I didn’t accomplish much in April. Now it’s May.
Oh yeah, I did ask my long-term, short-tempered girlfriend, Aimiee, to marry me, as threatened in my last Sugar Water column. And the answer was no, but don’t start crying for us just yet. See, she wants to marry me, but as she put it, “If gay couples can’t legally marry in Illinois, why should straight people like us have that right? Plus you abandoned Xing, our seven-year-old adopted Chinese son who’s actually our daughter, in Nebraska right before that safe-haven law was changed last November, which brings up a wide range of trust issues.”
See, all I have to do is convince the Illinois Supreme Court that gay marriage isn’t a threat to the moral fiber of our state — or Chicago’s chances of hosting the 2016 Summer Olympics — and Aimiee will be my wife. Of course, at the beginning of April I was pretty crushed since there seemed to be no way Illinois would legalize gay marriage, but suddenly its corn-fed neighbor Iowa was down with hot man-on-man lifelong commitment and kinky girl-on-girl sacred vows.
Yes, Iowa and Vermont accomplished something much more important in April than writing a new Sugar Water column, though they’re welcome to sub for me at any time while I watch syndicated reruns of the so-bad-it’s-good TV show Boston Legal to prepare for my Supreme Court appearance. Unfortunately, the recently canceled “dramedy” hasn’t taught me a thing about how the law actually works. William Shatner doesn’t play a starship captain on this spin-off of The Practice, but it might as well be another self-punched notch on his science-fiction belt since it’s so far removed from reality. The attorneys at Boston Legal’s fictional firm are constantly being arrested or sued, and that’s when they’re not suing each other just to kill some time. In real life you’d take your business elsewhere if it weren’t for the fact that they win 99 percent of their cases, thanks to sanctimonious courtroom speeches delivered by James Spader that employ zany one-liners and statistics from the latest issue of Newsweek in equal measure. In the final episode, which aired last December, Shatner and Spader’s characters went before the U.S. Supreme Court to defend their right to marry each other even though they’re not gay.
As for singing old songs, I don’t think “Money (That’s What I Want)” or that old Destiny’s Child chestnut “Bills, Bills, Bills” are going to solve any problems, though my longtime girlfriend, 
For the Planet and its readers, the loss of Kent is significant. Always at the scene of the crime before other reporters, he seemed able to predict when bank robberies, muggings, and acts of arson were about to occur, not to mention major attacks by criminals from foreign galaxies. “I just have a nose for news, that’s all,” Kent explained in an aw-shucks manner that betrays his small-town roots.
Val Kilmer wants to be the next governor of New Mexico. In fact, as he told the Associated Press in a recent 
I’m only kidding, of course. The nation’s 39th president is a peaceful man who would only use the destructive power of science and technology for the greater good after all other options had been exhausted, not to settle petty grievances like I would. This is why I’m not — and will never be — president. But if I were, I wouldn’t give a speech like President Carter delivered on July 15, 1979, when he asked every American citizen to “take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel.” Sir, from one Georgian to another, allow me to be blunt — where yo’ head at? Did you really think you could sneak that speech past people in the last six months of the Me Decade and expect them to comply? I was only three in July of ‘79, but if I wanted my parents to take an unnecessary trip to the Macon Mall so I could meet a guy dressed up as Darth Vader, nothing was going to stop that trip from happening.
Obama: No. Unless you count this phone call as a surprise. Because it is October.
Can you believe it? Neither could I. For one thing, I’ve never held political office. On the other hand, I voted for myself as a write-in candidate in the last three presidential elections, so I clearly have ambition. (Full disclosure: in 2000 and 2004 I ran as “Mike Hunt.”) But Senator McCain said he had read my “Sugar Blogger” posts and was impressed by how I pay lip service to important current events while pushing my real agenda of kissing up to celebrities. He said that sort of mind-set would come in handy when negotiating America’s foreign policy.
Hey, how y’all doin’? Everybody have a good summer? I hope so. Hard to believe it’s almost over, huh? I’m like, “Whoa, summer, you leavin’ already? You just got here. C’mon, sit down and stay a while. Have some guac. Lemme get you a Corona.”