Crazy, Man...

Hello Readers! I've been on sick leave from GNN for longer than I've worked here. Goomba has ordered me back to my desk under threat of revoking my discount at his Railroad Salvage Store in Woonsocket. Every man has a price, so I'm back.

Nothing has changed here. Teresa and Opie are still tugging on the hems of their miniskirts and talking about boys. LL is adjusting his sights, Odie is sharpening something, Jihad Gene's pants are neatly folded on his desk and DC is buried in seed catalogues.

Goomba is still air-drumming to "Itchycoo Park" ("the best dang song ever written"), which he plays over and over on his cassette player. Everyone else is upstairs on the first floor drinking up Goomba's old supplies of free Postum.

I have a neurological disease, which is why I've been absent. It's made some things impossible and a lot of things difficult. QWERTY typing is hard, and, sometimes, so are movement and cognition. There's not much movement and cognition at GNN, so my stock has actually risen here, but every silver lining has a touch of gray (Jerry Garcia). My touch of gray is medications, which swizzle the subjective and the objective together into a muddy, depersonalized unreality. Imagine that you're in a noisy, over-lit bar, at a Christmas party with people you detest. You've had three drinks in 20 minutes and you go somewhere in your head, even though your body is at the party enjoying itself. That's what it's like for me all the time.

Goomba has appointed me Arts & Entertainment reporter. I can't say who got bumped from this position, but he spent too many hours in a place called The Sun Art Theater in Texas. My first assignment is to do a feature on the video technology that makes a movie like "Shrek" possible, or enables Ellen Degeneres to do a commercial for Cover Girl beauty products. I'm not sure if they're the same technique, and Goomba seems more interested in understanding video embalming (Degeneres) than motion capture ("Shrek"), probably the first reason - as I suspect - is because he secretly thinks "Shrek" is real. I don't want to tell the big, loveable child the truth.

Second, what Goomba wants to know is whether the hair-spray-on-the-camera lens that made Doris Day look 18 when she was 96, is like what they did for Degeneres, and do for him in the big-screen bio-epic he plans for himself. I don't think this is what Nick wants. He showed me Ellen's commercial. They dialed the technology up to eleven for her face and the results make the scrubbed, featureless, red-lipped tart in Progressive commercials look as real as Helen Thomas, by comparison.

Ellen's face looks like a white pie shell with yellow fringe. Four other vague features must represent eyes and nose, and that rippling pink gash must be a lipsticked mouth. It tracks with Degeneres's praise for the powers of Cover Girl. And powerful stuff it is, that's the message if you want to look like Ellen Degeneres looking like The Man Who Fell to Earth.

At any rate, I don't know how they do it or why. Has someone really powerful decided that TV facsimiles of humans will prepare us for the eventual transition to full computer simulation of news, entertainment and advertising entities? Maybe one day Obama will be tele-cast looking like Little Richard; in that case you'll know who to blame. This might be a good time to go crazy after all. I'll get back to you.