Okay, for whatever reason, I’ve been puzzling over this all day.

Suppose that you had something terrible happen to you while you were young. Maybe you were a hostage or a POW for a few years, or you survived a plane crash, or you battled a horrible drug addiction, or maybe your Dad was an alcoholic. I don’t know.

Suppose that you are now successful because of it. Maybe you got a book deal, or you speak to auditoriums full of people about it, or you were able to settle out of court with the person that wronged you for a large sum of money. The bottom line is, you’re much more successful after the event happens than you would’ve been if it had never occurred.

Now, you go to bed tonight, and when you wake up the next morning, you’ve gone back in time. It’s before whatever the event is, and it gives you an opportunity to avoid it. You can go to graduate school instead of joining the army, catch a different flight that won’t leave you stranded in the mountains and force you to eat another person to survive, or turn down that first hit of heroin.

Do go through the event again, knowing where it will lead, or do you opt out of the bad situation and forgo the success that will stem from it?

What if you decide not to go through with it? How badly does it fuck you up if you forgo it, and instead of living off royalty checks from the made for T.V. movie of your struggles, you have to get a job at a Best Buy? Even if it’s much worse in the short term, are you willing to give up the happiness you’ll get from it once it’s over? Is it possible that you will end up worse off in your 30′s because you DIDN’T spend your 20′s addicted to heroin?

I’ve given this a lot more thought today than is probably warranted. I’m also suspicious that it’s one of those things that isn’t that interesting to other people; it’s like listening to a teenager who just realized that racism is bad or has recently discovered Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I probably just spent my day thinking about something that’s covered in a Saved By The Bell Episode.

Anyway, here’s a Prodigy video. You know those older people that are desperately trying to cling to youth, and part of that is convincing themselves that bands that they listened to in high school are still cool and edgy, even though the band is something like 20 years old now and hasn’t really been doing anything relevant since Bill Clinton was president, and some people would argue that they weren’t really even relevant back then?

I’m that guy now.

Either way, I can’t help it. The Prodigy have a new album coming out next month, and so far, I like what I hear.

Stay Classy, bitches.

I’ve set my website to allow images to be viewed even if you’re not actually on it. I’ll warn you that there’s a possibility that you’re going to end up seeing someone’s asshole. I did it in part because almost everyone who reads this does it with RSS feeds, and also because the bandwidth I was losing due to what is apparently a world wide David Lee Roth fetish that I didn’t even know existed before making the mistake of putting his name and a few of his pictures in a post seems to be dying down.

Seriously. There is apparently a very strong demand to see naked pictures of David Lee Roth, because I can’t remember a single day since putting up that post that it’s not the number one search query that lands people on this blog. I’m not quite sure why so many people want to see what looks like the crypt keeper in assless chaps with a blond wig on, but they do. Multiple times per day. Trust me.

And seriously. That’s what he looks like. Look at this:

I'm hot for SCREECHER!!! EEE-HEE-HEE-HEE-HEE!!!

I’m on day 18 of no video games. During the week, it hasn’t been too much of a problem, but during the weekend it drives me nuts. I’ve been handling it in two different ways.

First, I’ve been watching videos of games being played on youtube to help calm down my shakes and sweating. Speaking of, I stumbled on a site called “Gaming In the Clinton Years”. It’s a site full of videos of games from, as you might expect, 1992-2000. If you spent any amount of time playing console games during the 90′s, I highly recommend it. It was fun.

Second, I’ve been …obtaining them. Games I used to like when I was younger, games that are 10 years old that I never played, games that I’ll probably have to purchase a new computer to play…I am doing my level best to completely fill up my hard drive with ISOs. I see this ending one of two ways: Either I’ll end up deleting them once I have the choice to play games again and the forbidden fruit syndrome isn’t there to make me want to play Barbie Horse Adventures and That’s so Raven, or January 1st, 2010 will be the first day of a three month orgy. I guess we won’t know for three hundred and forty seven more days. Damn it.

My time away from video games has been harder than I thought it would be. In between pacing around and looking longingly at the Wii, I’ve had some time to think about what I want to do with all of this recently opened up time and how to motivate myself to do it. Strangely, I’ve been having the most success with this while I’m exercising.

I just bought a new pair of running shoes last week. I know, exciting, right? They’re Nike +, which means that I can put a little chip in them and then hook them up to my iPod and keep track of my mileage, speed, etc. When I get home and sync my iPod, it uploads all of that information to Nike’s website and I can view it as exciting graphs and charts. From there, you can set up goals and challenges for yourself or to compete against other people. It’s kind of like battle.net for running.

It just occurred to me that some of you were having sex and passing your classes in highschool, so let me just throw this out there: battle.net is the online service Blizzard uses for people to play their games against each other online.

This led to realization #1: I will perform any task with great enthusiasm, no matter how shitty it is, if it somehow involves electricity and graphs. I’ve actually gotten a lot better at running over the past year, making me hate it much less, but it’s still by no stretch of the imagination “fun”, and yet I find myself extremely excited to go out and run a few miles so I can come home, upload it to the website and view it as a little green bar on a graph.

I’m pretty sure that this translates across all of my interests. If a company were to release a line of enema bags that electronically monitored how often you were using them and what was flushed out, I can almost guarantee that I would be filling my butt with coffee three times a day and checking my results online every ten minutes.

The second realization was about my longer runs. There’s a route that I take where I just run up to the end of reservoir road. If I turn around there, it’s 4 miles. If I hang a right and run the rest of the route, it’s 6. I’m always sick of running when I get to the turning point, and usually thinking about turning around and hacking two miles off of my run.

Then, I ask myself “Is that what a man would do?”

I always say no and then, cursing under my breath, I limp the full six miles.

The problem is that I only seem to have this response when I’m running. If I’m in a situation where I’m not wearing a pair of running shoes, I almost always respond to adversity by taking off my pants and firing up my gameboy (NOT an effective tactic in the classroom, BTW). I need to figure out a way to get that voice into my head when I’m not running.

So that’s that: I need to find a way to incorporate electricity, graphs, and stupid machismo into all of my daily activities. Or Civilization 4. I really want to play some fucking Civ4. And Warhammer. And Starcraft. And Metroid 3.

I need to stop, or I’m going to lose it.

Anyway, one of the things I wanted to do with my new free time was post more blog entries (I realized that I haven’t been doing nearly enough damage to my reputation lately). I’m shooting for one a week.

And I apologize for this one. I’m not sure that it’s even interesting to me. Either way, it’s done.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to try to convince myself that I should do something besides drink beer and watch football all day.

It’s what a man would do.

Here’s a video of Dillinger Escape Plan. Believe it or not, this is a cover. I think 3 of you will know what it is, and Dan is the only one who will think that it is cool.

Maybe it’s time to admit that I have a crush on David Lee Roth, too. I don’t seem to be able to make it a week without mentioning him or putting up a photo of him. It’s what a man would do?

FACT:
I took a nap this afternoon. While I was asleep, I had one of those crazy, vivid nap-dreams. In this dream, I crapped my pants. For the remainder of the dream, I did nothing about it. I would, from time to time, think about how uncomfortable it was to go about my business with my business sitting in the back of my pants, and even think to myself “I should really take care of this in a minute,” but it never happened.

This led to a lot of reflection when I woke up.

My first thought upon waking up was how comfortable, and more importantly, feces-free my pants were. We’ve all had those dreams where we spend a few moments awake and unsure that what we dreamed was really a dream. Sometimes they’re good things, and it breaks my heart a little bit when I realize that they never actually happened. I still remember being eight and dreaming that I owned Optimus Prime, only to slowly realize after a few moments of being awake that I didn’t. On the other hand, when I’ve just finished dreaming that a loved one is dead, or that I showed up to work before realizing that I accidentally left my clothes at home, or maybe shit in my pants and then ignored it for two hours, that moment where I wake up and realize that whatever the bad thing was I had been dreaming about didn’t really happen, it’s a great feeling.

My second thought was that I really should’ve changed my pants in the dream. I had numerous opportunities to, and it would’ve been easy enough – certainly easier than walking around with soiled pants for two hours – but I never bothered to do it. I have a lot of dreams where I respond to the things that happen in ways that are very different than how I respond to them in real life, and it never occurs to me that there was a much easier, more reasonable thing to do until I’ve been awake for an hour. This was definitely one of those times.

My next thought was that my brain is pulling a fast one on my with this whole “you need to sleep” thing. Think about it: I allegedly need eight or nine hours of sleep a day. If I don’t get it, I go crazy, I can’t think, and I can’t do anything without dozing off. If you deprive yourself of sleep for too long, you can end up damaging your brain. Even though we still don’t totally understand sleep, It’s supposed to be pretty important, because it gives your brain an opportunity to sort everything out, get chemicals re-balanced and organize your thoughts.

I call bullshit, and here’s why: when I give my brain this allegedly vital time to reorganize and recharge, what does it do? I’ll tell you what it does: It spends two hours pretending that I took a dump in my pants. Entertaining, certainly. Vital to my survival? Bitch, please. I’m losing nine hours of my day that I could be spending doing something productive (or, much more likely in my case, unproductive) because my brain “has” to spend time pretending that I’m making out with my Mom or showing up to work naked. It’s the biggest load of shit I’ve ever heard.

Assuming that my brain isn’t fucking with me, it makes me wonder why shitting my pants is of such vital importance for me to be dreaming about. I could be flying or riding a centaur or playing video games in my dreams, but instead I apparently have to be sulking around with the back of my pants sagging for my brain to properly recover from a long day.

My last thought on the subject was that it was interesting that of all of the things I dream about, this was the one that resulted, by far, in the most reflection after waking up. There’s something wrong with me.

NEXT SUBJECT:
I was talking with one of my friends a few days ago that had read this paper by a psychologist who thought that romance novels, movies and sitcoms were completely fucking up everyone’s perception of how relationships were supposed to work. The argument was that people spend a lot of time soaking up these fictional stories about a couple that meet, completely click, know each other’s needs before the other person even knows what they are, finish each other’s sentences, and after a conflict, usually involving a less appealing boyfriend or, in especially queer instances, evil vampires that sparkle in sunlight, everything is resolved and they live harmoniously forever. According to the psychologist in question, there is no conflict in the relationships in most mass media, no compromises, no down time and no real work. Love is just a constant, epic, never ending passionate joy ride, and people see this and expect it out of their relationships. Chuck Klosterman wrote an essay with similar sentiments, but his irritation was directed at Coldplay for blowing people’s perception of love into unrealistic proportions with their bombastic lyrics. I’m not really sure that’s the best reason to not like Coldplay – to me, it’s like turning up your nose at a turd sandwich because it has tomatoes on it – but I guess that my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

I was thinking about this today, because I was working in an eight grade reading class and I decided that I’m pretty sure that a lot of middle school student’s views on life are shaped by shows like “Saved by the Bell” and “The Breakfast Club”. Nobody that age is probably even aware that either of those things exist, but I’m almost certain that there is something similar that has replaced them since then; it’s a winning formula. There seems to be this assumption among certain students that they are a bunch of clever, wise-cracking pranksters who’s job is to sass the teachers, who will, in turn, become flustered and forget to assign them homework. It kind of makes sense. A lot of middle school kids are very focused on themselves and seem to believe that the world is their stage and that they’re the only ones who think or know anything. Unfortunately, for me, in real life, middle school kids are played by middle school kids instead of hot actors in their early 20′s, and there isn’t a staff of funny adults (read: “Jews”) writing their jokes for them. It’s just like being on the set of “Welcome Back Kotter”, only the show is written by 12 year olds. On the fly. It’s about as funny as it sounds.

I shouldn’t be such a dick. There are probably only about six kids out of 100 that I deal with in a day that are actually a pain in the ass. The rest of them are usually really nice, hard workers, and they frequently catch me off guard with some really funny, clever stuff. I just have to devote a lot of time and energy to getting the crazy ones to shut the fuck up and do what they’re supposed to.

NEXT SUBJECT:
I really like Arsonists Get All The Girls. They’re a band (One million points to anyone who can guess the genre. Hint: I like them). Here’s the thing: I’m not completely sure, but I kind of think that they they have a keytar player. At the very least, someone has a synthesizer, because I keep hearing all these sweet Moog type sounds. It’s a relatively rare choice for most modern bands. In a hardcore band (did you guess correctly?) Unheard of.

NEXT SUBJECT:
One of the things that I like about metal shows is that it is considered acceptable and even expected that you shove the people around you. If you’re next to the guy who won’t stop talking, or drank too much, or is irritating in some other way, you can run into him or start throwing elbows at him and it is completely okay.

I was thinking the other day that it would be nice if this was the case ANY time metal was playing.

My little sister and I were at the grocery store buying supplies for Christmas a few weeks ago. The store was packed. A lot of the customers were old, and you know how old people are: slow and unaware of their surroundings. I couldn’t go five feet without having to wait or park my shopping cart somewhere and run by to grab whatever it was that I needed.

Here’s my fantasy: I’m at the grocery store. It’s packed. Old people are all standing in the mathematical center of the aisle I need to get through, staring at the canned green beens in befuddlement. I’m not even sure if they’re actually alive, or just incredibly lifelike mannequins placed in my way to make my shopping experience inconvenient. I can’t get anywhere.

But I’m not angry. I calmly put on a giant pair of sunglasses, take a cassette tape out of the back pocket of my jeans, slide it into the boom box in my shopping cart and hit play.

The next aisle over, everyone is calmly standing in the middle of the aisle, carefully examining the all of the goods as slowly as possible. Slowly, the sound of double bass drums and yelling becomes audible over the sound of the muzak.

Suddenly, I come skidding around the corner. I’m pushing my cart in front of me, full sprint. I have ten feet or so to get a full head of steam before I make contact with the first shopping cart. When I hit, it looks like a bomb went off. The contents of the other cart go flying through the air and even the cart itself goes air born before crashing into a Triscuit display. I pause long enough to grab a couple of jars of marshmallow fluff, play a few licks of air guitar and throw up the horns before sprinting around the corner.

The next five minutes at the store are like that. By the time I make it to the check out counter, the floor is covered with broken jars, overturned rascals and oxygen tanks that have been separated from their owner. Once I have everything, I hit “Stop” on the boombox, take off my sunglasses, pay for my groceries and calmly leave.

Think about it. If this is how life worked, the applications would be limitless! As I’m sure you’re aware, every situation is better with metal, and there are thousands of times during the day when the task you are performing would be accomplished in a far more expedient manner if you could simply elbow someone in the adam’s apple.

I hope that you’re taking notes, president-elect Barak Obama. I’ll send you the Dr. Acula tape free of charge if you promise to use it when you’re “negotiating” with Vladmir Putin.

FINAL SUBJECT:
When I was 12 and started noticing girls, I found 14-16 year old girls to be incredibly hot. When I was in high school, I thought that high school girls were incredibly hot. In college, I was a huge fan of college girls, although I still found high school girls attractive. Now that I’m in my late 20′s and approaching 30, I find myself having the hots for the girls in their mid 20′s up to their mid 30′s.

When is this trend going to stop? When I’m in my 70′s, am I going to be drooling over some hot 60 year old piece of ass that I see walking down the street, hopefully in the process of getting leveled by a shopping cart being pushed by a young man who’s blasting music out of a boombox?

Probably not. Old men who are rich or famous enough to hook up with a trophy wife don’t seem interested in having sex with anyone over the age of 25. I just never thought that I would actually be attracted to 30 year old women, and so the fact that I am now makes me wonder how old I will get before women my age are no longer attractive to me.

THAT IS ALL.



I’m telling you, that’s a damn keytar.

They say that if you want to quit a habit, you need to do something else in its place. Apparently, I write about the habit and then put it on the Internet.

My first day was alright, which didn’t really surprise me. The first couple days of something like this are always fairly okay. It’s only been a few days since I played games, so I’m not too desperate, and my resolve is still pretty strong.

After a few weeks, though, I start having to deal with a three pronged attack: My resolve weakens, my desire increases, and I sometimes completely forget that I gave them up in the first place. The first two are pretty self explanatory. Let me elaborate on the third.

I’ve given up games before. My Mom used to force lent on us, and back before I could refuse, I would sometimes pick video games (I always tried to give up things I didn’t really care about or do in the first place (“I’m giving up fucking pigs for lent!”) or slip a double negative in somewhere (“I’m going to give up not looking at nudie pictures on the Internet!”), but my Mom was too shrewd to fall for either trick. She’s a sharp one). Every time that I did give up games, the following scenario would always play out in one way or another: I would go to a friend’s house. He would be playing something. He would offer me the control. Without thinking, I would say “sure!” and grab it. Thirty minutes later, I would realize what I was doing and start sobbing. Then, if I listened carefully, I could hear Jesus’ voice drifting down from the heavens, comforting me with kind words.

“It’s cool, my son,” he would say. “Video games are a difficult vice to shake. I’m just glad that I just gave up food and fucking water for 40 days and 40 nights, instead of something really crucial like fucking N64. Maybe I was a little bit thirsty by, I don’t know, day 2 out of 40, you know, while I was in a FUCKING DESERT, but I would have been a goner for sure if I’d been out there and I hadn’t been able to play a few rounds of Golden Eye. No, this is totally understandable, you weak-willed little bitch.”

And somewhere, from the depths of hell, I could hear Satan’s laugh as he wailed on his electric guitar.

I’ll concede that the second half of that story was a lie – if you can prove that it didn’t happen.

Like I was saying, playing games – it’s one of those things that I normally do so much that it’s almost a reflex. It’s like not flushing the toilet, not not wearing pants or taking my job seriously – After 29 years of doing something a certain way, it’s pretty much muscle memory. Try it tonight. Use the toilet, and then don’t flush it. You’ll sit there, thinking about it, finish up, stand up, flush it, wash your hands, and then realize that you weren’t supposed to flush it. When I worked as a line cook, the same thing would happen when people ordered a club sandwich with no mayo. We would end up having to cook it seven or eight times because after preparing fifty club sandwiches a day with mayonnaise on them, we were almost physically unable to make one without. It was infuriating.

Anyway, that is my fear – a week from now, I will be three hours into playing Metroid and suddenly realize that Metroid is, in fact, a video game, which I resolved to not touch between now and 2009.

For now, though, I’m in that phase where I’m cool – I’m not going to forget, I’m not quite at the point where I will offer to suck my brother’s dick if he’ll just let me borrow his Wii for a few minutes, and I still remember that I’m not supposed to be playing them.

Well, I guess that’s all for now. Expect another post in 10 minutes, if the first 48 hours of 2009 are any indication.

I will leave you with a video that will reveal a most unholy secret to you: the only thing that Satan loves more than my missteps during lent is The Golden Girls.

I hope that everybody had a good New Year. I celebrated mine in such a way that I ended up coming home at 2 in the afternoon the next day, feeling like I had just been pinched out of a clown’s butthole. I was tired, a little hung over, and on the verge of getting sick (while I was visiting family in Golden earlier this week, my little cousin did his level best to give me a cold by refusing to cover his mouth when he coughed and ignoring personal space boundaries. Since then, I’ve felt the virus trying to take foot, but so far I have managed to fight it off). I got back into my bed at 4 PM, woke up for a few minutes for dinner and then slept until midnight, which is now. I feel much more rested and far less like I’m going to get sick now. Nonetheless, I anticipate writing this and then getting back into my bed and sleeping for six or seven more hours. So far, 2009 has been very relaxing for me, I guess.

I hope that everyone else has had a good New Year too. I’m feeling pretty good so far. Looking back at me from January 1st, 2008, I think I’m in a better place, which is good.

I was chatting with a friend the other day, and I realized that I spent most of my 20′s learning not to hate myself, and now that I’ve pulled that off, my life has been a lot easier. I feel like a different person now, even though almost all of the change is just my perception of myself. It’s sad to look back at all of the opportunities I missed out on and inappropriate things I let happen to me between 19 and now just because I was so down on myself all the time, but I’m glad that I hate myself a little bit less now.

So, I made a horrible mistake for 2009: I made a resolution. I got the idea from an article someone shared with me in my RSS feeds.

I’m going to try to avoid video games for all of 2009. I don’t know if it’s that good an idea, or if I’ll even be able to pull it off, but I’m going to find out. Most of the people that I’ve told this about want to know why, exactly, I’m planning on doing it and what I hope to accomplish.

The answer is that I’m not entirely sure, exactly. I’m not trying to make some sort of statement. I’m not hoping that this is the first step in completely cutting video games out of my life permanently. I like video games, and plan on continuing to play them in the future. I don’t have some far more productive activity planned instead, either. Maybe I’ll get more writing done or take up piano or something, but maybe it’ll just free up a few more hours a day for me to masturbate or develop a coke habit. I just know that I spend a pretty large amount of time during the year playing games of some sort, and I’m not sure that there are any real tangible benefits to it. I think video games are pretty benign. I don’t think they’re harmful, but I’m not really sure that I’m making that much growth by playing them either. When I waste two hours dicking around on the Internet, at least I learn some useless information of some sort. In fact, I just took an hour long break from this post to read about people who live in vans that they have converted into relatively comfortable homes, and I’m now in one of those retarded moments where I’m fired up about something that I don’t actually care about, so I’m half convinced that I should purchase a van and convert it so I can live in it. On an unrelated note, I’m beginning to think that I might have a little bit of ADD. What were we talking about?

Oh yeah. Things that I do besides video games that I think have benefits, no matter how minuscule. When I read a book, even if it’s relatively airy, I feel like I’ve learned something. When I write a blog post, I’ve upped the chance, no matter how slightly, that somebody can find it someday and eventually use it against me.

Actually, after a little bit more thought, I think that it boils down to this: although I really enjoy them, I also tend to use them as time wasters. I play games that I really like, but I also sometimes play games that I’m not that excited about as a way to kill time. If I’m a little bit bored, or I want to put something off, or I just want to slack, I automatically default to video games, and I don’t really do that with other things. If I read a book, it’s because I wanted to read it. If I write something, it’s because I wanted to write it. If I play a video game, sometimes it’s because I wanted to play it, but sometimes it’s because it’s easier than doing something else. I want to stop doing that.

So, we’ll see what happens. Maybe it will help me turn video games into something I only do for recreation instead of something that I do for recreation and to fill time while I’m waiting to die. Maybe I’ll become more productive. Maybe I’ll quit after a week. Maybe I’ll end up finding some other way to waste my time (I think that’s probably the most likely answer). I don’t know. But I’m interested to find out.

Kind of. It’s only been 12 hours, and I am seriously pissed off so far. I tried to use the bathroom today and reached for my DS before remembering that I couldn’t play it for another 364 days. I sat there, irritated and befuddled for a minute, trying to figure out how in God’s name I was supposed to use a toilet for the next year if I couldn’t play puzzle quest. I settled for a book. The fact that I am no longer capable of pooping without a gameboy in my hands is probably an indication that I need a little break from games.

Well, it is now two in the morning and my computer is beeping at me because the CPU is too hot. I should probably turn it off, go back to bed and blow all of the dust bunnies out of the heat sink when I wake up. I’ll keep you updated about how my attempt to stop playing games for a year goes. I can tell you right now that when I get into bed, it’s going to drive me up the wall to not be able to play games for a while before falling asleep.

This trend that I’m starting to notice where I can’t perform basic human functions without a controller of some sort in my hands is making me wonder if this isn’t so much a casual New Year’s resolution as much as a wake up call, letting me know that I have a serious problem. I’ll probably be in the hospital in a couple of days, dying of malnutrition and exposure in a soiled pair of pants because I can’t play Wii.

Either way, it’s time to go back to bed. Happy 2009.