That's right, ladies and gentlemen, for a limited time YOU TOO can impress your friends and confound your enemies with the Astonished Head Protestor Kit! Comes with unisex alternative-style clothing, a selection of clever signage (you supply your own stick), and an assortment of hip protest accessories including anti-establishment buttons, temporary tattoos, and "radical" facial hair (facial hair not shown). Only $29.95!
Or, if you want, you can just paint your entire body blue like a Pict and run naked down the National Mall screaming Buuush! Oiiiilll! Hitler!!! Lies!!! Just as effective at a tenth of the cost.
Then again, the fruitbats in my ever-more-thinly-haired belfry are particularly restive today, which leads to peculiar warbling and the strange sense that I really ought to be, you know, doing something, but I can't, having shackled myself to certain medications which may or may not be causing an already-tweaked adrenaline and cortisol matrix to redouble its efforts and send me shouting out onto what passes for the lawn.
Waiter! There is a mustache, in my soup!
Eh. I've had worse. But not many. This is right up there with the Naked Poet Under A Blanket On The Couch During A Party act I pulled when I was 23, without the party, the blanket, or the nakedness. Such acts really do require an audience, you know. Not much point in being naked and afflicted all by your lonesome.
Now: naked and afflicted on the lawn, that's something else. That happened a couple of weekends ago; fortunately, it was dark out and no one noticed. Or unfortunately, depending on your mindset.
So I shall wobble not particularly bravely forth, ever curious as to the precise depths I will plumb during this period of broken-headedness, lo! I shall wait with eager anticipation and twitching fingers, and a crate of benzodiazepenes, which are, I have found, extremely handy to have around in times such as these.
I mean, if it's a choice between quivering on the couch under a blanket and tearing up the street in my boxers shooting out streetlights, I think the couch is a much better option. Very rarely do the police get involved when you're just sitting on the couch.
Unless, of course, you've done something wicked earlier in the day and are recuperating on the couch, and they've tracked you down, but I've found that's really more about the prior wickedness than the couch-sitting per se.
