I am totally aware that my opinion is worth about as much as a basket of Enron stock circa 2002 but I am going to offer it up anyways. So shut the fuck up and read what I have to say!! Or don?t?

I spend much of my waking hours sitting on a weathered lazy-boy in a darkened room with a loaded shotgun in one hand and a bottle of Jack in the other. I strive to find silence in the darkness but all I hear is the noise of a thousand screaming voices inaudible to everyone but me. I guzzle Jack in the hopes of drowning them. The reason for the shotgun? I think it?s because I heard somewhere, maybe in college, that it is best to a gun around when you are drinking just in case things get out of control. Seemed like sound advice then and it stands to reason that it is solid advice now. But lest I digress.

So as I sit there, in the dark, drunk and bordering on madness, I will occasionally come up with a cogent thought that I can grab on to for stability. Usually it?s something basic like, ?why does America produce more cheese than any other nation on Earth. Yet cheese mongers worldwide sneer at American cheese roundly. If we make so much fucking cheese why couldn?t we have made the one that we put our nation?s name on good??
However, I think it was last Friday night when I had just gotten home from work. Yeah, I am a seasonal worker if you didn?t know that already. And from Turkey day to Xmas, I am a busy bee outside of my nest. You see I live in Chicago. Chicago has 142 Walgreen?s, each one with a Salvation Army kettle sitting right next to the front door collecting donations for the less fortunate ??.like myself. What I do is really pretty simple and I think quite ingenious.

As I just said, I am what you would refer to as ?Less Fortunate.? I realized this early in life when I was forced to wear a helmet all the time because my skull was deemed soft and my reflexes slow. Then I got caught eating paste in kindergarten (the stuff tastes so damn good). A year later, I spent three weeks in the hospital with a ruptured intestine after I mistakenly put super glue on my rashed out butthole instead of the A&D Ointment I intended and then going the next week without a single bowel movement. It wasn?t until I started looking like Starvin Marvin from South Park that my guardian at the time took notice and got me to spill the beans. Well all I remember about the hospital was the endless stream of young medical students that would be paraded in front of my bed and every last one of them would look at me while sadly shaking their heads in a shocked disbelief as they learned of my ordeal. A look that screamed ?LESS FORTUNATE!!???.

I could go on and on about how I came to be classified as less fortunate instead of let?s say a, convicted felon but that is a dog for another day. The bottom line is those kettles are there to collect money for the ?less fortunate? and since I am less fortunate then ostensibly those kettles are collecting money for me, keep following because we are almost there in the Polish Logic Olympics, and thus those are my kettles. So instead of waiting for all of the crap involved with the redistribution of this kettle money I decided to eliminate that time consuming process by just taking the kettles myself. Sometimes those entrusted with the kettle and its proceeds resist my attempt to elevate my sad socioeconomic status. With a little help from my 12-inch buck knife, those initially eager to resist my overtures usually see it my way in short order. However, while I am less fortunate that doesn?t mean I cannot become greedy so while I could justifiably take as many kettles as I want each day I make sure that I never take home more than two. Doing so also seems to quiet the voices for a bit but only just a bit.

Back to last Friday night? I had just gotten home from another successful evening of kettle commandeering and had just taken my first big swig of stiff and soothing whiskey when the voices in my head started roaring with the ferocity of fifty jet engines. For a second I thought my head was about to explode. I tightened my grip on the shotgun and was seconds away from ending it all and blowing my head off when?. God damn it. I forgot.