I spent last weekend on Fire Island in the company of my great good friends the Couch Baron and Dix, and after driving up to the ferry and wending our way to the island and portaging our overpacked duffels and several eighteen-packs of domestic beer to the house, we settled in for a blissful weekend of doing absolutely nothing. We drank our domestic beer, of course, and we made the occasional run into town for artery-clogging breakfast supplies, and we lounged around playing the name game and insulting one another desultorily and formulating our plan to kidnap Chris Meloni and make him our shared-custody houseboy, and I managed to acquire a championship sunburn on my shoulders, but other than that, we didn’t do a blessed thing. I turned off my phone, I left my laptop at home, and for forty-eight hours I had no contact with various annoyances in my life both personal and pop-cultural. Unfortunately, I had to come home eventually, and when I did, I found all of these annoyances still firmly entrenched and showing no signs of relinquishing the field, as well as a couple of new ones that I hadn’t anticipated.

I would like these annoyances to go away and leave me in peace. They don’t have to stay away forever, these annoyances, but I’d like them to give it a rest for a week or two, and not just for my own sake, because every time I shout something like “oh my holy God, ENOUGH ALREADY!” and wing a platform sandal at the television, it startles the cats.

Darva Conger

The “pay it no mind and it’ll go away” principle doesn’t seem to apply to Ms. Conger. Every time she seems to have squeezed the last drop of notoriety from the udders of her fifteen minutes, she finds a way back into the spotlight, first with the annulment of her marriage to Rick Rockwell, then with her petulant insistence that she just wanted to go back to her life – a declaration which, I suspect, she intended to lend her an air of mystery, thus garnering more attention for herself. When the public made the mistake of taking her at her word, she stripped down for Playboy and then gave several hundred interviews on the subject, all while sporting a tan straight out of a mortician’s make-up case and protesting that she “had no choice” because she couldn’t get a real job after the Who Wants To Marry A Multimillionaire debacle. It’s disingenuous, Ms. Conger’s leave-me-alone-oh-wait-come-back-here-with-a-camera-so-I-can-tell-you-why routine, but Ms. Conger herself doesn’t irritate me nearly as much as the knee-jerk denunciations of her. “She’s a whore” this, “she’s a liar” that, “she’s harming the feminist movement” the other thing – give me a bloody break. The wage/gender gap still not closed in the United States, women still denied basic human freedoms all over the world, incidents like the Central Park harassment incidents still going on, and Darva Conger is harming the feminist movement? How – by posing for nude photos and accepting money for them? It’s not classy – it’s not in the same zip code as classy – but I don’t recall her coming out in support of shorter sentencing for rape, or citing Phyllis Schlafly as a role model, or saying anything else that we could construe as anti-woman. In fact, she’s just doing her own thing, which the last time I looked forms a cornerstone of the feminist movement which she has allegedly endangered, and calling her a danger to the development of young girls does nothing but ensure her more of the attention she craves, so could we please just stop talking about her already? She’s a skank. Let it drop.

The IRS

I don’t like paying taxes, but taxes have their uses. I like roads and government-funded art and whatnot, so I’ll complain about taxes, but I’ll pay them. In return, I’d like the IRS to get their shit together. I’d like the IRS to, oh, I don’t know, look at the paperwork I submit before filing it, the better to avoid bombarding me with paperwork saying that I’ve paid the wrong taxes for my incorporated date of election. I’d like the IRS to apply the overage from last year to this year, as I specifically asked them to by checking the box next to the words “check here if overage should be applied to Year 2000 return,” instead of – get this – penalizing me for giving them too much money, then deducting it from a refund I didn’t want in the first goddamn place and sending me a check that’s two hundred dollars short. Just to review – I gave the IRS too much money in estimated taxes, and instead of applying it to my 1999 return, which they suggested to begin with, they fined me for paying them too much, and then they sent the money back to me anyway. And did I mention that they sent it a year late? Because they did. And I’d like the government to stop pestering me about my estimated payroll. I have already filed the estimated payroll form twice this year. How many times do I have to send it in before they stop hallucinating the words “just kidding” at the top and resending it to me? I mean, I accept that the government will take my money, but I’d feel a lot better about it if they demonstrated the first clue as to what to do with it.

The anniversary of JFK Jr.’s death

I’ve already gone on at length about JFK Jr.’s untimely demise, so I won’t repeat myself. I will say that the media, especially in New York, absolutely must stop torturing the rest of us by running stories about it a year later, and that the drama queens who persist in leaving candles and flowers and mementos on the doorstep of the building where JFK Jr. used to live absolutely must get proper hobbies and go about practicing those hobbies immediately. Three young people died in a plane crash, to no discernible purpose, and that’s a terrible thing, but for the love of Pete, put the teddy bears away. If you think this tragedy has anything to do with you, think again.

Survivor non-survivors in the press

First of all, none of the Survivor bootees can spill the beans as to who won or they’ll have to give their prize money back, so stop trying to trip them up. Second of all, stop interviewing people who got booted off in the first two weeks, because they have no insights and we don’t care. B.B. got punted approximately fifteen minutes after floating up to shore. Leave the man alone. Ramona’s Entertainment Weekly diary is just the most egregious example in recent memory, and what did we learn from her jottings? This: “Day 1: I barfed. Day 2: Barfed some more. It’s hot. Day 3: Still hot. More barfing. We ate bugs (barf!). I think the rest of my team thinks I suck. Day 4: Hot. Barf.” If we watched the episodes, we know this stuff already; if we didn’t watch the episodes, we wouldn’t care about it now. What purpose do these endless non-news non-stories on Dr. Sean serve, exactly?

My real-estate broker

This individual – a tiny Brazilian man named Ben who, coincidentally, looks exactly like Ben Stiller, leading me to dub him “Mini-Ben” – has shown me a string of too-expensive apartments that have ranged in quality from mildly to completely unsuitable. Unfit potential domiciles included a loft in Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of the worst neighborhoods in New York City; a two-bedroom apartment mere yards from one of the most dangerous housing projects in the country; a seventh-floor walk-up with nary a closet anywhere (I would have laughed at Mini-Ben’s suggestion that I use one of the bedrooms as a closet, but I couldn’t breathe at the time); and sundry dwellings to which to which the landlord had added “rooms” by punching a hole in the wall. And yet Mini-Ben persists, despite repeated entreaties that he not call me with any apartments costing more than a certain amount per month, not call me with any apartments located squarely in outright slums, not call me with any apartments which require a Sherpa or a grapple hook in order to gain entry, and not call me every bloody half an hour offering to shave a lousy twenty bucks off of his commission. My phone rings, and it’s Mini-Ben. My Outlook Express mail notifier says “ding,” and it’s Mini-Ben. I go through my lobby and I see Mini-Ben, disguised as the UPS guy. As I walk down the street, I see a tiny Ben-Stiller-shaped shadow on the sidewalk, and when I look up, I see Mini-Ben, circling. I no longer want to move because I need more space or because I’d like a change; I want to move to throw Mini-Ben off my trail.

Harry Potter

Great. Fine. Harry Potter And The Magical Whatever. I just don’t want to hear about it anymore, please.

Smokers who can’t take responsibility for their own actions

A Florida jury slapped tobacco companies with umpteen billion dollars in damages late last week. Smoking is bad. I don’t dispute that. I can’t; nobody can, and nobody tries. But I smoke, and the tobacco companies will pass the cost of this jury award on to me, the consumer, and I don’t like that. I don’t like the fact that taxes on cigarettes keep going up as an annoying by-product of yet another failed government attempt to legislate people’s habits, I don’t like the fact that nobody in a position to make a difference seems to have learned thing one from Prohibition, and I don’t like the fact that, yet again, a jury has chosen to reward people for willfully disregarding the health risks associated with a given behavior. Let’s review: smoking is bad. Says so right on the pack, doesn’t it? Contains carbon monoxide; causes low birth weight; associated with lung cancer. The Surgeon General says it’s bad, and has for years, and I don’t care if you can’t read or you’ve never set foot in a doctor’s office or you live under a really large rock the size of Maryland – you’ve got to know smoking is bad for your health, and you’ve got to know that you can’t blame anyone for your emphysema but your own dumb self. Of course the tobacco companies market to kids. Of course they manipulate the nicotine levels to get smokers addicted. They have a business to run, and it’s hopelessly naÔve for us to expect a higher standard of behavior from them. I’ve got no problem with booting smokers out of public spaces (I’ve long since adjusted to going outside), or with charging us higher health-insurance premiums, or with any of that other quality-of-life stuff; it makes things a bit inconvenient for me, but I’ll manage. But if you smoke, you pay the price – you. This case sets a terrifying precedent for the legislation of health habits, and whether you smoke or not, it should worry you.

Anti-abortionists who use violence

I can sympathize with the pro-life point of view. I don’t hold it myself, but I can understand it. It’s when doctors get stabbed, and shot, and blown up by bombs that I start getting confused. The last time I looked, pro-choice women didn’t go to OB clinics and start setting off sticks of dynamite because the women therein refused to get an abortion, and I really really wish the radical anti-abortionists would cut that shit out. You want to protect the unborn, to look out for the children? Fine. Volunteer at your local Planned Parenthood and make sure women near you have access to the information and services they need. Head down to a soup kitchen or women’s shelter near you and see to it that less fortunate pregnant women and mothers of small children have enough to eat and a safe place to stay. Join a Big Brothers/Big Sisters program and give your time to a child that’s already in the world. But don’t go around thinking you know God’s mind, or that you’d have the right to kill adults even if you did. Murdering a gynecologist for doing her job doesn’t win you any converts. I don’t want to hear about this happening, so just please stop.

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