Another Earth Day has come and gone, presenting us with an ideal time to check in with Mother Earth to see how she's doing these days as compared to last year at this time. (Does anybody know when Earth Day was this year? I thought it was supposed to be every April 23rd, but it looks like people were getting all Green on the 22nd this year.) It's getting harder and harder to get in touch with Mother Earth these days, as she has so much on her plate, but I was finally able to track her down and ask her a few questions.

When you think about, we really don't know that much about the Mother, do we? Heck, I bet none of us even know when she was born! Everybody has their own theory as to a date, but from the religious to the scientific, we're all just guessing. One thing I do know for sure, whatever her age may be, it's really starting to show. There are deep lines on her face, which weren't even there a year ago. She's become even more stooped-over then ever, and she's developed a really nasty cough.

When I finally caught up to her, she didn't seem to be in the best of moods even though it was Earth Day and people all over the world were celebrating how much they cared about her. I thought she was being somewhat ungracious and decided to call her on it.

I'm surprised you're so put out given that people all over the world have been making a big fuss about you. Don't you think you could be acting a little more grateful?

Mother Earth: Oh, and I've got so much to be grateful for. 364 days a year they don't think twice about spitting on me, and I'm supposed to feel grateful about them taking one day to pick up some garbage? I'm still going to have to figure out what to do with all the crap they pick up today, aren't I? No don't answer; it was a rhetorical question, idiot.

What do you think is going to happen with all the garbage that gets picked up today? It's going to go where garbage always goes: into landfills, onto a garbage scow in New Jersey, or burnt in an incinerator. It means I'm still going to have to figure out how to bio-degrade shit, pray to whoever that the damned scow doesn't sink and dump its load in the river, and trying to absorb another load of CO2 from it being burned. Not much different from any other day of the year as far as I'm concerned.

Doesn't it make you feel like people at least care about what's happening to you?

Mother Earth: Care? Care! If they goddamned cared they wouldn't have dumped the garbage they're picking up in the first place. Don't talk to me about caring, asshole. For the last, I don't know, how many billions of years, I've worked at creating this really incredibly delicate balance called the natural order of things where all is beautifully interconnected. It's a goddamned work of art if you ask me, but what do you philistines do?