Big Mike: It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad....

The Loved One was reclining on the living room sofa, gazing out the window at the lush Kentucky greenery as we chatted. One cat was nestled in the crook of her arm, another in the crook of her leg. She should have been as relaxed as the government regulations that have led to our current economic mess.

We were, in fact, talking about the economy, in addition to the wars, the environment and the overall state of the union - all of which, we agree, had been criminally mismanaged by George W. Bush and his consiglieres.

I'm glad we agree on such basic issues. I can't imagine sharing bathroom space, dinner dishes and the living room sofa with someone whose political views are as dissimilar as, say, those of Mary Matalin and James Carville. I recall when this horrifying two-headed gargoyle first made news, back in the early 90s. They were celebrated for their purported all-consuming love that overcame any differences they might have had regarding such trivialities as capital punishment, abortion, lending a hand to those in need and killing brown people for the sake of inexpensive gasoline. In fact, there were even a movie and a TV program based on their laugh-a-minute media personae.

So, despite the two of us singing to each other's choir, The Loved One seemed tense, almost bubbling over with ire.

"Didja hear that report on NPR this week?" she asked.

"No, which?"

"The one about the American woman in Iraq."

"Tell me all."

The Loved One raised herself up on her elbows. "It makes me so mad, I could..., I could...," she fumed. She paused for a moment to find the right words.

"Go on," I said.

"Well, she worked for Halliburton."

"Yeah, Dick Cheney's old outfit."

"The things I could do to Dick Cheney...," she spluttered.

"Uh huh."

"She went outside the barracks for a drink with four other Halliburton people, all men. One of them handed her a beer. She took a few sips and she was unconscious, just like that."

"They roofied her?"

"Yeah. Then they raped her, front and back. They manhandled her breasts so badly that they're deformed now. She woke up and one of the guys was still there, sleeping. She tried to get them prosecuted but guess what - private contractors in Iraq can't be prosecuted for crimes they commit there.

"It makes me so mad! She's there trying to protect the people of Iraq but who protects her - from her own people?"

"My god."

"Here's what I want to do," The Loved One said through narrowed eyes. "I'd like to sneak into Dick Cheney's house in disguise and torture him. You know how he doesn't think torture is all that bad, right? Only I'd do to him what those guys did to that woman and I'd make sure he was awake for it all. I'd want him to feel it all!"

Normally, The Loved One is the picture of compassion and sensitivity (except when we argue; but, I admit, I can enrage even a lamb at times.) For this brief moment, though, she was the emotional sibling of my next door neighbor Captain Billy, who regularly rages about Mexicans, Democrats, Arabs and other miscreants who, in his view, ought to be slaughtered.

The whole world seems to be mad. Kim Jong Il is waving his primitive little nukes around like a four-year-old displaying his penis. The Taliban is blowing up innocents in Pakistan. The Jews and the Palestinians, natch, are still at it. al Qaeda's probably cooking up some kind of perverse birthday cake for us at this very minute. And pasty, jowly, bilious white men like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly are shrieking at us every day on radio and TV, whipping the anencephalic dopes of this nation (of whom there are a scary many) into action.

You think the recent killings at a Marine recruitment center, a doctor's church in Omaha and the National Holocaust Museum are flukes? I'm afraid they're trumpet blasts for opposing cavalries. I'm afraid, period. When I say the whole world seems to be mad, I mean both angry and insane.

The world occasionally has a nervous breakdown. We may be headed for the padded room right now. And when my normally placid mate suddenly has a taste for blood, I wonder if the world has come unhinged already.

Big Mike: I Rebel Against Guy Nation

I've never been terribly comfortable being a guy. It's not that I've ever thought about changing my sex. I'd be equally - if not, more - uncomfortable being a woman, what with how they've been treated by the guys of this world. So don't worry, this isn't a confessional about my hitherto undisclosed desire to become the next RuPaul (RuBig Mike?)

It's just that guys are jerks. And the more guys who gather in a room, the more the jerk factor shoots upward. In fact, with the addition of each single guy, the jerkiness factor increases exponentially.

Want proof? Go to a bachelor party. Walk into a cop bar. Peek into a men's locker room. Hell, the jerkiest religions in the world are those that relegate woman to the status of quadrupeds. Ever hear of a Catholic priest named Mary (outside of Halsted Street, that is)? Orthodox Jews say a prayer every morning thanking god that they weren't born women. And, of course, in the strict Islamic world, women would be taking a giant step up to achieve the status of sheep.

Guy-ness even pervades art. I usually keep my utter distaste for hip-hop and rap music quiet. To be honest, I don't want to open myself up to the charge that I'm a bitter old prick who hates anything the kids are listening to nowadays. While it's true I am a bitter old prick, I love a lot of new music. The Decemberists. Feist. My Morning Jacket. Radiohead. The list goes on. But I loathe hip-hop and rap because it's so guy. Hip-hop guys are always getting laid, drinking expensive Champagne, wearing precious metals, rolling in dough and calling every female on the planet up to and including flowering plants that contain the ovule-bearing structure, the pistil, bitches. Hip-hop and rap are way too guy.

I found myself surrounded by guys at Dick's Pizza the other night. One of those things. For some unknown reason, there wasn't a single woman in the house. There were the two bartenders, Hank and Rock-star Zach. There were Old Gus, Dinesh, All-American Allen, a couple of strangers and your faithful reporter. It was a sausage fest.

Old Gus is the epitome of senior guy-ness. He drives an aircraft carrier-sized Buick. He carries a came with an ornate gold knob. He was married a long, long time ago but he left his wife after a month and has remained a happily dispeptic bachelor ever since.

Dinesh comes from India. Once I asked him how the average Indian views Pakistanis. Normally a reserved man, Dinesh became an orator. He launched into a half-hour examination of the many socio-political, cultural and religious issues that divide the two nations. But as he went on, his anger mounted. He finally concluded with the statement, "D'ey are no goot! D'ey are pieces of sheet!" He couldn't resist, in other words, being a guy.

All-American Allen, whom I've introduced previously in this space, is a staunch Republican. You know, the party of white guys.

Bartenders Hank and Rock-star Zach are reasonably decent fellows although Zach plays lead guitar for a local band that gets a lot of radio airplay around these parts. Ergo, guy.

On the evening in question, the jowly, ever-outraged face of Lou Dobbs loomed above us on the three giant flat screens over the bar. Lou Dobbs is a king among guys. As if there weren't enough to send Dobbs's blood pressure skyrocketing, he'd found a video of an unfortunate incident on some big city bus. As captured on the bus's security cameras, a young man walked on, paid his fare, took two steps toward the handicapped seats and suddenly, without provocation, began whacking the shit out of some poor blind woman. Oh, the steam was pouring out of Dobbs's ears.

The gang of guys at Dick's was transfixed. We watched as several fellow riders tackled the assailant and threw him off the bus. Dobbs called them heroes. But my barmates weren't in a mood to laud heroes.

"They shoulda held him and called the cops," Rock-star Zach announced. "I hope they put him in jail and show that video to all the other guys in jail every morning. Then he'd get what's coming to him!"

"They shoulda beat him bloody!" All-American Allen proclaimed.

"I know what I would have done to him," Old Gus said in a loud voice, "I would have stuck my cane up his ass right then and there!"

"D'at guy ees a piece of sheet," Dinesh said in a louder voice. "D'ey should shoot him in d'e forehead!"

There followed a three-minute orgy of can-you-top-this with the two strangers joining in. I listened patiently until the orgy died down a bit, then spoke.

"Has it occurred to anyone that maybe, just maybe, the guy's mentally ill?"

The bar became silent. Either the guys were wowed by my intellect and sense of compassion or they'd exhausted all their rage. Aw, I'll stop kidding myself. They'd spewed all the bile they could muster. They were spent.

Hank sidled near me just as a different video of some thugs pummeling an old man in a playground flashed on the screens. "What's wrong with people?" Hank asked.

I pondered for a moment. "People?" I responded. "Or guys?"

Big Mike: My Head Hurts

One of the most emotionally powerful scenes I've seen in a movie features Philip Seymour Hoffman and Mark Wahlberg in "Boogie Nights." Hoffman plays the pudgy, nerdy, effeminate Scotty J. and Wahlberg is Dirk Diggler, possessor of a titanic asset most cherished in the porn industry.

The two are at an LA party. Scotty is emboldened by alcohol to express his secret feelings for Dirk. Outside the party, Scotty tries to kiss Dirk and is rebuffed. The camera lingers on Scotty for the next few minutes as he deals with his humiliation. He pounds the steering wheel of his car. He calls himself names. He sobs. Finally, he yells out, "Why am I so stupid?"

How many times have you wanted to yell out the same line? Not many of us have suffered unrequited love for a human tripod, as Scotty did, but time and again all of us have wanted to hit ourselves over the head with a skillet because we've done something spectacularly idiotic.

That was your humble blogger Tuesday night. See, I normally have a rule: don't get into political arguments in bars. Arguing with guys who are half in the bag is a fool's endeavor. And political discourse today has been transformed by TV and talk radio into a professional wrestling match where your guy is the upholder of all that is righteous and good while the opponent is a comic book character bent on the destruction of America. Yelling and personal attacks are de rigueur.

It was Trivia night and Team Gorlock was cleaning up. Here's one I'll bet you didn't know - which country is the world's largest producer of bananas? (The answer is at the end of this post.) Skip the Trombonist and I got that one wrong but not too much else.

We were feeling pretty good about life when in walked Captain Billy, fueled by his normal rage and, perhaps, a libation or four. The Captain generally is angry about illegal Mexican immigration, Indians and Pakistanis who are swiping IT jobs from good Americans, and, in his own inimitable words, "all those fuckin' towelheaded bastards."

His dudgeon lies just beneath the surface at all times. Mention the words poblano peppers to him and he'll launch into a screed about how the best way to stem the tide of illegal immigration is simply to pick off Mexicans one by one with high-powered rifles as they scuttle across the deserts of the Southwest.

Captain Billy's heroes are few but he's in thrall to the bilious Lou Dobbs ("Now there's the man who should be president.") and the mad Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County ("He doesn't give a shit about all the scum.")

Now you might think I'd be smart enough to refrain from matching wits with such a thoughtful observer of the human condition. And usually I am. Captain Billy operates under the notion that I'm always eager to hear his opinions. He'll catch me early on a Monday morning, say, when I'm rolling the garbage can out to the roadside. As the cardinals and the mockingbirds begin to announce their presence, the Captain finds it necessary to dash out of his house and explain to me that the best way to get politicians to become responsive to their constituencies is to have dedicated patriots sneak up behind a few of them as they leave their homes in the morning "and put bullets in their heads. Then we'll see 'em start listening."

Naturally, I do not offer counterpoint because, well, what am I gonna say? Golly Captain Billy, maybe we oughta try the ballot box first?

So, the Captain lugged his steamer trunkful of grievances into Dick's Pizza midway through Trivia. He ranted loudly about the world in general, then the French, then his wife - his favorite bullseye. At one point, he slammed his palm down on the bar and declared Andy the Trivia-meister "an incompetent fuck."

By this time, Skip and I, in a futile effort to ward off the onslaught, were huddled together like early-20th Century immigrants on the deck of an ocean liner entering New York harbor.

It was between the second and third rounds of the game when I forgot my own rule. A clip of Barack Obama flashed on the big TV screens. He was explaining one or another plan to delay financial armageddon. The mere sight of the president's face drove the Captain to an even higher level of fury. "Look at 'im," he barked. "This no-good, messianic, narcissistic asshole. He's worse than all the rest of 'em!"

This was followed by a string of garden-variety pejoratives and expletives. Then, as if a light bulb had flashed on above his head, the Captain delivered his biggest indictment of Obama. "He's lettin' that crazy bitch from California run all over 'im!"

He meant, of course, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is telling Obama what to do. A man allowing a woman to tell him what to do is the foulest entry in Captain Billy's list of abominations.

Here's where I said, Screw it! I launched into a defense of Obama that for sheer volume and spirit matched the Captain's own retorts. Diners lowered their heads and began eating faster. Skip did his best to shush us. Eventually, the bartender came around and warned us to keep it down.

The Captain still had to get in the last word. "Your problem," he said to me, "is that you try to make everybody who disagrees with you look like they're crazy."

Give me credit. I caught the words, No, only you, before they could escape my lips. After a few minutes, the Captain offered me a ride home. I quickly came up with an excuse not to go with him. Later, Andy the Trivia-meister drove me home. Poor guy. Through the whole ride he had to put up with me hitting my forehead with a fist and repeating the words, "Why am I so stupid?"

Trivia answer: India! Who knew?