Well, Jay-Z and Beyoncé finally had their baby, which can only mean one thing: Here comes another baby song!

You know what I’m talking about, right? One of those intolerable, “Oh-my-precious-little-angel-it’s-a-miracle-that-you-were-born-unto-me” tunes that a songwriter is compelled to write every time he or she pops out another squirmer.

Whether you believe newborn babies are miraculous gifts from God or subterranean alien vampire-rats bent on draining your life force, can we at least agree that songs about babies tend to suck rusty buckets of contaminated amniotic fluid?

And this new tune by Jay-Z is especially abominable.

“You’re a child of destiny / You’re the child of my destiny / You’re my child with the child from Destiny’s Child / That’s a hell of recipe.”

OK. I want you to pause for a moment and marvel at the pure hideosity of that line: “You’re my child with the child from Destiny’s Child.” I want you to bask in the rays of its badness like a pale-skinned woman on an overpowered tanning bed; absorb the radiation of it on your face and neck—mind not the blisters and the hair loss— for a lyric as bad as this is a thing to behold.

Britney Spears’ “My Baby” is no less irradiated: “With no words at all / So tiny and small / In love I fall / My precious love / Sent from above / My baby boo / God I thank you.”

I want you to imagine that you’re Britney’s baby being spoon-fed in the kitchen, when suddenly mommy starts singing that song to you. Wouldn’t you eject the strained carrots onto her shirt and blurt, “Bitch, you better get your ass back in the rehearsal studio!”?

In Brit’s defense, “My Baby” sounds like a John Prine political ditty compared with Creed’s criminally negligent baby ballad, “With Arms Wide Open.” The worst part about that afterbirth is the video, which features singer Scott Stapp posing on a mountain top, his “arms wide open” toward the sky, his long, gorgeous Jesus-locks blowing in the wind and the fetor of a thousand soiled diapers blustering from his howl-hole.

Speaking of mucky diapers, Lauryn Hill’s baby song, “To Zion,” is a rash on the ass of all that is right and good. Lord knows Hill is full of herself, but how much of a messiah complex must you have in order to name your kid Zion?

And, look, I dig Stevie Wonder as much as the next guy, but “Isn’t She Lovely” isn’t. The melody is as mesmeric as a busted mobile, and all Stevie does is sing “Isn’t she lovely, isn’t she wonderful, isn’t she special” over and over again like a drill burrowing into the part of the brain that represses the urge to take sniper shots at random pedestrians.

I will concede that John Lennon’s song for Sean, “Beautiful Boy,” is lovely. But I often wonder how messed up it must be for Julian whenever he hears his dad gushing on the radio or jukebox, “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful… darling, darling, darling Sean”—given that Lennon neglected Julian as a child, which makes Lennon something of a parental dickweed, nullifying any fatherhood songs written by him.

The list goes on. The Dixie Chicks’ baby anthem “Godspeed” is in dire need of a spanking. “Prayer for You” by Usher should have been terminated in the first trimester. “Just the Two of Us” by Will Smith needs a circumcision—at the base. And it’s utterly impossible to keep your formula down should you happen to hear “In my Daughter’s Eyes” by Martina McBride.

And, yes, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Oh, Ed, you hate baby songs because you don’t have any children and don’t understand the miracle of new life.

Wrong!

You needn’t be a parent to understand the miracle of new life. Nor do you need to understand the miracle of life to scrutinize a song about the miracle of life, just as I don’t need to live in South Central L.A. to know “Straight Outta Compton” is a badass song about living in South Central L.A.

No, these baby songs suck for two simple reasons:

1. Childbirth is such an enormous, sentimental event in most of our lives that our emotions can be easily manipulated. You could write the lamest piece of cliché-addled garbage and everyone will blubber over it, leaving songwriters no incentive to compose something truly original and profound.

2. Baby songs never tell the whole story about parenting—no tunes about sleepless nights and bedraggled days; no odes about giving up your dreams, your friends, your drugs and your porn collection; no power ballads about how you’ll age an average of five years for every day you cohabitate with a toddler. There are no verses that mention that the only movies you’ll be permitted to watch for the next dozen years will feature talking cartoon animals and worse, a moral to the story, nor are there any refrains about how your sacrifices will go unappreciated—because they think it’s  invisible elves who stock the refrigerator and replace the toilet paper—and the day will come when not only will they not appreciate you; in fact, they will hate you. Sure as the babysitter will raid the liquor cabinet and blow her boyfriend on your couch, your children are going to hate your guts.

This is the thanks you’ll get for giving them life, because they are cold, cruel tyrants, and you are but a peasant who mollycoddles them. Hmm, I like that: “Cold Cruel Tyrant.” Now, see, that’s a baby song that needs to be written!

Well, 2012 is almost upon us. On Dec. 21 of that year—according to an interpretation of an ancient Maya calendar—the world is supposed to end. To that I respond, “Thank Christ Quetzalcoatl! It’s about frickin time!”

One of my greater pleasures in life is observing the hilarious backpedalings of certain crackpot prophets when the horrifying doomsday scenarios they champion don’t arrive. A recent example is radio minister Harold Camping, whose explanation for his incorrect rapture prediction was to claim that God was still collecting data. Then he predicted a new, modified rapture date, which came and went without so much as a single frog falling from the sky.

This is why I can’t wait for Dec. 22, 2012. Because there will be not one, but thousands of kooky soothsayers who will have to backpedal like hell once Mayageddon is proven to be horse shit. And I know it’s horse shit for three reasons:

The first is because I’m not an idiot. I realize, as a person with a full-functioning brain, that human beings are unable to predict what’s going to happen when they step out the door tomorrow morning, much less what will happen 5,126 years in the future.

The second is because the Mayas made no such prediction. This is a common misconception. There are no ancient hieroglyphs, no tomes, nor scrolls, nor scriptures that say, “Homies-of-the-future, beware! The world ends in 2012. Sucks for you, yo.”

“There are no Maya prophesies that seem to claim the world is going to end,” said Dr. Mark Van Stone, an expert in Maya hieroglyphs and author of Science & Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, in a KPBS interview. Stone said that 2012 is mentioned only once in any known Maya inscription, and all it says about what will happen on that date is that a minor god, named Bolon Yokte, will float down to Earth and “dress up.”

Yup, that’s what they believed. He was going to dress up, probably in some sort of ritualistic beak-and-feather costume, and prance around like a bird in flight.

Bolon Yokte: God of silly costumes

The Mayas never predicted an apocalypse. That was our own idiotic, superstitious interpretation of the fact that a Maya calendar “ends” in 2012. And I put “ends” in quotation marks because it’s not quite the right word. “Reverts” is the better word. There are no endings in the Maya calendar. In fact, the Maya calendar is not a single calendar at all; rather, it’s a series of 17 calendars, all of which have different cycles. For instance, the trecena calendar was on a 13-day cycle, the veintena calendar denoted a 20-day phase, the calendar round (a combination of other calendars) was roughly a 52-year cycle, containing the most common calendar, the tzolkin, which used 260-day intervals.

It’s all quite confusing and I barely scratch the surface of understanding any of it; however, for the purposes of this discussion, all we need to know is that the calendar that “ends” on Dec. 21, 2012 (called the long count calendar), is on a 5,126-year loop, after which a new cycle (or b’ak’tun) begins. So, saying the world will end in 2012 because that’s when the cycle reverts is like saying it will end on Saturday, because that’s the last day of the week.

The third reason I know that Mayageddon will not happen is because the Mayas were morons. Now, before I get a bunch of angry letters from MAAD (Maya Alliance Against Defamation), let me clarify: What I mean is, they were primitives—maybe not when compared with other civilizations of their time, but compared with more modern cultures of, say, the last 1,000 years, the Mayas were dumb as thumbtacks.

Of all the civilizations and religions in history that predicted different doomsday scenarios, we’re supposed to believe it’s these guys who had it right? The same geniuses who believed people are made of corn? The Einsteins who sliced open their penises with stingray spines to facilitate communication with deceased ancestors? The Darwins who drowned pre-pubescent children in order to satisfy a cranky rain god? The rocket scientists who divined the future by talking to birds. We’re talking about the Maya, who hung beads in front of their babies’ faces in order to cross their eyes permanently—these are your go-to guys for credible predictions? I wouldn’t let a Maya pick my next football parlay, let alone when I can safely start maxing out my Visa for an Armageddon credit blowout.

Still not convinced, crackpot prophets? OK, how about a bet? If the Mayapocalypse doesn’t arrive on schedule, you have to dress in a ceremonial beak-and-feather costume and walk around Horton Plaza with a sign that says “Bird brain.” And if the prophecy does come true, I have to give you my spot in the bunker I built when Y2K was upon us. Yeah, I know—silly me. But I was afraid I would get hit by one of those planes that were supposed to drop out of the sky.

Ed Decker
12.12.11

A few months ago, I bought an iPad for my wife. W had been hinting for a while that she wanted one, and when I say “hinting,” I mean telling me every day to buy her an iPad or she was going to staple my lips as I slept.

And boy was she happy when I presented it to her. For one short moment in time, I was the guy on the white horse in the Old Spice commercials who could do no wrong. Immediately after opening the package, she logged on to Facebook and boasted, “My honey just bought me an iPad! Isn’t he the most wonderful, greatest, bla bla bla and best husband ever?”

Naturally, this did not go over well with any of the men in our inner circle of family and friends— The Brotherhood, as I like to call them. In fact, it was my brother-in-law, Sage, who promptly Faceblasted me for going rogue.

What is going rogue, you ask? Going rogue is buying or doing something so wonderful, thoughtful, bla bla bla for your wife, that it causes all the women of the inner circle to blurt to their husbands, “How come you don’t buy me no iPad!?”

Indeed, in the few short minutes after W’s Faceboast, all the other wives of the inner circle—The Sisterhood—began posting about what lazy, rotten, cheapo bastards their husbands were for not doing the same.

Not that any of the members of our Brotherhood deserved it. They’ve all purchased excellent, spontaneous gifts in the past. In fact, it was shortly after the iPad debacle that Sage himself went horribly rogue. The little bastard—for no reason other than to express his devotion and bla bla blappreciation—brought his wife, Jessica, a bouquet of flowers accompanied by the following note, which she promptly posted on Facebrag:

“Dearest Buttercup, you are my sun, and moon, and gag, vomit, hurl. For you, I would climb to the top of the highest retch, sail the roughest bile, because I love you from the bottom of my barf.”

Make no mistake. This was a far more serious transgression against The Brotherhood because his gift came from a place of adoration, whereas mine was merely an effort to muzzle my wife so I could play Call of Duty in peace.

What followed was as hilarious as it was tragic. W was in the living room, scrolling through Facegloat on her iPad, when she saw Jessica’s post.

“How come you never do anything nice like that for me,” she snorted, holding the still-shimmering iPad in her greedy fingers!

Oh, well, that’s how it is with wives, I guess. You and she can be on the terrace of an Italian villa overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and still she’ll figure out a way to say “You never take me anywhere” with a straight face.

It’s just what married men must deal with and, since we can’t change women, the best we can do is stop throwing each other under the bus, because, up to now, the concept of going rogue has been unclear and discombobulated. Therefore, I have taken it upon myself to clarify and, um, combobulate, the rules and definitions of rogueism.

There are three basic ways to go rogue.

The first, and most common, is buying your significant other a spontaneous gift—for no other reason than to express your love and undying bla bla blavotion—and, sure as Herman Cain was dropped on his head as an infant, it’s an abomination unto The Brotherhood.

The second example is buying a non-spontaneous gift, you know, during those gift-expectant holidays (birthday, Christmas, etc.), but spending far more money than anyone else in The Brotherhood is spending. For example, if you buy the missus a two-karat diamond for Valentine’s Day and the rest are doing chocolate and flowers, you have gone senselessly rogue.

Last, any of those creative and priceless-type gifts—like writing love poems, or having “Happy anniversary, darling,” plastered across the stadium JumboTron, or building a red carpet made of rose petals that lead from the front door to the bedroom, where you’ll be waiting in silk boxers and grasping a bottle of baby oil—are especially disagreeable to The Brotherhood, as they require planning, effort and—shoot me now should I ever go the silk-boxers route—passion.

Of course, in a perfect world, no man would ever go rogue against his boys. But we live in the real world, with real women—women with hormones that rage like barbarian marauders across the continent of your marriage—making it sometimes necessary to wander from the herd in order to prevent your lips from being stapled together.

In these instances, just be sure to notify The Brotherhood of your intention to stray. This way, it gives them the opportunity to buy something of equal value, or begin the quarantining process— which is done by dropping their wives’ cell phones in the garbage disposal, hacking their social pages and infecting them with some sort of influenza bug that will keep them from leaving the house all week.

So, men, are we all on the same page? Excellent! Now let’s all take the Oath of The Brotherhood. Please put your hand on our bible—1001 Fart Jokes— and repeat after me: “We, the proud, brave—yet war-weary—married men of The Brotherhood, do solemnly swear to go rogue only when necessary, to alert The Brotherhood when deviation is unavoidable and to reject Satan—The Old Spice Guy—for it is he who will lead us into the shadow of the valley of the doghouse, so help me Hemingway, amen.

Gallup recently reported that 50 percent of Americans are in favor of legalizing marijuana, while 46 percent remain opposed.

Well, doesn’t that just bubble my bongwater! For the first time, we can actually say that there are more rational, logical, free-thinkers in our society than idiot bovine who mindlessly devour the propaganda of the anti-fun fuddy-duddies who have lorded over our country for way too long.

Naturally, after Gallup released the report, all the anti-fun fuddy-duddies appeared on the cable news shows, rehashing their tired B.S. that marijuana is not a virtuous blossom grown from the mineral-rich soil of God’s green Earth, but that it’s a heinous pistillate fertilized in the hothouses of Hell with the blood and bone-bits of deflowered Girl Scouts.

OK, nobody quite put it that way, but there was an awful lot of fear-mongering, such as when David Evans of the Drug Free America Foundation told MSNBC’s Chris Jansing that “Marijuana use is going to double or triple” if made legal.

Don’t you hate when people make declarative, predictive statements about things that might happen when everybody knows that nobody knows what the future holds. Evans said that marijuana use is going to double or triple, not “I think it will” or “I believe it will” or “My gut feeling is that it will”– with “gut feeling” being an appropriate way to say it since double or triple is a statistic he clearly pulled from his anus. Actually, to retrieve such a ludicrous stat, he had to reach his arm beyond his anus—deep into the ravaged hinterland of his rectum, past the cold, crusty crevasse of his dying colon, up the snaky ravine of the intestines, where his fist waged an epic battle at the gates of the ileocecal valve (fiercely guarded by the Owls of Ga’Hole) and drilled into the slimy folds of the lumen, where poop and other poop-like matter (such as bogus statistics) are formed.

Double or triple? Please! There is no way of foretelling such complex matters of human behavior—especially when no one knows if legalization will cause the price of marijuana to rise or drop; or how much it would be taxed; or how much government regulation would be implemented; or how much, and what kind of, marketing will be permitted— which is why not a single, legitimate, scientific study has attempted to predict how much consumption will increase, if at all, and why Evans had no choice to but to retrieve that number from the recesses of his bowels.

Whatever. The job is to frighten the herd into submission. So, the fuddy-duddy cattle farmers spew their propaganda on cable news shows like CNN (Cattle News Network), HLN (Heifers Late Night) and, of course, FOX (For Oxen Only) News, and all the livestock on Mooing Moron Farms believe it—unquestionably—just as they believe that the slaughterhouse is where well-behaved cows go for a spa and massage.

My gut feeling is there would be a slight increase in usage if pot were made legal (about 10 to 15 percent), which would occur over the course of a dozen-or-so years, and my reasoning is:

1. Pot is already as easy to acquire as any legal drug and damn near as easy as buying groceries.

2. According to a 2009 survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, roughly 102 million Americans (41 percent) have admitted to using marijuana during their lifetimes, while 15 million (6 percent) admitting to using regularly.

Put another way, of the 102 million Americans who have tried marijuana, 85 percent of them did not become regular smokers, which suggests that there is a whole shitload of people out there who tried it and realized, at some point, it wasn’t for them. This suggests that it wasn’t a law that kept those 87 million people from smoking dope (or they wouldn’t have tried it in the first place); rather, it was their own disinterest.

There is something Evans said that did make sense. He said that when cannabis consumption doubles or triples, “all the costs to society will double or triple, as well.”

That seems reasonable. Whatever the increase in consumption—10 percent, 50 percent, double, triple, centuple—the cost to society will likely increase, respectively. Of course, the question then becomes, what are the societal costs of marijuana consumption and legalization? Is it the cost of manufacturing more cardboard Pringle’s tubes ? Is it the cost of pressing all those extra String Cheese Incident concert tickets? Is it the cost of providing emergency-room health care to uninsured reefer smokers who burn their fingers trying to light the last millimeter of roach? Or, is it the cost of hiring more IRS agents to collect and oversee the estimated $6 billion in extra tax revenue should pot become legal?

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Didn’t Decker just attempt to predict the future by saying we will reap $6 billion in taxes? Perhaps. But at least I didn’t pull the number from my ass. I pulled $6 billion from a study conducted by economics professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University. Of course, he could be wrong, too. It is—study or no study—just an opinion. However, it’s an educated opinion, which is only my opinion about his opinion, but I’m right about my opinion—in my opinion.

The column was called, “Sons of Lame-Archy.” In it, I razzed the concept of biker clubs and gangs. The part that caused the brouhaha was a digression in which I lamented that none of the gay biker-gang names I saw online had any of that queer flair I love so much, like—and I don’t mean to re-inflame—“Hell’s Anals, The Sodomites and The Mangols.”

I meant no offense. They were just the kind of flamboyant biker-club names that I thought celebrated homosexuality, the kind of gay-biker-gang names that said, “In your face, homophobe! We are no longer going to ride in the closet!” The kind of biker gangs I would join if I happened to be gay or even entice my hypothetical gay biker son to join when if he was old enough.Among the swarm of angry emails, tweets, Face-pastes and blog-floggings were several responses from staffers of San Diego Gay and Lesbian News (SDGLN), including publisher Johnathan Hale, who reported my column to GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), and assistant editor Morgan Hurley, who tweeted that “There is NO appropriate context for those types of words,” and wrote a column in which she criticized me for, among other things, not apologizing. That’s when the bees really started buzzing.

And while I received a lot of support from members of the LGBT community, a lot more sent very angry, accusatory missives, all of which boiled down to one or all of the following questions 1. Is Ed Decker a homophobe? 2. Is it ever permissible to use bigoted epithets? 3. Does Ed Decker owe an apology?

1. Is Ed Decker a homophobe? Not even close. My queer-friendly street cred is airtight. For starters, I have written dozens of columns in which I ferociously argued in favor of gay rights and viciously attacked its enemies.

Second, I, too, have been a victim of homophobia—in the workplace. True story: The company for which I worked at the time had transferred me to a new store. For reasons that don’t matter here, I was favored by the supervisor (who was thought to be gay), and an assumption spread that I, too, was queer. It didn’t take long before I was uniformly outcasted, ridiculed, sabotaged and—get this—poisoned.

Last on my list of pro-gay cred is the fact that—wait for it—some of my best friends are gay. Yup. I said it. Some of my best friends are gay. Why shouldn’t I say that? If I hang out with gay people, it sort of defeats the whole homophobe concept, no? Cases in point are two of my closest friends in the world, Danielle LoPresti and Alicia Champion (founders of San Diego IndieFest), who have appointed me as godfather to their newborn son, Xander Lucian, and have asked me to be a bridesmaid in their upcoming wedding. I haven’t decided whether I should go in drag; regardless, if a man agrees to be a bridesmaid in lesbian wedding, well, let’s just say it wouldn’t be long before he gets kicked off the Fallbrook Annual Aryan Homophobic Apple Bob and Barbecue Planning Committee.

The LoPresti-Champion family

2. Is there ever a time when it’s permissible to use bigoted epithets? Great question. Answer: Yes.

Ms. Hurley likened the FGGT-word to the N-word, which is a reasonable comparison. She also said that it was “never, ever” OK to use these words, which means I need only one example to prove her wrong. Of course, I have many (such as Louis CK’s hilarious and obviously non-hateful bit about the FGGT-word), Lenny Bruce’s various uses of the F- and N-words, but my favorite happened about a year ago, in the live-music bar where I worked.

That night, we had a touring band consisting of members of different lineages—two Africans, two Mexicans, an Arab, an Asian and a couple of crackers for good measure. When the night was over, the band and some of their friends drank at the bar while we bartenders stocked beer and closed shop.

Once we were all sufficiently intoxicated, one of the band-friends pulled out a camera-phone and announced that it was time to play the “Shout the Most Offensive Racist Slur You Can Think Of” game. Apparently, this is something they did after every show on the tour. It was an easy-enough game. Everyone took turns shouting the most outrageous racial aspersion they could think of, followed by a round of uproarious laughter, hugs and backslapping.

I don’t think I’d ever laughed that hard. There was something so freeing about it—especially the shouting part—as if the slurs were ostrich eggs we cracked against the wall and watched all the hate and anger—the yolk—of those words harmlessly dribble onto the floor.

When the camera pointed at me, I stopped what I was doing and shouted, “Niggers don’t tip!” The two bruthas leaped up from their stools and high-fived and hugged and complimented me for such exquisitely hateful hate speech—all of which felt so good I wanted to leap over the bar and make out with them both.

3. Should Ed Decker apologize? No, he should not. Because it would be the most bigoted thing he could do.

After having spent the last 17 years razzing Christians, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Scientologists, Africans, Asians, Arabs, Latinos, Caucasians, Republicans, Democrats, athletes, musicians, sports fans, pot snobs, beer snobs, snob-snobs, women, men, cats, dogs, bikers, bar customers, bartenders, waitresses, MYSELF, my writing, my looks, my family, my friends, flight attendants, cartoonists,  parents, children, cheerleaders and guys named “Chaz” without a single “sorry” to share between them, wouldn’t it be patronizing to apologize now? Wouldn’t that assume gays and lesbians need coddling or special treatment? I mean, yes, absolutely, I am “sorry” that my words have been hurtful to some, but I do not apologize, because I did nothing wrong.

That said, I don’t want any apologies, either. For those who called me a “homophobe,” “bigot,” “hater,” “enemy to civil rights,” “ignorant” and “filth peddler,” warned me to  “watch my back” and spread my column around the country to stoke a response—no apologies necessary. In fact, I’m stoked by the ferocity of your response. I’m stoked that you mobilized against what you perceived to be a hateful voice, stoked that your  days of taking shit and cowering in shadows are over, that you’re increasingly more willing and able to shout, “In your face, homophobe!” Honestly, I’m so happy about that it makes me want to leap over the bar make out with each and every one of you.

Ed Decker
09.05.11

Epilogue: The letter from GLAAD

After I’d written the first draft of this column, I received a cordial, non-reactionary letter from GLAAD’s senior media strategist, Adam Bass:

At GLAAD we believe that a couple of your fictional gay biker group names used terms that were unnecessarily offensive.  The satire of the column was not lost on us, but we believe the jokes could have used different words to get the same point across.

The letter went on to ask that I not use words like “faggy,” “sodomite” and—this one took me by complete surprise—“homosexual.”

Because of the clinical history of the word ‘homosexual,’ it is aggressively used by anti-gay extremists to suggest that gay people are somehow diseased or psychologically / emotionally disordered…. Please avoid using ‘homosexual’ except in direct quotes.

Here is my unabridged response to him:

Dear Adam,

Thank you for your fair and reasonable letter. As a life-long hater of homophobia, I understand why so many in the LGBT community took offense to some of the language I used. However, I must respectfully decline your request as I am a firm believer that what really matters in these situations is context.

A good example is the revelation (to me) that the word “homosexual” is now on the list of words I am not permitted to use.

First of all—and again, I say this with utmost respect and with no desire to offend—I do not recognize GLAAD’s authority over my vocabulary. My opinion is that there is absolutely nothing offensive about “homosexual.” It is—by its etymology—exactly what it defines, with zero innuendo. Homo means “same” and homosexuals are people who are sexually attracted to members of the same gender. It just couldn’t get any less offensive than that.

I mean, if we’re going to start indiscriminately banning words, I can think of one that is far more offensive than “homosexual,” yet is embraced by the gay community.  The word is “homophobe” and here’s why.

I think you would agree that the word “homo”, as a noun (not a prefix), is currently considered as one of the more offensive anti-gay slurs. Well the word homophobe takes the word “homo” puts it in front of “phobe,” creating a word that means “fear and/or loathing of homos.”

Whoever coined the word “homophobia” didn’t know what they were doing because an etymological breakdown of the word shows that the word is actually made up of a prefix (homo as in “same”) and a suffix (“phobia” as in fear) without a root word.

Technically, homophobia means “fear of the same” which doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless, you know, it is applied to someone with an irrational fear of cloning.

But that’s not what the coiners were doing. Whoever coined it was using homo as a root word – as in, “that guy is a homo” – and attached it to phobia, making homophobia more of a slur than homosexual. However, it doesn’t have any anti-gay baggage so it remains acceptable – proving that context is what matters.

I also took issue with the reason GLAAD says “homosexual” is off the table, that it was “aggressively used by anti-gay extremists.”

Well, sure , any word can be aggressively used by extremists, even polite ones, or, in this case, clinical ones. That’s the point. It’s not the word; it’s the context. And the reason that “homosexual” is the next word on the chopping block is not because there is something wrong with it; rather, it’s that there is something wrong with the way some people use it.

If we ban “homosexual” and make “gay” the appropriate term, bigots will eventually start saying “gay” with contempt, and in 10 years we’re back to the same place, banning “gay” this time in favor of the next acceptable word, and the next—killing word after word without understanding that no matter how many words we kill, the bigots live forever.

Thank you so much for your letter and the cordial tone with which it was written. I have great respect for GLAAD and its endeavors. Let me know if you need the gratis services of a spunky writer—I’d like to chip in.

Ed Decker,
San Diego CityBeat

I was zip, zip, zipping through Ocean Beach on my little, black and silver, 150-cc Lance Milan putt-putt motor scooter when I pulled alongside a real biker, dressed in full-blown biker-gang-guy regalia, leaning on his Harley waiting for the light to turn green.

We glanced at each other simultaneously. I nodded hello, and he—get this—laughed in my face. He looked at me, looked down at my bike—making a quick assessment about my manhood (which he identified as Level-7 Pussy)—looked back at me and laughed, out loud, real nasty-like. Then he turned away in disgust, as if a glob of bird shit had landed on my head and was dripping down my cheek.

It wasn’t a big deal, really. I know the score. Harley riders deplore scooter riders the way stand-up comedians deplore mimes. And pretty much everyone else older than 12 thinks scooters are a joke, too. Well, everyone older than 12 can suck on my skid marks! My ride is a beast. It goes zero to 60 in—well, actually, it doesn’t ever get to 60. But it can do 35, no problem—only takes a few minutes to get there. Then it’s zip-zip, putt-putt all over the place!

Seriously, though, for me, a scooter makes crazy-good sense: For one, it’s a huge money saver. The gas, insurance, registration— even the cost of the vehicle itself—combined, are only a little more expensive than renting a couple of Pauly Shore impersonators for a party. Second, I work from home, which means no long freeway commutes. Lastly, I live at the beach, where parking is scarce and traffic is fierce, making a scooter ideal because it parks anywhere and splits the lane to get to the front of the line at traffic lights—which is exactly what I was doing when I came upon the biker.

Now, for the record, I didn’t nod to him as though I thought we were badass biker brethren of the road—as if we had something in common the way, say, a Corvette owner would nod at another ’Vette owner, or the way black men in Alpine nod on the oft chance they cross paths. No. I nodded to him because we were standing right next to each other, looking at each other. It was a human-to-human nod for crissake, not biker-to-biker. I would never consider my little putt-putt job to be in his hog’s league. However, I’m also not going to feel inferior because my chosen mode of transportation doesn’t meet the approval of a man who cuts off the arms of a leather jacket with a hacksaw and thinks that’s punk rock.

When the light turned green, he revved up and peeled out, leaving me in a poisonous cloud of noise pollution, hate pollution and pollution pollution. And what I thought as I stared at the back of his motorcycle jacket, with the motorcycle-club iron-on patch was, He thinks I’m the pussy!? The guy who irons decorative patches onto the back of a sawed-off leather jacket because he thinks that’s punk? The guy who replaced the stock tailpipes on his ride with ones that are twice as loud, for no other reason than to be noticed and/or annoying? The guy who belongs to some juvenile social club with handshakes, passwords, parliamentary-style bylaws and arbitrary officer rankings? You know how those first meetings always go: “OK, so I’ll be the President, and Bear will be V.P., and Vulgor is the Road Captain, and Sammy “the Hammer” will be Sergeant at Arms”—and then you have the “prospects,” who are basically college-fraternity pledges, which is really what these biker gangs are, rolling fraternities, the only difference being that biker gangs have goofier names. Here are just a few nuggets of comedy I found on MotorcycleClubIndex.com:

• Organized Kaos (stifling my laughter).

• The Wastelanders (as if they were a gang of rolling marauders, scanning a post-apocalyptic hinterland for scantily clad, mute chicks and gasoline).

• Gospel Riders (who are, their website says, “Motorcycling for Jesus”).

• The Centurions (actually, I wanted to name my first rock band The Centurions—when I was 15!)

• The Star of David Bikers (blood enemies of The Gospel Riders).

• A Few Good Men (which is not what you think; though, you have to wonder how it was possible not to notice the gayness dripping off that name).

Speaking of homosexual bikers, I absolutely had to Google “gay motorcycle clubs” when researching this column. Alas, all that came up were totally inoffensive, non-hilarious monikers like The LGBT Motorcycle Club, The Golden Gate Guards and The Spartan Motorcycle Club. What a disappointment! I was hoping for some totally awesome, totally faggy, gay-biker-gang names, like The Sodomites, or The Truck Stop Cruisers, or the queer chapter of the Mongols Motorcycle Club—The Mangols. Or how about The Fag Hags, for a motorcycle gang composed of meth-addled straight chicks who follow The Mangols. Or, my all-time favorite gay-biker-gang name I just made up: Hell’s Anals.

I swear to God, I am seriously thinking about going gay just so I can wear that patch on the back of my sawed-off leather jacket. At least then, when I encounter one of these holier-than-thou Harley enthusiasts on my little zip-zip, putt-putt motor scooter, he’d have a reason to object to my presence: Because my iron-on biker-gang patch isn’t making fun of gay people; it’s making fun of him and his amusing fraternity, preposterous costume and obnoxiously loud tail pipes that he intentionally modified for no other reason than to be obnoxious and loud.

Vice President Joe Biden collected some trouble recently when he seemingly endorsed China’s controversial population-control policy during his visit there.

“Your [one-child-per-family] policy has been one which I fully understand,” he told the crowd. “I’m not second-guessing.”

It didn’t take long for his enemies to pile on, including House Speaker John Boehner, who said he was “deeply troubled” by Biden’s statement.

Doesn’t Boehner’s hyperbole make you wretch? He wasn’t just troubled by Biden’s remarks, see; he was deeply troubled—as if Boehner was pacing in his office all week, brooding about the apocalyptic effect the VP’s speech will have on our nation.

“The result being,” Biden continued, “that [China is] in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. [It’s] not sustainable.”

Well, whaddaya know? Biden wasn’t endorsing it after all. Rather, he was making an economic argument over a moral one. Because, as Biden knows, when you attack someone’s morals, they become defensive and all progress comes to a halt. It’s called diplomacy.

Of course, I got a laugh out of the whole thing because, while everyone else was demanding that Biden publicly denounce China’s family planning policy (which he did), all I could think was, Denounce it!? Are you nuts? Denouncing a one-child-only policy in China is like denouncing a one-mosquito maximum at your campsite. Why would anyone denounce the greatest government moratorium  since the Trojans banned giant, rolling, wooden horses from entering their city gates?

To hell with the Great Wall—the one-child policy is the shit that belongs on all their tourism posters:

“Visit China—what few kids we have are muzzled.”

Or,

“Beijing! Where the brothels outnumber the brats!”

Oh, sweet Republic of China—how long is thy immigration line? For I would gladly tolerate the traffic jams, pollution, rampant public spitting, government-controlled media, bizarre alphabet, squat toilets, avian influenza, aggressive pro-panda propaganda (propandaganda?) and, worst of all, the 24-hour All Lucy Liu channel, to live in a country that isn’t inundated with chil—OK, OK. I’ll stop. Sorry. I honestly didn’t intend to run the joke so far into the ground. You know I was joking, right? You know I know that the Chinese family-planning policy is barbaric. I would never support a law that limits our right to reproduce; however—isn’t it time our government stops promoting reproduction?

There are many tax benefits that incentivize procreation, not the least of which is the child tax credit, which gives families $1,000 for every dependent under 17. That is udder bovine excrement! Given our overpopulation problems, people should be incentivized toward not having kids. We should give a $1,000 tax credit to every child a taxpayer does not have. If you don’t have two kids, you get a $2,000 credit. Not having four kids gets you $4,000. As for me, I plan on not having 15 children. I know, I know, 15 is a lot of kids to not have, but the way I see it, I’ve got a lot of love not to give.

Another problem with the child tax credit is that it goes to the wrong people. Currently, only families earning less than $110,000 are eligible. That means we are subsidizing lower income-people to breed, which is utterly whackbasswards.

Lower-income families usually have to work three or four jobs and can rarely afford quality childcare, so their unsupervised golem are free to loot convenience stores and drop bricks from overpasses all day. The last thing we want is for them to have more children. Better to incentivize upper-income people because they have money: They can afford a team of tyrant-nannies to crush their children’s spirits. They can afford to build a sound-proofed dungeon in which to shackle and torture the little murderers-in-the-making. They can afford to seal all their offspring’s orifices with expensive cosmetic surgery.

And while I do oppose the Chinese concept of levying fines or prison sentences for violating one-child law, I am down with taxing parents extra. For instance, we should institute a “Screaming Hellion on the Plane” tax. I’d also like to see a “Too Much Pee in the Public Pool” tax; a “Mommy, Why is that Man so Fat and Other Insults” tax; an “Everything on TV Sucks Because We Can’t Let Kids Hear Bad Words or Encounter Adult Concepts” tax; and, of course, a “No Fun Family Values Asshole” tax for all those a-hole parents who think they can dictate adult behavior—such as when we have to stop drinking beer at the ballpark, how much porn we can view in the public library, who can’t marry whom and how many feet away from the middle school we have to be when selling or buying our drugs—all in the name of protecting “the children.”

What’s that you say? Families are the backbone of America and we need to make it easier on parents to raise smart, healthy and productive members of society?

Are you crazy? Did you not see Children of the Corn? Scary, right? Well, turns out Children of the Corn wasn’t a horror movie after all. It was a documentary.

Holy Kee-rist, what an abomination! It looks like the Harmony.com profile of a bovine-semen collector who inappropriately enjoys his job too much. And what is that extra fold of skin just beneath my left eyebrow? Is that eyelid fat!? Kee-rist in Heaven, where did that come from?

There are so many reasons why I can’t stand having my picture above my column, some of which have nothing to do with the fact that I am ugly and old. Here are the top five:

• No More Identity-Denying: Every now and then, a stranger will approach and ask, “Are you Ed Decker?” Sometimes I say “Yes” in spite of the possibility that the asker will stab me in the face for writing an unflattering missive about his sister’s vagina. Other times, I deny my identity—not necessarily because I fear the wrath of Sir Sister-Vagina-Avenger, but because there is a likelihood—especially if it’s a drunken bar encounter—that I will be subjected to an hour-long reprobation of my writing skills, and/or an impassioned sermon about all the things that are wrong with my political opinions, and/or a screed about why I should stop bashing religion, all of which will be followed by a request that I write about his “totally awesome band,” The Attention Whores. So, um, yeah, CityBeat, thanks for that.

• No More Fly on the Walling: One of my favorite life-moments is the rare occasion when I stumble upon somebody who is in the process of reading my column. I love that! The last time it happened was in a Mexican-food joint. A couple in their early 60s were sitting at a neighboring table, reading it together. They were taking turns pointing out certain parts and laughing. When finished, I embarked on my usual undercover ego-recon mission: “Pardon the interruption,” I said, “but what are you reading that’s so funny?”

“It’s a column called Sordid Tales,” the man said, lifting the paper to show me the cover. “It’s in CityBeat magazine.”

“What’s it about?” I asked.

“It’s about the writer getting fired from his bartender job,” the woman responded. “It’s pretty funny.”

Well hot damn! I thought. They like me. They really like me! It’s a feeling that never gets old. But now that my goddamn face is up there—complete with quinquagenarian wrinkles and disgusting eyelidulite—I can kiss any future undercover ego-recon missions goodbye. Thanks CB.

• No More Man of Mystery: I used to receive a certain amount of flirtatious emails from enthusiastic and, let’s say, libidinous ladies. Well those days are over, too. See, when my picture was not on the column, an enthusiastic, libidinous lady was free to imagine me as whatever knight-on-a-white-horse, movie-star, hero, hunk, lifeguard and Marlboro-Man-of-her-dreams man she always dreamed about. It is for her that I grieve.

Even my wife loves the columnist-me better than the actual me. When she reads it, she fantasizes that it’s written by a totally yoked, college-age pool boy who comes over to clean the Jacuzzi we don’t have. Thanks a lot, CityBeat, for crushing what few little moments of joy W. had in her life.

• Parent Killing: Until now, I’ve been able to confound my mother and father into believing that the Ed Decker of Sordid Tales fame—the booze-slurping, drug-sopped porn-monger with the sense of humor of a high-school freshman that got left behind a time or two—is not the same Ed Decker as the one they raised. When they realize it was me all this time, their brains will likely burst, so, thanks for killing my parents, CityBeat.

• Ideological: I’ve always felt that columns which contained an image of the author diluted or distorted the effect of the words within. It’s the same way I felt when MTV debuted in 1981. I remember seeing Mark Knopfler’s goofy face and scrawny body for the first time and saying, “Huh? That’s him!?” The guy responsible for some of the most smoldering guitar pizazz of all time is wearing a Miami Vice patio jacket, neon-pink headband and glowing orange leather pants as if he were Sonny Crocket’s bi-curious lover and street informant from the theater district.

And I damn near dropped the bong the first time I saw Def Leppard in—oh, Kee-rist, say-it-ain’t-so—leotards! Now, it’s important to note that those early Def Leppard albums were respected, hard-rocking recordings, released long before big-hair glam had even been identified as a genre (largely because, without MTV, nobody knew they wore makeup and big hair in the first place). When I finally saw the video of them wearing leotards, eyeliner and an osprey’s nest of twigs and straw held together by a quart of Aqua Net on their heads—well, let’s just say I wasn’t able to masturbate to my Olivia Newton John poster for three months.

I never listened to those bands in quite the same way again. And now, I fear, you’ll never read these words in quite the same way, either. Although, admittedly—from a reader’s perspective—I do prefer seeing the face of the author. There’s something organically appealing about that, and I fully understand why the CityBeat overlords want to include our photos. I just can’t stand looking at mine, not in the least.

“Dear Ed, [I read] about this job in Norway or Iceland… where people hire drinking buddies for the night. Man, if you couldn’t swing this, no one could.”—William H.

The company to which William refers is called the Kind Fairy Agency out of the Ukraine. For about $18, they will hook you up with a drinking pal for the evening.

I do love this concept, but judging from the tone of the company’s press release, I’m not sure Kind Fairy is right for the job: “We are not trying to get people drunk deliberately,” says director Yulia Peeva. “Our main mission is [to provide] good, fruitful conversation.”

“… [W]hen I see that a client is relaxed,” says professional drinking buddy Gennady Maksimov, “I urge him to talk rather than drink more.”

Well, what the hell kind of drinking buddy company is this?! A true drinking partner doesn’t “urge” his buddy to drink less—unless, of course, he’s on the verge of talking shit to a table-full of soldiers of The Mongols motorcycle and murderers club.

And the “main mission” of any true drinking excursion isn’t “conversation.” The main mission is drinking. All that other stuff—talking about problems, exploring philosophical concepts, arm wrestling, picking up hotties, telling jokes, starting bar fights, closing business deals—whatever it is any two drinking buddies decide to do while they drink together—will vary from buddy to buddy. However, the one constant—the raison d’etre—of a having and being a drinking companion is drinking.

Oh well, you get what you pay for, I guess. Eighteen bucks does seem rather inexpensive. Not to be snooty, but I’ll be charging a helluva lot more than that to be a professional drinking buddy. But then, that’s because I’m a pro.

My credentials are impeccable: For one, I like boozing with other boozers, so you won’t be hearing any of this “urge him to talk” talk from me.

Also, as a veteran bartender, I have had plenty of experience breaking up fights, which means there’s a decent chance I can talk Mongols’ Nation out of pulverizing your spine into a fine powdery substance and snorting it. However, if I fail, and a bar brawl with these felonious behemoths is imminent, well, don’t worry, because I have your back… gammon board. It’s at my house, where I’ll be hiding with the blinds drawn.

And what is a bartender but a paid drinking buddy, anyway? For years I’ve listened to the go-nowhere stories of the mumbling masses. I listened as they cried into the pints of their broken marriages, crumbling careers and devastated self-esteem. I’ve listened to them rant about their political ideology, religious convictions and conspiracy theories. I have heard so many brain-butchering tales of exaggerated conquest and valor that I actually grew an extra ear canal to receive all the crap I don’t care about.

The secondary canal runs from the outer ear, to the inner ear, toward the brain, but then dips—bypassing the brain entirely— down the spine, into the intestines, and, finally, into the rectum goes whatever turd of a story (also known as a “mono-log”) that had just been shat into my ear.

So, how does that benefit the client? Well, having a secondary ear canal means you can talk incessantly without worrying about my going into a coma.

Finally, not only am I a talented and efficient drinking comrade in the field; I’m also a scholar of drinking-buddy philosophy.

I know everything about the subject, including: Shot Rotation Theory, The Psychology of Barstool Selection, Quantum Waitress Seduction Mechanics, Beer Goggle Defogging and proper back-patting methods for when your drinking buddy is pitching dinner in the bushes.

I’m also well-versed on the history of drinking buddies. For instance, did you know the concept didn’t even exist until the 9th century? Apparently, two males boozing together was seen as being totally gay, so they only drank alone or in groups. It wasn’t until 865 AD, when Viking warrior Godfrid “Drippy-Beard” Ragnarsson drank side-by-side with Ivar the Boneless—the infamous berserker King of Scandinavia.

Legend has it that Boneless, so named for his difficulties with impotency, was distraught over the sudden death of his queen. And though it was Boneless himself who murdered her in a rage for failing to arouse him, he was still stricken with grief. Not wanting to be alone, he invited Drippy-Beard to join him at the pub.

By all accounts, the meeting was a success:

The two drank long into the night, guzzling mead and devouring cow legs until Boneless had forgotten his despair and nearly split his belly open from all the riotous, blow-hardy Viking hilarity.

The night did end in tragedy, however, when Drippy-Beard made a pass at Boneless during the walk home. It was then that Boneless discovered, as evidenced by the bulge in his tunic, that he was not impotent at all. Turns out Ivar the Boneless was gay as a glory hole in a Gomorrah bathhouse. So, he did what any closeted Viking king would do in this situation—he beheaded Drippy-Beard on the spot.

So there you have it: my drinking-buddy résumé. The cost is $25 an hour, plus you pick up the tab and the cab. Oh, and don’t worry: If you get a bit boozy and decide to make a pass, I won’t lop off your head. I will charge extra, though.