurably that we’re without words to describe our torment.

We live in interesting times. Ironic, given that the purported Chinese curse from which that first sentence derives also bears two other curses of escalating severity:

1. May you live in interesting times;
2. May you come to the attention of those in authority; and
3. May you find what you are looking for.

The Internet promises all three, so perhaps we are indeed cursed. Perhaps the real curse is that the Internet is us: the collective consciousness of our species; the unmapped space where kings and queens consort with minor devils, where the best hire publicists and the worst self-promote their atrocities. Pomp and porn. Valor and voyeurism. Dignity and defilement. The fervor and funk of human thought.

In other words: the blog. That’s where the Internet inevitably leads: the attention-grabbing public wank that is our lives and minds on display. The hand-job of diary. The cerebral circle-jerk. Reality programming, with us as the stars of our own lives.

Welcome to sockjockey. Call me Gimp. I’ll be your host.