My friends, I am here to tell you that The State of the Jungle is dizzy!

What? Whoa, where am I? How are you doing? Where can I take you?

I'm getting mixed messages. The dumped girl flirts and runs. The finance advances and suggests. Go too far, see the signs, get down, turn around, jump back and kiss myself. How did the end finish before the beginning?

No more quality holidaze until May. How come Leap Day isn't a holiday? The day only happens once every four years, and yet it's treated like every other 24-hour stretch. Just another day in the can to keep us regular. We wouldn't want to get ahead of ourselves. Or is it behind?

My Alma Mater loses at home to Air Force. Jeez, this team sucks. My Alma Mater wins at home against the league-leading Utah Mormons. Hey, this team's all right! Is it the high altitude that makes me dizzy, or is it the disparity in effort? Do you know what a disparity is? Okay then.

Dean becomes a professional wrestler when he loses in Iowa, and Kerry adds a new layer of skin when he wins. Gephardt never grew eyebrows, and Edwards grew some balls. Kucinich continues to garner a dedicated one to two percent because some people just can't get enough of the bottom of the barrel. No, I'm not a Democrat, but I will vote like one in the presidential election. And my head just started spinning for the lesser of two dizzy spells.

What's that, Prez? Stop taking steroids? Standardized testing is the only way to see how well the kids are learning? Pretend I'm a ten year-old girl? I don't get it. I just don't get it. Since when did everything going wrong in this country become my fault? Just take my freaking tax money, buy some more bullets, and leave me alone. Just to make sure you heard me the first time: The State of the Jungle is dizzy.

My freelance writing experiences another strange turn. My editor tells me to go on a fact finding mission for some breast cancer benefit rave. I stumble in late on a Saturday, look at college art, listen to DJs thump beats, get my face painted, drink gin and tonics, hop around to some groove band, talk to the organizer, and stumble out the door later in the evening. I recount this to the editor and he asks if it's something their demographic would be interested in attending in the future. I don't know. What do demographics do for fun nowadays?

Three theatre venues in three days. A serious monologue about a serial killer, a funny one about growing up with brothers in Wyoming, a play about a grandmother trying to hook up her granddaughter, and finally All My Sons. The last one took longer than the other ones put together, but it wasn't as much about time as it was money. I didn't pay for any of them, and I enjoyed half of them. It's nice to be on the list, but it also means you're supposed to attend. Can't they tell my head is already spinning? Oh right, it's all in my head.

Loud rock n' roll in a little room. No gigs in January, but that doesn't stop us from honing our skills and losing our hearing. I think we're getting better, or I can't hear and it matters less. Can't break through, through to you people, people what, what you been doing, doing things, things that you shouldn't, shouldn't we get, get right down to it.

So here we are, and there you have it. To say The State of the Jungle is confident and strong would be both inaccurate and misleading. We keep plugging along, but it's hard to find Rhyme and Reason in the same room during these dizzy daze. Or is that dizzy dazes? No wait, it's dizzy daisies! That's it, I'll take one dozen of your finest dizzy daisies and shovel them into my mouth. Buds, petals, stems and all. Maybe that will clear everything up for me.

Chris Jungle is far too in touch with the rotation of the Earth at the moment.