Organic Guilt

From the home office in Tallulah, Georgia, I present the Top Ten Reasons I haven't blogged in a month:

1. I was attempting to honor the Hollywood writers' strike.

2. I forgot my log in ID and password.

3. After almost a year posting, I'm fresh out of original ideas.

4. I was caught up in the passion of Hillary's ideas and I've been on the campaign trail for a month.

5. Lost the will to write after witnessing another Red Sox World Series victory.

6. The guy I'm plagiarizing my stuff from hasn't posted in a while.

7. Recovering from breast-reduction surgery.

8. Mistakenly believed the story that the Internet was passe and everyone went back to communicating face-to-face.

9. Trying to catch up on my Oprah's Book Club list.

10. I have been traveling almost constantly for the past month and this is the first time I have found time to post since my journeys began. My apologies to the four people who read this blog.



But, since I'm here, I might as well write.



Hi. How have you been? I've been well, thank you - a bit haggard after my traveling schedule, but no worse for the wear. I don't really mind travel too much - I mean, being away from my wife and kids sucks, and the work piles up on my desk, but the actual travel never really bugged me...until now. And that is because the Green Guilt Police are making it so less fun to travel. And I know, it is very un-PC to say anything against the environmental movement these days, what with Al Gore quickly becoming more influential than the Pope, but the Green Guilt Police are starting to annoy me. And don't get me wrong, I am not opposed to doing my share to help save the planet from whatever ails her - after all, I now only bathe in rainwater I collect from my gutters - sure there is all manner of sticks, mud, dirt, dead flies, and disease-carrying muck, but I am all about doing my part. But what gets me is the all-consuming, I'm-going-to-influence-every-second-of-your-life theme to this latest environmental movement that has me annoyed.

For example, I was in the San Francisco airport the other day and I was washing my hands in the men's room, and when I went to get a paper towel, the towel dispenser had the following sign on it: "Take only as many paper towels as you need - do your part to help the environment." And I read this and I was thinking a couple of things: first, what if I have really big hands, or I got them extra wet and sudsy? Are people monitoring paper towel usage to gauge the effectiveness of the sign? But mostly, I was thinking, "Damn it!!!! How did they figure us out??? What kind of geniuses are these environmentalists??? For years, I have been recruiting a counter-environmental movement with only one purpose: to slowly kill the planet by using two to three (depending on size and thickness) extra paper towels that we didn't really need. It was the perfect plan - for years I had painstakingly convinced 1/2 to 3/4 of the six billion people on the planet (hard numbers are difficult to come by, what with the birth and death rates being so varied) that the earth was becoming uninhabitable, and that paradise awaited us beyond the grave. Well, that took a lot of convincing, I don't mind telling you - the language barrier alone was positively maddening at times. Just getting the first billion took like six months. And then there were the doubting Thomases of the bunch who kept asking me if I was committed to the movement, that they had seen me using the automatic hand-dry thing on several occasions (you know, to try to throw the environmentalists off my trail), and did I really have what it took to get this done. And trying to recruit three billion people to join my fiendish plot without word leaking out? Well, let's just say that I spent more than a few nervous nights scouring the Internet for word. And then there was the training - how to surreptitiously take two to three extra paper towels (depending on ...well, you know) without being scene; when to abort a mission; how to lose a suspected tail; what to do in upscale restaurants and hotels that had linen towels (three words: toilet paper rolls). But, in the end, it was all worth it. I had successfully recruited the (approximate) number needed to destroy the world using only extra (two to three, depending on size and thickness) paper towels. Our training was impeccable. Our mission clear. In only a matter of hundreds of thousands of years (well, possibly millions, but hey, I'm an optimist) we would use two to three (again, depending on size and thickness) extra paper towels each time we used a public rest room, and I WOULD DESTROY THE WORLD, HA HA HA HA (fiendish laughter)!!!! But, damn those environmentalists, damn them to hell. How could they have learned of my plan? How could they know? Well, they may have won the battle, but we'll win the war! (in fact - and don't tell anyone you've read this - what the environmentalists don't know is that I have a back-up plan to destroy the world in only several million years: taking an extra Kleenex and throwing it away without using it - they'll never suspect it - HA, HA, HA!!!!!! Take that Al Gore!!!