Unread Nonsense

A (Serious) Post!

2011-01-17T08:42:00.044-07:00

My feelings about Christianity are roughly equivalent to my feelings about lead: I know that people have gotten a lot of use out of it over the past few-thousand years, but I still don't want anyone to ball it up and shoot it at me. Also, I wouldn't let my kids around traces of it. Also also, I don't want it to be in my paint.

Basically, I just want people to be happy that they made what they're sure is the right choice, to live their lives according to whichever cherry-picked literary passages they like (just not the stoning-to-death-for-sins ones, please, thanks!), and to quit trying to force it down everyone's throat like a megachurch preacher in an Applebee's men's room. Back me up here, St. Peter!:

"But in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect." (1 Peter 3:15)

Cool. That sounds pretty reasonable. It sounds here like Peter just wants Christians to live virtuous, Christian lives, and to engage anyone who seeks them out, and to do it with a spirit of what might be best described as "non-dickishness". And truth be told, most Christians - including my parents - live this way. I don't know why the rest of them are so--Wait, what's that, Jesus?

"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." (Matthew 28:19-20)

Fuck. I think we all know that Jesus trumps Peter here the same way the Ace of Spades trumps the "Rules of Poker" card that someone forgot to take out of the deck before the game. So instead of convincing people to maybe come to Jesus by basically being groovy, a lot of Christians tend to feel like they ought to go on extensive obnoxious evangelical roadtrips, with Jesus always riding shotgun. A lot of Christians hear Jesus say things like,

“Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned," (Mark 16:15-16)

and,

"I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me," (John 14:6)

and their minds immediately (and rightly) turn to people in countries that aren't Christian - people who might have never even heard of Jesus, much less chosen to worship him - and they (the Christians) are filled with empathy and pity and maybe shame because those poor people are going to get anally penetrated by fireswords after they die, all because they didn't get a chance to high-five Jesus while they were alive. And instead of maybe questioning why Jesus would want to fuck these non-Christians over like that, or why he would give some people a head start/free pass simply because they were raised as Christians -- instead of asking why Jesus would be such an obdurate asshole, or wondering whether a savior like that is worth worshiping, they just accept it and decide to do the right thing given the circumstances: they set about saving as many Jesus-ignorant souls as possible from bullshit damnation (see comments). A lot of Christians do that.

Christians like Tim Tebow, inchoate quarterback of the Denver Broncos. Tim Tebow isn't so much modern Evangelical Christianity's spokesman as he is its mascot - a carefully-crafted, cartoonishly-idealized best face for the whole movement. And he happens to stand at the intersection of Evangelical Christianity and professional football - an intersection that I would go a few miles out of my way to avoid because I don't like pickup trucks. All of which makes it sound like I really don't like Tim Tebow, when honestly I don't mind him very much, and actually kinda feel for him (which I'm sure he is grateful for, as a millionaire who is more successful in his field than I will ever be in anything). Still, I am about to talk shit about some things pretty close to Tim Tebow's heart, so I'd like to temper that and prove my non-disdain by first saying a few sorta-charitable interpolatory things about #15:

Sorta-Charitable Thing #1) Tim Tebow is good at football. Whatever you think of his pro prospects, the guy is one of the greatest college football players of all time, and I have to say that he showed more than a small amount of potential in his late-season audition with the Broncos. Unorthodox mechanics aside, he acquitted himself a lot better in his short stint as starter than most rookie quarterbacks do, and better than I thought he would or even could. And though he probably tucks the ball away and runs too quickly and often, he is a powerful and surprisingly slippery runner (even if that slipperiness is attributable to the fact that he is all greased up from five years' worth of jizzbaths from nearly every conservative white Christian male in America). In my decidedly non-expert opinion, Tebow could become a very good NFL quarterback.

Sorta-Charitable Thing #2) He feeds the homeless. The McDonald's on the 16th Street Mall in Downtown Denver might be the saddest McDonald's in Colorado, which would pretty much automatically make it the saddest non-trailer structure of any kind in Colorado. It's not so much the place that hope goes to die as it is the place that dead hope goes. It is a place of bearded schizophrenic fistfights and garbage bags as suitcases, a place where you might walk by a guy scribbling what looks from ten feet away like a bunch of Vitruvian Man/time machine sketches, then while you're standing in line someone might offer you an almost-definitely-stolen iPod for 20 bucks. It smells like antiseptic and despair. Here is what it usually looks like, sort-of:

But not on Monday, December 27th, 2010 - the day after Tebow rallied the Broncos from a 17-0 Halftime deficit to a 24-23 victory over the Houston Texans, capped by a double-pump-fake, six-yard touchdown run in the waning minutes of the fourth quarter. Unbeknownst to me until I was in line for an iced coffee, he had in victory earned a free Big Mac for anyone who presented some plastic keychain thing on Monday. I don't know the specifics of how to get such a keychain thing, but it can't be too hard, because every scraggly-bearded gentleman and nearly-toothless lady within a square mile was now milling about in line brandishing keychain things that were almost never attached to keys or anything else. It was chaos. McDonald's couldn't make Big Macs fast enough. No one was buying anything else, so the ringing-out process consisted of no monetary exchange whatsoever. But the sadness quotient was at an all-time low. There was a fresh energy in the air that belied the stale smell. And it looked more like this:

God bless you, Tim Tebow.

Sorta-Charitable Thing #3) He has the best-selling jersey in the NFL, and while you pretty much have to ascribe a good portion of those sales to the aforementioned Christian jizz-dousing, it's hard to deny that he seems like a likeable guy. I reserve the right to disavow this statement if he turns out to be some Tartuffe-level fraud who smokes meth and plows through hookers like undersized cornerbacks, but he just seems like a friendly, super-gregarious dude who mostly walks the unreasonably-high-standarded walk of his wacky religion. Fundamentalist women want to be with him as he reads his Bible and abstains from sex, and Fundamentalist men want to be him as he reads his Bible to keep from thinking about it. Also: hard worker, heart of a champion, intangibles, blah blah blah ad infinitum/nauseam/absurdum/something-else-smart-sounding-and-Latin-in-the-accusative.

Sorta-Charitable Thing #4) And this is the big one, the one that hopefully ties in to what I already said about Evangelical Christians and what I'm about to say about Evangelical Christians: I am not sure how to blame Tim Tebow for being a ridiculous, proselytizing, Bible-verses-on-his-eye-black, fundamentalist Christian. Because Tim Tebow's father is Bob Tebow - famous in his own right as the founder of the Bob Tebow Evangelistic Association, and a man who, in a Sports Illustrated profile of Tim when he was still in college, was quoted as saying,

"When I was out in the mountains in Mindanao, back in '86, I was showing a film and preaching that night. I was weeping over the millions of babies being [aborted] in America, and I prayed, 'God, if you give me a son, if you give me Timmy, I'll raise him to be a preacher.'"

...Which is crazy for a lot of reasons. My favorite part is that Sports Illustrated had to change Tebow's verb-that-is-happening-to-babies to "aborted" from something unknown. My best guesses are "killed" and "murdered", but my favorite guesses are still "tickled" and "swaddled" and "taken to the zoo".

But yeah, I can't help but think that with a father like Bob Tebow, Tim never really had much of a choice other than to be a devout Evangelical Christian, the same way that a kid who grows up in a village that is never exposed to Christianity has no chance (again, see comments), according to the evangelists, of getting into heaven without some expository intervention, and the same way Jesus grew up a carpenter because Joseph was a carpenter, even though Joseph was only a carpenter because he figured he should be nailing something. There is a certain inexorability to these things, because whoever has control of you during your formative years gets to for-better-or-worse decide a lot of things about who you are. Of course, ultimately you have the nominal choice to do whatever, but there is no doubt that we are a lot more likely to choose what we have been primed to choose. Christians tend to raise Christians (and Baptists Baptists, and Catholics Catholics, etc.), Muslims tend to raise Muslims, Scientologists tend to raise Scientologists, liberals who are going to hell tend to raise liberals who are going to hell, and tornadoes tend to raze barns. It's the fucking way of things. And the, like, I guess underlying unfreedom of it all makes my head hurt.

So what I'd like to do rather than come to some sort of empathetic conclusion, or rather than just shrug my shoulders and say that life is crazy, is to quit trying to understand and instead just dismissively make fun of Bob Tebow's life's work a little bit. And I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm straight up mocking these people. I'm trying to just mock their crazed ideas, but when your crazed ideas are by your own admission central to who you are as a human being, it's tough to avoid some collateral damage. Anyway, Bob Tebow's life's work is

"to preach the gospel to every person who has never had an opportunity to hear the good news of eternal life in Jesus Christ. Most of the world’s population has never once had the opportunity to hear the only true message of forgiveness of sins by faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone."

The current epicenter of the Bob Tebow Evangelistic Association is mostly just the Philippines, a country composed of over 7,000 islands and 92 dickloads of people (where one dickload = one million), making Bob Tebow's task a pretty goddamn daunting one, to say the least.

Good thing he has a lot of volunteer missionaries willing to cross oceans and rivers and climb mountains to spread Jesus' word. A lot of these volunteers are young, Tim Tebowish people, brimming with enthusiasm and megadoses of the holy spirit, and also willing to write little snippets detailing their most memorable evangelistic moments for yearly newsletters - newsletters which I love for their absolute tone-deafness. Every testimonial snippet is great in its own way, but here, in bold, are some of my favorites, arranged from awesome to most-awesome (my mean responses are in plain text):

7) Charles S.: One day at McDonald’s in Thailand, three college students were eating at the table next to us. They spoke English; so, I shared the gospel with them. They were very attentive and even asked some questions. Though none of them openly prayed with me, I will never forget the hunger in their eyes, as I talked about the peace in my heart that Jesus gives and the gift of eternal life. I pray that we can go back to Thailand and preach in the villages. With so few Christians, there is a great need for Christ there.

I'm not sure why this is the experience Charles decided to put in the newsletter, because to me it just seems like he bothered some college kids who were patient enough to engage him, then the students sat and watched blankly as Charles started praying by himself in the middle of a McDonald's. (As someone who has obviously seen some crazy shit in a McDonald's, I can confidently say that seeing this would have ranked right up there with the best of them.) And I think Charles hasn't considered the possibility that the "hunger in their eyes" could be pretty easily attributed to the fact that THEY ARE IN A FUCKING MCDONALD'S.

6) Michael C.: I noticed a couple of Muslim girls in the crowd at one of the schools I preached at. They were easy to spot because of the headdress they were wearing. I thought to myself, “They are about to hear a better message.” As I was preaching the gospel, one of the Muslim girls started to cry. She was hearing a better message - a message of love and hope, a message that changes lives. When the invitation was given, both Muslim girls accepted Jesus as Lord. “For God so loved,” is the best message ever told.

I don't really know what to say here. This story seems kind of unbelievable, but assuming it's true, I guess these girls went home and told their parents that they would no longer be wearing hijab or subscribing to any other inferior-messaged mumbo-jumbo. And I'm sure their parents were like, "That's cool."

5) Courtney S.: One morning, I went to a high school with 1,200 students (…)
While I was speaking, I noticed a boy in a wheelchair. After I finished, the principal
took the microphone and spoke to the students in Tagalog. I walked over to the boy in the wheelchair and found out that he put his trust in Jesus! (...)

And afterward, she ran around to her missionary friends, shouting, "I got a wheelchair one! I got a wheelchair one! Double points!"

Speaking of weird wheelchair fixations, here's Peter Tebow (Tim's older brother):

4) One day, I was preaching at a small elementary school when I noticed a young boy who had to be carried in a makeshift wheelchair because he didn't have the function of his arms or legs. I got to the part in the message where I asked if anyone wanted to put their trust in Christ, and he almost fell out of his chair because he was trying so hard to raise his hand. After the message, I approached him and told him that he would have a perfect body when we got to heaven and that we would have lots of fun.

Man. That's what you told him? Man. I'm not a very politically-correct person, really. But man. You looked at that kid and all you saw was the disability. Then you dangled in front of that little kid the notion of a perfect, functioning body in heaven in exchange for his faith. And then you said you'd have "lots of fun" in heaven, presumably by doing active things like throwing a frisbee across clouds or something. Man.

I like to imagine a heaven where Peter Tebow comes bounding up to the pearly gates in Under Armour, all pumped to just play sports for all eternity, and then God is like, "Hey Peter, do you remember Isaiah 40:4?" And Peter's like, "Sure thing, God! 'Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low,'" and right when he says "low," God goes, "Bam, dickhead!" and Peter loses the function of his arms and legs and has to watch former wheelchair kids do cartwheels for ten years, then run up to him and say that his body will be perfect someday in MegaHeaven. And Peter Tebow will know deep down that MegaHeaven doesn't exist, and he'll cry and cry and cry. That's what I like to imagine. That and What if I were Spider-Man.

3) Angela L.: While playing basketball one afternoon, I met a young man. Through small talk, I found out he was Catholic. I wanted to explain the good news, and before we left, I got the chance. I took a friend with me, and we were able to explain the love of Jesus. He asked Jesus to come into his heart and to be his Lord and Savior!

My word, a Catholic! I've heard of this tribe! Let me tell it of Jesus and His exploits, that this primitive beast might be saved from its flesh-eating ways! But I fear this is a task that cannot be undertaken alone, for the Catholic is not, under any circumstances, to be trusted in a one-on-one situation, lest you find yourself sacrificed at the altar of the Kennedys in hopes of a bountiful potato harvest!

2) James H.: It is an amazing feeling to preach the Gospel and see most of the people place their trust in Christ. I long for the day in heaven when I will see tens of thousands of Filipinos with tears of joy rolling down their faces saying,“Thank you, James, thank you.”

I am not a Bible expert, but I feel like James might not be getting into preaching for the right reasons.

#1 By A Million Miles) Ben R.: As I shared at a school, the roar of the rain on the tin roof was hard to talk over. Out of the crowd came the face of a first grader, who was seemingly innocent but inherently sinful. She cried as I explained sin and the punishment we all deserve. I had nothing to comfort her with on my own; so, I shared the grace of God. It is incredible how God used our feeble English presentations to extend his grace and glory to the uttermost.

This made my brain melt. This is horrifying. This guy scanned the crowd like RoboCop, locked his '80s-graphics crosshairs on a six-year-old girl, and SINNER: CONVERT flashed across his field of vision in big green block letters. So he busted out the most kid-friendly conversion method in his arsenal: describing the eternal damnation in a sea of hellfire that we all, as sinful humans, inherently deserve. And then she cried because she is a child, and children tend to cry when threatened by adult assholes. I guess she stopped crying when he shared God's Hell-Evading Rocketship Of Grace, even though he never actually says that she seemed to feel better, and it seems like he would mention it if she did. Pretty much, he sliced someone open for no good reason, then clumsily stitched up the wound he created, then said something crazy about God's glory. Amen.

...All of which is to say that I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around why people believe the things they believe. I really don't want to hate anybody in a world where I'm not sure to what extent people ultimately have control over how they see things, but I still have to say that whatever crazy interplay of circumstance and brain chemistry and generational conditioning led to the modern Evangelical Christian movement...that interplay is a dumbass.

"I want the truth!" / "You can't handle life's responsibilities!"

2010-03-11T04:41:00.014-07:00

As a frequent walker of the 16th Street Mall in Denver, I've naturally witnessed my fair share of change-centric interactions between the homeless and the homed, and for the most part they are surprisingly respectful on both ends. Sure, most of the homed do the cursory pocket-pat for change they very likely have, followed by "Sorry, I don't have anything," but you can't give to everyone, and at least they're not being assholes about it. And plenty of people do stop and give something, which will typically prompt the homeless person to say "God bless you" as a kind of metaphysical receipt for the kind gesture (a receipt which can presumably be used as a tax write-off in front of Jesus someday to counteract the time you accidentally made the toilet overflow in that bookstore and then just ran away like some cowardly, plumbing-destroying bioterrorist). It might not sound all that heartwarming, but considering that I've heard the following interaction between a Greenpeace canvasser and a guy walking the Mall...:

Greenpeace Canvasser: Hey, bro, can you stop and chat for a minute?
Guy Walking the Mall: Go fuck yourself.

...I'll take it.

Generally, I give my change away freely, not only because I know I don't need it as much as the other guy, but also because I don't fucking want it. I hate change. I hate the jingle every time you step, and how it makes your hand smell all metallic every time you reach into your pockets, and how it always finds a way to trickle out any time your legs aren't at a 90-degree angle to the ground. I'll sometimes give a few dollars when I have cash, but I'll give all of my change every time. I would give my change to a serial killer and think afterward, "Serves him right."

So imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I - fresh off of giving a guy the remainder of my change on my way to lunch - was approached on my way back by a different guy, asking if I could spare something for the bus. "Sorry, man. I just gave all my change to someone across the street," I said, pointing in the general direction of my earlier benevolence. Foolishly expecting this to be the end of the interaction, I started to walk away. Then, behind me, I heard an accusatory "Where? Where?", and I turned around to find the homeless guy surveying the area to which I had just pointed, looking for a panhandler he obviously presumed to be fictional. "I don't see him. Where is he?" And I will grant him this: the other guy wasn't there anymore - a fact which to him seemed akin to catching me contradicting myself on the witness stand. If he had suspenders he would have been tugging on them and rocking back on his heels, but he settled for the kind of supercilious smirk that you rarely see on a homeless dude. I wanted to point out to him that human beings are not typically bolted down like mailboxes, and are in fact capable of a good deal of movement in a ten minute span; or that it's pretty audacious for a guy who just used the old "for the bus" line to call ME a liar; or to maybe just pull out my pockets and show him my empty wallet for his edification. But then I realized that I was about to flout one of the absolute truths of life: it is never worth it to argue with someone who has fewer teeth than you have fingers. So I just walked away. And in case this story makes you think that I behaved like an adult, you should know that later on I wondered whether he was off somewhere telling this story to his friend and making me sound like some colossal dickhead whom he put in his place for being a liar. Then I imagined that his friend was a dirty mop in an alley. Which is kind of a mean thing to think, because mops are very bad listeners.

Long

2009-12-04T06:42:00.016-07:00

The other day, for the first time in years, I found myself walking alongside a particular wooden fence that I used to pass every day on my way to elementary school. And before I even realized what I was doing, I started to give that fence a super-wide berth, and I found my steps picking up a little bit, and my heart started beating a little bit faster. Because years ago, friends, that rickety assemblage of crappy Home Depot wood was the only thing that stood between me and a gruesome death-by-dogjaws.

If you walk by enough fences in your life, you pretty quickly build up an immunity to the feckless posturing of people's pets. For the most part, the murderer has been bred out of pet dogs, and you just know that once you get past the fence they nod their adorable widdle heads in self-approval at the inspired performance they just gave, lick for a few seconds the area where their nutsacks used to be, and trot back inside to get a hard-earned bellyrub and eat some food from their prissy, fire-hydrant-shaped bowls.

But not this dog. No one could love this dog. This dog was Hannibal Lecter, and his owners probably trapped him back there through some last-resort magic spell designed to restrain the abominations that we create but can't ever destroy. This dog longed to murder the outside world, and settled in the meantime for sodomizing any rabbits or raccoons that were dumb enough to wander into his accursed domain at night. But I just knew what the real prize was, and it was me. Then the world.

Anyway, every day for 50 feet of my walk home this dog would just go insane on that fence - barking and growling and snarling and baring his teeth through the wood's numerous knotholes, sprinting back and forth looking for some opening he might have missed the last thousand times he looked, knowing that if only he could find it, he could finally eat me and sprint down the street in freedom, frothing at the bloody mouth. And for the last 10 feet of fence, when he knew that I was about to be out of his jurisdiction, he would get even more frenzied and resort to just straight trying to knock the fence down, running up and kind of jumping into it, standing on his hind legs and pushing. And goddammit if every day that fence didn't wobble a little more. Of course, I imputed method to his madness. I pictured him toiling purposefully for years in anticipation of a future that must have initially seemed light-years away, like Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption (I was a cultured little kid to think of this reference, especially because the movie wasn't out yet). I pictured him in a lab coat running leverage tests and shit, and circling the day on his calendar that all of his hard work would finally spring him from his penury. And then I imagined that he would plan to make it happen at the most fortuitous moment of that day, and that naturally he would choose the time when I was walking home from school playing with the yo-yo I bought at the assembly. He would just sit there calmly like an asshole of a dog statue while all the other kids went by. He would nod at the other kids, as if to say "Carry on." And when it was just me he'd topple the fence in one swift motion and tear me asunder, taking my tibia as a trophy to hang on his mantle in Mexico. And I was not Benny the Jet. I would not be able pickle the beast.

I can safely say from the adult world that it was kind of a quaint fear, at least compared to my current concerns, which include getting health insurance, figuring out what to do with my life, the ethical implications of accepting any comfort in a world where kwashiorkor is a thing, and Sarah Palin. But at 6 or 7 years old or whatever, worrying about being killed by a fenced-off dog actually represented a firm step in the direction of reality for me. Other items that would have appeared on a Threatdown in my early childhood:

1) The Jibboo

Of all the things you might think a child should be afraid of, I am guessing that a Dr. Seuss drawing would be in your bottom 5, and creepy pedophiles in the top 1. Enter cognitive dissonance, care of the Jibboo from Oh, The Thinks You Can Think!:

I think you'll agree that the Jibboo is not one of Dr. Seuss' more lovable characters. Sure, the friendly wave says "You can trust me," but the fact that it comes from a horrible shadowy birdthing wandering the barren streets at night effectively finishes that statement with "to touch your butthole." And the marks in the dirt behind his feet suggest to me that he has been dragging them, possibly due to the exhaustion of a long journey undertaken to beat the rap in some far away prosaic land. Here, he has stumbled upon an uncorrupted, whimsical Seussian utopia to which he doesn't belong, and that little kid knows it. And that little kid was me. When my parents used to read me this book, I would apparently scream at them in a panic to skip the Jibboo page (and it is just this one page - Seuss never offers an actual answer to the question). I will leave it up to you to decide whether that made me a sissy or a smart kid. But keep in mind before you answer that throughout my childhood I never got molested even once. Would this have been so if Dr. Seuss hadn't implied that you should never to talk to birdthings? Something to think about. So what would YOU do if you met a Jibboo? My advice, then and now: Fucking run.

(And luckily, my parents never sat me down and took me through Dr. Seuss' political cartoons, because this springmonster would have kept me up for weeks:

)

2. Deinonychus

What is Deinonychus, you ask? Take it away, "Wee Sing Dinosaurs" lyrics that triggered my fear!:

VERSE ONE
One of the most fearsome hunters
Wasn’t big at all,
He measured close to ten feet long
And only five feet tall.

CHORUS (forebodingly, guys)
Deinonychus,
With his powerful jaw,
Deinonychus,
With his terrible claw.

VERSE TWO
Stalking quickly through the woods,
He hunted with a pack,
When they spied a likely foe,
They’d race to the attack.

REPEAT CHORUS EVEN FOREBODINGLIER TO SCARE SHAWN DAVIS AND MAKE HIM LOOK LIKE A LITTLE BITCH

Here is Deinonychus engaging in dinosaur parkour. His mouth is open like he is roaring. It is of course impossible for people to determine for sure what color dinosaurs were, or what their voices sounded like, but to me this drawing suggests that Deinonychus' roar sounded like the opening scream from "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who.

Oh, but once upon a time Deinonychus scared the shit out of me, or at least that song did (the Deinonychus one, not The Who. Though speaking of pedophiles...). Which is admittedly very stupid, because even the dumbest little kids with the worst kind of irresponsible parents know that dinosaurs haven't roamed the earth for like 5,000 years, ever since they obstinately refused Noah's efforts to get them all on the boat. You can blame Noah if you want, but you just can't help a superorder that doesn't want to help itself, and dinosaurs were the Amy Winehouse of superorders.

I think the phrase "terrible claw" is what got me, though, because are there really two scarier words to put together? In fact, "terrible claw" is what "Deinonychus" means in Greek, which is much cooler and scarier than, say, what "Hadrosaur" means ("sad existentialist duckbilled pussy").

This is the "The Thinker" of dinosaur art. Suck it, Rodin.

If you're anything like me, you have by now wondered what it would be like to live in a world with Deinonychus. And thankfully, Wikipedia has a size chart that captures approximately how it would go:

Man: (jolly, Flanders-like) Oh, hey there Deinonychus. How's Brenda?

Deinonychus: (opening scream from "Won't Get Fooled Again," dashes forward)

Man: Well, I had a good run.

3. Bees

Actually, I guess this one is reasonable enough. But it's pretty rare that you can pinpoint the exact moment a fear developed, and I can do that with bees. I have a vivid memory of being in preschool in Ft. Meade, Maryland, and our class was doing the bees unit. And somewhere in the course of the unit, my teacher, Mrs. Dennison, made a point to tell me that bees are attracted to the color yellow, and by extension they are attracted to blondes: a dubious claim that I still don't know the truth of (though it would be funny if all bees are always having mid-life crises and chasing blondes), but one which nevertheless made me paranoid about bees for years until one day in my early 20s when I suddenly realized that I am at least 6 times their size (and also that life IS pain, and bees are the smallest of the small-time merchants, trading in a particularly fleeting and meaningless brand, y'know?). But still, there are times when any given bee will freak me out and I'll make some goofy noise and run away as if I'm doing it to be funny and over-the-top when in fact I'm doing it out of self-preservation and terror.

At first when I thought about it, I concluded that Mrs. Dennison was a horrible crone for messing with me like this, in spite of the fact that she gave us all seashells on the first day of school, and seashells are awesome. Then I remembered a few things from my preschool report card:

"Shawn is going through a fisticuffs time. He needs better negotiating skills."

"Shawn has trouble with rules. He sometimes thinks they are for 'the other kids' (his words). Therefore [they] don't apply to him. He forgets and acts on impulse."

And I remember a few times during recess or whatever when I was forced to sit in a chalk circle that she would exasperatedly draw on the ground because I was being an asshole to the other kids. In other words, I was the terrible person. I apparently tormented this woman and her class, and she probably used bees to give me some small measure of comeuppance. And I respect that. After all, I can't say that I am unhappy that bees supposedly die when they sting you, or that Deinonychus is extinct, or that the Jibboo is serving consecutive life sentences in a prison for imaginary pedophile birds no one cares about anymore. They are jerks, and that's what they get. And do you know how the dog story ends? I took a few steps away from the fence, then realized that there was no barking from which to recoil. Then I felt this weird, swelling sense of triumph. Because in that moment, I realized that though it may suck getting older and having less-fun fears and such, at least time also killed that fucking dog for me.

What an asshole.

Validation, Or Why Paying Downtown Parking Prices Is Worth It

2009-12-02T06:11:00.018-07:00

Here is an annotated timeline of my Denver-to-Aurora lightrail trip yesterday:

6 PM: I finish work and wander out of the building, taking my time to chat with coworkers about various inanities, because I am both affable and collegial.

6:07 PM: I get on the crowded 16th St. MallRide.

6:12 PM: The MallRide creeps up on the Stout St. Station, stopping at every block like your tiny-bladdered, biodiesel-powered grandfather on a roadtrip. I am a little nervous, because the H-Line leaves at 6:14, and if I miss this one I have to wait 15 minutes in the cold for the next one, which will cause me to miss my bus when I get off at Nine Mile, which will in turn relegate me to another hour in the cold. I dislike the cold. I lament the fact that I have a long-standing policy to never again run to catch buses and trains and stuff - a policy I adopted because I hate the feeling you get when you run and still don't make it, when you're left standing there like an asshole and everyone around you knows they just saw you fail at something you wanted, and they get to sip that delicious pity/schadenfreude cocktail on your dime. And that is one cocktail I will not fucking spring for. No sir. Not me. Also, I have always thought that there is just an inherent sadness to running for the bus/lightrail, because when it boils down to it you are sprinting like an action hero just to get on a dank, smelly thing that will get you to your job as an insurance underwriter on time. I will gladly run to get on a rocketship to the moon. But not for the bus or the lightrail. Unless they are going to the moon.

6:14 PM: The MallRide finally gets to the Stout St. Station, and I see my H-Line to Nine Mile already sitting there, looking antsy to depart. Fuck. I get off the bus and sprint across the street like a dirty hypocrite, showing the congregated panhandling homeless what pathetic desperation really looks like. I pull out an express pass as I run, planning to turn this lame betrayal of my principles into a cool-looking win. I will slip the ticket in the validator in one magnificent thrust and bolt inside the closing doors like a deadline-conquering megachampion. (Oh, hyphenated adjectives.) But of course we all know that even the coolest-laid plans are foiled by the goddamn validator. So I end up standing there trying frantically to get this little piece of asshole paper stamped as the train doors start their customary "It's go time, bitches" beeping. I feel retarded, but to be fair it's like if at the end of the 100 meter hurdles, every runner has to pull out a wrinkled up dollar and get a vending machine to take it in order to win. Shit gets hard. This simple motherfucking thing all of a sudden feels like trying to slide a brick under a door. Having already abandoned my plan to be the awesomest lameass in the history of running to catch things, I figure I might as well abandon the desire to be a dignified adult who rides legally. I take a few hard steps, shove my hand between the closing doors, and trudge up the stairs. I am a stupid out-of-shape freeloader. I briefly think about how much we implicitly trust door-sensor technology, to the extent that we go around shoving our hands inside things that would fuck us up if the sensor were broken. I picture the lightrail dragging me by the arm screaming into a wall. In the outside world, which is thankfully not subjected to the stupid things I think about, the automated female voice reminds everyone to get away from the doors so the train can depart, and I know that she is talking about me. I plop down next to some lady who probably saw my whole sad ordeal. We leave.

6:16 PM: We pull up at the Convention Center Station, the only station on the route where the automated voice says "Remember, you must have a valid ticket, transfer, or pass." I get paranoid that the enforcement dudes are going to get on and embarrass me. I'll be sitting there talking to some pudgy 50-year-old guy in a fake cop uniform, trying to explain how I really tried to validate my pass, but the train was leaving, and I couldn't miss this lightrail - not again. Not for you, not for anybody. I will show him my blank pass, and try to reason with him that I wouldn't carry one of these around and not validate it. That would be dumb, man. I will tell him it's cold outside. I will start crying and ask him what he would do if I were his son. And he will give me a ticket and kick me off the lightrail because he doesn't talk to his son anymore because his son is a faggot. And everyone on the lightrail will be whispering about me, judging me, with their fucking laminated monthly hologrammed passes that you don't ever have to validate. Then they'll get home and have beef stroganoff and tell their spouses over dinner how some guy got caught without a ticket on the lightrail today and wept like a girl. I can't handle this. I will not be the "Oh, something actually happened today that was different from my affair-inducing day-to-day drudgery" story. So I decide to do something about it. I bolt the train as soon as the doors open, looking left and right and left for the green glow of the validator thingies. I see one that's kind of far away, and I start to sprint for it. But I hear the beeping start, and I realize that I have no shot. I hop back on, defeated, dodging the doors exaggeratedly as if they're picking on me. I am now on the next car over. This time, I just stand in the doorway, muttering to myself and waiting for my next shot.

6:19 PM: Colfax at Auraria Station. The busiest stop. Lots of commuter students, and it'll take them a minute to get on. This is it. I bolt again, running down the line, weaving through sane people and looking for the goddamn validators. I don't see them. I get like 100 feet from the lightrail, whipping around in circles. I mutter "Where the fuck?" three or four times. The doors beep. I turn and run again, catching them and prying them open like I am strong. But I am not strong. I am weak and sad. I am also in the same car I started on. A few people seem to notice that I have now sprinted up and gotten on their train twice within three stops. I hope they just think I'm really fast.

6:25 PM: Self-loathing. I ask myself why I even care if I get caught. It's probably 50 dollars. I don't really care about money. And RTD inexplicably does not check tickets very often, in my experience. So my main concern really is what these people would think of me on the off chance that I got caught. These people. These coughing, sniffling, dead-eyed people. Why? I decide to abandon my original quest for validation (deep double-meaning alert!) and just look around for anyone who stands out and makes me less bummed that I'm concerned about what everyone thinks of me. There is a serious, distinguished-looking old man in a suit and tie writing something in a notebook. There's a guy whose respect it might be reasonable to give a shit about! I really want to ask him what he is writing, but I am not really a talk-to-strangers type of guy. But still: Is he one of those people who writes a daily poem or something on the lightrail? Is it about me? A haiku? Can he capture the universality of my predicament in 17 syllables?

Or iambic pentameter?

But I never ask him, so I'll never know, and I'll never talk my way into a surprise internship with JP Morgan Chase, and I'll never get to date his granddaughter if he has one. That's what I get.

Also around me are two college-aged Asian girls with designer bags and rhinestone-peppered cell phones. Their conversation flits between how guys who wear pants for multiple days in a row need to make sure they wear underwear or the pants will smell disgusting, and an in-depth discussion of Tiger Woods (his wife: "pretty hot"; mistress: "ugly skank"). They laugh a lot. I get off at the next stop and walk one car over again. When I get on, I see a woman I saw earlier. She chuckles at me. I wonder how much she knows, and whether she can be trusted.

6:44 PM: It's been a while now since I actually got off the lightrail seeking the elusive validators, but I've still been looking out the window at each stop, just in case I might be able to see one, or at the very least catch a glimpse of the RTD cop waiting at a station, allowing me to step off as he got on. But at Southmoor, I finally see my chance. The validator is 10 feet from the door, glowing a friendly green. I take a deep breath and step off. I walk over, slide my pass in, hear the telltale beep, and stroll back aboard with a newfound sense of belonging and ownership. I am finally legal. I have my green card. No show today, assholes. I am valid.

6:47 PM: Regret. I made it all this way, then I validated my ticket two stops from Nine Mile? I'm such a pussy.

Conclusion: I am incapable of being happy with myself. But maybe someday, blah blah blah, find the kind of validation that lasts. The End.

The Thing About Simplicity Is DORDORDOR!

2009-11-05T07:38:00.013-07:00

The other day, I overheard a conversation that included this snippet:

Guy: The women run the show here, dude. Everyone in charge is a woman, except for Robert. And Robert is a fag, so he's basically a woman, too, y'know?

So Guy posits here that one's true gender is basically reducible to one's sexual preference: if you have sex with men, then you are a woman (and vice-versa, presumably). And I think you'll admit that it's both a hilarious joke AND a pretty persuasive argument. Because gay men sometimes have high voices and love shopping! You can't debate that! Sure, it would be a different story if gender were about something more than the kind of genitalia a person prefers to play with. I mean, if you're one of those people who says shit like, um, "Gender is an unfathomably complex bundle of nuanced behaviors and motivations and thoughts and desires governed by what must be millions of constantly-shifting little rules, some of which govern us and compel us without our knowledge or conscious consent - just ingrained somewhere in the tens of billions of interconnecting and alternately-firing neurons that make up our brains - while other rules are borne out of the brain's insane ability to be simultaneously capable of adjusting on the fly throughout life - of adapting to the circumstances into which that individual brain is born and raised, sometimes accepting circumstance as immutable law in an effort to just get by in this world, other times thinking critically about whether the herd is going in the right direction, and at every second determining what a man/woman/person is and isn't, and what they should and shouldn't be. It's this crazy, always-changing process - an interplay between being bound by our biological encoding to be a certain way, and empowered by that encoding to choose who we want to be, and what it means to be male or female, and what the importance is of these lines that we are continually compelled to draw in the sand..." if you're one of those people, then you might think that gender is more than the junk-diddling thing I was talking about 700 words ago. But if you're one those people, you're gay and wrong and shut up.

But then I was thinking about it for a second, and I was like, "Wait. But if anyone who has sex with men is basically a woman, then whenever a man has sex with a man, they are each having sex with a 'woman.' And if they're each having sex with a woman, then that makes them both men again. But if a man has sex with a man, he is having sex with a 'woman,' so he's a man. And so on into infinity! Man! Woman! Man! Woman! Infinity!" Then I imagined two people having sex and constantly shapeshifting between male and female forms, and I thought it could be like a trippy screensaver. Then I got angry. Then I got aroused. Then I got angry. Then my head started hurting, and I realized that we live in a breathtakingly complex world, and it's easier/better to just call gay people fags, kick them out of my gender, and move on. And I did.

BOO!(?)

2009-10-31T19:09:00.023-06:00

Hey, ghouls and 'goyles! Also, hello to the guys and girls. Happy Halloween! What are you going to be tonight? A girl in a Women's Studies class I was in once posited that everyone goes as themselves on Halloween. It's a provocative point, and one that seems trenchant (or at least amusing) in the context of cross-dressing frat boys in which it was made, but I just can't for the life of me figure out how to expand the theory to apply to the guy who shows up as an M&M. I don't really like most people very much, but I am willing to give M&M guy the benefit of the doubt on this one, that there is more inside his soul than a peanut.

In case not doing it will cause something terrible to happen to those they love, some people brush their teeth for exactly 123 seconds. And similarly, in case you were wondering, my favorite Halloween (in retrospect) is when I was four or five years old. I went as a hobo (Correction: No I didn't. See below.), because there is really nothing funnier than dirty homeless urchin children. But that isn't what was most awesome about it. Nate went as a pirate, complete with an eyepatch, skull-and-crossbones hat, and painted-on mustache. Obviously we cut a fucking adorable figure, but as the night wore on, it became apparent that Nate was struggling. He was stumbling around the entire time and falling repeatedly - and not in some precocious attempt to portray a pirate loaded up on mead and opium because he wants to forget the treachery of the sea. My Dad was obviously perplexed, but when we got home Nate was fine, and my parents just chalked it up to some combination of the dark night and the lack of depth perception with the eyepatch and general fatigue from walking around with short little 2-year-old legs. It was only a few years later, at Nate's first eye exam, that my parents learned that Nate had, and probably always had, like 20-500 vision or something in his right eye, and was walking around that night with an eyepatch over his left eye, blind as a blind pirate's blind parrot's devotion. Which is just hilarious ~~to me~~. I guess my parents kicked themselves for missing it at the time, but hindsight never wears an eyepatch.

Left: Nate as a fearsome 3-foot-tall blind pirate. I imagine that he tells all the other pirates that he puts the patch over the eye that works just to give the sorry scurvy dogs a fighting chance. Then he kills them anyway. Right: Me as a fearsome 3-and-1/2-foot-tall hobo wearing man-sized clothes and a fedora. I have retroactively named this character Basement Mraz. Also, when I went to get these pictures, I discovered that I actually went as a clown the Halloween Nate was a pirate. But I really don't want pictures of me as a clown out in the world, no matter the age or circumstances. A vagrant I can deal with, especially since I'll probably be one for real someday. If you want pictures of me as a clown then you'll either have to steal mine or drug me and dress me up as one. But let's be honest: you don't give a shit about it.

I will admit, though, that it's been at least a decade since Halloween was my kind of holiday. After retiring from trick-or-treating at the reasonable age of 13, I for years looked down upon the postpubescent dipshits who tossed on half-assed costumes and ran around the neighborhood carrying pillowcases, just daring adults who were shorter than they were to deny them their fun-sized Twix bars. It was just weird to see teenagers - who otherwise devote so much time to looking cool and independent - willfully engaging in an activity in which they must roam the streets surrounded by mommies and daddies shepherding their snot-costumed kids from house to house to obesity. And I hated that the teenagers would travel in packs and laugh their Jimbo Jones laughs like they were only doing it to be hilarious and ironic. Pretend all you want, but you and I both know, motherfucker, that when you get home tonight you're going to pour out that pillowcase on your bed and sort the contents just like you did when you were eight years old: full-sized vs. fun-sized; chocolate vs. non-; Snickers over here, Butterfingers here, Spree over there, Good 'N' Plenty in the trash. So come on. Give me a break. (Give me a break. Break me off a piece of that BULLSHIT. Boom.)

But recently I've softened my stance, as two simple facts of life have become more clear (or at least relevant) to me: kids can wring happiness out of almost any situation, and adults out of almost nothing. If Halloween were set up just to maximize everyone's general happiness above baseline levels, the kids would be handing shit out to adults - candy or chocolate liqueur or coupons for free haircuts or whatever it is that might help them to forget their day-to-day miseries and feel, for at least a few hours, that life is something more than a cruel vitality sieve. And if the kids feel left out, the adults can just throw them an ill-conceived party the next day, and they'll dig it. Because these are the same people who can pump pure distilled joy out of shit like finding eggs hidden under couch cushions or going to Casa Bonita or driving through the car wash. They will make it work. So it's cool, Halloween. Just because I got an irreversible Halloween vasectomy doesn't mean that the postpubecent shouldn't be able to use you as an excuse to make some funbabies. Or real babies. Or punch.

So Happy Halloween to all - M&Ms and Eminems and slutty RNs and slutty M&Ms alike (I'm looking at you, green one!).

Why Dicking Around On YouTube Is Justifiable

2009-09-29T09:30:00.000-06:00

Hey guys. Sorry I haven't been around much. I've been killing myself trying to get this guy to let me be his agent:

Can you say, "Voice of a generation"? This has like 32 views, and five of them are me. It should be viral. THINK people, THINK!

New Template, Same Bullshit

2009-08-30T22:38:00.010-06:00

After over three years of lighting up the blogosphere at a blistering rate of one little-seen post every three weeks, I have decided it's time to mix things up a little bit. I've actually been meaning to change my template for a year or so - an interval that a scientist might call "A fraction of a microsecond in terms of geologic time," but that normalfolk call "A super-long time to put something off that takes 5 minutes to do." I think deep down I am hoping that renovating my blog will inspire me to write more, like a husband who buys his aging wife breast implants in hopes of maybe being able to achieve a natural erection in her presence.

Whether this comes to fruition or not, I cannot say. But the template switch has already paid dividends for me in the real world: You see, it felt so good to cross something off my Inconsequential To-Do List that I just went ahead and did something else - something much more important than a two-bit blog update or a hacky banner. Today, after several years of hemming, hawing, and foot-dragging, I finally threw away the pair of boxers that my penis always slips out of.

It's been a long, checkered journey for me and my short, checkered pair of Hanes 34-36 waist boxers. From the day they came out of the package, my package came out of them with disturbing frequency, the slightest movement causing a penis jailbreak through the shorts' canyonesque, apparently defective front flap, forcing me to readjust covertly so often that anyone paying close attention would think me incapable of going ten minutes without fondling myself. Don't get me wrong: I'm all about giving my penis a sporting chance to break free, but I was tired of my boxers making my junk look like the Harry Houdini of genitalia.

Eventually, I dropped the boxers from my rotation, relegating their Adam Eaton-style implosions to mostly long-relief and mop-up duty. But since I am an idiot who never does laundry until he's out of clothes, the boxers kept getting spot-starts. And unlike my penis they never, ever came through. I'm sure they would blame their slipshod performance on being out of practice, but look at the stats and face facts, man: you have always sucked, and I'm in the playoff hunt. And so it is that today, August 30th, 2009, I grant my worst-performing boxers their unconditional release. I wish them all the best, and hopefully they'll be rescued off the garbage heap and latch on with a hobo in rebuilding mode.

Here's to change!

Twitter Post 2: The Fallout

2009-08-11T10:58:00.006-06:00

As a result of my last post, I now have two followers on Twitter. Let's meet them:

Follower #1

Name: Ryan Garde

Dossier: One of my best friends and a fellow Dervish (who drove in the tying run with two outs in the bottom of the last inning on Sunday in our colossal Battle of the 10-0 teams, paving the way for an epic extra-innings victory that I might write about in the next few days if I feel like it. And he's single, ladies!). Enjoys cars, golf, Chipotle, Derving like it's 1999.

How he came to follow me on Twitter: This very blog.

Picture on his Twitter Profile: A parasailer. Parasailer may or may not be Ryan. I will ask him.

Follower #2

Name: rimming__guy

Dossier: I don't know the gentleman, but according to his Twitter Bio his interests include "gay porn," "gay porno" (BIG difference), and being sent gay porn/o. And one of his tweets informs me that he is "hung and looking".

How he came to follow me on Twitter: Not sure, but if I had to guess I'd say it has something to do with the fact that I wrote a tweet for my last post that said "Having gay sex!!!!" Just a hunch.

Picture on his Twitter Profile: A man fellating another man. (Warning: Link contains...guess.) Unclear whether rimming__guy is the fellator, the fellatee, the cameraman, or none of the above. I will not be asking.

Welcome, both of you!

@everyone: Hi!

2009-08-09T07:00:00.023-06:00

Here is a list of the three things that I think probably suck the most about getting old:

1. You get wrinkles (Yuck!)
2. Your hair goes gray or falls out (Icky!)
3. The world around you slowly-but-definitely turns into something you neither recognize nor approve of nor have the time, energy or desire to try to understand - a strange, throbbing abomination ruled (at least culturally) by a younger generation that seems to you morally bankrupt and dismissive of its elders. It is as if the very ground you walk on slowly tilts downward, shifting incrementally over time from a very slight decline into a difficult-to-manage slope that at any moment could (and inevitably will) become a freefall from existence, as if time knows life's nature and seeks to expel you from a world that is no longer yours.

In no particular order. Going bald is probably the worst. Sunburns on the top of your head? Ouch!

I am 24, and I already find myself waging an internal war against the dickish old fogey that I know is lurking somewhere inside me, overmatched and largely-dormant for now, only occasionally rearing his liver-spotted head to curtly dismiss a new fad or ask some teenagers a series of inane questions about how XBox Live works, slipping in anecdotes about how he played paleolithic online games like NFL 2K1 on the Sega Dreamcast using a 50-foot phone cord to take advantage of its 56k connection and dealing with the 2-second lag between flicking his finger and seeing Marshall Faulk execute the move on the screen. But just about the time the kids are resolving to egg his/my birdfeeder later that night, I overpower him and right the ship by showing them a viral video. Still, his occasional appearances remind me he's always there, reading Harper's and whittling, biding his time, and that the balance of power is always shifting in his direction, and eventually he'll be all that's left. Until he/we are dead.

And that is why I recently joined Twitter. Because truth be told, my old fogey and I have always thought it was pretty dumb. "But isn't Twitter just a glorified facebook status update?," we'd ask/declare. And the young people would just scoff, the little pricks, the way we did years ago when people wondered how facebook (back when it was "thefacebook.com," dagblastit) was any different than myspace. Or the way we heard people reacted to the notion of myspace with an incredulous laugh, saying "We don't need a website to tell us who our friends are! And we can keep track of them just fine with email, thanks!" Or the way we heard people say that people said people reacted to email, objecting to how impersonal it all was, saying that they much prefer to write letters, if it's all the same to you. All the way back to "No sentences. We rape." And further!

So, while I still can, before my inclinations crystallize into an insurmountable Great Wall of Codgerdom, I have decided to give Twitter a shot. And I have to admit, just from my first impression I can tell that it is not just like a facebook status update. It is different enough to justify its existence. If you don't believe me, ask me how on facebook or something and I'll tell you, you old bastard.

I'm not quite off the ground floor yet. As this blog has made it abundantly clear, I can't really be bothered to do much in the way of self-promotion or networking. And I haven't felt the need to follow anyone yet. I'm looking at it as a beta version, so I can work out all the kinks and "I just farted LOL"s before I actually have any followers. All of this means that I look like the loneliest bastard in the illustrious lonely bastard history of the internet. So no one was around to read 140-character nuggets like these:

Or so I thought. Check it out!
This guy digs what I'm laying down. The first thing you might notice about this fellow is that he is posing in front of the American flag. Or maybe you'll notice the cowboy hat. Or maybe you went straight for the words and you saw that he considers Barack Obama "the biggest Racist (CAPITAL R!) of all." Whatever the case, I hope you're with me when I say that my first impression of this gentleman is that he appears to be something of a dick. Here's his page:
I love my new friend. Reasons:

- Fighter jet tiled wallpaper!

-"Regan (sic) Conservative"

(Simple mnemonic device for spelling "Reagan":
Republicans
Everywhere
Are
Great
At
Notbeingabletospellthelastnameofthepatronsaintoftheirdouchebagparty. Try it!)

-"Supports Isreal (sic)"

(Simple mnemonic device for spelling "Israel": A before E, except after drinking paint.)

-"Ok i'm a Redneck"

(You are the world's foremost redneck. The Greek God of Rednecks. Your neck is burgundy.)

- Forwards messages like "Is this the smoking gun of Obama's Kenyan Birth?"

(Simple Answer: No. Longer Answer: Nope.)

- Fighter jet tiled wallpaper!!!

I think there is a strong chance that this guy added me because I facetiously said "I blame Obama" in one of my tweets (ugh), and he did a search for tweets containing the words "blame" and "Obama" together or something (maybe even the exact phrase "I blame Obama"), choosing indiscriminately to follow the writers of each hit he got. Maybe he even has some program rigged up to automatically follow people whose tweets meet his deranged criteria. I have no idea if that is even possible, because I am old. At any rate, I doubt he found me by searching for "This American Life." Though "Crunchwrap Supreme" is a possibility.

I thought it would be funny to start writing tweets like these until he deleted me:

But I'm an impatient man, so then I just blocked him. And now I have no friends again. But maybe the lesson here is that there are more important things than being popular. Like not being stupid. On that, my fogey and I can agree.

NATE: Pledge of Allegiance as History Lesson?

2009-07-23T18:05:00.012-06:00

Ever heard of the WallBuilders? If you see that name and assume that the WallBuilders are a lunatic anti-immigration fringe group, you are about half right. In reality, the WallBuilders are a lunatic anti-…um…sanity fringe group whose facility with figurative language leaves something to be desired. The WallBuilders’ hilarious website explains the origin of the name thusly:

In the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, the nation of Israel rallied together in a grassroots movement to help rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and thus restore stability, safety, and a promising future to that great city. We have chosen this historical concept of "rebuilding the walls" to represent allegorically the call for citizen involvement in rebuilding our nation's foundations. As Psalm 11:3 reminds us, "If the foundations be destroyed, what shall the righteous do?"

Since I counted, in my last reading, 7,812,374 metaphors in the Bible, I find it a bit curious that this is the one they choose to use as the foundation of the crusade to restore Christianity to its rightful place in America. Immigration confusion aside, I like to think that the preponderance of Christian groups left the WallBuilders with the table scraps, or that “Fishers of Men” and “Loads of Loaves” are gay- and scat-themed pornography sites, respectively, but whatever the reason, WallBuilders it is.

Riotously, the WallBuilders’ choice of allusion/metaphor is extremely significant in the historic debate regarding religion’s proper place in the public sphere. To wit, in what is almost certainly the most famous quote on the topic, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

My perfunctory search of the website turns up that although the WallBuilders do address the 1802 letter at length, they are unaware of their name’s delicious irony in this respect. But I digress.

The reason I bring up the WallBuilders is that the group’s founder, David Barton, is sitting on a panel of experts tasked with revising Texas’ history curriculum. Sitting on the panel with Barton is Reverend Peter Marshall, whose contention that the Vietnam War and Hurricane Katrina were punishment for American sexual promiscuity and tolerance of homosexuality makes him exactly the type of person who should be charting the next generation’s educational course. With the WallBuilders' mission (specifically: the [nation] rallied together in a grassroots movement to help rebuild the [everything] of [New Orleans] and thus restore stability, safety, and a promising future to that great city) and images like this and this and this in mind, I can only assume that Barton and Marshall are at each other’s throats during each and every meeting of the panel. Anyway, per the Guardian article linked, Barton’s enlightened recommendations include:

§ The curriculum should reflect the fact that the US Constitution was written with God in mind including that “there is a fixed moral law derived from God and nature,” that “there is a creator” and “government exists primarily to protect God-given rights to every individual.”

§ Children should be taught that Christianity is the key to “American exceptionalism” because the structure of its democratic system is a recognition that human beings are fallible, and that religion is at the heart of being a virtuous citizen.

First of all, I’m not entirely sure how democracy is predicated upon some Christian notion of human fallibility, since it is a) based upon people’s sovereign ability and trustworthiness to make the decisions affecting their own lives, and b) older than Christianity. In fact, the bullet-pointed items above are so batshit insane that I don’t really feel compelled to refute them. I suppose all of this is only noteworthy insofar as people in positions of public trust are now attempting to beshit history in a manner traditionally reserved for science. At least science, from their perspective, deserved it. Given its role as an impartial arbiter of facts with a pesky tendency to cast their entire set of childish superstitions into doubt, the impulse to subvert and destroy it makes perfect sense. The flip side, of course, is that the hard sciences are able to defend themselves.

Scientist: This fossil, found in Coastal Brazil, is nearly identical to hundreds of others found in South America and Africa, due of course to their continuity prior to the breakup of Pangaea.

Crazy Person: That fossil is 6,000 years old.

Scientist: Excuse me?

Crazy Person: Dinosaurs went extinct because they were too big to fit on the Ark, or because they were unable to cope with the post-flood ecosystem changes. Our scientists are working on figuring it out as we speak.

Scientist: Get out of my office.

Easy enough. History can, of course, be used to poke holes in religion's shoddy boat as well, albeit more obliquely (“To whom do you sacrifice your Wednesday goats?”). But as a more subjective discipline, history can’t defend itself quite so convincingly from co-optation. I don’t have the answer—I’m just glad that this kind of bullshit stops at the state school board level.

Oh, turd.

For real? We are really straight-facedly recasting federal fucking evangelism as an ode to Judeo-Christian American history? Of course, the whole “under God”/“In God We Trust” thing has a fairly well-established narrative as a relic of McCarthy-era gobbledygook, so I’ll just leave that part alone.

I’m a reasonable man, so I was thinking of ways to compromise here. Perhaps, as a paean to the historic role that fucking has played in the great American experiment, we could just engrave a giant penis on the wall of the Capitol Visitor Center. If our elected officials are serious about the “Judeo” part of our Judeo-Christian heritage, I’ll even allow that penis to be circumcised. I think it’s fair to say that without fucking, America, and indeed the world, would not exist as we know them today. I would simply ask, in the spirit of the older, Latin-er, badder-ass motto “E Pluribus [Spermae] Unum” (“Out of Many [Sperm], One”), that Congress give this proposal some thought.

Alternatively, if the desire to enshrine history in the Pledge of Allegiance is in earnest, here’s an idea:

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands: one nation, Under God, indivisible except by Federalism, Indian extermination, slavery, The Mexican-American War, Civil War, Reconstruction, rights of laborers, Cuban independence, World War I, flappers, World War II, nuclear escalation, The Cold War, Korea, McCarthyism, drugs, The Civil Rights Movement, that goddamn rock music, Vietnam, feminism, Reaganomics, race, class, both wars in the Persian Gulf, violence in the media, guns, hip-hop, abortion, gay rights, immigration, drugs again, religion, financial industry regulation, and health care; with liberty and justice for most, give or take*.

*Excludes: women, 1788-?; racial minorities, 1788-?; and yucky fags.”

I guess that, when reciting this pledge, one would have to actually say “asterisk.” And would have to use one’s best judgment when replacing those question marks with actual years. But it shouldn’t come up if we’re just engraving it on a wall for purposes of historical education. We can keep the current one, for everyday usage. It’s a modest proposal. Consider this my contribution to the debate. Maybe one of these days I’ll write about something that isn’t a sociopolitical powder keg.

Wherein I Demonstrate How Badly I Suck At Photoshop

2009-05-21T10:07:00.039-06:00

I think I was built for highway driving. But not by some shithouse loser-ass American company. By Honda. If Honda made a machine that drives machines that drive on highways, I like to think that it would be a lot like me, but with a less-chiseled jawline. My ability to stay within the lane? Legendary. Those "You're going to die if you don't adjust!" grooves would have nothing to do if the highway were full of Mes. My endurance? Iditarodian. My bladder? Well let's just say I was walking by an oil tanker that moonlights as a CT scanner the other day, and HE was like, "God-Damn!". I saw a lot of tough-looking sumbitches drivin' them big rigs on my cross-country trip - dudes with laughable mullets and hunting-catalog outfits. And as I - a northerner without any questionable facial hair and with a penchant for conjugating correctly - passed them, there is no way they could have known that they were being passed (courteously and always on the left) by their future champion. I will be the Jeff Gordon of big rig drivers. They will adorn their rides with cartoons in which my call number receives a golden shower, but they will soon find out that I am unflappable - I will drink their metaphorical golden shower like it is lemon-lime Gatorade, and drive past them as they metaphorically vomit in disgust.

What's so great about highway driving, though, is that it masks my weaknesses. For instance, many of you know that I have the poorest sense of direction this side of a game of pin the tail on the donkey. If you were to drive me and a dog around randomly for an hour and then kick us out of the car, I would blindly follow the dog with my arms outstretched like a two-year-old until one of us got run over, and if it were him I'd start looking for the nearest place to make a new life for myself. But the highway is pretty straightforward. Take I-70 East for a thousand miles. Got it.

As you might have surmised if you have been paying very close attention, I just got back from a roadtrip - a whirlwind east coast jaunt with my Dad to attend Nate's graduation from Penn, and to bring him back to Colorado, whereupon he may Derv mightily. (Speaking of the Dervishes, we are 3-0 now, and have summarily ass-whipped every team we've played thus far. Bandwagon-hoppers, your time is now.) It was a good trip. When I think about all the shit we got done in one week - visiting with all of my grandparents, attending an Orioles-Royals game in Kansas City (on Ladies Night, no less. My attendance was a surprise treat for them) and a Rangers-Tigers game in Detroit (and witnessing my first live one-hitter. Fuck you, Michael Young.), and attending Nate's various graduation clusterfucks in Philadelphia, all sandwiched between a shitload of the highway driving for which I was maybe built by Honda - it really makes me appreciate what a week can be. As a gentleman who has on multiple occasions failed to put on pants for three straight days because it looks a little bit cloudy outside, an eventful trip like this one is both an edifying and a shaming experience. At any rate, here are a few thoughts I've had in the past week:

- I found out on this trip that the tired waitress schtick of mock-seriously denying customers some basic perquisite is not endemic to Colorado. I hate this schtick very much. Only one of these lines did not happen:

My Dad: Could I get another napkin?
Waitress: Nope. We're not allowed to give out extra napkins.
(Very Short Pause)
(A unicorn trots in and orders a black coffee)
Waitress: Haha! Did you see his face?
Me: (murders her)

- A 17-hour car ride with one other person presents a lot of opportunities for conversation and for silence, and I appreciate both. I especially like when a period of silence is so long that your thoughts can swim off in some random direction for twenty minutes, which is always hilarious when you come up for air. For instance:

Dad: Who is this (playing on my iPod)?
Me: This is Flight of the Conchords.

(20 minutes of silence)

Dad: Is it possible to extract DNA from bone marrow?

Awesome.

- And in case you don't have anything to talk or think about, the highway is littered with thinkpieces. For instance (I didn't take this picture, but I'm pretty sure this is the exact billboard I saw):

At first when I saw this I missed the point and was like, "Probably Cabo." Then I thought about it for a second, and I was like, "Well, wait. I'm dead. I don't think incorporeal souls can get tans. Or drunk. Can souls date? I mean, you always hear about 57-years-married Eunice and Herbert meeting up in heaven, but if you die single, can your soul mingle? Because Cabo would be no fun without the potential for intercourse. Souls don't seem to care. Souls are asexual creeps." Then I thought about it some more and I realized that this isn't one of those hypotheticals where you get to have fun choosing. This isn't graduating from Penn and having infinite possibilities. It's graduating from the Air Force Academy and wondering where your ass is being sent. So I thought a little bit about Thomas Aquinas and came to the following conclusion:

This sign is more direct (I didn't take this picture, either, but this sign is probably everywhere):

Actually, Christians pretty much dominated the pedantic billboard market across the Midwest. "Hell Is Real," "An Abortion Stops A Beating Heart," "Thank Your Mom For Not Aborting You" - the fuckers are everywhere. Rush Limbaugh loves to talk about the drive-by liberal media, but it only seems fair that the media lean left to balance the large and important drive-by billboard disparity. When I get rich by inventing a locker system for theme parks and zoos that is capable of transporting your items to any other same-numbered locker in the theme park/zoo (patent pending), I am going to combat this disparity. And yes, the billboards I put up will be hacky photoshop jobs, too. And they'll all have pictures strapped awkwardly on top.

- Do you know why Philadelphia is called the City of Brotherly Love? It's because that's what "Philadelphia" means in Greek. It certainly isn't because people in Philadelphia are nice to one another. Philadelphia is a miserable place, populated by miserable people who cannot get over their own misery long enough to treat each other with even a modicum of respect or common human decency. With the notable exception of the waitress I may or may not have murdered earlier in this trip/blog post (how do you know unicorns don't love coffee?), I am always effusively nice to strangers, and generally they are nice to me, so Philadelphia is a bit of a shock to the system. I'd imagine that spending a month or so there would be long enough to batter my spirit to the point that I would become one of them, and I suppose that's how the city stays so mean. Fuck that place...Maybe they've ruined me already.

- And you might assume that Ivy League parents would be relatively mature, thoughtful people, but Nate's graduation ceremony put the lie to that bullshit assumption you might have made. One guy in particular, every time someone with the last name "Hu" was announced, was cracking himself up by saying "Who?" and looking around expectantly, likely hoping that someone in the area was a talent scout or a voting member of the Comedy Hall of Fame. I was annoyed, but I'm probably a hypocrite to complain about him, since this billboard is the only one I could be bothered to take a picture of, and looking at it makes me laugh every time:

The Right Parts.

Baseball!

2009-03-28T06:42:00.010-06:00

The Tigers' Jim Leyland is my favorite manager.

To wit:

After all the day’s bad tidings, Leyland jumped at the chance to say something positive. When someone mentioned a recent published report that suggested Cabrera was out of shape, Leyland quickly came to his player’s defense.

“He looks great to me,” he said. “There’s no issue. He’s a big kid. To me, he’s perfect. Maybe shedding a little weight might be to his benefit, [but] I’ve seen too many people that are big guys like him, people say, ‘Oh, he’s too big,[’] they [expletive] lose weight and look like [expletive] Twiggy, and they’re not worth an [expletive].”

Three things:

1) You know Jim Leyland is awesome when he can drop two apparent Fuck-Bombs and one mystery expletive (more on that in a second) in one sentence and the reporter still deems the comment positive. The swearing is simply a non-issue because Jim Leyland could not say "fuck" more casually or often if his name were Bob Fuck and he were running for city council and he had just embarked on an exhaustive door-to-door effort to get his name out there because name recognition is everything if you want to unseat an incumbent as tenured as Cheryl Cunt. Which is a convoluted way of saying that Jim Leyland is cool. If Joe Torre gave this quote in response to questions about Jonathan Broxton's weight, reporters would be tripping all over each other to get the first "Torre (bristles/snaps/chafes/freaks out/plotzes) at question about reliever's weight" article out. I imagine them doing pratfalls trying to get to the rotary phones to call their editors, but I guess they'd just sit there and e-mail them.

2) I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what the last expletive is supposed to be. The first two are, as we've established, easy: "they fuckin' lose weight and look like fuckin' Twiggy". But "and they're not worth an ________" is perplexing. It turns out that not many common expletives begin with a vowel. Assfuck? Astrofuck? Otterdick? Invisichode? Nate suggests commonsensically that the reporter probably used "an" by accident in order to fit with the word "expletive," and this seems like a reasonable explanation. If this is the case, the most likely candidates are the old standbys "shit" and "fuck". I guess "damn" is also a possibility, but I'm ruling it out because I don't think it would warrant censorship. Anyway, I would root for "fuck" in this scenario to complete a pretty hilarious trifuckta. Or maybe he really said "invisichode". I dare to dream.

3) I honestly think that Jim Leyland should volunteer to talk to teenage girls with body image issues. I'm serious. At this point, people are desensitized to being told they're beautiful just the way they are, but I feel like Jim Leyland could get through. He should narrate Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty" commercials.

Leyland: (voice-over) Fat? What the [expletive] are you talking about? Who told you that? Horse [expletive] Cosmopolitan? Those little [expletive] [expletives] wouldn't know [expletive] beauty if it [expletived] in their mouths. You want to look like those Twiggy little [expletives]? I wouldn't [expletive] those [expletives] if I had cancer of the [expletive] and my doctor told me my [expletive] had 24 hours left to [expletive]. [Expletive]! To me, you're perfect.

On Patriarchy

2009-03-19T18:19:00.010-06:00

As I was walking to class today, I found myself alongside a woman wearing traditional Muslim hijab and talking loudly on a bluetooth headset. Naturally, my first thought was something along the lines of "How interesting. An ancient, patriarchal sense of shame meets an all-too-modern sense of shamelessness. This woman is truly a paragon of post-postmodern man's struggle to wed faith and reason...God and science...to exist in that always-vanishing, hyperliminal space between the past and the future. But wait! Now who is being paternalistic? 'Post-postmodern man'? There I go again, phallocentrically using 'man' qua 'human being,' as if women aren't even a part of history. Fie! There I go again! 'History'? As if women don't also have a story to tell? Hell's bell hooks! What is wrong with me? Or is it me? How can we break free of our ignominious past when its vestiges are embedded and insulated at the insidious level of language, which Nietzsche rightly stated is nothing more than an attempt to turn free-flowing ideas into stagnant (and illusory) truths? How can we break these linguistic, inculcated shackles when they're everywhere? And what of religion? Are we any more capable of shedding our seemingly anachronistic beliefs (soteriological or otherwise) than we are of exorcising sexism from our language? And if these changes are possible, can they happen in our lifetimes? And is my desire to see a world in which patriarchy is truly an anachronism simply a reflection of my modernistic desire for instant gratification - the very same shallow solipsism that causes this woman to babble loudly on her bluetooth in a crowd of people? What a mobius-strip world we live in!"

Just kidding. I thought "Man, it's too nice out to be wearing that. Religion is stupid." Then I went to class and doodled boobs.

Scatological Anecdote

2009-01-16T13:17:00.018-07:00

I'd like to preface this post by saying that it is very, very nice outside today. Downright pleasant. Nothing like a 50-something degree January day to melt the ice that has for the past few months turned CU-Boulder into a 25,000-student institution of pelvis-busting pratfalls. Sure, I secretly and childishly find them hilarious - especially since I have long-since mastered the choppy, slip-free gait that I can only imagine is shared by the most sure-footed of mountain goats. But openly laughing at the misfortunes of others is generally frowned upon in grown-up society, and I'm getting tired of faking empathy about something that is so objectively funny. It's not that I want to laugh at them and hurt their feelings; I just want to laugh about them while they're busy silently praying that no one saw them fuck up. What's wrong about that?

But the point (in case you foolishly forgot it) is that it's nice out. I'm happy. My post-Christmas, "January is the shittiest month" ennui feels like a distant, snowy memory. Life is good. So don't misunderstand me, or think me a miser, when I tell you that the last hour of this day sucked balls. I happen to agree with the great Johann Bromide: there is too much negativity in this world.

But man did it suck balls. If you are familiar with me personally, or even with my other blog, "How I Roll," then you know that I am always late for everything. (I know that's not a particularly unique thing to say [or be], but I think I'm especially good at it, so I don't feel lame saying it [or being it]. And besides, did not Johann Bromide also live by the credo "Fuck it - Say it anyway"?) And since class is a thing, modus ponens would dictate that I am always late for it (but apparently not too late for the part where they teach you about modus ponens. I'll have to work on that.). Anyway, as you could imagine, this perpetual lateness has several drawbacks: it engenders hatred in professors, forcing me to lie and say that my last class is all the way across campus, when I don't even have an earlier class; it makes me feel self-conscious when everyone looks at me when the door creaks, causing me to instinctively make a stupid "Hey everyone, I'm a late asshole!" face; but most annoyingly, it usually leaves me with a booby-prize seat (i.e. toward the front, or in the middle of a row, or next to the TA [making it impossible for me to defeat myself repeatedly in Tic-Tac-Toe]). So imagine my surprise today when, as is my custom, I slunk into lecture ten minutes late, fully expecting some lame-ass seat that I'd have to do some Late Asshole Gymnastics (LAG) to get to, but instead seeing a badass spot near the aisle in the back row, freeing me to play Tic-Tac-Toe without the nagging suspicion that the people behind me are watching and deeming me mentally-challenged.

Upon sitting down, however, I was confronted with the worst kind of realization: a smelly one. Straight-up stink. I don't want to belabor the point too much, because there's just no way I can synesthetically convey to you, reader(s), what I was smelling. So I'll just say that someone either shat themselves in this room, or lit a recently-invented candle that produces a smell that is indistinguishable from that of rancid doodies. (And I don’t doubt that the technology exists to produce such a candle. More than once I have been cruelly duped by the convincing aroma of apple pie-scented candles. The next time one of you assholes teases me with the prospect of apple pie like this, I’m going to eat your candle a la mode. And if you think that sounds like something you want to see, please keep in mind that I will likely subsequently vomit all over everything you love.)

I was almost in disbelief that such an unabashed stench could be coming from someone or something in a 21st-century college classroom. In the absence of some baby-genius-Doogie-Howser-type who is capable of passing a 4000-level college class but still shits in diapers, this was unacceptable. And over the course of the hour, I became increasingly agitated. I was rocking back and forth and grabbing at myself like a drug addict, only my drug was air that is fresh and doesn't smell like baby diarrhea. I tried to locate the stench, but it was hard to get a directional read, because it felt like it was everywhere, like if God took a bath in shit. Everyone was a suspect.

Here's a rundown I created in class (with the lid of my computer tilted down so that no one could possibly see what a moron I am):

Possibilities:

Old woman sitting to my left

Dude in white t-shirt and baseball hat sitting directly in front of me

Slightly-overweight guy to my right with holes in jeans

Someone pooped under my chair earlier today

(I didn't check)

Classroom was built on an Indian poop-burial ground

My Imagination?

Indeed, the most confusing part of this was that I didn't see anyone else reacting to what I can only assure you was a contemptible and noteworthy smell. It's possible that I've slightly overstated its strength throughout this post, but it was definitely strong enough that the people near me must've smelled it, too (discounting the fact that one of them likely dealt it). I have noticed before that I have an above-average sense of smell, which as this case indicates is more of a burden than a useful gift. But still, it was there, goddammit. Plus, I suspect that the reason such a great seat was available was that someone smarter than me moved away from the stench. I think what's more relevant here is that I have a far, far below-average patience with things that bother me, and almost anyone else in the world is more capable of soldiering straight-faced through annoyances like these than I am. So while no one else seemed to react much, by the end of class I was a twitching mass of murderthoughts. Murdering someone would have been ironic, too, because as we all know from the great Ezekiel Sotheysay, you poop when you die.

For the record, I think it was the old lady on my left. She was the most likely candidate because she was on the aisle, meaning I was the only one sitting directly next to her - which could help to explain why no one else was hit as hard as I was. And though she looked well-groomed, we simply can't overstate the positive correlation that exists between incontinence and old age. Plus, Ralph Waldo Blanketstatement long ago noted that old people often just don't care.

(Aside: For some reason, almost all of the classes I've taken in my college career have contained at least one "What the fuck are they doing in an undergrad class?" old person. I don't really understand it, but I'm sure they have their reasons. I guess as a rule, I just don't get it when people try to better themselves. But I'm glad they're here, because they're the only ones who laugh at the professors' awful attempts at subtle humor. Without their chuckles, jokes about Nixon that end with "And we all know how that turned out!" would create a silence so deafening that a black hole would form and destroy the earth.)

So ends this scatological anecdote. Man it's nice out!

Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year Quick Hits!

2009-01-03T02:16:00.012-07:00

Thanksgiving

Hey guys, I’m back! So how was your Thanksgiving? Oh, mine was great. Get this: I ate a lot! Of turkey! Half of my family, though, is vegetarian, so they abstained from the most sacred part of the holiday. Which I thought was bullshit. You can’t take the Turkey out of Turkey Day any more than you can take Woden out of Wednesday – am I right? To whom do you sacrifice your Wednesday goats?

Woden is like Gandalf crossed with the Gorton's fisherman, with a dash of bloodlust.

Christmas

And do you know what you get if you take Christ out of Christmas? Right! You get sent to hell, to eat your own poop for all eternity! More literally, though, you get “Mas,” which is Spanish for “more”. Gotcha, consumerists! Or maybe it’s an acronym, short for “Muslims/Abortionists/Satanists”. Take that, Muslims, Abortionists, and Satanists! In your unsaved faces!

I can’t really keep up this obnoxious tone, so I’m just going to say that I hope you had a good Christmas or whatever. I’ve always loved Christmas season. Sure, Jesus’ birthday party has been co-opted by corporate fuckheads, but since I’m of the opinion that Jesus is exactly as much my savior as the Verizon nerd is, I really don’t give a shit about that. And consumerism is always annoying. I’d argue that it’s actually more tolerable during Christmas season. I just get tired of 10-plus months of body wash commercials telling me to “Lather. Rinse. Repeat as Sexessary.” Don’t get me wrong - it’s fundamentally good advice – I just don’t sexessarily think that a brief marketing shift in the direction of wholesome Holiday Cheer is such a bad thing. Christmas is the one time of year when most commercials aren’t designed to give men erections and women eating disorders (boners vs. bonier?), and I appreciate the new pandering angle.

Really, I think your opinion about Christmas-season-minus-Christ is bound to hinge on your opinion about your family. For me, the prospect of a few festive, work-free weeks with family is exciting. But if you’ve written poetry about how you’re like a rose that grew from a pile of shit festering in a sewer, sustained only by the flicker of sunlight that ever-so-briefly snuck through the grate every day at dawn, then you might not see the attraction. I respect that. I get that.

New Year

Finally, Happy New Year! Hope you had fun. My New Year’s Eve was pretty subdued this time. I even stumbled into doing some designated driving. Because sometimes people don’t choose to be heroes; heroism is simply thrust upon them by drunks in the dead of night. Which makes heroism not unlike being raped, if you think about it. At any rate, if I DD every New Year until I’m 30, I might finally atone for last year’s inexcusable display, which, if you don’t feel like reading that post, can be summarized thusly:

World: Welcome to 2008, Shawn!
Me: (throws up on world)
World: What the fuck, man?

So this year started much better than last, and I’m excited for it. The country is, in so many ways, in the shitter, but I think there’s a general sense of hope - an audacious hope, you might say. But it’s not just a passive dream that things will get better. It’s a willingness to face all obstacles head-on - to laugh in the face of despair - indeed, to fuck despair in the mouth. It might sound clichéd. It might be jejune. But it’s there, goddammit. And no one has tapped into – maybe even driven – the zeitgeist like Bob Harper:

He’s not asking you “Are you ready?”. Time waits for no man. No, friends, he’s TELLING you “Are you ready!”. Which makes no sense at all. But you know what? Neither does the stock market.

But I really am excited. Barring a meltdown of which I’m certainly capable, I should graduate from boring-ass college this year and enter the boring-ass workforce. Look out for me, world! And again, sorry for throwing up all over you last year. That was not cool.

A Perfect Day For Barrelfish

2008-11-23T10:52:00.017-07:00

I'm going to try to write things that don't tear other people down once my semester is over. But in the meantime, let's mourn the death of Fire Joe Morgan and make fun of Scott Haltzman, Ph.D., who wrote an article that made it all the way to the front page of Yahoo, to be clicked by the seeking, the curious, the bored, and the meanspirited alike. It's called Dating 101: Dealing With the Fear of Commitment, and it starts with a question from some anonymous reader:

Why do I feel that I'm more committed to this relationship than she is? Any thoughts on dealing with emotional distancing? She has some abuse issues from her past that has (sic) made her emotionally distant. Can you give me any strategies for this? We both want this marriage to work, but I know it takes two to be on the same page. I am afraid that I am more gung-ho and committed to this than she.

The semantic asshole in me is forced to point out that “It takes two to be on the same page” is not an expression. It also takes two to be on different pages, because “same” and “different” are comparative words. But whatever. This guy is distressed. Help him, Dr. Haltzman!

I fondly recall my days as a child, eagerly awaiting the weekly TV appearance of Lee Majors as, "The Six Million Dollar Man."

Oh man. Stop reading right now and try to figure out where the fuck this is going. How do you think he'll bring this full-circle to answer the guy's question? Your guess will be wrong and better.

If your memory goes back to these halcyon days, you'll recall that the bionic man was "better, faster, stronger." In my heart of hearts, I knew I'd never be as good, fast or strong as the fictional Steve Austin. But my mother assured me that I was smart. Take that, Majors -- even if you did get to marry Farrah Fawcett.

What is going on? This guy didn’t ask for a depressing story about Scott Haltzman's struggles with self-confidence. That was the entire anecdote, and he’s about to tell us the moral. Can you guess it now? No, you still can’t. Because the anecdote is stupid.

Commitment Factor #1: Inborn Traits
"The Six Million Dollar Man" wasn't real, but the theme of the show serves as a reminder that we are not all equally endowed with the same qualities. Commitment, like smarts, strength and speed, is a human quality that is not the same in all individuals.

Really, Dr. Haltzman? The point of that entire fucking set-up was that people are different? “People are different” is a fucking truism that no one will ever disagree with, and you made us read all that bullshit to establish it? I hate you so much right now.

Look at how much work he had to do to shoehorn The Six Million Dollar Man into this answer. First he had to remind us that Steve Austin was superhuman. Then he had to make up a fucking story about how this made him feel bad as a child. Then he had to pretend that his mother told him reassuringly that he was smart, which somehow goes to show you that people are different - even though everyone already fucking knows that, and it barely follows from his example, and one of the “people” in this case is not real. Oh, and The Six Million Dollar Man aired from 1974 through 1978. Scott Haltzman was born in 1960, meaning he was between the ages of 14 and 18 when the show was on. So if you want to go along with the supposed anecdote, please picture a 14-to-18-year-old future-Dr. Haltzman whining to his mother that he’ll never be able to compare with Steve Austin, a fictional bionic man on a shitty TV show. And picture his mother desperately trying to hold back her laughter as she cruelly tells her functionally-retarded son, the stupidest person she knows, that at least he’s smart. At any rate, if you’re going to make up an anecdote to make a point, it should flow into that point reasonably well. This shit is terrible. I think Haltzman was just lying around all day before he wrote this watching Six Million Dollar Man DVDs, and decided it was time for shart to imitate life.

Also, I’m admittedly pretty unfamiliar with The Six Million Dollar Man, but it's unlikely that “the theme of the show” is that people are different. Because - one more time - “people are different” is fucking obvious to everyone, everywhere, everywhen. The theme of the show, I’m guessing, is that Steve Austin can do cool shit. Someone correct me if I’m wrong. Maybe the show is nothing more than a five season exploration of the “people are not the same” leitmotif.

I’m very bored by this, so we’ll move fast now. And by “we” I mean “I”. I am so sure that no one would read this far down that it feels disingenuous to use the collective first-person.

Being able to commit yourself to one person is an outgrowth of many personality traits and lifelong experiences. For instance, some individuals are born with high risk taking traits, and some with more reticence. Some individuals are more outgoing by human nature and some are shy. The more withdrawn personalities often have difficulties establishing close bonds with people, while those with the ability to be open and optimistic toward new experiences find it easier to trust others.

Dr. Haltzman here proffers the outlandish notion that people who are withdrawn “have difficulties establishing close bonds with people.” In other words, they are withdrawn. And those who are “open and optimistic toward new experiences” (i.e. “trusting”) find it easier to trust people. I happen to agree with him here. Moving on.

Commitment Factor #2: Life Experiences

Besides inborn personality traits, early life experiences also affect a person's level of commitment. People who grow up in stable households, and who have a secure neighborhood and stable friends, are more able to see commitment to one person as a tangible life choice. Adults who are exposed to early childhood trauma, such as abuse, may have problems feeling safe with others throughout their lives. As a child, of course, we don't have much of a choice about the world that surrounds us, but what happens to us in childhood does have an impact on the capacity to trust and be trusted.

Boring and obvious. Let's get some excitement up in here:

This scene cost 34 million dollars to shoot. Notice its undeniable focus upon how different Steve Austin is from a (robotic?) Sasquatch.

The ability to commit is also based on life events in adulthood. People who have promised their heart to one person, and later find that person has been unfaithful or abusive, will often have a harder time forming a solid bond to their next partner. Also, people tend to shy from committing to partners with a bad track record themselves; if you've been married six times before, or have been involved in past or current substance abuse, spousal abuse or infidelity, than (sic) it's reasonable for your mate to hold back on the expectation of a lifetime of mutual love.

Commitment Factor #3: A Series of Processes

Commitment, though, is not a dyed-in-the-wool trait; people's ability to commit depends on many factors besides inborn traits and early life experiences. Commitment is a process. Every suitor knows or can imagine the panic of having a person at the end of a first luncheon date say, "I want to spend the rest of my life with you!"

I find it funny that Haltzman, in crafting a supposedly universal example, refers to a "luncheon date". I didn't think that people went on "luncheon dates" very often. Then again, when I read this sentence I immediately thought of the Boulder Broker Inn, a common local luncheon host, then I imagined a scenario in which my friends ask me how my luncheon date went, to which I respond "Let's just say I Broker Inn" and proceed to high-five everyone within a quarter-mile radius. So it's possible that I'm the weird one here, and it's also possible that I'll soon be going on a luncheon date.

It wouldn't be right to feel a lifetime commitment to one person after just one date. If two individuals are involved in an emotional relationship, where each has consistently demonstrated trust and the ability to be trusted over time, then it's natural for commitment to grow. It may take longer for people who are less naturally inclined toward commitment or who have had bad experiences before. It's simply not realistic to expect attachment to grow at the same rate for each partner. That may be why you're feeling more committed to the relationship than your partner -- you and your mate simply haven't arrived at the same place at the same time.

So far we've learned that people commit differently because: they are born different, they have different formative experiences, and they have different reactions to different relationships. Thanks, Dr. Haltzman!

Also, I like how it took him this long to actually address the guy who asked the question. The guy had a question that was probably impossible to answer without knowing more details, but Haltzman doesn’t even acknowledge him before launching into a bizarre TV show anecdote. Then he writes an article that is obvious to the point of uselessness, and suddenly guesses that this guy and his wife “simply haven’t arrived at the same place at the same time” – whatever the fuck that means.

(I'm going to pause here and urge you all to check out another of Haltzman's articles, "On Counting Chickens Before They Hatch". It's great. It starts with a story about how much Haltzman liked Cheers as a 20-30 year old child, then proceeds to point out that when counting unhatched chickens, one must consider that: 1) they might not hatch, 2) they might get stolen before they hatch, and 3) they might hatch but turn out to be alligators!. Changed my life.)

But wait! Just when all hope seems lost for any semblance of any semblance of any semblance of a real answer, we (yes, we) get this:

Commitment Questions

You can take the initiative in trying to understand why your mate is lagging behind in commitment by asking some open-ended questions. Find a quiet time to sit and try to understand the factors that contribute to your mate's commitment-shyness. Here are five dating questions to ask:

1. What kind of child were you? Was it easy to form attachments to other people?

2. What are your early experiences with developing trust? As a child, was your trust ever betrayed?

3. Was there a time when you felt committed to a person, and you were hurt because you put your heart on the line?

4. Are there things that I am doing in the relationship that make it hard to put your trust in me?

5. Do you envision a time when you are able to trust me more, and make the kind of commitment that will allow me to trust that we will be together for a lifetime?

As you listen to your mate discuss these issues, try not to judge and don't try to cajole (missing pronoun because Haltzman didn't want to write "him/her" in a sentence that's about to use "his/her") into firming up his or her commitment. The best way to help trust grow over time is to be a concerned listener and a dependable friend. Then, your mate's commitment will grow better, faster and stronger.

Why didn't Haltzman just write this, and only this? This seems like relatively reasonable advice. I mean, I think a hypothetical partner might be weirded out by such a string of semi-accusational questions, but it's something. There's merit in there somewhere. So what the fuck is with the rest of the article? I am confused. And sure, the ridiculous anecdote does make possible the oh-so-clever "better, faster, stronger" ending, but believe me, friend: it's a Pyrrhic victory.

Why Not

2008-10-04T00:14:00.006-06:00

When I was 10 years old, I somehow became convinced that I needed a pet. I was ready. My age had finally reached double-digits, putting me on equal footing with my parents in that regard. Naturally, then, it was my turn to be responsible for the life of another creature. After extensive research, I settled on a chinchilla. Why a chinchilla? This is why:

Now you understand. Chinchillas are fucking awesome, and I wanted one. But my parents, likely sensing that my demands were movable provided their counteroffer had fur, were able to bargain me down to a hamster - a species so stupid it forgot to finish growing a tail. Obviously I didn't force the chinchilla issue enough. I was like an amateurish bank-robber who threatens to kill all the hostages if he doesn't get a chopper, and my parents were like veteran negotiators who in twenty minutes bargain the guy down to a roast beef sandwich and the guarantee that his prison cell toilet will have a seat on it.

So I got a Twinkie-colored hamster and creatively named it Twinks. Years later I took a class called "Social Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity" and learned that "twink" is a slang term for a young gay man. Urban Dictionary informs me that "(t)he stereotypical twink is 18-22, slender with little or no body hair, often blonde, dresses in club wear even at 10:00 AM, and is not particularly intelligent." Twinks the hamster was also young and blonde, but was female, hairy in the manner of a hamster, and not fond of club wear any time before 5 PM. I can't really speak to her intelligence relative to other hamsters, but she was smart enough to escape one time for like 5 days. Assuming that she was halfway to Honduras or halfway through our cat's digestive system, I was crestfallen, and my parents after a few days caved and got me a new hamster. This one was a poop-colored male that I, being very smart, decided to call Whiskers. Whiskers was notable for having the biggest balls-to-torso size ratio I have ever seen in nature to this day. You might say that this is just a case of childhood imagination-run-wild a la The Beast in The Sandlot, but I don't think so. I swear, man. It was like if you put monster truck tires on a motorcycle.

But at any rate, Whiskers' reign as the only hamster in town was short-lived, as I found Twinks a few days later wandering around in the basement. I excitedly picked her up, and she in turn excitedly bit right through my thumbnail. Not to be outdone, I responded by throwing her across the room and running away crying. But we were both fine. My parents were less-than-thrilled, though, as the amount of hamster cages, hamster food, and hamster litter to be changed out had just doubled.

Things settled down in the aftermath. After a week or two of hamster overload, I fell back into my regular routine of forgetting that I had any pets and relying on my parents to keep them alive. But on one particularly boring night, my brother and I decided to see what would happen if we put Twinks and Whiskers together. The answer, in hindsight, was predictable: if you put hamsters together, they have passionate hamster sex. That's it. Whiskers didn't have to ask Twinks if she saved some turkey for him, and he didn't have to roll up in a luxury hybrid hamster ball. They went from meeting to penetration faster than a mosquito on your arm. We separated them after like 30 seconds of laughing like nerds, but for Whiskers that was more than enough time to piss my parents off again a month later when a bunch of horrifically ugly, hairless hamster babies turned up in the corner of Twinks' cage. I was pumped. Conservative groups lauded Twinks' decision to choose life. Whiskers claimed he was not the father. But Twinks was like "Look at those babies! They look just like you! They look just like you!" and everyone in the crowd agreed.

So anyway, that's the riveting story of how 13 years ago some kids in my neighborhood got some free hamsters. I don't know how to sum this up except to say that this would never have happened if I'd gotten a chinchilla. First of all, Chinchillas don't escape. And second, Chinchillas don't have sex. Look at that picture again. No way they have genitals. Chinchillas just pop into existence whenever a unicorn sneezes.

Again?

2008-10-02T00:26:00.016-06:00

So a while back, I wrote this post about a shit-for-brains article which was somehow not only written by a (presumably) professional writer; and not only approved by a (presumably) professional editor and posted on forbes.com - a (presumably) professional website; but was then featured on Yahoo's obviously-prestigious front page, to be viewed by (presumably) thousands upon thousands of readers, singlehandedly destroying forever their preconceptions about the intelligence required to work for any of these websites. I may have dropped out of high school when I was 14, but even I feel smart enough to deem that article (and its rise to relative-prominence) "very stupid".

In writing that post, I stole the format used by one of my favorite websites, Fire Joe Morgan. And I stole it again in my last post. And I'm going to steal it again in this one. There's a simple explanation for this recent trend: Fire Joe Morgan has been largely-dormant lately, so my options for getting my FJM fix are several: I could get hired by a prominent publication as a sports journalist and write an article so godawful that Ken Tremendous would be forced to emerge from the woodwork and mock me; or I could attempt to be self-sufficient in these lean times by producing my own desperate imitations, not unlike a starving McDonalds chicken that eats its own eggs or an X-Files fan who continues to churn out spec scripts and fanfics that are somewhat realistic except that they all feature explicit three-way sex scenes between Mulder, Scully, and a hermaphroditic alien while the smoking dude or whatever his name is lurks and films in the corner. Obviously I've chosen the latter option.

Besides, when an article pops up so similar in content to the Forbes one that I wonder if the writer just stole it, I feel like I have to comment on it just for the sake of continuity. My public demands it. And I wouldn't want to let Nate down.

This one is called "Best Cars for Attracting Men and Women", which is an awesome title because it makes me think that it's aimed at some third party that is neither man nor woman. It is aimed at the hermaphroditic aliens, who between banging and being banged by FBI agents are always perusing Yahoo looking for relationship advice.

Face it, as terrific as your personality might be, society can be really superficial -- especially when it comes to the dating scene.

I didn't want to boast on here or anything, but Teen Vogue recently asked me to write a weekly advice column. It seems a strange partnership at first, but who knows more about teenage girls, they thought, than 23-year-old men? And I've got this great idea for an article, but I was pretty sure that everyone was going to call me an asshole for it. I was honestly about to give up, then Mr. Muaddi here reminded me of the Golden Rule of Morally-Questionable Article-Writing: Start by reminding the audience of the crucial player vs. game distinction. Muaddi and I aren't saying it's right; we're just saying that's how it is, and here's how you deal with it, son. Like, Matthew Lesko didn't write the tax code; he just knows how to use it to make the government pay for you to take scuba lessons. Now "The Best-Tasting Foods to Throw Up" can run unfettered by my conscience. Because face it, as healthy as your body might be, men can be really superficial -- especially when it comes to how many ribs they can see: the more the better!

While every nitwit knows the basics: brush your teeth, comb your hair, iron your shirt, yada yada yada, few consider the influence your ride can have on attracting the perfect mate.

He's exactly right: not many people consider this. I mean, sometimes indie movies and stuff will shed some light on it. Like I was watching this little coming-of-age movie the other day about how this kid deals with the terrifying power that comes with incipient adulthood, and its attendant responsibilities. It was interesting stuff. And this kid has this weird mutation or something that basically makes him a bug freak who shoots this sticky discharge out of his wrists. I think it was based on Kafka. I really felt for the guy. Anyway, there's like this whole scene at the beginning where he thinks that if he gets a nice car the girl of his dreams will notice him. He decides to enter a wrestling match to win the money, then his uncle dies or something. I don't remember much more - I was super stoned the whole time I was watching it.

And there's the other indie movie where this other kid thinks a cool car will help him get his dream girl. And he gets the car, but it turns out to be a robot or some shit. Fuck, nevermind, that was just this fucked up dream I had after this long day of tripping balls, and right after I fell out of this tree and landed right on my head, man. It was fucking crazy. It was epic. You should have come to Ricky's party, dude.

Oh, and there's this little documentary where this Kazakh dude is asking some car salesman if a car includes a pussy magnet. I was surprised, but the car salesman knows exactly what he's talking about.

And I remember this one commercial for Enterprise Rent-A-Car where this Moose guy has to go to his high school reunion, so he decides to rent a cool car. It went OK:

Oh, and there's the Forbes article from before. But the point still stands: not many people have heard that your car can get you laid. I obviously have an extensive background in the indie movie/indie TV commercial/ indie magazine article scenes, and even I could only think of these obscure examples - and it took me a few minutes, too.

It's like a personal ad on wheels, offering insight on everything from your personality to level of income. If you're into giving the right impression, check out these cars to help you attract the perfect mate.

OK. Seriously, man. This intro sucks. And it's not just that it uses "attract the perfect mate" twice in three sentences. It happens: I turned in a paper the other day and later noticed that I had used "to the extent" like 8 times in the span of 3 pages. It was embarrassing. Of course, I don't actually get paid to write papers. In fact, I pay my school to make me write papers. Regardless, I'd rather write a paper that starts with "Columbus was a famous explorer" than write this intro. No one considers how cars turn heads? Everyone living has considered this. You cannot find me a retarded rickshaw runner who isn't aware of this idea. It's been considered ad nauseam since the first fucking car rolled off the line and went "OwOOOga" when pretty girls walked by. Sometimes I think Henry Ford's racist, horny ass didn't care about getting people around town. He just wanted to help get them anti-miscegenationally laid.

I could go on wondering why my "perfect mate" would be so shallow, or noting how anyone with any common sense will know which cars within a particular class tend to be more impressive (positive correlation with price, I'm guessing), but this post is already way too long and my left eye is twitching, so I'm just moving on.

The Adventurous Type

Whether you're into hiking, fishing, camping or whitewater rafting -- nothing says "adventure" like a giant off-road vehicle. And since danger and mosquitoes are an acquired taste, it's probably safe to assume that adventure seekers prefer to stick together.

I'm going to go ahead and suggest something crazy: maybe if you're into hiking, fishing, camping, or whitewater rafting, your best bet for meeting someone who shares those interests is to meet someone while you're actually doing one of these things. Or you could just buy a big fucking truck and hope they knock on your window or that you injure them in a crash then pull them out of their burning car and they subsequently fall in love with you. Or you'll think they love you, because you told them to blink twice if they love you and they totally did. Whatever.

Girl Magnet: Hummer H2

Eye-catching, street-swallowing and slightly frightening, the H2's exterior design is adapted from military Humvees...and we all know how much ladies like a man in uniform.

Oh, I didn't know H2s come with uniforms.

The H2 definitely gives the impression that you're large, in charge, and have a few extra dollars to spend on luxury. Just learn to ignore those "oh he's just compensating" comments.

Anyone who would buy a Hummer in the current milieu has only one perfect mate: a meteor strike. This is the only car on this list that should have any bearing on your dating life. Because the Hummer is dumbest fucking car on earth, and people who drive them should die alone.

Guy Magnet: Toyota FJ Cruiser

While most off-roaders have a knack for making women look butch, the FJ Cruiser exudes a ton of spunk with its cartoonish color schemes and retro design. But don't let its cute exterior fool you, there's no terrain the FJ can't conquer. It screams "tomboy" for sure.

It's true: off-roaders make women look butch. If car manufacturers would just stop making the windows out of funhouse mirror material, this problem would be solved. It seems so simple. Also, "exudes a ton of spunk" makes me laugh, because I am immature.

The Settling-Down Type

Want to give off that mature, financially-responsible, and ready-to-settle-down vibe? Drive a hybrid. You'll save money, look modern, and score points for going green all at the same time.

Fuck.

Girl Magnet: Lexus RX 400h

In addition to its sexy Lexus nameplate, the RX 400h holds the honor of being the only luxury hybrid SUV on the market. Needless to say, 400h drivers ooze success. Best of all, this Lexus doesn't sacrifice its bold, manly design for that alien pod look that so many hybrid manufacturers are starting to embrace.

I don't know what it is that creeps me out about this, but if you have an RX 400h, you should lock your garage up tight, lest Mr. Muaddi should break in and get bold, manly success-ooze all over your expensive chick magnet.

Guy Magnet: Toyota Prius

Definitely an eye-catcher, the Prius possesses a futuristic bug-like design that only a woman can pull off. Add to that its roomy interior and industry-leading gas mileage, and it's an aspiring soccer mom's dream come true. Seriously, you couldn't attract a more mature man if you took out an ad in the New York Times stating, "I'm finally ready for a real relationship!"

So after manjaculating all over the RX 400h, and its ability to escape looking like an alien pod, he not-so-enthusiastically says the Prius has a futuristic, bug-like design that only a woman can pull off. I suppose these could be separate, unrelated descriptions, but I'm more inclined to think that Muaddi has regular nightmares about bug-like aliens and secretly fears the day that the giant alien praying mantis soccer moms descend in their futuristic Prius-style spacepods and destroy his rugged, virile RX 400h right before he can inseminate its exhaust pipe. He really can't hide his disdain for the Prius. Here's how I translate this:

- "Definitely an eye-catcher" = "very ugly"

- "...only a woman can pull off" = the most backhanded compliment since Archie Bunker told Edith her perfume smelled nice while simultaneously slapping her in the face with the back of his hand.

- "an aspiring soccer mom's dream-come-true" = "Fuck the Prius"

- "...couldn't attract a more mature man if you took out an ad in The New York Times stating, 'I'm finally ready for a relationship!'" = "Bitches be desperate!"

The Naughty Type

So you're not in the market for a soul mate. No problem. Drive something fast and sexy and you're bound to attract someone just as wild. For these speed daters, only a sports car will do.

Girl Magnet: Chevrolet Corvette

With its sexy curves and phallic profile, it's no wonder why many regard the 'Vette' as lust on wheels. Besides, where else can you get Ferrari-like performance for only a fraction of the price? Spring for the more expensive Z06 trim and you'll pin her to the seat in a little less than four seconds.

I was going to say "and be done raping her in twenty", but I decided not to because it's too easy. Then I just snuck it in anyway. But obviously Muaddi knew exactly what he was doing when he said this. Come on. Read this article to a bunch of castratos who were raised by castratos who were raised by a pack of castrato wolves, and they will understand that this is just a straight-up sex reference. Shame on you, Muaddi. I thought US News and World Report was a family magazine. And to think I almost let you guys tell me which college to go to.

Guy Magnet: BMW Z4

Ladies wanting to stand out will find that few cars turn heads, drop jaws, and drip drool faster than the Z4. This racy pocket rocket has sensual curves and performance dynamics that make it handle like a pro. For extra sass, go topless with the Z4 roadster.

How many times do you think Muaddi masturbated while writing this article? And how many car magazines did he ruin in the process?

The Classy Type

For those with a refined palate for wine, cigars, and other fancy things, it only makes sense that a high-class partner would be just as desirable. But to attract class, one must exhibit class. These high-priced vehicles will surely do the trick.

"(W)ine, cigars, and other fancy things"? I've eaten three packages of S'mores Pop Tarts today, and even I could have come up with less-stupid indicators of class. And "to attract class, one must exhibit class"? I think if politicians and other sophisticates throughout the ages have taught us anything, it's that you don't necessarily have to exhibit class to get with them. Maybe to be in a sham marriage with them, you do. But I believe the promise of America lies in the notion that anyone, irrespective of social standing, if they just play their cards right, is capable of moving beyond their humble means and being banged biweekly on some high thread count sheets by someone important.

I'm An Asshole

2008-09-12T02:10:00.014-06:00

Q: What do my laptop and your mother have in common?
A1: I call them both "my laptop".
A2: They both died last week.

If you combine these two answers, I think you have a pretty decent necrophilia joke. But really, all I want you to take away from it is that I'm having computer issues. If you also conclude that your mother is/was a whore, that's just icing on the cake.

But yeah, my laptop completely ate it last week. It actually crashed just as I was finishing up an assignment, which caused me to go ballistic and verbally assault every major religious figure I could think of for their collective unwillingness to delay the destruction of my computer 15 more minutes, at which point I would have been done with my paper and busy reading episode summaries of the seminal early-90s TV show "Dinosaurs" on Wikipedia. I've gotten over my rage now, having simply tossed it on the giant heap of "Problems That Only Very Lucky People Would Consider Problems Worth Bitching About", joining my long commute to school, the fact that the volume knob on my car stereo doesn't really work, the mysterious disappearance of the battery cover for my TV remote, and my cell phone's strange tendency to delete all my text messages for no apparent reason. But I'm still allowed to bitch about these things on here, because blogs are nothing if not repositories for stupid personal minutiae no one else really cares about.

Anyway, I completely formatted my hard drive, which seems to have helped a little bit. Now the laptop only freezes up every half-hour or so, as opposed to the previous instantaneous blue screen of death (BSOD, in nerd circles. Fun fact: The formula for the area of a nerd circle is to just ask any part of it.). It's not ideal, but let's face it: neither am I. So my blog is back in commission. And I never even thought about writing on a different computer. As a fan of the Baltimore Orioles and Miami Dolphins, and as a veteran Dervish, I have a long track record of being reason-defyingly loyal to things that suck (another example: your mom. I can't stop. Help me.).

If you need more proof of my baffling loyalty, I present Yahoo.com, my homepage since I was 14, and proud displayer of more inane front-page stories than my old middle school newspaper. Not a day goes by when I don't see a link on Yahoo's front page trying to bait me into clicking some story about a goldfish dialing 911, or a viral video of a cat moonwalking, or "10 signs he might be cheating". The relationship advice is definitely the worst. Sometimes I see a headline so cro-magnon-stupid that I think Yahoo is just daring me to click it out of sheer curiosity. And it works: When I see an article called "14 Fatal Online Dating Errors That Single Women Make", how can I not click it just to see just to see if "Dating someone who will probably kill you" is on there? Because that should be #1 on any "fatal dating errors" list worth its salt. And any article by David Wygant is good for a laugh. I don't want to say the guy is a complete chode, but he is at least 97 percent chode, and the rest is just blue #2 and calcium propionate (to preserve freshness). My favorite that I've seen so far is called "10 Tips For Approaching Single Women". It's just run-of-the-mill stupid until you get to #9:

Man, that is some douchey advice. I like how he clarifies that you should smile afterward to let her know you are joking. It's all about tone, people. A little smile afterward is the difference between being a lunatic stranger demanding turkey, and being a stupid douchebag asshole chodesmith demanding a phone number and soon-as-possible sexual intercourse. You naturally want to be the latter gent.

But by far the best part about this --and possibly the best part of existence itself-- is the orange box. I'm sure we've all seen quotes pulled from articles like this. It's a common practice that can effectively highlight and reiterate a particularly crucial point. And for this article, some editor went through and decided that the crux of Wygant's article, the thing that warrants highlighting and repeating, is "I hope you saved some turkey for me". I probably would have gone with the sentence before it: "Approaching her with a light and playful tone is one of the best ways to start". But I'm not the professional here, so I guess I'd have been wrong. Because apparently "I hope you saved some turkey for me" is not just a lame-ass example used here by Wygant - it is brilliant and universal. "I hope you saved some turkey for me" is the be-all, end-all magic bullet that will forever change the dynamics of courtship. It doesn't matter what manner of dead animal she has in front of her, if she has one at all. "I hope you saved some turkey for me" is too killer a line to be limited to such a specific scenario. The Yankees didn't just bring Babe Ruth in when there were runners in scoring position in the 9th inning of a close game. He worked that shit out all game long, and so should you never hesitate to pseudo-seriously demand turkey from the pretty woman browsing through movies at Blockbuster. God bless you, David Wygant. By God you've done it. You have gotten everyone laid. On the day you die, sir, I'll be there with a chisel, ready to carve out "I hope you saved some turkey for me" on your tombstone, above your impossibly-smarmy picture:

__________________________________________________________________

P.S. - Wouldn't you know it, while I was writing this post, yet another great story popped up on Yahoo's front page. This one is called "Miami residents are most attractive in U.S.: poll". Most of the article is pretty boring, except for this part (bold is the article, plain text is me):

"I'm not surprised at all, but I'm not in that group" joked Bill Talbert, president of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, about the city's attractive people rating.

Ha. Classic Talbert: nothing if not self-deprecating.

"When you're here, you kind of take it for granted. Then you travel, and when you come back you say, 'Oh my, look what we have here,"' he added.

He should not have added this. Not adding this would have qualified as "quitting while you're ahead". "Oh my, look what we have here" is just a creepy, weird thing to say when you spy an attractive person. I just had to put a face to this statement. And here it is:

I can just picture this guy seeing a pretty girl walking her dog and being like "Oh my. Look what we have here" creepily under his breath, and then I can picture seeing it from his point-of-view and realizing that he's looking at the dog. I'm not trying to be an asshole here. I'm just saying that I wouldn't be too surprised if he someday gets arrested for having sex with something that it's illegal for a person to have sex with. That's all.

First Three Rules Of Apartment-Searching: Location, Location, Reliable Plumbing

2008-08-22T09:10:00.032-06:00

There are many reasons that it's important to me to live in Boulder proper this year. I could easily cite the skyrocketing gas prices, or the importance of making the most of my last year in college, or the simple convenience of living close to campus. But really, all of those points are minor compared to what else is at stake here: no less than my ability to empathize with my fellow man, which is slowly-but-sure-as-shit eroding every single time I make the commute.

There is this one particular stretch of highway on my drive home that is just a meatgrinder for my sense of human fellowship. Basically, it's the point where one highway merges into another. So the left lane of the first highway merges into the new highway, and the right lane ends. Knowing this, most drivers kindly position themselves in the left lane as they approach the merge, leaving the right lane mostly open. This is obviously the perfect situation to see some grade-A dickbaggery. Like, if you were setting a trap for a vampire, you'd definitely get a nubile, nightgown-wearing virgin, and you'd put her in an old Victorian house, in a bed that's way too big for her, with lots of pillows, and with one of those curtains around it. Maybe you'd make sure the moon is full, because you don't really know anything about vampires but they probably dig that shit. And just as surely, if you were interested in seeing a straight-up parade of asshole cars, you would crowd up the left lane that they've been comfortably speeding in, and leave the right lane open, and put up a sign saying it's going to end in 1000 feet, then just sit back and watch the goddamn show. Because inevitably they'll get tired of crawling along in the left lane, and out of some dickheaded sense of entitlement they'll jump into the right lane and zoom by everyone in front of them, eventually picking out the pussiest person in the pack and cutting them off just as the lane ends. It is infuriating. I would sooner die than let my car be the one that one of these person-shaped shitstains cuts in front of. I have literally come inches from crashing just to keep this from happening. And in the event that such a wreck ever occurs, I make no promises about my subsequent behavior.

It's not like I see this every once in a while. Every single time I drive there, it happens. So when I went to that stretch of highway on Google Maps, I was not surprised to see that it happened to the gMaps Beetle, too. Now, I'm willing to grant that the gMaps Beetle is probably slow and it might be tempting to pass it. But the picture still speaks to me.

I know that everyone sees this type of thing every day, and we all have a few "It was so awesome! This guy was weaving through traffic, and I was all 'I hope he gets pulled over', then later on I saw him PULLED OVER ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD! I was so happy!" stories. And while I do enjoy such mild schadenfreude, my thoughts in these instances tend to transcend a simple hope for a slap on the wrist and dive straight into crazyland. I sit there and actually, really, not-just-saying-this wish for these people to have awful, awful things happen in their lives. I don't just want them to get pulled over up ahead; I want some Biblical, contrapasso-style shit to happen to them. Like maybe all the time they shave off their commutes by being inconsiderate shitheads allows them to get home just in time to find their spouses in bed with their best friends, or, if they're really egregious offenders, just as the robbers are leaving, and they get stabbed for their bad timing. That would be poetic. Or they could just get colon cancer - I'm not that picky. But harboring these thoughts can't be healthy.

Obviously I need to stop commuting so much, so I went into this apartment showing on Tuesday with an open mind. The location was close to campus, which would limit my driving and allow me to rehabilitate my tattered soul, so I was willing to overlook many potential flaws.

I showed up at the apartment and met the guy who was doing the showing, a kind-of-awkward, bohemian-looking guy about my age named Garrett. I would have been surprised that a shy hipster would be walking me through the apartment, if not for the fact that he had called a little earlier to confirm the appointment, and the conversation started like this:

Me: Hello?

Garrett: ... Um, hello...

Me: Hi. What's going on?

Garrett: Um... Not much. This is Garrett (blah blah blah)

I think the phone call was Garrett's way of giving me fair warning that this was going to be an awkward showing, and I appreciated the heads-up.

My apartment-searching experience is pretty limited, but I'm guessing that any time you're looking through an apartment that someone else is currently living in, it's bound to be a little weird, and this was no exception. The guy who answered the door cut a depressing figure: mid-40s, wearing a wifebeater, with hunched shoulders and a mopey, hangdog face. It might have been presumptuous to deem his life depressing this quickly, but when you are over the age of 40 and you let strangers see you in a food-stained wifebeater, you're kind of asking for it. I know I'm not an important guy, but come on - throw on a bowling shirt or a KISS '95 Reunion Tour T-shirt or something. Anyway, I'm going to call him Gus because I was too busy judging him by his cover to remember his name.

And the tour of the apartment vindicated my snap judgment (It was a studio, so by "the tour" I mean "my first three steps inside"). My task, then, was to try to separate the merits of the apartment from the depressing way that Gus was inhabiting it. This was easier said than done, because this guy was really a bummer. For instance, there was this mildewy smell, and I couldn't decide whether it was the apartment or if profound sadness just smells like mildew (read on for the answer). And he had a gift for answering my apartment-related questions with anecdotes that made me even sadder for him. In response to a question about how much electric ends up costing, I learned the following things:

- Electric can be 25-40 dollars a month, depending on the time of year. (Useful)

- He tries to be frugal, and he doesn't run heat during the winter. He just wears hoodies. He also likes to turn the lights off whenever he can because sunlight does the same thing for free. (Semi-useful, or at least relevant, albeit long-winded and obvious)

- Expenses add up, man, and this place is out of his price range these days. (Less-useful, very rueful)

- That's why he's moving out, and he wants to stay in Boulder but he doesn't know where he's going to live. Everything is expensive. He's hoping he can stay with a few people, but he's not sure. (Irrelevant, very sad)

Even in my empathy-damaged state, I really felt for the guy. As he was talking I got this really vivid picture in my head of him sitting on his floor (there was absolutely no furniture) in his underwear watching Olympic speed-walking on his 13-inch TV (also on the floor), eating Spaghetti-Os out of the can. I am 56 percent sure it was a psychic vision, and it was chilling. But his penchant for volunteering depressing information - stuff that other people would keep buried deep down in the recesses of their souls - actually soon came in handy. When Garrett pointed out the bed that was folded up into the wall, Gus told us he never used it, because it was uncomfortable and rickety. I asked him where he slept, then. He said "Just..." and then pointed to a specific part of the floor, and I wept inside for him. Then he told us that he used to have an air mattress, but it was ruined by the flooding. He not only said this like I already knew about the flooding, but also as if apartment flooding is just a fact of life - like the apartment was next to a South American river during monsoon season - of course it's going to flood sometimes. When I pressed him further, he told me that the apartment had been sporadically flooding with toilet water from the unit above him. This was game over for me. I was mentally checked out the second he said "toilet", but the guy had a good head of steam now and just kept complaining. We got to hear all about how the property owner declined to buy him a new mattress, and how next time they wanted to set up a showing they should call him a little later in the day because he's on sleeping pills and he can't get back to sleep if they call too early, and something about his caller ID not working. I'd imagine that Garrett wanted to strangle him; I just wanted to give the poor bastard a hug and get the fuck out of there.

While I waited for Gus to take a breath, I thought better of the hug and inched toward the door, fully prepared to leave Garrett to fend for himself. He tried to rent me a lemon apartment; I had no sympathy for him. But Garrett was having none of it, and he rode my coattails out the door. When we got outside I told him No Thanks, and as I walked past the staircase that led to the unit above, I smelled cigarettes and heard a girl talking way too loudly on her phone. And I couldn't help but smile, content in the knowledge that I would never, ever have to clean up that girl's poopy floodwater. And for just one day, the goddamn drive back didn't bother me at all.

Completely Self-Absorbed, Kind-Of-Serious Post. You Probably Shouldn't Read This.

2008-08-14T03:55:00.008-06:00

Do you know what my dad does when he gets bored? He reads the encyclopedia. Just grabs a letter from the bookshelf, pours himself an Arnold Palmer, sits down, crosses his legs, and sets about expanding his intellectual horizons. I, on the other hand, am a sporadic reader. My bookshelf is full of partially-read books, any one of which I will nevertheless claim to have read and loved if it comes up in a conversation. And if I get stuck comparing favorite parts, I'll just list a few things from the 20 pages I actually read, then I'll enthusiastically agree with anything the other person throws out there. I've never been caught doing this, but I cringe just thinking about the day that someone gets wise to my game and starts talking about the riveting chariot race in Catcher in the Rye. I have nightmares about this stuff.

Anyway, I tell you this for several reasons: to inform you that my father is better than I am or can ever hope to be; to alert you that I am sometimes a liar; but most importantly to establish that I have absolutely no follow-through. I don't stick with anything - books, commitments, relationships, jobs - anything. I'm not a finisher. One might say that "not a finisher" is a pussy-ass way of saying "quitter". And I say fair enough, hypothetical bullshit detector person. Fair enough. Whatever you want to call it, it's something I need to work on.

I guess the first step is to pin down some underlying causes. Sometimes, like when I can't finish a book, it just comes down to laziness. But I've realized that most of my problem is that I have absolutely no regard for my future self. I am really a fucking asshole to that guy. According to the old bromide, a stitch in time saves nine. Roughly translated, this means that a little consideration now can keep you from getting knifed in the balls later (figuratively speaking). I regularly fail to do simple little things that would save me testicular trauma (speaking in figures here) down the line. And I don't care who you are: when your nuts have puncture wounds (in the figurative sense), you want to do what it takes to stop the bleeding.

Take college, for instance. Miraculously, I am very close to graduating (with a degree that will limit my options to grad school or learning to give a killer handjob), but it has not been easy. The work itself isn't hard; even though I tend to do things at the last possible moment, it's only rarely made me contemplate quitting, and even then only for a few miserable sleep-deprived minutes. No, the worst part of college for me is this time of year, before school has even started.

It takes like 20 minutes to register for classes online. It is very easy to do. And considering the profound impact that your schedule can have on your quality of life for 4 months, it stands to reason that any semi-competent college student would free up a little time to register as soon as the system opens up. My school's registration opened at the beginning of April, with the earliest slots going to the students with the most credits completed. As a Senior, the system was obviously working in my favor. It's clear where this story is going: until this week, I hadn't registered for any classes, because I am an idiot. It's not like I forgot to do it; registering for classes is like all anyone talks about in late March/early April. For weeks, conversations like this were a regular occurrence around campus:

Guy: Did you register for classes yet?
Girl: No! I can't till the 6th!
Guy: That sucks.
Girl: Yeah, but I've been using the planner thing, so I kind of know what I want to take. I definitely want to take Western Civ. with Donahue because I heard he's super-chill and his class is at 2 on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I'm trying to get all late classes so I can party the night before but if that's full then I'll take blah blah blah blah (10 minutes of rambling about potential schedules and contingencies).
Guy: (bored, regretting that he asked)

I would regularly hear people having these conversations when I was already eligible to register. Sometimes I would hear these conversations in class, with my computer in front of me - registration literally at my fingertips - and I would instead choose to play online Family Feud or to type my full name into Word and attempt to come up with anagrams for it ("Shawn Christopher Davis" = "Christ, a dawn shivers. Hop!") for the entire class period. I didn't even think about what I wanted to take. Little did I consider that I was (figuratively) shanking my future self right in the (figurative) junk. Because here I am five months later looking through a bunch of booby prize classes that are going to make my life miserable starting in about two weeks, wondering what the fuck is wrong with me that I lack even the smallest shred of foresight when that little sliver would have been enough to prevent me from being in such a dumb situation.

The same applies for my living situation. I really have no idea where I'm going to live this semester, and school starts in two weeks.

And I do this every goddamn year, so early August is generally a pretty stressful time for me as I struggle to get my shit together before school starts. So I really, really feel like quitting. I feel the magnetic pull of the vagrant life: I'd roam from town to town, just me and my rucksack, working for food and impregnating the women with the fewest teeth. It would be great. But I guess I've come too far to quit now. There's plenty of time for vagrancy. For now, I need to finish what I started - if not for me then for my parents, not to mention my many, many future children. It's not that I want to be there for my progeny - I just want them to live. And vaccinations to protect against raccoon scratches don't come cheap. A college degree can be my first-ever stitch in time, because with a little work now I can not only save my future kids' lives, but I can more importantly keep one of their toothless, obese mothers from castrating me for being such a lousy bum, thereby saving my balls (LITERALLY!!!).

China's Underage Gymnasts

2008-08-11T23:26:00.006-06:00

I recently started watching Planet Earth, having heard reviews ranging from "It's great" to "After you watch it you'll sprint outside frothing at the mouth and have rabid sex with the dirt". So far, my opinion probably falls somewhere between the two, so I guess you could say that I want to feel up nature. It's definitely an impressive undertaking, man. The creators spared no expense, using state-of-the-art technologies to show us rarely-seen creatures and locales that other state-of-the-art technologies are pushing toward extinction. And David Attenborough's narration could make a backalley stabbing instigated by a "Yo mama" joke seem dignified and poetic.

I always feel weird about watching nature documentaries, though, because it turns out that animals often kill each other, and I never know who to root for. And the documentarians don't make it any easier with this popular formula:

1. Introduce animals as they frolic/eat/chill.
2. Segue to that animal's predator by cuing dramatic music and saying something about how life isn't all just fun and games for the animal.
3. Show the inevitable clash between the animal and its predator.

In cases like these, the primacy effect dictates that I'm going to root for the prey. Plus, I don't particularly like seeing things die. But then it's like, what do I expect the predator to do? They've gotta eat, man. They've gotta feed their families and mistresses, just like the rest of us. And what they do is necessary, even if I don't like it, not unlike bar bouncers or Rush Limbaugh's lawyers. So what the fuck do I do? I'm an American, and I wasn't brought up to watch things without a rooting interest. And fucking David Attenborough never helps me out by playing favorites. If he would just tell me that macaques are homophobic, or that golden eagles beat their wives, I wouldn't have a headache at the end of each confrontation.

Sometimes, though, one animal is so much cooler than the other one that I can wholeheartedly root for an outcome. Who wouldn't want to see a badass endangered snow leopard make an acrobatic kill on seemingly impossible-to-navigate mountain terrain? Unless you are a markhor enthusiast, this one is easy.

But if the snow leopard fails, it doesn't die on the spot - unless something goes super-wrong, it lives to hunt another day. So while I rooted for it, there was no real sense of urgency. It's only when the animal being hunted is undeniably cooler than its predator that shit gets intense. Cue the otters.

Otters are fucking awesome. I've always thought so. When I saw otters come up on the screen, I smiled a stupid smile, because otters are like little furry hits of Ecstasy without the spinal fluid issues and potential for rape. Basically if you don't like otters, I hope you get eaten by a snow leopard. So imagine my distress when Attenborough introduced the crocodile*. My memory isn't the best, but here is a paraphrased version of events:

Me: (smiling about otters)
Attenborough: (Britishly, accompanied by suddenly ominous music) Check out this crocodile. It is big and scary.
Me: Oh no.
Attenborough: Crocodiles eat otters.
Me: No!
Attenborough: A single otter is no match for a crocodile.
Me: (hoarsely, crazily) NO! Goddamn it, no! Run, you fucking otters! Attenborough, do something! Why won't you do something!

In retrospect, I should have seen the foreshadowing when he said "a single otter". But then my mind wouldn't have been so otterly (fucking yeah, I did.) blown when the otters got together and GANGED UP ON A GODDAMN CROCODILE. A bunch of cute little otters teamed up and antagonized a murderous dinosaur thing until it got confused and ran away. Usually when you root for the prospective prey the best you can hope for is that they live. But these otters basically got together and pantsed the school bully. Just when I thought otters couldn't get any cooler, by Darwin's balls they did it. If the otters were fat kids and the crocodile were Ben Stiller, this would be the movie Heavyweights.

I'm not really going anywhere with this, except to say that nature is cool.

___________________________________________________________________

*Some might contend that crocodiles are also cool, but they don't do much for me - certainly not as much as otters. Dictionary.com has my back on this one, as the third definition of "crocodilian" is "hypocritical; insincere". Otters are nothing if not sincere. I think "otterian" should eventually come to mean: 1. sincere; 2. gregarious; 3. lovable 4. better than a crocodile.

UPDATE: Just after writing this post, I realized that the otter video is probably on YouTube. Sure enough, it is. This renders moot my (inaccurate) paraphrasing of Attenborough, but oh well. Here ya go:

Drunk Post

2008-08-03T03:21:00.011-06:00

Even in my drunken state, I know this is not an original idea. Right after I typed "blogger.ocm" into my address bar and got zero results, I typed "drunk post" into google and got 45,100. But this will definitely be in the top 12,000 drunk blog posts of all time, so please read on. I mean, sure, in terms of drunken pastimes, writing blog posts might be more annoying than most, but there are certainly worse things to do while intoxicated. Like lighting a Mexican M-80, throwing it too late and having it blow up inches from your hand, thereby breaking your right thumb and possibly requiring surgery. Which is what Nate did yesterday. The first thing I thought when I heard about this was obviously "I'm glad he's OK". But thought 1A was that Nate's Dervish season is definitely over in the midst of a scintillating race to avoid last place. What an asshole (him, not me). I even thought for a second that he did it on purpose in order to jump the sinking ship that is our softball season. And I know that I haven't written a Weekly Dervish Update in like a month and a half. So here it is: I'm tired of the Dervish updates. Everyone knows that "You just had to be there" is the last refuge of a bad storyteller who would rather blame his friends for their non-presence than blame himself for sucking at telling stories or for finding decidedly lame things interesting. But you just had to be there, guys. It's like my friend's dad used to say: "Telling people about it just makes it less special, Shawn. Plus if you tell anyone I'll kill your family." My family's still alive, so you know I took his advice. And it turns out he was right - writing about the games is bringing me down a little bit. So if you want to know about the Dervishes, you'll just have to come see us. There are only two games left, and the last game almost ended with a fight in the parking lot, so you're really missing out if you don't show up.

And no, I'm not stopping because we suck. I actually played on two softball teams this summer, and the other one won the league championship last week. I never wrote about it until now because I thought I only had eyes for the Dervishes. But I won't lie: it felt good to win. Though writing about it now makes me feel kind of dirty, like I'm a married woman who finally caves to her boss' sexual advances after years of resisting, because her husband is a quadriplegic and a woman has needs, goddammit.

Hey, when you guys get super-drunk, do you ever go to the bathroom and have conversations with yourself? Is that normal? I never drink alone, so it's usually only an issue when I go the bathroom. But when I'm in there and I see myself in the mirror, I can't help but have something to say to that guy. Sometimes it's "Hey, drunk guy," followed by a high-five. Sometimes it's "You eyeballin' my woman, puto?", followed by mean-mugging. And sometimes I simply sing the "Drunk Guy Peeing" song while I pee, with ad-libbed lyrics that always share a common thread of dumbness. Whatever it is, I've always got something to say to myself when I'm alone and drunk. Which is probably why I'm writing this right now. Man this is obnoxious. Back to The Office. Goodnight.

Non-Sequitur Title

2008-07-14T03:03:00.002-06:00

I've recently been in the market for a new sport to play. It's not that I'm tired of the sports I grew up playing; it's just that in this new age of jobs, girlfriends, and increasingly rampant pansyism, getting a game of football, baseball, or even basketball going is a logistical nightmare that pisses me off to even think about. I've always been an instant-gratification type of guy. If you told me I could have three thousand dollars today or fifty thousand dollars in one year, then I'd laugh at you because I know you can barely pay your car insurance, much less play assholish games with your money. But then if you were like, "I won the lottery, and I'm giving you a choice, man", then I'd ask to see the ticket. And after you showed it to me, I'd be all "Holy shit, dude! Holy shit! You lucky bastard!". Then after shit settled down I'd think for like five seconds, and a week later I'd be zipping around on a Dervish-blue Vespa with a little decal of that cartoon guy who loves to pee on things like Chevy and Jeff Gordon, peeing on the words "Your Mom". Because a year is too long to wait to drive an awesome scooter whilst simultaneously informing my fellow drivers of their mothers' disgusting sexual habits.

Unfortunately, I happen to suck badly at all of the sports that are easy to play with a few people on a whim. So my lack of patience (for setting things up) has driven me to seek out sports which my lack of patience (for sucking at things) has historically caused me to hate. Such are the vicissitudes of being an impatient asshole, I guess.

Anyway, the way I see it there were two sports that fit my criteria (outdoors, easy to set up games, potentially fun after initial infuriating sucking period): golf and tennis. Seven years ago I would have openly disparaged both as "lame" and "stupid" (I've since learned bigger words), because by 16 I had tried and profoundly blown at both sports, and I subsequently shied away and mocked them from afar as a defense mechanism, like the high school jock who gets shot down by the smart, shy girl and overcompensates for his failure by telling his friends that she has a fivehead and she's borderline autistic and he wouldn't touch her vagina even if he cornered a goddamn leprechaun inside it. But he would. Everyone knows he would.

I like to think that I'm a little more mature now, and that as an adult I've learned to better cope with humiliation and pain. But even if that were true, we all know that a man can only take so much before he cries and sulks underneath a tree. So golf was never really an option. And it's nothing against the sport - I would honestly love to get good at golf. It seems like it'd be a lot of fun, and you never get too old to do it. You can play golf until the day your heart explodes at the 10th tee box just seconds after creepily flirting with the Drink Cart Girl even though she went to school with your granddaughter. I like that. But golf also has the steepest learning curve, and I just don't think I could handle climbing it. The last time I went golfing, I got so frustrated with my inconsistent ball-striking that I stopped using clubs halfway through the round, opting instead to pick up the ball and heave it as far as I could at every hole, laughing the deranged laugh of a broken man with no more respect for society's arbitrary rules and mores. It was probably embarrassing for my friends (I also may have verbally abused a goose), but it definitely made my round better and neutralized my slice. More recently, my friend Tim and I spent like two hours in his backyard attempting to chip a golf ball into a planter. Though we were both tired of trying after ten minutes, neither of us would admit it because we are idiots. We hit hundreds of unsuccessful shots until eventually it got dark outside and we gave up, having sent the planter on an epic, rollercoaster journey from "planter" to "prospective golf hole" to "very broken planter", which just goes to show you that even planters can never truly go home again.

So it's probably safe to say that I lack the temperament/natural ability to ever excel at golf. My memories of tennis are much more tame. When I was a kid every attempt to play tennis started with poor play and arguments over the rules, and quickly devolved into a competition to see who could hit the ball the farthest out of the court. Good times. And since tennis courts are almost always adjacent to basketball courts, I remember many times feeling superior as I walked past all the 40-year-old knee-braced tennis players on my way to play a real sport. But I've come to realize recently that tennis really is a beautiful, fluid sport, alternately requiring power and agility, offense and defense, a gameplan and the ability to improvise. I'm speaking generally, of course. Like when I watched Wimbledon last week. That was cool. The tennis I play requires only tennis equipment, the ability to hop a fence, and a lack of shame.

But I've definitely gotten better. I play whenever I have free time, and though I've thrown the occasional temper tantrum - complete with strings of expletives and violent swings resulting in the loss of tennis balls - I feel like I've on the whole been very patient. And now I can hit angles sometimes; and I occasionally play some long, crazy rallies; and I've even messed around with slices and drop shots and other cutesy things. It's been encouraging.

But it's a tenuous happiness that's easily shattered. A few weeks ago I was playing with some friends when someone in a car driving by yelled out "You suck!". There is no way he could have seen us playing long enough to make that determination, but it still stung. I'd imagine if someone who was clearly blind walked into a mall and just yelled out, "You're fat!", it would still shake the confidence of every person in the mall who considered himself fat, even though everyone knows the blind guy clearly couldn't have known what the hell he was talking about. It's just the kind of incident that only matters because it exposes our own deep-rooted insecurities. So even though I outwardly yelled back "Come get your ass kicked, pussy!", deep down inside I felt the withering glare of 16-year-old me, and he totally agreed with the assessment.

Unread Nonsense: Educational?

2008-06-29T00:05:00.033-06:00

I started this blog in August of 2006 in an effort to prove to myself that my summer job hadn't rendered me illiterate. It sounds like a stupid concern, I know. But you should have walked with me one of those nights as I ranted to myself about the fact that Fancy Feast not only saw fit to make like 100 flavors of cat food; and not only deemed it necessary to create separate "Grilled Beef Feast" and "Sliced Beef Feast" flavors, as if cats could differentiate between the two so soon after licking their own assholes; but then had the nerve to make such similar-flavored tins the exact same fucking color, rendering cat food almost impossible to stock without causing an aneurysm. And you should have been there as King Soopers' late-night classic rock soundtrack (which is the same to this day) played songs like Jackson Browne's "The Pretender" and The Who's version of "Summertime Blues", and I became convinced that the playlist had been designed with the sole intent of mocking my station in life. And when the night crew took its breaks outside and spent the entire time discussing bowhunting excursions, you should have read my mind as I wondered how hard it would be to commit suicide with a bow and arrow (all I could think of was to shoot the arrow way up in the air and catch it with your brain). Because if you had done all these things, you would understand that I had gone a little bit insane, and it was therefore not at all inconsistent for me to wonder whether I could still read and write above a third-grade level.

So the day I quit that job, I started this blog. I decided to call it "Unread Nonsense" as a sort of lameass play on words, since "unread" can either mean "uneducated" or "nobody reads this". I'm confident that this site has lived up to its name in each respect. Until this week. Because on the heels of Nate's learned Constitutional discussion, I'm here to one-up him and present an educational post concerning something even more important to Americans' collective psyche than the Bill of Rights. Pin this to your lapels, fuckers: it's state flags time!

My favorites, in alphabetical order:

Alabama

Educational Fact: Alabama's state flag has won the Flaggy for "Flag That Most Perfectly Sums Up The Rest Of America's Feelings About The Statehood Of The Place It Represents" every year since the awards were created to drum up Cold War jingoism in 1957.

Delaware

Delaware's flag is a love story in one frame. Listen, it's the 21st century. It's sad that our society is so hung up on what consenting adults like to do with each other's genitals. That said, these guys are totally gay. And not because one of them is wearing pink; we all know that wearing pink doesn't make a man gay any more than liking The Notebook or being secretly psyched to hear a Corinne Bailey Rae song does (so shut up!). No, these guys are gay because of the besotted glance we catch them sharing, the kind of glance that in a single second betrays feelings that years were spent hiding. These guys are gay because the farmer on the left is trying way too hard to seem insouciant, with his aw-shucks posture and his hand in his pocket. He's not fooling anyone. Also, these guys are gay because they're masturbating a hoe and a gun, respectively. I don't know what ever happened to Vernon and William (I named them Vernon and William), but I hope their story turned out happier than Ennis and Jack's, or Romeo and Juliet's. Let's hope it was more like Allie and Duke's, though I'm sure we can all agree that theirs too is bittersweet at best... right?

Oh, and Educational Fact: "December 7th, 1787" commemorates the day Delaware became the first state to ratify the US Constitution. Of course, December 7th eventually became much more well-known for two "days which shall live in infamy": the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the RIAA attack on Napster in 1999. The former forced the United States to enter into World War II; the latter forced me to pay for an Everclear CD instead of just downloading that one song I like for free (I know there were other file-sharing sites, but I was stupid, OK?).

Hawaii

Educational Fact: Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959, but its flag predates its statehood by over 100 years. It is the only state flag to feature the Union Jack, which honors Hawaii's friendship with the British during its years as an independent kingdom. After Hawaii became a state, President Dwight D. Eisenhower attempted to replace the Union Jack with America's flag, famously stating "It's OK for your new wife to be friends with her ex-boyfriend, but this is like finding out she has his name tattooed on her vagina."

New York

Educational Fact: The woman on the left represents Liberty, and the woman on the right represents Justice. Liberty and Justice are in a sorority at SUNY Oswego. Many people erroneously believe that Liberty is holding a Phrygian cap; actually, it is just some cap that she stole off of an old couple's garden gnome as part of her initiation. And while it is popularly held that Justice wears a blindfold because "Justice is blind", she is in fact very drunk, and is playing a game of strip "Pin the scale on the donkey" with some frat guys. Such shenanigans often have a price and this is no exception, as in the process of playing she inadvertently punctures a bald eagle's left wing with her sword.

Bonus Fact: Derek Jeter sucks!

North Dakota

Educational Fact: In a 2004 poll of worker birds, Buzz, the eagle on North Dakota's state flag, was named "The Hardest-Working Bird In The World". "It's crazy," said Milo, a carrier pigeon from Chicago. "Every bird I know would take one trip for the holly, one trip for the banner, one trip for the arrows. Hell, I can't even carry arrows. This guy, he does it all at once. He's a freak of nature." More recently, due to his skyrocketing blood pressure, Buzz has been advised by his doctor to take it easy. Predictably, he is said to have responded "Shove it up your ass, pussy."

Rhode Island

Educational Fact: The following is a heretofore-unseen transcript of the 1897 meeting during which Rhode Island's flag was created.

John: I propose that the flag have 13 stars, arranged in a circle, to denote our status as one of the original 13 colonies, and as the 13th state.

Robert: A splendid idea.

John: And I further suggest that we include our state's motto, "Hope". Perhaps we could place it within the circle of stars.

Robert: Fantastic! This is shaping up wonderfully. And maybe if we just add an image within the circle... one that signifies hope... I'm reminded of Shakespeare here: "True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings". Perhaps, then, we could include some sort of bi--

Steven: (interrupting) Anchor!

Robert & John: ... ... ...

Robert: ... Yes, an anchor. Brilliant idea, Steven.

(Steven smiles and leaves)

Robert: I fucking hate that Steven is the governor's son.

Virginia

Educational Fact: Virginia's is the only state flag celebrating murder. Beneath the king's corpse is the motto "Sic semper tyrannis", which is Latin for "What now, bitch?".

West Virginia

(close-up)

Educational Fact: West Virginia's flag commemorates the date that zombies (pictured above) rose from the dead and seceded from Virginia. The slab of rock is meant to resemble a tombstone, and the flowers framing the picture represent zombies' love of pretty flowers. The state motto "Montani semper liberi" (translation: "Mountaineers are always white") was a last-second inclusion, replacing the original motto, "Uuunnnnnnng" (translation: "Flowers are pretty").

There you have it. To the states whose flags didn't make the cut: better luck next time. And to you, my twelve readers: just remember to thank me when you go on Jeopardy and "State Flags" is the final category. And Nate: Sic Semper Tyrannis.

I Have To

2008-06-27T11:00:00.007-06:00

As I read Nate's hyper-literate post about a hot-button constitutional issue, featuring a well-articulated discussion of Latin ablatives as they pertain to the Second Amendment, all I could think about was doing this:

Please consider this my contribution to the debate. I imagine that the guy on the left had his pinkies blown off by a gun, so he's here to speak out against the Second Amendment. The guy on the right just accidentally showed up at the wrong rally. And before you impugn my skill with MS Paint, bear in mind that one of these guys is missing fingers (albeit pinkies), and the other gentleman is retarded. These signs would be pretty well-made, all things considered.

NATE: “I Love Guns”: 37,700

2008-06-26T18:28:00.040-06:00

I was going to title this post “Today: Gun Control, Tomorrow: Poop Jokes." But then I got home from work and saw an opportunity to both metareference this blog and avoid making a scatology-based promise that I’ll probably be too lazy to keep. Thanks, buddy!

For those keeping score at home, this means that guns are only slightly less beloved than cancer, which makes sense, because cancer kills way more people than guns do. On a gun-related note, while we have noted the dearth of hits for “I love beating the elderly” (that’s 2), there are thirty-eight (38) results for “I love shooting babies,” due at least in part to photographers who have become completely isolated from linguistic reality. This is all beside the point. Hard to believe, I know.

The point beside which the preceding resides is that the Supreme Court today overturned Washington, D.C.’s long-time ban on handguns. I was informed of this development by CNN.com, which I regularly check while I’m working. Generally, I point my browser to CNN and spend a few minutes trying to convince myself that the voting preferences of a dipshit Mormon (alliterative highlight: “A conservative believes that our inalienable rights do not include housing, healthcare or Hummers.”) and Heather Locklear’s recent bout of the crazies are exactly what is supposed to pass for important news in a modern global society. Today, however, I was greeted with a breaking news banner and front-page graphic about a landmark Supreme Court ruling. After I got all caught up on Mariah’s new hair color and how to tell if my boyfriend is cheating on me, I decided to read the gun thingy. Wow! It was interesting!

If you’re like most readers of this blog, your last name is Davis and you fancy yourself a Dervish. If you're the other reader, I can only suspect you come here hoping to find quasi-analysis of important social issues authored by people with no real qualifications to provide such (b)anal-ysis. Well boy, are you in luck! This is going to be a little more serious than I like to be, in general. I’ll try to at least use a lot of curse words and make offensive comments so the change of pace is a bit easier to swallow. Off we go!

First, here’s the picture that accompanied the CNN story. It’s what inspired me to start writing this in the first place:

Man. Where to begin? Look at that poster on the right. "If guns kill people," our friend asks his audience of poor saps unaware that he is about to slam the goddamn Mjolnir of Logic and Analogy down upon their ignorant heads, "do pens misspell words?" Sets 'em up and knocks 'em down. Sticks the landing. Clears the bases. Beautiful. Fucking beautiful. Let it simmer for a minute. Bask in the glow of wisdom emanating from this gape-mouthed creature's amateurish sign. Ejaculate if you feel the desire. Okay. Take a deep breath. Let's move on.

That, as Gandhi would remind us, is fucking retarded.

Let's think about this for a minute. I don't think homeboy's analogy is especially apt. Now, with your blessing, I'd like to explore it by way of a word game, my second in as many posts. Here are the rules: Imagine you are the prospective inventor of the noun given. The answer to each riddle will take the form of "Eureka! I will invent the (noun given) in order to (verb) shit." All you have to do is provide the verb! Ready? It sounds harder than it is. Here's an easy one:

Stove. "Eureka! I will invent the stove in order to ______ shit."

Answer: cook. Stoves cook shit. See? Easy. Next up:

Forklift. "Eureka! I will invent the forklift in order to ______ shit."

Answer: lift. The answer was in the name of the thing. Pretty easy. Cool. Smarmy rhetorical device, hit me with another if you'd be so kind:

Pen. "Eureka! I will invent the pen in order to ______ shit."

Answer: write. The purpose of pens is to write shit. Also acceptable: draw.

Now, and bear with me here, because it's about to get tricky:

Gun. "Eureka! I will invent the gun in order to ______ shit."

The correct answer, friends and colleagues, is "kill." The gun was invented to kill shit. That is what it is for. Could I use a forklift or a pen to kill someone? Absolutely. I can and have. But that is not the purpose of those items. If all beings on this earth were immortal and invincible, we would still need pens and forklifts. Guns would be about as useful, to borrow a phrase, as tits on a turtle. See the difference? Good. That's settled. This barely-recognizable horse carcass is in for some more abuse, however.

Gun control isn't really even my issue. I do think that Philadelphia (390 murders in 2007) and Provo (0) ought to be able to respond to their respective situations with different courses of policy, but I'm not up in arms (so sorry) about it. Unless this thing goes horribly off the rails, I'm not going to be running down every argument in favor of gun control, mostly because I don't care enough to do it. But I would like to ramble a little while longer.

The Second Amendment reads as follows:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Rad. I did some homework and found out that the construction of that first clause closely resembles a Latin construction called the ablative absolute, which was used much more widely 219 years ago. Many agree that the first and third commas are unnecessary in modern usage, so we could rewrite the Second Amendment as:

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

That is also, incidentally, the version of the amendment ratified by at least some of the states--the point being that our Founding Fathers apparently weren't going to let grammatical precision or continuity get in the way of their fun. (Yes, I know Thomas Jefferson had pretty much fuck-all to do with the Bill of Rights.) The argument of our friends pictured above, which I can only imagine is based on a learned consideration of the Latin ablative absolute and that particular construction's inconsistency with respect to the relationship between the first and second clauses, is that the first part of the sentence has nothing to do with the second. That's crazy. It's the same logic I employ with my best pickup line: "Your effervescent eyes having seared their image eternally into my soul, and your buttocks being firm and in proportion to your waist, I love french toast." ["I love french toast": 12,000. Not quite ping-pong.] Fuck it. If you're really interested, read this and this and this. I thought it was fascinating.

I'm partial to a modern rewriting of the Amendment to look like this:

Because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

I may not be an America-lover on the level of Jeremy Shockey, but I have a lot of respect for the Constitution. I happen to agree with Jefferson, but it's done pretty well for itself. I also happen to think that Originalism is fucking crazy, for a few reasons. Hey, if we're going with it, though, these guys who wrote and ratified the Second Amendment also mostly opposed a standing army. They thought it was a big kick in liberty's balls to have an army during peacetime. In other words, a bunch of assholes with muskets were all America had in the event of an invasion by its big scary enemies. I haven't heard a whole lot of chatter from the American Revolution-humping, gun-loving crowd about disbanding the United States military, so I'm left to assume that they either a) are full of shit, or b) actually believe that the NRA membership list is fulfilling the historic role of the (well-regulated) militia in defending America's security interests--above and beyond the capabilities of Navy SEALs, CIA Black Ops, Army Rangers, Angel Dale Earnhardt, and the like to do so. I'll let you guess which way I'm leaning.

Keeping with the Originalism meme, the militia was also seen as an internal check on tyranny--if the government got too powerful and corrupt, the people would grab their guns and take it the fuck over. They probably could have, too. In 1789. Fast forward to today, and we are presented with this gentleman, who is feeling Brian Wilson in that he just wasn't made for these times:

I know this guy. We're friends. Grew up together. I used to get hammered and hit on his sister. His name is Chauncey but he goes by Rambo. Now, I haven't talked to Rambo in a few years, but from what I know about guns, this is a picture of him holding a flag with a silhouetted US AR33 Assault Rifle on it (full disclosure: what I know about guns, having never owned one and having stopped playing videogames some years ago, comes from the N64 classic Goldeneye 007). The taunting "Come and Take [It?]" is seemingly directed at the United States government--a go-getter attitude better suited for 1789 than 2008, I'm afraid. If only he could hear me. "Rambo," I would say, "if the United States government wants your gun, they're going to fucking get it. Don't do anything stupid." I'd show him this picture I made of what might happen to him if all the gun owners were to decide to overthrow the government:

I just hope he gets the message before it's too late.

And I'm still not quite done.

The thing that originally pissed me off about these people (and I'm sure the anti-gun people did it too) was the fact that they're protesting outside the Supreme Fucking Court. This is the branch of government that is mostly insulated from public opinion for good goddamn reason. These are the most brilliant legal minds America has to offer. John Paul Stevens coined the term "appeal." Souter wrote the Magna Carta. The Justices, though I don't agree with them all the time, have a combined 7,982 years of legal experience, and are fairly firm in their positions. You get it. These aren't dumbass Congressmen or Senators. Why stand outside the Court and chant slogans? What difference is that possibly going to make? "Very little," I thought. I was wrong.

After a bit of research, I found some pretty crazy shit.

Former Chief Justice Roger Taney recounted to a biographer that his Court was set to rule in favor of Dred Scott when, on their way to the courthouse, the Justices encountered a protester with a sign reading: "If niggers aren't property...can my mule vote?" Things would never be the same.

Korematsu v. U.S. was similarly influenced by a brave skywriter just above the U.S. Capitol: "If my Japanese neighbor isn't trying to kill me...will my syphilis go away on its own?"

Even John Marshall wasn't immune. After his death, his private papers revealed the effect on the venerable jurist of a hired town crier and his repeated bellows of "Fuck Marbury." Thus was Judicial Review born.

Oh, god dammit. I've come all this way, and I see now that my original premise was flawed! These patriots do not deserve my scathing derision! They are efficacious social activists worthy of nothing less than the highest respect of their countrymen. I'll just go ahead and post this anyway, so that the many, many readers of this blog might avoid making the same mistake.

All done. Here's a poop joke, one day ahead of schedule:

A woman living in a rural area wanted to have an outhouse that wouldn't stink. She advertised in the local papers searching for a contractor who could build such a structure.

After some time, a contractor contacted the woman and guaranteed that he could build an outhouse that would have no odor at all. He got the job.

Sometime after completing the construction, the man got a frantic call from the woman. "You'd better get here fast!" she screamed. "That outhouse has a terrible smell!"

He rushed over to the woman's house, walked to the outhouse, poked his head through the door and exclaimed,"No wonder it stinks! You pooped in it!"

I Love Summer!

2008-06-26T08:35:00.005-06:00

So the plan for this post was to talk about how much I love summer. I was going to do this facetious thing where I have an epiphany that I love summer, and I was going to say that it's funny how love can sneak up on you that way. I was going to say that summer is the season of my dreams. Then I was going to go tell my best friend (Google) that I love summer, and Google was going to tell me that everyone (427,000 results for "I love summer") loves summer. And I was going to cry and cry because summer is such a cocktease and I was going to lament my youthful hubris in thinking that summer would ever settle down with me. It was going to suck.

Luckily for all of us, my attention span is as short as that of a guy whose attention span is so short that he can't be bothered to concoct a decent simile. So what ended up happening is that after I googled "I love summer," I forgot about writing the post and I started googling "I love" followed by random things and drawing definitive conclusions about their popularity based on the results - conclusions which I will maintain are correct for the remainder of my life. Because what better way to determine the relative popularity of something than to see how many people have explicitly stated on the internet than they love it? (That was a rhetorical question: there is no better way.)

So here for your learning pleasure are 25 of the things I googled (e.g. "I love [blank]"), ranked in (now-indisputable) order of popularity:

1. Lucy - 3,640,000
2. Jesus - 1,080,000
3. Summer - 427,000
4. Harry Potter - 241,000
5. Baseball - 240,000
6. Cancer (!) - 39,200
7. Apples - 33,300
8. Elephants - 25,100
9. Shakespeare - 23,400
10. Ping Pong - 14,300 (with "table tennis" 20,140)
11. Oranges - 13,700
12. Uranus - 4,340
13. Peeing - 4,090
14. Heroin - 3,160
15. Porcupines - 2,570
16. Pooping - 1,940 (with "shitting" 2690)
17. Tony Danza - 161 (with "shitting" 911)
18. Cutting Myself - 146
19. Canoodling - 25
20. Shawn Davis - 7
21. Renaissance Poetry - 1
22 (tie). Beating The Elderly - 0
22 (tie). That Video Of The Monkey Peeing In His Own Mouth - 0
22 (tie). Harpooning Whales - 0
22 (tie). Immature Blogs - 0

Before we discuss, I'd like to singlehandedly render this list inaccurate:

I Love Beating The Elderly!
I Love That Video Of The Monkey Peeing In His Own Mouth!
I Love Harpooning Whales!
I Love Immature Blogs!

Congrats, you four! Each of you is now as popular as Renaissance Poetry. Suck on that, Roger Ascham!

Roger Ascham is bummed about it.

Also:

I Love Shawn Davis!
because none of you assholes has ever said this on the web. Fuck you guys.

Anyway, let's talk about the list. I'm sure you'll notice that I tried to compare things that have historically been linked and bitterly debated: Apples vs. Oranges, Pooping vs. Peeing, Tony Danza vs. Cutting Yourself, Shakespeare vs. Elephants, etc. The matchups were sometimes close (elephants win by a nose! woo!), but I think we can safely say that each of these classic battles has finally been settled forever. You're welcome. But beyond the obvious oppositions, there are some interesting results:

- This Lucy girl is more than three times more popular (which my pappy raised me to read as "better") than Jesus. Waaaah is right, Jesus.

- Cancer is much more popular than the mainstream media would have you believe. Maybe Iraq does smell like ginger bread.

- Porcupines are underappreciated.

- So is Uranus...but not by me.

- People who harpoon whales don't love to do it. Their high school guidance counselors are probably very disappointed.

- Summer is fucking awesome! I love you, summer! XOXOXO.

Weekly Dervish Update: Musical Edition

2008-06-09T13:23:00.016-06:00

I'm going to make this one relatively quick, because I don't have too much to say. The Dervishes played The Rocks two consecutive times. We really wanted both of these games, not only because we didn't want to suffer the ignominy of an 0-12 season, but because apparently the Rocks were talking shit in the stands during our first-week drubbing at the hands of the similarly lamenamed A-Town Nugs. A tale of two weeks (with accompanying music!):

Week 1

(Hit play, then read. Except you should check out the guy at 1:18. He would definitely be a Dervish groupie.)

Victory! If I had to come up with one sentence to best describe how we felt as this game unfolded, it'd have to be "Where the fuck did this come from?". Playing the undefeated Rocks (who Nate oh-so-cleverly dubbed "The Walks" due to their baffling refusal to swing the fucking bat), we couldn't have hoped for much. To this point, we had generally hit and fielded like a blind softball team might hit and field if you took away their BeepBalls. But our bats inexplicably came alive, and our fielding was good enough, as we swapped our clown shoes for cleats and triumphed, 23-8.

Highlight: Some might point to our 14-run outburst in the first inning during which we batted around twice and yelled "Yeah!" a lot. But my personal favorite moment came when our first baseman Tim "En" Garde attempted to slide into second base but instead performed a maneuver that looked like a cross between a fencing thrust and that scene in Bambi where he's trying futilely to walk on the ice.

Safe

Lowlight: Our umpire was a dickhead. There are not a lot of things sadder than when Bambi's mom dies, but an old, double-knee-braced umpire who compulsively injects himself into the game with unsolicited commentary and crotchety stipulations just might bum me out more. Seriously, fuck that guy.

Is the music still playing? Hit stop. John Philip Sousa's boisterous songs of American triumph have no place in week 2.

Week 2

(Once again, click and read.)

Oh yes, friends, we were riding high. But we knew that if we didn't do it again the next week, the first win would feel hollow. That didn't stop us from losing, though. We fell 19-9, though the game was actually closer than the score might indicate. The Rocks had a couple of players who weren't there last week, though I'm not necessarily claiming that shenanigans were afoot. I am, however, claiming that the new players were fucking assholes. Their new shortstop dropped a double play ball and proceeded to scream at the umpire, claiming that he dropped it during the glove-to-hand transfer (he didn't). Their new left-centerfielder slid into every base cleats high, even if there were no outs to be had, claiming he was "just tryin' to scare ya". We weren't scared or impressed. So in a span of two weeks, they went from Rocks to Walks to Cocks. And from losing to winning. Funny how that works, I guess.

Highlight: I'm tempted to just go with what makes me laugh again (walking into the complex, Nate was looking at a scoreboard and walked directly into a trash can, knocking it over. It was both awesome and a bad omen.), but the highlight has to be Cody Ray hitting two long home runs in the losing effort. It was so impressive that after the game I told him he could date my sister. Yeah, he was already dating her. But still. Also noteworthy here is a spectacular diving catch by left-centerfielder Matt Hockett. Also also noteworthy is that our team has two players named Matt Hockett, and they are in no way related. That is insane. How many people do you know named Matt Hockett? It's not that common a name. My name is way more common than that, and it would still blow my goddamn mind to meet someone named Shawn Davis. I'm not sure how I'd react: I'd either join arms with him and jump around gleefully for 10 minutes, or I'd push him out of a tree in a fit of insecurity like Gene in A Separate Peace (terrible book).

Lowlight: Plenty. But like Rowlf, I'm prone to crying jags, so let's not talk about it anymore. In conclusion,

Thank-Yous

2008-06-08T03:15:00.021-06:00

I know that people love to crib the thoughts of well-spoken others and insert them into conversations. It's hard not to, really. And it makes you sound smart and classy. Take me, for example. Just the other day my friend Tim and I had this conversation:

Me: (reacting to Tim's dog barking outside) Are you going to let your dog in?
Tim: The back door is open.
Me: That's what she said.

And then we laughed for like 20 minutes. Even though she's the one who said it originally, my decision to call it back at that moment was impressive, and obviously reflected well upon my intelligence and character.

But there are thousands upon thousands of quotes out there, competing with the always-unnamed she to be casually dropped into conversations. I think I hear this one the most often:

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."

I'm going to go out on a limb here and designate this phrase "stupid" and people's use of it "annoying". My reasons are several and boring, and I'm not going to talk about them because I hate to sound serious. Besides, everyone knows that the definition of insanity (unverified by the dictionary) is "any act that can be described by a googly-eyed emoticon or by the sound made when you simultaneously hum and flick your finger over your lips" (that's what she etc.)

But as I finally sat down this weekend to write thank-you notes for my birthday, I couldn't keep that goddamn quote from coming to mind. Not only because I wait way too long every year to write these things and still expect family members not to think I'm an asshole, but also because somehow every year I sit down expecting to write the rip-roarinest, most awesome letters ever written in response to 25-dollar checks. Then immediately my brain gets all constipated and I struggle to remember which way the letters S and N are supposed to go, much less how to write effectively. Inevitably, two hours and 5 sentences later, I've come up with a lame-ass form letter to duplicate on every other card, and I slink away thinking much less of myself as a writer and as a human being. It's crazy, man. In almost every other area of my life, I can say that I've learned something since early childhood. But somehow my thank-yous are stuck in a Never-Land of Retardation. As a point of reference to show you how far I haven't come, I've tracked down a thank-you note I wrote to my parents at age 7:

Your first instinct might be to say something pithy and cutting like "BLAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Oh my God I can't breathe. HAHAHAHA What a moron!" Me? I'll go with a knowing sigh. Oh, 7-year-old me, you probably thought you'd get considerably better with time. Fool. A few things you might notice:

- I had written a first line, but decided to erase it and start again a line lower. You might wonder how bad that line must have been to be deemed unsuitable for this letter. I just wonder whether I did such a bad erasing job because I couldn't see very well through the anxious tears.

- You would probably figure that by age 7 I'd know which direction question marks are supposed to go. Actually, I would figure that, too. This might be one of the few areas of this letter that I can identify as no longer an issue in my thank-you note writing. And that's only because it is such a breathtakingly stupid mistake. To say I've gotten better would be kind of like commending a murderer for at least sparing the family's goldfish this time.

- My lowercase Ks look like uppercase Rs. I should actually point out that my handwriting here is probably a thousand times better than it is today. I've regressed in this area. Now my lowercase Ks look like uppercase What The Fucks.

- "I got everything I wanted" is awkwardly slipped into a list of things I got. It seems like the kind of thing on a standardized test where they'd number the sentences and ask which one seems out of order or shouldn't be there at all. Right now, for instance. I still do this.

- I got a book and a microscope (which I call "neat") and claim to like my gifts "very much". Both the gifts and the adjectives I apply to them would be classified by a child psychologist as "things that are gay".

(Super-long aside: I feel like I need to explain myself here. I was the oldest child, and in case you weren't aware, the oldest child is a fucking hero. By the second kid, parents have usually realized that children are not as sensitive as the egg babies they took care of in high school home-ec classes. But the first kid is shielded to the point of absurdity - never exposed to things that might be dangerous or cool. By the age of 7, kids who are second and third have not only led less-coddled lives in general, but they've also been privy to the cool things that the older siblings picked up at school between having their lunch money stolen and being called words that they don't understand because they're not allowed to watch anything awesome. While younger siblings are at home torturing the cat, the oldest kid is at school every day chipping away at his lameness with a little pickax, then he comes home and readily makes gifts of the cool he mined. I very clearly remember my friend Woody Potter (awesome name? yes) telling me in kindergarten that Santa Claus isn't real, and me arguing vehemently and confidently that he was mistaken. Imagine my embarrassment the next day. Or in first grade, my friend Bryce told me that the F-word was "fuck", and I was positive that he was just fucking with me. It blew my mind that the F-word wasn't a word I already knew. I had always just assumed the F-word did other work when it wasn't being the F-word, like Clark Kent did lame stuff when he wasn't Superman. So I argued vehemently again, going so far as to keep saying "fuck" in the middle of class, so sure was I that it was nonsense. These are the kinds of public defeats that first-born kids have to suffer on the road to knowledge of cool things. I will definitely be sitting my first kid down on the first day of kindergarten and just schooling him(/her) in every vile, depressing thing known to man. He will be bummed for a few days, but will soon be psyched when he earns cool points by telling his friends about Santa* and Fuck and what "teabagging" means.)

Where was I? Oh yeah. I called things neat and liked microscopes. Fucking sue me. This is another area in which I've improved, though when I'm writing letters to my grandmother, using words like "neat" actually isn't a bad idea. Better than "epic" or "sickmendous".

- Probably the most ridiculous part of this whole letter is the fact that I ended a note to my parents - people who conceived me and gave birth to me and changed all my shitty diapers and taught me to walk and taught me to talk and took me to the hospital when I ate a whole bottle of Flintstones vitamins and protected me and bought me a microscope that I wanted for Christmas - with "Sincerely, Shawn Davis". Like it's a fucking business letter. Like when they walked me to my first day of school I turned and said goodbye with a handshake and told them we should have lunch sometime. I can just imagine them getting this note:

Mom: Oh, we got a thank-you card from Shawn Davis.
Dad: Who?
Mom: You know, Shawn Davis? Our real estate agent? He was just thanking us for the radio and the microscope and the books. He said they were really neat.
Dad: (coming over to take a look) Huh. Isn't it weird that we didn't just pay him in money?
Mom: I don't know. He said he wanted those things a lot worse. Remember, when we were closing the sale he gave us that JC Penney catalog, and he'd circled the things he wanted?
Dad: Oh, right. Odd guy.
Mom: He was nice!
Dad: His lowercase Ks look like uppercase Rs.

So yeah, "Sincerely, Shawn Davis" is retarded. But I'm pretty sure that within the last three years, I've signed a few of my thank-yous "Shawn Davis" in cursive without even thinking about it.

If I'm being completely honest, I know my notes have gotten better since this one. But not much better. They start with "Thanks" and end with "Thanks again" and in between they very briefly mention how I used the gift (since it's always long-gone by the time I'm writing the letters). So pretty much the same sentiment as when I was 7, but with slightly better execution. It's pathetic. I'm a grown man - I should at the very least be able to come up with something small-talky and inane. I do, after all, write this blog.
____________________________________________________________________

*I would like to mention that I don't blame my parents for not telling me about Santa Claus. Because without a belief in Santa, I doubt I would have been inspired to create masterpieces like "Santa Mouse". It's like, who knows what Caravaggio would have painted if he wasn't a Christian. It's just like that.

Santa Mouse sees all with his big squiggly left eye. He must have also seen that coming to my house would have been a mistake, because if my mom had seen him she would have freaked out and smashed him with a book.

Post About Not Always Writing Dervish Posts Which Is Nonetheless Still All About The Dervishes

2008-06-04T04:43:00.014-06:00

It was too much, I know. I think that Nate decided to post as a sort of passive-aggressive intervention, before my descent into Dervish-inspired madness was irreversible. I was young and foolish, and I kept telling myself that I was just a hobbyist - that I could stop any time I wanted to and go back to how things were. Besides, I don't have to tell you that Dervish posts always feel so damn good. And that's the thing about addiction, friends: what feels so much like transcendence is really about as base and earthbound as it gets. But you don't usually figure that out until your tongue has already been in somebody's butt; I was one of the lucky ones who had a support system that cut me off before it came to that. Really, taping "Dervish" over the "Cheeri" on my cereal box isn't that bad. And neither is editing the nutrition facts, because Dervishos do have one billion percent of your daily Pimp Juice. And Boardwalk is a stupid street name in Monopoly, anyway. But I shudder to think of what I've no-doubt driven my readers to do under the influence of my powerful Dervish posts. So I had to do something, for you.

But I can't quit Dervish posts altogether; you (I) love them too much. It's just about moderation. To that end, I recently got some great blogging advice from the Foundation for Alcohol Responsibility. It was pretty poorly-written, but I know exactly what they were going for:

Pair your (blog posts). The single best habit you can adopt is to always (blog) one non(Dervish post) for every (blog about) (Dervishes), (softball), or (pussies who take walks).

(...)

Pairing your (blogs) in this way offers several benefits (for your readers):

You are slowing and diluting (their)(Dervish) intake. This gives (their) (minds) more time to adjust to and metabolize the (Dervish posts) (they) consume, and gives (them) more control over (their) (reading) experience, since (they) can "slow down" by switching to (non-Dervish posts), making (them) more likely to be enjoyably relaxed as opposed to (frothing at the mouth) and (having dangerously powerful orgasms).

(Dervish posts) (are) a (roller-coaster ride of emotion), (titillating) you and making you (randy), so (reading) a non(Dervish post) keeps you (clothed). [This also helps to prevent (becoming a Dervish groupie), which (is) partially caused by (Dervish posts).]

(They) can also better enjoy the (metaphorical) flavor of (their) chosen (softball team), because (non-Dervish posts) can help clear your (metaphorical) palate.

It's good advice. My next post will not be even vaguely Derv-ish, which will calm everyone down before I launch into the Weekly Dervish Update (which should be a doozy). But as I take my first tentative steps back into the world of non-Dervish-related blogging, I simply ask for your continued patience and understanding. If I occasionally interrupt a post about words that sound funny with "Hit your fuck-damn cutoff man!", please forgive me and continue your regular yawning routine. Funny word: milquetoast.

Fortnightly Dervish Update: Brave Face Edition

2008-06-01T10:24:00.006-06:00

We're back. After taking a Sunday off to barbecue and remember something, the Dervishes today enter Phase 2 of our super-secret master plan for interstellar softball supremacy. Phase 1, you might have guessed, was "Suck balls." Mission accomplished. Phase 1 reached its successful conclusion two Sundays ago, when a 7-5 loss to "Dem Cats" left us 0-3, thereby granting us "Clown Shoes" certification, and the attendant league-wide disrepute that is so important to our cause.

And our cause is a movie. Because while there's something to be said for the purity of amateur pseudo-sports, there is also something to be said for the purity of really pure cocaine. And that something is "LET'S GET NAKED!!! WOOOOO!!!" But movies don't get made about juggernauts. Hollywood wants the unlikely champions, man. The first half-hour of any sports movie worth its salt has to include enough comic bunglery to justify intermittent reaction shots where the coach throws his hat on the ground and contemplates suicide. And the Dervishes have delivered. Now we can "miraculously" turn it around and set ourselves up for a showdown with the seemingly-unstoppable team that beat our asses early on (the 4-0 A-Town Nugs). If all goes according to plan, Hollywood won't be able to resist, and the Dervishes will soon come to a multiplex near you, to be played by the cast of 300 (which would be about akin to casting Dennis Quaid to play Jim Morris -who really looks like this, yet apparently does not molest children or run a saloon).

Anyway, today we play "The Rocks", one of two undefeated teams in the league. Next week's opponent: "The Rocks". Good fucking job, schedule makers. And all false bravado aside, we will probably lose. If so, I'll see you here next week, armed with some equally mealy-mouthed attempt to laugh off our soul-crushing shittiness. If we win, I'll probably post something ejaculatory later on tonight, then go get drunk. So again, see you next week.

Weekly Dervish Update: Narrow Loss Edition

2008-05-18T15:02:00.007-06:00

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
- Helen Keller - Author, Activist, Noted Softball Player

Damn straight, Helen "Wheels" Keller. My first thought as I sat down to write this was that posting weekly updates is much less fun when they follow weekly losses. We lost, 13-12 in the bottom of the seventh inning. I've been trying not to think about it too much, because even though intellectually I know softball doesn't matter, I also learned in second grade that intellectuals are gaywads and winning is always awesome. Ask anyone: I hate losing. I'm completely insufferable for about 30 minutes after I lose at something. I fume and rant and bitch and throw things and generally comport myself poorly. Beyond 30 minutes I'm usually fine and I revert to my baseline level of insufferability. But talking about losses is still no fun. So I'm not going to go into too many details; I'll save those for when (if) we win a game. In the meantime I'm taking shelter in the soothing words of great thinkers/softball players of the past.

There is a strength in the union even of very sorry men.
- Homer - Poet, Power-Hitting Shortstop

Weekly Dervish Update: Blowout Loss Edition

2008-05-08T07:33:00.018-06:00

Hey out there, all you Whirling Derverts™! If you thought I was kidding when I said there would be weekly updates - if you thought "He won't ever do that. He has to know that no one cares about the travails of his stupid softball team. Even he can't be that out of touch, can he?" - then you were super fucking wrong and kind of mean. I'm committed, man, and the fact that I'm posting an update after this game just proves that this is happening weekly, come shine or rain, victory or humiliating defeat, avid readership or scorn/indifference.

It was a beautiful day for softball, slightly overcast but warm, with a pleasant breeze that only fanned the white-hot flame that burns in the heart of every Dervish. As we arrived at the complex, the weird "thwack" of juiced bats against balls made real what for the last 9 months had been only the subject of beautiful dreams (when we weren't dreaming about cops on all-fours chasing after dogs on two legs who are wearing ski masks and carrying bags of money while our grandparents look on - a favorite Dervish dream): softball season was here.

The game started off pretty well, with both teams playing solid defense (often in short supply in softball leagues) and limiting scoring chances. One thing I'd like to note is that the A-Town Nugs loved to take walks, man. Growing up playing baseball, I must've heard the saying "A walk's as good as a hit" about 90 times per game. Every time a batter got to three balls, "A walk's as good as a hit" would be hurled at him ritualistically from every conceivable direction: his coach, his teammates, his parents, his teammates' parents, the teammate whose parents abandoned him's uncle. Planes would fly overhead, towing a banner that said "A walk's as good as a hit!!!" behind them. And all that was fine, because it's true. But this is rec-league softball, man. The ball is going 5.3 miles per hour, and you're 39 years old, and your glory days are already gone if they ever came at all. Who the fuck wants to walk in softball? The saying in softball should be "If you walk, you are a gigantic pussy". Everyone should chant it every time someone gets to three balls. If the ball is in your general vicinity, you have enough time to position your body so that it's perfect to hit. But in this case, these balls were like an inch off the plate. Swing the goddamn bat.

Oh, right, the game. So thanks to a nice surge in the bottom of the fifth inning, the score was 7-4 Dervishes. Life was good; it was time to bring it on home. Right here I am going to posit the existence of a Dervishmobile just so that I can tell you that the wheels fell off of it in the top of the sixth. Then, in the top of the seventh, someone smashed the windows and stole our awesome Dervish sound system. And by the end of the inning, people were looting it of all its semi-valuables and having sex with each other inside its hollow shell while a crazy homeless guy defecated on its hood. All of a sudden in the last two innings we couldn't play defense. We dropped popups, overthrew cutoff men, bobbled balls, let balls past us, and generally bungled every opportunity we had to get outs. We lost *expletive deleted*-8. Fine, 26-8. After being up 7-4 two innings earlier.

I was stunned. I was crushed. I needed answers. So after the game, the Dervishes struggled through the throngs of upset groupies and compared notes. And we figured it out. It was so simple. You see, though the Dervishes are cut from the manliest cloth in God's sweatshop, we are sensitive, too, like a swan or a clitoris. And it hit us collectively, in the top of the sixth, how meaningless softball really is amidst the world's suffering. When our first baseman dropped a popup, it turns out that he was tormented by thoughts of how skyrocketing oil prices are driving hardworking people into poverty. So he dropped a softball; big fucking deal. Our left-centerfielder overran a line drive, allowing the hitter to come all the way around and score. But it turns out that he was busy writing a poem about the effects of deforestation on third-world countries. No one can catch a ball while simultaneously rhyming "deforestation" with "the poorest nations", or "the tree" with "hug me", or "mudslide" with "sun-dried". Those multisyllabic rhymes need one's full attention. So: catch a ball, or talk about a serious issue facing our world? Which one would you choose? I know I personally was troubled by the deadly stalemate between the Israelis and Palestinians when I flew out to left with runners on base. Sue me.

But after a long philosophical discussion about the nature of suffering and our obligation to help relieve it, we came to the nuanced conclusion that it is up to each of us to do what we can to help, but we cannot, in these efforts, sacrifice fully our obligation to actualize our own happiness. We must help with one hand, and with the other reach for our own greatness. And what in life is greater than to be a Whirling Dervish? So the Dervishmobile is rolling once more. Next opponent: "The Unknowns". We can sympathize with them, because before last Sunday we too were unknowns, even to ourselves.

Fin.

Eventually Has A Point (Sort Of)

2008-05-03T09:25:00.005-06:00

So I'm getting older, and my illustrious college career is slowly approaching its end. It seems like every conversation I have includes the old "What do you want to do with your degree?" question (not surprising, since that's like question #4 in the official "How To Conduct An Inane Conversation With A Stranger/ Acquaintance/ Person Much Younger Than You" handbook). And even though answers like "Get your daughter pregnant" or "Go back in time and read King Lear to impoverished young T-Rexes" are temporarily amusing, they don't change the fact that I have no goddamn idea what I'll be doing for a living in two years. Some people just always knew their calling, but a quick look through my past aspirations reveals that I've always known that I always never always know. Careers to which I've aspired:

- Age 3: A fire truck.

- Age 5-15: A baseball player

- Age 15-17: Great thinker who never leaves his bed but still totally gets laid and stuff because he's such a great and renowned thinker that girls seek him out and he's like "Hey ladies, since we're already in bed..." and they oblige because they're totally in awe of what a great thinker he is and he was just awarded the Nobel Prize for something he thought of but he didn't accept it because he's such a badass.

- Age 18: Lame Popsicle Stick Joke-Writer

Q: What did the guy fan say to the girl fan?
A: "Wanna go for a spin?"
Alternate Dirty Answer: "Blow me."

Q: What happened when the hose raced the soap?
A: It was a wash.

Q: What did the schoolteacher say to her husband?
A: "I want a divorce."

Q: How did the phone propose to the other phone?
A: Gave it a ring.

Q: What is the Sun's favorite TV show?
A: Friends

- Age 20-22: A fire truck

But we all know that only so many people get to be fire trucks. If everyone in the world could be whatever they wanted to be, we'd all be fire trucks and there'd be no one to fill us with fuel or foolishly start forest fires for us to heroically extinguish.

So obviously there's been a big gap in my life in the area one might term "An Overriding Purpose". Sometimes I envy religious people because it's all right there for them: Life is a strange and often-cruel test to see if you're good enough to get into an unseen treehouse on high, all for the amusement of an apparently bored and fickle God (also unseen). Simple. All you've got to do is obey a bunch of arcane and anachronistic rules that often contradict one another and fly in the face of sanity and common human decency. It's so easy! I, on the other hand, have generally struggled to find such a convenient post to which I can hitch my dreams. But I don't think it'll be my job. And why should it be, anyway? Plenty of people shovel shit all day (zookeepers?), but they fill their lives outside work with things that make them happy and keep things interesting. Like the satisfaction of cleverly adding arugula to an old pasta recipe and drawing rave reviews from the family. Or kicking back with a beer on a muggy Friday night and planning your hard-earned weekend. Or the exhilarating depravity of an extramarital affair. THESE are the things that help us to get through the endless days of our lives. God bless them.

All of this desultory nonsense brings me to the thing I meant to write this post about. Because I have found one such small pleasure, something that brings me satisfaction and shakes me out of my annoying early-adulthood ennui. And your mother and I thought you were mature enough to know. Just kidding - It's Rec League Softball, fuckers!

Last year, my friends and I put together a D-League team, but we hardly comprehended what we had just done. For how could we have known, in those germinative stages, that we had just set in motion the wheels of history? We struggled in vain to find a name for our motley crew, and nothing seemed to fit. I fought valiantly for The Fire Trucks, but cooler heads prevailed. Someone (the mighty sands of time have obscured who) finally suggested a name that at first struck the rest of us as odd, but we couldn't help but keep coming back to it. There was this inexplicable magnetic pull, and eventually we realized that we couldn't fight it. We all agreed that it was perfect, but we certainly could not have known that it was magic. And so a little team you might know as The Whirling Dervishes was born.

Michelangelo's "Creation of The Whirling Dervishes" in the Sistine Chapel - Ever heard of it?

Sorry, I just get excited. The first question you might have is "Are you guys good?". Well let's just say that if Putin managed to reassemble the USSR, and the NewSSR attacked America, and both sides fought to a standstill and decided that an epic slow-pitch softball match should be held to determine the ultimate balance of global power, and the United States chose The Whirling Dervishes to go up against the NewSSR Vodkas, then assuming that the NewSSR Vodkas play in a league that is similar in skill-level to the D-League in Aurora, Colorado, and assuming that they are about an average team within that league, then I would give The Dervishes about a 45-percent chance of prevailing. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I thought so.

The roster is almost entirely comprised of people who grew up together. We know all kinds of embarrassing shit about each other. But don't even ask. Because Dervishes stick together, asshole. They don't leave each other hanging out to dry. That would be cold. Dervish colors don't run, motherfucker (provided you wash on "cold" and hang out to dry). Our pitcher is my father, and if you step in against him, he's your father, too, chump. Too much? Probably.

Anyway, I tell you all this because the first game of the new Dervish season just so happens to be tomorrow, against a team called the A-Town Nugs. So if you like your softball teams to have annoyingly foreshortened names ("Nugs"? Really?), then the A-Town Nugs are for you. On the other hand, if you're against the genocide in Darfur, then Go Dervishes! Either way, if you're into standing-room-only crowds full of your standard Dervish groupies, trolling for Dervish seed, then you should come by Olympic Park at 5:50 tomorrow. Look for us. We'll be the ones wearing the grins that only winners wear. Or stay tuned. Because starting next week, we'll have the Weekly Dervish Update to keep you all apprised of what's happening with your favorite softball team that's named after Spinning Turkish Holy Dudes. There will be prize giveaways and stuff, so check often! G'day.

P.S. There will not be prizes.
P.P.S. You can ask for autographs if you want, but only some of us know how to write.
P.P.P.S. We are also taking requests for Dervish seed. Will be filled on a first-come-first-served basis. Gross pun? You decide. (Yes.)

Wherein I Lose My Mind

2008-02-16T19:42:00.032-07:00

Hi there. Weren't expecting me back so soon? Expected me to be gone for a few weeks, as usual? Well, I thought you'd be happier to see me. Why are you so flustered?... What's going on? Whose shoes are those!? You fucking whore!

It's a busy weekend, and I really didn't expect to post anything for a while, but I also didn't expect to read a Forbes article entitled "What Your Car Says To The Opposite Sex". It's already changed my life. I'll admit that just yesterday I was a novice in the field of car semiotics. And no wonder. I drive a simple '98 Saturn, and the only language it can muster is an onomatopoeic, retarded "VROOM!", which women rarely respond to. I just figured that every other car was the same. How wrong I was, friends. Forbes has opened my ears to the limitless lexicon that cars have developed in the past decade, unbeknownst to silly old me. The progress is staggering. The newest luxury cars are capable of witty repartee in several languages, always culminating in an accepted invitation for drinks on the veranda, and, ultimately, oral sex.

There is really so much of this article to talk about, that I'm going to go through it step-by-step, Fire Joe Morgan-style. Let no critic ever say that I ignored perfectly stealable formats. Here we go (bold is excerpted from the article; regular type is me):

Can't seem to catch the attention of that certain someone? You may be driving him or her away before you open your car door.

You might wonder how often it is that "that certain someone" is in a position to see you pulling up in your lame-o, turnoff car. You also might wonder why you would be smitten with a person who apparently comes to dumb conclusions about you based on your current mode of transportation. Hold on, though. Maybe your ride says more about you than you might imagine.

That's because your ride says more about you than you might imagine.

Bingo. At this point I was intrigued, and I instantly suspected that my past romantic failures were not due to my own ineptness, but rather because my car had been telling girls behind my back about all the helpless animals and schoolchildren I've willfully mowed down over the years. It all made sense, finally. I knew my Knock-Knock jokes weren't "horrifyingly terrible"! Take that, therapist!

A man pulling up to a ritzy restaurant in a two-seater Porsche 911 sends a signal that he is a determined, highly successful, middle-aged professional.

Ohhhh, we're talking about signals here. So check it out: If you're like an 80-year-old dude trying to score some 30-something tail, the 911 is for you. You just pull up to Le Food, and the girls will pick up on your determinedness, and successitude, and, most importantly for your purposes, middle-agedness, and they'll be intrigued. Now comes the tricky part, because you need to find a way to seduce them without letting them see your wrinkly old-guy face. Because I'm pretty sure that your car won't help you project middle-agedness when you hobble out and take your walker out of the backseat. You are disgustingly old. But what do I know? I drive a Silver Saturn SL2 with 93,000 miles on it. Maybe an 11-year-old can step out of a 911, and the girls will be so captivated by his car's luxurious signals that they'll peg him as a 44-year-old stockbroker.

The guy behind the wheel of an Audi RS4 sedan is confident shopping on Rodeo Drive and making deals on Park Avenue.

Self-explanatory. Are you a little squeamish shopping in Beverly Hills or brokering megadeals in the Big Apple? Here's a step-by-step guide to help you alleviate your anxiety:

1. Buy the RS4

You're welcome. Even if you've never made it out of Idaho, you're now well-prepared for a confident coastal foray.

Let's skip forward a little bit. Now we're learning what a car can say about a woman:

"The (Jaguar) XF is extremely modern," says Anne Clinard, a Jaguar North America spokeswoman. "It says that I am an individual who has a strong sense of self and appreciates the finer things in life. People know you have discerning tastes and that you are not afraid to stand out and drive something different than what your neighbors may drive."

You've gotta hand it to Forbes. To figure out what specific cars say to the world-at-large, they go to impartial sources: spokespeople for the car manufacturers in question. Anne Clinard may awkwardly segue from the first- to the second-person, but she really seems to know what the XF has to say. She knows that it takes a brave "individual" to drive around the neighborhood in a new Jaguar. I can just imagine how unique and discerning Jaguar XF drivers must appear to their upper-crust neighbors. They might as well ride in on a jewel-encrusted, three-legged ostrich. A Jaguar in a rich neighborhood? Get outta towne! But XF drivers are well-equipped to handle the whispers. Their sense of self will carry them through.

Automakers like Jaguar know that a car is more than transportation for some; it is an extension of the driver's image.

That's just how it is. It's not like Jaguar spends untold millions of dollars to make sure people know that people of a certain standing drive Jaguars.

That's why we turned to them to see what the market's most popular cars for men and women, according to J.D. Power and Associates, say about their drivers. Our findings come from automaker-supplied buyer demographics.

Wait. Didn't this article start by saying that your car could be the reason that you're seen as such a terrible prospective mate? But all of the article's conclusions about drivers are drawn from automakers' demographic info? So the girl of my dreams would only know what my car says about me if she pores over the market research of various car companies? Maybe it is the Knock-Knock jokes. Damn you, Dr. Fitz! See you next week!

"This new generation of consumers looks at a vehicle as a piece of clothing," says Wesley Brown, partner in Iceology, a Los Angeles-based consumer research and trend consulting firm. "We have clients who say 'My BMW or Jeep is the last thing I put on before I go out.' They are concerned with the color of their iPod and spend $200 to $300 for cool-looking sunglasses."

Wow. Wesley's clients are fucking douchebags. I'd like to hear the audio of Wesley's interview, because it seems impossible to give that quote without a disdainful inflection. I would also like to see video, because I have a hunch that he would enclose "cool-looking sunglasses" in sarcastic air-quotes. How come no one at Jaguar included "fucker" along with "discerning", "appreciates the finer things" and "strong sense of self"?

High on the luxury list for women are safety, reliability and value. Men prefer the exact opposite; performance, power and style are among their top choices.

You heard it here first: The exact opposite of safety is performance. Kids, remember that come SAT season, and you can go to a state school like Uncle Shawn.

Take the Porsche 911. Its buyers are 86.8% male with the average age of 51 and median income of $390,000. They are driven to succeed and like to reward themselves for achieving their goals.

Recurring theme: Buyers of expensive cars are "driven to succeed", which as far as I can tell means "Can afford to buy an expensive car," thereby telling us nothing new about the buyer of an expensive car. Similarly, "like to reward themselves for achieving their goals" can be understood as "Would buy an expensive car". In related news, men who have cancer are cancerous, and are more likely to die of cancer than men who do not have cancer.

If you are looking for love, you may want to steer clear of women driving sport-utility vehicles.

So an article that began by saying that your book is being judged by its cover is now encouraging you to judge other books by their covers. Also, I was really, really hoping that the next sentence would reveal that market research has shown SUV-driving women to be both fatter and smellier than their car-driving counterparts. But alas:

Mike Michels, a Lexus/Toyota spokesman, says 66% of the RX 350 SUV buyers are female, and 78% are married. Their median age is 55 and they have a median income of $141,000. About 25% of female buyers have children under age 18, suggesting that many are empty-nesters.

Oh well. Also, it seems a little crazy to recommend that men "steer clear" of women driving SUVs based on the sales figures of a luxury model that doesn't even rank in the top-ten selling SUV models for 2007. I'm not saying that the RX 350 figures are any different from other, better-selling models; I'm not doing that research. It just seems like a hasty claim. All those poor SUV-driving single women, destined to be alone because Forbes says talking to them ain't worth it. It's a shame.

Then the article inexplicably craps out and talks briefly about niche marketing, ending with a strange discussion of Volvo's attempts to market their cars to a wider range of audiences. No tidy conclusion. No "So next time your love life can't get any traction, consider a change of wheels." Nothing. Just this:

The Volvo S40, with a base price of $24,365, has helped Volvo reach single women who want safety in a more stylish package at an affordable price.

The End. It started with a promise to outline unconsidered ways your car might affect how you're perceived, and ended with the boring machinations of a car company's marketing success. It's like they realized that the article was incredibly stupid about halfway through; that everyone already knows that nice cars suggest that you're rich, and less-nice cars suggest nothing (but don't preclude you from being rich). They realized the article was a useless nothing-husk, and they bailed. But not before an awesome slideshow. Some of the contestants:

Volvo S40
Base Price: $24,365
The woman who drives this car is often in her 30s, college-educated and likely isn't status-conscious. She is more concerned about the welfare of her family and friends than about image.

You are a saint, hypothetical Volvo woman. You care more about keeping your family and friends safe than you do about looking cool. If only hypothetical Mazda woman had been so selfless, instead of choosing Botox injections over a life-saving surgical procedure for her daughter.

Jaguar XF
Base Price: $49,975
The woman behind the wheel of the Jaguar XF is an educated and highly successful woman. She surrounds herself with the finer things in life and is equally as likely to be single or married.

Did they mention whether this woman was a woman? Also, "finer things in life" = "bought a Jaguar XF. Duh." Adds nothing except redundant redundancy.

Lexus RX 350
Base Price: $37,500
Behind the wheel of this car is a married mother who is a college-educated professional and takes great pride in herself and her accomplishments. She surrounds herself with luxurious things because she has the money to pamper herself. But she doesn't make frivolous purchases; she wants luxury that fulfills a purpose and performs a function.

"Takes great pride in herself and her accomplishments" = ...I don't even fucking know where they're getting this. Did they do demographic research on pride levels, or does it just mean "Proud to have bought a Lexus RX 350"?

Also, I don't want to be this guy, but don't words like "pamper" and "luxury" sort of imply frivolity? I refuse to link the dictionary, but words like "excessive" and "unnecessary" are likely to come up a few times. When your car has a "backup camera" and DVD voice-activated navigation, shit is getting to be a little frivolous. Also a little frivolous: parsing definitions like this. Moving on.

Acura TSX
Base Price: $27,785
The driver behind the wheel of the Acura TSX is a successful woman who is likely married with a median income of $87,000. She likes tasteful things but isn't into flash and status.

In this article this amounts to a colossal dis of the Acura TSX. A car under 30,000 dollars? Clearly this woman has no interest in flashiness or status. I'll bet she doesn't even special-order her maple syrup. Is it not weird for them to write all these captions as if they're talking about a specific person, while continuing to describe stats like median income? She's fucking fake; just keep your weird illusion going and say she makes around $87,000.

Mercedes Benz CL Class
Base Price: $103,875
This affluent man is a captain of industry or a very successful professional who wants it known that he has arrived. He surrounds himself in tasteful luxury and attacks life. He doesn't waste time on the mundane or frivolous.

I know this gets repetitive, but doesn't "surrounds himself in tasteful luxury" just mean that the car he bought is tasteful and luxurious? So aren't we really just inferring things about the car he bought based on the car he bought? Or did they go to his house and approve of his subjective taste in grandfather clocks? Also, this man considers the mundane and frivolous a waste of time. Case-in-point: he does not "get" the mail. He doesn't "make" breakfast. He doesn't "go on" dates. He attacks his mailbox. He destroys breakfast. He assaults women. And he never laughs, unless he hears a joke that is relevant to his stock portfolio. Envy him.

Mercedes-Benz C-Class
Base Price: $31,975
This woman demands respect. She is a successful, independent thinker with discerning tastes. She is not shy about what she wants, likes to make bold statements and is driven to succeed.

You do not fuck with this woman. She is both "successful" and "driven to succeed" (as evinced by, you guessed it, her goddamn car). She is also an independent thinker, unless she only decided to buy the car after reading about how cool it is on forbes.com... Then she would be quite dependent, if you think about it. And she likes to make bold statements, like "You, sir, murdered my grandfather," and "Reagan was assassinated by his own brain". I assume. Or maybe "likes to make bold statements" is just another euphemism for "drives a nice car". But that would be readily apparent anyway, so I'm sure that's not it.

Lincoln Mark LT
Base Price: $38,340
This well-to-do guy wants it all and is in a position to get it. He likes the best things in life and doesn't mind being noticed. He is driven to succeed and likes to make a statement wherever he goes.

Hey, Forbes caption writer: we fucking get it. Nice cars. Successful. Likes the best things. Successed. Finer things. Success-oriented. Statement-making success story. Success-loving. Why not try saying things that the cars in question, like, do? If my only criterion for a car is one that says "This guy's successful", I'll just go buy a speaker I can mount on top that says "This guy's successful" over and over and over. And I will use the money I saved to hire a discreet hitman to murder the editor of Forbes magazine.

Or, better yet, they could hire me to write these captions, so that I can be successful, too. Here's my audition:

12-Speed Mountain Bike
Base Price: 75 dollars
No hill is too steep for this guy. Typically in his mid-tweens, with a median annual income of his-allowance-times-52, this kid commands respect on the playground. Driven to succeed, this jack-of-all-trades can adjust his speed to any situation. He appreciates the finer things, like Biggie-sized fries and expensive packs of baseball cards. What a successful succeeder.

Lamborghini Murcielago
Base Price: $300,000
What a success story this guy is. A Powerball jackpot winner, he has no idea what 35 divided by 5 equals, much less how to manage money. But he just bought a Murcielago, so he is a successful, finer-things-loving, tasteful, individualistic, go-getting captain of industry who takes pride in his achievements and is addicted to meth.

*Whew* Did you actually read all of that? Sorry. Goodnight.

The Object Of Your Unrequited Desires Has Herpes, Anyway

2008-02-14T15:58:00.005-07:00

So apparently you are to be wary if you receive a Valentine's Day e-card today, because it could contain a virus. (I've only seen the story linked above, but likely headlines from other news outlets include "Tainted Love", "HeartWorm", and "Hey Retard! Don't Open Strange E-Mail Attachments, Ever!"). If I were a curmudgeonly old person, I'd lament that even something as seemingly pure as a Valentine's Day greeting is fair game for hucksters in this day-and-age. I'd probably get all glassy-eyed as I slipped into a rueful anecdote about how such concerns would never have crossed my mind in Plano, TX circa 1946, when people respected holidays, and Debbie DuBois and I traded Valentine's Day cards and chased grasshoppers until a well-earned suppertime. And I'd sum it up by saying that these are strange and sad days indeed. Then you would tell me to shut the fuck up, because 1946 sucked and the fucking country was still segregated and infinitely more close-minded. And I would be humiliated and I'd slink back to my rocking chair and pine away for the days when kids respected their daggum elders enough to let them prattle on impotently.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Not About Lent

2008-02-08T00:39:00.001-07:00

I am a huge sports fan. It's no secret. On any given weekend afternoon, it's not too far-fetched to assume that I'm presently jumping up and down in front of my TV, hoarsely screaming an unintelligible string of verbs and expletives. And at least 3/4 of the time, the TV will be on. (1/8 of the time I'm berating the blank screen for being dusty, and the rest of the time I'm just cranky, and the spot in front of my TV happens to be a good place to stand and rant at nothing in particular.)

But even though I really get into it, sometimes when I'm watching a pregame show before some particularly enormous matchup, I can take a step back and see why a lot of people think sports are fucking stupid. Like, when they play some sports montage backed by music from a war movie, and some baritone-voiced guy starts spouting shit like "Throughout the ages" and "future generations" and "immortality" and "man's innate desire to be the best", and William Shakespeare quotes get busted out, and highlight reels get enhanced with mighty thunderclaps and former coaches bloviate that this is what it's all about, baby. Then after all this pomp they cut to commercial and I'm like "NOOO! THE FATE OF THE FUCKING UNIVERSE IS AT STAKE HERE AND YOU GUYS CUT TO JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE GETTING HIT IN THE FUCKING BALLS?!". And that's when I realize that it's all sort of dumb.

But if you didn't watch this year's Super Bowl, then shame on you. Sure, ultimately sporting events mean very little while claiming to mean a lot. But you know what else means very little in the long run? Your mom's birthday. And you wouldn't miss that for the world, would you? And I know, all the ridiculous hyperbole is off-putting. But Super Bowl 42 was fucking awesome. It fucking lived up to it, man. Super Bowl 42 actually did it! It singlehandedly rejuvenated my flagging faith in the goodness of things. What's more, Super Bowl 42 cured AIDS. Just like that. Poof. Gone. The mighty fucking Patriots marched in undefeated, riding a wave of hype and draped in unconvincing false humility, and left legitimately humbled. And to celebrate their newfound humbleness, I danced and gloated and pompously mocked them. Because that's what winners do. Especially winners who only win by virtue of watching a team they hate eat it bigtime. I just wanna thank my mom, Jesus Christ, and spicy hot wings. Without any of you, this still would have happened the same way. But it wouldn't have been as special.

Lost in the furor about the Patriots, though, was another long Super Bowl winning streak. Only this one didn't go up in flames. That's right, the hotly-contested mantle of "Fucking Shittiest Goddamn Super Bowl Commercial", unofficially awarded by me. Every year. In my mind. And it's always the same. Sure, seemingly every season a hot new contender rises through the ranks to challenge our perpetual champion, but in the end it comes down to execution (as the sportscasters say), and you just can't unseat this heartless, ice-cold Sucking Machine. Sorry, GoDaddy. Sorry, Salesgenie.com. Bud Light is still the king. Without further ado...your champion.

I don't know how they do it. Year-in, year-out people expect them to finally not suck, and yet they continue to confound the critics and churn out new shitty juggernauts. I know I've talked about this before, but I can't help it. Who the fuck is writing these things? What world do they live in? How does it work?

Writer A: Dude, we totally need to write a *sick* Super Bowl Commercial, or they're gonna be like, "You fags are fired" or whatever.

Writer B: Hells yeah, man. What should it be? Like, we need to think about shit that dudes like us don't wanna do, but that our stupid girlfriends, like, make us do, then we can make it about finding a way to drink Bud Light.

Writer A: Totally. Girls are always, like, making dudes like us do stupid-assed shit, and I'm all, "Bitch, I don't wanna do that shit!".

Writer B: Seriously, man. Like, what's something that a girl's made you do?

Writer A: ... ... Uhhhhhhh. *Laughs* Dude, I'm totally drawing a blank here. Gimme a second. How bout you?

Writer B: ... ... ...

A LONG, UNCOMFORTABLE SILENCE, IN WHICH BOTH WRITERS STARE AT EACH OTHER AND TACITLY REALIZE THAT NEITHER OF THEM HAS BEEN AROUND A GIRL IN A VERY, VERY LONG TIME.

Writer A: You know what I hate? When girls, like...um...like when they...um....they have these parties, where they all get together and, like, um...take these pregnancy tests together. And they make their boyfriends come along, like we're a bunch of fags or something...I'm not a fag, y'know?

Writer B: Dude, totally! I'm not, either! I hate when chicks do that shit! Or like, when they...um...they make you go like shopping with them, because she's like...looking for caviar for her...pet poodle, and shit.

Writer A: Yeah, man! That shit is the worst! Or when they...like... uh...invite all their friends over...for like...a cheese... and wine party, and all their boyfriends have to come and... eat cheese... like faggy mice. Like some straight-up Ratatouille shit, bro.

Writer B: Dude, that should be the commercial! And then the dudes, like, are all walking in with this cheese and wine and whatever, only it's not actually cheese, it's really--

Writer A: Bud Light! Dude! That shit is genius!

Writer B: Hells yeah!

THEY KISS PASSIONATELY
END

Anyway, congrats, Bud Light. See you next year.

New Year's Resolutions!

2008-01-10T06:43:00.001-07:00

If you have somehow made it through the first few weeks of January without seeing anyone's banal and hopelessly optimistic dreams for 2008, then congratulations. Now allow me to Oswald/Grassy Knoll on your parade. And if you thought that I wouldn't stoop to using a concept that was probably invented to help businessfucks move gym equipment, then clearly you don't understand the abyssal depth of my intellectual laziness. Because the fact is, I'm not a very impressive human being, and there are plenty of self-improvement projects for me to choose from. Just a few:

Eat Better - I'm pretty sure it's on everyone's list, but this resolution can rarely be as absolutely necessary as it is for me. The human body is fucking remarkable. My diet is entirely devoid of any nutritional value; I might as well be eating mud. But somehow, I continue to exist and function at a level that only a few could deny is above retarded. I can't even begin to grasp the physiological process that turns my death-wish diet into life-sustaining neurotransmitters and fluids and whatever. It freaks me out. It's like throwing a bunch of fertilizer into the air, and then by the time it hits the ground, it's a shiny red bicycle. And even though you should probably just be happy with your good fortune, you can't help but look down every time you ride it and feel paranoid that it's going to fall apart and turn back into shit at any moment. I don't want to have my arm turn into a Chipotle burrito and fall off next time I throw a football.

So we're back to "Eat Better". I'm no nutritionist, but I believe that this involves eating healthy foods more often, and just as importantly, eating absurdly unhealthy foods less often. Fast food needs to go. Besides, what's faster than an apple? You're right, The Flash is. But, um, McDonald's isn't. So obviously there is to be no McDonald's unless they're giving away Flash toys. This shouldn't be too tough, because while I'll cop to the occasional McDonald's trip, in the aftermath I always feel as bloated and disgusting as the Olsen twins probably feel after eating anything. This one's doable. Moving on.

Learn to play guitar - That’s right - Mine ears have heard the glory of the strumming of the chord. This resolution is perfect because it represents the synthesis of several smaller resolutions, the first of which is to “Capital-R Rock by any means necessary”. Also, “Find a cool excuse to die young” and “Get more girls to like me or at least think that I have emotional depth”. Anyway, by this time next year I hope to be bothering those around me with constantly flubbed renditions of their favorite songs, due both to my poor technical skills and the incorrect tablature that I got from some website. All of this means that years from now, you may remember 2008 as the year you killed me in a fit of frustrated rage.

Continue to resist hiking trips - This resolution differs from the others on the list, in that it does not involve a change, but rather a continuation. This does not in any way detract from its importance, though. People love hiking, and Colorado presents plenty of opportunities to explore beautiful scenery while taking in some fresh air and escaping the day-to-day drudgery of city life. It's all very tempting, and I've given in before. The problem is that I occasionally forget an important fact: I fucking hate hiking. I hate bugs, I hate brush, I hate boots, I hate photo-ops, and I hate ascending things (be they hills or hierarchies). When I was younger, I used to go sledding down at Arrowhead elementary (my alma mater), which was half-a-mile away. The trip there was fine, and so was the sledding, but the trip home fucking sucked. I was tired, my extremities were numb, my nose was running, and then I had to stumble home in my awesome but cumbersome one-piece snowsuit, dragging the goddamn sled behind me. The same principle applies here. Trudging home all tired and bug-bitten as it gets dark after a hike takes what little fun there was to begin with, murders it, and buries it up in the Flatirons, to be repeatedly trod over by future hikers but never, ever found.

This isn't to say that I hate exercising. I grew up playing all kinds of sports, each of which beats the shit out of hiking. I think I just need the competition. For all its natural splendor, carved over hundreds of millions of years, at the end of the day you just can't talk shit about nature's personal hygiene, and "In your face!" means nothing to a mountain goat. Anyway, I hope I can continue to resist hiking's siren song. It sounds sweet, but all that's there are jagged rocks. I'll leave the hills to Bigfoot and letter-bombers.

Live - I don't mean "Live" as in "Dance as if no one's watching" or "Lose yourself in the moment, you own it, you better never let it go". I mean "Live", like "Be extant at the end of 2008". It seems easy, but I want it on the list because I'll either accomplish it and be happy or I'll fail and it'll look eerie whenever someone looks at this again. If I don't make it, tell that girl with the dyed black hair from Humanities 2000 that I loved her. She might pretend not to know who I am. That was our thing. Also, my family. I loved them, too.

Stay in contact with people - You know how when you're playing with a baby you can hide a toy behind your back and the baby acts like that toy has magically disappeared from existence? That's adorable. But when a 22-year-old acts like things that aren't in his line of sight don't exist, that is unacceptable. I suck at staying in touch. So, for 2008, I will try to be less like a baby. That means accepting object permanence and keeping tabs on the whereabouts of friends, and it also means going potty like a big boy. The baby food stays, though. It's healthy.

Dance as if no one's watching - Because they really aren't.

The Price Of Eggs In China

2007-12-12T00:25:00.000-07:00

In elementary school, my class used to get semi-regular visits from the Desk Fairy. The Desk Fairy, we were told, would stop by our classroom from time to time and inspect each student's desk for cleanliness and organization. The students who made the cut would come to class on Monday to find some sort of treat or classroom currency waiting for them. Suffice it to say that no one in elementary school was very impressed by this idea. Come on. By then we knew most every cuss word, Offspring song, and "ha ha you're gay" joke in existence. Rolos and raffle tickets were fine, but a fairy? I guess it all served a purpose, though, because it made what can now be understood as an invasion of privacy into something that conjured up images of our teacher prancing from boogery desk to boogery desk wearing a tutu and carrying a bucket of candy (and if you knew Mr. Stoneman, this would be hilarious to you, too). Most kids by default kept their desks clean enough to make the grade, possibly driven by a normal human desire to stay organized. I never got anything from the Desk Fairy, though. In fact, my desk might have been the reason the Desk Fairy started drinking.

Anyone who knows me knows this about me: I do not have my shit together. I never have. My desk used to be so dirty it wouldn't fully close. I dropped out of high school before I finished a semester. I leave things on the floor in front of my bed, then wake up every day and promptly trip over them (which is actually fine, because it turns out that screaming "fuck" or "cocksucker" is a good vocal cord exercise). Every time I take a test, I have to borrow a pencil from someone around me, then that person finishes first and I lose their pencil before I see them again. Basically, anything in life that involves even a modicum of organization or foresight is beyond me.

I've always envied people who somehow manage to stay on top of their responsibilities. If you've ever started a paper more than 8 hours before it's due, or made plans to go to a movie with friends like a week in advance and then honored those plans, or stayed on a consistent sleep schedule, then you're a better person than I am, and I hate you. I even envy those little everyday rituals that people develop, like doing the Jumble, or going for a jog, or hitting up Starbucks on the way to work. I guess it's just the level of comfort and rhythm that daily rituals seem to provide. I also realize that to be mystified by something so simple makes me sound like a robot from an '80s made-for-TV movie who becomes fascinated by a child's capacity to love unconditionally. I'm OK with it.

Recently, I've tried to develop some of these daily placeholders. By far the most successful of my efforts has been to drink some sort of hot beverage every morning. It's a pretty simple thing (which is why I can do it), but somehow it makes me feel like everything is right in the world. For 8 minutes or so a day, my shit is together, and not in diaspora. I'm not sure why or how it works, but I'm going to contend that it's the mug. Something about the act of sipping from a mug with a handle slows everything down and puts your metaphorical ducks in a row. Or it might just be my mug, because I found the stupidest/baddest-ass mug in the world. Just looking at it makes me unexplainably happy. Behold - Christmas Dogs!

This makes me laugh every time I see it. The picture is low-quality, but I'll take you through it. The dogs are posing in front of a Christmas tree, and in front of them are cookies and milk. There is a note affixed to the mug in the bottom-right, which I've blown up below.

First, I just have to point out that the artist missed a chance to be very meta by making the mug in the picture a Christmas Dogs mug, as well (kind of like writing an annoying blog post about blogging...shit). But anyway, did I mention that the puppies supposedly wrote a motherfucking note? At first glance you might just think that some lame asshole decided to pose some dogs with Santa hats in front of a tree. But no, this is a universe in which puppies are capable of writing. All of a sudden, the rules have changed. Then the letter reveals that these are not just adorable little puppies who can miraculously read and write. These are naughty little scamps, caught in the act of incorrigible superpuppy rascaldom. The one on the left has a candy cane in his mouth, the one in the middle a cookie, and the one on the right clearly just drank some of Santa's milk. And the puppies aren't just apologizing after the fact. They wrote the note ahead of time, then proceeded to keep eating Santa's goddamn food. There is no remorse here. These are cold, calculating, cuddly puppy bastards. Also, notice that the "e"s in "Dear" and "We" are backwards, but the "e" in "explain" is normal. They are getting smarter by the second. From the beginning of a one-sentence note to the end, you can detect improvement. Humanity is fucked. Armed with the knowledge that these puppies are capable of more planning and cunning than I am, we can start looking at the individual dogs in a new light.

Benoit

The streetwise and devious leader of the group. I think it goes without saying that Benoit is the leader here. I mean, come on, he looks like Wishbone - you know he's the brains of the outfit. But there's just a certain je ne sais quoi about the guy. He's got style. I mean, there's wearing a hat, and there's wearing a hat, knowhati'msayin'? Also, Benoit is a ladies' man. While his lackies greedily devour their ill-gotten food, Benoit carries around a candy cane like it's a rose. But there's something menacing about the guy. The left side of his face is bathed in darkness like he's Vito Corleone, and there's something cold and detached in his eyes. You just get the idea that Benoit will murder you with the pointy end of that candy cane if you so much as look at him funny. Maybe his bark is worse than his bite, who knows. But don't you fucking dare make fun of his "Joy" sweater. Joy is his mother's name, and through years of painstaking research I know exactly two things about dogs: 1. They love their moms, and 2. They are too hairy to get tattoos.

Carbuncle

The group's enforcer/chameleon. Carbuncle is a soi-disant moron. He is known for his general loutishness and poor conjugation skills, but this is all a ruse. Carbuncle knows how to manage expectations and make them work to his own benefit. He could have been a successful businessdog, if he hadn't grown up on Benoit's side of the tracks. He lacks Benoit's natural charisma and leadership skills, and is more comfortable when he's pretending to be someone else.

Percy

Poor Percy. Yeah, he's greedily drinking Santa's milk, but you know he doesn't feel good about it. There is a quiet desperation in his eyes that lets you know that he never thought he'd end up here. But way leads on to way, and here he is, debasing himself and depriving St. Nick a hard-earned swig of cow lactation. Benoit and Carbuncle are his childhood pals, and he's always tagged along and put up with their abuse because they're the closest thing he has to family. But the eyes don't lie: he can't take it anymore. I like to think that this is Percy's last job; he's getting out. He has dreams of opening an eponymous bistro and settling down. If this were a ridiculous movie, and not a ridiculous mug (and why can't it be? Those stupid Geico caveman commercials became a stupid TV series), Percy would never get his chance. His last job would go horribly awry, and he'd be killed by a vengeful Santa Claus. Benoit and Carbuncle would be crushed. Sure, they often treated him poorly, but he was like their kid brother. He was innocent. Cue the badass third act, where Benoit and Carbuncle regroup and devise an elaborate revenge plot, which involves Carbuncle dressing up like a woman and seducing Santa while Benoit leads Mrs. Claus to the scene, leading to Santa's ultimate fall from grace and a high building. Then, cut to sixth months later. Carbuncle has opened up Percy's Bistro, and it's a resounding success. The kitchen is staffed by Santa's elves, and Benoit saunters on in with the newly liberated Jessica Claus, and orders a scone. Benoit couldn't give up the life of crime. He's bummed that Carbuncle dropped out, but at least he's got his lady with him. After exchanging a few pleasantries, they head out the door, and through the window we see them take off in Santa's sleigh. "Merry Christmas" writes itself across the screen in big red cursive. The end.

Anyway, I love this mug. It is so unbelievably stupid and lame that it's impossible not to love it. If the person who painted this was being completely sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek, I would call that person a genius. I'm guessing, though, that this painter truly believes in that special magic that can only result when Christmas and puppy scampishness collide. According to the bottom of the mug, that artist is one J. Newland. I am afraid for J. Newland. Anyone who could envision a universe this over-the-top, this nauseatingly adorable, is going through a pretty bleak time. I want to reach out and help, but I'm scared that to do so might deny repressed and sad WASP mothers everywhere the seminal voice of their generation. If someone had cured Van Gogh's depression, we wouldn't have Starry Night. J. Newland might live a desperate, lonely, ephemeral life, but Christmas Dogs will be loved forever. Of course, you might say that to question J. Newland's sanity so soon after crafting elaborate backstories for painted dogs might be akin to Carlos Mencia telling someone they're not funny. Fuck you.

It's Not A Dirty Word, Guys (It Just Feels Like It Is)

2007-11-17T00:16:00.001-07:00

I’ve got a confession to make. It’s been weighing on me, man. I’ve been living with it for months. Deep breath. OK, I can do this. I have a…I’ve got…I’ve contracted a crippling and debilitating case of…a blog. There. Blog blog blog. It feels so liberating to finally say it, y’know? I don’t think there’s anything to be ashamed about. Millions of Americans suffer from blogs, and I hope that by screaming mine from the mountaintops, I can help remove some of the stigma that’s been attached to the word for years. For so long I’ve tacitly endorsed the rampant blogophobia by shying away from the term. I refused to admit that I blog. Well no more. I’m here, and I’m ready to take you through my heretofore unacknowledged past as a blogger, and I hope you’ll join me. We will stare down the future with our heads held high. Just me, you, and a blog made for spew.

So that last post was written by Nate, my younger brother (ed. note - Nate has since deleted his post). Nate often does things, and has also been known to care about things. You should get to know him, because he’ll probably be important someday. I, on the other hand, will ask to crash at your place for a couple of days, and 3 years later our relationship will be irreparably fractured when I steal your futon to get you back for totally fucking stabbing me in the back when I thought you were always there for me, all because I sorta fucked up your family room and beat up your kid when he beat me at Madden.

Hopefully Nate will be posting more often, because sometimes when I’m at a creative low-ebb, I get tired of seeing my own stupid writing all the way down the line. Besides, maybe a little sibling rivalry will spur the blog to greater heights (ok, maybe off the ground). And if I ever get the impression that I’m being shown up, I can just throw him down some stairs. Because sometimes a blogger just has to mark his territory, and apparently pissing on your keyboard voids the warranty under the little-known “You Are a Sick Fuck” clause. But if you film the keyboard-pissing, it makes you the proprietor of the #137 website in all of Thailand, and #35 in the all-important “50 to 70 year old pervert with unkempt earhair and a nose that whistles with every intake of breath” demographic. You might wonder what it takes to get to #1, but it’s out of the question. I have scruples, and I respect salamanders way too much to even think of doing something like that.

So until recently I’ve never really tried to indoctrinate myself into the blogosphere. Saying “blogosphere” actually makes me feel dirty all over. Some words just don’t sound right coming from your vocal cords. Like, picture your grandma reading the lyrics to H.O.V.A. aloud. The part where she goes “Fo' sheezy my neezy keep my arms so freezy” is an approximation of how awkward it sounds when I say "blogosphere" out loud. You see, your grandma and I like to stay in our respective comfort zones (granted, there’s some overlap; Merle Haggard slays me, and your grandmother loves a good fart joke. And she and I have sex sometimes. And afterward she tells me what war rations were like). Anyway, it is far outside my comfort zone to use the same lingo that Andy Rooney uses when he’s pointing out just how zany things have gotten these days. Your grandma loves Andy Rooney, too.

I’ll admit it: When I first started blogging, I didn’t know that “blog” was short for “weblog” (not pronounced “we blog”, because that wouldn’t clarify what ‘blogging’ is at all. But it would sound more communitarian). I just figured BLOG was an acronym like LASER (Looks Awesome! Safe Earhair Removal!). Possibilities included Big Ladies Own Guns, Big Ladies Overuse Girdles, Big Ladies Outeat Godzilla, and Big Ladies? Oh, Gross!

I guess I’m still a little uneducated about the whole subculture, though. I still don’t know what it is to “troll”. I could easily look this up, but I don’t do things that make me smarter, as a rule. So I just assume that it has something to do with being a blogger who blogs about being ugly and eating children. Also, “Blog Dicking”? It sounds romantic. But before you Dick your Blog you should get it something nice for once: some fancy HTML tags, maybe a new template? You know, like you used to do, when you were still in Blog Love and you two Blog Dicked all the time like Blog Teenagers. Who knows, you might even get a blogjob out of this.

In spite of my old-man-like distrust of your newfangled words and fancypants pants that are fancy, I’m actually making some semblance of an effort to look around the ol’ circle…o’…blogger…dom these days. And I’ve come to the conclusion that my blog is weird. My blog would be like the blog that the other blogs only invite to birthday parties because my blog happens to live right across the street and our blogs’ moms share cacciatore recipes sometimes.

For one thing, I don’t like to hyperlink every other word. This is partially because I know that I would hate to be diverted every three seconds from reading the goddamn blog that I’m voluntarily visiting. Also, though, I’m scared that if I post a link to a John Edwards video on youtube, you’ll just end up finding that video of the monkey peeing in his own mouth and you’ll forget all about my blog. And my blog is very needy.

Also, I don’t blog the news, because I hate the news. The news bums me out. But I will admit that sometimes I’ll see a story about a pumpkin shaped like Boris Yeltsin or something, and I feel a fleeting desire to post a little excerpt and then say something pithy beneath the caption, like, um, “Pumpkins are high in vitamin A, which in high doses can be toxic to your liver. So eating your facesake would be bad news for you, Boris. Because of your alcoholism, y’know? Lucky for you, you don’t have to worry about it, because you’re already dead, sucker. P.S. Nice job in Chechnya, asshole.” Yep. Checkmate.

I’m also a little bummed out that no quirky conversational community has developed in the Petri dish that is the blog’s “comments” section. Other blogs have like this regular cast of characters who are united by a love of that particular blog, and they just sit there and quibble with each other, and occasionally the blog proprietor will poke in there and say something brief and semi-charming, and all the commenters will bask in this recognition like it is the first golden ray of sunshine after a long and cannibalistic nuclear winter. But no one comments here except for Elliott. High-fives, Elliott. The general lack of comments may be because most of the readers of my blog can just talk to each other over the Davis family Thanksgiving dinner. But I guess I’m OK without the comments, because some of the regular commenters on other blogs couldn’t be stranger if they had wiggly fingers for teeth.

But for my money, the most annoying thing in the blog…kingdom is when bloggers give their friends and families cute little pseudonyms, like their true identity is some closely-guarded government secret. When your blog has 28,000 hits per day, this can only be described as prudent. But these bloggers need to appreciate their status as blogospheric (now, I say “blogospheric” with the same confused cadence that your grandma would say “Fergalicious”) bellwethers. There’s a trickle down effect, and eventually every two-bit bumpkin blogger feels the need to come up with a cute pseudonym to keep his kinsfolk safe from the Jew-run liberal media. When you write a blog about your life as an antfarm hobbyist, you can feel free to use the real name of your significant other, and even the real names of your carpenter ants. You should probably consider yourself lucky to even have a significant other, weirdo. This is not Sex in the City or Citizen Kane. Codenames are frivolous. But I understand your concern. You love your family, and you want them to be safe. I know how it goes (it goes like this):

Bill: Honey, can you come into the kitchen please? Mark, Katie, you too.
Mark: What’s up, dad?
Bill: Guys, sit down. OK, we knew this day might eventually come. I have entered the blogosphere*. If you ever comment on my blog, you have to use the screen names I made for you. This is also how I will refer to each of you in my blog posts. Any slip-up can be fatal. Mark, you are henceforth “Magic”, like magic MARKers, see? And Katie, you are “Sherlockette”. Get it? Katie? Katie Holmes? Sherlock Holmes?
Katie: This is the lamest thing ever.
Bill: Honey, you will be "Honey". Because you’re my honey.
Honey: Yippee.
Mark: But dad, you’re just an auto mechanic.
Bill: No, Magic. I am an auto mechanic with a blog. And eventually, because of {MufflerMusings}, someone will seek to destroy me and everything I love, and I won’t let that happen. Not to you.
Katie: I hate you, dad.

*unlike me, Bill can say “blogosphere” as if it is in his native tongue.

See what you did, megablogger? Bill’s daughter hates him now. She is going through a very difficult time in her life, and I don’t think a girl who has had two abortions in the last year can afford to have a father figure she doesn’t respect right now. Do you? So suck it up, megablogger, and publish the names of your loved ones. Sure, one of your pets will occasionally be murdered by a bunch of BlogMansons, but that’s the price you pay to be seen as the all-knowing and radiant God of your overflowing comments section.

GUEST WRITER: Cornelius T. McJesus, Professional Hobo

2007-11-09T20:25:00.001-07:00

Dear Sir,

You may think that you have received this letter in error; I can assure you that this is not the case. You know me, sir – or at least you would, were it not for your seeming resolution to cross the street at the very sight of me. You’re a busy man, I understand, and you don’t have time to stop and talk to everyone you see during the day. But would it kill you to acknowledge me as a fellow human being when I say “Good morning” to you? Would it hurt you so much to offer a little more than your standard cursory mumbles and averted gazes? At least have the common decency, sir, to look me in the penis when I’m talking to you.

Times are tough, I get it. I, better than anyone, understand what a man has to lose when he allows himself to be diverted from the task at hand. It is true; I have fallen from the good graces of society, of responsibility. But I do not seek to detain you, sir. I merely seek a brief moment of human contact. Am I now subhuman? Am I no longer a man? Am I no longer worthy of even a fleeting acknowledgment of my manhood? While not everyone can afford to stop and fondle my exposed genitals, the least you could do is pause for a millisecond and look past your prejudgments, look past your ideology - indeed, look past your disdain - and simply look a man in the penis, in spite of his hardship.

Was it not Albert Schweitzer who said, “Think occasionally of the penises of which you spare yourself the sight”? It is true – time’s ravages have taken their toll. One look into my penis will reveal the years of suffering and pain. But you don’t have time, do you? I see you walking your children to school. You shield their eyes. You hurry them on by. You are terrified that they might see the seedy nether regions of society – the America they never learn about in school. You want to shield them from the mangled, herpetic truth. But here it is, sir, in the full light of day. To simply refuse to acknowledge my penis will not make it go away. To look at my penis is not to see the American Dream; there is no story of rags-to-riches, only crags and stitches. My penis’s story is not the tidy story of George Washington’s penis, or Betsy Ross's penis. But you are too cowardly to acknowledge the tale my penis can tell, aren’t you? Home of the brave, indeed.

Again, I understand that you don’t want to lend a helping handjob. All I ask is a little understanding. Next time you’re in front of a mirror, I want you to look yourself in the penis, and ask yourself what it would be like to pee through my eye for a day. Walk a day in my penis, sir, then ask yourself who is really the blue-veined monster here. Do you have the balls to answer that question? You don’t have to suck me off, sir. Just don’t blow me off.

Circumspectly and Circumcisedly yours,

Cornelius T. McJesus

Cornelius T. McJesus is the author of several essays, including “The Government: Friend, Foe, or Run by Giraffe-Necked Aliens With Debatable Intentions?” and “On the Merits of Skeet”. He has recently authored a series of pamphlets, entitled “Double Your Aluminum Cans in 30 days, or Your Handjobs Back!”. He is a regular contributor to “Raving Hobo Quarterly”, “Bridge Aficionado”, and “The Panhandler”. He currently resides in Hackensack, New Jersey with his loyal dog Nixon.

Obligatory Holiday Post

2007-10-31T15:19:00.000-06:00

I almost forgot it was Halloween, the most evil of the secular holidays (OK, besides Abortion Day... and Earth Day). I get closer and closer to forgetting it every year. I'd say about 4 years from now, I'll forget entirely and just think that my boss has somehow been transformed into a big foam dinosaur.

Say what you will about it, but at least today everyone gets to be what they want. People who want attention can get it, and people who like to blend into a crowd are happy, too. I think we've all had one of those paranoid days when it feels like everyone is looking at us when we'd rather just feel anonymous. But today, as I walked in front of Peter Pan and behind a Giant Sperm, I realized that that type of day isn't very likely to ever be Halloween.

This post won't be very long, because I'm writing it in class. In a couple of minutes, I'll have to pack up and take the Buff Bus to the place I illegally parked my car. For anyone lucky enough not to attend CU, the Buff Bus just runs in a continuous 2-mile-or-so circle, and takes students from off-campus housing to campus. It's usually fine, but it can be annoying if you're running late, or if you're next to someone who smells like feet, or if you're riding it when people are packed inside, clown-car-style (especially if one of those clowns has the aforementioned "Smells like feet" distinction). The worst part, though, is riding LeRoy. To clarify, "LeRoy" is, for whatever reason, the sticker that's affixed to the front of the shittiest bus in the Buff Bus fleet. But if you thought "riding LeRoy" meant something else, and it applies to you, then good for you. Anyway, LeRoy sucks. It's rickety and squeaky and miserable. The tiniest potholes rattle your brain, and it seems counterintuitive to give students concussions just before they get to class. I don't know why they don't just get it over with and donate it to a prison. Today I was lucky enough to be riding LeRoy and standing in the aisle, when an abrupt stop-and-start made a girl slip a little and fall into me. Which leads us to the lame/awkward conversation snippet of the day, starring me:

Her: I'm sorry
Me: Oh, it's cool. I don't blame you for inertia.
Her: *Nervous chuckle* (Inside brain: This guy sucks)
Anyone Who Heard This Conversation: (Inside brain: This guy sucks)
Me: (Inside brain: I suck)

To be fair, I probably had a concussion. And, on that note, back to the Buff Bus. Happy Halloween.

Plot Outlines for the Next 3 Bud Light Commercials

2007-10-11T01:48:00.000-06:00

Two unshaven dudes wearing holey jeans and faded t-shirts find an ingenious way to sneak Bud Light into their best friend’s funeral: stash a few in the coffin beforehand. Unfortunately, they later find that their dead buddy’s hands have somehow become tightly wrapped around the bottles. Hilarity ensues.
Two unshaven dudes wearing holey jeans and faded t-shirts sit in a room talking about what a bummer it is that they have to put down their Bud Light when they have to go pee. Guy #1 says “Check it”, and proceeds to demonstrate how he’s trained his dog to pull his zipper up and down for him. Now they can drink while taking a leak. Guys 1 and 2 clink their bottles together to celebrate their ingenuity.
Two unshaven dudes wearing holey jeans and faded t-shirts lament that they can’t enjoy Bud Light and football on Sunday, because they have to help Guy #1’s legally blind grandmother move into a nursing home. Unless…Cut to Nana’s house, where Guys 1 and 2 sit on her couch, drinking Bud Light and watching football. Zoom out to reveal two scary-looking ex-cons moving Nana’s stuff. Nana pats one of the cons on the shoulder and notes how strong her grandson has gotten, but wonders when he started smoking. Guys 1 and 2 clink their bottles together to celebrate their ingenuity. Nana’s stuff is never seen again. Neither is Nana.

Jesus

2007-10-04T01:28:00.002-06:00

Now that is a snappy title for a post. Too often my titles show up in the "Recent Posts" section in abbreviated form, because I couldn't save my long-windedness for the gigantic fucking box right below the little title section. So this is good. And "Jesus" is just bound to suck you in. If not, you're definitely going to hell.

I'm not a Christian. But I grew up Methodist, so I was privy to (read: unable to escape) stories about Jesus' kindness and wisdom and general magical rockinness. And I remember thinking to myself how awesome it must have been to be Jesus. I think a lot of kids occasionally and innocently wonder what it would be like to be in a different situation. Like, what if your parents were professional athletes, or movie stars, or at any rate, what if they were not toothless, alcoholic ne'er-do-wells currently incarcerated for selling gorilla hearts on the black market? I just happened to wonder what it would be like to be God's son, and to suddenly realize that you hit the motherfucking kid jackpot. Your dad is the world's boss, and you have superpowers. The fact that you're fated to die in your thirties is no big deal. Some people die of snakebites before 30, and they never even had a pair of shoes, much less the ability to multiply food, cure leprosy, and (most impressively) build a solid table. Besides, you know you'll be chillin' with dad for eternity (just like the son of an Ivy League president will never have to worry about going to a state school).

Then, of course, I turned 11. And I realized that just because we reenacted Jesus' feats in a little sandbox in Sunday School, that doesn't make them any more true than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle episodes were made true by my brother's and my reenactments when we were 5 years old using fake swords, bowstaffs, and cardboard turtle shells, and using the bushes and trees in our yard to represent Shredder, Bebop, and Rocksteady. FYI - the Turtles always prevailed, and all those trees and bushes are now gone in favor of xeriscaping. How does that taste, evildoers? Anyway, Jesus didn't seem so impressive when interpreted as either a huckster or a make-believe character on par with Master Splinter.

Leonardo (Me, 5, on left) and Donatello (Nate, 3, on right). I am holding a He-Man Sword, which I mentioned in a previous post. It was awesome - it made a clanging noise when it hit something, and had all kinds of shooting sound effects available at the press of a button. I used it until the sword part broke, then I pretended it was a He-Man Knife, because the base was still intact. Then I had to go away to college.

But as I got older, I realized that just because I'd decided Jesus was probably a fraud didn't mean that he wasn't pretty awesome. In fact, it would still be pretty great to be Jesus. Consider:

Reasons It Would Be Awesome To Be Jesus, Anyway

Jesus had to have done some pretty sweet things to fool all those people into thinking that he was God's progeny. I mean, some of the crazier ones, like walking on water, have probably been enhanced by years of hyperbole, but there definitely had to be some kind of cool feat there. I don't really remember all of the things he supposedly did, but I do vaguely recall that he once threw the pharaoh's first-born son across the Delaware River, even while he was nursing a partially torn ACL. And it was a perfect spiral. Now that's worthy of exaltation. He also may have made the Pyramids disappear once.
So we've established that he was a pretty bad-ass magician - someone to be respected at least on par with the holy trinity of Davids: Copperfield, Blaine, and Hasselhoff (whose entire career has been the best example of conjuring a lot out of very little since Jesus' aforementioned fish and bread trick). Granted, nobody looks to David Copperfield to inform the public discourse on stem cell research. But give Jesus a break. The man was an entertainer - he can't help how a bunch of idiots interpret his art. Jesus was the Eminem of Biblical times.
How amazing and convincing was Jesus' act? Oh, I don't know. Why don't you ask his followers, who preserved the most important things Jesus said for all of posterity, and eventually made sure that they were written in red motherfucking ink. I think that any Jesus worth worshiping would occasionally use this clout to be hilarious. Like, maybe every once in a while he'd call Peter over and be like, "Peter, you are my rock. Hear this well, and preserve it so that all of humanity can someday enjoy the fruits of my heavenly wisdom (*whispers in Peter's ear*)".

2000 Years Later, a pastor stands in front of his congregation and reads aloud from Chapter 3, Verses 16-22 of Peter's Letter to the Bullshittians:

And Jesus said unto me, O, yea, let it be heard, that there shall be no fornication with fat chicks, for they are repugnant in the eyes of the Lord. Though shouldst thou be in the midst of an epic dry spell, thou should be given one reprieve by thine bros. But thou should not linger, but rather be certain to hit it and quit it, which to the Lord is known as the Virgin Mary Plan. That is all. I have to poop. And he pooped. And it was good.

(Of course, determining how long a dry spell must endure before qualifying as "epic" could prove difficult. Also, how exactly is one to assess fatness? It would probably involve some discussion of a circumference [in cubits]-to-pounds conversion. I'm sure scholars would have something to say about the translations. In the end a few schools would claim to be right, and would proceed to kill each other to prove it. Whatever. Jesus didn't have time to clarify every linguistic ambiguity. He had to shit. But it's all moot, because Jesus was apparently mature, and was only interested in being ambiguous about boring things. Come on, man. You only live once... right?)

So there you have it - being Jesus would rock. Though I'd be remiss if I didn't mention a few of the downsides. First, dying like Jesus would have sucked, to say the least. But hand it to the guy - he partied while he was here. Jesus was the James Dean of Biblical Times.

And finally, while Jesus, whether God's son or not, was a pretty big badass, he never ate at a Country Buffet, went to Disney World, or balanced his checkbook at Yahoo! Finance. Come to think of it, neither did Edison, Da Vinci, Twain, or Lincoln. Granted, I've never cured the sick, invented the lightbulb, painted the Mona Lisa, changed the face of literature, or freed the slaves. So we'll call it a draw between me and those guys. Except Da Vinci. He wins because he's had a Ninja Turtle named after him.

The Usual: Big Love, School, Personal Portrait of Hell

2007-09-24T16:22:00.001-06:00

Quick question: Why is it that every time someone mentions Big Love, anyone within earshot who has seen the show makes orgasm noises? I've now heard this multiple times, and it typically goes down like this:

Person A: ...kind of like that one episode of Big Love.
People within earshot who've seen the show (gutturally): Uuurrnggg. Such a great show.
Everyone else within earshot: What the fuck was that?

I'm generally a pretty stubborn person when it comes to heeding the suggestions of others. Never seen The Wire. Don't care how much you love Lost. Will not, for Christ's sake, put some pants on. But I might have to give Big Love a shot. Not many shows can claim to be getting orgasmic reviews. Maybe next time I'm hard-up for a date I'll check it out, and I'll be sure to have extra...everything handy. Apparently it could get messy. I'll report back sometime with some sort of scaled Uuurrnggg ratings system.

Anyway, this disturbing thought was made possible by the fact that school is back again. This semester is the first time since I up-and-decided to give gittin' ma edyewcaytion one more shot that I have been completely against the prospect of summer ending and school starting back up. I mean, in any given semester I become cynical and fed up a few weeks in, but this time it's been there from the get-go. It might just be that I know the drill. We parse. We talk about some apparently heavy duality. And one kid starts out the semester timidly raising his/her hand to squeak out an observation, is told "good point" one too many times by the professor, and suddenly morphs into the blowhardiest knowitallface this side of AM radio. Other students cower beneath the blustery assbaggitude. Anyone who raises a hand and speaks knows that there will be a response from the professor, and a response from Godcomplexzilla - and not necessarily in that order. I never offer my opinion in class anyway, but I used to just sit there in amusement while everyone else fantasized about the loudmouth's spectacular and well-deserved demise. And now I'm just tired of all of it.

None of which is helped by the amount of commuting I've been doing. I'll find out soon enough, but I'm pretty sure that if hell is made-to-order depending on what makes a particular person miserable, then my own personal hell will look something like the oil refinery in Commerce City. Yep. I'll be stuck in an endless traffic jam on 270 alongside the oil refinery. A little part of my soul dies every time I drive by those post-apocalyptic-looking towers, especially when they're all lit up at night. Anyway, my hell will be pretty much like my Wednesdays, except that in hell the refinery's skies are patrolled by horrible, gigantic mechanical vultures with glowing sulfur-yellow eyes, that feed on oily sludge and shit rusty bolts. And the flapping of their wings makes a terrible creaking, clanging sound as their razor-blade beaks blast Creed's greatest hits, on repeat, forever. And while one of the worst parts of the real commute past Commerce City is the disgusting, seemingly ever-changing smell that refining oil apparently produces, in hell it will be made even worse by the knowledge that the smell is actually the result of 2,000 huge, sweaty sumo wrestlers having endless sex with each other in an enormous vat of rotten eggs with the world's largest fan behind them, propelling the stench into my nostrils. Oh, and all the cars in the traffic jam will have homiletic bumper stickers plastered all over them, so everywhere I look I'll get uninvited life-lessons in the form of a lame rhyme or pun or creative use of bold letters and underlines. Suck on that, Alighieri.

In short: who's lookin' for a roommate? C'mon, it'll be fun!

Random And Annoying Parsing of Common Human Practices

2007-09-22T16:28:00.000-06:00

So on Thursday, at about 1:00 PM, I realized that I should write a new post. To pinpoint a reason for such a sudden and powerful impulse would be difficult; anyone who's seen Titanic knows that the heart just wants what it wants. Sometimes it's sex aboard a doomed megaship with an urchin in a Model T, and sometimes it's writing a post on the internet. Still, if I had to venture a guess, I'd say it had something to do with the fact that I was at a Rockies game, and it was just about Star Spangled Banner time. Y'know, that obligatory pre-sporting event ritual where everyone puts on their best self-consciously solemn face, turns toward Old Glory, and sings out of key along with a (choose one):

-long-winded, run-loving American Idol hopeful.
-church choir.
-military veteran in full military veteran regalia.
-child with an iron will, a golden voice, and six months to live.

Don't get me wrong: I love me some jingoistic pomp. It's a good-thing, too. Because just as the announcer was asking us to please rise and kindly remove our caps, the guy next to me asked me a favor. He wanted me to help him remove his cap (he'd figured out the 'rising' thing all on his own). Sometimes in the space of about two seconds you can do about a written page's worth of thinking. In this case, I immediately thought that this guy had some sort of physical disability. Maybe he didn't have hands. I even thought about what an asshole I was for thinking that the word "handicap" contains both "hand" and "cap". Anyway, I said "sure" and surreptitiously looked down to figure out this guy's plight. And immediately the burden of assholery shifted away from me, because it turns out his only notable disability was that he is apparently an incredibly messy and impatient eater. Because in his (fully-functioning and fully-fingered) hands he held an overloaded, half-eaten footlong hot dog, which was overflowing with all your standard hot dog accouterments.

As I stood there clutching the hat of this ketchup-fingered douchelord (I'd already said "sure", and I was way too amused to do anything but laugh and peel his stupid hat off his stupid head), listening to him boisterously sing along with the choir-du-jour, I suddenly, after all these years, knew exactly how it feels to be fully and hopelessly American, with a capital 'G'. (Because when someone would rather ask a complete stranger to awkwardly remove his hat from his head than simply leave it on through an overwrought song about the War of 1812, the fear of God just has to be to blame). But just like that, all my empathy was gone. It was just one of those zoom-out moments when your subjective understanding fades away and you're left wondering why the fuck everything is so weird. I couldn't really shake it for the rest of the game - especially as I watched a fat, middle-aged woman a few rows down who felt it necessary to stand and do the macarena every half-inning, whether the song was, in fact, the macarena, or whether it was Tim McGraw.

Clapping in particular is fucking strange. I'd just love to be able to see the moment in the history of mankind when we decided that while grunts of approval and virgin sacrifices were all well and good, nothing better serves to honor those we hold in high esteem than to hit ourselves repeatedly. Somewhere as you read this, a bunch of sophisticates are dressing up nice, sampling Brie, and banging their hands together to signal scholarly appreciation. Still, I think you can learn a lot about a person based on the way he/she claps. It sounds like the start of a Cosmo article or something. But it's not. It's much worse. Sorry:

First, we have your wannabe trendsetting clapper. This person badly wants to be the one to spur a large round of applause, but lacks the social awareness to pick opportune moments, leading to a puny smattering at best. Only the weak-willed follow this person. Additionally, this person might have a tendency to start knee-jerk facebook groups before gathering all the facts. 9 people join, and they all leave within a week. Let's run through a few others, because I'm not tired yet:

your Johnny-come-lately clapper, who, once the applause has been safely established, jumps in wholeheartedly and vociferously, staying on until he/she is the very last one clapping. Is likely known to still "raise the roof", make fun of Viagra's "erections that last more than 4 hours" disclaimer, and write "Wash me" on dirty car windows.

your intense, smart clapper, who, unlike the wannabe-trendsetter, is smart enough to know when to start, and determined enough to stay on until the very end. Likely to wear down his/her loved ones until he/she ends up broken and alone.

clapper who claps outside of the social settings for which clapping is generally allowed and expected. A grab bag:

may be overly self-conscious about how he is perceived, and must let others know exactly how he feels about something. May see everyone laughing at a movie, and must one-up them, leading to clapping in broad, exaggerated motions, as if smashing two giant cymbals together. Possibly accompanied by a tilting back of the head and a lifting of one leg off of the ground.
person who disdainfully pantomimes clapping, often raising the hands unnaturally high and close to the face, as if to say, "Look, what you said is so uninteresting that I'm willing to make an enormous douche out of myself in order to show you. I rule."
person who claps while urging you on toward some possibly unattainable or lame-ass goal. Is almost certainly your boss. Not only does the exhortative hand-clapping fail to rile you up, it actually makes you want to strangle the clapper, because your job sucks and you are hung over.

finally, we have the biggest douche of them all: the single-clap guy. Rather than sit there in stony silence, he claps but once. Confronted with the prospect of being regarded as the prick who didn't clap, he chooses instead to be regarded as the prick who made a mockery of clapping. He lifts his arms ever-so slightly, starting with his hands almost together in his lap. He then proceeds to slowly spread his hands apart, as if he is holding a slowly expanding object. When his hands are about a shoulder's width apart, he pauses, then casually flings each one toward the other, to illustrate that he doesn't even really care whether the appendages actually hit each other. Generally, though, they at least make glancing contact. The second the hands hit each other, they fall lifelessly back into the asshole's lap, communicating the fact that he is so bored by whatever he is watching that it has drained all of his strength, and the last little bit he could muster was used to throw one disapproving clap. In the aftermath of such a display, the asshole will typically either yawn or check his watch. The recipient of the one-clap should not be too offended, though. It is entirely possible that the clapper's arms are tired from a late night of beating the homeless, which accounts for the one clap and the yawn. And the watch-checking could simply indicate that he is late for traffic court, or that he needs to pick up his kids for their monthly visit.

and not to be forgotten, the non-applauding whistler, who eschews clapping in order to demonstrate at every possible juncture the ability to produce an ear drum-piercing whistle. Is possibly the devil.

Anyway, I'd like to leave you with a word of advice. Maybe I'll make it a recurring feature. Probably not:

If you're ever lucky enough to win a penis-measuring contest, you definitely shouldn't rub it in the loser's face.

That advice may be a bit male-centric. Couple that with my sporadic use of gender-neutral pronouns during this post, and it's clear that I'm not being very forward-minded here. But have no fear - I'll dispense some advice for the ladies, too:

If you ever happen to win a penis-measuring contest, you'd better fucking rub it in the loser's face. Because that shit will be hilarious.

Goodnight.

22

2007-05-04T13:28:00.000-06:00

In the interest of full-disclosure, I already wrote a post today. It was called "Exciting News", and I proceeded to explain that yesterday was my birthday. I really meant to write something amusing, but when I finished and looked over it, I realized that I came across like some self-important 22-year-old who thought his world was ending because 22-year-olds are no longer children by any definition, and are therefore very old. And adulthood sucks. And I haven't really accomplished anything. And in another country, I'd be a full-fledged warlord with like 12 kids by now. Basically, I was crying like a child about how my childhood is over and I have nothing to show for it.

And it's funny, because if I've realized anything, it's that the whole black-and-white childhood/adulthood distinction is false. Every birthday, someone thinks it's funny to half-facetiously ask you if you feel any older. And you never do. I mean, obviously people grow up, and grow old, but old people are usually just as goofy, stubborn, and ridiculous as kids (albeit more wrinkly and hairy). I wake up on May 3rd every year, and for just a few seconds I wonder whether the odometer rolling over has caused some metamorphosis in my life. Maybe I've finally crossed that magical threshold into full-fledged adulthood. Then, I turn on my TV, and sure enough, cartoons are still hilarious. I go to class and still have to stifle giggles when I hear someone broke their coccyx or has angina. Then I cry and kick things when my overambitious celebratory three-scoop ice cream cone goes splat.

Even the supposedly awesome birthday milestones that I'm leaving behind are overrated. Teenagers can't wait till they turn 18. After all, at 18 you can buy cigarettes, play the lottery, enlist in the army, vote, go to strip clubs, and be tried as an adult for any number of offenses. And it's the age of consent, which means that you can expect that 60-year-old from across the way - who was gumming at the bit over you - to come a-knockin'. In other words, turning 18 mostly sucks for those of us who don't have a hyphenated first name. Turn 21, and you hit the nominally important, but practically worthless drinking age. People still get excited, though, because though they've been drinking for years, they just now earned the right to get drunk in bars, clubs, and sports arenas for much more than it costs to drink at a house party. Hooray! You haven't really been drunk till you've been drunk with 38-year-old thrice-divorcees, anyway.

Still, I guess I'll miss having birthdays to look forward to. There might not be many entitlements left that accompany birthdays, and it's tempting to stop counting. I know at a certain age, colonoscopies become a pain in the ass (wow), and Old Guy Discounts at Denny's will be pretty sweet, but those just don't hold the same kind of excitement that turning 18 did, for some reason. So I've decided that I'm going to mine each forthcoming birthday for some awesome (read: lame) numerical meaning, and deprive myself of something arbitrary until I reach it. For instance, 22 is my second-ever palindromic double-digit birthday. I can now eat Jello. I can't wait until my Michael Jordan-themed 23rd birthday, at which point I'll be allowed to watch reruns of Happy Days. And then there's the 24th, which is my second "first digit is half of the second digit" birthday, which means I get to go to Minnesota! Life is good.

Now, in light of my palindromic birthday, I would like to leave you with a palindrome (it's very deep):

No! Come on, ol’ lad. Lose? We’re Yanks! (A revenge biodome in rot). Dog sits if fist is God! Torn? I, Emo? Do I beg? Never! Ask? Nay! (Ere we sold all). O no! Emo con!

Thank you.

Today Is Not April Fool's Day

2007-04-01T22:50:00.000-06:00

Gotcha! It totally is April Fool's Day. Man, you should have seen the look on your face! Quick, turn off your monitor and try to make out your expression in the dim reflection. Fuck, nevermind - the moment passed. If you do it now, you'll just look like a squinting dumbshit in dire need of a handheld mirror. But that dark screen does make you look more tan. So it's up to you - look or don't. I'll wait.

April Fool's Day is a seriously goofy holiday. It's the one day when you're given carte blanche to use someone else's trust in you for frivolous evil. The idea, as far as I can tell, is that you spend the rest of the year cultivating relationships and establishing a mutual trust, and on April Fool's Day you take that emotional capital and blow the entire wad on a giant, douche-til-you-drop douching spree against those to whom you mean the most. That's the evil genius of the day. It's designed to make someone look foolish, but it only works when the prankster is a person so close to the prankee that callous acts of assholery should really be out of the question. If all your best friends are the types of people who draw on you or hit you in the nuts when you fall asleep, then they're not in a very good position to take advantage of April Fool's Day. But the friend who sees you sleeping and sees fit to put a blanket on you and defend you from would-be testicle vandals - that friend is well-equipped to fucking rock your world for 10-to-15 seconds before the inevitable snort seeps out and explodes into an avalanche of loved-one-mocking laughter. The one perceived as least likely to participate is the one who can pull the legendary prank. That's why I never take calls from my grandparents on April 1st. All of April, actually. You just can't be too careful.

But if we're being realistic, for every legendary prank that is passed down from generation to generation and immortalized in song (who hasn't heard "'Twas Ellersbury Who Trick'd Ye" around a campfire?) , there are a million poorly planned, poorly executed, poorly remembered desperate grasps at hilarity. The fact that April Fool's Day is universally known to even the most gullible would-be patsy obviously limits a prankster's options. If it were "April: Fool's Month", it'd be way easier. So most people who can operate within the stringent timeframe to pull off something awesome are so trustworthy that they would never even dream of abusing their power. It just isn't very likely that your priest is going to show up at your door saying the apocalypse is nigh, only to start laughing and reveal that it was Sister Josephine, not Jesus, who set all your bushes on fire. Although I guess I can think of a few cases of priest untrustworthiness, so that might have been a poor example.

What are we left with, then? Mostly, we're left with uncreative, untrustworthy assholes who lack the requisite cache to pull off anything cool. The most they're getting away with is tapping you on the shoulder and shouting "APRIL FOOL'S, DUDE!" when you look the wrong way. So either they are self-aware enough to know this (in which case any prank that they successfully pull off is so mundane that it's akin to the St. Patrick's Day "no-green pinch", and therefore is lame), or they plan something so farfetched and ridiculous that it ends up being debatable that "April Fool's Day" isn't actually referring to them. What you end up with is a potentially awesome day that almost never delivers, and in fact is often more irritating than any average day. Like when you turn 50, and every individual gift-giver thinks their gag-gift will be hilarious and a nice change of pace, but in the end you get a bunch of lame cards, 20 enemas, and a few Viagra flyers, but no real gifts.

But enough about April Fool's Day. APRIL FOOL'S! I'm not done yet! Gotcha again! No, I am done. Gotcha again, again. Sorry. Just kidding. Nevermind. Shit.

This Post Has No Title (Except For This One)

2007-01-24T03:19:00.003-07:00

I was kind of a punkass little kid. In the course of my childhood, I...

- broke windows while hitting balls around my neighborhood.
- broke a kid's tooth with a "bowstaff" (random stick strategically wrapped with tape) while playing Ninja Turtles.
- broke the rules of board games when I thought no one was looking.
- broke numerous promises.
- regularly hit, kicked, manipulated, and otherwise antagonized siblings and neighborhood children.
- stole baseball cards from my little brother.
- was an all-around dick. To everyone.

And aside from the occasional grounding or admonishment, I got off scot free. Adults can't hold a grudge against an 8-year-old, and kids forgive easily. When I try to play Ninja Turtles now, I can't get away with half of what I used to. And no one wants to play. Is it because I always get to be Leonardo? Well tough shit. I'm the one with the He-Man sword. And it's not my fault if you don't wear a mouthguard.

I think this lack of consequences was the best part about being a kid. Everything was kind of a haze, and you would have to do something pretty horrible or great to interrupt the dreamlike status quo. One day's sworn enemy was the next day's lunch-swapping partner. Nowadays, if you happen to, say, put an earthworm in a girl's hair, you're apparently a "dickhole" or "douchebag" for the rest of your natural-born life. Whatever. Totally worth it.

Since consequences are so few, kids can be relatively guileless in their interactions. Piss someone off, and it'll pass. Do something stupid, and the other kids will forget. Get shot down for a recess date at the swingset, just cross her name off the note and send it to someone else. I really think the elementary school note is due for crossover success in adulthood. I miss the simplicity. Rather than wasting time trying to suss out whether someone likes you using inexact heuristics like body language or frequency of laughter, you can just ask. And by doing it in note form, you spare yourself a potentially awkward face-to-face rejection (and you get a hardcopy for your files).

I remember my note sending/receiving days. I know what you're thinking - "Shawn, your notes must have been great. No one could have possibly rejected you." Well thank you for thinking that. I remember thinking that as well, third-person perspective and all. But believe it or not, I wasn't always up to my ears in pigtails and retainers. Apparently I overestimated the coolness of writing. Some things never change. Still, I did alright. While I didn't have my own sleek, personal pencil sharpener, or a No Fear shirt, or Jonathan Taylor Thomas ("JTT", according to the posters) good looks, I made up for these obvious deficiencies with more mature, less superficial fare - like conversational skills, a Captain Planet lunchbox, and a totally killer POG collection. And I could run really fast. So I did get the occasional "Do you like me? Check 'yes' or 'no'" letter. But that doesn't mean I always said yes. Cooties were (and are) a real and present danger, and some of those girls were walking repositories. That's what happens when you hold the hand of every goofy, slimy 10-year-old boy who so much as loans you a colored pencil. If I'd given in to the temptation of those letters, who knows where I'd be today. Cooties have derailed untold kajillions of young lives.

But somehow, at any age, it always comes back to appearance. I remember one day in 3rd or 4th grade when a note made its way around the room to me. It was from a redheaded girl with freckles and a hole-filled smile. I was pretty happy to have an admirer - and a relatively cootie-free one, at that. I wondered whether it was my soccer skills or my coloring ability that she admired most. Either way, I knew she'd love getting one of the NFL Valentine's Day cards that I gave out every year. I'd sneak her a few extra heart candies, because that's what admirers do. Was she a good hand-holder? Had she given any thought to where we'd live after the wedding? (I voted Moon). How many babies would Santa's stork Milo bring us? I opened the note up, fully prepared to check "Yes" (or play it cool with "Maybe", if such a choice was offered).

I looked down excitedly, but the note did not contain a profession of like, or even answer boxes (blasphemy in those days). Instead, there was a crudely drawn spectrum, labeled "Cute" at one end, and "Ugly" at the other. It threw me off for a second, then I saw what she was getting at. Below, I have faithfully recreated the gist of the note:

----------------------------------------Shawn
Ugly-------------------------------------X-----------------------------------Cute

I guess it could've been worse. But at that moment, I knew we wouldn't be getting married. To this day, that note confuses me. She actually took time out of her busy life to not only ponder my appearance, but also to unsolicitedly let me know of the conclusion she'd come to. She could have been reading Goosebumps or Wayside School, but she instead decided to go out of her way to inform me of my averageness. It's like frantically sprinting a mile to the store so that you can lazily browse through magazines you know you won't buy. Was she trying to knock me down a peg? Maybe I deserved it. Maybe I'd shown her up earlier by pointing out that it was Paul Revere, not the Babysitter's Club, who yelled "The British Are Coming!". Who knows. Or maybe everyone secretly talked about how ugly I was, and her note was actually written out of kindness, letting me know that I wasn't really all that bad. Probably not. If I was smart, though, I would have turned the tables and made up my own Attractiveness Spectrum. It could have looked something like this:

That'd have shown her. I am patiently waiting for time travel, and for no other reason but this one. You might say that putting her so far to the left that she's subzero would be really mean, and I'd be inclined to agree. It would have ruled. All of this serves to prove that Little Me was, in spite of all the horrible things he did, still both a pussy and a much more mature person than 21-year-old Me.

The End.

That One Blizzard

2007-01-15T10:17:00.000-07:00

The year was 2006. iPods were all the rage. No one yet knew that cell phones cause Alzheimer's. People used "LOL" like it was going out of style. And it was. "LOL" sucked.

The date was December 20th. The University of Colorado was winding down its fall semester finals season. These were the days before CU switched from a state university to a private middle school, so the academic standards naturally were much lower then. I woke up early, fully prepared to take my last final and get the hell out of dodge, only to see the only thing whiter than CU's student body - a fucking blizzard. I turned on the news, and while impressed by their nifty "Christmas Blizzard 2006" graphic, I was horrified to hear that there was no end in sight. Every year people ask for Christmas snow so that their trailer park can look just a little bit like a Norman Rockwell painting. It seems like they never get it. They were going to get every year's order, plus interest, in 2006. The weatherman said that it was a bad day to drive, and a good day to curl up with cocoa. Fuck that. I wanted to go home, and my cocoa supplies were shockingly low. After slandering God (He sued), I went and took my final.

Of all my options for action at this point, two stood out: 1) Cry, wet myself, go fetal, and remain inert and blubbering until the storm subsided, or 2) Hastily pack my things and burst into the blizzard, determined to get home. I went with a classic compromise. I sobbed and soiled myself, followed by slowly packing while regaining my composure, and finally the heroic bursting thing... if you understand "heroic bursting" to mean "slowly stumbling to a bus stop because there's no way your shitty car is even getting out of the parking lot".

Now, this may seem in retrospect like a foolish decision, considering that I later found out that US-36 was a de facto parking lot, and I needed to not only get from Boulder to Denver, but from Denver to Aurora, and somewhere in Aurora to my house. But I would have gone down on Old Man Winter himself to get home that day - with his shriveled, old, floppy...moving on.

So there I sat at the bus stop across from the UMC, waiting for a bus that I wasn't sure was coming. I remember thinking that if and when I got on a bus, there would be a 0% chance that I would be staying in Boulder that night, and a fairly decent chance that I'd end up stranded somewhere between the two beds that I was able to call my own. And I thought about going back. I even set a 10-minute limit, after which I was going to resort to Plan 1 (outlined above). 30 seconds later, I was on the B bus, headed for Denver, with a bunch of stops to make along the way. The driver didn't even check for bus passes or anything, which I assume is because you would have to be some kind of Action Movie supervillain to turn away passengers to fend for themselves in a shitstorm.

I plopped down in a seat in the front row, which turned out to be a good move, and after everyone got settled we were off. We were immediately informed that US-36 was a definite no-go, and thus our side-road odyssey began. No more than 5 minutes into our journey, we were stopped...for an hour-and-a-half. I still have no idea which road we were on, as they all tend to look the same when jam-packed with cars in white-out conditions. Things were looking pretty grim there for a while - we were moving maybe a car-length (not a bus-length) every 10 minutes or so. Of course, there was no traffic whatsoever in the other direction, and man was that open road looking sexy. I heard whispers suggesting that we should give up and turn around. Louder than whispers, though, something else. Apparently, when faced with an uncertain timetable in a bathroomless conveyance, people get a little antsy...which in turn makes them have to pee. It's a vicious cycle. Eventually, there was enough of a groundswell that the driver opened the doors (which I didn't appreciate as a person in the front row) and allowed the weak among us to wander out and relieve themselves. I have to admit that a small, Machiavellian part of me wished that the seas would part and that the bus would zip away, leaving a handful of people with a handful of their own junk and no way home. At any rate, I made sure to note who among us took advantage of this "Make-A-Peecicle" program, as these people were barred from being my partners should the boredom have led to a buswide patty-cake tournament (as it so often does). Also, if one of them had later chosen to insult my honor in some way, I could have mocked that person's childlike bladder. It's good to plan ahead for all contingencies.

One of the several people whose dirty hands were now on my radar was the type of person you can only meet while using public transportation. He kind of reminded me of a bizarro-world Forrest Gump - he was definitely a few candies short of a full box of choc-o-lates. But where Hollywood Forrest Gump was disarmingly charming and sweet, RTD Forrest was loud, obnoxious and vulgar. His seat was toward the back, but that didn't stop him from regularly visiting (read: pestering) the driver. In one twenty minute span, I must have heard him relate how he fuckin' single-handedly fuckin' dug out a fuckin' bus that was stuck earlier in the fuckin' day 4 separate (fuckin') times. Apparently the driver was supposed to be forever indebted to RTD Forrest for saving his bus-driving brethren from certain doom, but shockingly he didn't seem too impressed. Eventually, RTD Forrest got tired of being ignored, and wandered back to his seat, taking the vague scent of booze and the strong one of cigarettes with him.

Traffic slowly unsnarled, and as we eased on ahead it was clear why the wait had been so long. The right lane was peppered every ten yards with stranded motorists who at that moment had to have been regretting their taste in cars. It's a strange day when drivers of Camaros and Mustangs look upon bus passengers with envy. But this was that day. I could have felt sorry for them, but I instead assumed that they were the same Camaros and Mustangs I regularly see parked across three spaces, or in a handicapped spot, or doing something otherwise douchetastic. I was glad those pricks were stuck. My empathy wasn't going to help them anyway - it was only going to bring me down.

As we left those stranded assholes in our oversized side mirrors and started making stops, it was quickly apparent that the regular routes just weren't gonna cut it. In addition to the aforementioned highway closure, many side roads were unpassable, and avoiding big hills became paramount. As the driver made his way down unfamiliar, icy roads, with snow whipping around him, I'm sure the last thing he wanted was a distraction. Enter RTD Forrest. RTD Forrest was a pretty annoying dude. People who talk on cell phones in public are pretty annoying as well. RTD Forrest, on a cell phone, in a vehicle, in a blizzard is just lunacy. From what I could gather, RTD Forrest was talking to an equally "special" friend, and informed this friend that he was currently on a bus. For reasons that I can't even begin to comprehend, his friend refused to believe that RTD Forrest could have possibly been riding a bus at that moment. I don't know if RTD Forrest had a history of yanking his friend's chain over such mundane and normal things, but his friend apparently considered this claim to be far out. RTD Forrest didn't say anything remotely strange, like "I'm in a fuckin' limo!", or "A girl is actually fuckin' talkin' to me!", or "Watermelon is actually a fuckin' vegetable!", but his friend wasn't having it. Sorry, but the idea that a slow-witted drunk might find himself riding on a dingy, cold bus just doesn't set off my bullshit detector. I'm not surprised to see sick people in hospitals, drunk people in bars, or hypocrites in churches, and I'm certainly not surprised to find an obnoxious, erratic halfwit on a bus. I could see the hamster wheel in RTD Forrest's head turning: "He don't fuckin' believe me! Fuckin' how can I make him fuckin' believe me? I know, I'll let him talk to the fuckin' driver." And sure enough, RTD Forrest made a beeline for the front of the bus, imploring the driver to tell his friend, with the authority that only a bus driver can muster, exactly where RTD Forrest was at that very moment. "Imploring the driver" might be the wrong way to phrase it. "Putting the phone in the driver's face" is much more accurate.

Anyway, the driver and a few passengers who apparently didn't feel like dying over something this stupid begged RTD Forrest to go back to his seat, and after initally resisting, he did. For the next 5 or 10 minutes, I listened to him alternately cackle at something his apparently hilarious friend was saying, and exhort his fellow passengers to do some kind of a group greeting to prove once and for all that he was, in fact, one of those lucky sons-of-bitches who get to ride buses around all the time. Eventually, after getting a healthy dose of the silent treatment, he settled down. I think those people had dealt with RTD Forrest or 2-year-olds before.

Through all this, I was impressed by the driver. He was in the unenviable position of having to toe the thin line between being mean to a borderline-retarded person and crashing the bus. He managed it pretty well - no passenger bones or retarded feelings were hurt in the making of this story. For all his skills, though, the driver was clearly unprepared for the Magical Mystery Tour of sidestreets and frontage roads that this normally-straightforward trip became. And so this bland, unremarkable bus was transformed into Wikibus, wherein the knowledge of every individual passenger was collected and applied toward finding creative routes to each successive stop - all while avoiding any hills that might stall us and force us to resort to cannibalism (RTD Forrest definitely would have been first). It was beautiful, man. Whenever someone had some knowledge to impart upon the driver, that person would stumble to the front of the bus and crouch, taking on a sidekick/navigator role. The interplay was complex: the closer we got to a stop, the more the people who were about to get off knew the area, and were thus able to steer us in the right direction. When we would arrive, they would leave, taking their knowledge with them. Luckily, since we were then at the stops that the driver would make every day, he always knew enough to start us toward the next destination. And by the time he was completely lost again, we were close enough to the next stop for the residents of that area to speak up and right the ship. I'm crying just thinking about it. I love those people. The ten-year reunion should really be something.

And so we cut our serpentine path toward Denver. Finally, we got past the point where US-36 was unpassable, and from there our trip flew by. The highway was literally deserted, save for a cluster of abandoned cars every few miles. It was surreal. And soon enough, we were pulling into Market Street station - the end of the line. I grabbed my backpack and overstuffed duffel bag, and stepped out into the blowing snow. At this point I had to walk some small distance and catch the lightrail (which I wasn't completely sure was operating). Unfortunately, when snow is whipping into your eyeballs, and is deep enough to make simply taking steps difficult, and you're carrying a couple of heavy bags, "some small distance" seems pretty far. Especially when you manage to walk in the wrong direction for a while. Not surprisingly, 16th Street was completely shut down. I was feeling cold and a little lost. Then, against all odds, I noticed signs of life in one of the buildings. It was a miracle. Illegal Pete's was open, against the world's better judgment. It was like an old western movie - I wasn't from around those there parts, I stumbled into their saloon, and there was an old-fashioned staredown. I was staring at them because I was somewhat convinced that these people were a mirage, and I'm pretty sure they were staring at me because I looked like the Abominable Fucking Snowman. Either way, Illegal Pete's was a safe haven for me to thaw out and call a friend for directions to the lightrail stop. I still don't know why the hell they were open, but I guess Pete didn't get to be called illegal by bowing to convention.

After checking with my friend and confirming that yes, I am, after all, a dumbass, I headed back out and started to retrace my steps. There were about 8 blocks between me and the lightrail stop. It sounded manageable. It. Sucked. Balls. My bags were getting heavy, and my legs started to drag a little bit. About halfway through, as I got closer to the station, I saw some movement around me and realized that there were a few homeless guys struggling through this shit, as well. I really can't fathom having to spend a whole night in that bullshit. None of them seemed to bat an eyelash at me, and why would they? Looking at me, they saw a bundled up kid with a duffel bag, stumbling down the street like a drunken, peg-legged pirate and muttering obscenities to no one in particular. I fit right in.

Finally, mercifully, I made it to the stop, and right on cue my chariot arrived. I slumped in one of the seats, and away we went. I had the entire train to myself, but I was a little too tired for any Risky Business shenanigans, and I was asleep within a few minutes. I woke up only when the driver (conductor?) came back to apologize for the delay. Apparently we were sitting at every stop for about ten minutes. He pointed out the window in the distance, where two buses appeared to have crashed into one another. We both considered this to be awesome, because neither of us was on either of them. As we got a little closer, I called a friend (Adam - this Bud's for you.) and he met me at 9-Mile Station, saving me from having to catch yet another bus. Which is lucky, because as we pulled into my neighborhood, we saw a bus stranded - the exact bus that I would have been waiting for (a long time, as it turns out). We stopped and asked the driver if he needed anything. He politely declined, and told us he'd been stuck there the entire day. If only RTD Forrest had been there to valiantly dig him out.

And so ended December 20th, 2006. In lieu of one of those trendy "Blizzard!" Photo Albums, which would feature pictures of me making a snowman/snowangel/snowassholeoutofmyself, this message will remind me of that one blizzard long ago. It'll be freshly entertaining for me after my cell-phone-induced Alzheimer's kicks in.

Tainted Love,
Shawn

Remember That One Blizzard? Well We'll Get To That After All This Barrel Shit. Hooray!

2007-01-15T07:17:00.001-07:00

Let's talk horrible metaphors. Time is a river. And a person is a barrel. And a mother's womb is... like... this barrel factory... on the banks of a river... and the factory drops recently completed barrels into the river... for some reason. A barrel doesn't choose to get dropped into a river - it didn't even choose to be a barrel. Then one day, it's not only a barrel, it's a barrel barreling downstream, bobbing and weaving and going wherever the current takes it. And eventually, inevitably, that current is going to lead it into some jagged rocks, and thereafter for eternity it'll no longer possess that special something that made it a barrel. It'll just be... like... driftwood. Some barrels hit those rocks sooner than others. And this weird journey only occurred because the mother, the barrel factory, happened to be hammered that one night and consequently got it on with the first tree that sauntered on by. And we all know that trees are wont to saunter.

The point is...um...that barrel factories are dirty whores. No, that's not it...Uhhhh... Oh, right. The point is that life is goofy and potentially almost over. You never know when the current is going to pull you into some gnarly rocks - you poor, unsuspecting barrel bastard. Unless, like me, you know exactly which rocks you'll probably hit ahead of time. You see, as a 40th birthday present, I've decided that I'm going to take one of those wooden-thingy (what are they called?) rides off Niagara Falls. So my metaphorical Jagged Rocks of Doom will in all likelihood be...um...jagged rocks. Liver failure's for pussies, anyway.

So, at 21, I'm in prime position for a midlife crisis. It's time to stop my barrel midstream and ask, "What will the article beneath the headline 'Dumbfuck Plunges to Watery Grave' say about my life? Is there an overarching theme?". And I've found just one: Inexplicable Laziness. It's everywhere. I mean, everyone is lazy about taking the trash out, but I'm lazy about things I enjoy. (And if you enjoy taking the trash out, then you're a fucking weirdo - and this is coming from someone who has said "barrel" about 30 times in the last two paragraphs). I enjoy writing incoherent schlock online. I mean, the money, the women, and the blow are all definite perks, but for the most part I do it because I like it. Almost every day, I see something that probably merits mention amongside all the other useless nonsense I post on this site. And yet it's only about once a month that I actually follow through and write something. Three weeks ago a blizzard hit that almost kept me in Boulder for the beginning of winter break. I thought that writing about my trip home would be interesting. Flash forward to today. Still haven't written it. Since I came home, it's snowed like 4 more times, Christmas has passed, 2006 has ended, and the guy who invented instant noodles turned from barrel to driftwood. But goddammit I'm writing it, topical or not. It'll be as relevant to 2007 as a Monica Lewinsky joke. But I don't care. It's my Martin Luther King Day dream to one day be eulogized not as a lazy, barrel-loving asshole, but as a barrel-loving asshole whose hobbies included consistently churning out schlocky idiocy on a site that nobody ever visited. We can't all claim to have invented instant noodles, but at least my legacy will beat the aforementioned Ms. Lewinsky's. Sucks noodles to be you, Monica. See? Lame.

Guess Which Letter Doesn't Wor

2006-12-21T15:58:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends, Ill-Wishers, and Undecideds,

I have to start this message out with a disclaimer: A button on my computer is not functional. It's the button that forces me to say "button" and "functional" when far less robotic words would normally be available. I thin...shit... I believe that I can ma...um...I believe that I can get this to wor...goddammit! I believe that I can do this. I've got mad s...I am good. Just to temper expectations, though, I have to note that since I'm wor...acting without 1/26th of my repertoire, it's only fair to expect a 3.84% reduction in awesomeness. They didn't as...try to get Beethoven to write beautiful music without Middle C, and I can't write my typical brand of mediocre inanity without such a pivotal home row player. Just as parents wonder why one of the inferior children didn't get leu...cancer instead of the apple of their eye, I can't help but feel a little hostile toward Q, X, and Z. You guys are worthless. If you're not going to carry your weight around here, why don't you go join your brother in oblivion? Tell him I love him while you're there.

I thought this would be a lot easier than it has been. I figured that as long as I didn't veer into discussions about hooded white supremacists, or movies starring Pat Morita and Ralph Macchio, or 13th-century Mongol emperors, I'd be o...I'd be alright. But it's not alright. And so the disclaimer becomes the entire message.

Fuc this,
Shawn