Post-Christmas Letter to Santa

Another disappointing Christmas.

Here is my post-Christmas letter to Santa.

Merry blah blah blah.

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Christmas Toys for Twats

I know that some people like this holiday season. And I love bullshit as much as anyone. But seriously, I had a gift to get and stopped in Saks in midtown yesterday. And, shit. The place was packed full of shoppers with vacant eyes like chickens on the conveyor belt at Perdue. Everyone looked like they had entered the store starving and maybe Saks had hidden a sandwich in a gaudy purse or a fragrance gift pack.

Also, it was way too crowded to enjoy shoplifting. Really. It felt like work.

So, as much as I adore bullshit, I am not a big fan of these holidays.

Still, I can write about the holidays. In fact, I hardly know where to start. Should I tell you about the parts of It’s A Wonderful Life that give me a raging hard-on? Or how hanging mistletoe from my belt buckle is finally starting to get old? Or how putting a wreath around your dick sounds like a very festive thing to do until those little pine needles start to sting?

Well, I guess I should tell you that I do not have a traditional Christmas tree at all. I did, however, design this Christmas buttplug that I think is very cheerful and that I hope to stuff up some lucky woman’s ass early Christmas morning while carolers sing far below the stoogepen.

But really, Christmas is not about me. Christmas is all about the kids. It’s the children that make Christmas what it is. Really, Santa Claus doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with Jesus. Neither does Rudolph the Alcoholic Reindeer or Frosty the Cokeman. All of those things are for kids. Children love dysfunctional claymation creations and they love presents. Mostly, they love presents. That’s what Christmas is really all about: bling. Toys. Shit.

For the last few years, I have donated toys to a charity for kids. It’s called Toys for Twats™. See, more and more, kids toys are realistic. They celebrate the real world, a world of sex and terrorists and death. Not just videogames, but all toys. Toys for Twats™ gives toys to boys and girls and, for years, I have made my own toys and also purchased toys for this worthwhile charity.

So, here are just a few of my favorite Toys for Twats™ toys from over the years.

Horror Barbie

Recently, I saw this Barbie doll.

This is Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ Barbie® Doll. This Barbie is in the process of getting pecked to death by birds. That’s right. Barbie takes on a horror role and is being attacked by clawing, eye-pecking, flesh ripping birds. This may be the most awesome Barbie yet!

I hope this is a theme. I hope Barbie does all the great horror films. In case Mattel is looking for any ideas, I suggest Cannibal Holocaust for their next horror film tie-in. I think kids would find that a lot more exciting than The Birds. I mean, The Birds is pretty fucking old and is in black and white, you know? Cannibal Holocaust is pretty old but not quite as old, and at least it is in color.

Of course, you’ll have to supply your own blood.

Stuffed Things

Kids like stuffed shit. I have never understood this. What the fuck is so good about a stuffed thing? Even if it looks like a bear or whatever, it is just a fucking pillow. If you give a kid a pillow, he would look at you like you were out of your fucking mind. But give him a pillow that looks remotely like a dinosaur, and he will carry it with him to his first fucking job interview. Dude, that’s a fucking pillow!

Anyways, I couldn’t see the fascination with pillows, but here is one that caught my attention.

This is the Snugglers for Girls Cinderella. Notice the giant condom-covered cocks in the background with the purple reservoir tips? See, now this is a pillow I think teaches kids something. Safe sex is important.

Anyways, I have made some stuffed pillow-like shit to give to kids, too. And I think my stuffed shit also teaches all sorts of valuable lessons.

And, yes, in case you were wondering, the clit squeaks when you squeeze it.

Dick in the Box

Boys love to play with their own dicks. And this is one of those things that a boy never outgrows.

So, I guess this toy doesn’t really make all that much sense. I guess if I’m ever too old to play with my own dick, I would want a toy dick. And girls don’t have dicks, so this toy might make sense for them. And gay boys might enjoy this toy as well. Oh, who am I kidding. Dicks are just fun. Period. That’s why we tell so many dick jokes. Dicks are just a barrel of laughs. Who needs babies? Dicks are bundles of joy.

But, you know, if you already have a baby or something, here is a dick toy it can play with.

Merry Whatever-the-Fuck-You-Celebrate

Maybe I’ll post something else before Christmas, but the chances are slim. So Merry Fucking Christmas just in case. I know that all of you do not celebrate White Christmas, so Happy Jewish Christmas or Black Christmas or Arab Christmas or whatever the fuck bullshit Christmas you celebrate. And Happy New Year, even though I know some of you have your own goddamn New Year, too.

Oh, this is also the last Christmas that George Bush will be president and Dick Cheney will be Vice President. So, a very special very White Merry Christmas to them. For all they have done for us, I made a very special Christmas tree for them.

That’s all I have to say about Christmas unless I decide to post more toys or something. Who knows, right? In the meantime, if you’re looking to stuff a holiday buttplug up your ass, drop me a line.

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A Wisconsin Thanksgiving and Other Crap

I have been MIA and I apologize. I owe you a blog post, but I am busy as hell and not feeling very funny. I am busy because, in my little corner of the world in fabulous in New York City, the global financial crisis has hit home. See, in the daylight, I am a fish in an incredible creative pond where wonderful imaginative creatures do fabulously inspired things. In about a month, the shit is going to hit the proverbial fan here. I can’t talk a lot about that, but it’s one of those movie-lot wind-generating turbo fans. And a lot of people are going to lose their jobs.

I’m not worried about losing my job. If I lose my job, I will post more regularly and dress less frequently. But a lot of good people I work with who have pink hair and nose rings and who smoke crack during their lunch breaks are going to lose their jobs, and then who the fuck will hire them?

So, this global financial crisis we’re in is on my mind a lot lately. And I’ve wanted to write about the global financial crisis, but it’s pretty fucking complicated. I mean differential equations complicated. So, instead, I will ramble about my Thanksgiving and Wisconsin.

See, a lot of people like me don’t think they are personally impacted by this whole financial mess. That’s because a lot of people like me don’t live in the real world. We live in this fantasy world where we wake up and say, “Where the fuck am I today? And who the fuck are these bitches?”

My Thanksgiving was spent with my mother at her house. Every Thanksgiving we share a feast, with a whole turkey and a whole ham and all the fixings, between just the two of us. Mum does not exactly live in the real world, either.

But I have always thought that she lived in the real world much less than I did, because I do things that are real that she does not. Like, I fuck and watch porn and snort cocaine and go to work at noon every day. My mom does not do those things, as far as I know. I have asked her and, though I never get a straight answer, I think that’s because the answer is “no, I do not fuck and watch porn and snort cocaine and go to work at noon every day.”

But I was wrong, as I found out this Thanksgiving. Not about the fucking maybe, but my mum lives more in the real world than I do. I discovered this because this year’s Thanksgiving revelation was that many of the friends I had as a child were, in fact, not imaginary at all. They were real people.

I have checked around since then and realized that many of my childhood friends were real people. In fact, I was an imaginary friend outcast.

So, I don’t really live in the real world. In fact, I am realizing more and more that the things that I do that I thought made my world real actually make it more unreal. For instance, a couple of years ago I took a trip to the Sonoran Desert to shoot at fruit. It was just for kicks and relaxation, you know? It’s a dude thing. I brought the guns and fruit with me in an SUV, along with some recreational drugs. You are probably wondering what could possibly be more real than using fancy guns in the stifling, dry heat just outside of Maricopa to shoot exotic fruit I personally imported while stoned out of my mind. I used to wonder the same thing. And I will tell you. Worrying about how you will buy crayons for kids and where your retirement money will come from.

That’s where Wisconsin comes in.

A couple of years ago, five Wisconsin school boards worried about how they would continue to pay for services to retired teachers amid escalating medical costs. A trusted St. Louis investment bank advised them that the best return on their money would come from something called a collateralized debt obligation, or CDO. Now, maybe you’ve heard a lot about credit-default swaps and CDOs. But just in case you haven’t, a credit-default swap is sort of like insurance. It’s a private contract where you pay a premium just like with insurance. The difference is that it is insurance for credit: if a loan goes into default, the insurer owes you money. You don’t need to have anything to do with the lender or borrower to buy a credit-default swap on their loan. We won’t talk about credit-default swaps at all because they bore me. They’re pretty easy to understand.

Let’s talk about the CDOs the Wisconsin School Boards bought instead. With a CDO, somebody starts a company that buys a credit portfolio. It buys debt or maybe debt derivatives. The company funds these purchases by selling equity in itself and selling bonds it must pay back. Under this scheme, if you invest in a CDO, you never own any of the underlying assets or debt. It already sounds complicated, right? Well, there is a thing called a synthetic CDO that is even more complicated. It creates CDOs from other CDOs. And it’s a complex way for corporations to move bad debt off their books. It is in synthetic CDOs that the Wisconsin School Board unwittingly invested.

I won’t go into any more detail about how a synthetic CDO works, but if you’re really interested in the mechanics of it all, here is a mathematical formula you can ponder that may help to explain it all.

Anyways, these five Wisconsin school boards were convinced by their investment banker that CDOs were a really safe investment with a great return. In a meeting with their investment banker, he told them that, in order to lose money on their investment, “There would need to be fifteen Enrons.” That’s a direct quote from their tape-recorded meeting. So, the school boards invested $35 million dollars and borrowed another $165 million from a Irish bank to buy three CDOs from the Royal Bank of Canada. CDOs are deliciously global and awfully fucking expensive.

So, here we are fifteen Enrons — Lehman Brothers, AIG, Bear Sterns, Citigroup, to name a few — later. The Irish bank they borrowed the money from — Depfa — was bailed out by the German government to the tune of $85 billion. And their synthetic CDOs are pretty much worthless.

So, to pay back their debt, the Wisconsin school boards need to take money from their budgets. That means cutbacks for teachers and retirees. And it means fewer books and fewer crayons for children. As one first-grade teacher put it, “what happens to my retirement? Or the construction paper and pencils and supplies we need to teach?”

Well, Mr. or Ms. First-Grade Teacher, please see the formula above.

That’s the real world.

Here is something you should expect by now: the dude who was head of the Irish bank that got into that financial mess and had to be bailed out for $85 billion, Gerhard Bruckermann, got $150 million when he left the bank. Does this remind you of AIG, where the CEO of the company when it posted record losses and had to be bailed out, Martin Sullivan, was paid $47 million after he was fired? He also got an office and an assistant until the end of this year. That’s not the real world.

But in the real world, many people like you and me will lose their jobs and their pensions and their homes. Probably not me personally, at least not right away. But a lot of people I work with everyday.

A little while ago, we fired one of the bigshots where I work. This dude really had it coming. He made one big mistake each and every month he was with us, and each of those mistakes was at least as disastrous that the mistakes I make daily. He had been making like half a mil a year. After he got fired, I talked to him and he told me that his severance package sucked and he was on the verge of losing his house. He told a lot of people that. And I was discussing this with one of the pink-haired, chronically pierced women with whom I work and this is what she said.

Maybe you find it hard to feel sorry for Lehman Brothers or AIG or Citigroup. Maybe you think it’s wrong to bail those companies out. But let’s look at how a world financial collapse occurs. Credit-default swaps are a wonderful thing. Let’s say you have a business and you need to expand, but your credit is not so great. You had a rough year last year but, this year, your biggest competitor went out of business so business is booming. Still, your credit sucks and banks aren’t sure they want to lend you money. The answer is a credit-default swap: credit insurance. The bank will lend you money but buy a credit-default swap. You’ll pay a little more for the credit because the bank needs to pay for the swap. But your business can expand now, keeping the economy healthy and creating jobs. Everyone is happy and buying coke and whores. Lube flows like tap water.

Then the economy goes sour. It’s actually been going south for much of President Bush’s tenure in office, but he and Congress don’t do shit about it. Finally, the real estate market tanks and businesses start to default on their loans. Now, all those credit-default swaps are coming due. Just like any insurance business, the credit-default swap business plays the law of averages. But when an economic bubble just bursts as happened in real estate, a lot of swaps are all of a sudden due at the same time. This is what pushes Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy. The government does nothing to help Lehman and, in fact, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has stated that a bailout of Lehman was never an option. But when Lehman files for bankruptcy, the global credit markets freeze. That’s because, all of a sudden, a lot of debt is uninsured and creditors are afraid to extend themselves any further. When the credit markets choke, businesses can’t buy inventory or finish projects and acquisitions to which they are already committed, leading to more defaults. This is what pushes AIG to the verge of bankruptcy. Then, because it is one of the few ways of raising capital left, variable-rate bond interest shoots through the roof, pushing more businesses into insolvency. There was a domino effect. There is already lots of evidence that a different sort of global domino effect will occur if we don’t bail out the US automakers. And we haven’t even talked about how many whores are now walking the streets with nothing to do.

Maybe you still don’t feel bad. Maybe you still think that AIG and other businesses should have been better prepared. AIG should have guessed years before that, if Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, the credit market would implode like a house of cards and AIG would be in serious trouble. Well, maybe. But AIG had 116,000 employees when the grips rolled out an industrial-strength fan and started throwing shit at it. The group that caused all of this trouble — the group responsible for AIG’s entire credit derivatives business and all of AIG’s heartache — always had fewer than 400 people. It’s true that the average salary of everyone in that tiny unit was more than a million bucks. So maybe you think that 116,000 people should lose their jobs and their health care and their pensions and not be able to buy crayons for their kids because 400 millionaires fucked up. If so, you will love the global depression that will occur if we don’t bail out these companies. There’s no guarantee that it’s not coming anyway. And those millionaires will still be able to buy all the porn and cake they want.

I could tell exactly the same story about Citibank. One tiny unit lost all of Citibank’s money. Pivotal in this collapse of Citibank was Robert E. Rubin. Rubin had been Treasury Secretary under Clinton, when he oversaw the removal of depression-era regulations that prevented banks from entering certain risky businesses. After Clinton, he went to Citibank and blessed their riskiest investments. Now, he’s on President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team as an economic advisor. So, he still has a job. Everyone is not so lucky. All of Citibank’s roughly 370,000 employees reaped the rewards of a boom in the financial markets, including the credit market with all its complicated derivatives. But in 2008, Citibank has shed about 70,000 of those 370,000 jobs. Most of those 70,000 people did not know what a credit-default swap or a CDO was before reading this post today. And now they can’t buy their kids construction paper or pencils. If they weren’t living in the real world, they are now. But if those people weren’t living in the real world, none of us were.

And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s not fair to blame place all the blame on the backs of a few thousand millionaires for a delusion we all shared. We all snorted lots and lots of coke and fucked two different whores everyday and bought only the fanciest cake to go with the nastiest porn.  Or something like that, right?

Oh, that reminds me: I never told you about all that I was thankful for this Thanksgiving. I have plenty for which to be thankful. The irony of this entire post is that, on January 20, 2009, this country will inaugurate a president I hope will do something about this stinking mess, in spite of Robert Rubin’s presence on the transition team. That’s about a month away, too.

So, even though the inauguration will happen too late to save a lot of people from a shitstorm of grief, one of the many things I am thankful for is that we do not have this to look forward to for the next eight years.

By the way, I wasn’t kidding about waking up and wondering where the fuck I am. After two weeks of traveling, I woke up this morning and wasn’t sure where in the world my sorry ass had landed. My bedroom was cold and foreign. It was raining outside so it was mostly dark, but some mucky light still pulsed into the room through cracks in the blinds. I could tell you stories about the last two weeks, about women with thigh-highs the color of coffee ice cream and others with eyelids that sparkled like bubblegum. About meetings and meetings and meatings. But I won’t. I will tell you that, after a few minutes of laying there, I realized that a passing siren had awakened me but I still didn’t know where I was or who I was. And I imagine now that this feeling is a lot like what all of you experience when you read a blog by some anonymous dude you know nothing about besides the fact that he likes cake and porn an awful lot and is sadly without as many imaginary friends as he had once imagined he had.

I wish I could help you out here, but I can’t save you. Sorry.

I am still working on my epic project for this blog. It truly is epic but it’s also not even half done. In part, that’s because I had an epiphany about it and restarted the whole thing from scratch after Thanksgiving. It’s also in part because I have just not had much time to work on the bajillion images. But hang tight. It’s coming.

In closing, I have spent a lot of time in airplanes lately, and I would like to address the final section of this blog to a special woman.

To the woman in seat 4D of Virgin Atlantic flight VS007 on December 2nd: I was the dude seated in 3A. We made eye contact a couple of times before takeoff and you smiled shyly. Many passengers were angry with you after you had some kind of crazy, very dramatic seizure right after we got into the air because we then had to turn around. We were delayed for hours after that. Others felt sorry for you. I felt neither anger nor pity. In fact, I found the whole thing very sexy. If you flop around and bite and snort and drool and tremble like that every time you have a seizure, I think we could have a really good time together. And I couldn’t help but notice that your skirt was soaking wet afterward. Because you were kind of out of it, I did not get your number. Please contact me if you read this.

To the flight crew on that same Virgin Atlantic flight: I am not really a doctor.

That’s all I have to say about all of that.

I will try to post every week or so, but I won’t make promises I can’t keep. Not because I’m opposed to that or anything. I just don’t feel like it right now.

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