I am perhaps a bit excitable. (Not in the Warren Zevon "Excitable Boy" sense.) (Though I did kill my prom date then later dug her up and made a cage of her bones.) (All the kids were doing it that year; that Warren, always on top of the trends.) I was told recently that I should maybe back off the caffeine a bit, which, seriously, is a slur: those monks totally had it coming. (Don't ever let anyone tell you that Buddhist monks are nonviolent; those guys fought like fucking wildcats.) But I do recognize the need to perhaps dial it back a bit, to take a breath before saying what is on the tip of my tongue and to count to ten before hitting anyone with a length of lead pipe. (In my defense, I totally thought that guy was mocking the way I was dressed. How was I supposed to know he was blind?) (Well, okay, the cane and the dog, but other than that? Impossible to tell.) (Except for the dark glasses. And the sign that said, "Help me. I'm blind.") One of the twelve steps that people in Alcoholics Anonymous and similar groups undertake is making amends to those they've harmed, and while I am not and have never been in such a group (though if my obsession with yogurt peanuts becomes any more overwhelming, I may well seek one out), I recognize the wisdom of mending fences. And so, here and now, I wish to make amends to all those whom I might, in my excitability (or my rush to get at the yogurt peanuts), have injured or insulted.

            Republicans: I do not truly believe that you are, as I might have implied or said or, perhaps, carved on a large granite monument, "a bunch of brain-damaged zombie fucktards." Some of you are decent, moderate and intelligent individuals, whom the rest of the party will quickly marginalize, silence or kill and eat. Also, that original offensive statement was clearly inaccurate and hyperbolic; it is of course difficult at best to tell whether or not a zombie is either brain-damaged or a fucktard, because of how they're the living dead and their brains are largely rotted away (note my refusal to note the similarity to the Republican Party), though if any group could bring together those attributes in a single zombie, it'd be the Republicans. (Kudos. You Republicans see how I'm giving you credit where credit is due?) (Calm and generous. That's me. Mr. Calm And Generous.) (If anyone wants to send me checks, though, it's still Mr. Elliot.) And I must thank you, Republicans: every time you talk about running Sarah Palin for President, and seem serious about it, it just makes me laugh and laugh. You guys are funnier than Carrot Top and Dane Cook combined.

            Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientologists: I am truly, deeply sorry that I called your churches and told you my soul and those of my entire extended family were in desperate need of salvation and made an appointment to see a large team of each of you at the same time, then watched you brawl on the street below my apartment. (Thank god for security doors, huh?) By way of explanation--I do not mean this as an excuse--it was a pretty slow Thursday night, and several weeks until Grey's Anatomy is back on. I am equally deeply (and truly) sorry that I was laughing like a loon at the resulting sissy-fight; it was unseemly. I never should have said what I did when my neighbor, 86-year-old Mrs. Polenska, kicked all of your asses and ended the brawl. Truly, Mrs. Polenska, you are not a crazy witch who used to run a Polish gulag. Well, you're not a crazy witch, anyway.

            Birthers: (I'm really digging deep here) I apologize for calling you "racist trailer-trash fuckwits who, were they slightly more intellectually accomplished, could be mistaken for slime molds."  That big fat blobby lady at the town-hall who bleated that she wanted her country back (Really? When was it hers? Was that before or after we stole it from the Indians?) could, admittedly, in the right light, be mistaken for a slime mold, but I am quite certain she is not. For one thing, I am pretty sure that slime molds are incapable of human speech, and that they reproduce by means of spores, and that Birther woman could speak, however incoherently, and I'm guessing she reproduced the way all her kind do: drunk, and after being impregnated by a relative. Orly Taitz and Alan Keyes, though... Have we seen their birth certificates? Do we know they didn't grow from spores? Unless and until they produce their original  birth certificates, I cannot eliminate the possibility that they are in fact slime molds.

            I'm making amends, but I'm not crazy. Well, I am, but not that way.

            Padma Lakshmi: I forgive you for so cruelly spurning my advances. Is it because you still carry the torch for Salman Rushdie, your ex-husband, who is taller and a much much much better writer than me, and also has that cute British accent that makes us feel so inferior here in the States? Is it because your Top Chef duties keep you too busy to consider your romantic happiness? Is it because I don't actually know you, and even if I did, would probably just stammer incoherently in your presence until you had your burly bodyguards beat the fuck out of me for your amusement? Sure, we could hash through these possibilities endlessly, but I think it's important that you just know: I forgive you.

            And finally, the Bush Administration. Yes, I admit it, I have at various times and in various places attributed to you the worst and most heinous crimes imaginable. In my defense, it's because you actually committed them. But, truly, from the bottom of my heart, I wish to make amends. I wish to break with the past and forget all the people you had killed, maimed and tortured. I wish to say, Be well, George W. Bush; you are not the worst President we ever had, since you only got us into a civil war in another country and Buchanan got us into a civil war in this country. (Whew, huh? I bet you have a shrine to that dude in your new Dallas digs.) I wish to say as well, Go with god, Dick Cheney. Sure you shot a guy and he apologized to you, but is it your fault you have very forgiving friends, who are good about taking responsibility? It is not. Also, I wish to say that your leer isn't half as creepy as I might once have thought. Mostly, I wish to say, Could you consider calling off those Blackwater guys you hired to render me to a country less concerned with human rights than the US? (My only hope is: Yeah, good luck finding one of those.) They've been sitting on my front stoop for the past 12 hours and it's dark now and the mirror shades are kind of freaking out the homeless guys and the hookers. Not to mention the automatic weapons. (I mean that the automatic weapons are freaking out the homeless guys and hookers, not that the mirror shades are freaking out the automatic weapons, because they're inanimate objects. The automatic weapons, not the homeless guys and hookers.) I just wish to do the right thing. And not get rendered.

            I feel better, cleansed, as if a weight--the weight imposed upon me by my anger, in fact, and also my fear of being rendered--has been lifted from my chest. It's good to make amends, to atone for and go beyond the offenses of the past. For one thing, when you commit the offenses of the future, you'll have the element of surprise.

            Oh, and: Call me, Padma! I've got yogurt peanuts...