I confess, mostly I just wanted to write a post with that title.

See, George Clinton once said something like "Prune juice cleans the shit out of your ass; funk clears it out of your head."

Today, I dragged my lazy ass to the gym for a little stationary biking. I thought of a million-kazillion reasons why I shouldn't go - other 'important' stuff I should do, didn't want to wrack myself with fatigue so early in the week, the sun was in my eyes, like that - but I still went.

And I biked.

And I finished.

And I felt weirdly good. All of the stupid little things I'd been kicking myself over in the morning had floated away like dandelion seeds on the wind.

And I marvelled at how - after I had put so much time and energy into dreading it - the exercise took so little effort and has made my outlook so much rosier.

So I guess what I'm saying is that while prune juice might get the shit out of my ass, exercise is getting it out of my head - like funk.

Because everyone says I'm a bad mother-

(shut your mouth!)

I'm just talking about myself.

(we can dig it!)

I just took The Bush-McCain Challenge -- an online quiz to see if you can tell the difference between George W. Bush and John McCain. Check it out, and see if you can do any better than I did!

The You've Got Nothing To Hide Act of 2008 (from noted hate site DailyKos)

Here is my proposal. We, the public, should be allowed to spy on you, and all those you come in contact with, with similar promisees of amnesty.

For each member of Congress, I propose we set up a collective internet site. This site will allow interested members of the public to, in realtime, monitor your every activity to assure ourselves that none of you are committing illegal or terrorist-enabling acts at any given moment of the day.

Me and my brother were talking to each other
'Bout what makes a man a man
Was it brain or brawn, or the month you were born
We just couldn't understand

"Tattoo", © Pete Townshend - The Who

Does drinking coffee make you a grown up?

If that's true, I realized this morning, I'm wizened well beyond my calendar-years. I remember filling an old tin-lunchbox thermos with a coffee-milk-sugar mixture (hey, give me a break - I was still a youngster!) and stowing it in my locker and gulping from it at class breaks. This served the dual purpose of giving me a necessary pickup during the stultifying hours of education-by-rote and pissing off the teachers serving as hall monitors who would see me tipping the thermos up and immediately home in on me, exulting that they had caught this nerdish trouble maker sneaking quick nips of hooch on school grounds.

When I arrived at college, I arrived with a small coffee pot and a bean grinder (gifts) which I put immediately to a herculean production output. Since then, almost every place I've ever lived in has had a well-used coffee-maker (the exceptions were the two summers I lived in cheap boarding houses - there may have been shared coffee-makers in the kitchen, but I was loathe to interact in any way with my housemates - I instead relied on the office coffee-makers of countless temporary jobs).

I must say, for my years of caffeine addiction, I think I've suffered few or no health problems as a result, though there was a spell when I was drinking three or four 20 ounce trucker's mugs a day thatI noticed odd, sporadic flutters in my chest. On doctor's advice I cut back a little. If anything, I maintain that my coffee habit ironically kept me from smoking because I never felt competent enough to maintain three vices simultaneously (beer being the other).

So here's to you, coffee - I'm a man now, thanks to you!

Welcome to my life, tattoo
I'm a man now, thanks to you
I expect I'll regret you
But the skin graft man won't get you
You'l be there when I die
Tattoo

"Tattoo", © Pete Townshend - The Who