I got in the mood today to write something the way I used to write when I was full-on mad at the world. I don’t know that I am that mad anymore, so it is tough for me to pick a target and aim at it with words on a page the way I used to. I would say I had a kind of acerbic wit, but then I would have to look that word up to make sure I used it correctly and I’m just not in the mood for that. Somebody else needs to look that up for me and get back to me.
I feel like picking on my standard targets would be like beating a dead horse, which is something I have never tried so I can’t say with absolute knowledge that it is a waste of time (maybe it’s a real joy, like having a hootenanny or something), but it sure seems like there would be a lot better ways to spend an afternoon. Not that I spend an entire afternoon writing this crap, because I honestly wouldn’t devote more than about 40 minutes to anything as asinine as one of my blogs.
So far, on my other blogs on Myspace, I have attacked children, stupid children, white trash children, people who drive Infinitis, fat people who cut me off to go eat at CiCi’s Pizza (I hate that, and yet it happens more than you would believe), people who can’t decide which yogurt to buy at the grocery store, my dog shitting in my bike seat, the fact that when a horse runs into another horse it is actually called a “horse wreck” (I swear I’m not making that up), people who wear sunglasses inside of Target and people who put loud mufflers on their Japanese sedans. I honestly can’t think of anyone else left to go after.
I may need some help on this one, because I have been feeling some venom that I need to spit at SOMETHING. The bad thing is that so many of my favorite topics have become off limits because of family developments with my friends. I feel bad attacking kids for being stupid when all of my friends have kids. And even though, technically, they are still some of the dumbest human beings alive because they are babies and they can’t even talk, I feel bad for saying that. Obviously not THAT bad because I’m still going to make my comments, but I sort of feel bad about that. So come on you no-talking, poopy-diapered babies, why don’t you engage me in some meaningful conversation already so I can run rings around you and do a little superiority dance right in your baby face? What are you going to do, cry about it?
Rebuttal? Nothing? I thought so. Too busy pooping on yourselves and making my friends have to stay up all night.
It’s not even fun attacking babies anymore, either verbally or in person with my nunchucks. Just kidding, I would never use nunchucks on a kid, unless they had a bo staff and a tattoo of the Yakuza or they had a poopy diaper and they were trying to sit on my lap.
Let that be a lesson to all of you: NEVER sit on my lap if you have poop in your pants unless you want a whack to the dome and a loud KEEYARF right in your ear.
Wow, this blog went downhill REALLY fast, didn’t it?
I guess I should get to the real point, which is that since the Christmas season is over I need something else to do with the dollar bills floating in my pocket from time to time. During the Christmas season I like to “pay a toll” of $1 to the Salvation Army bell ringers every time I walk past them. That means it costs me $2 to go into the grocery store and come out between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And that’s okay, because I just do stupid stuff with my money anyway and I figure anything they do with it would be more productive than anything I do with it. Odds are, my dollar, left to fend for itself on my whims, would probably end up in some stripper’s G-string just before my hat gets marvelously molested by a very athletic and flexible girl with anger management issues and a surprising vendetta against baseball caps.
It’s happened before. It wasn’t pretty. It was pretty F’ing AWESOME! I really felt as if that girl and her crotch hated my hat.
Anyway, after much soul searching and generally being annoyed by idiots in the world, I have decided to spend my money on something much more valuable than the Salvation Army. I am going to pay people $1 not to talk to me.
Here’s how it’s going to go down: Someone is going to approach me and talk to me in an unsolicited conversation. I am going to make a snap judgment based on the intelligence of what the person is talking about, the voice they use to talk to me in, and, just for good measure, what kind of shoes they are wearing. If I disagree with anything the person says, sounds like, or chooses as footwear, I will pull out a crisp one dollar bill, snap it taut a couple of times, dangle the currency right in their stupid face and say, “I will give you one dollar to NEVER talk to me again.”
If they reach for the dollar I will pull it just out of their reach and say, “This is a one-time offer and a binding agreement. If you take this dollar and say another word to me I will spray you in the face with an entire can of mace and take my dollar back. By accepting this dollar you accept the terms I have given and henceforth you will NOT SAY ANOTHER WORD TO ME FOR THE REMAINDER OF YOUR NATURAL LIFE!” Then I will probably add something in Latin like “quid pro quo” or “e pluribus unum” just so they think I know some more lawyer stuff and they will shut their stupid mouth. Forever. At least in my direction.
I’m gonna need a LOT of mace.
B!
P.S.—I feel compelled to give examples of things I am looking to never hear again. So here is a short list of things that will earn you a dollar for your silence (trust me, the list is much, MUCH longer than this but here is something to get you a general idea):
If you complain about the air quality as you light a cigarette
If any part of your voice comes through your nose (unless you are doing an impersonation of that lady from The Nanny, in which case I will just mace you without giving you a dollar)
If you say anything about how your vacation home has lost value in the market
You think I’m lying about the “horse wreck” thing
If your shoes don’t match your belt
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Writing In Permanence
Today I was looking for something (I can’t remember what because I got sidetracked) and I found a big pile of spiral bound notebooks from years past. These notebooks are filled with thoughts, hopes, dreams, song lyrics, notes from various classes, doodles and other such things one might find in a notebook owned by someone who dreams more than he accomplishes.
There is something very magical in going back through things like that. I don’t think many have the same archive of things I do, as my notebooks go back all the way to about almost 1981 or 1982. I have always made a point to not throw away anything I ever write if I can help it. That notebook from 1982 I have is the one where I wrote my first play, a story about my G.I. Joe action figures attacking a secret base for Cobra.
It’s a horrible play, but I was 10 when I wrote it so fuck off. And I spelled almost everything correctly, in ink, and in ACTUAL cursive. The kind of cursive you have to practice in school and get grades on. Part of me wants to scan those pages into the computer and post it for the world to see, but, like almost everything else in my life, I didn’t finish the play because I got tired of writing it and nobody wants to read 14 pages of story setup with no denouement unless you are deeply into Akira Kurosawa films and really obscure references like the one I just used.
Looks like I’ve been doing the same thing for almost 30 years, huh? Starting things and never finishing them. I am 155 pages into a screenplay I have no ending for. I am 65 pages into a different screenplay I don’t like anymore. I am 135 hours into 4 college degrees that I have no money to finish and no job prospects to think of even if I did finish one or all of them.
There are some interesting things in the notebooks, though, finished or not. At one point I was going to buy one every January and keep those notebooks like volumes of my life. But the notebooks started combining years because I never filled all of one in a year, until my latest notebook has covered almost 3 years and still has almost all of it left. I haven’t written a song lyric in a couple of years, probably closer to three years, because I don’t see the point of any of that stuff if I’m never going to finish it. My dreams of being a rapper are long gone anyway. And not even cats in heat want to hear me sing, so why continue writing?
I think the advent of the computer might have led to the downfall of my writing permanence. I still have saved all of the blogs I have ever written in my Word program on my computer, but this computer is getting close to running its course and I am not savvy enough to figure out how to transfer all of the volumes of things I have written onto another computer. I’m sure it is simple and I could figure it out in a few minutes of whacking the keyboard, but there is a whole lot less charm in looking at stuff I have written on a white screen versus looking at journal entries I have written with my own hand.
The part of me that wants to live forever always kind of hoped that when I died someone would find all of these journal entries and want to publish them. But, honestly, who the hell would read the journal entries of someone who halfway finished almost everything in his life? In fact, the only thing I am SURE I will finish in my life is my actual life. And that’s only because I have no choice. I spent almost 25 minutes writing my screenplay today, which is 25 minutes more than I have spent in the last 10 days, but after 25 minutes all I wanted to do was get online to see if anyone had written me an e-mail.
Who knows what brilliance I have lost to the world by sending it over e-mail to friends and family members? Who knows what ignorant crap I have sent over that same electronic Pony Express? Whatever I have written in e-mail form has been lost to the world over the last few years because, unlike my handwritten notebooks, I don’t save ANY e-mails because they are impersonal and they all look the same, no matter how brilliant or stupid the writing in them may be.
There is something special to be said about the way my handwriting looks when I’m drunk. Or the way it looks when I’m pissed off at the world. Or the way it looks after I’ve killed myself in the gym. Or when I’m in love. All of those nuances are lost when I put the keys to motion and throw my thoughts down on a screen. All of that humanity is gone. And yet I don’t want to handwrite things like this because it would definitely take too long to get from my mind to my page. If I type 60 words a minute I can get probably 40 more words per minute to the “page” than I ever could by writing it by hand.
So I lose the ability to genuinely think about what I am writing. I just flow words from my mind to the computer screen and I let that highly impersonal style affect the way I connect with the rest of the world. Should I be sad about that? Should all of us be sad about that?
I think I am.
B!
There is something very magical in going back through things like that. I don’t think many have the same archive of things I do, as my notebooks go back all the way to about almost 1981 or 1982. I have always made a point to not throw away anything I ever write if I can help it. That notebook from 1982 I have is the one where I wrote my first play, a story about my G.I. Joe action figures attacking a secret base for Cobra.
It’s a horrible play, but I was 10 when I wrote it so fuck off. And I spelled almost everything correctly, in ink, and in ACTUAL cursive. The kind of cursive you have to practice in school and get grades on. Part of me wants to scan those pages into the computer and post it for the world to see, but, like almost everything else in my life, I didn’t finish the play because I got tired of writing it and nobody wants to read 14 pages of story setup with no denouement unless you are deeply into Akira Kurosawa films and really obscure references like the one I just used.
Looks like I’ve been doing the same thing for almost 30 years, huh? Starting things and never finishing them. I am 155 pages into a screenplay I have no ending for. I am 65 pages into a different screenplay I don’t like anymore. I am 135 hours into 4 college degrees that I have no money to finish and no job prospects to think of even if I did finish one or all of them.
There are some interesting things in the notebooks, though, finished or not. At one point I was going to buy one every January and keep those notebooks like volumes of my life. But the notebooks started combining years because I never filled all of one in a year, until my latest notebook has covered almost 3 years and still has almost all of it left. I haven’t written a song lyric in a couple of years, probably closer to three years, because I don’t see the point of any of that stuff if I’m never going to finish it. My dreams of being a rapper are long gone anyway. And not even cats in heat want to hear me sing, so why continue writing?
I think the advent of the computer might have led to the downfall of my writing permanence. I still have saved all of the blogs I have ever written in my Word program on my computer, but this computer is getting close to running its course and I am not savvy enough to figure out how to transfer all of the volumes of things I have written onto another computer. I’m sure it is simple and I could figure it out in a few minutes of whacking the keyboard, but there is a whole lot less charm in looking at stuff I have written on a white screen versus looking at journal entries I have written with my own hand.
The part of me that wants to live forever always kind of hoped that when I died someone would find all of these journal entries and want to publish them. But, honestly, who the hell would read the journal entries of someone who halfway finished almost everything in his life? In fact, the only thing I am SURE I will finish in my life is my actual life. And that’s only because I have no choice. I spent almost 25 minutes writing my screenplay today, which is 25 minutes more than I have spent in the last 10 days, but after 25 minutes all I wanted to do was get online to see if anyone had written me an e-mail.
Who knows what brilliance I have lost to the world by sending it over e-mail to friends and family members? Who knows what ignorant crap I have sent over that same electronic Pony Express? Whatever I have written in e-mail form has been lost to the world over the last few years because, unlike my handwritten notebooks, I don’t save ANY e-mails because they are impersonal and they all look the same, no matter how brilliant or stupid the writing in them may be.
There is something special to be said about the way my handwriting looks when I’m drunk. Or the way it looks when I’m pissed off at the world. Or the way it looks after I’ve killed myself in the gym. Or when I’m in love. All of those nuances are lost when I put the keys to motion and throw my thoughts down on a screen. All of that humanity is gone. And yet I don’t want to handwrite things like this because it would definitely take too long to get from my mind to my page. If I type 60 words a minute I can get probably 40 more words per minute to the “page” than I ever could by writing it by hand.
So I lose the ability to genuinely think about what I am writing. I just flow words from my mind to the computer screen and I let that highly impersonal style affect the way I connect with the rest of the world. Should I be sad about that? Should all of us be sad about that?
I think I am.
B!
Thursday, November 26, 2009
A Thanksgiving Day Blog
I promise I am trying not to make everything I write during the next few weeks about the holidays coming up, but since this is probably the first time I am planning on actually writing something on Thanksgiving I might as well write about the holidays again. Don’t worry, I’ll be back to complaining about stupid people with their stupid faces in their stupid cars with their stupid driving habits by the middle of next week. Maybe. You might just end up getting a bunch of sentimental drivel for the next 5 weeks and then a tome about how happy I am going to be when I get wasted on New Year’s Eve.
Speaking of getting wasted, I was reminded last night that Thanksgiving Eve is the busiest bar night in America. That’s something you don’t think about when you don’t hit the bars all the time like I used to do (when did I get so lame and old?) back when I was a young buck with disposable income, lots of free time and a bulletproof liver. To me, Thanksgiving Eve was just another Wednesday night with 2 for 1’s at Mulligan’s, $2 U-Call-It’s at The Depot Cantina and the trailer park’s night out at Club R&R in Flagstaff (that should be quite a walk down memory lane for a few people who used to frequent those establishments). And Thanksgiving Day was just a day where I had to drive back home from Laughlin, Nevada because somehow the 2-4-1’s made me end up in a different state with bars that closed at a time I like to call “never.”
I have already gone into detail in my previous blog about how I have spent more Christmases with other families than my own. Thanksgiving is a whole very similar animal. The last Thanksgiving I can remember spending with my family was in 1992 or 1993. For those of you who are mathematically challenged, it’s been at least 16 years since I hung with the fam on turkey day.
So for the last 16 years I have had to come up with something else to do on what I consider to be the lamest holiday of the year. For those of you who go crazy talking about “oh, but the food” and “the food” and “don’t forget the food,” guess what? I eat food EVERY OTHER DAY OF THE YEAR. And guess what I eat just about every other day of the year? Nope, not candied yams, those things are disgusting and should be against the law. Guess again. Correct, I eat TURKEY.
I eat turkey at least five days a week, and probably closer to six since I don’t eat out as much as I used to. What this means to me is that turkey is just another protein source, not some huge deal where I need to work myself into a frenzy before I eat it like I’m some kind of shark that only eats barnyard animals. As far as I can tell, it is possible to buy and cook a turkey 365 days a year. 366 on leap years. It’s not like the animal is seasonal. It’s not an F’ing watermelon. It’s a turkey. The meanest and dumbest and most delicious bird in the history of the earth. People talk about eating the turkey like it is some mythical creature that only appears when a parade happens in New York City.
Good God don’t get me started on parades. Dammit, you did. I will just say that a parade is something invented when there was no such thing as cable TV. Or electricity, probably. It was something invented when kids used to entertain themselves by running around with a stick trying to keep a hoop rolling down the street. Enough said? I guarantee that if kids had PSP’s and Nintendo DS systems back in the days we would not be watching a Thanksgiving Day Parade. We’d be watching a Thanksgiving Day robot cage match and it would be the most awesome thing ever seen on TV.
So when people ask me if I’m excited for Thanksgiving, I am not. I am excited for a day off of work with football on TV. But there are other days like that in the world. I’m trying to think of what they are. Hmmmm. Oh yeah, now I remember, they are called SUNDAYS. How could I forget? Thanksgiving is just a Sunday in disguise. As far as I’m concerned, Thanksgiving is a Sunday with “The Office” on instead of “The Simpsons.” Oh, and everything is closed but Denny’s, and that works out just fine for me because, like I said, I don’t eat out as much as I used to so Thanksgiving actually saves me money.
Thanks Thanksgiving. You’re a doll. A big dumb stupid delicious doll who is going to make me spend 4 hours a day in the gym to work off the damage I’m going to do to myself this afternoon.
On second thought, F U Thanksgiving. You’re a pain in my ass. I wish Taco Bell was open today. If you were a Sunday, like you pretend to be, I could get my chicken chalupas and lounge in peace. Maybe Taco Bell should work on a turkey chalupa, just for days like today.
Mmmm, chalupas. Then I’d only have to spend 3 hours in the gym to work it off.
Happy Thanksgiving, fuckers.
B!
Speaking of getting wasted, I was reminded last night that Thanksgiving Eve is the busiest bar night in America. That’s something you don’t think about when you don’t hit the bars all the time like I used to do (when did I get so lame and old?) back when I was a young buck with disposable income, lots of free time and a bulletproof liver. To me, Thanksgiving Eve was just another Wednesday night with 2 for 1’s at Mulligan’s, $2 U-Call-It’s at The Depot Cantina and the trailer park’s night out at Club R&R in Flagstaff (that should be quite a walk down memory lane for a few people who used to frequent those establishments). And Thanksgiving Day was just a day where I had to drive back home from Laughlin, Nevada because somehow the 2-4-1’s made me end up in a different state with bars that closed at a time I like to call “never.”
I have already gone into detail in my previous blog about how I have spent more Christmases with other families than my own. Thanksgiving is a whole very similar animal. The last Thanksgiving I can remember spending with my family was in 1992 or 1993. For those of you who are mathematically challenged, it’s been at least 16 years since I hung with the fam on turkey day.
So for the last 16 years I have had to come up with something else to do on what I consider to be the lamest holiday of the year. For those of you who go crazy talking about “oh, but the food” and “the food” and “don’t forget the food,” guess what? I eat food EVERY OTHER DAY OF THE YEAR. And guess what I eat just about every other day of the year? Nope, not candied yams, those things are disgusting and should be against the law. Guess again. Correct, I eat TURKEY.
I eat turkey at least five days a week, and probably closer to six since I don’t eat out as much as I used to. What this means to me is that turkey is just another protein source, not some huge deal where I need to work myself into a frenzy before I eat it like I’m some kind of shark that only eats barnyard animals. As far as I can tell, it is possible to buy and cook a turkey 365 days a year. 366 on leap years. It’s not like the animal is seasonal. It’s not an F’ing watermelon. It’s a turkey. The meanest and dumbest and most delicious bird in the history of the earth. People talk about eating the turkey like it is some mythical creature that only appears when a parade happens in New York City.
Good God don’t get me started on parades. Dammit, you did. I will just say that a parade is something invented when there was no such thing as cable TV. Or electricity, probably. It was something invented when kids used to entertain themselves by running around with a stick trying to keep a hoop rolling down the street. Enough said? I guarantee that if kids had PSP’s and Nintendo DS systems back in the days we would not be watching a Thanksgiving Day Parade. We’d be watching a Thanksgiving Day robot cage match and it would be the most awesome thing ever seen on TV.
So when people ask me if I’m excited for Thanksgiving, I am not. I am excited for a day off of work with football on TV. But there are other days like that in the world. I’m trying to think of what they are. Hmmmm. Oh yeah, now I remember, they are called SUNDAYS. How could I forget? Thanksgiving is just a Sunday in disguise. As far as I’m concerned, Thanksgiving is a Sunday with “The Office” on instead of “The Simpsons.” Oh, and everything is closed but Denny’s, and that works out just fine for me because, like I said, I don’t eat out as much as I used to so Thanksgiving actually saves me money.
Thanks Thanksgiving. You’re a doll. A big dumb stupid delicious doll who is going to make me spend 4 hours a day in the gym to work off the damage I’m going to do to myself this afternoon.
On second thought, F U Thanksgiving. You’re a pain in my ass. I wish Taco Bell was open today. If you were a Sunday, like you pretend to be, I could get my chicken chalupas and lounge in peace. Maybe Taco Bell should work on a turkey chalupa, just for days like today.
Mmmm, chalupas. Then I’d only have to spend 3 hours in the gym to work it off.
Happy Thanksgiving, fuckers.
B!
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
I'll Be Home For Christmas
For those who aren’t hip to the whole workings of the retail machine, Black Friday is coming up this Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. If you want more info on what Black Friday is, you can Google that shit. Suffice it to say that the day used to be a little more under the table as far as retailers competing for your dollars, but now it seems like it has come to all-out whoring for your dollars.
It’s kind of nice to see Wal-Mart become such a slut. Though that is kind of overkill, to be honest. It’s like the Yankees begging and pleading for ANOTHER World Series title when they already have like 29 of them or something. Okay, we get it, you rule the world, now stop killing everyone else for a little while and let them have some fun.
And we all know that with all of this “holiday” spirit comes all of the Christmas songs that can either get you in a really great mood (usually only if you are a girl) or completely destroy your day by throwing you into past memories you never really asked to be thrown into. Today I had just such an experience. And since I’m not a girl, you know which of those I was thrown into.
It was the song “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” by any artist who has ever stood in front of a microphone for a Christmas album. I think I heard nine different variations on it today. And nine variations of that song is nine too many, if you ask me. And you didn’t ask me, but you’re reading this and that’s close enough for me.
The chorus got me thinking about where exactly home is. Am I supposed to dream about going home to the first Christmas I ever remember having? The one where I got the most AWESOME army man mountain fort with tanks and 6 levels of army man glory in it? Or am I supposed to dream about the one where I walked around all day in my underwear and my Lone Ranger 6-shooters (stop swooning ladies)? Those Christmases were in a house in Denver, Colorado and no one lives there anymore. At least no one I would go home to. I’m sure lots of other people live there, just not my family.
Should I think of the Christmases I spent in Flagstaff, AZ with my family? The ones where I was old enough to appreciate Christmas as more than just a day when I got a bunch of gifts but as a day where I got to hang around with my family and participate in traditions that the younger kids don’t even know exist? Those were some good Christmases, but once again, no one lives there anymore. That house belongs to someone else now. I haven’t even seen the inside in twelve or thirteen years.
Or should I think of the Christmases I spent with my friends and their parents over the years? In the last 15 years I have spent more Christmases with four COMPLETELY different families than I have with my own. Hell, I haven’t even seen my parents in eight or nine years. It’s been so long since I’ve seen them that I don’t even know what year it was anymore. Is that how I am supposed to think of going home to Christmas? The years I have spent as a Christmas “orphan?”
How do I go home to a Christmas like that? I have lots of fond memories of all of the holidays I have spent with my friends and their families, and I can’t thank those families enough for opening their arms and hearts to the Christmas orphan, but which of those memories am I supposed to go home to in my dreams?
I think this year the Christmas I am going to go home to is the one from 1993. I don’t remember exactly what happened that Christmas, but it couldn’t have been all bad . . . just like all of the rest of them.
B!
It’s kind of nice to see Wal-Mart become such a slut. Though that is kind of overkill, to be honest. It’s like the Yankees begging and pleading for ANOTHER World Series title when they already have like 29 of them or something. Okay, we get it, you rule the world, now stop killing everyone else for a little while and let them have some fun.
And we all know that with all of this “holiday” spirit comes all of the Christmas songs that can either get you in a really great mood (usually only if you are a girl) or completely destroy your day by throwing you into past memories you never really asked to be thrown into. Today I had just such an experience. And since I’m not a girl, you know which of those I was thrown into.
It was the song “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” by any artist who has ever stood in front of a microphone for a Christmas album. I think I heard nine different variations on it today. And nine variations of that song is nine too many, if you ask me. And you didn’t ask me, but you’re reading this and that’s close enough for me.
The chorus got me thinking about where exactly home is. Am I supposed to dream about going home to the first Christmas I ever remember having? The one where I got the most AWESOME army man mountain fort with tanks and 6 levels of army man glory in it? Or am I supposed to dream about the one where I walked around all day in my underwear and my Lone Ranger 6-shooters (stop swooning ladies)? Those Christmases were in a house in Denver, Colorado and no one lives there anymore. At least no one I would go home to. I’m sure lots of other people live there, just not my family.
Should I think of the Christmases I spent in Flagstaff, AZ with my family? The ones where I was old enough to appreciate Christmas as more than just a day when I got a bunch of gifts but as a day where I got to hang around with my family and participate in traditions that the younger kids don’t even know exist? Those were some good Christmases, but once again, no one lives there anymore. That house belongs to someone else now. I haven’t even seen the inside in twelve or thirteen years.
Or should I think of the Christmases I spent with my friends and their parents over the years? In the last 15 years I have spent more Christmases with four COMPLETELY different families than I have with my own. Hell, I haven’t even seen my parents in eight or nine years. It’s been so long since I’ve seen them that I don’t even know what year it was anymore. Is that how I am supposed to think of going home to Christmas? The years I have spent as a Christmas “orphan?”
How do I go home to a Christmas like that? I have lots of fond memories of all of the holidays I have spent with my friends and their families, and I can’t thank those families enough for opening their arms and hearts to the Christmas orphan, but which of those memories am I supposed to go home to in my dreams?
I think this year the Christmas I am going to go home to is the one from 1993. I don’t remember exactly what happened that Christmas, but it couldn’t have been all bad . . . just like all of the rest of them.
B!
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
The Music Store Of Life
On my way home from the gym today a song came on my iPod. The song is called “Five O’ Clock World” by a group called The Vogues. I’m not sure of the exact release date of the song, but I’m guessing it comes from somewhere early in the 1960’s. I’m going to say 1962 just because it sounds like the music did before the Beatles came along. I could go look it up but I absolutely don’t feel like doing that so deal with it.
Anyway, the lyrics of the part of the song I want to talk about go like this:
“Up every morning just to keep a job
Got to fight my way through the hustling mob
Sounds of the city pounding in my brain
While another day goes down the drain
But it’s a 5’O Clock World when the whistle blows
No one owns a piece of my time
And there’s a 5’O clock me inside my clothes
Thinking that the world looks fine”
The point I am trying to make is that people have been feeling this way for at least 40-some years. Most likely a lot longer than that, but this song is the first I’ve heard about a guy hating his job and knowing his life doesn’t begin until his work is over.
How many of us feel that way? Is everyone really only working for the weekend? It makes me wonder what people would do if they could just do it. If money was no object, what would you do with yourself?
By the way, I hate that question. “If money was no object . . .” blah blah blah. Guess what? It is an object. It has always been an object. It isn’t the only object, but damn it, it’s a pretty big object. If money really weren’t an object, I can honestly say I would be writing this in a completely different time zone (at the very least) on a completely different computer while wearing completely different clothes.
Money is the object that keeps my life the way it is now. They say when you get rich your personality doesn’t change, you just become more of whatever it was you were in the first place. If you were an asshole before you got rich, you’ll just be a bigger one. If you were a really great person before, you’d just be a bigger really great person.
I can honestly say that the only thing that would change about me would be the fact that you wouldn’t be able to find me. That’s why the internet could be such a brilliant tool for me to use if I ever actually did something with myself and got rich. All I’d have to do is put up my daily bullshit blog and the bored few who actually read them could follow me along my completely uninteresting adventures to nowhere.
Let’s face it, I’ve never actually been headed anywhere in my life. People who have known me for a long time can attest to this. I always worry about the fact that I am not moving forward in my life, but the fact is, even if I am moving forward I am heading nowhere. So I’m just moving further along a tangent line into the ether.
Like the line from The Streets: “If you don’t know where you’re going then any road will take you there.” That pretty much sums up my life to this point. I’ve been blessed with gifts I don’t use, I have no “calling” in life that I know of and I end up wasting hours and hours searching for something that I have never found and probably never will.
Have you ever gone into a music store to browse while you are waiting for something else to happen (your car to get repaired, an appointment somewhere, etc.)? Then when an employee comes up to ask if you need any help you realize that you have just walked around a store for 20 minutes and not known what you were in there for? The standard response (from me at least) is, “Oh, I’m just looking. I’ll know it when I find it.”
That’s pretty much how I live my life. I’ll know it when I find it.
I just hope time doesn’t run out before I figure out which purchase to make.
On a related note, if anyone has found an extra Calling In Life somewhere, can you pass it along to me? I think I need one of those. Wow, you’d never guess my 37th birthday is in two days, would you? Holy shit I’m getting old.
B!
Anyway, the lyrics of the part of the song I want to talk about go like this:
“Up every morning just to keep a job
Got to fight my way through the hustling mob
Sounds of the city pounding in my brain
While another day goes down the drain
But it’s a 5’O Clock World when the whistle blows
No one owns a piece of my time
And there’s a 5’O clock me inside my clothes
Thinking that the world looks fine”
The point I am trying to make is that people have been feeling this way for at least 40-some years. Most likely a lot longer than that, but this song is the first I’ve heard about a guy hating his job and knowing his life doesn’t begin until his work is over.
How many of us feel that way? Is everyone really only working for the weekend? It makes me wonder what people would do if they could just do it. If money was no object, what would you do with yourself?
By the way, I hate that question. “If money was no object . . .” blah blah blah. Guess what? It is an object. It has always been an object. It isn’t the only object, but damn it, it’s a pretty big object. If money really weren’t an object, I can honestly say I would be writing this in a completely different time zone (at the very least) on a completely different computer while wearing completely different clothes.
Money is the object that keeps my life the way it is now. They say when you get rich your personality doesn’t change, you just become more of whatever it was you were in the first place. If you were an asshole before you got rich, you’ll just be a bigger one. If you were a really great person before, you’d just be a bigger really great person.
I can honestly say that the only thing that would change about me would be the fact that you wouldn’t be able to find me. That’s why the internet could be such a brilliant tool for me to use if I ever actually did something with myself and got rich. All I’d have to do is put up my daily bullshit blog and the bored few who actually read them could follow me along my completely uninteresting adventures to nowhere.
Let’s face it, I’ve never actually been headed anywhere in my life. People who have known me for a long time can attest to this. I always worry about the fact that I am not moving forward in my life, but the fact is, even if I am moving forward I am heading nowhere. So I’m just moving further along a tangent line into the ether.
Like the line from The Streets: “If you don’t know where you’re going then any road will take you there.” That pretty much sums up my life to this point. I’ve been blessed with gifts I don’t use, I have no “calling” in life that I know of and I end up wasting hours and hours searching for something that I have never found and probably never will.
Have you ever gone into a music store to browse while you are waiting for something else to happen (your car to get repaired, an appointment somewhere, etc.)? Then when an employee comes up to ask if you need any help you realize that you have just walked around a store for 20 minutes and not known what you were in there for? The standard response (from me at least) is, “Oh, I’m just looking. I’ll know it when I find it.”
That’s pretty much how I live my life. I’ll know it when I find it.
I just hope time doesn’t run out before I figure out which purchase to make.
On a related note, if anyone has found an extra Calling In Life somewhere, can you pass it along to me? I think I need one of those. Wow, you’d never guess my 37th birthday is in two days, would you? Holy shit I’m getting old.
B!
Monday, November 9, 2009
Today I was driving home from work when the song, “Meet Me Halfway” by the Black Eyed Peas came on the radio for like the 900th time in the last two days. I have gone into depth in previous posts about how much I hate the Black Eyed Peas and how they have pretty much ruined music in the early 2000’s.
I can’t really fault somebody for making shitty music that the masses latch onto. It has happened time and time again over the years. I will freely admit that I was a fan of MC Hammer back in the days when he was absolutely demolishing real rap music with his vapid lyrics and “marbles in the mouth” delivery. The only reason I listened to Hammer was because his beats were SO DAMN GOOD! In fact, they are still good and you know it.
The main thing that separates MC Hammer from the whole horrifying thing that is The Black Eyed Peas is that MC Hammer isn’t a liar like Will.i.am is. When MC Hammer says, “You can’t touch this” it is the absolute truth. Did you ever try to touch it? Were you successful? Of course not, because you couldn’t touch it, just like MC Hammer said.
On the other hand, you have lyrics like these from Will.i.am in the Black Eyed Peas’ song “Meet Me Halfway”:
Girl, I travel round the world and even sail the seven seas
Across the universe I go to other galaxies
Just tell me where to go, just tell me where you wanna to meet
I navigate myself to take me where you be
Now, let me break this down so I can prove that this dude is a liar. First, we will take the line “Girl, I travel round the world and even sail the seven seas.” There is a girl involved, apparently, so this must be a love song. And because this is a love song, there has to be these unreal statements of devotion from the man to the woman because most love songs are full of shit and girls eat that shit up. I believe he would travel around the world, but not for a girl. It would probably because he was on tour and had some concerts scheduled in places that would take him to several different cities around the globe.
As far as him sailing the seven seas? Not a chance. Not a chance in hell. Do you know how much time that would take? Do you know how dangerous that is? I don’t think anyone has ACTUALLY sailed the seven seas in like 150 years. They have engines now that eliminate the need for sails on a boat. Maybe he was so busy flying around in his G-5 airplane that he didn’t realize that. A better lyric would probably be “Girl, I go from place to place in cities around the globe but I try to stay away from places that don’t have 5 star hotels and limo service, and I would probably take a cruise ship from Miami to Jamaica, but I don’t have much more free time in my schedule for that because I have to drive Fergie to an audition to play young Jack Nicholson in the newest Batman movie.”
Now, the lyric “Across the universe I go to other galaxies” has got to be examined closely. Not for any other reason than the fact that if he were actually going to travel across the universe, he is in the wrong business for it. Even that kid from N’Sync got denied his little jaunt into space and that dude was way more popular than the Black Eyed Peas will ever be. The only way for him to get a trip into space would be for him to join the Air Force, become a pilot, work his way through the ranks, get into the astronaut training program, dazzle his superiors and be lucky enough to get assigned onto a space shuttle mission. Unfortunately for him, the space shuttle doesn’t have the capability to go across the universe or even another galaxy, and I’m pretty sure NASA would be pissed if he blew his whole space mission just to meet some girl and hopefully get some ass. Here’s a better lyric: “Across the street to Waffle House I’ll slip you a hotel key.”
The next lyric, “Just tell me where to go, just tell me where you want to meet” is the most realistic lyric in the verse because, as we all know, girls control the when, where and how any booty exchange takes place. Of course, by admitting to the woman that she is in control of where you will go with your life you have just F’ed yourself and you have given her the “hand” in the relationship. If you don’t understand “hand” you should go watch re-runs of Seinfeld until you get a better grasp on the way the universe works. Suffice it to say that if he does actually show up where she wants him to show up, he might get some ass but he will definitely have given her the upper hand in the relationship and she will probably actually send him across the galaxy at some point JUST BECAUSE SHE CAN. Way to go, dumbass! You’ve got to think of these things before singing them to your girl. And stop singing them to other people’s girls because I GUARANTEE there is some idiot girl getting ready to ask her boyfriend, “Would you travel across the universe for me?”
How the hell do you answer that? You can’t tell the truth (“Shoot, I barely like walking across the room for you, do you really want me to answer that?”) so you HAVE to lie. Way to make liars out of everyone, Will.
The last lyric, “I navigate myself to take me where you be” is not only a lie, but it’s an idiotic one because in the line previous he tells her to tell him where to go. If someone tells you which way to go, what does that make them? A navigator, perhaps? So how are you going to navigate yourself if you have to ask someone else where to go? That doesn’t work, unless he is talking about literally driving a Lincoln Navigator to where she wants to meet, but those things would never make it into space to go across the universe, and even if they could, they get horrible gas mileage and there’s no place to fill up. Plus, that thing would sink in the first of the seven seas and it would get crushed under the weight of the ocean.
This guy can barely navigate himself across a music track without making several stupid mistakes. I really hope this girl doesn’t hold her breath in hopes that he really will meet her halfway. She’ll be dead somewhere and he’ll have driven his SUV into a lake. Maybe she’ll be holding her breath halfway across the lake.
Hmm.
Maybe they deserve each other.
B!
I can’t really fault somebody for making shitty music that the masses latch onto. It has happened time and time again over the years. I will freely admit that I was a fan of MC Hammer back in the days when he was absolutely demolishing real rap music with his vapid lyrics and “marbles in the mouth” delivery. The only reason I listened to Hammer was because his beats were SO DAMN GOOD! In fact, they are still good and you know it.
The main thing that separates MC Hammer from the whole horrifying thing that is The Black Eyed Peas is that MC Hammer isn’t a liar like Will.i.am is. When MC Hammer says, “You can’t touch this” it is the absolute truth. Did you ever try to touch it? Were you successful? Of course not, because you couldn’t touch it, just like MC Hammer said.
On the other hand, you have lyrics like these from Will.i.am in the Black Eyed Peas’ song “Meet Me Halfway”:
Girl, I travel round the world and even sail the seven seas
Across the universe I go to other galaxies
Just tell me where to go, just tell me where you wanna to meet
I navigate myself to take me where you be
Now, let me break this down so I can prove that this dude is a liar. First, we will take the line “Girl, I travel round the world and even sail the seven seas.” There is a girl involved, apparently, so this must be a love song. And because this is a love song, there has to be these unreal statements of devotion from the man to the woman because most love songs are full of shit and girls eat that shit up. I believe he would travel around the world, but not for a girl. It would probably because he was on tour and had some concerts scheduled in places that would take him to several different cities around the globe.
As far as him sailing the seven seas? Not a chance. Not a chance in hell. Do you know how much time that would take? Do you know how dangerous that is? I don’t think anyone has ACTUALLY sailed the seven seas in like 150 years. They have engines now that eliminate the need for sails on a boat. Maybe he was so busy flying around in his G-5 airplane that he didn’t realize that. A better lyric would probably be “Girl, I go from place to place in cities around the globe but I try to stay away from places that don’t have 5 star hotels and limo service, and I would probably take a cruise ship from Miami to Jamaica, but I don’t have much more free time in my schedule for that because I have to drive Fergie to an audition to play young Jack Nicholson in the newest Batman movie.”
Now, the lyric “Across the universe I go to other galaxies” has got to be examined closely. Not for any other reason than the fact that if he were actually going to travel across the universe, he is in the wrong business for it. Even that kid from N’Sync got denied his little jaunt into space and that dude was way more popular than the Black Eyed Peas will ever be. The only way for him to get a trip into space would be for him to join the Air Force, become a pilot, work his way through the ranks, get into the astronaut training program, dazzle his superiors and be lucky enough to get assigned onto a space shuttle mission. Unfortunately for him, the space shuttle doesn’t have the capability to go across the universe or even another galaxy, and I’m pretty sure NASA would be pissed if he blew his whole space mission just to meet some girl and hopefully get some ass. Here’s a better lyric: “Across the street to Waffle House I’ll slip you a hotel key.”
The next lyric, “Just tell me where to go, just tell me where you want to meet” is the most realistic lyric in the verse because, as we all know, girls control the when, where and how any booty exchange takes place. Of course, by admitting to the woman that she is in control of where you will go with your life you have just F’ed yourself and you have given her the “hand” in the relationship. If you don’t understand “hand” you should go watch re-runs of Seinfeld until you get a better grasp on the way the universe works. Suffice it to say that if he does actually show up where she wants him to show up, he might get some ass but he will definitely have given her the upper hand in the relationship and she will probably actually send him across the galaxy at some point JUST BECAUSE SHE CAN. Way to go, dumbass! You’ve got to think of these things before singing them to your girl. And stop singing them to other people’s girls because I GUARANTEE there is some idiot girl getting ready to ask her boyfriend, “Would you travel across the universe for me?”
How the hell do you answer that? You can’t tell the truth (“Shoot, I barely like walking across the room for you, do you really want me to answer that?”) so you HAVE to lie. Way to make liars out of everyone, Will.
The last lyric, “I navigate myself to take me where you be” is not only a lie, but it’s an idiotic one because in the line previous he tells her to tell him where to go. If someone tells you which way to go, what does that make them? A navigator, perhaps? So how are you going to navigate yourself if you have to ask someone else where to go? That doesn’t work, unless he is talking about literally driving a Lincoln Navigator to where she wants to meet, but those things would never make it into space to go across the universe, and even if they could, they get horrible gas mileage and there’s no place to fill up. Plus, that thing would sink in the first of the seven seas and it would get crushed under the weight of the ocean.
This guy can barely navigate himself across a music track without making several stupid mistakes. I really hope this girl doesn’t hold her breath in hopes that he really will meet her halfway. She’ll be dead somewhere and he’ll have driven his SUV into a lake. Maybe she’ll be holding her breath halfway across the lake.
Hmm.
Maybe they deserve each other.
B!
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
A Gray Haired Creep
I don’t know if it’s just me or if everyone has been experiencing this, but it seems like more and more I am being reminded of exactly how old I am getting. It seems like several times a week I will see something on TV or hear a song on the radio and they will say what year it is from and I will think, “That was how long ago?! Are you kidding me?!”
Sometimes I even say that out loud. I’ll admit it. Luckily I haven’t done it in public. Or maybe I have. Oh my God! Have I done that in public and not even realized it due to my advancing years? Have I crossed over to the sort of advanced age related idiosyncrasies like sneezing SO LOUD that it restarts your heart because it’s so worn out it stops when you sneeze and I haven’t even noticed it because my hearing is so bad?
Just kidding, my hearing is fine. What?
It’s quite a reality check when you realize that a very important event in your life happened over a decade ago. Are you kidding me? Do you know what is supposed to have happened a decade ago? Fifth grade. That’s it. That is the ONLY thing that should have happened that long ago. Everything else in life should have happened within the last 2 years because that’s how young people experience life.
College kids have no concept of the reality of age because everything that happens to them is new and fancy and full of fun and probably the very real threat of an STD. And I can honestly say that there is nothing wrong with that. As far as I’m concerned, everything should be new and fancy and full of fun and I’ll just bring a condom to make sure everything is the way it is supposed to be. Even the STD.
The best part of being young is (or should I say ‘was’) the fact that there are no consequences for most of your actions. Fail a class? “I’ll take it next semester.” Break up with your girlfriend/boyfriend? “I’ll get a new one in a couple of weeks.” Have a shitty summer vacation? “I’ll do something better next year. Maybe Cancun.”
But the next thing you know 12 summers have passed, you’ve never been to Cancun and you’re sitting at home on a Tuesday night, watching “The Biggest Loser” alone while eating a plain chicken breast and broccoli instead of being out at the bars enjoying San Felipe’s Cantina’s ½ price tequila shots on Tequila Tuesdays with bar food, the hot girl that worked there who wanted to do you but you never hooked up because one of you ALWAYS had a girlfriend or a boyfriend when the other was single, and at least 2 of your best friends in the world. Oh yeah, and tequila.
That was a really long sentence that mathematically adds up to this sentence: Why the hell do I even wake up in the mornings anymore? Honestly. What the hell am I doing being this old and this lame? A decade ago I was making more money, drinking a WHOLE lot more and thus having a WHOLE lot more fun, and I had no concept that someday I would wake up and be as old as I am.
I’ll be honest, though. I can’t really say I am depressed by the act of getting older, because mentally I feel just about as dumb as I was when I was 22, give or take some sparkles of age-induced brilliance every now and again (like when I finally figured out what securities trading is. Unfortunately I am getting old and I promptly forgot what I learned so I need to go look it up again just to make sure). Apart from how much it hurts to get out of bed sometimes, it’s really not too bad.
The worst part of it, to me at least, is the fact that I have gray hair creeping up into my facial area. I don’t like that one bit. Not one bit I say! Gray hair is for old people. Not almost 37-year-olds. It’s for like 55-year-olds and above. That stuff just does not fit into my lifestyle.
A couple of years ago I was at a pool party at my friend T-Rock’s house (just an FYI, eventually we are going to be too old for nicknames like that. Eventually Ice Cube is going to HAVE to change his name back to O’Shea Jackson because I don’t think anyone in their 40’s should be named after something you use to reduce swelling) and I was standing on the diving board, getting ready to unleash some mad diving skills upon the pool, when Zoom, a friend of mine whose nickname days are also numbered (can’t wait to see you half-stepping it with a walker and telling some lady at the nursing home, “They call me ZOOM, bitch!”) says to me, “Dude, what the hell is that on your chest?”
I look down, fully expecting an open wound, a tattoo I don’t remember getting or a large piece of barbed wire to be sticking out of my chest. Instead I come face to face with a large patch of gray chest hair where my black chest hair used to be. And the gray hair begins mocking me.
“What the hell is that?” I ask, a bit panicked.
“Is that gray hair?” asks Zoom.
“No, I think I was out in the sun too long and it bleached my chest hair blond,” I lie.
“Ha ha! That’s gray hair! Dude, you’re OLD!”
So I tried to cannonball him but I jackknifed my hip and almost drown because my leg didn’t work. That’ll teach him.
But he was right. It was gray hair. And that gray hair has steadily started the creep up from my chest into my goatee and into the sides of my hair. If I don’t shave for 3 days I can literally add 12 years to my face. That would have been awesome when I was 19, but it’s not so good when I’m already old enough to do anything worth getting old for.
Except maybe joining AARP. I hear they have some good tequila parties. But they probably don’t let anyone dance on the bar anymore. Not without a doctor’s note.
I think there is probably a box or two of Just For Men in my future. I’m lame, I know, but the gray hair belongs on someone else’s face, at least for 13 more years. Then I’ll take it back. Maybe.
B!
Sometimes I even say that out loud. I’ll admit it. Luckily I haven’t done it in public. Or maybe I have. Oh my God! Have I done that in public and not even realized it due to my advancing years? Have I crossed over to the sort of advanced age related idiosyncrasies like sneezing SO LOUD that it restarts your heart because it’s so worn out it stops when you sneeze and I haven’t even noticed it because my hearing is so bad?
Just kidding, my hearing is fine. What?
It’s quite a reality check when you realize that a very important event in your life happened over a decade ago. Are you kidding me? Do you know what is supposed to have happened a decade ago? Fifth grade. That’s it. That is the ONLY thing that should have happened that long ago. Everything else in life should have happened within the last 2 years because that’s how young people experience life.
College kids have no concept of the reality of age because everything that happens to them is new and fancy and full of fun and probably the very real threat of an STD. And I can honestly say that there is nothing wrong with that. As far as I’m concerned, everything should be new and fancy and full of fun and I’ll just bring a condom to make sure everything is the way it is supposed to be. Even the STD.
The best part of being young is (or should I say ‘was’) the fact that there are no consequences for most of your actions. Fail a class? “I’ll take it next semester.” Break up with your girlfriend/boyfriend? “I’ll get a new one in a couple of weeks.” Have a shitty summer vacation? “I’ll do something better next year. Maybe Cancun.”
But the next thing you know 12 summers have passed, you’ve never been to Cancun and you’re sitting at home on a Tuesday night, watching “The Biggest Loser” alone while eating a plain chicken breast and broccoli instead of being out at the bars enjoying San Felipe’s Cantina’s ½ price tequila shots on Tequila Tuesdays with bar food, the hot girl that worked there who wanted to do you but you never hooked up because one of you ALWAYS had a girlfriend or a boyfriend when the other was single, and at least 2 of your best friends in the world. Oh yeah, and tequila.
That was a really long sentence that mathematically adds up to this sentence: Why the hell do I even wake up in the mornings anymore? Honestly. What the hell am I doing being this old and this lame? A decade ago I was making more money, drinking a WHOLE lot more and thus having a WHOLE lot more fun, and I had no concept that someday I would wake up and be as old as I am.
I’ll be honest, though. I can’t really say I am depressed by the act of getting older, because mentally I feel just about as dumb as I was when I was 22, give or take some sparkles of age-induced brilliance every now and again (like when I finally figured out what securities trading is. Unfortunately I am getting old and I promptly forgot what I learned so I need to go look it up again just to make sure). Apart from how much it hurts to get out of bed sometimes, it’s really not too bad.
The worst part of it, to me at least, is the fact that I have gray hair creeping up into my facial area. I don’t like that one bit. Not one bit I say! Gray hair is for old people. Not almost 37-year-olds. It’s for like 55-year-olds and above. That stuff just does not fit into my lifestyle.
A couple of years ago I was at a pool party at my friend T-Rock’s house (just an FYI, eventually we are going to be too old for nicknames like that. Eventually Ice Cube is going to HAVE to change his name back to O’Shea Jackson because I don’t think anyone in their 40’s should be named after something you use to reduce swelling) and I was standing on the diving board, getting ready to unleash some mad diving skills upon the pool, when Zoom, a friend of mine whose nickname days are also numbered (can’t wait to see you half-stepping it with a walker and telling some lady at the nursing home, “They call me ZOOM, bitch!”) says to me, “Dude, what the hell is that on your chest?”
I look down, fully expecting an open wound, a tattoo I don’t remember getting or a large piece of barbed wire to be sticking out of my chest. Instead I come face to face with a large patch of gray chest hair where my black chest hair used to be. And the gray hair begins mocking me.
“What the hell is that?” I ask, a bit panicked.
“Is that gray hair?” asks Zoom.
“No, I think I was out in the sun too long and it bleached my chest hair blond,” I lie.
“Ha ha! That’s gray hair! Dude, you’re OLD!”
So I tried to cannonball him but I jackknifed my hip and almost drown because my leg didn’t work. That’ll teach him.
But he was right. It was gray hair. And that gray hair has steadily started the creep up from my chest into my goatee and into the sides of my hair. If I don’t shave for 3 days I can literally add 12 years to my face. That would have been awesome when I was 19, but it’s not so good when I’m already old enough to do anything worth getting old for.
Except maybe joining AARP. I hear they have some good tequila parties. But they probably don’t let anyone dance on the bar anymore. Not without a doctor’s note.
I think there is probably a box or two of Just For Men in my future. I’m lame, I know, but the gray hair belongs on someone else’s face, at least for 13 more years. Then I’ll take it back. Maybe.
B!
Monday, October 26, 2009
Memory On Sabbatical
There is a trailer that has been playing for the last three or four months at the movie theater I normally go to that talks about the Will Roger’s Institute and how donations from moviegoers has helped finance all kinds of programs used at the institute. According to the trailer, millions and millions of dollars have been donated to the institute. The problem is, I don’t remember ever donating money to them.
But then it hit me: Way back in the mid- to late-1970’s they used to play a Will Roger’s Institute commercial on the screen at the movie theater and then they would stop everything, turn on the lights and pass a couple of buckets around the audience for people to donate money into, kind of like a movie version of the collection plate at church.
The memory I have of this happening is of me sitting next to my dad at some movie I saw with him, the title of which has been lost to the winds of time. I do remember that the walls of the movie theater were brown, but I doubt that helps much. I won’t even attempt to name the film because that memory is absolutely gone. But I do remember several occasions where a film was stopped and a bucket was passed around to collect money for the Will Roger’s Institute.
So I’m not really worried about what happened to the collection bucket because it’s obvious that a bunch of them probably went missing and they had to find a new way to collect money from moviegoers. What worries me is what exactly happened to the rest of my memories of the circumstances surrounding those collection buckets. Where are they? Are they still with me?
Logic would assume that they have to still be with me, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to recall something that hasn’t happened for 30 years. Where has that memory been? Hanging out with a bunch of other random, nearly meaningless memories down at the pub, throwing back pints and waiting to get called up to mess up my mental processes for an afternoon?
The fact that I remember anything kind of leads me to believe that I probably remember everything. If a smell can trigger something specific in my mind (my kindergarten teacher, whose name is a mystery to me, used to smell like a very specific mixture of cigarettes and perfume that other women occasionally have and it hits my nose from time to time and brings me right back to the days of Dick, Jane and Spot), and a song can bring me back to a certain time in my life, should I assume that everything that has ever happened to me is stored somewhere in my memory?
If you think about that in real terms, that should boggle the part of your mind that is prone to that sort of thing. Everything you’ve ever seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched is somewhere inside of you if we subscribe to this theory.
I went so far as to call my dad and ask him if he ever remembered something like that happening. It was obvious that he hadn’t thought of it in probably the same amount of time I had. It’s kind of neat to be on the other end of the phone listening to someone’s light bulbs light up as they slowly recall some otherwise meaningless event that is only a noteworthy experience because it is a shared experience.
At the same time, a friend of mine told me about a time where a few of us TP’ed a guy’s house when we were in high school and I ABSOLUTELY CANNOT remember doing that. I don’t even have the faintest glimmer of a recollection of doing that and it has even gotten to the point where I want to go TP his house just so I can see what it feels like, see if I can’t jog some memories or something.
Where the hell is that memory? Why can I remember some guy standing in a movie theater, begging with a bucket, but I can’t remember something that should be a semi-noteworthy experience in my life?
Alcohol, I blame you.
Man, I could go on and on about this subject, but I don’t think I would get anywhere. What are your thoughts?
B!
But then it hit me: Way back in the mid- to late-1970’s they used to play a Will Roger’s Institute commercial on the screen at the movie theater and then they would stop everything, turn on the lights and pass a couple of buckets around the audience for people to donate money into, kind of like a movie version of the collection plate at church.
The memory I have of this happening is of me sitting next to my dad at some movie I saw with him, the title of which has been lost to the winds of time. I do remember that the walls of the movie theater were brown, but I doubt that helps much. I won’t even attempt to name the film because that memory is absolutely gone. But I do remember several occasions where a film was stopped and a bucket was passed around to collect money for the Will Roger’s Institute.
So I’m not really worried about what happened to the collection bucket because it’s obvious that a bunch of them probably went missing and they had to find a new way to collect money from moviegoers. What worries me is what exactly happened to the rest of my memories of the circumstances surrounding those collection buckets. Where are they? Are they still with me?
Logic would assume that they have to still be with me, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to recall something that hasn’t happened for 30 years. Where has that memory been? Hanging out with a bunch of other random, nearly meaningless memories down at the pub, throwing back pints and waiting to get called up to mess up my mental processes for an afternoon?
The fact that I remember anything kind of leads me to believe that I probably remember everything. If a smell can trigger something specific in my mind (my kindergarten teacher, whose name is a mystery to me, used to smell like a very specific mixture of cigarettes and perfume that other women occasionally have and it hits my nose from time to time and brings me right back to the days of Dick, Jane and Spot), and a song can bring me back to a certain time in my life, should I assume that everything that has ever happened to me is stored somewhere in my memory?
If you think about that in real terms, that should boggle the part of your mind that is prone to that sort of thing. Everything you’ve ever seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched is somewhere inside of you if we subscribe to this theory.
I went so far as to call my dad and ask him if he ever remembered something like that happening. It was obvious that he hadn’t thought of it in probably the same amount of time I had. It’s kind of neat to be on the other end of the phone listening to someone’s light bulbs light up as they slowly recall some otherwise meaningless event that is only a noteworthy experience because it is a shared experience.
At the same time, a friend of mine told me about a time where a few of us TP’ed a guy’s house when we were in high school and I ABSOLUTELY CANNOT remember doing that. I don’t even have the faintest glimmer of a recollection of doing that and it has even gotten to the point where I want to go TP his house just so I can see what it feels like, see if I can’t jog some memories or something.
Where the hell is that memory? Why can I remember some guy standing in a movie theater, begging with a bucket, but I can’t remember something that should be a semi-noteworthy experience in my life?
Alcohol, I blame you.
Man, I could go on and on about this subject, but I don’t think I would get anywhere. What are your thoughts?
B!
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Catching The Wind
On my way home from work today I was behind a green Ford Thunderbird with at least three young adults in it. First off, I know I’m getting old because I can call people in their late teens and early twenties “kids” and “young adults.” I guess that makes me a “medium” adult, because I think the crossover from adult to “old person” is about 53 years old.
Ask me about that “old person” thing when I’m 53 and I’m sure I’ll be able to slide that one up to 70 pretty easily. Don’t ask me anything when I’m 70 because I won’t have time for any stupid foolishness like answering questions about my age and how I feel. I’ll be too busy going to bed at 6:30 at night and enjoying my breakfast at 4AM at Denny’s. And don’t you dare get in between me and my Moons Over My-Hammy. I will kill you. What are they going to do, give me life in prison? It will be worth the 2 years I serve to see the look of shock on your face when I stab you with in the ear with my fork for interrupting my morning date with two eggs and a slab of ham. Fair warning.
Anyway, as I’m rolling behind this Thunderbird, the passenger window rolls down and a hand comes out, trying to catch the wind. At the time I couldn’t tell if the hand belonged to a young person or an old person, boy or girl. All I could see was it trying to catch the wind. Then it did the “swan move” and made itself more aerodynamic, then it started surfing the wind as it blew past, moving up and down as the wind dictated.
Seeing that hand made me happy. It made me think about the first time I ever caught the wind in my hand like that. It made me think about riding in a blue Econoline 150 van with my dad back in the 1970’s. It was equipped with captain’s chairs in the front and no chairs in the back, just a shag rug because it was the ‘70’s and nobody had any concept of style or safety back then. Seat belts? Not so much. Maybe a lap belt for the driver, but everyone else in the car would have been left to bounce off of each other like a huge polyester mosh pit in the event of a crash.
But that passenger window in that van was perfect for catching the wind. My dad used to have an air conditioning system he used to call “the 255 A/C system.” It sounds cool, but all it meant was two windows down and 55 miles an hour. Nothing to do but catch the wind and sweat when you’re in advanced technology like that. Fortunately we lived in Colorado so you could get away with that air conditioning system for most of the summer there. Still, I wonder how much wonderful Colorado scenery I missed while staring at my hand while it caught the wind.
Then I have to wonder if I will ever get too old to be mesmerized by the feel of the wind on my hand as I drive down a road somewhere. I hope not. But you rarely, if ever, see old people driving with the windows down and their hands out the window. Did they just forget about doing that? Or is that something that loses its allure over the years?
I hope I never get too old to feel the wind.
B!
Ask me about that “old person” thing when I’m 53 and I’m sure I’ll be able to slide that one up to 70 pretty easily. Don’t ask me anything when I’m 70 because I won’t have time for any stupid foolishness like answering questions about my age and how I feel. I’ll be too busy going to bed at 6:30 at night and enjoying my breakfast at 4AM at Denny’s. And don’t you dare get in between me and my Moons Over My-Hammy. I will kill you. What are they going to do, give me life in prison? It will be worth the 2 years I serve to see the look of shock on your face when I stab you with in the ear with my fork for interrupting my morning date with two eggs and a slab of ham. Fair warning.
Anyway, as I’m rolling behind this Thunderbird, the passenger window rolls down and a hand comes out, trying to catch the wind. At the time I couldn’t tell if the hand belonged to a young person or an old person, boy or girl. All I could see was it trying to catch the wind. Then it did the “swan move” and made itself more aerodynamic, then it started surfing the wind as it blew past, moving up and down as the wind dictated.
Seeing that hand made me happy. It made me think about the first time I ever caught the wind in my hand like that. It made me think about riding in a blue Econoline 150 van with my dad back in the 1970’s. It was equipped with captain’s chairs in the front and no chairs in the back, just a shag rug because it was the ‘70’s and nobody had any concept of style or safety back then. Seat belts? Not so much. Maybe a lap belt for the driver, but everyone else in the car would have been left to bounce off of each other like a huge polyester mosh pit in the event of a crash.
But that passenger window in that van was perfect for catching the wind. My dad used to have an air conditioning system he used to call “the 255 A/C system.” It sounds cool, but all it meant was two windows down and 55 miles an hour. Nothing to do but catch the wind and sweat when you’re in advanced technology like that. Fortunately we lived in Colorado so you could get away with that air conditioning system for most of the summer there. Still, I wonder how much wonderful Colorado scenery I missed while staring at my hand while it caught the wind.
Then I have to wonder if I will ever get too old to be mesmerized by the feel of the wind on my hand as I drive down a road somewhere. I hope not. But you rarely, if ever, see old people driving with the windows down and their hands out the window. Did they just forget about doing that? Or is that something that loses its allure over the years?
I hope I never get too old to feel the wind.
B!
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
The Dumbest People In America: A Competition
Unbeknownst to the majority of Americans, I have been conducting a top-secret, ultra-undercover, amazingly scientific survey intended to determine the dumbest people in America.
I could easily bore you with all of the talk of analogous subsets, placebo groupings, double blind ad hoc testes wrestling, and, of course, the Dentyne effect, where no matter how hard you search for five dentists to agree on something, one of those motherfuckers ALWAYS recommends Big Red.
One day that fifth dentist is going to get theirs, I tell you. In spades. Or maybe in his teeth, because I don’t actually know what “in spades” means.
I have decided not to bore you with all of the scientific mumbo jumbo because it is really just a bunch of spreadsheets that would make no sense to anyone but me, and since I never wrote down a key to the meaning in case the spreadsheets fell into the wrong hands, you will just have to take my word for it unless somebody out there gets all fancy crazy and discovers/makes up a Rosetta stone to help translate my findings. You should take my word for it anyway because I literally spent minutes of my life gathering this information and organizing it into something sort of official looking.
And who cares that I got a B in Bio 100 in college and never took the lab because I didn’t feel like standing around in a lab with silly goggles on for 3 hours a week for 1 credit of work. If you ask me, the people who actually wasted their time for that crap have no business passing judgment on the stupid people of the world because somebody would just have to slip a mirror into the little slide on the microscope they spent 3 hours looking into to give them an idea of who the real dummy is. Really? All that work for one credit hour? Are you kidding me?
The real smart people took an astronomy lab because you didn’t have to cut anything open, you just had to look through a telescope, draw dots on paper and label them as stars and galaxies and you got the added bonus of hanging out with a pretty hot girl who, in retrospect, led you on just to copy your homework and who turned out to be kind of a bitch.
Ah, the ignorance of youth. How I miss it. The bliss of not knowing when a girl was using you to get her degree without having to give up the pootie. If I could go back, several women would have either not graduated or spent some time naked in my room, I tell you what.
Anyway, I will now reveal the findings of my survey and list, once and for all, who the dumbest groups of people are in America:
#5: Rich women in luxury cars they didn’t buy themselves. I’m guessing this is kind of a surprise to people, because who has better access to education and all that crap than rich people? But here’s the rub: rich women don’t have to be smart, especially if they are pretty. They can pretty much coast through life and have stuff handed to them without ever having to make an actual rational decision or original thought. All they have to do is look good and stay a few steps behind their rich husbands/fathers and make as few waves as possible.
#4: People who think that writers who resort to using Top 10 lists for humor have hit the bottom of the creative barrel and are using the lists as a cheap way to get a laugh. All I have to say to that is “F U” and please take special note that this is a top 5 list and there are MUCH cheaper ways to get a laugh. Take my fart jokes, please. So I’m only halfway to the bottom of the creative barrel you sons of bitches. There’s much more crap where this came from, trust me. And please, take my fart jokes. Pretty please.
#3: Texas.
#2: People who spell the word “maybe” wrong. Mabey, mabye and mqqqqbe are all spelled wrong. Learn your native tongue you pricks.
#1: Juggalos or whatever the hell the people who consider themselves fans of the Insane Clown Posse call themselves. I would consider them in the same league as Oakland Raider fans, but in reality the Juggalos are SOOOO much dumber that they take the Raider fans completely off the charts since the Raiders fans are at least smart enough to like a football team. There is literally not ONE redeeming quality about anything the ICP does at any point. They had one song that was mildly entertaining, but it wasn’t even good enough for me to know the title of, so that pretty much wraps it up for those guys.
As an added bonus, I will give you the dumbest animals in America at no extra charge: cats. I only have one bit of data to back up my claims, but I think it will suffice. A woman just found her two cats that climbed into a part of the house that was being remodeled THIRTEEN weeks ago. Instead of coming out after spending a couple of minutes snooping around in the remodel, the cats decided to spend the next 3 months trapped inside of the walls of the house.
You know how many times I’ve heard that story about a dog? Zero. You know why? Because dogs aren’t that fucking stupid.
I rest my case.
B!
P.S.—as a special addendum to this blog, I would like to retract anything I ever said about dogs being smarter than cats thanks to an episode I experienced last night where my dog threw up shit. Let me repeat that for those who may have missed it. My dog threw up shit. Out of his mouth. I am not lying about that. You only get one guess as to why there was shit for him to throw up.
So, to any dogs reading this blog (and I know you’re out there) you can send your thank you cards to Foster Charmington for dropping your collective IQ to a VERY unrespectable level. He would like to apologize, but he’s got kind of a potty mouth and I don’t want that kind of stuff going on in this blog.
Get it, potty mouth? Oh, fuck off, that was good and you know it.
I could easily bore you with all of the talk of analogous subsets, placebo groupings, double blind ad hoc testes wrestling, and, of course, the Dentyne effect, where no matter how hard you search for five dentists to agree on something, one of those motherfuckers ALWAYS recommends Big Red.
One day that fifth dentist is going to get theirs, I tell you. In spades. Or maybe in his teeth, because I don’t actually know what “in spades” means.
I have decided not to bore you with all of the scientific mumbo jumbo because it is really just a bunch of spreadsheets that would make no sense to anyone but me, and since I never wrote down a key to the meaning in case the spreadsheets fell into the wrong hands, you will just have to take my word for it unless somebody out there gets all fancy crazy and discovers/makes up a Rosetta stone to help translate my findings. You should take my word for it anyway because I literally spent minutes of my life gathering this information and organizing it into something sort of official looking.
And who cares that I got a B in Bio 100 in college and never took the lab because I didn’t feel like standing around in a lab with silly goggles on for 3 hours a week for 1 credit of work. If you ask me, the people who actually wasted their time for that crap have no business passing judgment on the stupid people of the world because somebody would just have to slip a mirror into the little slide on the microscope they spent 3 hours looking into to give them an idea of who the real dummy is. Really? All that work for one credit hour? Are you kidding me?
The real smart people took an astronomy lab because you didn’t have to cut anything open, you just had to look through a telescope, draw dots on paper and label them as stars and galaxies and you got the added bonus of hanging out with a pretty hot girl who, in retrospect, led you on just to copy your homework and who turned out to be kind of a bitch.
Ah, the ignorance of youth. How I miss it. The bliss of not knowing when a girl was using you to get her degree without having to give up the pootie. If I could go back, several women would have either not graduated or spent some time naked in my room, I tell you what.
Anyway, I will now reveal the findings of my survey and list, once and for all, who the dumbest groups of people are in America:
#5: Rich women in luxury cars they didn’t buy themselves. I’m guessing this is kind of a surprise to people, because who has better access to education and all that crap than rich people? But here’s the rub: rich women don’t have to be smart, especially if they are pretty. They can pretty much coast through life and have stuff handed to them without ever having to make an actual rational decision or original thought. All they have to do is look good and stay a few steps behind their rich husbands/fathers and make as few waves as possible.
#4: People who think that writers who resort to using Top 10 lists for humor have hit the bottom of the creative barrel and are using the lists as a cheap way to get a laugh. All I have to say to that is “F U” and please take special note that this is a top 5 list and there are MUCH cheaper ways to get a laugh. Take my fart jokes, please. So I’m only halfway to the bottom of the creative barrel you sons of bitches. There’s much more crap where this came from, trust me. And please, take my fart jokes. Pretty please.
#3: Texas.
#2: People who spell the word “maybe” wrong. Mabey, mabye and mqqqqbe are all spelled wrong. Learn your native tongue you pricks.
#1: Juggalos or whatever the hell the people who consider themselves fans of the Insane Clown Posse call themselves. I would consider them in the same league as Oakland Raider fans, but in reality the Juggalos are SOOOO much dumber that they take the Raider fans completely off the charts since the Raiders fans are at least smart enough to like a football team. There is literally not ONE redeeming quality about anything the ICP does at any point. They had one song that was mildly entertaining, but it wasn’t even good enough for me to know the title of, so that pretty much wraps it up for those guys.
As an added bonus, I will give you the dumbest animals in America at no extra charge: cats. I only have one bit of data to back up my claims, but I think it will suffice. A woman just found her two cats that climbed into a part of the house that was being remodeled THIRTEEN weeks ago. Instead of coming out after spending a couple of minutes snooping around in the remodel, the cats decided to spend the next 3 months trapped inside of the walls of the house.
You know how many times I’ve heard that story about a dog? Zero. You know why? Because dogs aren’t that fucking stupid.
I rest my case.
B!
P.S.—as a special addendum to this blog, I would like to retract anything I ever said about dogs being smarter than cats thanks to an episode I experienced last night where my dog threw up shit. Let me repeat that for those who may have missed it. My dog threw up shit. Out of his mouth. I am not lying about that. You only get one guess as to why there was shit for him to throw up.
So, to any dogs reading this blog (and I know you’re out there) you can send your thank you cards to Foster Charmington for dropping your collective IQ to a VERY unrespectable level. He would like to apologize, but he’s got kind of a potty mouth and I don’t want that kind of stuff going on in this blog.
Get it, potty mouth? Oh, fuck off, that was good and you know it.
Friday, October 2, 2009
The Infinit Ownership Test
Today, while at the library, I came across a top secret document that the makers of the Infiniti line of automobiles use to weed through all the riffraff as part of their ownership requirements. They don’t want you to know these answers because Infiniti is a luxury brand and they don’t want trailer park scum like yourselves being able to get behind the seat of one of their automobiles.
I say we all take these answers to heart and go to the nearest Infiniti dealership, take the test, pass it, go for a test drive, then go straight over to the nearest Nissan dealership and buy one of their cars because they are the EXACT fucking car only cheaper. Sound good? Now, get out your cheat sheets and prepare to answer the Infiniti Ownership Test. The answers will appear in bold print for your convenience.
Question 1:
When driving on a thoroughfare with a posted speed limit of 45 MPH, what speed should you travel?
a. 45 MPH
b. 47 MPH
c. 52 MPH
d. A posted what? I’ve never heard of such a thing.
Question 2:
When driving on the freeway, what is the proper procedure for changing lanes?
a. Check your mirrors, signal, make sure there is adequate clearance, slowly merge
b. Signal and change lanes, checking your mirrors after you already in the other lane
c. Just go man, just go
d. Drive right up the ass of the guy in front of you until you can see what he ate for lunch, then cross as many lanes of traffic as there are, cutting off as many people as you can, then cross as many lanes back across the freeway as possible to end up one car length in front of where you started.
Question 3:
When encountering a stop sign, how long must you come to a complete stop before proceeding?
a. 1 second
b. 2 seconds
c. As long as it takes to ensure I have the right of way.
d. I bought this car to go, not stop. I acknowledge the stop sign’s presence with a slight nod of my head as I blow through it then contact my attorney to slap an injunction against the Stop Sign Placement Coalition and go on about my day.
Question 4:
Which lane should you be in to make a right hand turn?
a. The right hand lane
b. The center lane
c. The left hand lane
d. Whatever lane I want. My car is better than everyone else’s and they should be happy to share the same road as me.
Question 5:
What kind of person best fits the profile of an Infiniti driver?
a. Someone who knows the rules of the road and always drives defensively
b. Someone who enjoys a car that performs and who knows the rules of the road
c. Someone who cares about the well being of other humans in the world
d. Someone who is a self-important prick who knows nothing about how to drive except that shiny cars look cool.
I know it’s a short test, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t pass it. Happy Infiniti driving, assholes!
B!
I say we all take these answers to heart and go to the nearest Infiniti dealership, take the test, pass it, go for a test drive, then go straight over to the nearest Nissan dealership and buy one of their cars because they are the EXACT fucking car only cheaper. Sound good? Now, get out your cheat sheets and prepare to answer the Infiniti Ownership Test. The answers will appear in bold print for your convenience.
Question 1:
When driving on a thoroughfare with a posted speed limit of 45 MPH, what speed should you travel?
a. 45 MPH
b. 47 MPH
c. 52 MPH
d. A posted what? I’ve never heard of such a thing.
Question 2:
When driving on the freeway, what is the proper procedure for changing lanes?
a. Check your mirrors, signal, make sure there is adequate clearance, slowly merge
b. Signal and change lanes, checking your mirrors after you already in the other lane
c. Just go man, just go
d. Drive right up the ass of the guy in front of you until you can see what he ate for lunch, then cross as many lanes of traffic as there are, cutting off as many people as you can, then cross as many lanes back across the freeway as possible to end up one car length in front of where you started.
Question 3:
When encountering a stop sign, how long must you come to a complete stop before proceeding?
a. 1 second
b. 2 seconds
c. As long as it takes to ensure I have the right of way.
d. I bought this car to go, not stop. I acknowledge the stop sign’s presence with a slight nod of my head as I blow through it then contact my attorney to slap an injunction against the Stop Sign Placement Coalition and go on about my day.
Question 4:
Which lane should you be in to make a right hand turn?
a. The right hand lane
b. The center lane
c. The left hand lane
d. Whatever lane I want. My car is better than everyone else’s and they should be happy to share the same road as me.
Question 5:
What kind of person best fits the profile of an Infiniti driver?
a. Someone who knows the rules of the road and always drives defensively
b. Someone who enjoys a car that performs and who knows the rules of the road
c. Someone who cares about the well being of other humans in the world
d. Someone who is a self-important prick who knows nothing about how to drive except that shiny cars look cool.
I know it’s a short test, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t pass it. Happy Infiniti driving, assholes!
B!
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
A Pothead's Guide To Meaningful Conversation
I am not a pothead, so don’t let the name of this little essay fool you. I will admit I have smoked marijuana two times in my life: once when I was twelve and once when I was thirty. My rationale for the two trips down High And Stupid lane basically follow the edict that when I was twelve I wasn’t old enough to know any better (even though I did know it was a “bad” thing to do) and when I was thirty I was too old to know any better. My parents are going to kill me when they read this, by the way.
Amazingly, I made my way through several years of high school and college without ever doing the marijuana drug (or any drugs for that matter) again after my indiscretion as a 12-year-old. I also found out something very important about myself when I engaged in the illicit activity of smoking marijuana: It made me a complete fucking idiot. It made me stupid when I was twelve (which is why I didn’t do it again until I was thirty) and it made me EVEN DUMBER when I was thirty because I had 18 more years of experience to pile on to the Dumb Train before driving it off the tracks and into a ravine.
I’m not going to pull any punches here with the weed smoking because I have lived with enough potheads in my lifetime to be able to speak my mind about it. And, let’s face it, anything you smoke that can make a story about a guy with a hotdog in his pocket that he is contemplating throwing at a homeless man the funniest thing you’ve ever heard in your life needs to be called out in a public forum other than an article in High Times.
I take that back, that story is still pretty funny. Just not funny enough to make me or anyone else cry with laughter unless they are high on the ciga-weed. Then, somehow, a man in a tracksuit with a hotdog in his pocket becomes the highest form of comedy ever conceived, leaving things like satire, slapstick and “your mother” jokes choking in the dust. Or the smoke, as it were.
The biggest problem I have had lately with potheads is that they talk about it too fucking much and they like to interject random bullshit factoids to support their use of the drug. You will be engaged in a conversation with a pothead about how the NFL draft went, for example, and they will say something like, “Did you know that Thomas Jefferson smoked a gang of weed all the time? And so did Albert Einstein. Those guys did alright.”
What?
I always want to come back with, “Yeah, and did you know Hitler did amphetamines? Look how much that guy got done in a couple of years. The theory of relativity is for pussies. A real man gets bombed out of his gourd, invades Poland and bitch slaps France before committing suicide in a bunker somewhere after murdering like 8 million people.”
And if you have the audacity to think I’m glorifying Hitler, by the way, you should put down the pipe/apple/bong/gas mask and take a trip into the real world with the rest of us who actually have to deal with reality on a daily basis. I’m just not into the tired rhetoric of potheads. “Dude, George Washington smoked pot and they put his face on the dollar bill.”
Yeah, but, surprisingly, they didn’t put his face on the dollar bill because he smoked pot. I can pretty much guarantee that. Otherwise I’ve had several roommates during my lifetime who belong on currency of some sort. Probably Jamaican, come to think of it. For every one person who did something great with themselves in the 1700’s in spite of smoking pot I can give you at least 30 in the 2000’s who have done nothing but get blazed and play Halo for 16 hours straight.
“Yeah dude, but they play Halo in cooperation mode. That shit’s hard to do when you’re high. Can you order me a pizza? I can’t remember where the phone is.”
You know what else is hard to do? Try putting something in your mouth without lighting it on fire. I can’t tell you how much I struggle with that. Who even thought of that in the first place? If I walked around with a lit candle in my ear would that make me look cooler than I already am? What if I told you it would get you SUPER high and you could see God?
“Dude, it’s herbal. It’s natural. God wants us to smoke it.” Really? Then why do respiratory ailments exist? Is that God’s way of saying, “Gotcha, suckers! Smoke all you want, I’ll still kick your ass.” If you think about it, everything on earth was put here by God (if that’s the route you want to choose in your argument for weed) and we just used our free will to take the periodic table of elements and move some stuff around a little bit here and there and we came up with awesome things like crystal meth, morphine and internet porn (obviously everything isn’t ALL bad about playing with the periodic table). EVERYTHING we use is natural at some point in its existence on earth. Until we start smoking moon rocks or doing lines of Mars at the new Studio 54 I regret to inform all the potheads that the “it’s natural” defense is bullshit.
Do you only eat “organic” food too? That stuff is another huge crock of shit but I will save that for another day, just to save you from having another rant to worry about.
The worst part about the weed smokers is that they all think they are smarter than people who don’t smoke. Let me put this into the proper perspective: People who habitually use a drug that makes their reaction time slower, their conversations more boring and their clothes more smelly actually think they have the ability to pull one over on those who don’t smoke because they think they are smarter than everyone around them.
And they say weed does no harm. I say we already have enough stupid people in the world, what the hell do we need with a drug that makes people dumber than they already are? You are absolutely not fooling anyone when you smoke out and show up in the same room as me. You’re not fooling anyone when you go to your room, close the door and put a towel down on the floor to cover the hole on the bottom. You’re not fooling anyone when you suddenly disappear from a campsite because you “forgot your ice cream” in town (actually, I take that back, you did fool me and I’m still pissed about that). You’re not fooling anyone when you spend days upon days going to your friend’s house to “practice for softball” but come home every night glassy-eyed and still as shitty at softball as you were when you left.
Basically, all I’m saying is that if you want to go smoke weed, go ahead. Smoke away. Get higher than a motha. But don’t try to tell me how awesome it is because you would never use the same tired arguments potheads use for weed in place of ANY other drug or pastime. I won’t try to tell you how awesome playing golf is and have my only argument for playing golf be that President Eisenhower was an avid golfer and the president of the United States and he has his face on the dime. George W. Bush played golf, too, and he smoked weed. And he did cocaine. And he got busted for DUI. When his face gets on some currency we will talk. Until then, SHUT IT!
Thank you.
B!
Amazingly, I made my way through several years of high school and college without ever doing the marijuana drug (or any drugs for that matter) again after my indiscretion as a 12-year-old. I also found out something very important about myself when I engaged in the illicit activity of smoking marijuana: It made me a complete fucking idiot. It made me stupid when I was twelve (which is why I didn’t do it again until I was thirty) and it made me EVEN DUMBER when I was thirty because I had 18 more years of experience to pile on to the Dumb Train before driving it off the tracks and into a ravine.
I’m not going to pull any punches here with the weed smoking because I have lived with enough potheads in my lifetime to be able to speak my mind about it. And, let’s face it, anything you smoke that can make a story about a guy with a hotdog in his pocket that he is contemplating throwing at a homeless man the funniest thing you’ve ever heard in your life needs to be called out in a public forum other than an article in High Times.
I take that back, that story is still pretty funny. Just not funny enough to make me or anyone else cry with laughter unless they are high on the ciga-weed. Then, somehow, a man in a tracksuit with a hotdog in his pocket becomes the highest form of comedy ever conceived, leaving things like satire, slapstick and “your mother” jokes choking in the dust. Or the smoke, as it were.
The biggest problem I have had lately with potheads is that they talk about it too fucking much and they like to interject random bullshit factoids to support their use of the drug. You will be engaged in a conversation with a pothead about how the NFL draft went, for example, and they will say something like, “Did you know that Thomas Jefferson smoked a gang of weed all the time? And so did Albert Einstein. Those guys did alright.”
What?
I always want to come back with, “Yeah, and did you know Hitler did amphetamines? Look how much that guy got done in a couple of years. The theory of relativity is for pussies. A real man gets bombed out of his gourd, invades Poland and bitch slaps France before committing suicide in a bunker somewhere after murdering like 8 million people.”
And if you have the audacity to think I’m glorifying Hitler, by the way, you should put down the pipe/apple/bong/gas mask and take a trip into the real world with the rest of us who actually have to deal with reality on a daily basis. I’m just not into the tired rhetoric of potheads. “Dude, George Washington smoked pot and they put his face on the dollar bill.”
Yeah, but, surprisingly, they didn’t put his face on the dollar bill because he smoked pot. I can pretty much guarantee that. Otherwise I’ve had several roommates during my lifetime who belong on currency of some sort. Probably Jamaican, come to think of it. For every one person who did something great with themselves in the 1700’s in spite of smoking pot I can give you at least 30 in the 2000’s who have done nothing but get blazed and play Halo for 16 hours straight.
“Yeah dude, but they play Halo in cooperation mode. That shit’s hard to do when you’re high. Can you order me a pizza? I can’t remember where the phone is.”
You know what else is hard to do? Try putting something in your mouth without lighting it on fire. I can’t tell you how much I struggle with that. Who even thought of that in the first place? If I walked around with a lit candle in my ear would that make me look cooler than I already am? What if I told you it would get you SUPER high and you could see God?
“Dude, it’s herbal. It’s natural. God wants us to smoke it.” Really? Then why do respiratory ailments exist? Is that God’s way of saying, “Gotcha, suckers! Smoke all you want, I’ll still kick your ass.” If you think about it, everything on earth was put here by God (if that’s the route you want to choose in your argument for weed) and we just used our free will to take the periodic table of elements and move some stuff around a little bit here and there and we came up with awesome things like crystal meth, morphine and internet porn (obviously everything isn’t ALL bad about playing with the periodic table). EVERYTHING we use is natural at some point in its existence on earth. Until we start smoking moon rocks or doing lines of Mars at the new Studio 54 I regret to inform all the potheads that the “it’s natural” defense is bullshit.
Do you only eat “organic” food too? That stuff is another huge crock of shit but I will save that for another day, just to save you from having another rant to worry about.
The worst part about the weed smokers is that they all think they are smarter than people who don’t smoke. Let me put this into the proper perspective: People who habitually use a drug that makes their reaction time slower, their conversations more boring and their clothes more smelly actually think they have the ability to pull one over on those who don’t smoke because they think they are smarter than everyone around them.
And they say weed does no harm. I say we already have enough stupid people in the world, what the hell do we need with a drug that makes people dumber than they already are? You are absolutely not fooling anyone when you smoke out and show up in the same room as me. You’re not fooling anyone when you go to your room, close the door and put a towel down on the floor to cover the hole on the bottom. You’re not fooling anyone when you suddenly disappear from a campsite because you “forgot your ice cream” in town (actually, I take that back, you did fool me and I’m still pissed about that). You’re not fooling anyone when you spend days upon days going to your friend’s house to “practice for softball” but come home every night glassy-eyed and still as shitty at softball as you were when you left.
Basically, all I’m saying is that if you want to go smoke weed, go ahead. Smoke away. Get higher than a motha. But don’t try to tell me how awesome it is because you would never use the same tired arguments potheads use for weed in place of ANY other drug or pastime. I won’t try to tell you how awesome playing golf is and have my only argument for playing golf be that President Eisenhower was an avid golfer and the president of the United States and he has his face on the dime. George W. Bush played golf, too, and he smoked weed. And he did cocaine. And he got busted for DUI. When his face gets on some currency we will talk. Until then, SHUT IT!
Thank you.
B!
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