triplehitter.net © Copyright 2002

Home   Meet the team   Contact us
  Advertise with triplehitter.net   What is triplehitter.net?  

Why not advertise here???

Name : Robert Levin Email : Mlevin5844@aol.com
Location : New York, USA Date : 15/09/2002

Levin Clears His Files

I've puzzled over it since last year's playoffs and I still don't understand how superstar basketball players can miss so many of their foul shots. We're talking about guys able and positioned to compile humongous career stats--twenty thousand women, a hundred million dollars--those are Hall of Fame numbers by any measure. So what's the problem? Are they ashamed to be seen cashing in their free throws? They can give them to me. I'm seriously middle-aged, five-foot-seven, myopic, arthritic and usually nauseous. Not every part of my body is still getting a proper supply of blood. The closest I've come to resembling an athlete has been in the manner of my deterioration; as with Mickey Mantle it was my knees that went first. But shit. I made six of ten just yesterday and it wasn't even my home driveway!
***
Since my memory loss is strictly of the short-term variety I have no problem remembering the last time I got laid.
***
Can we cut the crap for just a minute? Managed care isn't about reducing medical costs, it's about making money for the people who run and invest in HMOs.
***
Is it me or is it Congress? I mean, doesn't it miss the point just a little to allow a "successful" lawsuit against an HMO to result in higher premiums for its members instead of a devaluation of the HMOs stock and a lower annual bonus for its CEO?
***
I've never been represented by anyone in the House of Representatives.
***
The fitting response to "gatekeeping" doctors who refuse to order certain procedures or make specialist referrals because it means losing a percentage of their HMO take is, of course, to break their collarbones. But short of that, I think physicians found capable of compromising patient care for financial gain should thereafter be addressed not as "Doctor," but as "Mister," the appropriate title for the businessman they've opted to be. It may not seem like much in the way of vengeance, but I've noticed that doctor's get unhinged in a major way when you call them "Mister." (No, I'm not going to bother reconstructing any sentences to accommodate women doctors. Women are supposed to be more compassionate than men. If they pull that "I don't think the hole in your heart is big enough yet to warrant a cardiologist" shit, they don't rate even GENDER recognition--call them "Mister," too!
***
When you're put on hold in America you might very well be subjected to a lackluster Naval Academy Choir cover of "Bitch Better Have My Money." But when I called a company in Italy recently I got to hear the entire first act of "La Boheme."
***
Mother Teresa’s death, coming literally in the wake of Princess Diana’s, struck a friend of mine as a mean-spirited attempt to diminish Diana’s moment by obliging us to remember who our real saint was. My own take was something quite the opposite. A canonization ritual elsewhere in progress, I thought she’d seized an opportunity to complete her identity with an exit that would go relatively unremarked. I don't know what’s required to achieve sainthood status, but it seemed to me that her timing demonstrated how centered she had to have been--how free of ambivalence she was about the life that she led--and that it was testimony to her attainment of, if nothing else, a state of grace.
***
I've been pondering the "offers" to insure my accounts against default that I receive from credit card issuers. I agree that, stifling any chance for me to save money by charging interest
rates that would embarrass my local loan shark, these companies have good reason to be concerned about my ability to repay them should I lose my job. But, you know, the peace of mind problem here is all theirs. I myself miss no sleep over the prospect that I may one day be forced to stiff people for whom capitalism is too heady a system--who get much too overheated and giddy when they use it--and who should never have been allowed to participate in a free-enterprise economy. So I'm afraid that, in response, the best I can do is tender a counteroffer. I'll consent to the insurance if they pop for the premiums.
***
When individuals or groups demand that I respect them, they are evincing an uncertainty about their respectability--and a need for my reassurance--that only makes me contemptuous of them.
***
How slovenly we've become in our pursuit of money is no way better demonstrated than by the loose subscription cards that cascade from our magazines. I appreciate the fact that a lot of magazines are in trouble and I know that good subscription numbers sell advertising, but for me these cards have resulted in only a pronounced aversion to newsstands. And I can't be alone. The choice of having a torso that's permanently bent at an angle perpendicular to your asshole, or leaving a trail of "blow-ins" from your subway stop to your apartment door--tipping off the entire neighborhood that you've squirreled a copy of "Miraculous Mammaries" inside the annual face towel issue of "Macrame Times"--has to be hurting magazine sales at least as much as the dwindling literacy rate. (It should go without saying that those were arbitrary titles that happened to come to mind.)
***
Re: The final installment of Ken Burns's "Jazz." Isn't Branford Marsalis the entertainer who used to lead "The Tonight Show" band? What exactly qualified this man to pass judgment on the work of an authentic artist like Cecil Taylor?
***
In most of our stores these days, trying to negotiate a simple purchase with personnel who, by all appearances, were clients of the City University of New York placement service, is to subject yourself to a degree of stress the proverbial Turkish prison warden would be loathe to inflict. But it's stores where the salespeople are trained to pounce and hover, and where the security guards greet you at the door like they haven't seen you since you did hard time together, that irritate me the most. Betraying both desperation and a guiltiness about something, they automatically lose any prospect of getting my business.
***
The real mission of proselytizing religious groups isn't to share a revelation, it's to validate beliefs they're not sure of by securing the agreement of others.
***
Since I think that, for the most part, the people in charge of educating New York City's children would be more suitably employed as highway dividers, I certainly don't want to appear to be coming to their defense. But it should be pointed out that in its front page story about that faculty-written junior high school graduation program with all the spelling errors, the "Daily News" incorrectly identified "programme" as a misspelling of "program." In fact, "programme" is a legitimate, if chiefly British, variant. Apparently the folks who wrote and edited the "News" piece are themselves products of New York's school system.
***
Where can you relax or drop your guard these days? I'm thinking of how stressful and enervating the dumbing down thing has made all but the most basic of verbal exchanges; of the automatic defensive posture rampant greed forces you to take when you enter into the most elementary of financial transactions, and of the increasing incidence of random violence. And I haven't begun to talk about what you have to deal with after you've left your family in the morning.
***
Since I get all of the violence and profanity I need at home I only go to the movies for sex.
***
People tend to be confused about this. I'm not pro-choice, I'm pro-ABORTION. Okay? There are currently six-billion humans on this planet, most of whom are stupid and unattractive and all of whom show up at precisely the moment I'm in a supermarket aisle and reaching for something on a lower shelf.

Got any feedback on this work? Click here and quote reference number 216 or email the writer directly

triplehitter.net © Copyright