There is no more highly charged and explosive subject than that of Politics. Most people hear the words "Politics" or "Politician" and instantaneously turn on the bullshit meter and turn off their ability to believe anything they hear. Considering how politics is practiced in America, this is a perfectly understandlable Pavlovian response to a wad of feces being hurled at your face at 47 mph as you leap over a dung heap while jogging.

For Americans today, Politics is the ultimate reality show. A marvelous conglomeration of Survivor meets Big Brother. We start with a huge pool of contestants that we lock up in inclusive, luxurious buildings. We give them huge salaries, limousines, personal asistants, personal security, lots of interns to fuck, and all the media attention they can grab. We then subject them to numerous challenges throughout their terms of service. We watch them form tribes and alliances and then switch sides to better their position. We cheer them on as they form racially and morally dominated packs and fight for supremacy. We listen to them continuously stab each other in the back while pretending to be the best of friend in front of the camera. And every four to six years or so (even sooner if the bastard really pisses us off) we vote some self agrandizing windbag off the island and banish him to the Today Show where he can whine and cry about how he was a victim of politics (isn't that a laugh) and then go on speaking tours, if he isn't facing an indictment or prison sentence by then. This is the shameful way we have come to view the governing of our country and, with all due respect to Alec Baldwin and the alien hoard at HULU.com, there is no sadder testament to that old saying that "Television Rots Your Brain!"

Welcome to the wonderful world of insanity. You are about to take a trip through those precious moments in life that stop you dead in your tracks, make you snap your head around and exclaim “WHAT THE F%&*?” We all have these moments since it is human nature to not only question the utterly nonsensical but to actually perpetrate it.
In order for you to fully understand how I view the world, and it does not involve psychopharmacology except in the medically necessary sense, you have to understand what it means to be Insanely Normal. The good news is that, if you have enough sense to ask that question, odds are you probably are Insanely Normal or at least have the potential to become one of the “IN” Crowd. It’s difficult to describe the Insanely Normal person because at first glance they look like everyone else. They come in all shapes and sizes, races and social scenes. They could be total hotties, geeks, jocks, or just plain fugly. There is no way to tell exactly who is Insanely Normal and who isn’t. At least until you hear them speak. They say the most unbelievable things and it is within these humble utterances we discover who is truly part of the IN Crowd. There are surprisingly many famous people who are part of the IN Crowd; Robin Williams, Lewis Black, George Carlin, Whoopie Goldberg, Penn and Teller, et al. They get paid millions for their musings and do it on a world wide stage while the OUT Crowd laughs cluelessly at the joke without realizing that they ARE the joke. They speak the truth with amazing clarity and those of us who are truly IN hear them loud and clear. So if you are part of the IN Crowd, this is the place for you to find a voice and others of your kind who spend their days wandering the Earth muttering “what the f%&*?.....

One of the biggest fears about government run healthcare is that your health care would be put squarely in the hands of a government analyst and completely out of the doctors’ hands. Do you want your health being held hostage by a bureaucrat? Say it isn’t so! We will be forced to fight and scream and beg for our basic benefits. Life saving procedures and medicines would be withheld pending review while millions of us will die waiting for the sea of red tape to part and approve our healthcare. Non medical personnel will be making decisions about what treatments we can or can’t have without any medical knowledge or training whatsoever. And we won’t be able to sue them for withholding treatment and causing all kinds of death and destruction because you can’t sue the government! My God it’s the end of everything. The apocalypse is here!

But…..I have a question to propose. And don’t act like you didn’t know this was coming. Your average bureaucrat at the administrative analyst level, has a college degree and a Federal job. He sits at a desk and has no medical training whatsoever. He gets 3 weeks vacation a year, a solid comfortable salary, union representation, every paid holiday on the planet plus 2 personal days to use whenever he wants. His benefits are the best there is and don’t cost him anything. He has a credit union that won’t go under. His retirement is matched and he’s completely vested within 5 years. And it would take an act of terrorism to get him fired. I don’t know about you, but this sounds like one happy son of a bitch to me! Your average insurance claims processor has a job that depends on his denial of your benefits. He gets paid an average salary that only increases with commissions for every claim he denies. He works long hours and has to listen to people whine and cry and beg for coverage because they are sick and dying. Unless he is one merciless, uncaring dickhead, he takes two Xanax with his morning coffee just to stomach his job and three shots of bourbon to get to sleep at night. He has the better health benefits than you do through the company. He gets a weeks vacation that increases every year he is there but this hardly happens because people don’t last very long in his job without psychological treatment, and this isn’t part of his coverage. His job is secure only as long as he saves the insurance company money by denying you coverage. But…and here’s the really great part about private insurance….he has bosses that are actual medical doctors with years of experience. These guys are the icons of modern medicine. They are so qualified it’s astounding. Now these guys are actually worth the billions in profits a year that insurance companies make by letting people die. So it may take a few years and about seven lawyers to get them to answer your letters begging for the healthcare you paid for, SO WHAT! If you lasted that long then they were right anyway and you didn’t need the treatment. Problem solved. These are the guys we WANT making our healthcare decisions. It doesn’t matter if they say ‘No’ to a life-saving operation. They’re doing their part to keep my premiums down and my health insurance provider in the black! Wow! They’re real doctors with diplomas and everything.

Now we also have to realize that there are unscrupulous doctors out there that were car thieves before they went to medical school. They see an illness as an opportunity to hack off body parts. They practice medicine like a hospital is their own private chop shop. We see warnings in the news all the time about the propensity for doctors to rip out your organs rather than treat the illness affecting them. This is especially true with women since a hysterectomy or a mastectomy is a hell of a lot more fun for the surgeon than chemo. He gets to root around in your innards while listening to 80’s hair bands and he doesn’t have to listen to you whine about your vomiting, your hair loss, or that the pills are making you fat for the next 5 years. We need some form of oversight to make sure that these hacks aren’t taking advantage of their patients. In the past we’ve used things like common sense to serve this purpose but it failed miserably. Then we invented something called second and third opinions but your insurance company will always go with the cheapest option so that didn’t work out so well either.

So here we have a choice as to whom we really want making our healthcare decisions. We can have the happy, well paid oblivious bureaucrat who goes to work with a smile on his face and goes home felling that he actually helped people each day. Or we can have the drugged out alcoholic, amoral, asshole who goes to work each day knowing that his job and bonuses depend on your dying before you can cost the company more money than you’re worth. My mother taught me when I was a child that life is too short to spend time with assholes. So with all due respect to the alarmist right wing, I think I should follow mom’s advice.

Besides, when did the Federal Government ever provide you with a real doctor to help you? I’ve been in public hospitals and urgent care centers and I’ve seen what they have masquerading as caregivers. There are no plush offices with diplomas on the wall. There are no doctors and nurses there. The Feds go down to skid row and hand out white uniforms and lab coats to bums and homeless people. They tell them to take a shower, use some deodorant and shave. They tell them to put on the uniform and show up at the big concrete building down the street. When you arrive we’ll give you knives and needles and drugs and we’ll let you torture the working class for free! Those aren’t real doctors and nurses. It’s a Communist Government plot to pull the wool over your eyes! They want you to get used to being cared for by bureaucrats and homeless people so that when Universal Healthcare becomes a reality, you won’t know the difference!


You know, back in the good old days, the mob invented insurance. They would send a bunch of guys with baseball bats and clubs to your place of business and fuck with you. They would demand that you pay them protection money so that nobody else would fuck with you or else they would fuck with you some more. The fact that nobody was fucking with you to being with didn’t matter. So you paid through the nose and nobody fucked with you because you had insurance. And it worked! This was the successful business model as it was originally conceived by those bastions of business acumen; the Mafia. But something has been lost along the way. Insurance companies today do business by new methods. They follow the psychological principle of denial. See most of us live in a state of denial on a daily basis so they’ve simply taken that premise and made a completely new business model out of it. We pay them to perpetuate our state of denial. We pay them for healthcare and they deny us. We argue with them and they deny us. We sue them and they deny us due process. Instead they give us this nasty little thing called impartial arbitration where both sides sit down outside of a courtroom and argue over why we are being denied the healthcare that we paid for. But since the arbitrator is hired by the insurance company, how impartial can he be? We deny that universal healthcare will do anything but destroy our American way of life. But we also deny that we’re being driven to bankruptcy and death by private insurance companies through stress and denial of decent medical care. Maybe we should all go back to doing business the way the mob did it long ago. We pay you and nobody fucks with us. It’s either that or Universal Healthcare Comrade!

I am totally clueless on this one and, like most of you, have no idea whatsoever the future will bring on this one. I have been told that that Universal Healthcare is a socialist policy and would be the gateway to allowing the total and complete takeover of every individual right by the Government. No more independence. No more Democracy. No more choice. We would all become Commies! Well, I checked around and … Holy God they were right! If we adopted socialized medicine we would end up the same way as all the other Commie strongholds surrounding us. Countries like Great Britain and France and Canada! What was our government thinking when they proposed this? Those countries are full of enslaved citizens with no civil rights whatsoever! They don’t have a cool Democracy like we do, they have Evil Republics. They elect Presidents and then force them to share power with a Prime Minister. This is just sick. They all have Constitutions of course but theirs couldn’t possibly be as cool as ours is. After all, we have the Senate and the House of Representatives. They have some dastardly organization made up of elected officials called a “Parliament”. This insidious group of politicians gathers regularly and enacts laws that they decide are in the best interests of their countrymen. How Communist is that!

Everyone is also scared that we will all have to pay higher tax percentages to provide healthcare for the poor or extremely unhealthy. We don’t have to do that with private insurance. Well, under the current system, you don’t have to worry about paying for the poor or the illegals because they can’t afford health insurance. But your rates keep going up every year because the people who can afford your insurance, especially if they can’t be kicked to the curb with pre-existing conditions because they are covered under their employers plan, go out and do stupid things like bungee jump or ski or jump out of airplanes. They smoke or drink or do drugs because they have jobs and they can afford to. They take vacations to third world countries and drink the water. They have cosmetic procedures and tell the insurance companies that they needed the boob job because their tits were giving them scoliosis. They get older and sicker and need more healthcare. So while you won’t have to shoulder the burden for the poor or the indigent, you do have shoulder the burden for the working middle class and the rich. And we know what a needy pathetic bunch of whiners they are. Every time they get a fever, a cold or the flu they go running to the doctor. If their kid gets a childhood disease, instead of just shoving a thermometer up the kid’s ass and a Tylenol down his throat, they go running to the hospital. If they have cancer, they go running all over the place trying every quack holistic program or procedure and every experimental drug on the planet on the insurance company’s dime trying to save their sorry asses instead of going home and dying with dignity in front of the t.v. with a cookie and a glass of milk. If they would just keep their sick asses at home like the poor people do instead of wasting the doctors’ valuable time with non life-threatening conditions, our premiums would be cheaper. These people are the Communists within; the domestic terrorists that our military swears to defend us from. Incidentally, we do pay higher taxes to care for the poor and the infirm. They just call it something else so we won’t stage a coup. HA! GOTCHA!

With all the hullaballoo flying over the Stimulus Package and how bad for the economy it is, I stumbled across an entire world of bloggers who fear something even greater than Obama’s bailing out the economy: Universal Healthcare! We can thank Michael Moore for stirring up this hornets nest by releasing his documentary “Sicko” on pay per view. As if we didn’t have enough to complain about already. But the blogosphere is rife with doomsayers who warn us all that Universal Healthcare will mean the rise of Communism, the end of Democracy, and life in America as we know it. With the conviction of Nostradamus, they prophesize that, should Universal Healthcare come to pass, by the end of the decade we’ll all be working the communal wheat fields, in government factories or leaky nuclear power plants, and eating borscht each night while watching government approved television propaganda starring muscular Russian female athletes on steroids. The fact that they are on steroids would make them legally eligible to become our nation’s first professional female National League baseball players. News media would be censored, comedians would be shot. Rush Limbaugh would be appointed Chief of Staff, Ann Coulter would be Secretary of State, and Tipper Gore would be appointed head of the FCC. If that didn’t put the fear of God into you, nothing would.

As I sit at my desk at work and stare at my computer screen at work, I struggle to find the right words to describe my daily presence in this internment camp for the working middle class. I can’t find them anywhere. When words fail us human beings, we tend to describe intense situations or experiences in our lives that leave us dumbstruck by comparing them to things that elicit the same reactions in us but from a different medium. For instance, the soft purr of a kitten can invoke maternal instincts and bonding in women. A rich, fabulous piece of chocolate or sumptuous treat is sometimes described as being orgasmic or sexual in how it slides across your tongue. Silk sheets can make you feel as if caressed by a lover. In fact being in love is often described as being on a never ending roller coaster of alternating pain and pleasure. For four months I have sought and searched through every experience I have ever had in my life to find the one that would adequately describe the feelings this place evokes in me. It was with great surprise that I finally realized, I had never experienced anything even remotely resembling my employment here. I would most certainly have to look elsewhere for inspiration so I turned to my most beloved hobby to guide me. I read books. Given my predilection for horror fantasy novels, you can surmise the sort of imagery I was subjecting myself to. But lo and behold, my taste in books provided me with the perfect means to express my appreciation for my current job.

Picture yourself hanging naked from a tree in the Amazon jungle. You are dangling from a vine that has little red flowers along its length that chatter and mimic human voices. It is crawling with stinging red ants and you are suspended over a murky brown bog bubbling with man eating piranhas. They jump greedily from the water and chew away bits of your flesh with every leap while the little flowers mimic your cries of pain and laugh at you. At the top of this vine sits a troll in a business suit with a grin like a shark wearing Jimmy Choos and an outdated designer outfit. Each time the fish eat away at you to the point where they can no longer reach you, you feel a tremendous sense of relief as the pain momentarily subsides. But then the troll turns a crank and you drop down another few inches. The fish begin to feast on you yet again and the troll chuckles and gurgles while you writhe in agony and flowers continue to mock your every scream. Once you have this image firmly visualized and can actually feel the despair and hopelessness that such an embodiment of evil can produce, you will understand exactly what it is like to walk through the front door of my office and hear that ominous click as the door locks behind you......

You may think I am being a bit melodramatic but the cocktail of high blood pressure pills and anti-depressants that my doctor has insisted I take before I have a stroke would indicate otherwise.

On the flip side, Insanely Normal people are those who find a way to exist in the world without warping their sense of identity. They show restraint when necessary but they do not sacrifice honesty for required deception. They are true to themselves to the extent that, when they do or say something that totally boggles the mind in its political incorrectness, it is nevertheless indisputable in its truth. They are who they are and don't fear asking the obvious question or pointing out the simple absurdities of a situation or phrase simply because it isn't proper to do so. They scoff at the allegedly well bred and sneer with disdain at the professionally pressed. The best of them become stand up comics. The rest just throw great parties. They are the socially subversive who spend their lives realizing that humanity is a cosmic joke and that the Earth is the Universe's Comedy Central.

This page is my homage to my IN Crowd who far too often go ignored and when they are not being ignored they are being shunned as the destructors of the delusion of normalcy that human beings struggle so viciously to maintain. God bless you all and welcome to my dementia.

What does it mean to be IN? Well, the simplest way to examine what the Insanely Normal person is all about is to examine his or her polar opposite; the Normally Insane person. You exist in a state of Normal Insanity if you spend your life trying to convince the world that you are something you’re not. Don't laugh just yet. We all do it to some degree but for most of us it is a situational necessity. We are all expected to behave and speak a certain way when we are in different situations or social groups.

For instance, when you go to church services or sponsored religious events, you are expected to be on your best behavior. So you clean up your language and try to look respectable. Women leave the padded bra and thongs at home. They ditch the come-fuck-me-pumps for sensible one inch heels or flats and use a small brush instead of a spatula to apply their makeup. Guys set aside the construction crack jeans complete with beer stained wife beater tees (that have been 3 sizes too small since their first parole hearing). They put on their best un-faded denims or clean Dickies that they only break out for funerals and court appearances and on occasion they actually shave. You are in the house of the Lord so straighten up your act lest you incur the wrath of clergymen, your fellow parishioners with their impressionable children and gossiping wives, or at worst (or best depending on your sexual proclivities) a nun with a yard stick and a spanking fetish. You suspend your rational disbelief and say amen to every metaphor. You absorb enough dogma to scare you into behaving yourself, at least for the next 2 hours. Then it’s back to the real world where football reigns supreme and damnation is all but assured.

When you enter therapy, whether voluntary or otherwise, you put on an act because ........ let’s face it ........... no one goes to group therapy intending to let the other mental defectives know just how far off the rails you’ve jumped. Maintaining an air of controlled eccentricity allows you to convince yourself that you’re not anywhere near as crazy as the other guys! Therefore you must be getting better hence you don’t really belong in group therapy and it’s all a cosmic injustice. Superiority among the Insane is kind of like Honor among Thieves. It works great in theory but in practice …

When you go to work you have to put on a happy face that broadcasts "I am a happy well-paid worker who loves my job and believes that my purile and mudane duties will ultimately improve mankind." You have to do this despite the fact that you hate your job, your co-workers are back stabbing gold bricks, your boss is a greedy, megalomaniacal, two faced letch, your salary is barely enough to cover your weekly bar tab, and your work is repetitive and less life altering than a box of Ex-Lax. Pity the workers that have to add "Political Correctness" to their normal insanity. They have to somehow suppress every bias, prejudice, or unkind secular thought (innocently conceived or otherwise) and present a persona that has all the warmth and brevity of a plastic hairbrush. Honestly…..vibrators have more personality and are more fun to hang out with from 8-5!

We all have to adopt these fake personalities for the majority of our waking hours without somehow suffering a Schizoid Dissociative Event. I'd say only about 30% of us are successful and exist in a state of Normal Insanity, although about 80% of that 30% are sociopaths (hey, everyone thought Jeffrey Dahmer was normal). The rest of us buy hand guns and wait for the intellectual apocalypse that is surely coming in 2012. We read every day about seemingly sane people going completely mental and popping the sanity cork. The government agency that gave birth to that bastion of mental health, the Unites States Postal Service, held the Guinness title for Schizoid Events for decades but the economy and the internet forced the Postal Service to lay off most of them and now they work in customer service for Microsoft. The Santa Claus killer, Bruce Pardo was one such ray of sunshine. Nobody could believe that he was completely crazy. They all kept saying "but he went to church and prayed every week." What makes people believe that going to church makes a person sane or normal? One reason is that people see the phony face you are forced to adopt to be there. The truth is that going to church doesn't change the fact that you dissect people’s pets for fun, stalk 8 year olds because you couldn’t get laid if someone glued a thousand dollar bill to your forehead and hung the keys for a Porsche around your neck, or that you honestly believe that with the right sauce and seasoning, people really do taste like chicken! It only threatens you with eternal damnation if you actually show people these sides of your personality. It’s no wonder that with all the roles we are forced to play, 70% of the population is utterly and completely insane.