Hello kids. I am in kind of a good mood today because I think I just invented the best hobby ever created. I’m kind of excited about it because I think it might just take the world by storm and I like to think of myself as kind of a trendsetter (those of you who used to read my Myspace blogs will already be familiar with my trend setting skills through my invention of the word “pissblanket” and my universally accepted “Cro-Magnon Introduction Method To Meeting New People”—and those of you who haven’t read those blogs, maybe if you are really nice I will post a retro blog one day a week to remind you of my seemingly bottomless pit of brilliance. All you have to do is ask. Oh, and send money).
So here is the concept of my new hobby. Whenever I get bored, I am just going to open up a Word document and write someone a really tasty piece of hate mail that is completely baseless and most likely borderline insane. My targets will be chosen completely at random, except in very severe circumstances where someone I can actually identify has pissed me off in some way. Here is an example of my first bit of hate mail (I’m new at this, so if this sucks, tough shit):
2/8/10
From: the Desk of B!
To: The Governor Of Texas
Dear Sir or Madam,
Good morning, or afternoon, or evening, as the case may be. You will recognize by the salutation that I don’t know who you are. You will also recognize by the signature below that you don’t know who I am. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?
I have not bothered to look up who you are because I don’t think it is right to introduce yourself to a person who clearly has no interest in you. Since this feeling is probably quite mutual, I think we can dispense with the formalities and get on with the business at hand, which is this: Your state is a festering pile of crap.
I wasn’t a math major, but I would like to school you on some of the properties of math to let you understand just what kind of a moron you are for purposefully seeking the title of Governor of Texas. The first property I would like to introduce you to is the transitive property of math, which is stated as:
If a = b and b = c, then a = c
To put this property in proper perspective, let’s add names to the variables, shall we?
If (a) can be taken to stand for Texas and (b) can be taken to stand for the word “is” and (c) stands for a festering pile of crap, then we can assume:
Texas is. (a = b) Is a festering pile of crap (b = c) then Texas is equal to a festering pile of crap (a = c). It is also humid there, so that makes the crap even worse, but I don’t have a property accounting for humidity and ambient air temperature so you’ll just have to take my word on that one.
Your state of Texas is a festering pile of crap. Right there, mathematically proven, in your face, so don’t try to argue with me. Oh, and as a postulate: you’re a moron. I just added that last part in because it’s true. I don’t have a mathematical proof at hand for that one, but I’m sure I could muster one up if you would like me to. In lieu of the mathematical proof, I will just provide data that would convince any jury of what a moron you are:
Anyone who would willfully and intentionally govern a state with such places as Dalhart, (a city with so much cattle flatulence in the air you can literally see it from six miles away) and Houston, which, in spite of NASA being located there, has amassed a population so stupid that the collective IQ of that city isn’t even a real number as far as I can find in the math books both real and imagined. And Galveston? Are you kidding me? Did you even LOOK at the state you were trying to run or were you just so entranced with all of the murals of Tom Landry and all the other old Dallas Cowboys on the walls of your local Outback Steakhouse that you wanted to assume control of a state with such artistic, if stupid, tendencies.
Have you ever heard the phrase “the wonderful state of Texas?” Of course you haven’t, because such a phrase doesn’t even make sense. I spent 9 months in Texas and I don’t even look at it as a state as much as I look at it as something that I stepped in that was so disgusting I had to throw my shoes away.
So not only are you a moron, you owe me a pair of shoes, jerkface.
Would you like more examples of how horrible you and your state are? Of course you would, because you haven’t BEGUN to understand how stupid your state is. For this next example, I will use the symmetric property, which is stated as:
If a = b then b = a
In this case, as always, the letter a stands for you, the governor of Texas, and the letter b stands for big pile of asscrap (yeah, I just made that word up, what are you going to do about it, you pissblanket?) called Texas, then you and a pile of asscrap, governor, are one and the same.
Congratulations on running the 2nd worst state in the union. You can thank God for Mississippi, the only state in the Union that is more fun to spell than it is to visit. But at least it doesn’t have to count El Paso as one of its GOOD cities.
Fuck off. Sincerely, fuck off.
B!
I’m pretty psyched about my new hobby. My next target is the guy who kept cutting off those GoDaddy commercials before they actually did something worth watching in that crappy game yesterday.
I like me some Danica Patrick. And not just because her last name kicks ass.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Stabbing Cracker Barrel
Ahem. I am going to stab the Cracker Barrel right in their stupid heads, I promise you that.
I like to start off each one of my little entries here with some sort of a seemingly random quote that will grab the reader’s attention and let them know that, hey, I mean business. And business, in my case, involves stabbing corporations right in their stupid heads. I know it is only pro bono work at this point, but I’m hoping if I stab enough corporations on my own dime I will latch on to some bigger corporation stabbers in some sort of paid internship or something.
Granted, I don’t actually know if Cracker Barrel is incorporated, it may be an LLC or it may be part of a larger conglomerate that is run by lower primates. I will leave finding those answers up to somebody who didn’t just get rejected by them for an interview based on some sort of screening process that was obviously devised by a chimpanzee. I’m still going to stab them.
For those of you who have never been to Cracker Barrel, I congratulate you, for you have successfully dodged one of the worst dining experiences known to man. Here is what it’s like to engage in a dining experience there: As you make your way past a seemingly endless row of “handmade” rocking chairs priced at $149 on the porch, you see a menu describing the daily special written in chalk on the side of the building next to the door. You can NEVER read that because it has been the same special for 13 years and they ran out of chalk 12 years ago. The management has never gone through the rigorous process of going to Wal-Mart to buy more chalk because they are so engrossed in figuring out how to put on their suspenders they have little time for anything else.
Inside you will be forced to walk through a retail store that has somehow managed to cram so much stuff into the space that it looks like an episode of “Hoarders” is getting ready to film there if they could just figure out how to get the camera inside the door. In between Christmas ornaments of Elvis and cassette tapes of Kenny Roger’s Greatest Hits you will find cool things like . . . ummmm, nothing. There is nothing cool there. Unless you count the little tub full of those awesome dinner mints that melt in your mouth, but that little 8 ounce tub costs $7 so if you do count that, you should be eating at a much better restaurant than Cracker Barrel. You should be at the Red Lobster, moneybags. There’s more flavor in those cheesy biscuits than in a whole table full of crap from Cracker Barrel.
If you manage to find a path through all of the piles and piles of shit that makes a Grandma’s knees quiver in dry-crotched joy, you will finally find a hostess who is genuinely unhappy to see you. If she wasn’t so busy fielding special requests from people making ABSOLUTELY SURE there is no spice on any of the food, she would actually spit in your face before taking you to a table right next to either a table of pure-blood white trash or a table full of the bingo club from the church or, better yet, both.
At this point, the dining experience is completely unremarkable unless you happen to catch some of the conversation from the pure-blood white trash table, where you will hear genuine, straight-faced statements like, “I don’t care what you say, I will park my Camaro anywhere in the yard I feel like,” and “Does this tank top make my rebel flag tattoo look bitchen or what?”
Just eat your “food” and get the hell out of there as fast as you can. And on the way home, don’t forget to stop off at ANY OTHER RESTAURANT to make sure you get some good food in your belly before you get to your front door.
Okay, so back to why I am going to stab these F-worders, they have an ad up in Flagstaff looking for a manager to run their retail side of the restaurant. I applied to the ad and was given a link to their screening process. From what I could tell from the “screening process,” the only question was this:
Do you have at least 2 years of retail management experience?
My answer was, “Yes.” (I have almost 15 years of management experience, for those who were wondering if I was lying about the whole “yes” thing right there)
My final score: 0
What the fuck?! I can say that word because I am over 18, in good physical health, have never been convicted of a crime (or even accused of one, for that matter), and have seen “Scarface” more than 57 times in my life.
I know I am probably not the best employee in the world. But I am as close as you will ever get without having to deal with someone who says things like, “Buck up, camper, things are getting better” and “What a fantastic day! It just makes you want to whistle a happy tune, doesn’t it?” early in the morning before you’ve had your coffee or pushed a midget down the stairs yet.
Somehow I have become fundamentally unemployable over the last 2 years without even trying. That’s the best part. I am the same guy who ran $2+ million volumes with little or no effort (just kidding, I worked my ass off, I just made it look easy). I am the same guy that managed to keep all of the various races and tribes from killing each other on their lunch breaks up at Savers in Flagstaff while SIMULTANEOUSLY lowering my golf handicap by 8 strokes.
Let’s face it, I rock. So why do I score a big fat 0 on the screening process for stupid Cracker Barrel? I don’t even want to work for Cracker Barrel. Their food tastes like it was designed by a chef who wanted the food to taste “as close to air” as possible, the people wear stupid outfits, I can never figure out that damn pyramid game with the golf tees in it before my food arrives and all of the people who work there look like they’d rather be in the back taking the jawbone of an ass to their manager, bible style.
What I want from Cracker Barrel is an interview so I can tell them to fuck off and quit calling me. I already know how awesome I am and I am WAY too good to be working in a shithole like that. But how can I tell them that if they won’t even give me an interview?
Somebody get on that for me, will you?
B!
P.S.--I don't care what you think about it, that "dry crotch" comment made me laugh, and that's all that matters, even if it is kind of sick and twisted.
I like to start off each one of my little entries here with some sort of a seemingly random quote that will grab the reader’s attention and let them know that, hey, I mean business. And business, in my case, involves stabbing corporations right in their stupid heads. I know it is only pro bono work at this point, but I’m hoping if I stab enough corporations on my own dime I will latch on to some bigger corporation stabbers in some sort of paid internship or something.
Granted, I don’t actually know if Cracker Barrel is incorporated, it may be an LLC or it may be part of a larger conglomerate that is run by lower primates. I will leave finding those answers up to somebody who didn’t just get rejected by them for an interview based on some sort of screening process that was obviously devised by a chimpanzee. I’m still going to stab them.
For those of you who have never been to Cracker Barrel, I congratulate you, for you have successfully dodged one of the worst dining experiences known to man. Here is what it’s like to engage in a dining experience there: As you make your way past a seemingly endless row of “handmade” rocking chairs priced at $149 on the porch, you see a menu describing the daily special written in chalk on the side of the building next to the door. You can NEVER read that because it has been the same special for 13 years and they ran out of chalk 12 years ago. The management has never gone through the rigorous process of going to Wal-Mart to buy more chalk because they are so engrossed in figuring out how to put on their suspenders they have little time for anything else.
Inside you will be forced to walk through a retail store that has somehow managed to cram so much stuff into the space that it looks like an episode of “Hoarders” is getting ready to film there if they could just figure out how to get the camera inside the door. In between Christmas ornaments of Elvis and cassette tapes of Kenny Roger’s Greatest Hits you will find cool things like . . . ummmm, nothing. There is nothing cool there. Unless you count the little tub full of those awesome dinner mints that melt in your mouth, but that little 8 ounce tub costs $7 so if you do count that, you should be eating at a much better restaurant than Cracker Barrel. You should be at the Red Lobster, moneybags. There’s more flavor in those cheesy biscuits than in a whole table full of crap from Cracker Barrel.
If you manage to find a path through all of the piles and piles of shit that makes a Grandma’s knees quiver in dry-crotched joy, you will finally find a hostess who is genuinely unhappy to see you. If she wasn’t so busy fielding special requests from people making ABSOLUTELY SURE there is no spice on any of the food, she would actually spit in your face before taking you to a table right next to either a table of pure-blood white trash or a table full of the bingo club from the church or, better yet, both.
At this point, the dining experience is completely unremarkable unless you happen to catch some of the conversation from the pure-blood white trash table, where you will hear genuine, straight-faced statements like, “I don’t care what you say, I will park my Camaro anywhere in the yard I feel like,” and “Does this tank top make my rebel flag tattoo look bitchen or what?”
Just eat your “food” and get the hell out of there as fast as you can. And on the way home, don’t forget to stop off at ANY OTHER RESTAURANT to make sure you get some good food in your belly before you get to your front door.
Okay, so back to why I am going to stab these F-worders, they have an ad up in Flagstaff looking for a manager to run their retail side of the restaurant. I applied to the ad and was given a link to their screening process. From what I could tell from the “screening process,” the only question was this:
Do you have at least 2 years of retail management experience?
My answer was, “Yes.” (I have almost 15 years of management experience, for those who were wondering if I was lying about the whole “yes” thing right there)
My final score: 0
What the fuck?! I can say that word because I am over 18, in good physical health, have never been convicted of a crime (or even accused of one, for that matter), and have seen “Scarface” more than 57 times in my life.
I know I am probably not the best employee in the world. But I am as close as you will ever get without having to deal with someone who says things like, “Buck up, camper, things are getting better” and “What a fantastic day! It just makes you want to whistle a happy tune, doesn’t it?” early in the morning before you’ve had your coffee or pushed a midget down the stairs yet.
Somehow I have become fundamentally unemployable over the last 2 years without even trying. That’s the best part. I am the same guy who ran $2+ million volumes with little or no effort (just kidding, I worked my ass off, I just made it look easy). I am the same guy that managed to keep all of the various races and tribes from killing each other on their lunch breaks up at Savers in Flagstaff while SIMULTANEOUSLY lowering my golf handicap by 8 strokes.
Let’s face it, I rock. So why do I score a big fat 0 on the screening process for stupid Cracker Barrel? I don’t even want to work for Cracker Barrel. Their food tastes like it was designed by a chef who wanted the food to taste “as close to air” as possible, the people wear stupid outfits, I can never figure out that damn pyramid game with the golf tees in it before my food arrives and all of the people who work there look like they’d rather be in the back taking the jawbone of an ass to their manager, bible style.
What I want from Cracker Barrel is an interview so I can tell them to fuck off and quit calling me. I already know how awesome I am and I am WAY too good to be working in a shithole like that. But how can I tell them that if they won’t even give me an interview?
Somebody get on that for me, will you?
B!
P.S.--I don't care what you think about it, that "dry crotch" comment made me laugh, and that's all that matters, even if it is kind of sick and twisted.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Whirligigs and Shurikens
Let’s face it, my last blog was a bit of a downer. It’s okay, you can admit it, and more importantly, so can I. It was a downer because yesterday was a downer of a day and I will punch your lips through the back of your head if you disagree with me.
I say that because today is more of a rager. I don’t care that “rager” isn’t technically a word. I will keep using it anyway because that’s what I do. Whereas yesterday I was blah and bummed out and whatever, today I am actively seeking fights with people just because I want to see how far I can push people. I almost made an idiot wreck his car today trying to get in front of me because I wanted to see how much of an asshole he would be in an effort to get one car length ahead of me.
Turns out his bootie sphincter has an enormous capacity for growth. It would probably have even more capacity if he would just relax. At least that’s what Frankie Goes To Hollywood says. It turns out that if I push the right person’s buttons, they will actually drive 60 MPH through a school zone in an effort to get ahead of me. Don’t worry, I went 15 through that school zone because I know how the lights are timed on that road and I ended up right next to the guy anyway. And then I stared at him until the light changed. He loved that. He may have peed on himself. Perhaps he was wearing Depends and was going to do that anyway. I like to think I helped the process though.
The funny thing about people driving like assholes is that most of them know they are doing it so when they get called on it, they realize how shitty they are as members of a modern society and they sit in their cockpits and pee themselves a bit when a guy much bigger and angrier than them stares down at them while they pray for the light to change.
One of these days I will probably get shot doing something like that. And I will deserve it, but just know that if I turn up dead in some kind of road rage incident, whoever shot me was being a complete dick and all I was doing was making sure his day was as shitty as possible by making him stay in his own lane. Turns out my day probably ended up shittier if I got shot, but at least I’m not a dick.
Man, that’s weird talking about your death in the future/past tense. I think there are probably some grammar rules that I broke because of that, but they are rules that I made up anyway just for that scenario so if they are broken it is only because I said they are. Plus, I was living in the future and the past at the same time, so what did you expect?
But I digress, because what I really wanted to talk about today was how women put men through the most horrific torture known to modern man: shopping with women.
Seriously, it might be the worst thing ever invented with a couple of special exceptions, including, but not limited to, Texas and Rosie O’Donnell. I’ve never been stuck in a whirligig or put in stocks in the town square, but I have been shoe shopping at Charlotte Russe and I swear it is the same thing. Maybe watching an episode of Rosie’s show taped in Texas while sitting in the stocks inside of a whirligig could be worse, but just barely.
I don’t want to turn this into a big war of the sexes or anything, but women shop like animals. ANIMALS! Don’t believe me? Just go to any department store on a weekend and look at the return rack for the fitting rooms. Women have crap everywhere. Everywhere! There are ill-fitting pants hanging from ceiling fans, a ball of hangers the size of Donald Trump’s ego on the floor, and piles of loose thread and yarn that used to be garments of clothing stacked up on the back of the register. If you stick around the selling floor long enough, you will actually see women throw things that don’t fit them like they are cloth shurikens, creating airborne clothing designs that look like the girl from Ally McBeal is doing flying cartwheels through the dressing rooms.
A shuriken is a Chinese throwing star, for those of you who are not hip to Bruce Lee and everything else that is cool in the world. And the Ally McBeal chick is the really skinny girl who looks like an alien and was the inspiration for the 4th Indiana Jones movie, for those of you not hip to stuff I just made up.
Do you know what men throw? They throw out their back at the thought of having to go shopping with a woman and be subjected to the horror. A man would rather fake an injury than be forced to spend an afternoon with his best girl at the mall.
Yeah, I said best girl. What else do you want? I definitely wouldn’t hit up the mall with my worst girl either, unless she just wanted to go to Best Buy and perhaps The Sports Authority and NOWHERE ELSE. If that were the case, I would instantly turn her into my best girl and STILL avoid the mall with her because all of that, “Let’s go to Best Buy” is just a way of buttonhooking you into ending up at Charlotte Russe with her and wishing your heart would explode so you would have a legitimate excuse to leave the building without pissing her off.
Ah, who am I kidding, she’d still be pissed off. But at least she’d come out of there with 7 pairs of shoes for $100 so she’d have something to model for me while I was laid up in the hospital waiting for the doctors to work some “Six Million Dollar Man” magic on my ticker to get me back in the game stronger, faster, smarter and genetically engineered to withstand the rigors of watching a woman try to decide if blue or black shoes would match a piece of clothing they haven’t even bought yet.
Nothing like a captive audience to show your shoes to, right ladies?
B!
I say that because today is more of a rager. I don’t care that “rager” isn’t technically a word. I will keep using it anyway because that’s what I do. Whereas yesterday I was blah and bummed out and whatever, today I am actively seeking fights with people just because I want to see how far I can push people. I almost made an idiot wreck his car today trying to get in front of me because I wanted to see how much of an asshole he would be in an effort to get one car length ahead of me.
Turns out his bootie sphincter has an enormous capacity for growth. It would probably have even more capacity if he would just relax. At least that’s what Frankie Goes To Hollywood says. It turns out that if I push the right person’s buttons, they will actually drive 60 MPH through a school zone in an effort to get ahead of me. Don’t worry, I went 15 through that school zone because I know how the lights are timed on that road and I ended up right next to the guy anyway. And then I stared at him until the light changed. He loved that. He may have peed on himself. Perhaps he was wearing Depends and was going to do that anyway. I like to think I helped the process though.
The funny thing about people driving like assholes is that most of them know they are doing it so when they get called on it, they realize how shitty they are as members of a modern society and they sit in their cockpits and pee themselves a bit when a guy much bigger and angrier than them stares down at them while they pray for the light to change.
One of these days I will probably get shot doing something like that. And I will deserve it, but just know that if I turn up dead in some kind of road rage incident, whoever shot me was being a complete dick and all I was doing was making sure his day was as shitty as possible by making him stay in his own lane. Turns out my day probably ended up shittier if I got shot, but at least I’m not a dick.
Man, that’s weird talking about your death in the future/past tense. I think there are probably some grammar rules that I broke because of that, but they are rules that I made up anyway just for that scenario so if they are broken it is only because I said they are. Plus, I was living in the future and the past at the same time, so what did you expect?
But I digress, because what I really wanted to talk about today was how women put men through the most horrific torture known to modern man: shopping with women.
Seriously, it might be the worst thing ever invented with a couple of special exceptions, including, but not limited to, Texas and Rosie O’Donnell. I’ve never been stuck in a whirligig or put in stocks in the town square, but I have been shoe shopping at Charlotte Russe and I swear it is the same thing. Maybe watching an episode of Rosie’s show taped in Texas while sitting in the stocks inside of a whirligig could be worse, but just barely.
I don’t want to turn this into a big war of the sexes or anything, but women shop like animals. ANIMALS! Don’t believe me? Just go to any department store on a weekend and look at the return rack for the fitting rooms. Women have crap everywhere. Everywhere! There are ill-fitting pants hanging from ceiling fans, a ball of hangers the size of Donald Trump’s ego on the floor, and piles of loose thread and yarn that used to be garments of clothing stacked up on the back of the register. If you stick around the selling floor long enough, you will actually see women throw things that don’t fit them like they are cloth shurikens, creating airborne clothing designs that look like the girl from Ally McBeal is doing flying cartwheels through the dressing rooms.
A shuriken is a Chinese throwing star, for those of you who are not hip to Bruce Lee and everything else that is cool in the world. And the Ally McBeal chick is the really skinny girl who looks like an alien and was the inspiration for the 4th Indiana Jones movie, for those of you not hip to stuff I just made up.
Do you know what men throw? They throw out their back at the thought of having to go shopping with a woman and be subjected to the horror. A man would rather fake an injury than be forced to spend an afternoon with his best girl at the mall.
Yeah, I said best girl. What else do you want? I definitely wouldn’t hit up the mall with my worst girl either, unless she just wanted to go to Best Buy and perhaps The Sports Authority and NOWHERE ELSE. If that were the case, I would instantly turn her into my best girl and STILL avoid the mall with her because all of that, “Let’s go to Best Buy” is just a way of buttonhooking you into ending up at Charlotte Russe with her and wishing your heart would explode so you would have a legitimate excuse to leave the building without pissing her off.
Ah, who am I kidding, she’d still be pissed off. But at least she’d come out of there with 7 pairs of shoes for $100 so she’d have something to model for me while I was laid up in the hospital waiting for the doctors to work some “Six Million Dollar Man” magic on my ticker to get me back in the game stronger, faster, smarter and genetically engineered to withstand the rigors of watching a woman try to decide if blue or black shoes would match a piece of clothing they haven’t even bought yet.
Nothing like a captive audience to show your shoes to, right ladies?
B!
Monday, January 25, 2010
Buttslurpalicious Monday
Did you ever have one of those moments in your life where you realized, in no uncertain terms, that you had just wasted an entire year of your life with absolutely no gain? I got that today. And today sucks bootie because of that. With a straw. A curly straw that someone didn’t rinse out after drinking whole milk. Gross.
I guess I shouldn’t say I haven’t gotten anywhere in the past year, but I’m about as close to going nowhere as you can be without actually falling backwards. Luckily for me and my psyche, I fell backwards the year before last, so my lack of upward mobility in the past year is a HUGE improvement over the loss of $40,000 a year in salary I managed to throw down the year before last.
I could easily fall down into a depression that would make Eeyore look like an old dancing boy in comparison, but I’ve worked too hard at the gym and enjoyed way too much of an endorphin high today to drop into something like that. But it lurks. I promise you it does. And if it rears its ugly head I will hit it squarely in the grill with a bottle of something that Irish people use just before they car bomb something.
I know that won’t help, but if doing 2 hours of straight cardio isn’t going to help either, I might as well defile myself a bit in another direction, just for good measure.
So, in honor of the fact that my life is going nowhere, I have compiled a list of things that you can use in your life to help you lose your money, your cool condo by the golf course and the national forest in Flagstaff, your ability to golf every weekend and anything else you might generally like about your life.
#1. Tell your regional vice-president that he is wasting your time by spending a whole day in your store doing something that could have been done over e-mail. Apparently, VP’s like it when you kiss their ass, not when you point out how much his existence costs the company in travel fees, free lunches and complete bullshit. Let that be a lesson to all of you.
#2. Work for a company for 12 years that is going bankrupt. Yeah, that’s a bad move, I don’t care who you are. Because when it really comes down to it and they want to “trim the fat” so to speak, the first people they are going to come after are the ones that make the most money. And for those who wonder who makes the most money, it’s people who have worked there for 12 years, apparently. On the plus side, you will have a very valid reason for doing a victory dance when you read that they finally filed full-on bankruptcy and none of the bastards who pushed you out have jobs either. That will give you exactly 17 minutes of happiness before you realize that they probably got WAY better severance packages than you did.
#3. Drop out of college because the company that is going to go bankrupt offers you more money than any of your friends who have Master’s degrees. In the short run it seems like a really good idea to make more money than someone with an MBA, but in the long run your company will go bankrupt and they will still have Master’s degrees and you will work part-time somewhere with no opportunity for advancement, wondering what happened to the last 15 years of your life.
#4. Change your major from Communications to Business Administration because there is more money in business even though the communications classes are the only classes that you ACTUALLY enjoy in college. When they say, “Do what you love” they are NOT kidding. No one has ever given advice anyone thought was sage when they said, “Take the first job that comes along and run it into the ground, then flounder for the next 6 years, hoping for something better.” Oh wait, somehow I found that to be the best advice to take.
#5. Whatever you do, DON’T get good grades in high school and earn scholarships to college. The best thing to do is score in the 98th percentile on every standardized test you have ever taken, get a 31 on the ACT, reject all the scholarship offers to schools in stupid states like Georgia and Iowa, and go to the U of A for one semester before transferring back to NAU because the girls in Tucson won’t talk to you because you’re not in a fraternity. It is much, MUCH cooler to be $48,000 in student loan debt with no degree than it is to go to a real school for free and actually graduate doing something you love to do. Remember, only stupid people do smart things with their life.
I hope everyone is more stupid than I am. But I think it’s that kind of thought process that got me where I am today.
Like I said, today is buttslurpalicious.
B
I guess I shouldn’t say I haven’t gotten anywhere in the past year, but I’m about as close to going nowhere as you can be without actually falling backwards. Luckily for me and my psyche, I fell backwards the year before last, so my lack of upward mobility in the past year is a HUGE improvement over the loss of $40,000 a year in salary I managed to throw down the year before last.
I could easily fall down into a depression that would make Eeyore look like an old dancing boy in comparison, but I’ve worked too hard at the gym and enjoyed way too much of an endorphin high today to drop into something like that. But it lurks. I promise you it does. And if it rears its ugly head I will hit it squarely in the grill with a bottle of something that Irish people use just before they car bomb something.
I know that won’t help, but if doing 2 hours of straight cardio isn’t going to help either, I might as well defile myself a bit in another direction, just for good measure.
So, in honor of the fact that my life is going nowhere, I have compiled a list of things that you can use in your life to help you lose your money, your cool condo by the golf course and the national forest in Flagstaff, your ability to golf every weekend and anything else you might generally like about your life.
#1. Tell your regional vice-president that he is wasting your time by spending a whole day in your store doing something that could have been done over e-mail. Apparently, VP’s like it when you kiss their ass, not when you point out how much his existence costs the company in travel fees, free lunches and complete bullshit. Let that be a lesson to all of you.
#2. Work for a company for 12 years that is going bankrupt. Yeah, that’s a bad move, I don’t care who you are. Because when it really comes down to it and they want to “trim the fat” so to speak, the first people they are going to come after are the ones that make the most money. And for those who wonder who makes the most money, it’s people who have worked there for 12 years, apparently. On the plus side, you will have a very valid reason for doing a victory dance when you read that they finally filed full-on bankruptcy and none of the bastards who pushed you out have jobs either. That will give you exactly 17 minutes of happiness before you realize that they probably got WAY better severance packages than you did.
#3. Drop out of college because the company that is going to go bankrupt offers you more money than any of your friends who have Master’s degrees. In the short run it seems like a really good idea to make more money than someone with an MBA, but in the long run your company will go bankrupt and they will still have Master’s degrees and you will work part-time somewhere with no opportunity for advancement, wondering what happened to the last 15 years of your life.
#4. Change your major from Communications to Business Administration because there is more money in business even though the communications classes are the only classes that you ACTUALLY enjoy in college. When they say, “Do what you love” they are NOT kidding. No one has ever given advice anyone thought was sage when they said, “Take the first job that comes along and run it into the ground, then flounder for the next 6 years, hoping for something better.” Oh wait, somehow I found that to be the best advice to take.
#5. Whatever you do, DON’T get good grades in high school and earn scholarships to college. The best thing to do is score in the 98th percentile on every standardized test you have ever taken, get a 31 on the ACT, reject all the scholarship offers to schools in stupid states like Georgia and Iowa, and go to the U of A for one semester before transferring back to NAU because the girls in Tucson won’t talk to you because you’re not in a fraternity. It is much, MUCH cooler to be $48,000 in student loan debt with no degree than it is to go to a real school for free and actually graduate doing something you love to do. Remember, only stupid people do smart things with their life.
I hope everyone is more stupid than I am. But I think it’s that kind of thought process that got me where I am today.
Like I said, today is buttslurpalicious.
B
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Grown Folks Clothing
This year didn't start out well at all on my writing front. So much for New Year’s resolutions involving writing something every day. I only missed my mark by nearly three weeks, I guess, but damn do I need some work on getting creative stuff done.
I blame it on Bejewelled Blitz. I really do. And the worst part of that whole thing is I actually get worse the more I play that game. I don’t know if my brain just stops working because it knows I have wasted far too much time on something that means absolutely nothing, or if my eyes just start to get blurry from looking at stupid jewels that they give up and just start inserting things into the computer screen to entertain themselves.
Apparently, my eyes think leprechauns are pretty entertaining. I feel like I am fighting my way out of a bowl of lucky charms at times on that game. And the worst part about it is that after I have stopped playing the game I still try to move stuff around in my house to create a chain of three that will disappear. I just lined up a bill from the IRS, the cable bill and my car insurance bill in hopes they would blow up and be replaced by jewels of some sort but, unfortunately, no such luck.
It’s not like I don’t have stuff in the works besides my next conquest of Bejewelled. I do. I have several things in the works. The problem with me is that “the works” is inside of my mind and not anywhere near a place that could be considered tangible. Here are a few of my latest ideas (and don’t steal any of this stuff because I will come after you like an IRS agent that doesn’t like the fact you didn’t declare your 401(k) cashout as earned income in 2008 even though they ALREADY taxed it when I pulled it out):
A line of adult t-shirts that take actual children’s T-shirts and just makes them big enough for adult people to wear. I’m going to call my line of clothing "Grown Folks." Nothing says “I’m okay with myself” like a bright blue and green T-shirt that just says “Truck” on it right next to a cartoon picture of a dump truck. Forget all this children’s fashion crap about making kids clothes look like scaled-down versions of adult clothes. Let’s just make the adult clothes look like kids clothes and get rid of the age barriers and bias we have created as a society. Plus, people can have the EXACT same style for their entire life. That would be a first in the modern world. In fact, I am wearing my custom made “My Mommy Loves Me” shirt to the gym tomorrow. And my engineer’s choo choo cap.
I’m writing a cartoon about a group of science nerds who decide to use the scientific method and their knowledge of physics to project the final resting place of a fat kid they push down a hill as their final project in physics. They’re going to forget to take into account the train tracks at the bottom of the hill, the train schedule and the fact the fat kid ate a salad for lunch and is lighter than he would normally be at that time of day and they are all going to end up getting an F on their final project. Too bad. Maybe next year, nerds, when you get out of prison for manslaughter.
As some of you may know, I have been known to dabble in a bit of hip hop during my time here on earth. Since it has been roughly 19 years since I recorded my last album, I think I’m going to make a comeback and I’m going to do a rap album with the following song titles:
I Buy My Bling At The Swap Meet
Your Mom Goes To College
Yes, I Actually Am Hard (Go Ask The Guy I Just Beat Up)
Rippety Rhyme and A-Hippety Hop To The Izzo
Your Nipples Must Be Jealous
Respect The Police
Still Hard (‘Cause I Yelled At Your Grandma)
Tickled At The Thought Of Playing Hide The Pickle
Just Say No To Drugs (But Alcohol Is A-OK!)
30 Second Intervals of Pure Cussing, Volume I
I Can’t Believe Your Parents Named Their One-Legged Girl Eileen
Bleep You, Mother Bleeper (Radio Edit)
Reading Cosmo Doesn’t Make You Smarter
I Cordially Invite You To Leave The Premises
Gila Bend Gangster Stylee
This Town Is Like A Great Big Chicken Just Waiting To Get Plucked (My Ode to Network TV's Version of Scarface)
The Sesame Street Theme Song (Bonus Track)
Now all I have to do is go write them. Maybe after I play Bejewelled Blitz. Yep. That sounds about right.
B!
I blame it on Bejewelled Blitz. I really do. And the worst part of that whole thing is I actually get worse the more I play that game. I don’t know if my brain just stops working because it knows I have wasted far too much time on something that means absolutely nothing, or if my eyes just start to get blurry from looking at stupid jewels that they give up and just start inserting things into the computer screen to entertain themselves.
Apparently, my eyes think leprechauns are pretty entertaining. I feel like I am fighting my way out of a bowl of lucky charms at times on that game. And the worst part about it is that after I have stopped playing the game I still try to move stuff around in my house to create a chain of three that will disappear. I just lined up a bill from the IRS, the cable bill and my car insurance bill in hopes they would blow up and be replaced by jewels of some sort but, unfortunately, no such luck.
It’s not like I don’t have stuff in the works besides my next conquest of Bejewelled. I do. I have several things in the works. The problem with me is that “the works” is inside of my mind and not anywhere near a place that could be considered tangible. Here are a few of my latest ideas (and don’t steal any of this stuff because I will come after you like an IRS agent that doesn’t like the fact you didn’t declare your 401(k) cashout as earned income in 2008 even though they ALREADY taxed it when I pulled it out):
A line of adult t-shirts that take actual children’s T-shirts and just makes them big enough for adult people to wear. I’m going to call my line of clothing "Grown Folks." Nothing says “I’m okay with myself” like a bright blue and green T-shirt that just says “Truck” on it right next to a cartoon picture of a dump truck. Forget all this children’s fashion crap about making kids clothes look like scaled-down versions of adult clothes. Let’s just make the adult clothes look like kids clothes and get rid of the age barriers and bias we have created as a society. Plus, people can have the EXACT same style for their entire life. That would be a first in the modern world. In fact, I am wearing my custom made “My Mommy Loves Me” shirt to the gym tomorrow. And my engineer’s choo choo cap.
I’m writing a cartoon about a group of science nerds who decide to use the scientific method and their knowledge of physics to project the final resting place of a fat kid they push down a hill as their final project in physics. They’re going to forget to take into account the train tracks at the bottom of the hill, the train schedule and the fact the fat kid ate a salad for lunch and is lighter than he would normally be at that time of day and they are all going to end up getting an F on their final project. Too bad. Maybe next year, nerds, when you get out of prison for manslaughter.
As some of you may know, I have been known to dabble in a bit of hip hop during my time here on earth. Since it has been roughly 19 years since I recorded my last album, I think I’m going to make a comeback and I’m going to do a rap album with the following song titles:
I Buy My Bling At The Swap Meet
Your Mom Goes To College
Yes, I Actually Am Hard (Go Ask The Guy I Just Beat Up)
Rippety Rhyme and A-Hippety Hop To The Izzo
Your Nipples Must Be Jealous
Respect The Police
Still Hard (‘Cause I Yelled At Your Grandma)
Tickled At The Thought Of Playing Hide The Pickle
Just Say No To Drugs (But Alcohol Is A-OK!)
30 Second Intervals of Pure Cussing, Volume I
I Can’t Believe Your Parents Named Their One-Legged Girl Eileen
Bleep You, Mother Bleeper (Radio Edit)
Reading Cosmo Doesn’t Make You Smarter
I Cordially Invite You To Leave The Premises
Gila Bend Gangster Stylee
This Town Is Like A Great Big Chicken Just Waiting To Get Plucked (My Ode to Network TV's Version of Scarface)
The Sesame Street Theme Song (Bonus Track)
Now all I have to do is go write them. Maybe after I play Bejewelled Blitz. Yep. That sounds about right.
B!
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Yakuza Babies And A Dollar To Shut Up
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
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
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!
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