Today I was in the checkout line at the local supermarket, and while there I made a point to check the local gossip mags — Us, People, In Style — for the latest news. I find this is my best way to maintain contact with the common rabble of the American public. I discovered that Miley Cyrus has been caught smoking pot.

This must be an interesting conundrum for the Cyrus family (one of several, as it just occurred to me, it was recently announced that Miley’s mother had an affair with Bret Michaels.) How does someone like her father — mega successful country artist Billy Ray Cyrus — tell his daughter to stay away from drugs? No doubt he was partying back when he was 19. And he is the one person most responsible for pushing his daughter into the limelight.

I guess the larger question is: how do glamorous celebrity types — who are all drug snorting bisexuals — handle the fine art of disciplining teenagers? Normal parents who may have done their share of partying back in the day don’t have their antics preserved for antiquity in copies of People magazine from 20 years ago. But, modern celebrities have zero moral authority when they tell their kids not to do drugs. I mean, how can Tommy Lee wear a straight face while telling his kids to stay away from crack?

And, I think there’s an additional layer to this. Most people have some kind of youthful flirtation with drugs and wild sex and general partying, and retreat largely unscathed. It’s, frankly, a pretty enjoyable experience — not one I would want to deny my children (if I had children.) Can someone like Billy Ray Cyrus deliver the message, “you should have fun, but not too much fun”?

For today’s post, I thought I would discuss how anxiety can effect the biofeedback output when tracking the somatic state of electrical impulses as measured in the muscles of test monkeys. It’s quite fascinating to note that…

What’s that? You say you’d rather look at naked pictures of Courtney Love?

Here you go.

I can think of a few articles on the web more deserving of the “must-read” category than this profile of utterly insane movie producer/porn drug addict/gonzo war journalist/hard-core conservative Pat Dollard. It’s incredibly long, but packed with a narrative and dialogue beyond anything Quentin Tarantino could dream up. I can’t begin to summarize it, but perhaps this little snippet of conversation between Dollard and his ex-wife will give you a taste.

“Have you talked to your mother?,” Megan asks. “You need to call her.”

“How’s that fucking bitch?,” Dollard says.

“You don’t talk about your mother that way.”

“Watch me—I just did. I just did.”

“Your mother is the most wonderful woman that I’ve ever met,” Megan says. “I want to punch you in the face right now.”

She sits up and inadvertently knocks over an ashtray concealed under the blanket on the bed. She leaps up, brushing ashes from her jeans. “This brings back memories,” she says, growing angry. “This is definitely why I left you.”

“You left because you’re a quitter,” Dollard says.

“I left because you are an alcoholic and you won’t get help,” Megan says.

“You didn’t stick around like Bill Wilson’s wife,” Dollard says, referring to the wife of the A.A. co-founder. “If Bill Wilson’s wife hadn’t stuck by his side when he was drinking there would be no A.A.”

“My husband was hiring hookers on my credit card—to buy coke [for him],” Megan says to me.

In the past, I’ve mentioned that I can’t stand the writing of Dean Koontz, and that I think he should have boiling hot urine poured onto him, and then be flailed, and then have alien spores thrown into his wounds so that insectoid alien eggs eventually open and alien larva crawl into his body and he starts screaming, “There are alien bugs crawling UNDERNEATH MY SKIN!” and eventually his brain explodes.

Perhaps my biggest beef with Koontz’s writing is its unnecessary verbosity. Take this example from “Hideaway” which I am currently reading.

Sister Immaculata, who was in charge of St. Thomas’s home for children, looked like a great black bird of prey perched on the armchair to the right of the sofa.

That’s actually not so bad, is it? Unfortunately, it’s not the complete sentence.

Sister Immaculata, who was in charge of St. Thomas’s home for children, looked like a great black bird of prey perched on the armchair to the right of the sofa, and Hatch would not have been surprised if she had suddenly let out a screaky cry, leapt into flight with a great flat of her robes, swooped around the room, and divebombed him with the intention of pecking off his nose.

For the 0.2% of the reading audience that are not familiar with what birds of prey do, the sentence provides full, if unnecessary, detail.

My suspicion has long been that Koontz writes with an eye towards his word count, filling his books with pointless detail and extrapolation to meet his publisher’s quota. Check out this sentence from the same book:

The first body at the base of the 30 foot Satan was that of Jenny Purcell, a 22-year-old waitress to who had worked the evening shift in a re-creation of a 1950s diner, where the jukebox played Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, Lloyd Price and the Platters, Buddy Holly and Connie Francis and the Everly Brothers.

Gee, Dean, I’m not sure you listed every musician available on the jukebox. What about Eddie Cochran and Hank Garland and Roy Orbison and Hank Williams etc.?

You might be asking, if I so detest Koontz’s writing, why am I reading yet another one of his dreadful books? Well, in a couple weeks I’m going to start taking a pass at writing a horror novel myself, and there’s no denying that Koontz, after Stephen King, is probably the most successful suspense author out there. If reading his work is necessary to get a sense of what the snoring, obese, flatulent common rabble consider quality writing, then so be it.

The irony of the fact that the sentence with which I began this post — the mother of all run-on sentences — would make the perfect Dean Koontz sentence just landed on me.

One thing I’ve noticed in the past couple years is a marked increase in the number of people I see with tattoos. And I’m not talking about a little heart on the bicep with the word “mom” in the middle, I’m talking about elaborate collages of imagery that run from the neck to the chest down the arm to the fingertips.

Additionally, I find the kinds of people with these tattoos surprise me. It used to be the tattoos were only imprinted on “outsider” types: punk rockers, heavy metal dudes, strippers, bikers etc. These days I see a lot of tattoos on what look to be essentially middle-class college girls. And, again, they don’t just have some small tattoo, they have a giant pair of eagle wings spread across their back, or a spiderweb that runs down their chest and ensnares their delightful pert nipples.

This increase visibility and acceptability of tattoos is, of course, destroying their “rebel effect.” It used to be that tattoos indicated some kind of courage, a willingness to embrace social ostracization. Soon the opposite may be true — people who have abstained from the ink needle will be the true individualists.

As some readers may know, I have a few tattoos myself, though nothing like these elaborate sleeves that run down some people’s arms. For a while I considered them to be reliable indicators of my awesome manliness. But, as I take note of some of the douchebags walking around with tattoos, I have to concede this can no longer be the case. I’ll have to go back to relying on my gigantic penis.