I Have Been Wronged

I hate being cheated. I'm sure you do too. I'm sure if we put our heads together we can in a disturbingly detailed manner recount the last 8,309,347 we have been sleighted by someone or something. Furthermore, because we are so very self respecting I am sure it would be no trouble to remember in painstaking, unbiased reminiscence every single time in our lives that we were taken advantage of by someone who was far better off than we to begin with. Nothing feels quite so bad as getting taken for a ride by people who just have no good reason to. Desperation is one thing, but the rich picking on the poor because riding in the Bentley or eating sushi off of the dropouts of America's Next Top Model is so passé.

The pathetic thing is that examples veritably abound across the headlines these days. Just ask these guys...







Yes that's right you know each as the one that might have outdone his predecessor as history's greatest swindler. Men whose infamy is the only thing bigger than their fortunes or egos is their infamy. Men whose popularity is best measured in death threats received.

Perhaps these slimy sleight-of-handers can lend a bit of comfort to our miserty. I propose just because it sounds attractively phoenetic that all those moments whether past present or yet to occur in which you were positively cheated by someone's whose otherwise wealthy situation made it all the more egregious that they cheated you Madhoff Moments. But I contend the list is incomplete...may I propose one more addition to the list?





That's right, the pasta, sunshine, olive oil, and wish-we-were-still-an-empire capital of the world. I have been personally wronged by this great state and so have every regular reader of this blog. Whether you know it or not Sam's 21st birthday was on Monday, and it has taken me this long to stop being shattered by the depth of the injustice brought to my doorstep. I can count 16 boxes of Kleenex's on the floor...all empty and I have burned out my copy of the Fox and the Hound for I assumed that only they could understand the completeness of my depression.

So pardon me while I don my ethnocentric blinders, but where do you get off Italy? You've had my closest daily companion for near a month, but that wasn't enough? You had to steal him for his birthday as well? Wait a moment, not just any birthday (picture Lewis Black here) BUT HIS 21st BIRTHDAY!!!??? It isn't even a big damned deal in Napoli to turn 21. In America it's one of the few birthdays to interrupt an otherwise dull American existence otherwise only punctuated by the red light going on at Krispy Kreme, getting another excuse to call Obama a socialist/communist, apple pie you bought at Wal-Mart eaten at baseball game with your mom which ended in fireworks and your team won...or YOUR 21st BIRTHDAY!!! It's OUR first excuse to go get smashed (or if a UD student get smashed legally).

You, the thoroughly criminal nation of Italy, have precisely zero reasonable excuses for perpetrating this offense. You as an entire nation would now be looking up at every creep who ever kicked a puppy. No worthy explanation for making my entire 6/1/09 into 1440 Madhoff moments. Though approximately 50 of your number were immediately party to the crime, the blame rests with all of you for the sickening complicity it took to rob us of the chance to get Sam ridiculously drunk, hold his head up while he puked, and then make fun of him the next morning while recounting exploits he cannot recall.

No wonder Rome fell.