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Can you help me with a #moderncrisis and #personaldilemma: I hate Twitter so much. I had high hopes that Google Wave or some much better other thing would sweep it away, but it hasn’t happened yet. I found Twitter somewhat useful to check some tweets during the snow storms in DC (firefighters: look both ways when crossing street!) but most of the time, I just wish my favorite tweetsters could stop using this dreadful twitter novlangue and go back to blogging in full sentences already.

Of course, I have a Twitter too: I joined in 2007 but only started tweeting last year, for no particular reason, just to stay in the loop. Even you relented! Should I stop worrying and learn to love Twitter or do you see in the current twittermania the seeds of some awesome and smart new medium that could make me all excited and giddy like it’s 1999 again? — Grumpy in DC.

Dear Grumpy,

Nothing will make you excited and giddy like it’s 1999 again. That was 11 years ago! The Internet was pretty worn out already, even then, and the dot-com bust of March 2000 made it clear that the Web was just a lot of lies and dog puppets made of other people’s fake money. What were people even doing on the Internet in 1999? Selling the beanie babies on eBay?

And then, magically, some new stuff happened. Stuff we all take for granted now: blogging, YouTube, Facebook, sexting, LOLcats, ChatRoulette. And all of that stuff was pretty lame, too.

Twitter’s not really a whole lot worse than that other junk. The people who use it are worse, sure, because studies show more than 90% of Twitterers are gross old Republican senators. They don’t even know about the “140 character limit” on Twitter, that’s just how they think and write all the time — like idiots.

As for you and your friends, there’s no reason to stop writing in complete sentences or spelling words correctly just because you’re using one “status message” service or another. Wy wod u hav 2 do dat & lok vv dum? Just write a sentence that fits the space. Journalists and editors have been doing it since the dawn of the Printing Press, whenever they needed to make a headline fit the available space on the page.

Is it hard to write full sentences in 140 characters? Not at all. Americans already type too much garbage on the Internet. To be clear and concise is no crime. In fact, brevity in writing is often evidence of clarity in thought. I use Twitter for work, to announce things I’ve written and posts on Wonkette, and there may well be other benign uses for the thing. And every sentence in this paragraph was well below 140 characters.

Don’t let some old dingbat in Congress or halfwit celebrity decide how you will or won’t use Twitter. Just say no to creepy sext-ing politicians and illiterate Hollywood actors. Twitter doesn’t kill language, people do.

Send your important questions to ask.layne@gmail.com. But if you have a REAL problem, call the police or something, as Ken Layne will not really help you at all. This is just a web page on the Internet, and he is just a writer who works for Wonkette.

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Can you expound on the Politico analogy from a few weeks ago — i.e., what brands of tea best identify the various types of teabaggers? — Ed O.

In the famous cartoon editorial meeting at the bat-cave/newsroom of The Politico, a story was proposed in which varieties of yuppie tea would be matched to elitist Republican establishment figures — “Pawlenty is Chamomile because he is sweet and calming, Romney is Earl Grey because he is traditional and dignified.”

But what about real Tea Party people, those real pro-American Americans with the tragic costumes and illiterate poster-board signs? Do they enjoy fancy imported tea from those dainty little tins? Of course not. The only thing Teabaggers take out of tins is flavored dip.

The actual tea-related products associated with angry patriotic Teabaggers are a) Sweet tea from McDonald’s (corn syrup with a lemon wedge in a paper cup), b) Raspberry-flavored tea at the Cracker Barrel (corn syrup poured over crushed ice in giant plastic cup), and c) Snapple or Snapple-related beverages purchased at the mini-mart (corn syrup in a glass or plastic bottle).

Rather than being soothing, these “caloric beverages” simply make people bloated and insane. Stick to water. Or alcohol.

Any chance this could happen: Palin bypasses the GOP primary by running as a Libertarian, which would put her on the ballot in nearly all states and be an easy, lazy way out, and solve the GOP’s “Tea Party problem” by separating the tea party people from the GOP? — Dan at GMU.

When you’re talking about Sarah Palin, there is no shut-off valve on the Crazy and no limit to her financial ambition. If HBO offered her $50 million to wrestle Conan O’Brien naked in jacuzzi full of live hamsters, she would at least show up to get the paycheck.

At this point, politics is nothing more than a gimmick to keep her in the news, so she can keep getting ridiculously sweet gigs like a million bucks an episode to stand in front of a camera for two minutes reading some platitude about Alaska scrawled on her hand.

You think she cares about John McCain? Yet there she was in Arizona this week, pretending to support old Walnuts the RINO. Her reward? Adoring teabagger fans who were only there to bask in her hair-sprayed glory, and hundreds of news reports about the adventures of Sarah Palin.

What Sarah Palin’s very short and very embarrassing career in politics tells us is that she enjoys the show-biz and the green rooms and the celebrity worship and the luxury suites and the free stuff and the fat paychecks and her entourage of snowbilly Wasilla trash and lots of poor sad unemployed desperate people screaming her name. She cannot follow any rules or ethics or whatever, and her only belief is that the people around her at any given time should worship Sarah Palin.

It’s wrong to dismiss her as a complete idiot, because she has the cheap, mean, instinctual ambition of a mobster. But will she run a White House campaign as a Libertarian or Independent? As much as America needs this comedy in 2012, it’s unlikely to happen. Politics is about at least projecting the semblance of public service. Sarah Palin only wants her public to serve Sarah Palin.

Send your important questions to ask.layne@gmail.com. But if you have a REAL problem, call the police or something, as Ken Layne will not really help you at all. This is just a web page on the Internet, and he is just a writer who works for Wonkette.

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Dear Ken Layne: I notice that you are a big advocate of getting outside and seeing nature. I think you also wrote a book about walking the length of California, but maybe I made that up. If I didn’t make it up, when is your book coming out?

I wonder if you could help me find the motivation to exercise each day. I work at night and have plenty of time to sleep late and then go to the gym (which is free and in my building) but I still don’t do it. Instead I read the Internet and write jokes. I fear that as I age and my metabolism slows I will become morbidly obese. What to do? — Sincerely, Sara Benincasa.

You can’t escape reading the Internet and writing jokes. It’s your job, Sara. When you’re supposed to perform comedy onstage or host that nighttime radio show full of filthy sex talk, what are you going to do, talk about the transcendent quality of nature? (This is exactly why Ralph Waldo Emerson got fired from his job on satellite radio.)

Still, you want to exercise, like everybody claims to want to do these days. Morbid Obesity is apparently no longer the American Dream, what with the new Health Care Reform and the preventative medicine and the Death Panels. The problem, for many, is that exercise is Not Fun.

A gym in your building, is that fun? It’s an amenity, and adds to the price you pay for the apartment. Yet nobody ever thinks in anticipation, “I cannot wait to go to the gym in my building’s basement.” The only similar room to The Gym in most apartment or condo buildings is The Laundry Room, a Place of Shame people avoid unless they can’t get away with wearing the same stained sweater and stiffened socks for another day.

There’s often a teevee mounted to the wall in even the smallest gyms, so that the pain of exercising can be partially blotted out with the History Channel or cable news. This is also terrible.

Even the big city membership gyms — the 24-Hour Fitness centers and the Equinox and the Y — are built for the Chore of Exercising. (And finding sex partners, which is a kind of different subject, probably, but still a chore.) While some people love the whole gym atmosphere and the spinning classes and the parasitic foot fungi, you don’t sound like that person.

I despise organized exercise, myself. Don’t want a new social scene, don’t want to network, don’t want to buy hemp Workout Wear, don’t want some creep in spandex hopping in front of me like an insane frog, and sure as hell don’t want a Nordic Track. If we stacked all the unused Nordic Tracks in America, we’d have a ladder to the Moon. And then America’s Unemployed could carry supplies to our new Moon Base, like Sherpas.

You need to be forced to leave your building.

How fun would it be to join a crew club of incompetent amateurs who row along the river two or three mornings a week? Maybe not fun at all, but still! What about a springtime Central Park “health-walking” deal with a set schedule to make you feel ashamed if you don’t show up for what is literally a walk in the park?

If you’re not motivated by a dog who needs a walk or a natural love of some oddball activity such as riding a bicycle until you’re run over by a cab driver, some kind of Group Activity on a Solid Schedule might be your ticket to physical fitness and a regular supply of comedic material. And is there anything more beautiful than Central Park on a spring morning, or the Hudson as the sun comes up and the shorebirds go nuts all around you? Even a corpse floating in the river can be pretty when the light hits it just so. As Thoreau often said, when he was drunk, “New York City is Nature times a million, plus all the money.”

PS — Last year I did hike about six-hundred miles along the seashore from Tijuana to San Francisco, writing about the California Coast during this awful recession. And yes, that mileage math doesn’t actually add up at all. As for when the book might see the Light of Day, my current publisher is currently represented by a Customer Service webform. Publishing is a challenging business these days.

Send your important questions to ask.layne@gmail.com. But if you have a REAL problem, call the police or something, as Ken Layne will not really help you at all. This is just a web page on the Internet, and he is just a writer who works for Wonkette.

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I’m pretty sure this won’t get answered and published because it’s mundane, but how do people get a life — a nice fulfilling social life? I am 20 and currently in university. Most days I go through the motions of trying to chat people up and most days it works and I can pretend that I have friends. But when I come home, all I do is drink and whine about my horrid, horrid life on various Internet message boards.

Thing is, I am fairly certain I tried it all. Talk to people, act confident even if you aren’t. Invite people to stuff. Pretend you’re interested in the things you’re not, so people will like you regardless. But nothing is really working. And with the spring semester ending in less than two months, I’m realizing that I completely wasted the year. I just wish I was a normal 20 year old who goes to parties, gets extremely drunk and wakes up with some random girl whose name he doesn’t know. How do you go about making that happen? — Friendless and Miserable.

There’s a pretty wide road between a “nice fulfilling social life” and waking up with alcohol poisoning, a naked stranger and gonorrhea.

You can barely feign interest in a few moments of small talk during the daytime. What would be different at a party with the same vapid people? The drinking? You’re already drinking — and instead of seeking traditional human contact, you’re amusing yourself by typing at other people who also prefer typing into the void.

Let’s consider the possibility that you’re basically anti-social, a moody loner, and there’s not going to be a “nice fulfilling social life” for you at all — not if you’re defining it by the routines of other 20-year-old college kids.

Lots of people drink and type on the computer at night. I’m doing it right now — this column’s not going to write itself. If that’s all you’re doing, maybe dial it down a notch, and please don’t drink and drive, give a hoot, etc. I regularly advocate for getting the hell away from the computers on a daily basis, donating your teevee to a prison, and spending as much time as possible outside, away from traffic and office parks and shopping malls and Other Humans. Run if you like to run, walk in the shade and gaze at nothing if that’s your speed, take the stairs up to the roof of your dorm and read, your mental and physical health is going to instantly improve in tangible ways if you get outside for a solid hour every day.

But look, if you’re more comfortable hanging around message boards where some like-minded souls get together and complain, do that. Brood upon the wretchedness of your comfortable academic life, that is fine, this is the age to brood. And with the newfound clarity you’ll get from giving your eyes and brain a brief daily vacation out of doors, you might come up with a genius idea like this:

Get on your message boards and propose a pub meet-up around your campus or town. If the university has more than a few hundred students, there will be at least a couple of people on your Internet board who are also in your geographic area, and chances are they prefer typing and drinking to trying to fit at the parties for the social types, but would still like to know some people “in real life.”

Lots of forums and boards have meet-ups. In the United States, Fark and Metafilter host them, even 4chan has pub nights. If your thing doesn’t, start a thread, “ANYBODY IN [YOUR TOWN] UP FOR A [SITE NAME] PUB NIGHT?” Use your board’s in-jokes and slang to show you will not be butt-hurt if nobody wants to do this, and then watch in subdued delight as a bunch of people claim to want to do this, and then feel bad but quickly get over it when about five people actually show up the first time. Five is a lot of people! Who has/needs more than five actual good friends? Eventually, somehow, girls will appear and enjoy the witty/confident nonsense you talk about, with these people, and sex will be had. Wear a condom, etc.!

If your group is especially deficient in even the most basic Social Skills, you might need something more structured, like an MTV Awards Night party or laser tag or whatever you people do, hopefully something better than those lame examples. Do you spend all night sexting with hobbit enthusiasts, for example? There’s a whole cottage industry catering to your costumed whims. (Ha ha, “cottage,” because isn’t that where hobbits live, “in real life”? No they live in a kind of dirt hole with furniture, I guess.)

But, hopefully, a simple pub night will get you out with people who are fun to talk to, because you’ve got similarly trivial or depraved interests, and all the in-jokes and rapport that comes with that stuff. The first attempt might fail, just make it a regular thing, say Wednesday nights, what else does anybody have going on? Once a month, maybe. My ex-boss Nick Denton made a small fortune about a decade ago hosting parties for computer nerds too socially retarded to actually go out. It was called “First Tuesday” and that’s what it was, a party for Silicon Valley geeks on the first Tuesday night of the month. And then he moved to New York, where even the nerds go out because every apartment is the size of a bathtub, which is in the kitchenette with the futon, the end.

Ken, a friend asked me this question yesterday and I was totally stumped, so I’m hoping you can help me: What is the meaning of life? — Lewis Grossberger.

The meaning of life is a 20-year-old passed-out drunk guy in a hobbit suit who actually believed his favorite Internet board was hosting a “pub night” in an old abandoned warehouse down by the railroad tracks, and you’ve just given him gonorrhea.

Send your important questions to ask.layne@gmail.com. But if you have a REAL problem, call the police or something, as Ken Layne will not really help you at all. This is just a web page on the Internet, and he is just a writer who works for Wonkette.

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I need some sage advice from an internet sage. (I am eating a piece of pizza with sage on it).

I hate my job. More specifically, I hate being a 24-year-old paralegal. I took this job almost two years ago as a precursor to law school and a career as a public defender, or at least that lawyer that gets eaten on the toilet in Jurassic Park. Then the economy collapsed and law schools/graduate schools/cosmology schools became glutted with applicants and I realized how terrible the law is.

Like my entire generation I want to write. But I didn’t eat enough Panera or get enough internships to land something at The Atlantic like my peers. I’m starting a website with my friend but that too seems sad and cliche. I don’t even have a garage/running car to sit in while I blast “The House of Stone & Light” and think about how much my kids will miss me. What should I do?

And what’s it like soaking up America’s problems like a sponge? — Desperate in DC.

Law is a funny business. For all of its lingering popularity on the teevee melodramas, the actual attorneys I know are constantly trying to escape that whole line of work. They’ve always got a scheme: become a judge, start a blog, run for dog-catcher, write books, teach law school, get a cable show, join the Peace Corps, do porn, open a yoga studio, move to the desert and make pottery, open a cat rescue, etc. Nobody wants to actually practice the law. Why is that?

And now the economy is terrible and those giant law firms are firing everybody and — like so many other white-collar industries — the entire profession is “rethinking” itself, starting with those $300 billable hourly rates nobody can afford anymore. So you’d like to maybe skip the whole “becoming a lawyer” thing and go right to the “what I’d like to do after I’m done being an attorney.”

That is fine, and will save a lot of heartbreak. Especially if you’ve got some good, viable career alternative. Oh wait, you want to be a writer? As a job? Are you insane?

You may be a good writer, I don’t know. You might be wonderful, a genius. It has never mattered less, not since the days before people began paying a half-farthing or whatever for the week’s murder ballad delivered by a traveling minstrel with plague lice in her mustache.

Never mind the tens of thousands of laid-off editors and reporters and publishing people in the print industry and the decimated online publishing genre and the dull-eyed human survivors expected to do more work, more words, more copy, more Red Carpet slideshow captions for less money and the constant threat of the Friday email memo saying good-bye forever.

Your real competition is the Internet itself, with its millions of unpaid bloggers and commenters and Facebooking Twittering free laborers for the the Content Generation Machine. Every time you see a LOLcat, make something a Favorite, Retweet, read a Yelp review or laugh at an ALL CAPS death threat in a blog’s comments, you are both witnessing and contributing to the demise of paid writing. It’s done! Not completely, sure, and there will be a handful of humans overseeing the robotic dissemination of all news, ideas and celebrity features in the very near future. But these humans will be efficiency consultants or (whoops!) lawyers, not writers.

Even worse, there’s no prestige to go with the not-getting-paid part of being a writer. Nobody cares if you’re an author or a poet. It means nothing. And if you’re some kind of fool doing the journalism, you are openly hated and mocked by the only people who know you exist. This is part of the Humbling of Everything, the same “oh well I’ll just look it up on the Internet” era that makes once-respected figures like professors and doctors and (whoops, again!) lawyers just tired people with big student-loan balances forced to argue with some excitable amateur who sat up all night actually reading the latest research and literature relating to his or her problem. It doesn’t matter if the customer/patient made a crucial connection the professional missed, or wrote NOT THIS ONE, THE OTHER ONE on her “good knee” in Sharpie, or if it’s just another dingbat refusing to vaccinate a child so that a long-conquered disease can start wiping out the multitudes again. What matters is that the Professional is done — unloved, unwanted and unaffordable.

Even cops can’t get away with the crap they used to pull on everybody — everybody not rich and white, I mean. Since the Rodney King riots, police departments have been putting little video cameras on the cruisers. Might as well, because everybody driving around is going to take video on their cell phone and put it on America’s Funniest Race Offenses. The cop is revealed as just another high-school graduate who maybe spent a bewildering year or two in Iraq getting yelled at by officers and shopkeepers, in Arabic, and would now like to return the favor to some powerless Mexican kids. And it will not be long at all until those bomb-sniffing robots utilized by both the local PD and the Pentagon are upgraded to do the actual law enforcement. You think those Predator drones are going to stay in Pakistan forever? One day soon they’ll be “taking out” drug gangs in Tijuana and money-laundering shops in North Hollywood and meth labs in the abandoned stucco exurbs of Las Vegas.

There is just not a hell of a lot of use for any of us, not here, not in America. You want to write? Fine, write. Write volumes, write sci-fi masterpieces, literary spectaculars, ironic memoirs and footnoted post-post-modern 600-page monstrosities. But do something else for money, for sanity — Sarah Palin got all the remaining advance money, anyway. A writer may be a small step above the person who codes websites or makes “interactive apps” or causes the iPhone to fart when you walk by a cripple, but that’s not enough to die with dignity. And we all need more dignity.

There’s a bakery down the road from me, and every time I go there I feel like people are doing the right things. It’s a tiny place and the early risers nearly always get the fresh bread before I come around, but man it’s nice to buy the muffins and cakes made with care and love by people who know what they’re doing. There are artists I love who paint and sculpt wonderful stuff you can take home for a fair price and look at every morning to help remember why you got up, why you still bother. There’s a native-plants gardener in town who can spot every lousy invasive weed, and who goes to the city council to argue for regulations to protect the Joshua Trees and cholla cactus. These people are doing things. They’re getting by. One day soon, I imagine I’ll have to start actually working for a living, too, instead of just typing nonsense on the Internet for ever-smaller paychecks.

I would say “it was fun while it lasted,” but that would be a lie. It’s not really fun, unless you’re the kind of creep who wakes up in the morning and spends an hour admiring yourself in the mirror before writing a thousand words about your opinion on the health care or whatever. Jesus ….

Also, finally: If this is what you were made to do, this writing stuff, you will do it. You will do it because you won’t have a choice. And you’ll do it regardless of what you do for money. But for the sake of your soul, find a job that requires no thought, something that keeps your mind free from petty annoyances. The baseball writer Bill James wrote his early books for many years from the comfort of a boiler room, where he worked nights as a security guard. Edward Abbey worked as a fire lookout or seasonal park ranger. They had space to think, and they didn’t waste the solitude looking at goddamned Twitter.

Send your important questions to ask.layne@gmail.com. But if you have a REAL problem, call the police or something, as Ken Layne will not really help you at all. This is just a web page on the Internet.

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Somehow, and partly because we had super-cheap rent in YOUR FORMER HOUSE, and definitely because we never bought a bunch of crap like real estate or “cars made after 1994,” my modest cosmopolitan family was able to save a modest amount of money. For years, the formula worked pretty well: Save the loot in Europe, because the dollar would (and did) collapse for a decade. Occasionally change money to buy things in the U.S., like a baby.

But now, the Europe-money seems to be infected, too. I don’t like “investments,” I don’t like buying anything more expensive than a plane ticket, and Ron Paul won’t let me buy his gold. Also, I’m easily confused. All I want is to park my daughter’s school-lunch money somewhere safe, and maybe occasionally profit from & laugh at the “fat cats.” What is my program? — Matt (not Yglesias) in D.C.

I work as a writer, what the hell do I know about money?

BUT, the best way to hang onto what you have is to continue not buying stuff. And the best place to hide the money you’ve got is in low-cost no-load investment funds from a company that’s known for boring stability, think Vanguard or Fidelity. You can set it up online or have somebody walk you through it. Make sure you reinvest all your dividends (that means “earnings from your funds”) and automatically add to the pile through monthly transfers from your bank, however much you can comfortably afford.

Put as much as you’re allowed into retirement funds and college-education funds, always making sure the expense rates are NEVER more than half a percent — 0.5%. And put as much as you think you’ll need before retirement age (or college age for that baby you bought) in regular holdings at the same low-cost fund company. If you want to buy a house or cash out and move to Ron Paultopia in Belize or wherever, you can sell that stuff and pay the capital gains on your profit, which is the difference between what you put in and what you got when you sold it. So if you bought a thousand dollars in shares of a fund and sold it all for eleven-hundred dollars, you are taxed on the $100 difference, not the original thousand, GET IT?

You can stick to bonds or inflation-protected treasury securities if you want to be very safe and not feel the horrible sadness of watching your stock indexes drop by 40% or 50% every time there’s another financial collapse.

Or you can add maybe half of your pile to stock indexes that track entire markets, like the S&P 500 (a varied bunch of big companies based in America) or solid emerging markets (Asia and South America). And when you’re thinking about buying a house or getting old and retiring or whatever, start moving everything back to nice safe bonds. For the not-too-greedy person who is afraid of gambling, this is the safest way to make some returns on your money and not just lose it to inflation over the years, which is what happens when it sits in a bank making 0.0009% interest. Plus you’re contributing every month and reinvesting whatever earnings, so you’re adding to the pile all the time regardless of what happens to the markets.

(There’s an even easier way to do this, and it’s called a “target-date fund.” It is automatically re-jiggered as you get closer to retirement age or college time, so somebody else remembers to move your riskier stocks and bonds to very conservative cash holdings by the time you need the money. But if you don’t want to ever hold a lot of stocks, pick your own safe-as-milk combination.)

The main thing is to do this right, and then quit thinking about it, except maybe once a year, take a look, see if you want to re-jigger your fractions, maybe the stocks are worth more than your 50% allocation, so you put the difference in bond funds to even things out again, and etc. Really don’t think about it, never watch CNBC, read the business news with restraint and only as a disinterested outsider.

Then maybe dig up all your old 401ks from all your various forgotten jobs with a couple of hundred dollars here or there, and ask the nice people at your new low-cost fund company to help you move those things into one easy IRA made up of low-fee funds divided up the way your other stuff is sliced, with so many percent of bond funds and so many of indexes, etc.

And if you see James Cramer or Larry Kudlow or especially Alan Greenspan wandering around Washington, push them in front of a speeding bus.

Nobody should ever ask me about Money$ again because it is boring. Also never buy a house unless you are ready to keep it for the rest of your life, and the low-rate fixed mortgage plus property tax and insurance is cheaper than your rent, etc.

Rosie O’Donnell or Roseanne Barr? — Andrea in NYC.

This is a difficult choice, but the answer is Rosanne Cash.

Send your important questions to ask.layne@gmail.com. But if you have a REAL problem, call the police or something, as Ken Layne will not really help you at all. This is just a web page on the Internet.

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I am a young man (under 30, at least), but I have been in my share of terrible romantic relationships. I can’t seem to stop getting myself into them! I meet someone, like them a lot, start seeing them exclusively, and buy communal second-hand furniture.

But soon enough I’m so tired of their crap that if I hear about why taking out the garbage EVERY SINGLE TIME IT IS EVER TAKEN OUT doesn’t actually count as “cleaning up” — which apparently I never do! — I may fly my Cessna into Waste Management’s corporate headquarters. What’s worse, I always tell myself I’m not really unhappy, and let these things drag out months and years longer than they should. Is this natural, or has the TV or Facebook or whatever rendered me incapable of being in a long-term loving relationship? — Bothered in Brooklyn.

Facebook and the teevee aren’t helping anyone have a better life, but your situation might be one of the few modern problems not caused by social networks and wasting what’s left of your young life watching programs on the flat-screen.

Living with somebody, you people do it so casually. And then you’re all sad when, whoops, living with somebody is actually a Commitment, like Moses made to King David or whatever.

Don’t ever cohabitate with someone you “like.” If you like somebody a lot, go to a motel for the weekend. Let the housekeeping staff deal with your champagne bottles and condoms and rotting take-out. (AND PLEASE LEAVE THE HOUSEKEEPERS A DECENT TIP, JESUS, SO GROSS.) And then return to your respective apartments, date nights, the Wii, etc.

If you do live with somebody — and unless you make enough money to let your gal stay home as a Professional Houselady, and that’s what she wants to do with herself — you need to clean up your filth. Or pay for a maid service. Help the economy. Give a hoot.

But, come on, if you’re breaking up with people and moving out and etc. over housekeeping, stop moving in with people. You like youthful squalor? Enjoy it, wallow in it, and don’t try to make some casual girlfriend deal with it.

I enjoy your columns. If you were in the jungle or some other crappy place and you were being attacked by either a bear or rhinoceros, which one do you think you could beat more easily? Also, what’s you favorite kind of soup? — Kyle P.

Lentil soup is pretty damned good when it comes to soup. There’s a little cafe next to the National Park visitor center in Joshua Tree, and it’s got the kind of lentil soup you want even when you’re actually thinking maybe you’re hungry enough to go over to the Santana’s taco shop and eat about six quesadillas all dripping with orange grease.

Best soup I ever had was at the Hare Krishna restaurant in Prague about fifteen or seventeen years ago, used to go there all the time, food so good and pure it would dissolve the drugs and booze and other random toxins right out of your body and into Thin Air.

As for rhinos and bears, let them work out their own problems. When people get involved, all the animals go extinct. Ask the California Grizzly. Well, don’t, because the California Grizzly has been extinct for a century. It’s still on the state flag.

Send your important questions to ask.layne@gmail.com. But if you have a REAL problem, call the police or something, as Ken Layne will not really help you at all. This is just a web page on the Internet.

Powerhouse Museum Collection

Working in my overgrown backyard a few years ago, my shovel hit a metal container buried under a tree — the cremated remains of some guy who died in 1988. I thought about calling the city, but would I want to spend eternity on some shelf in the Los Angeles Hall of Records, or just be thrown in a dumpster? His ashes weren’t hurting anyone, and I didn’t really want to desecrate his resting spot. So I put him back in the ground. When I sell this house, am I obligated to tell potential buyers that there’s a guy buried here? It’s not like there’s a skeleton or tombstone, just a little box of ashes and bone fragments buried under a tree. — Very Worried in Eagle Rock.

Somebody who once lived in your little house loved it enough to want his remains placed there forever. That’s sad enough. Or his wife or kids or distant relatives didn’t know what else to do with the cheap urn after the estate sale, so they buried it in a shallow grave where the dog pooped. Sadder still. Either way, the final physical traces of this human were intentionally buried beneath a tree in the backyard, your backyard.

Maybe it was the guy’s favorite tree. Maybe he planted it back in 1953 or so, and in his later days would sit under its shady branches, reading Sunset magazine and worrying about Sputnik or the Mexicans. Maybe he died right there, who knows.

You are concerned about the legal consequences of less-than-full disclosure. I am not a lawyer, legally, so I cannot advise you one way or the other. What I can do is tell a story as ancient as time itself, which I read in either the Bible or an AARP magazine at the dentist’s office a few years ago.

The Peasant’s Rebuke

There once lived a man in the green hills of Glendale, or Glendale adjacent. He died of either gout or gang violence, but still had enough hobbit doubloons left over for a cremation. Within about a year of the Spring Equinox, his kin placed the charred remains in an oak bole, and then everyone attended a Renaissance Faire in Irwindale, where folke consumed goblets of mead and eated many-a-corn dog.

Later, some guy moved into the dead man’s house and happened upon the bony remains in a slender tin box sequestered beneath the earth’s surface. The guy was all, “I’m fifty grand underwater on this dump, and now I’ve got an INDIAN BURIAL GROUND in the backyard, just cold full of Poltergeists? I don’t think so,” and then verily he cornholed a narrow shaft into his neighbor’s yard, by night, just under the fence, and did entomb the remains right there, about three cubits from the original location, which is totally fine and pleasing to one and all gods.

Here’s another story, a true one: I was trying to sell a house a couple of years ago, right before the Entire Global Economy collapsed, because of houses. But nobody wanted to buy my house. This was a problem for many people at the time, and that’s why there were many news articles on the Internet about a new craze called “Jamming St. Joseph head first into the soil of your garden.”

You get a plastic St. Joseph — the actual father of Jesus! — and point his skull into the dirt. Pound him in, with a hammer or plain fear or whatever you’ve got, and say a prayer over his shameful grave for seven or ten days. Then you’ll sell the house, especially if you slash the price down to what people can actually afford.

Do you tell the new buyers that you’ve pounded a three-and-three-quarter-inch action figure of St. Joseph into the soil in a pagan ceremony? NO ARE YOU INSANE?

I’m having regrets about everyone in the world talking on a cell phone. Remember when you were terrified of calling a girl as a teenager because her neck-vein-popping Dad might answer the phone? Teens these days just call each other directly. Also, remember when you’d call your friend and have a nice chat with his roommate/mom/girlfriend/etc? Never happens anymore. How do I get back to that drive-by conversation feeling I’ve lost? — M. Roston, off off Wall Street, New York.

That girl probably got married and re-married about a dozen years ago, and she doesn’t even like boys anymore. You can’t go on blaming mobile telephones forever. Sure, fine, the cellphone is just one more assault on what’s left of the human soul. But it doesn’t matter if you click Next on ChatRoulette for the rest of your life, you’ll never see her again.

Send your important questions to ask.layne@gmail.com. But if you have a REAL problem, call the police or something, as Ken Layne will not really help you at all. This is just a web page on the Internet.

Image by Guvee via Flickr

Why is my cat in better shape than I am? I go to the gym six days a week and torture myself there with fake skiing machines and iron maiden-like devices for hours on end. I eat all sorts of healthy food and pay attention to whether my fat is saturated or not and whether I am getting enough stuff like omega-3, whatever that is. And he just sleeps all day and eats whatever crap I feed him, plus bugs. Will I have to eat bugs? I don’t want to. — Nigerian Business Executive, Africa (or maybe Spain).

Let’s not perpetuate a crude stereotype. Some cats are not fit and trim. Indeed, many cats are ill-tempered bloated globs of fur and disease. If you’ve seen the hilarious new comic strip, Garfield, surely you know what I mean.

But your cat is apparently one of the “healthy ones,” even though the creature doesn’t exercise in the traditional American way of buying a $1,500 fitness machine in seven easy monthly payments and then sticking it in whatever forgotten room in the far corners of the tract house, with the boxes of old computer magazines.

What dark magic is the feline demon practicing to keep so taut? Italian-American Strong Man Charles Atlas devised his “dynamic tension” home fitness course by watching lions and tigers stretching at the Brooklyn Zoo. Apparently, cats both large and small can stay fit by simple resistance, pitting muscle against muscle. Also, cats go completely insane for no reason at all about four times a day, trying to run up vertical walls and smashing into sliding glass doors. This is how they achieve aerobic exercise.

It is from this New World blend of big cats at the zoo and a Long Island muscleman’s comic-book ads that we get the modern practice of “Yoga.”

Does he burn her furniture at the end of “Norwegian Wood”? Also, why doesn’t my stomach digest itself? — Katy in CT.

John Lennon famously composed the pop song “Norwegian Wood” to conceal an illicit sex affair he was having with some wood. But his wife, an angry Swede, discovered the infidelity by hearing the song on the radio all the time for the next forty years. You are right to wonder if arson was involved. As for your stomach, it begins digesting itself — i.e., “you” — in old age. This is what causes death.

Send your important questions to ask.layne@gmail.com. But if you have a REAL problem, call the police or something, as Ken Layne will not really help you at all. This is just a web page on the Internet.

Image by Flickr

After essentially getting fired, I managed to put things together and get the last good job in America, but in another city. So my family and I moved, bought a house we can almost afford, found a good public school with the sorts of hippie progressive education stuff we believe in, and plunked the kids into it. “Landing on your feet,” people said. “Dodging a bullet.”

Of course the transition was rough for the kids. “Give it time,” “It takes six months,” people said. Turns out, people don’t know shit. Six months in and the kids are worse than ever. The fifth grader grows more sullen by the day; the second-grader breaks down and cries at dropoff time, “I’m so lonely,” ” I want to go back,” “Don’t leave me, please, I need you.”

What should we do? Where’s the line between telling them to tough it out and realizing they might be right — that we might very well have dropped into the pit of suburban anomie? — Krugmanic Depressive.

There’s nothing you can do, not about where you used to live and the job you had and your kids’ lives before the move. That’s all finished.

Even if you gave up this last good job in America, managed to sell the new house at only a slightly catastrophic loss and moved back to the old hometown, what would happen there? What kind of grim situation would you create, with no income? Try to find an apartment near the same school? Rent a foreclosed house up the street from your beloved old home? Live in a van? Struggle with part-time or free-lance, if you can even get that in this hellish economy? Send out resumes by day and snap at everybody by night?

If the kids are bummed out now, just wait until they find out nothing’s the same back at home, and Daddy has gone all The Shining. Their buddies and playmates have already moved on — six months is forever for grade schoolers. Gangs of school kids are vicious, regardless of their parents’ Progressive Intent or whatever. Last year’s best buddies would be complete monsters if your kids returned to town under different circumstances.

Your children may or may not understand this, so you want to sit them down and paint a somber picture of despair and betrayal back in the old ‘hood. Play some deranged music at a low volume, maybe that creepy Bartók violin thing or the soundtrack to Mulholland Drive. A few more tears won’t hurt, at this point.

But are you truly stuck in what sounds like a lame suburb where nothing’s fun and nobody’s really connecting? Of course not. Things are already uprooted and weird. Maybe there’s a funkier part of town, still close to your job, where the kids actually hang together and there’s a farmer’s market and a community garden and those “art walks” where responsible parents are allowed to dump plastic cupfuls of wine down their throats while the kids play on the water’s edge.

There might be an interesting charter school in town, with some outgoing kids who welcome new pals because everybody there has been uprooted by their well-meaning parents. The huge public school full of smug little punks in a nice neighborhood is generally only fun for people who grew up there — the new arrivals are never really going to fit in.

The kids need to find their spot, but make sure you’re not doing too much “dropoff.” If this town is home, you need to sell it to your whole family. Why shouldn’t this place be bombed from space? Make the case. Make it fun. These kids aren’t teenagers, yet, so you’ve still got some time. Americans move, it’s what we do. Nothing is permanent. And the kid who learns to deal with change is the kid who won’t be a drooling dope-addict wreck when the inevitable deaths and disappointments arrive, as they do for everybody.

How long will it take for Silicon Valley to save us all from the Great Recession? — Don Frances

Oh they just need to come up with another couple dozen Social Networks and interactive tablet experiences and everybody’s rich. Probably about 27 days from now. Be ready!

Send your important questions to ask.layne@gmail.com. But if you have a REAL problem, call the police or something, as Ken Layne will not really help you at all. This is just a web page on the Internet.