Have you been receiving these E-MAILS ABOUT BARACK OBAMA!!!????? 

I have. People send them in to the paper as letters, as if they wrote them, with their names attached and everything. Except they didn’t write them. They received them in their e-mails from idiot acquaintances and sent them on to our idiot editors, who pass them on to their … columnist.

There are variations on these messages, but they’re built of the same components. They all:

• Use UNNECESSARY CAPITAL LETTERS and punctuation!!!

• Mention Barack Obama’s middle name, HITLERbinLADEN.

• Manage to both question whether he’s really a CHRISTIAN and criticize him for spending so much time at a RADICAL AFRICAN-AMERICAN CHRISTIAN church that was run by a preacher who HATES AMERICA. It’s all ridiculous, because Obama prefers to wear MUSLIN, just like his father who is KENYON IVORY WAYNES. And also, MUSLIN sounds like MUSLIM if you squint your ears, so whose deity is he really worshipping, if he indeed WORSHIPS AT ALL?

• Criticize Obama’s wife and baby mama, OPRAH WINFREY, for flashing gang signals when she appeared on RACHEL RAY.

• Note that he didn’t get sworn into office in the U.S. SENATE by putting his hand on a BIBLE. Instead he put his hand in the COOKIE JAR. When he got caught, they went easy on him because he’s BLACK. Or is he? They all mention that he’s not all that black, since his mom was a WHITE WOMAN from KANSAS. Or was she? Wasn’t she actually from HAWAII like JACK JOHNSON? Or was he? Wasn’t he actually from OHIO like NEIL YOUNG, who probably SMOKES POT? Or does he? Okay, he does. Maybe even stuff grown near HEARST CASTLE (Wow, I’m seeing freakin’ ZEBRAS, man! That’s good shit).

• Mention that Obama doesn’t always wear a FLAG PIN. But that’s not a fair criticism because Obama’s SKIN BURNS when he touches anything PATRIOTIC. It’s not his fault, he’s just ALLERGIC TO AMERICA.

• Note that if you added up all the letters in his first, middle, and last names and divided them by three, they’d average out to 6 each. That’s 666, which all biblical scholars know is an AREA CODE IN LOUISIANA. They do not, however, discuss the median, which would be 7, a number generally considered holy because there were seven letters in each of the names of JESUS CHRIST.

• Emphasize the ambiguities about his race, which is clever because everyone knows that’s what has made Americans HATE TIGER WOODS.

Thanks for nothing

The other thing I was going to write about was the latest tragic, unnecessary, and easily preventable death on the Oceano Dunes during the Fourth of July weekend. It was going to be a real tear-jerker. I was going to tell you all about the poor lady who got decapitated by that flying dune buggy of death. She was a volunteer at her church, a 28-year-old single mother with 13 children, and in her spare time she liked to knit flag-themed underwear for the troops abroad. I was going to tsk-tsk about how much Tecate the driver had been drinking, and the fact that the parole department never should have allowed his ankle bracelet monitoring program to extend quite that far. It was an accident waiting to happen.

Only the accident didn’t happen. She didn’t die. Nobody did, at least as far as I can discern from news reports. What the hell’s going on in this world when a newspaper columnist can’t count on the bozos on the beach to act like clowns? Throw us a freakin’ bone. Or at least a major hematoma.

And this …

Not chuckling? Too bad. I’ve got nothing else. Derivative cornball schlock is the last refuge of the anonymous columnist. I was all set to write a column defending the 55 Fiction contest from the onslaught of criticism it usually attracts. Last year folks around here couldn’t pick up the phone without someone complaining that the entries were vulgar (and wonderfully so!), weak, or just too freakin’ weird.

This year … almost nothing. Chalk it up to the self-medication that accompanies the Fourth of July weekend or whatever, but nobody seems to be worked up about this year’s winners. It’s not that they were disinfected: We had two f-bombs, one “asshole” and a story mocking a Sunday service in there. Not bad.

Instead, my theory about the lack of complaints is that it’s because a bunch of the winners this year, unlike previous years, were locals. People round here don’t like it when outsiders take all the glory, so they’re willing to swallow the f-bombs, if you will, (and if you won’t, maybe you should loosen up and try it sometime), so long as they’re tossed within the eight-oh-five.

That’s my hope anyway. I live in these parts. So even if you think this column was crap, just remember that I’m a local. This crap is your crap. Namaste.