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"  First, I&amp;#039;d like to know what God sees when he takes LSD. And second, I&amp;#039;d like to know what you say to God when he sneezes. I wonder how Michael Jackson started out as a black man and ended up as a white girl. But in a world where carpenters get resurrected, anything is possible. I am dysfunctional by choice,  and I love my attitude problem. If you talk to God, you&amp;#039;re praying. If God talks back, it&amp;#039;s schizophrenia. I am constantly trapped in my own freedom, environment, and heredity. I prefer life on the outskirts of hell,  located east of a rock and west of a hard place. And since we&amp;#039;re all, in reality, living in God&amp;#039;s waiting room, I&amp;#039;m okay where I&amp;#039;m at.  Old age is anyone twenty-five years older than I am.  It does seem a pity that Noah and his party didn&amp;#039;t miss the boat. That rather pessimistic outlook is endorsed by such things as (a) it takes your enemy and your friend to hurt you -- the one to slander you and the other to tell you about it; (b) most people should be obscene and not heard; (c) the main problem with the Christian Right is that it is neither. One positive thing about old age is that you can remember everything that happened, even if it didn&amp;#039;t happen. Today I find my life in a gloomy region, where the year is divided into one day and one night and lies entirely outside the stream of history. The purity of the air is without doubt due to the fact that the people around me have their windows closed. However, I guess my life is better than that of a poor, thin, spasmodic, hectic, shrill, and pallid being. It&amp;#039;s easy to understand God as long as you don&amp;#039;t have to explain him. I continue to try to live up to the standard of one of my heroes, Henry VIII, who perhaps came as close to the ideal of perfect wickedness as the infirmities of human nature will allow. I&amp;#039;ve bought myself a beautiful and enchanting castle in a hick town where there is no place to go that you shouldn&amp;#039;t go. I decided to move out of my other place, the Tarantula Arms, where I had a nice furnished web. It was located in Pasadena.  If I owned both hell and Pasadena, I&amp;#039;d sell Pasadena and live in hell. Now that the impeachment nonsense has faded into history, I wouldn&amp;#039;t mind getting my hands on that bloated, sexist, prissy, pompous, unsmiling, and unthinking accuser and huge bantam cock of a man, Henry Hyde, who offers the quintessential proof that it is far better to keep your mouth shut and let everyone think you&amp;#039;re stupid than to open it and leave no doubt. There is nothing more terrifying than ignorance in action. If the average man is made in God&amp;#039;s image, then Mozart was plainly superior to God. Love is an obsessive delusion that is cured by marriage. The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married. In my next life,  I want to come back as either a proctologist, so I can deal with all the assholes I meet, or as a matador, so I can deal with all the bullshit. Oh, I almost forgot.  Bill Bailey just called and said he&amp;#039;s not coming home. Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people.  Since I&amp;#039;m one of those people who are not happy unless they are not happy, it&amp;#039;s comforting to know that mental health doesn&amp;#039;t always mean being happy. If it did, nobody would qualify. Originally published in the September 1999 issue Related Stories: \u2022 Be My, Be My Baby: The Phil Spector Story \u2022 The Best of Phil Spector (One Man&amp;#039;s Top Forty) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a727/esq0999-sep-learned/>