What can I tell you? Times are tough.

People everywhere are getting laid off. People are moving out of New York City. Others are reconsidering lifestyles, "regrouping" would be the New Agey phrase to describe it.

Wall Street professionals aren't seeing the bonuses they had seen in the past, some are seeing none at all.

The media reports doom and gloom and persistantly airs homemade footage of a terrorist smirking as he boosts of orchestrating a mass murder we've all known he happily orchestrated, but the news organizations play it anyway as if to say "Aha! Gotcha! You do need more time with us on air! This *is* news! And we have the scoop!"

Ken Kesey is dead and that leaves me hitting refresh too often on Thompson's column in hopes of new words from what may be the last of the counterculturists among us.

Phish is broken up and that leaves me with String Cheese Incident, which in other words, leaves me with my Dead bootlegs.

Bob Weir did an interview for America's Most Wanted in behalf of a Ratdog Tourhead who ended up dead on tour.

Teens snatch up tickets for acts that don't play instruments and call them bands.

Bob Dylan says that if he were growing up now with the music being made today, he probably wouldn't want to make music.

America ignores Ellen Degeneres, no longer in vogue now that she's openly gay, but can't get enough of Rosie O'Donnell and Tom Cruise.

We've had our first offical post-9/11 suicide. A widow in Pennsylvania, who three months after losing her husband, found life without him so miserable that she ended hers. At the same time, the media and the American public seem to find the love life of George Clooney, of greater interest.

Madonna's biggest complaint in life, appears to be the work ethic, or lack thereof, of laborers in England.

Auto sales are up. Eron declared bankruptcy after awarding billions in bonuses to employees.

Everywhere I look, I see the Godfather DVD recommended as *the* guy gift for Christmas.

Winona Ryder lost her shit and tried to shoplift 5K worth of merchandise from Saks.

A NYT deliverman in Manhattan, unloading newspapers at 5AM for delivery this week, was standing next to his doubleparked truck and was killed - sideswiped in the head by the passenger side mirror of a passing vehicle.

Hollywood continues to hold lavish premieres with celebrities in designer duds and Cameron Diaz in peachy lipgloss with a cool $20m paycheck for a sequel to Charlie's Angels, while Steve Buscemi resumes his former position in the FDNY and pitches in wherever possible with work related to Ground Zero.

Angelina Jolie and Bill Bob Thorton, somehow, assume the open "Ozzy and Harriet" role in America.

Africa's latest emergency is infant rape. African men, believing that the cure to AIDS is sex with a virgin, thrust their manhood into babies 5-months old, ripping the flesh of defenseless babes and marking them for death just after they were given life. Doctors use primitive instruments to sew up the newborn flesh as best they can as international relief workers pull out their hair trying to explain to millions that this practice will not in any way, treat HIV or AIDS.

The Pope, already old and feeble, vows to Fast in an effort to mend conflict with Muslim terrorists who want nothing less than him and his followers dead.

The French politic for the life of a Morrocan/French terrorist who helped plan the murder of nearly 4,000 people.

Charlotte Church thinks that America should stop dwelling on 9/11 and buy her new album.

Interest rates are cut and cut and cut and cut. Gasoline prices fall to the lowest prices in 10 years.

These are strange days, strange days indeed.

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