Let me try and tell you what happened.

On the Monday before Christmas--which in Seattle turned out to be a citywide snow day--I woke up with an upset stomach. "I have an upset stomach," I told the wife, because I believe in directness in our marriage.

Later, I was haunted by awful chills followed by raging fevers, and I couldn't keep any solid food down. And because my wife also believes in clear communication, she told me, "You're pretty fucked up." I figured I had the flu, and responded appropriately: by drinking massive amounts of water and ginger ale, and eating Saltines to keep the good old electrolytes up.

I'm a fucking fool. By the following Sunday, I still wasn't eating anything approximating real food--lots of Saltines, though!--and was gulping water by the quartful. The wife wasn't having any of it by this point: "You're going to the hospital because you're still totally fucked up." But! The Saltines!

She threw me in the car--no real feat, since I had by now lost approximately half my body weight--and drove me to Swedish hospital, one of Seattle's finest Aryan-only hospitals. The check-in gal asked what the trouble was, which I answered with an extended hacking cough; she smoothly spun in her chair and grabbed a hospital mask off the wall. "Put that on," she said, as I attempted to cough out the phrase "persistent flu symptoms."

Three hours and ten cigarettes later, we were called in to be seen; nurses swiftly relieved me of a quantity of blood, took my vitals, tutted, fretted, patted my head, and only barely restrained themselves from installing one of those dog neck cones to prevent me from chewing on my own quaking limbs. Presently, a harried (but super nice) doctor presented herself; she was clutching a lengthy, alarming-looking printout and was staring at it with a rather close intensity.

"Well, Mr. Krubk, what I was waiting for was your white counts, but . . . " she stared again at my bloodwork printout. "Look, you're not going anywhere. Your electrolyte counts have made me shit my pants." Or something to that effect. "Your sodium, your potassium, your magnesium . . ." She shook her head. "These are so terrible, it's scary. I could probably shout you into a heart attack if I wanted to." Happily, she didn't seem to be in the mood to cause me heart failure. I got the feeling that she couldn't quite believe I had entered the building under my own power. She also explained to me that I was horrifically dehydrated, and oh, I also had pneumonia.

I mumbled something about Saltines and my dedicated attempts at rehydration, and she just gave me a smile of pity. Funny how my comprehensive cracker strategy had failed to adequately nourish my body, and funnier still was the memory of how often my attempts to rehydrate were immediately followed by bouts of gut-wringing diarrhea. Hard to figure out where everything went wrong, really.

They got me a bed up on the seventh floor and set me up for a night of "full observation." If you've never had the pleasure, "full observation" roughly means: You will get no more than fifteen minutes of sleep. This is because throughout the night, you will be visited by an incredible array of technicians, nurses, phlebotomists, doctors, and, in one memorable case, a nutritionist. ("I see you were admitted with very low potassium. Would you like some pamphlets explaining more about potassium?" Me: " . . . bananas . . . ")

I was outfitted with a set of leads on my chest for monitoring my magnesium-starved heart and was immediately hooked up to several different IV bags all of which groaned on the weird metal IV stand that you've seen in every episode of ER eve. I was also given a basketball-sized group of pills to choke down: apart from the fucking potassium, I don't remember what else they were forcing into me. Most of the IVs were of the passive sort--just draining into my bloodstream--but occasionally they souped up one of the mystery bags with a little motor thing that I assumed was some sort of push mechanism. I couldn't stop staring at the sheer number of bags of liquid being launched into me, and I couldn't help but do some basic physiological calculations: I was going to have to piss at some point, but here's the thing about the IV stand: it plugged into the wall. I pondered this while the nurse gave me one of what was to be three total heparin injections--right into the stomach!--to prevent my motionless self from developing blood clots through inactivity, or also from the hideous amounts of ESPN I found myself helplessly watching.

I dozed occasionally and fitfully, but it's hard to be restful when Don the vitals guy was lurking in the shadows, waiting to pressure-cuff me or when the phlebotomist gal ghosted by my bed, checking her list of luckless victimes, and looked at me and said meaningfully, "You'll be next."

I didn't have a private room, but I might as well have; I shared the room with a demented octogenarian who produced susurrations of the low-tide variety along with a varied medley of basso flatulence that somehow never stopped being sort of funny.

Once, at about two o'clock, yet another doctor came to visit me. He almost immediately irritated me by asking me to take off my glasses so he could perform some "follow my pen"-type diddlings. I wanted to ask him if he wanted to check out anything else completely irrelevant, such as my scalp or my nail beds. He casually asked me if anyone had told me when I could expect to go home, and I told him that the original doc had said that if all went well, I'd probably get sprung the next afternoon.

"Oh, I don't think so," he said nonchalantly. "You'll probably be here two or three days." I wondered if I had the strength to clout him into unconsciousness with my cell phone, but said nothing. I mentally vowed that no force on Earth would keep me in this place beyond the afternoon, provided it ever came, or that I was still sane when it rolled around.

After Dr. Downer split, I did another body-check. Yeah, I definitely had to piss. I eyed the IV apparatus again warily; there was no question that I was going to the bathroom. The question was, who was going to freak out if I dared move? The thing was still plugged into the wall, but I could be damned if I could figure out why: the IV push device had long since been removed; all of the IVs seemed to just be draining into the Hydra configuration sprouting out of my arm. Fuck this, I thought. The staff was, I'm sure, completely used to patients irrigating the bed, but I'd be fucked if I was going to lay in it or endure a professionally efficient sheet change. I reached over and unplugged the IV tree.

Nothing happened, at least that I could tell; no alarms went off, no nurses ran in to tackle me. Feeling positively subversive, I wheeled my ponderous IV thing over to the bathroom and exploded from two of my favorite orifices. It was a nearly religious experience, were I even remotely religious.

Later on, when I tried this operation again, I stood up and promptly and wetly crapped my pants (yes, I was still wearing pants). Trying to clean myself up in the bathroom, I realized that I just didn't care. I had my eyes on the prize: getting the fuck out of there in a few hours. Soiling myself, at this point, just represented one more lonely milestone to be passed. I would endure it stoically, if only to give the metaphorical finger to Dr. Asshole: Yes, I shit my pants, and I don't care. I'll take whatever I can dish out!

Finally, the morning came, and I forced myself to order some food: a couple scrambled eggs and some wheat toast. What I received was two planks of melamine (with butter) and an unidentifiable mass of matter that had almost certainly never been countenanced by, much less produced by a chicken. I ate it anyway, figuring it would give me brownie points with the unseen cloister of huddled doctors. "Hey, Mr. Kurnup powered through some death eggs! Maybe he won't die." "You owe me ten bucks."

Another doctor, this guy holding a strange plastic apparatus. "Heard you were having trouble breathing! Ever heard of Albuterol?" I allowed that I had. He was pretty excited about the Albuterol; he was pretty excited in general.

"Well, want to try some?" he asked, bouncing. It's a drug deal! I thought, And it's covered by insurance! "Hell yes," I said, though my shortness of breath had been somehow drowned with the incredible amounts of liquids and antibiotics that had been blasted into my system.

And as if to complete the whole drug deal aspect, Albuterol is an aerosolized drug delivery system, which meant that I sat there in bed, placidly smoking away on a hellish-looking futuristic plastic pipe. The doctor continued to be really into it. "How about a deep breath and a big cough?" he said when I was apparently done. I obliged, and produced a nice mouthful of phlegm, which was a good deal, since my morning nurse had been cajoling me for a really good productive cough so they could take my lung butter into the lab for further goo-testing. I hate to disappoint, and the next time she came in, I brandished the nightmarish jar: "Merry Christmas!"

"Good job!" she exclaimed, apparently genuinely excited to be the recipient of a sample jar half-full of mucus.

Finally--finally--yet another doctor came in, another woman. "I think you saw my colleague last night, Doctor Yeoh?" I couldn't have picked anyone out of a lineup from the last twenty-four hours, except for maybe Doctor Asshole, Doctor Albuterol and Terrifying Phlebotomist Woman. I could probably do an audio lineup to identify my roommate based on his mournful, tolling farts.

"At any rate, you look pretty stable now; we're going to load you down with some antibiotics and--" here she mentioned three other drugs that I couldn't care less about, since I WAS GOING HOME. She even threw in some Ativan, noting that I was displaying withdrawal symptoms from being boozeless and smokeless for thirty-six hours. I glanced up at the previously-laden IV tree and was stunned to see that the bags were all empty; they must have dumped a couple gallons of liquids into me over the course of 18 hours or so.

I missed two solid weeks of work, between the initial "flu" self-diagnosis and the subsequent hospitalization and recuperation from same. I have a followup doctor's appointment to, I guess, make sure I'm not still dying from pneumonia. Today was my first day back at work since the 19th. I had over 450 emails waiting for me to answer. It was completely exhausted coming back.

On the other hand, I went to the bathroom unencumbered by any trailing metal IV trees, and I managed not to shit my pants. So I count today as a success.

I make no promises for tomorrow. Frankly, as an excuse to go home, what can possibly beat "I just shit my pants"?
I think I might start showing up to work with a big IV tree. Nobody could possibly challenge me on this.

Here today on Izzle Pfaff--your go-to blog for when you just simply need to read something with an idiotic name--I'd like to introduce what I hope to turn into an annual feature: I would like to present to you 2008's stupidest song lyrics. THIS YEAR'S BIG WINNER: Indie band The Airborne Toxic Event, for their lyrics to the song "Sometime Around Midnight"!

Let's go right to the honey.

And it starts, sometime around midnight.
Or at least that's when you lose yourself
for a minute or two.
As you stand, under the bar lights.
And the band plays some song
about forgetting yourself for a while.
And the piano's this melancholy soundtrack to her smile.
And that white dress she's wearing
you haven't seen her for a while.

You just have to see her.
You just have to see her.
You just have to see her.
You just have to see her.
You just have to see her.
You know that she'll break you in two.

Okay, before we even start in on this terrible set of affairs: when a band's title references Don DeLillo's White Noise--surely one of the most respected novels of the past 25 years--one expects to see, lyrically, the A game. What we have here is surely what can only be described, at best, as a band's R game. This is like filming "The Stanley Kubrick Bozack Experiment" and then showing three hours of international test patterns.

And then there's the title: "Sometime Around Midnight." Do you suppose that the band was slyly referencing JJ Cale's "After Midnight"? Or Thelonius Monk's " 'Round Midnight"? Or do you suppose that the title simply reflects the hard sort of thinking that leads to razor-sharp observations such as "the band plays some song" or a white dress that the singer hasn't seen in "a while"? I have my own guesses.

Sonically, it's not a terrible song. It's not a good song, by any means, but it certainly is better than these terrible lyrics. It begins with an oddly downsweeping string figure, whose motif is repeated later in the song when it gets, like, dramatic, man, but by then the lead singer has adopted a particularly strangled style of vocalization that leads the amateur diagnostician to suspect a thoracic fistula, and anyway, by the time you get there, if you've paid attention to what the man has been saying, you're praying for death yourself. But the tune lurches along somewhat compulsively for all that; it wouldn't be out of place on a Coldplay album in a universe where Gwyneth Paltrow let Chris Martin chastely spank her every now and then.

But there's no getting past those lyrics.

The first stanza sets the tone: the singer is a chronic alcoholic! I guess. Which, if you're Brendan Behan is pretty awesome, but if you're, say, anyone else, is pretty terrible. As he stands "under the bar lights"--as opposed to on the bar lights, or inside them--he notices that a band is playing "some song" and then he sees his old girlfriend in a white dress he hasn't seen in "a while." Hey, enough with the excruciating details! We don't need to know everything!

The second verse is actually the least offensive of all of them, and that's saying something, considering it contains the phrase "She's holding her tonic like a cross." Over her shoulder? Nailed to her wrists? Clasped reverentially near her chest? I'm going to go with the last one, because I really enjoy breasts. At any rate, this sort of aimless grope at religious imagery is comically hopeless. It might be my favorite line of all.

Wait, just kidding! Honestly, this is my very favorite line: "And so there's a change, in your emotions." Has a person's mental state ever been so incisively, so pithily described? Why, just the other day, when the wife asked me, "How are you dealing with the death of several of your friends who all perished in a terrible bus accident?" I replied, "There's been a change in my emotions." She nodded her head and said, "I know exactly how you feel."

It's at this point during the song when the listener is forced to ask himself: "Why are the lyrics in the present second person?" And the listener replies to himself: "Because it adds to the horribleness."

This verse is where the frenzy starts. What could the phrase "memories come rushing
like feral waves to your mind" possibly mean? I used to body surf a lot when I was a kid; I never encountered a feral wave. I do like that the singer specifies that the memories rush to "your mind," as opposed to, say, your skin. Another good one is "like two perfect circles entwined." If circles entwine, don't they stop being circles? Listen, I'm not a topologist, though I'm trying. Maybe he wanted "toruses," but didn't want to confuse listeners or doughnut consumers.

Oh, the next verse is another bore, though it doesn't skimp on the inane cliches--"blood boiling," "you look like you've seen a ghost." Hmmm. Niggling point here, but wouldn't someone whose blood was at a boil look exactly the opposite of someone who had seen a ghost? Oh, never mind. This song is terrible. By now, the string figure is in full deployment, and the singer sounds as if he's being eaten feet-first by Nyarlathotep.

And then there's the end, where the singer wails insistently that "You just have to see her" five times, and then concludes that having done that, you know that she'll just "break you in two." Someday, I'm sure Donald Fagen or someone will write some knotty song about being broken into three, or broken into an algebraically complicated set of numbers to be debated by Marilyn vos Sant and the Mythbusters, but for now, you are, once again, forced to deal with being broken in two.

This is really embarrassing.

Listen, I know that there are any number of worthy candidates out there--I can practically hear people screaming "WAIT! What about 'My Humps?' " or whatever (I know, not really on the timeline) and whatnot, but really, what I'm after here is songs that genuinely pretend to be a step above and fail ridiculously. I'm confident in my choice. I'm rubbing my hands, 2009! Don't let me down. I know you won't.

You try to not violate your travel rules. Inevitably, you fail.

I don't know why this is hard. The wife and I learned this early on: Do not eat anywhere close to the town square, for you will be served fucking garbage. We violated this rule on our trip--again--and paid.

It was nearing ten o'clock in Avignon, and we had not eaten. Yes, we were in the fucking town square; yes, we were hungry; yes, we fell prey to the siren song of a godforsaken eatery on said square. We sidled up to it like you might approach a bored whore.

It should have been a sign all by itself. A waiter hollered to us--we apparently stink American, since he didn't even bother to try our awful French--"You better get a table! We close in fifteen minutes!" He really was very friendly, in a harried kind of way; I like to think of him as the Luc Besson of waiters. He didn't really care about the overall experience of his clients, but was mostly concerned with how efficiently he could cycle them in and out of his worldview. Which is why I suppose we were served the gastronomic equivalent of The Fifth Element.

I ordered a simple steak, which turned out to be, in Moe Scyszlak terms, the size of a toilet seat, generously marbled with copious amounts of gristle. The wife opted for a truly grievous pasta pomodoro thing, which she proceeded to salt the everloving bearfuck out of. I must have stared a little bit at her, since she eventually hissed, "It doesn't taste like anything." I dipped my head ruefully and continued sawing away at my sinewy colossus of pure meat; an unappetizing gruel of over-sauteed vegetables stared at me accusingly and greyly from the side of my plate. I ignored their vegetized grumping and concentrated on chewing my astounding gristle-slab while the wife continued to strafe her dismal dish of bloodied pasta with killing fusillades of sodium.

It's simple. Don't eat on the public squares. This is a lesson that we should have learned--we have learned--over many years of shared travel. We still fuck this up.

On our first night in Avignon, we got completely and utterly lost. This is easy to do in Avignon, as the city is laid out in a completely chaotic fashion, without regard to sense, direction, logic or geometry. Walking the streets of Avignon is a lot like watching I Heart Huckabees: a desperate, sweaty plunge into madness where around any corner you might find Dustin Hoffmanesque nebbishes yelling gibberish at cobblestones.

This sophisticated metaphor breaks down, however, with some prolonged exposure to Avignon, as Avignon actually eventually becomes really charming once you work out its more challenging features, as opposed to the ongoing urge to rip Avignon out of your DVD player and fling it forcefully into the Negative Zone.

Our lost first night led us--eventually, circuitously--to Mamma Corsica. I couldn't find it again if I tried, I don't think; it was located somewhere on the fringes of Avignon's non-Euclidean environs, off in some dusty corner of this French hypercube of a city. Mamma Corsica greeted us herself in the small space and immediately seated us at a Lilliputian table, slapping down a couple of menus for us. Then, beginning what would be a theme for the evening, she immediately left us alone with a giant, propped-up menu for us to examine.

Then she immediately returned and said something incomprehensible in her rat-a-tat French; the wife discerned it had something to do with aperitifs, somehow. The wife has mickle powers. She ordered a kir, and I panicked instantly, but then spied a large beer poster ad stapled to the bar. It was some sort of Corsican beer; everything in the place was (not surprisingly) Corsican. I pointed at it, and Mamma Corsica beamed. I got the feeling not many people ordered the Corsican beer. She rushed off.

And immediately rushed back, drinks in hand. CLANK! She dropped them on the table as if they were radioactive (well, it is France--they love them their nuclear power) and looked at us expectantly, ready to take our order. The wife calmly ordered the pork planc--basically a charcuterie plate, as far as I could tell, and that sounded good, so I turned to Mamma Corsica to order the same thing, and beheld the empty space where she moments ago had stood. She had noticed something at another table that required her attention and had sped off, leaving me to gape at the Mamma Corsica-shaped hole she had left in the fabric of reality. I glanced at the wife, and she shrugged. Was I to go hungry this evening?

Suddenly, there was an urgent, Gallic voice clattering in my ear, and I stifled a small scream. Mamma Corsica, having put out whatever notional fire that had ignited at the other table was now hectoring me for my dinner selection; the woman was a terrifying dervish. She was like one of the Triplets of Belleville, only insane and capable of drawing on the Speed Force. She made some meth addicts I've encountered look positively lackadaisical.

We had, somehow, also managed to order a pre-pork salad to share, and it of course arrived picoseconds after we had taken a sip from our drinks. Thank God we agreed to share it. BLONK! The now-supersonic Mamma Corsica delivered it to our table without actually slowing down enough to become visible; the salad was the size of, oh, I'm going to say Denmark. Happily, it was delicious. Periodically, as we munched the dish, Mamma Corsica blinked in and out of quantum superpositions around the room.

Soon after we finished our salad, it vanished from existence, possibly thanks to invisible ghouls, Mamma Corsica presented us with our pork plancs, served rustically on wooden cutting boards. The bacon alone was enough to cause Road-to-Damascus-like conversion reactions--I have seen the pig! And I was starting to warm up to the Corsican beer; it was all wonderful for all the chaos surrounding us. It should be noted that nobody else seemed to notice that our hostess was a living Feynman diagram.

At length, we finished our ridiculously great meal; Mamma Corsica materialized again beside our table to see if we wanted anything else. The wife ordered a cafe, and meanwhile I had been eyeing the mysterious bottles behind the tiny bar. Whiskey? I asked, taking a stab.

Mamma Corsica's face lit up like a Pachinko machine, but then crumbled into a rather piteous look, as if she expected that what she was about to say was going to be terribly upsetting.

"Whiskey," she breathed, and pointed to the three lonely bottles on the shelf. "Is Corsican, all." She wrinkled her face at me. She seemed like she had met disappointment before when explaining this. To which all I could think was, Who in the fuck passed up the opportunity to try out Corsican whiskey? She needn't have worried.

"C'est bon!" I hollered. I embarrass myself. I pointed to my selection, and she fairly roared over to the shelf to pour me my libation; I had picked the ten-year (trying to economize, y'know; she also had a twelve-year that I ached over).

I shouldn't have worried, of course. She was so pleased to have someone order her whiskey, she brought over a sample of the twelve-year as well, so I could compare. This is, of course, the way the world should always work. I try to behave this way. You like a thing I like! Oh, God, you have to try this similar thing! For the record, Corsican whiskey, while nothing that will blow your mind, is pretty good stuff.

If I think about it--not too hard, of course--this is sort of the essence of why we like to travel. We're not so different! Shall we share? Mamma Corsica clapped her hands at us when we bade our good-byes, and then she whirled madly for a moment and disappeared, a singularity occasionally, magically visible to those lost enough to stumble over her.

I have a troubling confession to make. I really like airport Bloody Marys.

Not because they taste good; they manifestly do not. Least of all in Heathrow, where what you will get when ordering one of these is a glass half-filled with vodka and tomato juice, and then a bottle of Tabasco, a bottle of Worcestershire, and a pepper shaker. Hey, thanks! You fucking limey creeps. Incidentally, fuck you, Terminal Five. Heathrow's new Terminal Five--roughly the size and shape and carrying the same charm as Winston Churchill's dead, grotesque liver--is thoroughly and wholly the living international shits.

Let's clear this up: Terminal Five handles most if not all of British Airways' international traffic. When you deplane, you are immediately herded onto these godforsaken little trams, and then you take a ride to the terminal itself, a ridiculous gulag of a building with this preposterous sign posted outside of every door: "It is unlawful to smoke anywhere inside our outside of this building." I've got news for you, Terminal Fucking Five: I broke the law several times today.

(I actually broke the law while in Terminal Five itself. When I was taking a shit in the bathroom outside "Huxley's," the impressively inauthentic English airport pub, I hotboxed a good four puffs on a cigarette because I exhibiting early signs of nicotine psychosis. One of those signs is ordering a Bloody Mary from Danish waiters working in Heathrow's abominable Triumph of the Will-styled cathedral bars.

Oh, and here's an actual conversation with a waitress:

"Is there a smoking area anywhere in here?"

"You cannot smoke anywhere in here."

"Oh. So I guess I'd have to go outside to smoke, then."

[Puzzled and pitying look] "You cannot leave, sir."

This is actually true. Unless you are vomiting blood, or have a thorax full of chestbursters all erupting at once, you cannot leave Terminal Five. Terminal Five is, quite literally, Hotel California. The Brits have settled on a fairly literal definition of the word "terminal": It will make you want to die.)

Anyway. Airport Bloody Marys. I don't know what it is about these terrible things, but I always must have them prior to boarding a plane. Part of it is the wan little celery garnishes and the microcephalic sword-impaled olives, and most of all, the abrasive chemical peel you get in your mouth from the wretched seasoned salt they rim the glasses with. All of these terrible details wake up my lobes and tell me: TRAVEL IS AFOOT! Plus, they help me deal with ancillary issues, such as settling into my BA seat only to find out that my next nine hours of air travel will be unadorned with such fripperies like a working set of earphones. When I went to plug in the 'phones, the entire jack caved into my armrest, causing me to spontaneously order six whiskies and then watch seventeen silent dumbshow reruns of Martin in a stuporous gloom.

I'm just kidding. I fell asleep. I'm stupid, but I don't hate myself. Not that much.

The only other in-country travel that we faced while in France was getting from Paris to Avignon via the astoundingly awesome TGV train, which travels so fast that you get to watch time dilate. We greeted our train at the Gare de Lyon with an hour or so to spare, so naturally we settled in to . . . the cafe/bar at the train station's soaring outgoing depot. The wife had an espresso while I opted for a beer. We settled in and watched all of the charming bustle. Ten minutes in, I picked up my beer and brought it to my lips. But I noticed something.

"What the fuck?" I said. The wife beetled her brows at me, questioning. I wheeled my beer glass around this way and that. There appeared to be tiny little slugs in my beer. "What the fuck?" I hissed again, showcasing my firm grasp of this uniquely American idiom. I peered at the tiny slugs. One appeared to be clinging listlessly to the rim of my glass. I picked at it.

"Slippery fucking thing," I grumbled. It kept sliding out of my grasp. What the hell was going on? I finally got a hold of the damn thing, but then it promptly dissolved in my fingers and fell like an ectoplasmic nightmare into the depths of my beer, creating a noisome cloud.

Gare de Lyon's upper depot is basically open-air. Trains come in and out on one end, passengers do the same on the other. There aren't any doors. There weren't any slugs in my fucking beer. One of the dozens of pigeons that make their home in Gare de Lyon had taken a desultory shit into my glass. And I had just spent ten minutes fingering a good quantity of it--had, in fact, come bare seconds away from drinking it. I suddenly glared up at the ceiling, staring at these hateful little fucking vermin, and then I had to laugh. The wife called over the waiter, and, her normally very good French failing her, pointed at my beer, then at the damned birds and said, "Ah . . . . pigeon . . . ah, boom?" Here she mimed a bomb drop. The waiter smiled easily and motioned me to hand him my glass and promptly replaced it. I noted clinically that he did not wear a hat; I doubted that this was his first skirmish with the evil avian bombardiers lurking above. I peered gloomily at my shit-beslimed fingers and sought out a bathroom.

And one last thing about Gare de Lyon. When we came back from Avignon, this station was also our point of disembarkment in Paris. So we got off the train--and we could not leave the station. We walked towards the "Sortie" signs; they took us deeper into the bowels of the terrible place; we soon found ourselves staring at subterranean train stations threatening to take to places prefixed by the word "Aix." We scrambled back upstairs; the wife spotted a sign that said "INFORMATION" with a helpful arrow; it pointed to a blank brick wall.

"WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?" I screamed. Nobody cared; the noise was incredible. Everyone was rushing everywhere and nowhere at once. Any direction could have possibly been the correct one. We ran up against a bank of alarming turnstiles; more trains. These promised to take us to towns named Glottal Stop and Swallowed R. We shrieked like bats and ran in circles; I contemplated asking the nice man in full camo gear for directions, but was given pause when I noticed that he carried not only a professionally terrifying moustache but also an automatic rifle that he cradled with no small amount of paternal warmth.

We finally emerged from this Gehenna thanks to some Parisian fellow that the wife managed to buttonhole: "GO LEFT! GO LEFT!" he screamed insistently, though it is possible that this was simply his local exhortation to vote for Barack Obama. We blinked as we staggered outside, and then hailed the worst cab driver in existence; he dropped us off three blocks from our hotel, saying, as far as we could tell, that he could "see it from here." The cab smelled like degraded polymer chains.

Exhausted, depleted, we finally discovered our hotel. And, the next morning, on the flight back home, I watched The Dark Knight. Not bad! At least my headphones worked. Halfway through, the steward offered me some inedible thing purporting to be a sandwich; I think it was alleged that it contained some sort of marmalade. (British people: I know American food is, on the whole, laughable and dispiriting, but is this a competition?) I politely declined and asked: "Can I get a Bloody Mary?" It was perhaps eleven o'clock, local time.

Bless him, he only paused for a moment.

HELLLOOOOOO EVERYBODY! The wife and I are back from France! Did you miss us? HOLLA IF YOU MISSED US!

. . .

HOLLA!

. . .

GOOD TO SEE YOU TOO! Anyway, sorry it took a while to get back to writing. I'm still kind of temporally fucked up from the trip. I've been back to work for two days now, and that's been oddly okay--no shootings yet, except for that Mary bitch with the motor disease or whatever--but it turns out that my geriatric nap schedule has been somewhat thrown into disarray, and now whenever I attempt my usual evening sleep period during when "How It's Made" comes on, I get this weird sensation that slavering wolves are breathing on my genitals, and I just lie there and sweat. I trust this will pass.

We had a great time over there, of course; we spent four days in Paris then a week in Avignon. A real writer would recount the entire trip in a roughly linear fashion, going off of his copious notes and dedicated scribbles. I, of course, cannot be bothered with that shit, so over the course of the next few entries, I will recount various vignettes and anecdotes in a more or less completely broken and incoherent fashion, so that the entire narrative will, eventually, come to light in a postmodern, fractal kind of way--think Pynchon, think pointillism, think CSI: Miami. Or do what I do and renounce thinking entirely.

Our first few days were spent in Paris, waiting for the wife's appalling fortieth birthday to pass, which it eventually did, much like a kidney stone, causing me to clutch my penis in horror, realizing that my old lady was, finally, genuinely old. Oh well. We tried to pretend to enjoy ourselves anyway.

We were staying in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, locale of the Eiffel Tower, Les Invalides, Musee D'Orsay and Rodin, and several fragrant public toilets--good for taking a hearty shit in provided that you're too hoity to get down on the sidewalk with the dogs and just leave it there.

Right around the corner from our hotel was our adopted cafe, the Cafe Du Marche, whose busy staff rarely managed to ignore our hideous French; we enjoyed started our days there, with the wife enjoying an "EX-PRESSO!" and me more often than not sipping a Campari.

As many people have observed, Paris is a crazy dog town, and we, being dog people, enjoy dog-watching even more than people-watching. One fellow on a particular morning sat down with his tiny little graybeard black dog in his lap and ordered a coffee. The dog was adorable. The dog was also the most fantastically caniopathic dog I've ever seen in my life: he hated every single other dog that came within five yards of his lap-ambit. He would be sitting there placidly on his owner's lap until he spotted another dog pretty much anywhere (and he was preternaturally good at seeking them out) at which point he would stiffen, chuff indignantly for a minute, growl and then FREAK THE FUCK OUT, writhing in his owner's lap like a sack full of angry eels, barking and howling as if someone had suddenly stuffed its asshole with a quantity of cilantro. He was outstanding. I'm pretty sure he was Napoleon brought back in tiny dog form. The other dogs looked at him lazily in any case, often stopping to take a desultory shit on the cobblestones, offering their professional opinions as to the efficacy of the tiny dog's threats.

Not that people-watching ever disappoints, especially in Paris. Particularly, for some reason, the old ladies. It must be said that Paris, pound for pound, contains the most undiluted concentration of hilarious crones that I've ever seen anywhere in my life. They are, quite honestly, incredible. On any given afternoon on the streets of Paris, you will witness the most astonishing collection of grotesques, gargoyles, termagents and just plain caricatures than you would believe; this was just at the Marche cafe. I saw things such as an upswept dye-blond beehive-cum-pompadour with half-inch long visible roots, wraparound designer sunglasses, pleather jackets with "NO MERCI" on the back, and high-heel leather boots with a crosshatched rhinestone design. Unfortunately, I saw all of these on the same woman at the same time; she of course also yanked along with her a tiny little dog whose only clear purpose of existence was to be stepped on by passersby. Watching old ladies in Paris is like owning free tickets to a Commedia del'Arte show every day for free: Columbinas tottering around with their little mewling canine Punches.

One day at Cafe Marche, watching the street show scroll by, I noticed that they served hot chocolate ("chocolat chaud"). That sounded nice. What also sounded nice was some rum with that. I flagged a waitress; the wife ordered some coffee, and then I gasped out in my typically horrific French: Je voudrais un chocolat chaud avec rum!

She looked at me as if I had opened my mouth and a plague of moths had flown out. Rum? she said, looking alarmed and not a little horrified. Oui! I replied, showing her my molars. She retreated inside a little shakily. She came back seconds later.

Rum? she asked again. I nodded. She motioned for me to follow her inside, clearly wondering what the fuck I was talking about. I followed her in. A bartender was drying glasses, staring at me warily. I turned to the wife. "I cannot possibly be the first person who ever asked for a hot chocolate and rum," I said. "Maybe you are," she chirped. Fuck you, Jack, I've got my coffee, was the clear subtext there. She was enjoying the weirdness.

I examined the bottles behind the bar and beheld no rum (the wife claims she saw some, but I didn't). Then I saw some whisky. "Whisky OK!" I cried, pointing at the bottle. The waitress looked, if possible, even more stricken now, and the bartender pulled a truly disgusted face, raising his pained eyes to the ceiling as if to seek answers from the mottled tin above, grimacing when the Gods did not immediately favor him with a suitable explanation as to what the stupid fucking American could possibly be asking for. C'est bon! I hollered defensively, and witlessly rubbed my stomach. The bartender stared flatly at me. He and the waitress chattered for a moment and then seemed to settle on a game plan; the waitress motioned us back to our table outside, clearly still unsettled by events.

We waited. I wondered what the hell was the problem, but right then my drink showed up; the waitress wore an expression that I figured was similar to the one worn by whomever had to serve Socrates his teacup. Merci! I said.

After the first sip, I realized what had gone horribly wrong, I'm pretty sure now. If I'm correct, my huge mistake was ordering chocolat chaud avec rum (or, later, whisky). What I should have said was chocolat chaud et rum/whisky. "Avec" means "with." "Et" means "and." PISH TOSH, right? Well, not so much. By ordering the hot chocolate "with" rum/whisky, what I had signalled to them was: replace the water you'd normally add to hot chocolate mix entirely with booze.

I was served a hot chocolate not with steamed water but with 100% steamed whisky. They must have used close to four shots; I nearly sent my first mouthful into my wife's hair in a concentrated jet. It was, of course, fucking awful. After a giggling half-dumbshow with the waitress explaining the misunderstanding, she burst into delighted gales of laughter and let the bartender know what the mix-up was. After that, my disgusting alcohol bomb became the topic of much hilarity: the waitress would periodically make a show of mopping my brow; I would periodically ask her to call me an ambulance or curse her for poisoning me. I worried what I was going to be charged for the awful mess, considering how much booze must have gone into it, but they apparently decided that its humor value more than made up for the whole episode, and only charged me five euros and some change.

Two days later, we were back at the Marche. A woman on a motorcycle screeched up to the outside seating area and pulled off her helmet, shaking out her long hair. It was the waitress. We grinned and said our hellos.

"You are not dead!" she cried. C'est bon!

Indeed.

Because of extremely favorable economic conditions as of late, the wife and I leave for France in a week and a half! We're looking forward to missing this oncoming shoulder season that Hollywood has planned in favor of staring dully at euros flying out of our pockets and doing hasty back-of-the-envelope-if-we-can-afford-envelopes equations to determine how much debt we're racking up. Whee!

In other words, it's high time I prejudged a bunch of what you suckers will be watching while we empty our pockets at some of Avignon's finest couple-friendly brothels.

Saw V

NOBODY TOLD ME THAT COSTAS MANDYLOR WAS PART OF THIS FRANCHISE! I gave up on this repellent series right after Saw II--which I think we watched in the same month that we endured the cheerless moral vacancy that was Hostel--for the usual reasons. There's no reason I'm going to put up with this fucking shit. It's the Faces of Death of this goddamn decade, and I'd sooner gnaw on live rats than . . . no, scratch that. I have more respect for rats than I do for the ghastly bastards that churn out this horrid garbage. So I'd sooner gnaw on the filmmakers.

That said, Costas Mandylor! He was on "Picket Fences"! Remember? Does Tobin Bell repeatedly shove glass rods up his urethra? I might have to reexamine my position on these films. Mainly because I seriously enjoy typing "Costas Mandylor."

W.

I think we can all agree that Oliver Stone, as filmmaker qua filmmaker, is primarily noted for his nuanced point of view and his easy touch as a humorist. It's ginger, light-hearted movies such as Platoon, Natural Born Killers and JFK that have ensured his legacy as the rightful heir to, say, Woody Allen and Billy Wilder. So it should come as no surprise that . . . listen, I can't even finish this sentence at all.

Stone is not entirely without gifts; he can fashion a fairly harrowing scene when moved to, and he has an occasionally interesting eye when it comes to framing. Unfortunately, he is also frothingly insane. The idea of him crafting some foamy comedy about our (also unfathomably demented) president is roughly along the same lines as assigning Costa-Gravas directorship of the next American Pie sequel.

(Now, horribly, I'm imagining some debased blowjob scene where Sally Field is going down on Jason Biggs. I hate myself.)

Max Payne

It's The Happening meets Constantine meets Hitman!! What on earth could possibly be better than that? IT HAS BEAU BRIDGES IN IT! Granted, he's no Costas Mandylor, but who is? I mean, other than Costas Mandylor.

It also has Ludacris and Chris O'Donnell and Donal Logue!

Seriously, do you think the casting directors all got together over an apple pipe in some back room and went, "You're kidding. They bought that?"

(BONUS DVD RENTAL NOTE: The wife and I genuinely enjoyed Hitman. We consider it the finest video-game movie adaptation to feature Timothy Olyphant and digitized pubic hair released to date.)

The Secret Life of Bees

Cast list includes:

Queen Latifah
Jennifer Hudson
Alicia Keys
Sophie Okonedo

UNCOMFORTABLE! Too many black people. Also, bees.

Upon further review:

Dakota Fanning
Paul Bettany

Well, that's certainly adding some cream to the coffee. Listen, are there any robots in this?

Sex Drive

Astonishingly, Judd Apatow does not appear to be connected to this film. Disappointingly, neither does Costas Mandylor.

The wife and I have returned from Vegas. Even though Vegas undergoes near-constant change, the city itself really doesn't. What's mostly interesting to me about Vegas is the fact that it manages to convince you--a visitor--that it isn't as absurdly fucked up as it is. While you're in Vegas, ostensibly enjoying yourself, you don't notice the incredibly strange things, such as your eternally dripping faucet--in a desert--or the fact that you're hanging out in warehouse-sized Skinner boxes without windows or clocks, being served alcohol relentlessly and congratulating yourself on this fact while you slowly go broke. Fountains and seafood abound everywhere in this ridiculous, blasted skilletscape. It's like if you went into the Amazonian rainforest and were completely unsurprised to round a trail corner and find a Portuguese bank.

Only in Vegas could you possibly do something as self-abnegating as agreeing to go to an establishment as repulsive as Coyote Ugly, only to have the plasticine bar staff order you onto all fours and bark like a dog for a free shot. Not that this happened to me: it happened to D. Later that night, D. ingested some food that had peanuts in it and went into anaphylactic shock. It happened the night before the wife and I arrived to join everyone, and obviously, I was sad to have missed it; I think it is the quintessential Vegas experience.

I was told this story, by the way, while enjoying the discharge of a six-foot-tall bonglike thing apparently called a "beer tower." I'm a little surprised that nobody has opened an entire casino called "Beer Tower." Maybe next week after they disintegrate the Stratosphere with lasers. (The Stratosphere is so notoriously awful that they'd probably neglect to inform the guests first, immolating and/or crushing several thousands of people too cheap to spring for some place classy like Harrah's, where we stayed. [Harrah's is a gloomy, cheerless dump.])

The long weekend progressed as you might imagine. We were there to attend the wedding of C. and L.--and, really, fuck this initial nonsense. It irritates me too anymore, except when I can't think of what else to do. Let's call the groom Corny Eely and the bride RILOR, because it pleases me to think of her as the world's sweetest robot intelligence. Corny Eely is just a Googledodge, and how I also enjoy referring to him, as I am a fucking idiot.

The first night was spent, of all things, gambling. The wife made it to a little after two, while Corny and I, in a truly heroic exhibit of drinking and not sleeping, made it until after four AM playing craps. No less than three times during that epic night, Corny looked at me, shuffled his many chips and said, "Well, ready to call it a night?" And each time, my response was, "We just ordered beers." And he replied, each time, "That's true." Free beers. So we soldiered on, until I was forced to struggle up to my room and bid good-night (or, I suppose, morning) to Corny, who tiredly waved and then proceeded to go back to the ridiculously terrible O'Shea's to play craps for another two hours, eventually winding up with $700 in winnings on the evening.

And the next night was the bachelor/bachelorette parties, of course. I'm not allowed to talk about the details of the bachelor party because of that GUY RULE of silence, but I can share this: for the first time in my life, and I fervently hope the last, I was heard to tell a bartender, "I need fifteen shots of Jaegermeister." Then later we drove out into the desert, bent a bunch of hookers over the guardrail and fucked them stupid, then bludgeoned them with garden hoes and dumped their bodies in Lake Mead. But like I said, I can't really talk about it.

The wedding itself was fairly unremarkable, not because it was unimportant, but just because the good people who work at the Flamingo churn out weddings like a Chicago sausagemaker. Get in! You're married! Get out! Most of us there were chewing this incredible gum that our friend L. had discovered: it was peach Sangria-flavored. So that was classy; while Corny and RILOR tied the knot, half of us were on the bench chewing booze gum like a herd of docile, mildly alcoholic cattle. It was sort of fitting. At the end of the 20-minute-ish ceremony, the officiant was seen, upon leaving down the aisle, to give a thumbs-up to the automatic camera filming the event and stage-whisper, "The end . . . and the beginning!" I like to think that Uwe Boll scripted that and was beaming in the editing room.

Corny and RILOR had the reception in their suite at the Flamingo, which we all gawked at, particularly at the TV display that was embedded somehow in the bathroom mirror. A couple of us wandered into the shower to sit on the little marble bench where you could watch the TV as well--because, you know, we're rubes. Toasts were made, naturally, with the best man's being notable--for one because the best man was a woman, but also for her frequent frustrated cries of "Shit!" because she kept tearing up. Congratulating her after the fact, she moaned and pointed at me, saying "Fuck. Blogger."

We're back home now, after a particularly hellish Sunday morning spent struggling to get up at 7:00 AM to make our flight. We had a good time, but as with all things Vegas, it was tempered with grimness. It's hard to ignore this underlying aspect of a city as debased as Las Vegas: the octogenarian fungi mechanically playing the slots; the hordes of bored Latinos paid to stand on the sidewalks and try and hand out cardvertisements for escorts, wearing their awful t-shirts with phone numbers and legends proclaiming "Call and she'll COME right over"; restaurants branded with Toby Keith's imprimatur; yardfuls of pina coladas.

I swear to God: heading up to the Flamingo suite for the reception, we shared a partial elevator ride with a local. He carried an oxygen tank complete with the little nostril tubes. Nice guy; he asked us where we were from and wished us good luck when he exited a couple floors before ours. There was another fellow waiting to get on. He carried an oxygen tank with him. "Hallo!" he wheezed at us, clanking his iron cylinder aboard the elevator car.

I stole some looks around at my friends. Presently, people realized the coincidence, and we shamefully grinned. But I think that a few of us almost didn't notice.

On Thursday, the wife and I take off for the promised land: Las Vegas. Las Vegas. The land of milk and honey! No, wait. It's actually the land of ruined daquiris and crusted semen stains. Well, whatever. Some friends of ours are 1. huge Vegas fans and 2. getting married, so you see where this is all coming from. "By the power vested in me by the Nevada Gaming Commission . . . " and all. On the other hand, there's like thirty people or so all coming down for the festivities, so it should be a good time. The only way to take on Vegas is to travel in packs. You know, hence the Rat Pack. They traveled in groups to prevent Mafioso sten-gun attacks on Sinatra, and to make sure that roving rednecks couldn't string up Sammy Davis Jr. from a streetlamp.

See, the last time we were there was for our first anniversary, and it was just the two of us. This was a horrible mistake in that it was just the two of us. My awful persona that I've adopted here on this blog to the contrary, I'm just not capable of being a giant asshole in public--usually--and the wife is a freakishly wonderful person in every way, and that's no way to take on the demented fuck-scream that is Vegas. One needs to be insulated, one needs a posse, if only just because being in a group of people--particularly when those people are all actors and sketch comedians--allow one the freedom--nay, the responsibility--of becoming a complete and total shithead. This is what friends are for. Would you ever scream "SHOW YOUR TITS!" in New Orleans if you weren't surrounded by your pals? Of course not. Similarly, in Vegas, being surrounded by your friends means never having to feel bad about taking a shit in the big planters outside the Venetian while braying like a donkey. It's what you do.

The first time I ever visited Vegas (as an adult) was in 1999 or so; I had organized the trip just on a lark, and there were about ten of us, I think. We just went because, well, what the fuck, why not?

On the flight down there, J. creeped back to where we were all sitting, away from his girlfriend, and showed us The Ring. "I'm asking her to marry me," he unnecessarily explained. Well, awesome! Our little jaunt now had a cool narrative! Of course she said yes.

So then: the bachelor party. Which, since J. hadn't told us about, was completely unexpected. And nine years ago, I was much, much poorer than I am now. AND, of course, the cardinal rule of bachelor parties is: the groom pays for nothing.

J. naturally wanted to go to a strip club. In fact, he wanted to go to Glitter Gulch. I had no idea what to expect.

We got there, and J. promptly emitted a piercing shriek of glee and ran off to receive the first of what turned out to be a staggering number of lap dances. A comely lass approached our group and exclaimed, "Hi, fellas! Welcome! That'll be ninety-eight dollars." As in: apiece. What that got you was two drinks and the ability to stagger around in a daze while chicks clambered onto your table and shimmied. Dazedly, I pulled out my debit card and handed it over; entering a fuguelike Monkeybone-style universe, my credit card grew a cartoon face and laughed at me.

I was pretty rattled. Rattled enough that, when armed with my watery Budweiser and when confronted with my first dancer of the evening, I shot my arm out and immediately shoved a fiver into her G-string. She raised her eyebrows at me and said, "Oh, boy! Fast mover." Then she left. Ten seconds of girlflesh, and then the awesomely insulting realization that I was supposed to let her dance for a while before rewarding her. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see J. receiving his nine hundredth lap dance, burying his head reverentially into the dancer's cleavage. I imagined shooting J. in the face with a bazooka and playing with his discarded teeth.

In my storied career, I realize now that I should just stay away from strip clubs.

There is, so far, no indication that our groom has any intention of hitting a strip club, thank God. We'll be apparently spending most of our time in Old Vegas hitting the fifty-cent blackjack tables and getting hit with hammers by demented locals intent on stealing our shoes, which sounds pretty good. We'll be with friends. So when I take that giant shit into some hotel planter, it will be a friendly voice that announces, "Skot, that's an Escalade's sun roof." And, because we're all friends, I will elatedly scream, "SHOW ME YOUR TITS!" And then Kirk will sigh and bury his face in his hands and vow never to go anywhere with me ever again.