The black rabbit

You know, I'm a negative bastard... or so it would seem from what I post on the internet. I nit pick, I criticize, I bitch and moan endlessly about all sorts of shit that displeases, annoys, or offends me, and there is indeed all sorts of shit that rises to that apparently very low standard.


I should be more cheerful. I should. I have a wonderful wife and tremendously excellent daughters and good friends many of which I do not see anywhere near enough (like Mark Gibson and his inestimable family, who are so tremendous as to be nearly as tremendous as my family) and I've got a job which provides excellent benefits and the opportunity to be screamed at thirty or forty times a day by strangers for shit that isn't my fault and that certainly reasonable enlightened adults wouldn't scream at anyone about.

I should be more upbeat.

But then I walk into the break room to get some lunch and nobody else is in there but FAMILY FUED is blathering from the TV so I grab the remote and switch it to something else, anything else, please, God, I'll take the fucking Kardashians for the few minutes I'll be in here over the goddam wretched appalling excrement-encrusted consensus celebrating conformity rewarding FAMILY FEUD... and I haven't made it to the vending machines which are thirty feet away before someone else has come into the room, shrieked in horror upon discovering that the TV is not tuned to FAMILY FEUD, and hurled their bodies across the room towards the remote, gibbering in dismay that they may have to spend as much as four seconds of their break or lunch period without the slick urbane inanities of Steve Harvey or the emotionally retarded dimwittedly risque topics he so smoothly exploits each and every weekday.

Has there ever been an episode of this show where at least one contestant did not smugly preen and posture about their involvement with their local church? Has there ever been an episode where some homely woman did not squeal in glee when her homelier mate or disfunctional family member managed to match "my wife's butt" with a topic like "things a man would like to eat off" as if this were the very apex of drollery and finely pointed wit in human experience? Has there ever been an episode where the two teams of contestants did not all appear to be bovinely unconcerned with anything beyond how much money they could make wringing their barely functional brain cells for the most obvious semantic and thematic linkages conceivable and then announcing them in the most unctious, smarmy manner they could manage?

What the fuck is wrong with the culture I inhabit, that we enshrine this show as an object of daily worship, and yet not one American high school graduate in ten can even formulate a coherent written sentence any more... much less an original thought?