I feel like I’ve been shirking my responsibilities as a blogger. Not really because my posts as of late haven’t been very good, which they haven’t. Not because I’ve been averaging about one of said mediocre posts every other month.

No, the problem is that I haven’t put up an entry in a while that would be incredibly damaging to me if anyone that I work with were to find out that this is my blog.

I aim to correct that right now. It’s time to step up and take care of business.

First of all:

Mission accomplished. Goodnight everybody.

I’m just kidding.

Anyway, us Bat….Castle. Us Castle men are woefully inept with the ladies. Almost used my last name. Nice one Tr…Johnny.
Damn it.

The point I was making was that I appear to be single again, as does my brother. I was hanging out with him tonight, and he told me that the girl that he’d been seeing had broken up with him because her mother told her that she had to date someone in the army. I’m not sure how plausible that sounds to me (actually, I am: not at all), but I didn’t really ask for details. Whatever the reason was for breaking up with him, she did, and he was pretty bummed about it.

The relationship that I was in ended recently, too, not because I wasn’t in the army, but ended nonetheless. I’d like to say more, but I think that’s a bad idea. Elaborating on the Internet about the more specific, personal details of my life usually causes problems for me. On top of that, the girl I was dating was pretty involved in our relationship, believe it or not, and even though I’m too stupid to resist putting personal details about myself up, It’s not really my place to put a bunch of information about her up on the Internet. Not everyone likes that as much as I do. Lastly, I’m probably not thinking very straight right now. In three years, I’ll probably have a pretty accurate idea of what happened. Right now I’m too close to the situation, and am far more likely to put something completely bizarre up that I will no longer believe to be true in a week from now and will regret ever posting for the rest of my life, kind of like the night that I wrote an entire post about how much I liked Yellowcard. Yes, I actually did that once. Yes, I regret it and I am deeply, DEEPLY ashamed.

Anyway, I’ve been spending some time cycling through the normal rotation of emotions. I know that posts like this only seem interesting to the person writing them, but I hope that you’ll indulge me.

When I was a little kid, I was terrified of getting shots. I’m what you might call a “pussy”, and avoid getting punctured at all costs. To sit there and let someone do it to me on purpose was pretty much unbearable. As I got older, though, I got used to it. I still don’t enjoy shots, but they aren’t the ordeal that they used to be. When I first started working as a substitute teacher, I got my ass kicked up and down the room. By a bunch of crazy 10 year olds. I’m still pretty bad at classroom management, but over the past year and a half I’ve learned a few tricks, gotten some advice, and I’ve gotten half decent at subbing. I hated my first job. The six hours I was expected to be there seemed like an eternity, the relatively easy work felt unbearable and my teenage sense of entitlement was constantly offended by my bosses who refused to pamper me the way that my parents did. I’ve been working (albeit as little as possible) since then, and over the past 12 years I’ve gotten used to it. I can make it through a longer shift, have a better attitude and am more effective.

The reason I’m telling you all of this is to show you a trend: I do it slower than most, but as I’ve grown up, I’ve learned to adjust to things that I find unpleasant and make it through them with less discomfort.

I keep hoping that this will happen with breakups. I keep hoping that it will get a little bit easier or more painless every time that it happens. It does not. It just sucks. Hard.

This is also the point where I develop a really unreasonable view about dating. I suddenly find myself realizing that every relationship that I have ever been in has eventually failed. This is really not that exceptional when you think about it; unless you’re a polygamist, the maximum number of relationships that you can have that don’t end eventually is 1, and there are plenty of people who die before they can pull that off. Despite this information, I find my .000 batting average getting into my head and making me wonder what’s wrong with the way I do things.

As an added bonus, the year before I started dating the last girl that I was with, I got kind of…weird. I started to get more and more down on myself, to feel like I was unlovable, to start showing a lot of interest in girls who were unattainable, unavailable or just flat out bad decisions. I’m not the dreamiest clown in the circus (I have just decided that I will be making up most of the figures of speech in this post as I go along. I’m sorry if you find it annoying or confusing, but it just goes to show you that a pentagram in the hand beats two in the butthole. Apparently my made up figures of speech won’t make any sense either. Enjoy.) but should I really be chasing after crazy divorced women who are five years older than me? I didn’t just reek of desperation, I was aiming all of that crazy energy at targets who I should’ve known were unlikely to pan out. Any normal person feeling the way I was would find someone interested, no matter how dumpy, get drunk and then make some bad decisions with them, but instead I was writing love notes to Bea Arthur and killing Pierce Brosnan’s plants in the hope that he’d pay attention to me.

Anyway, I started dating the last girl I was with, she was really great instead of mean or crazy or old and I came out of the fog. I enjoyed months of lucid, reasonable thought. I would occasionally look back at the way I felt and acted in that previous year and just shake my head in disbelief at my behavior. Actually, I do that pretty much all the time. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess (I’ve changed my mind. I’m too lazy to make up any more figures of speech). This was no exception, though.

And then our relationship ended. As I said before, whenever that happens to me, it’s always unpleasant – I spend time feeling guilty, angry, remorseful, etc. This time I have another thing to throw into the mix, however: fear that I will go crazy again. I’m still sane for now, but I don’t know how much more time I have before I’m back to mailing naked pictures of myself to Oprah or making passes at one of my married male friends (I’m talking to you, Atkins. Call me. Please.) It’s only been a few weeks, and I’m already starting to feel like a little bit like I haven’t been taking my medication or something.

In case you forgot:

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this picture since I saw it for the first time. I feel like there’s a story behind this. Well, not so much a story as a list of questionable decisions.

For starters, how do you come up with this idea for a tattoo? Most of the time when I see someone with a tattoo, I can get a feel for why they got it. The guy with the tribal pattern on his bicep thinks it’s badass, or the girl with the butterfly on her lower back or the butterfly on her ankle thinks it’s sexy. I don’t know exactly what you’re trying to say when you get a tattoo of a flaming pentagram that’s centered on your butthole though. I also have no idea what “HAWGSS” means. A google search of it turns up absolutely nothing. Is this guy trying to look tough? Is this a sexual thing? The result of too much alcohol or a lost bet? Who the fuck knows? It’s random enough that I’m almost willing to believe that it’s not a tattoo at all and just some kind of incredibly improbable birthmark – I have no clue.

Second of all, I have to wonder what the conversation with the tattoo artist was like. Did the guy walk in wanting to get a tattoo but unsure of what kind? Did he thumb through the book of stencils for a while before whipping it shut, sighing and asking in an exasperated tone “I’m looking for something a little bit more in the ‘burning-pentagram-on-my-butthole’ department, or is it just skulls and hearts with you buffons?” Did the guy just come in thinking about maybe getting a picture of the virgin Mary on his chest or one of those spiderwebs on his elbow and then ask the tattoo artist what he thought he should do? Actually, I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this was not the tattoo artist’s idea, and probably a custom job, and a fairly ambitious one at that. That’s a large tattoo with a fair amount of detail etched onto some difficult to reach spots.

Furthermore, and I know I keep harping on this, is this really the best place to get the tattoo? Wouldn’t this looks just as good on your chest, or your shoulder, or your torso, or any other part of the body that doesn’t have a butthole on it? There are only a few select places you can show off a tattoo like this to other people, and I imagine that it’s a painful place to have a needle stabbing you repeatedly. And how does it feel to be the guy that has to put it there? If I were a tattoo artist, I would do everything I could to convince the guy to get it somewhere else. A tattoo that size would be a big paycheck for the artist, but how many hours are you willing to spend pawing at some guys butt cheeks before it’s not worth it?

But let’s just forget all of that. Some guy has decided that he wants to get the tattoo in question, he wants to get it in that location, and he’s found someone that is willing to spend several hours with his face buried in his ass putting a tattoo on it. Why do you take a picture of it and put it up on the Internet? I have made some bad, bad decisions relating to what I should and shouldn’t post online, but this goes beyond that.

Something else just dawned on me: This guy isn’t holding the camera. That means that the camera is either on a tripod or someone is in the room taking the picture for this man. The gentleman in question must be incredibly charismatic, because he seems to be more than able to get everyone he knows to get in incredibly close quarters with one of the most unpleasant parts of his body. Does that thing shoot gold or play taps or something?

I guess I’ll never know. To be fair, now that I’m thinking about it, I just wrote 5 paragraphs on his asshole, so maybe if I’m going to write an essay on it I should take a good long look in the mirror before I bust everyone else’s chops for fixating on this guy’s butt.

All right. I actually have to work tomorrow, so I should probably get a little bit of sleep. On top of that, I’m not feeling too good about this post. 1 part whining about a break up and another part completely fixated on another man’s butt – I feel like this is a less than triumphant return to blogging. And like I need to press “Publish”, so everyone can bask in my shame.

Goodnight.

Oh, I almost forgot, I didn’t embed a video, and I know how important that is to everyone.



This is how techno should be, in my opinion: 30 seconds of techno to get you pumped up, followed by metal.

It’s interesting to me.

On facebook, all of my friends are excited about Obama getting elected. On myspace, that’s also the general consensus, but my friends list is also peppered with a few people who are “Terrified for the future of our country” and “Can’t wait to say ‘I told you so’”.

It’s interesting to me. People that support Barak Obama are incredibly excited about him winning and winning big. People are dancing in the streets over his election into office, but the people that don’t support Obama seem to have an equal but opposite reaction to his election. There seems to be this doomsday scenario where America is in ashes by the time he has finished his term. It’s not just going to be a sub par presidency. Obama is going to actively go out of his way to destroy America.

I’ve tried to discuss this with people. The students that hold this view can’t really defend it because they’re 12 and they’re just repeating what their parents have told them (Same goes for the kids who tell me that McCain is old or senile or has a funny looking jaw – after spending some time with them, I’m pretty relieved that 12 year olds can’t vote, because as near as I can tell, none of them are even kind of aware of the actual issues either candidate supports, just the really stupid, superficial shit they hear in attack ads and from Mom and Dad.)

More disconcerting to me are the voting adults that I talk about this with, because they don’t seem to be able to come up with a better response than the 12 year olds. I’m genuinely curious as to what it is about Barak Obama that makes a certain group of people think that he’s going to bring about the end of the world. I think I would be less curious if they just thought he would be a bad president who would hurt the economy or damage our foreign relations, but the fact that they think he’s going to destroy America literally and not figuratively really piques my curiosity.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get a straight answer. Or any answer at all, really. I’ve tried to get an explanation out of three different people, and each time I’ve gotten some deviation of “You’ll see”.

Here’s a text conversation I had with a friend tonight:

M.K.: You’re a bigger person that I am and thanks to your vote the world is going to come to an end!
Me: Lol. How do you figure?
M.K.: Oh you’ll see when the world comes to an END!
Me: You’re right. He’s only been elected for an hour and already we’re in an unwinnable war, have a record debt and a crumbling economy! Clearly we need a white republican to save us!
M.K.: I’m done talking to you

To be fair, I started antagonizing her when I didn’t get a straight answer. In my defense, I didn’t get a straight answer.

So, if there are any of you out there who think that this presidency is the beginning of the end, help me understand. Is it his middle name? Is it William Ayers? Is it his lack of experience? Is it because he’s a minority? What is it about Barak Obama that sends a shiver down your spine? Help me understand.

Because I’m am totally fucking stoked that he won, and won hard. I keep repeating this to everyone in earshot, but this is the first presidential election where the candidate I voted for won. I’m pretty excited.

Now I’m going to go to sleep.

All of you need to shut the fuck up about Obama being our next president. You are all jinxing the fucking election, and if McCain wins, so help me God, I am going to firebomb all of your houses before offing myself. Just put a lid on it and pray that this isn’t a repeat of 2000 or 2004.

I don’t care about the 7 point lead in the polls, or his estimated 98.2 percent probability of of winning on fivethirtyeight.com, or even the landslide victory that a lot of news sources are predicting. Kerry had a big lead in exit polls. Gore won the popular vote. The Denver Broncos were favorites against the Miami Dolphins, who have Chad Pennington as their starting quarterback. For those of you who don’t follow football, if NFL players were dining establishments, Chad Pennington would be Applebees. Applebees is a relatively solid backup plan, but never a first choice. The food at Applebees is edible (technically), but nobody eats there unless the place that they wanted to go to is closed or it has a two hour wait. That’s Chad Pennington.

Yet despite exit polls, Kerry lost. Despite winning the popular vote, Gore lost. And despite playing against the Applebees of professional football, the Broncos lost.

So until Obama has been sworn in and is sitting down in the oval office, I will not believe that something isn’t going to happen to fuck this up. I have spent eight long years watching an inept retard run the country into the ground, and you assholes better not ruin this for me with your smug overconfidence. Just put a lid on it for the next 24 to 48 hours. If he makes it in, you can all be as happy as you want while I let out a sigh of relief and get the opportunity to hope that something positive will happen to our country for the first time in eight years.

Until then, shut up.

And seriously. Fuck the Dolphins.