I Forgot

Lest We Forget

Well, here it is, the tag-end of 9-11 festivities and I forgot how much we love us some weepy holidays. America gets more like my family with each passing day. My family loved death and all its stylish accoutrements so passionately that certain members were known to bring their wills to the dinner table. Others brought memo pads and tiny pencils so they could jot down their pallbearers, then whack them off that self-same list in a fit of pique. "Are we all a bunch of goddamn Egyptians?" I hollered at one Thanksgiving. "What is it with the funeral plans?"For that, unsurprisingly, I received the collective lemon-sucking face given to such outbursts. If Keats was, ...half in love with easeful death, my family was downright horny for it.

Now I know that, as usual, my mom n' pop n' relatives were true visionaries, foreseeing what this country would become. The older I grow, the more America hankers for frequent tearful memorials. How long did we all hang by the TV, sniffling over Michael Jackson, whose death was not hugely unexpected? It seems like we drooped around for six months, watching CSI guys trudge off with big green plastic sacks packed with mad industrial-strength pharmaceuticals. And for Uncle Ted, God bless him, we're still carrying on like timber wolves in heat, and buying up all those special slick jumbo editions of Time magazine etc., engorged with every manner of Ted K. pix. But that's what we like.

I was so at odds with myself today, what with the weird muggy about-to-do-something-awful weather and all the 9-11 hoohah pestering my unconscious, I almost fled to CuteOverload, then realized a baby hamster in a sweater wouldn't do it for me. Not today. Today I was blindly impelled to the Cake Wrecks site. When life is so ghastly that teddy bears piled in memoriam on the fatal crash site just won't get it, here in America we order us up a cake. I knew someone would have constructed a Twin Towers cake and, indeed, they had. A cake so lousy and moronic that I refuse to show it here. Look it up your own bad self. The creepy sleeping (I hope) toddler cake is shown in its place. And without further ado, let me share a few more cake wrecks.

I can't think of the occasion for these but, uh, I'm sure it's wildly celebrated somewhere in the deep gritty South.

Onward to the...

As the website chortles, "Now everyone can have one in the oven. " Ba-rump. A pause for all the trolls and ogres to chuckle and for hilarity to ensue.

More? Okay, okay.

You whined and kvetched for the Twin Towers cake, so here it is in all its ad hoc glory, fashioned from glued-together cupcakes. I don't even want to know how that black frosting was made.

Happy now? Me neither.

Cuteness will not be mandatory...

Courtesy of cuteoverload.com

I don't know how you sweated out the last term of our Former Occupant, but me, I spent uncounted zombie hours in a tranquil muttering haze over at cuteoverload.com, where everyone speaks a mutant brand of English, and where there is an endless stream of animal pix, showing all species of critters who are tiny, adorable, and often occupied with eating something bigger than their heads.

Today, in the cool pure light of a new day, I did not once feel the need to scurry over to my website haven, and stare at a hamster trying to cram a large carrot chunk down its gullet. I count that as A Good Thing, since only God knows how many brain cells I was losing through sheer disuse. I'm not proud of it, but I was also known to hang out at icanhazcheeseburger.com, glomming digital photos of cats doing the darndest things.

And, when I woke this morning, I didn't race in for my required 2.5 hours worth of reading political and news blogs, posts, and newsfeeds to see if the Current Occupant had decided to just fucking go for it, and set off the big one. As I bumbled through my day, I didn't have to monitor those same news blogs, posts, and newsfeeds, checking on what fresh hell was happening, and deciding whether or not to run for the border.

The last eight years have been hard on us, maybe harder than we know. We're all fatter, dumber, and meaner now, but why wouldn't we be? It's hard to take a lively interest in working out when you can't afford the gym fees and when a looming global apocolypse trumps toning up those jiggly thighs. Don't know about you, but I sure clocked a lot of TV time too, mostly watching true crime shows, like there wasn't enough real crime around.

Maybe we're turning a new page. I don't know if we are or not, but I think we're turning a better page.

And good for us.