XII

I think I've come to terms with my limitations. I guess that comes with getting older and realizing that there are fewer and fewer things that you can really explore and experience without too much risk. I realize that sounds naive, me being 20 years old, but I think it's true. When I was a kid, I wanted to be hundreds of different things: a baseball player, a scientist, a writer, a kid with a smaller head, etc. I really didn't have any limitations, save for the head shrinking, and I could fool around with a whole bunch of different stuff. They say that the difference between primary school teachers and secondary school teachers is that the primary school teachers know a little about a lot and secondary school teachers know a lot about a little. Also, banging students is a little more frowned upon at the primary school level.

I think that narrowing of expertise is a reality of life today; in order to be a "productive member of society" you have to have a specific area of expertise. I don't think it necessarily is involved with the limitations of the human mind, people can learn almost infinite amounts of information, or limitations of time, we are around for a very long time and the brain is only useless when you're very young and very old (except for 14 year old males, whose brains become dedicated only to pornography, violence, and violent pornography for at least one calendar year), I think it has to do with limitations imposed by society, specifically American society.

America seems to be motivated, as well as controlled by work. One could argue that this work ethic gave us airplanes, automobiles, the moon landing, and those plastic things that go on the end of shoelaces (aglets). One could also argue that it made everyone in this country fucking boring. The work ethic back in the day led to the notion that getting up and going to work every morning at 9, doing something there, and getting back at 5 was an honorable and useful way to spend time, which I think is ridiculous. Have you ever pushed a pencil for 8 hours? Those things are REALLY tiny, and bending down to give them the business all day is really hard on the back. I guess you could say that the airplane, automobile, and aglet were all fantastic inventions and totally worth the work that was put into them. I'd actually have to agree with you on that. Which makes my examples very bad. I'm sort of getting away from my point.

Do you think that all of the modern conveniences we know and love would never have come along without the "American spirit" of toiling work? I think they would have. Eventually. I think my theory is pretty half-baked at this point, but there is something to it. I'll come back to this later, I'm too tired from working on schoolwork. Which actually was the impetus for this in the first place.

Here's a line from the best melodrama ever made:
"You want me to get a job on the line for the next 20 years til I’m granted leave with my gold-plated watch and my balls full of tumors because I surrendered the one thing that means shit to me? Well, you can just exhale because it’s not gonna happen, not in this lifetime."

I like the part about the watch. And the ball tumors. Fuuuck.

XI

off. That's the Finnegan's Wake conclusion to my post on the 14th. I tried to think of something funny to put up on here to honor the title, but there was too much pressure. I considered everything from pictures of my genitalia to pictures of other people's genitalia. In hindsight, that probably would have been better to just put up both of those. Sort of like a compare and contrast thing.

I find myself working another blue-collar, manual labor, landscaping-cum-menial janitorial work job this summer, which brings up several points. The first being that I'm never going to work a job like that ever again. The inherent positive of no mental exercise is easily outweighed by the inherent negative of absolutely no mental exercise. If I have to argue about the achievements of Phil Jackson, how much rain sucks, the benefits of sex sans condom, or how expensive it costs to go to Darien Lake ever again, I'm probably going to drown myself. This may sound like a jaded, whiny perspective on work, and "I should be lucky I have a job", but fuck that, this shit is like Chinese water torture. My second point is the way the job was sold to me, and the way the job actually is. Sold to me: Working at a boat harbor, dealing with boats, helping out customers, and most importantly, hanging out with girls in skimpy clothing. Job actually is: mowing lawns. Where is the fucking disconnect there? Nothing that the job actually is was promised beforehand. This is another constant in summer temp work: It's never as good as it seems. Buuuuuuuut, I'm working outside and getting paid for it, so fuuuuuuuuuuck it.

On to point two. This past Memorial Day weekend, I met a man named Ed. I say 'met' in the loosest way possible, as it was more of an exposure. The story starts on the beach at a campfire, as so many fantastic stories do in my small, pale, social circle. It was very late (around 3) and the booze had taken the manic, energetic turn that it so often does around that time. The night was passing erratically, and the fire was dying down in the same fashion. Suddenly, to the west, a blazing salvo against the dying of the light: a man approaching with a girl under each arm. Then something happens, I'm assuming conversation, and then I find myself (with a dear, dear friend as my plus one) following one of the girls back to their beach house to 'take some shots'. We get to this very nice house, literally like two houses away from where we were before, and follow the girl inside. In the light of the kitchen, two things become clear to me: this girl has the dead-eyed look of a sex trade worker, and I'm completely barefoot. No matter. We follow the girl to the front driveway, where a limo is parked. To add to the 'sex trade' worker vibe, this limo is not a nice new model, but rather one of those extended town cars, white of course. A tad bit sketched out, my friend and I decline this girls invitation to "get in" the "limo" and "do" shots, fearing some sort of trap. Who does shots in a limo that isn't moving anyways? No one. She can't find the liquor anyways (definitely a trap) so we go back inside. It is at this point that I realize that she has been talking about this guy named Ed a lot, how great he is, how he really helps her out with her life, provides her liquor (imaginary or not), etc. I didn't think too much of it at the time. I should've thought more of it at the time. Inside, she pulls out some white wine and pours herself a glass, at which point the man we met earlier, with other girl still in tow, appear on the front porch. I realize that this other girl is wearing a trench coat, and like me, is not wearing anything on her feet. By the way, when I say 'realize', I mean barely remember the next day. We all go outside again, and this man starts pissing off the porch. I decide this man must be Ed. The trenchcoat clad girl begins to flash this man as he's pissing. She starts to slowly writhe and dance before him. I am now sure this is Ed. At this point, my friend and I are too confused to do anything but mouth words to eachother: "What the fuck is going on", "Should we leave?", and "Oh my word, these women are prostitutes" were all popular choices. We didn't leave however, and the original girl we came with pulled out some sort of illegal drug. Not being too familiar with that whole "culture", I couldn't be sure what it was. However, not being too familiar with my own sense of mortality at that point, I couldn't be sure that I wouldn't accept it. I in fact did, as did my friend. Ed had retired to his upstairs quarters at this point, and was either brutally breaking the trenchcoated girl into small pieces, or banging her Old Testament style. Probably both. We partake of the mysterious substance offered to us, feeling confident it came out of the ground and was thus relatively harmless. We however failed to realize that people often combine illicit substances to increase their potency. I'm pretty sure we floated home at that point. I'll leave it at that.

I left out the part of the story where the girl that brought us to Ed's was shamelessly flirting with both me and my friend. Both of us are idiots for not hooking up with a prostitute. Especially me, because my friend has a girlfriend. And I already have pretty much every STD known to man.

One last thing on that topic: Trojan makes a new condom called Ecstasy that supposedly feels like there's no piece of latex on your peen. I think it would be funny if the condoms were just cut into hollow tubes and Trojan moved all of their stock options into baby clothing companies.

I should be in marketing.

X

Fuck...

IX

In an effort to keep this thing more current, I've decided to update it more regularly, which seems like a good place to start.  However, the number of posts per week is going to be inversely proportional to their quality, so be ready for more scatological humor.

First things first: apparently local Rochester news coverage is incredibly racist.

Either there were no white people that went to that Popeyes that day, which seems incredibly improbable, or whoever was doing the news coverage decided that it would be appropriate to only film the black people.  Who the fuck is running that news station that thought that that would be a good idea?  Seriously, not one non-black person in the whole 2 minute segment?  There were like a dozen people interviewed too.  However, I will admit that the outrage that the people that were going through the drive-through exhibited was equally ridiculous.  They were fucking livid.  Especially the really big guy that said he needed to feed his "family".  He was clearly alone in his car, and more clearly alone in his life.  He was planning on dropping a ten-spot and getting 16 pieces of delicious, nutritious chicken, then promptly devouring them, bones and all before he left the parking lot.  Keep in mind, that wasn't a racist joke, just a joke about fat people.  Because people can control their weight.  By not eating at Popeyes.

Waterboarding fetishes.  That is the offensive thing of the day.  34 ggs.

As I write this, I can feel the swine flu coursing through my bloodstream.  I am so sure that I am infected because of the enormous amount of pork I eat, especially in the last few days.  Also, I've been asking people to cough in my mouth for a while now.  Mostly Mexican pig farmers too, so I'm definitely fucked.

A sort of serious side-effect of this pandemic is definitely going to be a huuuuuuge negative backlash against Mexican immigrants.  I'm pretty sure Rush Limbaugh's head might explode, if it hasn't already.  People are going to simplify this thing to the point of infected Mexican pork-zombies slouching towards the border.  And those people are going to be idiots.

I'm really tired, so sorry if this post doesn't have the panache that the other one's do.

Actually, fuck you, I'm not your puppet.  I'll cough pig-death-disease all over your face.

VIII

So, I haven't updated this in three months.  Big fucking deal.  No one reads blogs anymore.  I think it's all about vlogs now, but I've never been really gotten comfortable with webcams after the last time.  I guess I'll have to stick with this.

I've been thinking about June 14th, and how even though the title of this blog has no real meaning and I got the sentence from Googlism, I'm really going to have to not forget to update over the summer.  And I'm going to have to make that update really fucking funny.  Or the consequences will be dire.

In fact, now that I look at it, it doesn't say anything about the blog specifically being funny, just me.  So I'm going to have to be fucking hilarious on June 14th, which is nearly impossible.  As most of my friends can attest, I've really lost it over the years.  I mean nowadays I mostly just sit around listening to Bon Iver and deleted Smith singles, moping it up.

I did however find time to watch a marathon of The Hills.  It was mostly accidental, as it was just on TV as I was doing work (read: I'm lying), but god damn that show is shitty.  Shitty in the worst and most addictive way possible.  It's like cheap crystal meth.  Actually, they're all pretty rich and privileged on the show, so I guess it's more like Cristal meth.  That is a hell of an idea for a drink: overpriced Champagne mixed with methamphetamines.  "For the sophisticate who loves the taste of fine Champagne as well as the benefits of horrifying facial-scarring."  That could go places.  Anyway, if you didn't know, The Hills details the lives of like seventy horrible cum dumpsters and the horde of douchescabs that follow them around.  From what I got, there are two camps, divided over the issue of how much one girl, we'll call her 'The Reason the Rest of the World Hates Us' doesn't like her ex-best friend's boyfriend, whom we'll call 'What the Fuck is That Awful Shit On Your Fa--Oh It's Your Beard'.  I don't know why TRTROTWHU doesn't like WTFITASOYFOIYB, presumably because he's literally the biggest box of toolboxes on the face of the earth (note: tool=bad, toolbox=worse, box of toolboxes=worse than Scott Stapp's solo album).  I don't know why Wattafitasoyfoibe (phonetic) doesn't like Tritrotwoo (phonetic), but it's probably because she scuffed his shoes once or something.  There really isn't much plot to be had on the show, just lots of girls talking.  And talking and talking and talking and talking and then there's a party on a boat and then a dude talks to a girl and she laughs but she wasn't really laughing at what he was saying she actually hates the guy so she talks to her friend behind the guys back about him and confesses that she wants to fuck him but doesn't really know if he's boyfriend material and then the other girl says something positive and supportive and then they both come to the conclusion that slavery wasn't actually that bad in that it supported the predominantly agrarian economic culture of the American South in the 19th century and that even though it was totes unfair that those people were viewed as property you can't expect an economic system as peculiar as the South's to just immediately stop what they're doing and change their way of life because that would be just as unfair.  I'm pretty sure that's verbatim.

I've been trying to figure out what it is that makes things that are horribly inappropriate so funny and I just can't really grasp it.  Simultaneously, I've been really trying to figure out the most offensive thing in the world, not because I'm a bad person or get any personal enjoyment out of it, but just because I think it is a thing that needs to be empirically defined, if only as a benchmark.  I have a hunch there's a limit to offensive things, wherein you just get too abstract for stuff to make sense anymore, i.e Jewish mummies mungjumping Helen Keller's progeriac babies, isn't really that offensive.  However, there is definitely a hierarchy of offensivity.  For example, the Holocaust is certainly more offensive than fetal alcohol syndrome, but by how much?  I propose a unit of measurement called the Allin, abbreviated gg, with something like 'kittens' and 'Valentines Day' measuring at 0 ggs, something like 'repeatedly punching someone with Krohns disease in the stomach' at around 50ggs, and stuff about Hitler, genocide, retarded people, elderly animal pornography, and gay and bisexual literature anywhere from 50gg to 99gg.  But what is that absolute zero of offensivity?  I ask you all, the two people that still know this exists, to give me some suggestions.  Don't be afraid, the anonymity of the internet will protect you.  I'll probably never be able to hold a teaching position if they ever find this, but that's why God invented fervent denial.

Some suggestions: Glenn Beck , and this abomination.

One of those is the cutest things in the world.

-FML

VII

First matter of business tonight, someone at Quaker Oats deserves a promotion. Why? For inventing Maple & Brown Sugar Life cereal. I don't know how long it's been on the market, but I found it today, and it's already changed my life. What a horrible pun. I've been a fan of Life for my entire life, specifically Cinnamon Life. However, after two decades, it had gotten pretty 0ld. Maple & Brown Sugar on the other hand, those two flavors had been consigned mostly to Pop-Tarts and oatmeal. I can remember several times in my youth when I would take a sleeve of those Brown Sugar Pop-Tarts (the only palatable flavor, short of the diabetic greatness of S'more) put them in a bowl, cover them with milk, and then break them up into small pieces, essentially creating a Pop-Tart cereal. I marveled at my gastronomic brilliance, and would often wonder why there never was a Pop-Tart cereal. Anyways, I believe that this Maple & Brown Sugar Life cereal is the closest I'll ever get, and thus I have purchased several thousand boxes. I consider it part of my portfolio.

Would it be considered ironic if you were a prisoner on death-row, and for your last meal you chose Life cereal? Someone should ask Alanis Morrisette. Someone should check if Alanis Morrisette is still alive.

I don't know what the big fuss about "Twilight" is. In fact, the only thing I do know about "Twilight" is that it's like fucking catnip to girls over the age of 13. I've also gathered that it's about vampires. And probably losing your virginity to vampires. It's like one of Jewel's poetry books if it was edited by Anne Rice. I think that's a fairly accurate interpretation of a book that I've never seen, read any reviews for, or really heard much about except that it's: "Totally awesome". I'm sure that it poses some interesting philosophical problems about growing up as a vampire. Do they have special retainers for people with huge vampire teeth? How can you make sure your Limited Too ensemble looks rockin' if you don't have a reflection? Are hickeys not only a badge of shame/pride, but an incredibly risky death-wish? What does vampire tween do when her friends go to the beach/tanning salon? Does getting your first period make you a little hungry? I'm sure the book answers almost none of those questions, and is probably like "One Tree Hill" with vampires. Which would be cool if the vampires rose up against the people in "One Tree Hill" and killed them all. Tell me you wouldn't watch Chad Michael Murray be drained of all his blood.

I'll try to update this more often.

Even though I just lost 98% of my readership with that "Twilight" bashing.

VI

A couple weeks ago, I was in my living room, watching the free music channels on Time Warner Cable, not the music video channels, just the straight up music channels (basically radio for blind people still in denial of the fact that they shouldn't own a television), drinking some sort of cran-apple-vodka-rum concoction when I decided that I should spill half of it directly on the laptop that was sitting in my lap. Unfortunately, this wasn't one of my roommates' laptops, it was mine. It immediately shut off. I know what you're thinking. This never would have happened if you were drinking Evan Williams like you should've been. For that I apologize. I opened the old girl up, dried 'er off, and put 'er up against a fan. I figured holy water would only exacerbate the problem, so I held off a final blessing. I awoke the next morning, slightly hungover, the memory of the cranputer still fresh in my head. Upon inspection, I found that my laptop still worked. Except for the sticky keys. I hate these sticky keys. My space bar has none of the youthful vigor it once did, lazily springing back to my thumb after every tap. My down arrow has lost its fucking mind, occasionally refusing to return to its upright position, throwing every scroll bar within reach to the dogs. And my shift key is just plain depressed. It sucks.

And yes, I have considered putting some Evan Williams in there to battle the evil clear liquor/cranberry juice combo, but I don't think even he has the heart for it anymore. Maybe the Blue Label.

That aside, I think that it is immoral and illogical to grade philosophy classes. If there is a class wherein half of the class period is righteously dedicated to discussing the existence of, and cause behind, a fucking chair, everyone should get A's. Seriously. Every fucking philosophy class I've been in has spent at least a little time on that god damned chair problem. What is the form of the chair? Does the chair exist? How did the chair come about? And even: What gives the chair its 'chair-ness'? What gives the chair its 'CHAIR-NESS'? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? It's a fucking piece of wood. If we can't get past that, we might as well just go sit in the corner and play with ourselves. The chair exists because someone in a factory made it. Out of wood, or metal, or some plastic conglamerate. Probably for more money than any philosopher makes, or will ever make discussing their own explanations of 'chair-ness'. Or better yet, how about the 'shoe-ness' of shoes? We can at least get the kids involved with that one; they gave the shoes their 'shoe-ness' working for 9 cents a week in some sweat-shop in Pakistan. Or the McCafe my professor brings into class every god damn morning. Does that have 'McCafe-ness'? Probably more like 'liqufied shit-ness'.

I wouldn't be complaining if I had a higher grade.

One more thing. Has anyone else noticed that Facebook tailors the ads on your page to your interests? If you say you like 'soccer', 'playing guitar', and 'hanging with the boys', your ads reflect that: FIFA, Guitar Center, NAMBLA, etc. To an extent it's extremely disturbing, as is usually par for the course with advertising, the fact that they think they know what you want to buy based on something you put in your Facebook interests. That's why I'm calling upon you, the two or three readers of this thing, to change your interests to something completely random, and see if it changes the ads you see on your page. Personally I will change mine to , 'covering my furniture in plastic', 'watching my grandkids eat', 'yelling at cars that go too fast', 'talking unabashedly about graphic health problems at dinner', and 'buying lottery tickets on my fixed income'. Hopefully this will result in a change in advertising from the shit they push on me now to things like: 'Fixodent', 'Depends', 'AARP Magazine', and 'Early Bird Specials at Denny's!'. I mean no disrespect to previous generations, just to advertising companies. Try it!

PS - "And my shift key is just plain depressed" is not a pun. That fucker is all Ian Curtis this and Elliot Smith that these days.