No one really thought it would work, a reality teevee show about government spending.  And it didn't, not at first.  Understandably.

It started out as "Let's Pretend We Care About Spending!"  It was a once-in-a-while program on cable access teevee -- a standard talking-heads, earnest round-table discussion, sprinkled with flat, mic-in-the-audience-of-five comments.

Intentions were pure, with producers trying to jump-start civic involvement and legitimate political discussion -- replacing apathy and posing -- in the country and its people.

There's a stand-up party game out, the traditional standby of social interaction in groups. Details have leaked: The game is from the Guild of Lazing Rich Old Buggerers (GLORB) -- the leisure service unit of Global Adherents of Special Persons' Protections (GASPP), itself a subsidiary of parent corporation HAVOCC, the House of Avaricious, Villainous, Oafish, Charlatan Capitalists.

It'll be a blast, as this is the same bunch behind Enron, the Exxon Valdez, fracking, GMOs, the BP oil volcano in the Gulf, mortgage crises, the credit crunch, bets on derivatives' bets, the hapless need for red-alert bank bailouts, inter-linked LIBOR manipulations, with even more in the pipeline, so to say, for the really lean years ahead.

You know the expression:  If it's not one thing after another, it's the same damn thing, over and over again.  The over-and-over part:  being on deathwatch, then losing another family member.  The damn thing, in this case:  Cancer.

It's the way these things go for those who survive:  Too many events are suspended in the fog of the surreal.  The sequence of events rubberizes and freezes clocks, stretching out and shrinking time.  Gravity is too variable, but almost always heavy-handed -- trying to run, or move quickly, makes one feel submerged to the neck in bread pudding.

This deathly period boils it down, right down to bare-bones existence.  Life, living, or feeling alive might come later.  For now, I am able to merely vote "present."

What's with all the zombies?

There was the horrific recent tale of the Miami face-chewer's assault on a homeless man, of course, the attacker high on a line of mind-whacking, over-the-counter drugs nicknamed "bath salts," the packet sporting a label proclaiming "Cloud 9," despite inducing the zombie-like behavior.

It's like a bad Saturday Night Live spoof:  Zombie Salts -- for stupes who think methamphetamine use and production isn't quite poisonous, vicious, or destructive enough for users, innocent bystanders, the country and countryside, or for the people who get to clean up in their wake -- from hazmat crews to social services and medical workers!