Funny Money

I was at the dollar store the other day, where I almost always pay with a debit card. And it's probably a good thing for everybody that I mostly use plastic instead of folding money. And here's why. The last time I took a look at my cash to see that the wad of tens and fives and ones (who can hold onto a twenty?) was really a wad of money in my pocket and not a wad of Kleenex, this is what stared back at me.

Oh, I'm sure that Alexander Hamilton's face was actually on that ten-spot instead of Fred Fortune but, you never know. Whoever thought we'd put eleven men on the moon? Whoever thought the Soviet Union would fall in our lifetime? Whoever thought there'd be no more French Franc or German Mark or Italian Lira? Whoever thought the New World Order's new mouthpiece would be an African-American U.S. President from Illinois?

So, seeing Fred Fortune on a ten-dollar bill may be closer to reality than you think. If the face is already there when I looked at it, the name Fortune will surely be next. God help us all.

Hollywood Whores

The Hollywood Whores I refer to in this title aren't the tawdry, know-it-all, young actresses in the multitude of seedy movies that Tinseltown cranks out each year. No, they're a dime a dozen, just like the unshaven, unkempt and foul-mouthed young actors they're paired with. No, the people "in" the movies of the new millennium are probably as dazed and confused about why they're so popular as Baby Boomers like me are about why Hollywood is allowed to become more of an open sewer each year.

No, the real whores in Hollywood are the writers, directors, and especially the producers, who have no morals and, therefore, no qualms whatsoever about turning the traditional, family-oriented, movie-going experience of yesteryear into a sordid extravaganza of four-letter dialogues and nano-second images of belly buttons and butt cracks and high-contrast action sequences that have no discernible plot or story line behind them.

The real Hollywood whores have been there since day one and now they own and run just about every type of multimedia source and they're pulling America and the rest of the world down into the gutter along with them. And I'm not even a religious person. Hell, I'm just sick and tired of being surrounded by and bombarded with filth and decadence.

The real Hollywood whores also end up with all the pimp money.

Earth God

If you're a writer and this is your god then you do tons of market research before you write anything and then you write only what the market will bear, not what you really want to write.

That's fine for freelancers who consider themselves to be writers rather than authors. I consider myself to be an author and, specifically, a novelist who does not worship this pagan god. I write what I want to write and then I try to shape a market for it. It's a market that really exists anyway. It's just been kept under wraps by The Great and Powerful Publishing Wizards in Big Apple City.

The Wizards, incidentally, worship this pagan god more than anybody.