Hey everybody, it’s time again to dig deep into the NAB mailbag, grubbing around in the psyches of the psychos sickos cherished readers who write me (hey! where’s YOUR letter, huh?), and coming out smelling clean.

I meditate 4 hours a day, every day.  I get up at 5 am so I can meditate for 2 hours before work, then I make sure I get home in time to meditate another 2 hours, every day.  Why am I not enlightened?  And why am I not getting girlfriends? Signed, Buddhist, Long and Hard

Dear BLAH,

Dude. It’s not quantity but quality that counts (not the same as “size doesn’t matter,” but we’ll get to that later). You’re spending four hours every day meditating? Shit man, if you were any good at it, you’d be levitating by now. But no. You have expectations. And those will kill you every time.

You want enlightenment? Do you even know what it is? Sad to say, most meditators and New Age crystal-sniffers haven’t a clue. It’s something about transcending one’s body, they think. Ascension. Being one with the … something-that-sounds-deep-and-wise.

That’s bleh, BLAH. Also it’s crap.

We are not here to figure out a way to be not-here. In other words, we don’t go through all the crap of living in a body (have you thought about some of the mechanics here? Pooping, for instance? Whoever came up with that had a bitching sense of humor) just to figure out a way to not need that body anymore. Nope, we are “here” — in these ridonkulous bodies living on this awesome planet — to figure out how to really love being “here.”

And you can’t get that from sitting with your legs all twisted into a pretzel.

Enlightenment comes through LIVING, BLAH. Living and eating ripe mangoes and smelling fresh-baked bread and making people smile and fucking up. And fucking, period. Living is a way to love living. Also you will be having a lot more sex if you’re not om-ing all day sitting on a fucking pillow sniffing incense.

Go out into the world, BLAH. Hang out where people are (not like a stalker, but like a fellow human.). Take regular showers. Wear something that’s not a World of Warcraft t-shirt.

Get a life.

Love, Bitch

All right, the devastating earthquake in Haiti isn’t breaking news anymore, but the Bitch would be cold and heartless indeed if she didn’t weigh in on what some short-sighted or incredibly idealistic headline writer is calling “The Disaster of the Century.” (After all, we still have 90 years to go, and even though the Doomsday Clock was just ratcheted down by a minute, we’re still seven minutes away from complete and total annihilation by a bunch of fuckwads, so let’s not forget that.)

But you can’t call yourself human and not feel something at the sudden (and probably horribly painful) deaths of a huge number of people. Numbers are impossible to estimate at this point, but they’re talking 50,000 – 100,000. People. Dead. That’s the size of a decent city. And THREE MILLION people in Haiti are affected by the earthquake in some way. Tons are homeless. Their tarpaper-and-spit shacks collapsed, not exactly being up to earthquake building code requirements. And now they’ve got nothing.

So, total dickwads like Pat Fucking Robertson aside (really? Haiti is cursed because it made a pact with the devil? is that the best you could come up with, Pat?), where do the rest of us stand on Haiti?

1. Fact. Haiti is a dinky country located where it’s hot and humid much of the time.

2. Fact. Despite being the first independent nation in Latin America, which sounds all civilized and shit, Haiti — like most of the world — has had an incredibly fucked-up history including pirates, slavery, smallpox, revolution, more slavery, dictatorships, coups, crushing poverty for most and incredible wealth for a few, and US military occupation.

3. Is this a reason to ignore Haiti? Most of us haven’t been there, have no family ties there, have enough shit to worry about…

Three fucking million people. That’s about how many Presbyterians live in the U.S., living right next door. You’d help them, right? But here, have a look at these photos. People’s homes. Lives. Gone. If you’re breathing, you’ll feel something here. Fucking help Haiti.

So, what’s it gonna be? Don’t give me any shit here. Three easy ways to send help to Haiti:

1. RIGHT NOW, you can text “Yele” to 501501 to donate $5 to Yele Haiti. It’ll be charged to your phone. Yele Haiti is a foundation created by musician Wyclef Jean to help impoverished people in his home country. So easy. Just fucking do it. (Hint: this works more than once.)

2. So you can get into this texting for Haiti thing, right? Then text “Haiti” to 90999 and you’ll be sending $10 to the Red Cross. Not as hip as Wyclef Jean, but whatever.

3. Want to give money the old-fashioned way? Fine. CARE is focusing on rescuing children trapped in the rubble of the schools they were attending when the quake hit. Next, they’ll focus on bringing water and food to those who need it. OXFAM is another highly respected aid organization, focusing for now on getting clean water to quake victims.

Go on. Go. What are you waiting for? Already gave money yesterday? Fine, great. Then give up your latte today and DO IT AGAIN.

I am brilliant. You knew that already, but dude. I am fucking BRILLIANT.

You know this world peace thing that has people holding hands and kumbayah-ing all over the place? It even has the evil corporate sellouts Starbucks on board with a trite-but-effective Hallmark moment on Youtube.

What? The Starbucks thing was for African AIDS awareness? Oh, whatever. SAME FUCKING THING.

Jeez.

Where was I?

Oh, right. The world peace bullshit. C’mon, people, we grow through conflict. Hasn’t anyone ever mentioned that before? “Turn the other cheek” never meant be a pussy and walk away from potential conflict, it meant BRING IT, BRO! BRING ME SOME ASS TO KICK!

But hey, I can profane the Bible in so many other ways. We’re talking world peace shit here.

Which I have a solution for.

Sure, I think the whole idea of peace is a little silly. After all, war gives people something to do. It helps keep the population down. It gives people something to fret about. It causes shitloads of karma. That stuff can’t be bad, right? I mean, without war we’d be, like, happy or something.

But hey, have it your way. And because I’m brilliant I have the solution. To end war.

Inflatable boxing gloves.

BOP. Put a pair of these bad boys on and whack away. Think about it: your boss, your wife, the dude with 11 items in the 10-items-or-less line. You name it. BOP. Conflict ENDED, man.

Issue a pair of these to every man, woman, and child (and the ambiguously-gendered; wouldn’t want to leave anyone out here) and you have your world peace within about two weeks. Just insist that any conflict be resolved with the inflatable boxing gloves or we’ll be cutting balls off.

Simple.

Effective.

So. Fucking. Brilliant.

Okay, people, it’s time to clear this up. What the eff is “New Age ” anyway? Chanting om all day? Wearing patchouli and letting your armpits go European? Yoga? Crystals? Tantric sex?

Nah.

New Age is the catchall term some fuckwad started applying to the idea that Old = Bad and New = Good, sometime around the Harmonic Convergence. Remember that? That was the day in 1987 when we were all going to get aligned and shit and life was going to be awesome afterward. Seems like somebody forgot about some of the un-awesome stuff that’s happened since then, like George W. Bush and orange alerts.

(Apologies, by the way, to the before-his-time William Blake, who applied the term “New Age” in the preface to a long-ass poem about John Milton, in which Milton battles Satan and Blake merges with a twelve-year old girl who’s really him. Awesome stuff. But Blake’s New Age didn’t have patchouli’d armpits in it.)

Old = Bad

Dogmatic religions, for example. They’re definitely bad. New Age devotees shun religion like it’s raw liver left out on a hot sidewalk (which used to be a part of many ritual ceremonies, but that’s beside the point), preferring to replace their Catholic rosary with a Buddhist mala.

(Hint: those are both prayer beads.)

See? Old is bad. New is good. Repeat after me.

Some old religions are allowed. Buddhism is a must, because it’s way cool and hip. Also Buddhism is often confused with  vegetarianism, which is favored by New Agers who hate eating anything with a face.

Hinduism presents more of a problem for most New Agers.  While it scores points for vegetarianism (good), it had a lot of gods, which is confusing (bad). New Agers like the idea in concept of multiple gods (some with lots of arms! some are animals! they have sex!) which is a big fuck-you to the Big White Dude in the sky with a long white beard and a long white robe, but the whole thing gets tiring after a while (bad). New Agers can’t tell one god from another, except that one is an elephant and one is a monkey. Aside from them, the gods sound to New Agers like a big feuding family who all has sex with one another, and that just hits too close to home.

Speaking of everyone in the family having sex with one another, New Agers also don’t like the idea of multiple spouses as in some fundamentalist religions like extreme Mormonism and Islam. Ew! They say, How positively medieval! Yet, call it polyamory and everybody’s okay with it — it even gets its own HBO show.

New = Good

New, like crystals. You know, rocks? That have been in the ground for centuries? Yeah. Those are new. Nobody ever thought to pick one up before the Harmonic Convergence, when we all wore quartz crystals on our foreheads to raise our vibration.

New also means yoga, preferably in a hot sweaty room. Like before there was air conditioning. See, new!

New also means music, preferably using instruments that have been around for thousands of years. Drums and flutes. (The electronic barfplosion that was New Age music in the 1980’s doesn’t count.)

Oh come off it, who am I kidding? There’s nothing new. It’s really about getting back to what’s old-old. Old = Bad but Really Fucking Old = Good. See?

Examples:

1. Tree worshiping. Or hugging. Same thing.

2. Sustainable living. Didn’t ALL living used to be sustainable? Because if it wasn’t sustainable, you just starved?

3. Astrology. Cuz the stars and stuff have only been around a few gazillion years or whatever.

4. Vegetarians, vegans, and fasting. In the old-old days, if you had meat you ate it. if not you didn’t. If you didn’t have food you fasted. Simple, eh? How spiritual.

5. Worshiping the feminine. As if pole-dancing wasn’t evidence of this?

And the granddaddy of them all:

Book sales and workshops. Because where would we be if we didn’t have people telling us where to go?

There you have it. The Bitch’s Guide to the New Age. You’re welcome. Now go grow out your patchouli pits.

One little-known fact about me is that I carry my home around me on my back like a hermit crab. Yep, that’s me with dishes, pots, pans, tampons, and a Wii strapped to my back. Purty sight, ain’t it? After all, its not like I’m pushing around a rusty shopping cart filled with random plastic bags or anything. Swearsies! And my stuff keeps the rain off.

But once in awhile I like a roof over my head and to shower the bugs off, so I check into the Marriott or the W or sometimes even the Ritz-Carlton, because I like a place where the maids look you in the eye like they’re people, too. Plus they know your name.

Good evening, Ms. Bitch! they say as I waltz past in my 4-inch red stilettos. I stare at a place on the wallpaper until the maid passes. Nobody’s going to suck out my brains by looking me in the eye, nossir!

But hotels are teh awesome. Let’s elaborate, shall we?

1. Archaeology. I got my degrees in rocket science and brain surgery with archaeology well down the list, but I still maintain a layman’s interest. What better way to study Early Man than with the stains on the never-washed bedspreads? Admittedly, some are difficult to identify, which is why I carry a blacklight with me. Makes every stain glow vividly, especially the ones from bodily fluids. Which is most of them. Sometimes I amuse myself by playing Connect The Dots. Or conducting an impromptu Rorschach test.

2. Psychology. In addition to enhancing my personal self-awareness through staring at the stains on the bedspread (they’re never washed. Have I mentioned that?), I also study other people. I start by dialing random room numbers in the hotel, informing my next-door neighbor, for instance, that there’s a package awaiting him at the front desk. Then while he’s out I go in his room and steal everything in the minibar. Or carry a universal TV remote with you while you slowly walk the halls and and punch on/off repeatedly.

3. Statistics. Hotels are a guessing game. When was the carpet last cleaned? How many long black hairs will I find in the sink? Was my non-smoking room last used by a pack of chain smokers? These are fun and enlightening questions to ask yourself whenever you check in to a hotel. Keep track of your score and win prizes!

4. Location, location, location. My last hotel was situated next to an adult store, I kid you not. Score! I’d go back there in a heartbeat.

5. Paying extra for things. Like Wi-Fi. $12.00 PER COMPUTER? Sure, no prob. Or the whole minibar thing. I love a $4 pack of M&M’s. Pretty soon you’ll be paying for air. Not air conditioning. Actual air.

6. Things that smell like… Chlorine-bleached sheets. The aforementioned bedspreads (I warned you, did I not?). Skanky slivers of soap the exact size and usefulness of your tongue. Generic Hotel Cleaner Stuff, the kind that is in use by hotels worldwide and also in prisons (not that I would know, cough). Last night’s pizza-delivery grease-fest wafting through the elevator. The cologne-soaked loser in the hotel bar with a badly-fitting rug up top and a gold chain the size of his penis draped around his neck.

7. Surly desk clerks. You know, the 17-year olds with acne explosions like pink grapefruit hanging off their cheeks? Yeah, them. The ones who dare to claim trumped up charges for in-room porn. What? Me? I make porn, honey, I don’t watch it.

8. It’s Motel 6, dammit, not Motel $139.99. Whatever happened to the 6?

Wanna come stay at my house? I promise I’ll only charge you 3 bucks for the M&M’s.

Oh, fuck. Might as well stay home.

As a spiritual practitioner, I get all kinds of clients. (You might say it takes all kinds, but that’s beside the point.) for the most part these are people who have begun to make thoughtful choices in their lives, and who are looking to consult a higher perspective in order to get the tools with which to make increasingly conscious choices in the future.

Fine.

Those people don’t suck.

Nor do they really need my help, much. They’re looking for a nudge and that’s what they get, a nice big hearty nudge that sends them off in the direction they want to go.

I love those people.

Then there are the Fix Mes. Whatever the problem, whether it’s Mommy Issues or Daddy Issues or body issues or self-flagellation issues, or if they just haven’t been laid in three years, these are the people who Just Want to Be Fixed.

NOW.

FIX ME NOW. Their puppy eyes gaze back at me over my crystal ball. FIX ME NOW. PLEASE.

The thing is, most of us want to be fixed. And now. Fix. Me. Now.

The other thing is, it’s not that simple.

I knew there was a catch! Dammit Bitch. What do I have to do, anyway? Work for it? I have to work for it don’t I? It takes 7 years? Fine, I’ll wait. 7 years. Just fix me now, willya? Just a little? Pretty please?

Yeah, well, no. It doesn’t work that way.

It’s not that healing doesn’t take work, because it often does. It doesn’t have to, but most of you love self-inflicted pain, so off you go making things harder for yourself than you have to.

But the main problem is that when you offer your tender white throat up on the sacrificial block to be fixed by whatever high priestess you desire (and I look smashing in high priestess garb), you GIVE YOUR FREAKING POWER AWAY.

And how many times have we talked about that?

When you start thinking of yourself as

a) broken, and

b) incapable of fixing yourself, you end up becoming

c) fucked,

because there is nothing anyone else can do TO YOU that you cannot already do for yourself.

BROKEN + HELPLESS = FUCKED

The Quick Fix, i.e. Lose Ten Pounds in 3 Days! does not exist. Whatever “fix” you receive from another person is like crack. You know about Workshop Junkies, don’t you? People who adore going to spiritual or self-help or motivational workshops? They zoom into all that collective juice and come away thinking they are going to CHANGE and BE HEALED and TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, but then a few days or a couple of weeks go by and things look about the same. The sky is gray and dull again and lines are long and traffic is slow and there’s never any parking. And people suck and hell, THINGS DIDN’T CHANGE WTF? And then they sign up for another workshop so they can CHANGE and BE HEALED.

Is that what you want?

I’m not saying that the alternative is all about crying and tantrums and painful childhood revelations. It doesn’t have to be.

But when you stop asking to be fixed, you stop thinking of yourself as broken.

And when you stop thinking of yourself as broken, stuff magically heals.

So put that in your 2010 pipe and take a deep deep drag. Smoke me, baby. You’re hot and you’re not broken.

(Oh, hey, and that 10 pounds? Stop treating yourself like a fat person and they’ll go away, too.)

Goodbye, Year of Suckage aka 2009.

Oh, not for me. I had a fabulous year. For you. I know how many of you have been sniveling about the various woes of 2009, and I know that you’re now looking forward to casting all that aside with one flip of a calendar page.

Well, hell. It ain’t that simple, baby. And yet it is.

Fine, Bitch. Explain yourself, wouldja?

No problem. I’m always happy to oblige.

1. It’s not that simple. So what was your beef about 2009?  It was a tough year for a lot of people. I don’t mean to say Quit your complaining, lots of people have it way worse than you, but I could say that. But it was a rough year. Not just from the economy tanking, people losing hope for change, foreclosures, homelessness, hunger, hopelessness, and litigious ex-husbands, no — there was a lot going on. On an energetic level. Woo-woo bullshit, the kind that’s real and smacks you in the ass.

You’re a sensitive person. You felt this. SMACK! You dug deep inside yourself and brought up all kinds of sewer sludge that now you’re wishing was still buried in there. And now you’re looking around helplessly, wondering what to do with all the shit inside you that you can no longer hide.

This is why it’s not so simple to change your outlook by changing the page of a calendar. Your shit travels with you.

2. It’s easy-peasy lemon-squeezie. Seriously, people, you’re making this way harder than it needs to be. So sure, you unearthed a bunch of nasty stuff and you can’t get rid of it. Right? Is this where we are now?

Fine. I’ll give away my secrets. Because I sort of like you.

Here it is. It’s in two parts, so pay attention. If you blink you’ll miss it.

A. Be open to the possibility that things can change for you in a way that’s easy and painless.

B. Then fucking forget about it.

Yeah, I’m serious about that last thing. Forget about it. Go on with your life. Let go of needing to let go. Take one step and then another. How many new-age platitudes do I need to roll out here, anyway? Just take a breath and do whatever you need to do in the next moment.

And if you do that? You are going to kick 2010’s ASS. I promise.

Now go. Kick some ass.