I was dining in Charlotte with my friend Woody at a greek place he had been meaning to try. They had excellent bread which they baked fresh at the place, and I was eating a slice with some herb butter that came with it.

The butter was super good with that bread.

On the next slice I used a little more butter, and I knew he was going to say something about it, so I tried to draw his attention away while I spread it so I would get away with hogging the butter.

The butter was even better in larger quantities, so I knew what I had to do. I had to really lay it on thick on the last piece. I went for it.

I didn’t even try to distract him, I just boldy carved out a huge chunk of the butter with the butter knife and started putting it on a piece of bread. He spotted me!

“What the…” he sputtered.

“You can’t… ” he started.

“Slather!” he called.

There’s a spyware program advertising a Diet Patch which is about the most insidious and malevolent software I have ever seen. Basically, it sits around on your computer and, at random, starts playing a recorded monologue about a Diet Patch that supposedly will help you lose weight.

This only happens in the wee hours of the morning when my girlfriend’s computer is on at her desk in the bedroom and the volume is up. It has woken us up a number of times.

It happened to her a few times before it got me, because I usually sleep through almost anything. The first time I experienced it, she sat bolt upright in bed as though she were being electrocuted and screamed “DIET PATCH MOTHER FUCKERS!”

I have downloaded numerous programs to try to uninstall it, notably Hijack This, Spybot S&D and Ad-Aware. So far it’s still on there but I am taking another run at it tonight.

Words can not express the focused hatred and rage I have toward anyone who would market a product by waking me and my girlfriend up in the wee hours of the morning, and I like to think I don’t get mad easily.

In other news, I live in the door to door solicitation capital of the universe, it seems. Hardly a day goes by that some jackass doesn’t stop by and leave some sort of advertisement on my door or hanging from the knob, and that’s the ones who don’t actually knock and want to sell me some magazines.

Two kids tried to sell me some magazines the other day, and when I told them I didn’t have any money they asked if I had a sandwich they could eat. It’s rare that I just stare at someone in amazement, but I did when that kid asked me for a sandwich.

Of course I could complain to the apartment management about this problem, except for one thing.

Are you ready for it?

Once a month the apartment complex puts a baggie on my doorknob full of coupons!

Thank St. Fuck of the Shit Hills for the coupons, apartment people! Whatever would I do without seven hundred more slick pages of 59 cents off of whatever-the-balls.

I hate ads so god damned bad I want to find someone to blame and slap them on the neck because it hurts and they won’t expect it on the neck.

No one expects it on the neck!

Today as I was peeing in the bathroom of a restaurant in Birmingham, AL, I noticed a sign on the wall which read “EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS” and someone had scribbled into the wall next to it “with SPITTLE”.

I like to call my friend Doug at his workplace and annoy him, because I don’t have a job and he works very hard at his AND goes to school full time.

He describes me as unencumbered by the mundane.

I call him up and go “Business! Transaction! Commerce!” and then I ask him if he is producing anything and sometimes he hangs up on me.

Things have been going very well for me lately. Yesterday in Target with my lovely girlfriend, I saw the tackiest fake red bird ever and I laughed my head off right there in the middle of ten thousand hurrying soccer moms. Sadly, my girlfriend abandoned me due to shame at the spectacle I was making of myself, so I was unable to fully enjoy being a public idiot. It’s always better when she is embarassed.

We were talking about what to put on the top of our christmas tree and I spotted the bird.

“How about this bird?” I said, and then laughed and laughed until I cried. I guess I can’t put my finger on exactly why it was so funny, but it was, and I’m not one to question a good laugh. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I am having a good chuckle at something and someone says “It’s not that funny.”

Well it was that funny, fuckass, until you ruined it.

I can’t find the bird in question on the Target web site, so you will have to trust me with regards to its hideousness.

The day before that I was listening to an audiobook by the Dalai Lama in order to get a better handle on what buddhism is about, but it mostly reads like stereo instructions, as the cast of Beetlejuice has been known to remark in the film of the same name.

As I was listening to it and driving my car to the chinese place for some orange flavored chicken and fried rice lunch, I felt something tickle me inside my nose horribly, so I went in after it. At just that moment I passed a thin man in a santa suit on the side of the road, waving at cars.

The man reading the Dalai Lama’s book over my car stereo to me at that moment made a remark about being unencumbered by material things.

And I, with one finger up my nose, sped toward an american fast food representation of chinese food, passing in the process a thin man in a red fur suit waving like a jackass at cars.