So when you become the president, and you start to settle in to the serial-killing portion of the job, apparently you develop a card fetish.

George II famously promoted "most wanted" playing cards depicting people in Iraq that he wanted to be dead. Because that man was a howling imbecile, the deck of the dead also included the trademarked Hoyle joker. Who spent the entirety of the remainder of the George II presidency in hiding, lest he be shot to pieces by some zealous Bushman.

Now there is this Barack Obama person, and his "baseball cards" of people under consideration for a cowardly backshooting drone-snuff. Except, by the time they make it onto the cards, they are no longer considered people.

Within the special operations community, the source said, the internal view of the people being hunted by the U.S. for possible death by drone strike is: "They have no rights. They have no dignity. They have no humanity to themselves. They're just a 'selector' to an analyst. You eventually get to a point in the target's life cycle that you are following them, you don't even refer to them by their actual name." This practice, he said, contributes to "dehumanizing the people before you've even encountered the moral question of 'is this a legitimate kill or not?'"

In this house is a full basement. In that basement I am erecting a Lab. In that Lab I am constructing a Time Machine. Into that Time Machine will go George II and the Kenyan. They will be returned to boyhood, where they can play with cards all they want, but without hurting anybody. George II can hang with his buddies, drinking whiskey, playing strip poker, till they all get into a nice little circle jerk. The Kenyan can sit in his Choom room, blowing gage, dreaming of some day playing second base for the Cubs.

The Time Machine will remain on standby awaiting the next occupant of the Oval Office. Anybody who gets in there who starts in with the serial-killing, into the Machine they will go. The Machine will remain a Necessity, until such time as somebody arrives in office who knows the only real card to play.

I am tempted to put The Hairball into the Machine, and send him back to before time and space. But I worry he would just find a way to brand the name "Trump" all over both.

If you want to be a serial killer, you do not have to be the president, or even a Hairball. You can instead be a Science Man.

This week we learned of the Science Man who found and photographed the only male Moustached Kingfisher seen in the wild in half a century. And then he killed it. Because, you know, that's what Science Men do. At least that's what we normal folk were told. Seems it is common procedure, out there in Science Man world, to Kill something, in order to Learn about it. Which is such horseshit. I learn from animals, minerals, and vegetables all the live-long day, and I manage to do it without killing and cutting them up.

Then there were the Danish zookeepers who killed a couple lions and cut them up in front of schoolchildren. Apparently the killers thought this was Normal. It was once also thought Normal to do that to human beings too—kill them and cut them up, cut them up sometimes while they were still alive, all live, and in public.

The zookeepers claimed they had to snuff the lions because no one would take them. Which is bullshit. Nobody asked me. They could have come and lived here. There's a feed store down the street and I could have loaded up the wheelbarrow there a couple times a day with big slabs of meat and haulted them home for the lions.

The lions could hang with the sparrows, who recently returned from Mexico. They summer there, and then cycle back here for the fall. Except there is not much of a fall here at present. It is like, oh, 350 degrees. The weather tubes are claiming it might rain this weekend, but those tubes are always Lying, and so I don't believe them.

The sparrows, for the lack of fall, they are Blaming me. But this does not prevent them from being welfare recipients demanding big scoops of birdseed every fifteen minutes. I think I am getting some Syndrome in my arm, from this ceaseless scooping. Also, while scooping, I experienced today an intense searing pain behind my left eyeball, which I figured was some sort of aneurysm. But then I ate creole rice and it went away.

At least I am not a hunchback, like these people with the phones. It seems that staring down at the phones all day and all of the night is turning everyone into Quasimodo. It is going to be a sad planet, when the streets the world over are filled with shuffling hunchbacks.

On the bright side, maybe, with all these Quasimodos, it will bring back bell-ringing. When I was a child the Catholic Church down the street rang actual bells, and that was a nice sound. Then these were replaced by taped bells. That is when I first turned to narcotics. My friend and former employer Bill Dalton similarly liked to listen to the Muslim calls to prayer in Indonesia. Then these too were replaced by tapes. There are some 17,000 islands in Indonesia, and Bill hopped on and off almost all of them, seeking relief from the taped prayers. Finally I think he settled on Irian Jaya, where they do not have prayers, at least as they are commonly known. Instead, they eat Rockefellers.

They announced this week the discovery of a dinosaur with a neck spanning half the length of its body; these animals "were basically a bunch of neck vertebrae with a head still attached to them." But they died out, from constantly staring down at their phones.

Here it is rural, so there are no streetlights at the town's main bus stop. But while I awaited a bus there early one morning this week, there were four ghostly little blue lights, shining from the phones up into the immobilized faces gazing down at them. These four young people were completely unaware of their actual physical suroundings. And I suddenly understood why the culture seems now to be so obsessed with zombies. Because that is what people are turning into. Zombie Quasimodos.

Then a couple more young people walked up, and these proved to possess the power of speech. They and the other four began animatedly discussing killing animals. At first I thought they were talking about some app or video game—"you can kill a cat or a squirrel, but not a dog"; "I've killed a dog"; "I've killed some birds." But then, when one youth said, "I killed some birds in Fort Bragg, a lot of them," I knew they were talking about actual, real lives they had taken—and clearly without remorse—while driving.

"What birds live in Fort Bragg?"

"All of them."

"How can you kill a bird? Don't they fly off?"

"If they're too stupid to get out of the way, they deserve to get hit."

Such people, they should always ride the bus.

On a bus trip later in the week I heard several young women strongly denounce men who consume a lot of soda, because it makes their semen taste really foul. This brought new meaning to me to the saga of Monica Lewinsky's blue dress. Bill Clinton, as is well known, loved to guzzle him some sodas. Obviously this gave him rasty semen, and so Lewinsky did not want to taste or swallow it. So instead she sprayed it on her dress. Said dress later delivered by Lewinsky's "friend" Linda Tripp to the Calvinist Clenis-hunters of Kenneth Starr. The rasty-tasting soda-semen staining the blue dress was the only actual physical evidence that Lewinsky and The Clenis had engaged carnally. So, if the man had simply laid off the soda, Lewinsky would have taken him into her mouth, there would have been no evidence, and we all would have been spared that utterly insane impeachment proceeding that caused extraterrestrials to set up a deep and wide "no go" area around all the planet.

I was tempted to widely publicize this Rasty Soda-Semen Revelation, in expectation that, once word was out, male consumption of soda would decline to 0, but I figured the soda Overlords would then come get me, and put me in a Dungeon, and it's simply not worth it.

They are running amok in India because people are eating beef. Some Indians don't believe people should eat meat; others, do. The former are howling for Laws to prevent the latter from munching cow-bits. But since the desired Laws are not yet manifest, a mob of nuts and nimrods recently ran down and killed a Muslim man who, rumor had it, had put meat in his mouth.

People who fly into a frenzy about what other people eat, they should all take a Sedative. Nobody has any more right to tell people how to eat than they do telling them how to fuck. You fuck how you want; I'll eat how I want. I personally would rather go to prison than eat mayonnaise—or even have it in my house. But this does not mean I should go to the supermarket and chase with a chainsaw anyone who strays into the mayonnaise aisle.

Of course, one is allowed to be a bit more tyrannical when running a restaurant (though even then it is not permissible to actually kill people). Once I was eating at The Columbus in San Francisco when a man a couple booths down foolishly requested "vegetarian lasagne." The proprietor, a volatile Italianwoman, immediately began screaming with rage. She pronounced "vegetarian lasagne" anathema, an insult to God, something only an idiota of an American could conceive or create. She ordered the man and his companions out of her restaurant, and continued to berate them in multiple languages until they were far down the street.

She was a real character, that woman. Sometimes she would override people's orders, deciding she knew better what they should eat. She would listen in on their conversations and then interject advice on how they should conduct their lives. Occasionally people would stand tentatively on the threshhold, asking if the place was open, and she would look them up and down, and then declare she was closed. She had clearly received some vibe that these were people she didn't want to feed. She'd present my young daughter with these special free desserts, and once I asked if I could also have one—which I would of course pay for—and then came the withering look. Which was at least better than the screaming.

The landlord was some clueless moneygrubber who kept raising the rent. We were all informed of this, loudly, as we ate. Finally he kept raising it until she was forced to close the place. The landlord was extremely stupid, because then the space had no "value" at all. He apparently believed it was worth more money than what he'd been getting, but in truth the only "value" in the space was that in it that woman served really good food. When the food was no longer there, neither was the value. It was just an empty hole. Today there's some other business in there, but it's still just an empty hole.

Some years on some shameless Bad People opened a restaurant a couple blocks away and named it after that woman. I ate there once, and then walked down to the police station to file Charges. It has been closed for many years now, but the owners are still awaiting trial in The Hague.

I had never heard of this Lamar Odom person until he needed to go to a brothel and there become unconscious. They wanted to put him on a helicopter, but he was too tall, so instead they bounced him to the hospital overland. It was news to me that the nation's helicopters are unequipped to fly hither and yon long tall basketball players. Couldn't they have just dangled him in some sort of sling? Apparently not. Looked dire there for a while, until after a couple days he regained consciousness, and opened his eyes. But then he saw some Kardashians, and immediately he closed them again.

I only recently became aware of Kardashians. They kept showing up on google news unfiltered. They didn't ever seem to be doing anything, but there they were. I asked around, and learned that the original Kardashian had been an OJ Simpson lawyer. Then a female Kardashian was in a sex tape. But it still made no sense to me. For there were lots of OJ Simpson lawyers, and lots of people have been on sex tapes, but none of those people are in google news every damn day.

Once I became aware of the Kardashians, I started discovering that they are, in some way, connected to, well, just about everything. That Jenner person, for instance, back when he was a man, he was married to a Kardashian. This Odom OD guy, he was enmucked with a Kardashian. Now, they are giving me The Fear. The Kardashians. So every night, before I go to sleep, I first check the closets, and under the beds, to make sure no Kardashians have gotten in. I do not want them here.

I am also alarmed to discover there is an asteroid known as 12818 Tomhanks. Tom Hanks is almost as bad as a Kardashian. He cannot act, but he is everywhere. I just know that asteroid is going to strike the earth. And cover it in mayonnaise.