Mind Your Own God Damn Business

So I had a little snafu yesterday.

I was at the gym. They have some new bikes there with monitors on them. They looked kind of neat, so I hopped on one and started looking around at the different modes that it had. There was one where the monitor just showed a racetrack, one that showed a mountain path that I could follow, and a few others like that. There was another mode called “Chase”. It sounded interesting, so I selected it. One of the modes involved chasing dragons. I picked it.

Only an idiot wouldn't be able to tell that this is a game. I am an idiot.

In that mode, you rode around on some mountainous terrain in a little chariot and picked up either red, green, blue or silver tokens. Once you picked them up, you had to find a dragon of that color and ram it with your chariot. I set it for 20 minutes, so I had that time to ram as many dragons as I could. The chariot was aggravatingly slow, so I had to pedal my ass off to get a reasonable amount of speed, but I could pick up speed multipliers to help me out.

I was about ten minutes in, when something occurred to me: Dragons? Tokens? Speed multipliers?

If I didn’t know better, I might think that I was playing a fucking video game.

After the initial flash of panic and shame about breaking my new year’s resolution, I decided to finish anyway (And almost died in the process; that chariot was abysmally slow. I had to pedal like a mad man to have any chance of catching one of those dragons), but I spent a lot of time during the rest of the day trying to decide if I had actually broken the resolution. After a lot of deliberation, I decided that this can probably be counted as an exception to the rule. If I’m playing a game that requires me to pedal a stationary bike as hard as I can, and I’m doing it not because I want to play a game but because I want to get some cardio done, I’m probably in the clear. If I had to get a colonic tomorrow, and I had the option to do it with a machine that let me play “Colonic Hero” while I was doing it, I would do that too. I’m also relatively sure that I can keep my play time down. I don’t think that there’s any way that I will accidentally spend all afternoon pedaling as hard as I can on a stationary bike, because I’ll have a stroke if I do.

So, even though I technically played a video game yesterday, I put a little grey “X” on my calendar marking that I made it another day without picking up a controller.

Ten and a half months to go.

Okay, I have to point this out.

1. I have never read Twilight, or any of the books that come after it.

2. Almost every girl I know has read the books and loves them. It is easier to count the girls I know who haven’t read Twilight than it is to count the ones that have.

3. From what I know about them, the books have several opportunities to be awesome that they completely avoid. If I didn’t know any better, I would think that Stephanie Myers was trying to make a bunch of romance novels for girls and not hilarious action stories for my entertainment. It’s as though instead of trying to appease one 29 year old male who doesn’t read her books anyway, she’s trying to appeal to everyone on the planet who is literate and in possession of a vagina.

Of all of the images that come up when you Google "Centaur", this is, by far, the best. Your eyes don't deceive you- that is, in fact, Patrick Swayze. I used to think that I could never get a tattoo, because nothing would still seem cool to me when I was 40. This changes everything.

I’ve mentioned before that the books should have centaurs. I’m constantly wishing for a scene where Bella is trapped by the vampires that want to drink her blood, and all looks lost until Edward comes charging in on a centaur (And not riding it like a horse – I want him standing on its back, so maybe “surfing” on a centaur would be a more appropriate term) wielding a chainsaw, and then it just rains vampire limbs for 40 or 50 pages. Now we’re talking!

Nobody that likes the books agrees with me on this point. I guess I can understand. It is kind of a reach, and it’s not very romantic. Whatever.

Listen to this, though:

(Actually, if you’re reading the books and haven’t finished them yet, don’t listen to this. It’s a spoiler.)

At the end of the fourth book, Edward and Bella get married. They do it, vampire style (I assume. I also assume that “vampire style” for Stephanie Myers is something really lame and mushy, considering her books are filled with hopeless romantic vegetarian vampires who shimmer in sunlight. In the Twilight universe, Vampires probably have sex by covering the floor in rose petals and then curtsying). Then, she gets pregnant. I guess that the little vampire baby starts sucking the life out of her, and kills her, or she turns into a vampire or something. I don’t remember.

Whatever it is, it’s a wasted opportunity. Here’s why:

A vampire and a human woman fall in love and have sex.

The woman becomes pregnant with a half human, half vampire baby.

Am I the only one who sees the logical direction this should take?

Think about it.

Does any of this sound familiar to anyone?

When she has that baby, who should be born?

Here’s a hint:



That’s right.

Wesley Fucking Snipes.

Blade.

A half-human, half-vampire killing machine.

Blade Cullen's High School Yearbook Photo

It could work! From what I understand, the conflict throughout all seven thousand pages of those books is that everyone wants to drink Bella’s blood. You know what solves Edward and Bella’s problem with the evil vampires that want to kill her and drink her blood? A heavily armed Day Walker that lays waste to anything with abnormally large cuspids. Those enemy vampires are a real problem for the Cullens until Blade is filling them full of buck shot, holy water and deep lacerations.

Not only could it work, it should work. This isn’t like my centaur pipe dream. Blade would fit into the story just fine, he would resolve the conflict of the story, and it opens the door for four more books that I would totally read.

At this point, I feel like Stephaie Myers is taunting me. She takes the story just a little bit in the direction of something awesome to get my attention, and then steers it back to something that makes 13 year old girls swoon. Every time I have a conversation with someone who is reading the book, it always goes about the same.

“‘Have I told you about the 5th book? It starts out with a twist!” The girl I’m talking to tells me. “It turns out that Edward and Bella actually live on a planet called ‘Krypton’. When their planet is in danger, they put their child, who they name Kal-El, into a rocket ship and send him to Earth.”

“And then…?” I ask eagerly.

“He falls in love with a girl and they talk about their feelings, but then in the middle of the book, their romance almost ends in heartbreak because she sees him at the mall foodcourt holding hands with that bitch Carla! Thankfully, it’s all a big misunderstanding and he makes it up to her by flying her to Venice and proposing to her on a shimmering gondola!” She replies, as my face sinks and all of the girls in earshot gasp, smile and clutch their hands to their hearts.

Then, she punches me in the balls and walks away as I crumple to the floor.

Speaking of, I like the new Prodigy album (It’s not actually related. I just didn’t feel like trying to come up with a logical transition, so I threw in the first one that came to mind). I don’t know if I like it because it’s actually awesome or because it reminds me of music that I listened to in high school, but I do like it. I think that there are some arguments either way. I’m always a sucker for high energy techno, and this certainly qualifies, so I think it’s very possible that even if you wiped all of my memories of high school, I would still really like this CD.

On the other hand, they made an effort to make this album sound like their older ones, and I think that it’s entirely possible that a large part of the reason that I like it so much is that it reminds me of their older albums. I don’t know. As I’ve been getting older, I keep getting this stronger and stronger inkling that I’m turning into that old guy who listens to music that sounds like stuff from his formative years and says things like “Fuck yeah! This is when music was music! They don’t make it like this anymore!”

It's like Fred Durst says: "Heartbreak is a headache, Like a toothache or an earthquake". Jesus, I wish I was joking.

Another example of that would be this fact: I am aware of the fact that Limp Bizkit is getting back together. Not only am I aware of this fact, I am vaguely interested to see what happens. Although, maybe that’s not entirely true. I can’t actually listen to Limp Bizkit anymore. The music seems really goofy to me now (remember, this is coming from a man who currently loves a band called “The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza”), and I don’t really relate to that whole “Girls are fucked up, yo!” stuff the way that I did when I was 19. I still have the mp3s on my computer, but it’s kind of like saving a picture of an old girlfriend or journal entries from childhood. They’re worth keeping to remind me of something that I liked a lot when I was younger, but I can’t really listen to them anymore.

Well, I guess that it all comes down to this: I can sit around here and try to figure out why I like the music that I do, or I can listen to the Prodigy some more. I think the choice is clear.

Have a good week.