-CBF-*

*( You may have noticed the “CBF” above. Allow me to explain: My new setup only displays an excerpt of my blog posts in RSS feeds, requiring you to click through to the actual website to see the full post. This change has been met with universal outrage. For the most part, people are irritated because they don’t want to navigate away from their RSS reader. One person went as far as to call me a “fucker”. There’s nothing that I can do for these people (except change it back to the way that it was, which I’m not going to do.)

There has been another concern that has been expressed to me, however.

As you may know, my blog can, from time to time, contain content that one might consider of questionable taste. The occasional profanity, the lurid details of my erotic Wilford Brimley (“The WB”, as I call him) dreams, or, hypothetically, the occasional picture of a man proudly displaying a giant tattoo that is decorating his butthole. Such images are easy to avoid from the RSS reader, but are much more difficult to dodge when visiting the actual webpage.

Like I said, I can’t (read: “am unwilling to”) help the people who want me to switch back to the old format, but I CAN help those of you who are afraid that if you click through to my website you will find mural-sized jpeg of a rectum leering back at you.

From now on, I will comb through my blog entries before posting them and search for inappropriate pictures. If the post passes inspection, I will stamp it with -CBF-, which, naturally, stands for “Certified Butthole Free”. You can then view the rest of the post reassured that you will not have to see anyone’s pooper.

Thank you for understanding, and enjoy!)

(I apologize for the image above. I am still working out some of the kinks in the new system, and this must have somehow been overlooked by quality control. I have no idea how it got there. Rest assured that I am working around the clock to rectify the problem.)

(And really, you know you’re maintaining a quality blog when you have to put an alert at the top of all your posts to let readers know whether or not it contains pictures of buttholes.

Enjoy!)

-BEGIN BLOG POST-

The gym is a wonderful place.

It’s a good opportunity to space out and listen to music or catch up on podcasts without anyone bothering me.

It’s a good place to leer at girls.

But most importantly, it’s a great place to watch guys make asses of themselves while they’re lifting weights.

You thought that I was going to suggest that it was great for working out, right? Whatever. That’s incidental.

I have to strongly recommend the weight room to those of you that don’t regularly visit it. I don’t care if you hate lifting weights, can’t  exercise because of a heart condition, or are paralyzed from the neck down – If you like to laugh, the weight room is the place to be.

This weekend, I was at the gym. I was doing my thing when I was suddenly startled by a series of loud noises behind me. It started with a man screaming, followed shortly by a VERY loud clanging of metal, followed by another loud scream. If I had heard the noise out of context, I would’ve guessed that the Kool-Aid man was trying to bust through a steel wall.

OH YEAH!

But the sound WAS in context, and so before I even turned around, I knew exactly what was going on: some jackass and his friend were doing squats with way too much weight and very poor, dangerous form.

For those of you that don’t know, a squat is when you hold some weight on your shoulders, squat down like you’re sitting down in a chair, stop when your thighs are parallel with the ground (or go lower if you’re really hardcore) and then stand back up.

Believe it or not, putting a bunch of weight on your back and then squatting down before standing back up a few times has the potential to injure you in all kinds of exciting ways. There are a few ways to screw up your back really badly, and there are all kinds of exciting ways to fuck up your knees. Squats scare the shit out of me, so I always try to be sure that I’m doing them like I’m supposed to so I don’t end up crumpled in a heap on the floor.

Anyway, I turned around to see if maybe all of the screaming and metallic banging meant that something entertaining was going on behind me.

I was not disappointed.

Sure enough, a gentleman was standing there with an absurd amount of weight on his back. He would bend his knees an almost imperceivable amount, lowering the weight two, maybe even three inches before yelling at the top of his lungs, standing back up and banging the bar back into the braces that were holding it before doing it again.

Appearance makes a difference too, though: If I see some guy doing something that seems ridiculous, but he’s also 250 pounds and 3% bodyfat, I figure that maybe he knows what he’s doing.

Here’s an example: As near as I can tell, Ronnie Coleman is completely insane. He almost always wears tights and a sleeveless t-shirts, which kind of makes it look like he’s wearing a tunic all the time. He has a Mike Tyson-esque high-pitched timbre to his voice, and as near as I can tell, he spends almost his entire time in the weight room screaming things like “Light weight baby!”, “Yeah Buddy!” “Ain’t nothing but a peanut!” and “Everybody wanna be a body builder, don’t nobody wanna do ( insert whatever exercise he is currently doing here)!”.

Ridiculous? No doubt. But here is a picture of Ronnie Coleman:

"Everybody wanna be a body builder, don't nobody wanna do bicep curls... or change this diaper that I'm filling to the brim even as we speak!"

A little bit crazy looking? Certainly. Not the kind of look that most people aspire to. Even repulsive to a lot of people.

And yet, when you see this man, no matter how insane his wardrobe is, comically musclebound he may be, or how much the things he yells make him sound like he’s suffering from the final stages of dementia, when you see a picture of him, it’s hard to not think to yourself “This is a man that knows a thing or two about lifting weights”.

Let me just re-emphasize how insane Ronnie Coleman is.

When I see people like this in the gym doing crazy things, I’m usually willing to cut them some slack. If some big guy is fondling his nipples with his free hand while he’s doing butterfly curls, hell, maybe I should too, because it seems to be working for him.

This was not the case, however. The gentleman in question did not have the appearance of a man who knew what he was doing. He was built roughly like me (a clear sign of incompetence if there ever was one), and was sporting a tight white undershirt, the collar of which he had cut in order to turn it into a very, very deep V-neck.

But it didn’t stop there. He had a friend with him. The friend in question was screaming motivation at the guy lifting to help him really push it to the limit.

“YEAH!” “YOU GOT THIS!” “COME ON! COME ON!” he would scream, while his buddy just barely bent his knees and then screamed some more at the top of his lungs.

After finishing, they spent some time high fiving and congratulating each other as though one of them had just killed a grizzly bear with his hands.

When I see things like that, it really reminds me how important it is to make sure that I make it to the gym regularly.

It also reminds me how hard it is to hold up weights when I’m giggling.

Goodnight.

Oh Jesus! I’m sorry! I don’t know how this keeps happening!

I got sick of how shitty the posts looked in the RSS reader, so I am now one of those dicks that makes you click to the webpage to see the actual entry. Sorry.

My Mother is a pack rat.

My Father is stressed out by clutter.

He retired recently, which means that he spends a lot more time at home, giving him far more opportunities to fixate on how messy the house is.

He reacts to this in the following fashion: He spends two months swallowing his rage and packing it up tightly in a little ball in his chest, and then he freaks out and throws some stuff away.

There are a lot of things wrong with that, but the biggest one is this: instead of picking out the largest, most useless things and getting rid of those, he always gravitates towards the things with the most value, regardless of size. I used to think that this was just because he was bad at assessing the value of things. Lately, I’ve began to wonder if it’s more of a passive-aggressive thing, where he’s punishing us for messing up his house.

"I'm sick of this clutter! I'm going to throw away all of those gold ingots. You know, the ones in the basement that are sitting next to the refrigerator box that's full of empty Pepsi bottles and broken glass!"

I was helping my Dad clean the basement this summer. There was a medium-sized box containing a bunch of China that used to belong to my grandmother on my Mom’s side. This grandmother is dead. My Mom considers that China an incredibly valuable family heirloom. I suggested that we just find an out of the way part of the house where we could store it. My Dad wanted to get rid of it. I stressed that maybe we should stack it somewhere instead.

“We’ll just put it in the middle of the playroom,” my Dad replied. “She’ll HAVE to deal with it, then!”

I knew that she wouldn’t “deal” with it, but I also knew that keeping the China out of the trash would keep my mother from murdering my father.

This is what happens six times a year. Roughly one quarter of our storage room is filled with used wrapping paper and bows from past Christmases. None of it ever actually gets used, and we could probably recycle most of it and get rid of a huge amount of clutter.  She doesn’t need it and wouldn’t miss it, and it would be incredibly easy to replace. There are plenty of large, useless things in our basement that we could get rid of to open up space, but instead of the closet filled with used napkins, my Dad is fixated on the manila folder that has our birth certificates and a rough draft of the constitution in it.

Last week, he was in another of his frenzies and was determined to throw away the rocking chair that my Mom breastfed us in when we were babies. Sure, it’s busted up and none of us have breastfed in almost 20 years, but my sister and I almost had to hold an intervention to keep him from throwing it away. I don’t care about that chair, but I do care about my parent’s marriage, and if they get divorced or one of them murders the other one, I don’t want it to be over that chair.

Another time, he tried to throw away my computer keyboard. For those of you that don’t know, a computer keyboard is only about the size of a loaf of bread and I use it to OPERATE MY FUCKING COMPUTER, which is something that I do pretty much every day.

This is what I mean: He singles out the most valuable item in the room, and then, regardless of size, storability or sellability, becomes convinced that it must be thrown away. I’ve tried to convince him that if he really wants something out of the house, he should tell my mom that she has a month to find a place for it, and if she can’t do it by then, he’s going to get rid of it. He refuses.

A few years ago, when he hit one of these sprees, he decided that he had to get rid of my CD collection.

I was pretty pissed off about it at the time (and still kind of am), but it hasn’t been the end of the world. Most of my music is on my hard drive anyway. I almost never use physical CDs anymore. There’s really only one situation where I miss it.

Ahh, the late 90's. Who DOESN'T miss those halcyon days of 200mhz computers, 56k internet, Boy Bands, Ally McBeal and uncontrollable acne?

Occasionally, I like to dust off music that I listened to when I was younger for nostalgia’s sake. If it’s something that I haven’t heard in 10 years, it can be kind of fun to hear it again, even if I don’t really like it anymore. I’ll remember putting it on a mix tape and listening to it in my Walkman on the way home from school, or riding somewhere in the car with Kevin, or day dreaming about some girl I liked that probably would’ve been into me if I’d tried to talk to them instead of just staring at the ground. I’m getting old enough that I don’t always remember what it was like to be a teenager, but if I hear an old song that I haven’t heard since the late 90′s, it gives me a little flashback of being completely fucking crazy, which sucked sometimes, but was a lot of fun on other occasions.

The problem is that to do this, I need to find music that I liked a lot that I haven’t heard in 10 years. If I’ve listened to it since then, it doesn’t really remind me of anything in particular, but If I haven’t heard it in 10 years, chances are that I’ve completely forgotten about it. I wasted almost all of my time and energy in high school on CDs (well, and barely playable mac ports of PC games that had been out for six years), and I have a less than photographic memory of what bands I liked and didn’t like.

That’s where my CD collection used to come in. I could usually find something that I had completely forgotten about and toss it in to see if I still liked it at all and trigger some old memories that I didn’t even know were still in my brain in the process.

Now that I don’t have the CDs anymore, it’s mostly just luck. I’ll stumble on something out of the blue, or I hit my head on the side of a toilet, and instead of inventing the Flux Capacitor, I’ll go “Huh. I wonder whatever happened to Dubstar?”

I had one of those moments a few days ago, when I remembered a band called Orange 9mm. I don’t know why I suddenly recalled them, but I did. I couldn’t remember what I thought of them, or even what their music sounded like, so I gave them a listen. All in all, they’re not too terrible. I think this probably sounded a lot better in 1995, but I think I still kind of like it.

Takes me back.

Well, I should probably get away from the computer for a while. I lucked out and scored another snow day today, and I need to get as much use out of it as possible.

Before I begin, I have to share a link to something called “Screamo-Crunk”. It’s exactly what it sounds like – Lil’ Jon Crunk type music, but with effeminate men with highlights in their hair and skinny girl jeans screaming instead of dudes with gold teeth and rhinestone-encrusted chalices rapping. Here’s a sample:

I’m not sure if this is awesome or retarded. I’m leaning towards retarded, but I’m fascinated by it and can’t seem to stop listening to it.

Moving on.

Here’s a riddle:

Suppose that you’re the recently appointed head chef at a restaurant. You’re preparing an important meal for a big table that night. The restaurant has a really good lobster supplier that they went to a lot of trouble to lock up, so the obvious choice is to serve lobster.

But you decide that you’re going to try and get steak instead, because you served steak at the last place that you worked. The steak is of slightly inferior quality to the lobster, but it was really popular at the old restaurant that you worked in because of all of the good things surrounding it – a delicious marinade, great side dishes, moist, chewy dinner rolls – the steak is good, but seems much better because there are so many good things complementing  it.

So you try to cut a deal with the steak guy so you can serve steak instead of lobster. Unfortunately, the deal falls though.

No problem. You’ll just keep serving lobster, right? Oops! The lobster supplier gets wind of the fact that you were trying to get rid of him in favor of the steak guy. This pisses the lobster guy off, and so he tells you to go fuck yourself.

Now you have no steak, and no lobster. It’s okay. You’ll just get a new lobster or steak supplier, right?

Wrong, bitch. The next best alternative is pot roast.

So, here’s the Riddle: What’s the name of the restaurant that you’re working at?

That’s right. The Denver Broncos.

Here's a picture of Jay Cutler, throwing a completion, interception, or incompletion. Hard to say. One thing is for certain, though: He's throwing it really fucking hard.

I suppose that I should apologize. I know of about five people that read this blog on a regular basis. I know that two of them are completely indifferent to football, and so I’m boring at LEAST 40% of the people who are crazy enough to waste their time reading this in the first place.

Well, one of the five wants to know what I think about Jay Cutler. That one person is twenty percent of my readership.

I have to give the people what they want.

The Broncos have Jay Cutler, their new coach tried to trade him for Matt Cassel, who isn’t as good, the deal fell through, now Cutler wants to leave, and that leaves the Broncos with…pot roast.

There have been people on both sides of this argument. Some people think that the new coach is a retard for trying to unload a 25 year old franchise quarterback that’s debatably the best player on the team. Others think that Cutler needs to quit acting so butt-hurt and just play, because football is a business, and trade offers are just part of the game. Everyone that kind of cares about football has some sort of opinion on it. I think I’m going to wait to pass judgement, at least for now.

Here’s the problem I see with coaching in the NFL: Your job is constantly in jeopardy in a way that it didn’t used to be ten years ago. Everybody wants to win right away, and so fans are ready to turn on you and owners are ready to can you faster than they ever were, so coaches are terrified of taking risks, and I think that it results in less interesting games (and probably fewer wins.)

This guy's name is also Jay Cutler. Here he is doing curls. I can't be positive, but I'm pretty sure that he's having an orgasm, too.

Last year, when they were down by one point with a few seconds left in the game, the Broncos decided to go for a risky two point conversion instead of the much easier extra point and tie against the Chargers. They ended up getting the extra point and winning the game. Everyone spent the next two weeks talking about what a genius Mike Shanahan was. In all honesty, I think it was a smart move; Denver’s defense was awful, and giving the Chargers any opportunity to touch the ball again almost certainly would have resulted in a loss.

But even though he was being celebrated as a genius, I was shocked that Shanahan had the stones to go for two. Here’s the thing: if that two point conversion hadn’t worked, everyone would have spent the rest of the year screaming about what a dangerous lunatic Mike Shanahan was and how he was completely fucking up the team.

People do this all the time, and football is no exception. Somebody takes a risk, and based on how it turns out, people either deem that person a visionary or an idiot. Once the event has happened, they’re convinced that in hindsight, the outcome was obvious, even though it usually wasn’t. I don’t think this is any different.

Everyone has been analyzing the hell out of the whole situation, but I think that it’s all going to boil down to how well the team plays. If they win, everyone will look back on the whole situation and think that Josh McDaniels is a genius, regardless of whether or not Cutler is the quarterback. If the team loses, I think that everyone will be ready to run him out of town. Fans will be ready to firebomb his house if they lose and Cutler gets traded, and if they lose and Cutler is traded AND he plays really well for his new team, random people on the street will be trying to rape McDaniels at knife point. But we don’t know yet.

This is Matt Cassel. He thrived in a Patriots offense that I probably could have scored a few touchdowns in if they had plugged me into it.

I guess if I had to say anything about it, it would be this:

if you’re a rookie coach who’s supposed to turn around a team, and you try to trade the franchise quarterback who managed to turn an offense with no running game into the number 2 offense in the league, and there’s no good alternative if the deal falls through, maybe you make good and fucking sure that the deal goes through, because if you don’t, the Broncos receiving corps are going to be catching short, wobbly passes from Chris Simms or Jeff fucking Garcia, and I’m going to have to suffer through sixteen weeks of rage, shame and potroast.

Unless Chris Simms turns out to be incredible, in which case I will be gushing about what a cagey move it was on McDaniels’ part to alienate Cutler.

Anyway, sorry to the people that don’t care about sports or my opinion on them. I promise that I’ll go back to my pornographic dreams about Wilford Brimley… as soon as I embed this video of 2008 Broncos highlights.

Now pray for more snow. I could use a three day weekend.

I can’t have wet dreams.

It’s not that I’m physically incapable (as far as I know). I have plenty of dreams where things are leading towards sex.

The problem is that I’m mentally incapable of it. Once I get to the point with the girl that we’re on the verge of the act, one of two things happens:

"Don't worry, pardner. Just 'cause I have the diabetes don't mean we need to cut this shindig short. Here's a wine cooler and a bowl of Quaker oats. Your boner will be back in no time. Who wants a mustache ride?"

A) The girl in question shuts me down – maybe she has a boyfriend, or she decides she’s not actually that into me, or I have one of those surreal dream moments where the girl from my Jr. College ethics class that I’m undressing suddenly transmogrifies into Wilford Brimley – whatever the reason, it suddenly becomes clear that we can’t have sex.

B) My brain stops me. I’ll be about to get it on, and then I think something like “Wait a second – you? Having sex? With a girl? Not likely. You must be dreaming!” at which point I realize that I am, in fact, dreaming and wake up.

Until a few months ago, this was the only type of reoccurring dream that I had where my brain would talk me out of having a good time while I was asleep.

But now, I have another type of dream to throw into the mix:

The Video Game nightmare.

It’s about what it sounds like. I dream that I am playing video games, having a grand old time, when I suddenly realize that I’ve broken my new year’s resolution. I then spend the rest of the dream completely devastated that I made such a terrible mistake. I wake up, spend a couple of hours feeling guilty and then realize that I only dreamed that I broke my resolution.

Here’s what I think about all of this: My brain can go and fuck itself.

I made a resolution to completely give up video games for a year, and so far, I have.

Even though I never made a resolution to give up sex for a year, it has kind of worked out that way, much to my chagrin.

What this means is that I spend all of my time during the day not playing video games or having sex, and I’m fine with that (or at least willing to tolerate it).

But I can do whatever the fuck I want while I’m sleeping, because if it happened in a dream, it didn’t actually fucking happen. It’s an opportunity to enjoy some activities that I can’t engage in while I’m awake. If I play games in my sleep, I’m not breaking my resolution, and I can do whatever filthy, depraved illegal sex acts (or completely wholesome ones) that I want in my sleep without any negative consequences, because I didn’t actually do it. Unfortunately, my brain doesn’t seem to realize any of that, and so the second I touch a controller in my sleep or go stumbling into second base with the girl who I saw at the grocery store earlier that day, it shuts me down.

It's cool, baby! Even if this weren't a dream, we're in Texas, so it's totally legit! Now let's get you out of that vest and fire up the PS3!

I’m leading this sexless, gameless existence right now, and the way I see it, the second my head hits the pillow and I close my eyes, there’s no reason that I shouldn’t immediately be balls deep in some 25 year old (Or 60 year old, or Count Chocula, or Wilford Brimley for that matter – none of it is real), Wii controller in my hand and a stylus strapped to my chin for the DS.

Riding on top of a Centaur.

Who’s taping the whole thing. Who cares? It’s a dream.

Instead, my brain cock blocks me, and I get to spend all of my time dreaming that I’m in the middle of the ocean getting eviscerated by sharks, or that it’s the last week of school and I just realized that there’s a math class that I haven’t been to all semester because I forgot that I was enrolled in it.

To add insult to injury, there are plenty of implausible things that happen in my dreams that my brain doesn’t bother to stop. Sometimes I can fly in my dreams. I had a dream one time that I was dating a tarantula. Dreams like that never make my brain pause for even a second, even though I’ve never once flown without the assistance of an airplane or had any reaction to spiders other than irrational fear. I had a dream one time where I had crapped my pants and didn’t do anything about it. That was totally fine with my brain. No arguments whatsoever. Throw a pair of boobs or a PSP in there, though, and all of a sudden, my brain is like “Woah, buddy! Let’s pump the breaks, here! Is this really realistic? Besides, is that person you’re making out with actually Jessica Biel? Look closer, bitch. It was Gene Shalit the whole time!”

For those of you that don’t know, this is what Gene Shalit looks like:

Do it on my face!

Fuck you, Brain.

Well, it’s getting late, and I have to work tomorrow. I’d better get to bed so I can have a long, restful night of stressful, humiliating dreams. Maybe I’ll dream that I’m brushing my teeth and getting ready for work. That’s always fun. Or maybe it’ll be the one where I’m in a classroom where the kids are misbehaving and refuse to calm down no matter what I say to them. If I’m really lucky, I’ll be in my underwear for that one. I just hope that I don’t try to do anything fun in my sleep, or I’m going to wake up covered in sweat, flinging my pillow across the room because I’m convinced that it’s Walter Mathau’s nutsack.

Goodnight.

I worked at an elementary school on Friday, where, coincidentally, my mother is the librarian. One of my duties for the day was to help a group of 5th graders film the little news program that they show at the beginning of every day. We had been forced to cancel the news on this specific day because the sound went out (For the record, I suggested that they do a mime routine for 5 minutes instead. It would have been at LEAST as interesting to watch a 9 year old pretend to be trapped in a box as it would be to listen to them mumble the day’s lunch menu. My suggestion was met with scorn. High-pitched, prepubescent scorn. This is why elementary students piss me off most of the time).

I had to come back on Monday, so after school I decided to try to get the sound working. As I was walking into the computer lab, one of the students that I had in class that day introduced me to his mother. I said hello and went on my way.

It didn’t take long to realize that fixing the sound would take a minor miracle. They had patched together a system using a five year old eMac, an mailbox-sized, 50 pound 1980′s camcorder that was literally held together with packing tape, a VCR and six or seven miles of RCA cable. It was difficult to figure out what wire was going where, if everything was plugged in like it was supposed to be, or if something had just shorted out or failed somewhere.

While I was tinkering, the mother that I had been introduced to earlier came in.

She asked me a couple of questions about her son’s performance in class, which I answered. She then volunteered that she had been in a two year relationship that had recently ended, which she was sad about.

For the record, it irritates the shit out of me when people that I don’t know that well start spouting off weird personal information with no prompting three minutes after we’ve met for the first time. If we’re close, sure. Tell me that your father was an abusive drunk. If I ask you if you’re seeing someone, feel free to tell me that you just got out of a relationship. But if we’ve just exchanged hellos for the first time and after two minutes of casual conversation about the weather you inform me that you were raped by a clown when you were eight, it just sounds like you’re desperate for attention. There’s no other reason to be that eager to share.

I acted sympathetic while I continued to screw around with the video camera.

She continued to make weird small talk with me for about five more minutes. I kept responding, but started to wonder why she was still in the room, talking to me.

She asked me what grades I could sub for. I told her that I could do K-12, but I kind of preferred high school.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ll bet high school girls can’t pay attention to anything you say, ’cause they’re so busy looking at you,” She said.

I paused for a moment, suddenly realizing what was going on as a cold sweat formed on my brow.

“Well, thank you. That’s very flattering. Well, I have to go back to my classroom. It was nice to meet you!” I said while getting the hell out of the computer lab as fast as I could.

I spent a few minutes in the classroom, mostly just killing time and trying to figure out if I’d just been hit on. After a few minutes had passed, I walked back to the computer lab and poked my head in the door. The coast was clear. I then went next door to the library and checked to see if she was in there. She was gone. I walked over to my mom (she works in the library, remember?) and told her about what had happened.

“Oh, yeah, She’s normally really cranky when she’s here, but she perked up when she saw you,” my Mom said.

“She asked if you were my husband or boyfriend, and when I said no, she asked if you were single. I told her that you were.”

It turned out that I was not making things up. I had, indeed, had a parent trying to get in my pants. After a brief conversation with my mother about how if a parent ever asked her if I was single again, the appropriate response was that I had been happily married to another man for several years, I cleaned up in the lab and headed home.

Later that evening, my mother told me that the parent had been back and had told my Mom that she had done some flirting with me. Rather than telling the parent that she had forgotten to mention first time that I was in a happy, long-term and completely gay relationship, she said something along the lines of “Well, that sort of thing can be fun.”

It was a first for me. I used to think that a school was only a lousy place to meet chicks because the only women in a school are married teachers who are older than me and crazy students who are younger than me. I didn’t realize that there was another entire different demographic that I don’t want to make out with.

I wonder if it’s too late for me to change careers. “Professional Athlete” seems like a pretty good option at this point. They seem to make pretty good money.

As you know, I gave up video games for 2009.

Some of the things that I have done instead have been productive – I read more, I write more, and I get a lot of that weird, inconsequential minutia done in a day that I didn’t before. Crap like folding my laundry, making my bed and making sure that I put my keys somewhere that I can find them. It’s weird, because getting all of those things done in a day takes me thirty or forty minutes tops, usually less, so it’s not like I had to choose between shaving regularly and playing video games before I gave them up. I didn’t get that stuff done before though, and I do now. I think that it’s mainly because I now have a large part of my day where I’m trying to keep myself busy and distracted from the fact that I want to play some damn games.

As I’ve mentioned before, I do have less productive activities that I have filled the void with as well though, and one of those is dicking around on Hulu. One of the things that I’ve started watching on there is “Lie To Me”.

For those of you who don’t know, “Lie To Me” is a T.V. show about a guy and his quirky team of experts who are able to tell from facial expressions and speech patterns if somebody is lying. At first, I kind of liked the show. I think that facial expression stuff is interesting, and there’s some actual science to it that I find fascinating. It’s based off of a bunch of work that a guy named Paul Ekman has done (He’s actually an advisor for the show, I guess). Here is a link to his website, and here is a link to a Radiolab podcast featuring Ekman. Apparently, when you watch people who are lying in real life frame by frame, you can spot brief moments of the emotions that they’re trying to hide “leaking” onto their face. I was hoping that I could get some of that action from watching the show. I do, a little bit. The more I watch it, though, the more irritated I get.

I’m starting to catch onto their formula. As is the case in most television shows, the characters are all one-trick-ponies. In a way, it makes sense – if you have to make 15 or 20 episodes of a television show that’s familiar to the viewer and runs off of a standard formula, you need the characters to be consistent. It wears on me after a while, though.

Anyway, the lead character, the guy who is a trained expert on detecting deception, is basically the bitchy doctor from House. He’s the quirky asshole who does everything in dangerous, unconventional ways that no one else understands, but he gets undeniable results that can’t be ignored. After spending an hour being a shithead to everyone around him and solving the case using his risky unorthodox methods, he does something sensitive in the last five minutes so you know that under that hard, protective shell there’s a soft nougat center.This type of character seems to be really popular in T.V. right now, but they mostly just piss me off. People like this wouldn’t exist in real life, because after two weeks of getting a snarky insult every time anyone said anything, one of their colleagues would hit them in the face with an axe.

The other thing that irritates me about the show is that all of the “tells” that they put in the show to let you know the person is lying are so heavily exaggerated that only a severely (and I do mean severely) autistic person wouldn’t be able to identify the emotion that they’re showing. Nonetheless, they make it seem like the main character is some sort of genius for identifying the emotion correctly.

"Impossible to tell what this man is feeling, right? Wrong! Squinting eyes, a tensed neck and teeth bared -this man appears to be angry! I see your look of disbelief. Trust me. I'm an expert on this sort of thing. Did I just blow your mind?"

So here’s what happens in every episode: The main character is brought into some case requiring an expert on deception. They interview someone that they’re not sure is being truthful. They talk to them for a while, while the main character looks at the suspect thoughtfully. Then, the main character does something weird and stupid to throw off the person that they’re interviewing and see how they’ll react. In one episode, he starts hitting on the suspect. In another, he eats a sandwich while talking to them. In another, he fires a gun into the air. Then, everyone asks him “what the hell was that all about!? You’re dangerous and insane!!” and he explains that there’s a method to his madness, and that he HAD to shoot himself in the dick with a bolt thrower because he wanted to see the suspect’s reaction in order to determine if they were being truthful. They repeat this a few times during the show, until about fourty five minutes have passed and it’s time to wrap things up. At that point, they interview someone, the main character starts giving a dog a blow job in front of the suspect (Assuming they’re in Texas), the suspect makes a face like he’s mugging for the cover of a death metal album, the main character says something like “Ah hah! Furrowed eyebrows, downturned lips and flared nostrils – those are all classic signs of disgust! This man is guilty!” Then all of the apparently autistic people are incredibly impressed and the suspect is sent to jail for their crime.

As much as I bitch about those things, that’s not what actually irritates me about the show. The problem isn’t the characters, or the Mad-Libs plot style. I’ll probably will keep watching it despite those things. It’s kind of formulaic, but I enjoy the formula. What really breaks my heart about this show, and all shows like it, is that it’s ruining my childhood.

Let me explain.

Shows like Lie To Me* and House are about an eccentric guy who has to solve mysteries. He’s got an idea that everyone thinks is completely crazy, but he always turns out to be the right one.

Now, let me tell you about a young boy with stars in his eyes, who’s formative teenage years were in the mid to late 90′s. This boy rarely watched T.V., but he loved a show called “The X-Files”. In this show, an FBI team composed of a conspiracy theorist by the name of Fox Mulder and a scientist named Dana Scully were sent to solve crimes that seemed paranormal. Scully would always search for a logical explanation for whatever was happening, but Mulder always knew better and suspected the work of something unexplainable. Scully would fight him on it, vehemently insisting that Lamprey men weren’t real, or Ghosts weren’t real, or that the Golem was just Jewish folklore and not a real thing that was murdering people for violating the rules of a planned community (Yes, that was actually an episode. Shut up.)

But Mulder always stuck to his guns, and by the end of the show, it always became clear that Scully had been wrong again, and the guy that played Ray’s Dad on “Everybody Loves Raymond” really COULD predict the future (I’m still not making this up.)

The show was on the air for 9 years, and that shit never changed. For nine years, Mulder batted .1000, and nobody around him ever stopped rolling their eyes. Nobody ever said “You know, your idea that people in this arctic research facility are killing each other not because of cabin fever, but because an alien parasite that they accidentally dug up is screwing with their brain chemistry, well, it sounds a little far fetched. On the other hand, your ideas ALWAYS sound insane initially, but after roughly forty five minutes, they turn out to be exactly right, every time. You’ve never been wrong even once, ever. I think I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt on this.”

It was always just “That’s impossible, Mulder!”, “There’s no scientific explanation for that, Mulder!”, “Oh shit, I guess that you were right…again…like you always are, Mulder!”, and “Don’t think this means that I will listen to you next time, though, Mulder!”

Every week this happened, every week I watched it, and every week I lapped that shit up with a spoon. I’m pretty sure that high school actually kind of sucked relative to the rest of my life, but there are some things that trigger fond memories of it and convince me that despite the acne, awkwardness and self hatred, I was actually having a great time. Those triggers are 90′s arcade games (NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat 3, anything by Capcom), Sony Walkmans, Broncos superbowl victories, shitty 68k Macintosh games and The X-Files.

And so, once again, much like when I fire up a Playstation emulator and realize how unfun I find Final Fantasy 7, or boot up my old iMac and manage to slowly use it for six minutes before it crashes on me, I’m forced to confront the fact that something I thought was perfect as a child is actually pretty average viewed through my 29 year old eyes.

And so I will probably continue to watch Lie To Me, and I will probably continue to sort of enjoy it, but I will also be irritated by the formula, and then, after bitching about it, I will realize that it is almost exactly the same as a television show that I used to be convinced was basically perfect.

Relaxing after a long day, more than likely spent grinding corpses.

On a positive note, Cannibal Corpse has a new album out. Here’s what their bass player said about it:

“In Cannibal Corpse, our goal has always been to try and make each new album we record our heaviest. That goal was a bit more challenging this time since we were extremely satisfied with our last album Kill, but we knew that by working with producer Erik Rutan at Mana Recording Studios again, we would be able to start at that same level of heaviness and take it even further. Now that we can hear the finished product, I would say we’ve been able to achieve this goal, and I think our fans will agree.”

This is what I like to hear. Most of the bands that I listen to decide two or three albums into their career that they’re “musicians”, and they start putting singing and ten minutes jazz solos onto their albums. It’s refreshing to know that I can trust Cannibal Corpse to keep doing what they do best: Writing heavy metal songs with lyrics that would trigger my gag reflex if I could ever actually understand what the hell they were saying.

I mean, come on. The lead singer’s nickname is “Corpsegrinder”. I rest my case.

One more thing: Some guy named “Kutiman” mixed a bunch of youtube clips together to make songs. I think they turned out pretty great. Here’s a sample:

Good day.

Windows.

I love them. They let in fresh air, sunlight and ambient sound. They’re a good way to sneak out of the house if you’re a teenager, and they’re a great way to get in if you’ve locked yourself out.

On the surface, it seems like windows are nothing but good news.

But beneath the charming facade, windows hide a terrible, sinister secret: They work both ways.

Maybe you’re rocking out to some hard, hard music, and your neighbors don’t like listening to it as much as you do. A bug screen doesn’t stop sound nearly as effectively as concrete and drywall, and before you know it, you have to turn it down.

A diagram of the silent killer. Be warned - It is difficult to view this bone-chilling image without a shiver running down your spine.

Perhaps you have an aversion to clothes, and so you walk around your house naked. Maybe you see a mirror, and you decide to have a conversation with it. A wall will prevent people outside of the house from seeing a naked man yelling at a mirror and pointing an accusing finger at it, but a pane of glass let’s that image right through with almost no resistance.

Or maybe you’re in your garden level apartment, masturbating. You have the blinds closed, but in the wrong direction, meaning that the only people that CAN’T see you having sex with your hand are the legally blind. You don’t realize what’s happened until you leave the apartment to get some food, and as you’re walking by the window you notice that not only is your computer desk situated in such a way that one might almost think that you deliberately put it where you did specifically to provide the best view possible of yourself at your least dignified, but with the blinds turned that way, the only way that it could have been any more obvious what was going on in your room would have been if you had been screaming “YOUR EYES DO NOT DECEIVE YOU! I AM, INDEED MASTURBATING RIGHT NOW! I AM WORKING THE BALLS! THAT THING YOU SEE IN MY HANDS RIGHT NOW? YOU ARE CORRECT IN ASSUMING THAT IT IS MY PENIS! HAS ANYONE SEEN MY DIGNITY?” during the act.

This is all hypothetical, of course. At least, assuming that you haven’t read any of my other blogs.

All of this can be avoided, of course. If you keep the volume down on your stereo when it will irritate your neighbors, make sure that there is always a pair of pants or a curtain shielding the outside world from the image of you having a naked argument with yourself and make sure that your blinds are turned in a direction that allow you to masturbate in peace, windows can be enjoyed with very little risk of police intervention.

What I’m saying is that I’ve had some good experiences with windows, and some real bad ones as well.

I was thinking about this while I was using my parent’s bathroom today. It has a window in it, which I enjoy. In my opinion, bathrooms are one of the highest risk/reward rooms to have a window in.

The benefits are pretty clear. First of all, is there any other room in the house that benefits more from a way to circulate air effectively? Here’s a hint: A bathroom is the room in the house that people shit in. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good breeze in my bedroom at night or a way to get the smoke out of the kitchen when I burn something, but I think if you had to pick the room in the house that can benefit most from fresh air, it’s the bathroom.

Second of all, it’s a solid escape route. How many movies or T.V. shows have you seen where the protagonist escapes from his captors by pretending that he has to go to the bathroom and then sneaking out the window? Too many to count. And let’s not forget the thing that you really need to be worried about escaping from when you’re in the bathroom.

I’m talking, of course, about sharks. The number of people who have died from shark attacks while in a bathroom with a window is ZERO. The numbers don’t lie, people.

A close encounter with a shark. Unfortunately, without a single window nearby, this gentleman is fucked. And just so you know, this is pretty much what I imagine any time I'm near any source of water.

For what it’s worth, my shark-related neurosis when showering have always been lower in bathrooms that have windows in them. Some of it is having some ambient noise and scenery to keep my imagination in check and remind me that I’m in a land locked state, but, embarrassingly enough, a large part of the window’s calming effect is the knowledge that if a great white takes a shot at me while I’m washing my hair, I can leap out the window to safety.

As a side note, some of you might think that this information could be useful for a little bit of comedy at my expense. That if you were to train a camera on the outside of my house and then do a good enough job of convincing me that there was a great white shark in my bathroom (something I am almost completely convinced of already) that you could probably get some fairly good footage of a screaming, naked man jumping through a window and on to his front lawn.

First of all, you’re right. Second of all, if you prey on my neurosis like that, I swear to God that I will murder you. Third of all, I will need a copy of that video, because it will probably be hilarious.

But even though bathroom windows are good for air circulation, escape and humor at my expense, they have some disadvantages that make them a pretty risky proposition.

The window in my parent’s bathroom is facing our neighbor’s house, which I would guess is about twenty feet away. I don’t know how the acoustics are, but as I was peeing and looking out the window, I wondered how many times our next door neighbors had enjoyed the privilege of listening to someone in the house using the toilet. I hope zero, but the number is probably larger than that.

The other problem with it is that it’s just about at waist level, meaning if I don’t want anybody outside to see my balls, I have to be careful, and I think that if we’ve learned anything about me, it’s that I’m not careful.

I frequently talk about how cool I think it would be if I had somebody keeping track of all of the useless stats in my life – how many hours I’ve spent playing games, how many quarters I spent in arcades during my childhood, how many eggs I flipped while I worked at my favorite little pancake house – I’d like to tack “Number of times someone has seen my penis without me knowing it” and “Number of times someone has overheard me peeing without my knowledge” on to that list.

I’ll leave you with a video of someone beating Metal Slug 3 without dying, in part because Metal Slug is really hard, but mostly because all I think about now is video games and how much I want to play them.

It’s been more than seven days since my last update. Sorry. That empty sense of longing that you’ve been feeling for the past few days that you couldn’t quite identify the source of? Now you know. Sorry about that.

I have an excuse, though. I was sick. Not really sick, I would say that it was probably just a head cold, but there was about a 48 hour period where I was in that zone where all that I could concentrate on was how crappy I felt. You know what I’m talking about – you can’t watch T.V., you can’t have a conversation, you can’t really even sleep. All you do is lie there and think things like “I never realized how nice it was to be able to breathe”, and “An hour ago I was pretty sure I had a fever because I was shivering in a 90 degree room, and now I’m pretty sure that I have a fever because I feel like I’m roasting in a 70 degree room – I wonder if that means I’m getting better or worse?” and “You know what’s really great? Solid bowel movements. At least, that’s what people tell me”.

Anyway, this I’m out of the fog now, and even though I’m still sick, I can breathe without thinking about it and it doesn’t hurt to do things like lie in a bed or sit in a chair, so my brain can focus on important things.

You know, like blog posts.

Speaking of the blog, there have been some changes.

First of all, the new formatting has made all of my old photo captions from before the format change invisible. If you want to know what sort of hilarious quips I had underneath the Golden Girls or David Lee Roth or that really inappropriate photo of the guy’s ass with the really weird tattoo on it, you’ll have to view the HTML, I guess. Sorry.

(Speaking of, I still get a fairly large percentage of my daily traffic from searches for David Lee Roth photos, but we have a new contender in the running – I was looking through search terms today, and “HAWGSS TATOO” came up. I’m feeling generous, so I won’t put up the actual photo of said tattoo.

At full size.

It never gets any less terrifying.

Remember that? Yeah, me too.

I don’t really know why I insist on maintaining a blog, seeing ass all that they have ever yielded me are lawsuits, memorably bad rebound relationships and hurt feelings, but whatever the reason is, I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t this. Mindyourowngoddamnbusiness.com – your one-stop site for pictures of David Lee Roth, butt hole-related tattoos, and nothing else of any importance, apparently!)

Second of all, I get about three comments a month on this blog from people who I know who have something to say that pertains to what is written in the blog.

Along with those, I get about 25 comments every day that are spam. Normally, this wouldn’t surprise me. If people know of any medium to contact you through to send you spam, they will do it, and they will do it frequently.

Everybody that has a computer has gotten spam. You get an email from someone you don’t recognize with a slightly suspect subject, and if you open it, it’s an link for an allegedly free Xbox360 or some cheap Viagra.

This is different, though.

Here’s a screenshot of the last few comments that I’ve labeled as spam:

Awesome.

There are a few things that we can glean from this screenshot. Hopefully, none of them pertain to my identity or bank account, not that I’ll be surprised if they do (I’m a moron when it comes to keeping sensitive information off of the Internet, and this would certainly be a golden opportunity to let something important slip). Anyway,

• I’m too much of a dick to save you bandwith by cropping out the unimportant information or using a thumbnail of a large image. Sorry. I resized it a little bit. You’re welcome.
• I had to Google how to take a screen shot. What can I say? I can barely turn on a computer running linux without getting confused.
• I get spam in my email, in my snail mail and on social networking sites, but the comments section of my blog yields the filthiest, most depraved variety by a very wide margin. There’s not a close second.

Take a good long look at that. I’m not an expert on law, but I’m pretty sure that “Free tit torture” is the only one of those acts that’s even legal, unless the “Animal sex” ones are referring to animals having sex with other animals and not with people.

(Okay, I lied. I just did a little bit of research, and if everyone is over 18 and it’s consensual, incest is actually legal in some states. I take back everything I said. Oh wait. No, I don’t.)

(Okay, I lied again. I just did some more research, and bestiality is actually legal in 23 states, including Colorado. It’s good to know that if I make a right turn on red at two in the morning when no one else is within four city blocks, that’s a $160 ticket, but if I decide to fuck a horse, I’m in the clear.)

Dishing out some Texas Justice, Panda-style.

(I also have to point this out – according to the source I found, Texas decriminalized bestiality in 1974. Is it just me, or is creating a law against sex with animals and then repealing it about 400 times more retarded than just never bothering to come up with one in the first place? If a state doesn’t have such a law, it seems plausible that the subject just never came up. If they did have the law and then repealed it, that means that someone cared enough about letting people have sex with animals that they were willing to go through the work of getting a law taken off the books. At some point, someone walked into the courthouse and said “Now wait a second. As it currently stands, if a man decides to give his pet dachshund a rim job, he’s committing a crime in the eyes of the state! What sort of country are we living in when we make it against the law for a man to toss his dog’s salad?” And then everyone listening to him thought about it and said “You know what? This guy’s making a lot of sense right now!” Way to go, Texas!)

(Thankfully, after checking, I can verify that rape is always illegal, no matter what age the participants are or what state it’s commited in. Thank God. It’s nice to know that even though under the right circumstances you can have a three way with your mom and a water buffalo without breaking any laws, rape is always illegal.)

Deleting a handful of these messages every time that I sort out my comments section has given me some time to reflect on spam, and I have to say, I am incredibly confused by these. They go against everything that I know about bulk advertising.

It seems to me that if you’re going to send out something in bulk, you’re going to want to advertize something that’s likely to appeal to a large number of people. Viagra. A Macy’s gift card. Perscription pain killers. A large sum of money in a Nigerian prince’s bank account. Normal pornography. A lor of people want that stuff. My guess is that a smaller number of people are interested in barely legal extreme fringe pornography. I’m not saying that nobody will want it, but it seems like you’re trying to appeal to a pretty small audience. If you were to get ten random people and offer them some pain killers, a gift card or a bunch of free money, I’m guessing that eight out of ten would probably have some interest. If, on the other hand, you put ten people in a room and offered them a video of a man performing a Clevland steamer on a grizzly bear…actually, that sounds pretty awesome. Everyone would probably want to see that. You know what I mean, though. They’re trying to sell a product that nobody wants by bulk mailing everyone.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m crazy, and this is genius. Do any of you have interest in this stuff? Should I be approving these comments so you can get that Rape DVD that you’ve been wanting so badly?

Let me know.

I would embed a video at this point, but nobody watches the videos I embed. Here’s this instead:

Welcome to Texas.

Maybe I need to stop harping on the alleged ineffectiveness of the spam comments that I’ve been getting. They’re apparently working just fine on me. Now I can’t stop thinking about bestiality.

Good Day.