Time again to regale you with my wit. To sweep you off your feet with my genius of prose and clarity of thought. But that’s bullshit. I know it, and even you probably know it. I’m feeling rather non-p.c. at just this instant. I’m going to run with it. To rub you the wrong way and make it feel right. Hence this installment of my little milk crate.

Now I have a story to tell. I don’t wish to humiliate a particular individual, but the lot of you. So don’t think of this story as one person Think of it as all of you in general. Anyone who falls within the bounds of the title.

I was at work last week when this woman came in. My work place is an adventure. Why just today, my ex, of two years, who I lived with and then we tried to destroy each other and then we just kind of cut each other off, but that was three years ago and I’ve been fine for a long time… well, she came in just minutes ago. So you can see how things stay exciting in the copy biz. But that’s another story all together. THAT’S ANOTHER STORY. You have to keep your humor in situations like this. But don’t forget, writers! Every relationship in your life, every tear chock full of melodrama, is a chance to exploit someone for your writing! Okay, this is past digression. Back to the psycho crackers.

I was at work last week and a woman came in. I watched her two little boys through the window. They seemed nice, happy children. She seemed a nice happy woman. She struck up a conversation. Anyone who knows me will tell you what a friendly philanthropic human being I am. So I naturally spoke with her.

She asked me what I’d heard about the floods in middle America; the breadbasket, the heartland, the home of true old fashioned goodness. I have noticed that disasters seem to bring out the best in people. Not self-sacrifice, but hard work to make things right. So even talk of a distant disaster can make life better here. I was enchanted that this woman had so much care in her heart.

She said she didn’t pay much attention to news and such so she was curious how the folks along the Mississippi and Missouri were faring. I said, “Oooo, not too good, you know. More rain expected and all.” She told me she did a lot of reading. And that the floods were predicted, “–you know.” That it was the beginning of the end.

I gave her my best skeptical, “Well…” She told me how all the disasters were the earth retaliating for the horrid damage we’ve done her. That the entire planet was cleansing itself in order to move to a new level of vibration; of harmonic. The two little tow-headed larvae outside suddenly took on a sinister appearance.

I told the woman that many religions predicted doom and destruction around the turn of the millennia, to which she replied, “Century?” No, Sharpie, the millennia. The world was supposed to end in one thousand anno domini (boy weren’t those friars’ faces red?). It’s supposed to end in two thousand as well. I got news for you. It’s ain’t gonna happen. It’s called reality. Look into it. So this nutty bitch—because she read it down at some metaphysical journal rack—thinks that the world is shedding its mortal coil to ascend the next level of karmically correct hierarchy. Blah-blah-blah. Bonk, bonk on the head.

Okay, I can detect some pissed off people, especially of the feminine variety, who have bothered to read this far. You’re mad, I’m mad. It’s a relationship.

Why am I picking on the women in this category? What’s the category at all? Well, it’s the new age aquarian crystal toting herbal smoking nirvana come latelies that I’m after, and I’m going to single out the women for one special reason. They, in particular, make it happen. They believe in it. They think it’s reality. The men who tend to assume the roles of gurus, bishops, holy men, Koreshes, Freds, Baghwans, Robertses, L. Ron Hubbards; these boys… they are not saviors (with a direct line to God’s front office) and they know they aren’t. They’re the lucky ones who found the wellspring of belief; the cistern of insecurity. They are making money, they are spreading their nonsense, and they are giving nothing in return but some diluted form of spiritual comfort that empty eyed psycho aquarian new age hose bag cracker bitches find keeps them thoughtless enough at night to sleep through another day in the stumbling journey towards menopause and midlife crisis while the real world spins around them. E.g: wouldn’t it be nice if mothers worried more about their children’s extracurricular activities, whereabouts and well-being than they do about Saturn obscuring Venus in the first half of February. I don’t blame the gurus much, they’d be homeless, talentless beggars if they couldn’t draw checks from these employers.

Now that you believe I’m a typical pig male of my breed I’ll let you in on a secret. I’m pro-feminist. But wait! I’m pro-masculist. In a less convoluted word: humanist.

Did you think that personal security came from without? Do you really believe you are empowering yourselves by building a community of reliance with the astral and ethereal? Is there a single new ager “feminist” out there who really believes that switching from a codependent relationship with Man to a codependent relationship with Woman is a change? There is going to come a day when you are a worn out fiftysomething, with nothing to show but a family who hates you and a catalogue of new age junk collecting dust in a cheap teak box from Indonesia when it still had trees. By then, manifesting your magnetism will no longer plug up the leaky dike of religion, and empirical data is going to flood through—and you are going to freak. Wondering why this happened to you; how the Universe could be so cruel, what aspect, or God, or crystal will save you now… Don’t call on those of us who have made it through, happy with ourselves and with everything to show for the years. Don’t ask us, you should have known all along. Here’s a piece of advice for you dizzy bitches: learn to respect yourself. Don’t call it unconditional cosmic love, don’t call it identity, don’t call it cyclic growth or attunement. Find something that makes you respect yourself… doing a good job, working hard at something you care about, improving yourself, learning a new language, not giving your soul away with a fifteen dollar check to whoever got airtime on public access this week and told you they had your answers. Find your own answers. Self-respect will make you whole. And it cannot be prayed for, bargained over, or acquired from others. It is self respect. Only you can give it to yourself or take it away. No one else.

And one more thing. Learn a little history would you?