So, it’s no secret that spiders freak me out. For a while, I let them hang out in my room because they weren’t bothering me. Then, a few bad apples ruined it for everyone, and I now have a “Kill on sight” policy.

With that in mind, let me tell you a little story about something that happened to me yesterday.

There I was. In the bathroom. Using it and reading a book, because that’s kind of my thing.

I finished up, marked my book, and started “cleaning up”.

All of a sudden, there he was.

Checkmate, household pests!

A spider, once again completely ignoring my dictum that he and his kind had to vacate the premises, was skittering down the wall to my right. He paused for a moment, at about eye level. I froze, mid-wipe. We sat and stared at each other for a moment, eyeballing each other. We weren’t speaking, but I could almost hear his thoughts: “That’s right, motherfucker. I’m coming in. I’m gonna walk down this wall and then put a bunch of creepy webs around here, and there’s not a god damn thing that you can do about it!”

At that point, my brain did some quick mental math, and in a split second, it came to the following conclusions:

• There was a spider in the room.
• That spider had to die.
• Before I killed the spider, I would need to get some toilet paper, my weapon of choice.
• The item I needed, toilet paper, was already clutched in my hand. How incredibly convenient!

Instinct took over, and I whipped my hand holding the toilet paper out and crushed the spider on the wall.

Almost as soon as I did this, I realized that there was an incredibly important fact that my brain had overlooked while it was assessing the situation:

The toilet paper in my hand was in the process of being used for something else only moments earlier.

I flinched and pulled my hand away from the wall.

The toilet paper, however, did not pull away from the wall. It stayed firmly in place, almost as if it were affixed by some sort of feces-based adhesive.

I sat there for a little while, stunned for the second time in less than a minute. How the hell are you supposed to react to something like that? Especially when it seems like I have at least one moment like this every day? I mean, imagine if a police profiler examined my living space – “Hmm, the walls are smeared with semen and feces, there’s poison everywhere – I think it’s pretty obvious that whoever lives here is a mentally retarded serial killer.”

After some of the crazed cackling that always follows one of these moments, I came to a few conclusions:

1. This method of execution is several orders of magnitude more humiliating than my normal method. I know what you’re thinking – “For you or the spider?” The answer is an emphatic “Both”, but why don’t we focus on the spider for the moment.

"Tell me again about the rabbits, George! I like beans with my ketchup ... and the look on a man's face when the life drains out of him...you can see it in his eyes, that moment when he realizes that he's going to die."

To understand, imagine the following hypothetical situation: Suppose, and remember, this is completely hypothetical, that I’m a mentally retarded serial killer, and I’ve decided to murder you. I capture you and give you a choice: either I smother you with a plastic bag, or I smother you with a plastic bag that I took a dump in earlier. It’s not really even a choice, right? Right.

(On a completely unrelated note to police investigating the infamous “Brown Bagger” murders of the early 1990′s that remain unsolved to this day: You should completely ignore this post. There’s nothing to see here. I already pointed out that the whole scenario I just described was purely hypothetical. I’m certainly not describing in eerie detail the technique that some deranged serial killer who the police dubbed “The Scatman” used to off his victims, if that’s what you’re suggesting.)

2. Killing spiders this way is probably a pretty effective intimidation tactic for other insects and arachnids who are thinking about trying to sneak in. If you’re a bug, maybe you want to get away from the birds and cats outside, but maybe you don’t want to get crushed by a towel smeared in duke more, so you take your chances with the great outdoors. I know that I would go out of my way to avoid areas where there was a risk of getting killed that way.

3. No matter how humiliating or intimidating bugs find it to die that way, it is SO not worth it. The disaster that I had to clean off of the wall after that kill was NOT fun.

…I don’t know. I think that I have dementia or there’s a gas leak in my house somewhere. I do way too much stupid crap like this. I’m going to have to start counting to ten before I do anything so I have time to consider the consequences, or something. Or maybe not, because if I don’t accidentally get my feces on the walls, what am I going to post on the Internet for everybody to read?

Either way, if you’ll excuse me, I need to eat some applesauce, put on my helmet and then buy some plastic bags, some Metamucil, a bone saw and some lye.

Have a great weekend, folks!

10 years ago (1999):

Welcome to...THE FUTURE!!!

I was 19. I worked as a line cook, drove a brown 1980 Audi, played N64 and Playstation 1, used my top-of-the-line 400Mhz iMac to browse through a futuristic source of information called the “World Wide Web” that had all kinds of fancy features like animated GIFs, frames, and flash animation, tried to get laid and took classes at the local Jr. College.

Cooking and dicking around on my computer went extremely well. Jr. College was a different story, however. I was failing and dropping classes left and right. Even though the most important thing I could do at that age was work on a degree, I put almost no effort into it. I was willing to register for classes and cut checks to the school; showing up to class or studying was a different story.

Flash forward ten years (2009, for those of you who can’t add):

My mother retired this year.

She has been cleaning out the library she worked in, which is full of boxes upon boxes of her stuff. Among those boxes was a box of my crap from 1999 that I apparently lost in a move ten years ago. It turned out to be a pretty fun little time capsule. It only really had two types of things in it: One was all of my old books on how to use Macromedia Flash, which are now completely outdated and useless. The other was a collection of notebooks that I had used for either journals or school notes. It was interesting to take a look back and get some perspective on 19 year old me.

Here’s what my notes for college algebra looked like, for instance:

Talking in barcodes.

Holy Crap! There's actually a little math on this page!

Of course.

Thanks, Adam Sandler.

Squeal Like a Pig, indeed.

I still don't know what "Buffalo Style" entails.

More barcodes, screwdrivers and the Atari Teenage Riot logo

I give up.

Still no math in sight...

It's a really good thing I put that note at the top of the page. Otherwise, I might have failed College Algebra the first time I took it.

There are a few things I notice when I look at these notes.

First of all, I had a real fixation on barcodes, screwdrivers, and ninja turtle heads.

Second of all, I notice is that although these were notes from an algebra class, there’s an alarming lack of algebra to be found. I was willing to put plenty of effort into drawing a turtle head attached to a lamp and a note to myself noting that “Black Gold = Human Shit”, but it appears that other than a few examples scattered here and there, it didn’t seem important to me to write down anything about the math the teacher was explaining to us. Nothing wrong with that, I guess- I still find these pictures vaguely entertaining, but I think that thanks to my sleuthing skills, the case of Johnny Castle and the mysterious failing grades has been cracked wide open.

Either way, it was funny to look and see what I considered important to write down while I was sitting in class ten years ago.

Dear Diary, I failed another math test, the boy who sits in front of me doesn't even know I exist and I STILL can't get the golden chocobo in Final Fantasy 7! LIFE IS SO UNFAIR!!! <3 Johnny.

My journals were fairly entertaining as well. They more or less re-affirm everything that I suspected about myself from that time: I was crazy. Really, really crazy. I read over them and realize what a whiny little bitch I was. The strangest part was reading about the events that I was whining and bitching about, because I remember almost none of them. It seems plausible that they happened, and the description of them is in my handwriting, but I have no recollection of most of them. Then again, if someone told me to get out a piece of paper and write down everything I remembered about my early 20′s, I could probably only fill up about a page with memories of specific events. Good to know that my life is evaporating out of my brain as though it never happened.

Take this, for instance: Apparently, when someone had pubic lice, Danny and I thought that it was funny to call that “Jackal Crotch”. And you know what? I still think that’s funny, but I had no idea that we ever thought that. If I hadn’t written it down, it would be gone forever!

Another interesting passage is one where I have a really stupid idea for a story that requires the main character to be constantly filming himself. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out why the protagonist would be doing something like that. By itself, that isn’t that interesting, but it got me thinking about the fact that it was only a few years ago that it was still too expensive and inconvenient for everybody to film everything that they were doing all of the time. Flash forward to now, when you can’t buy a phone that DOESN’T have a video recording feature and highspeed Internet costs virtually nothing. Anytime ANYTHING happens now, if there are people there it gets recorded. There happened to be a couple of videos of the planes hitting the twin towers eight years ago, but can you imagine how much footage we would have of that event if it happened tomorrow? And it’s not just important events – There’s an entire generation of teens clogging up youtube with hour after hour of boring, pointless talking. It was just a little bit strange to see something that was as dated as that in a journal I kept. I feel like I opened it up and found an entry that said “Day 15 – the scurvy continues to eat away at my body. When will science discover a cure for this horrible disease!?” or “You’d better get used to Ska, world, because that type of music is here, it’s queer, and it’s not going anywhere for a long, long time!”

Either way, it was kind of fun to get my hands on a time capsule from my past and see what my tiny, shriveled brain was doing ten years ago.

I’ll leave you with another little golden slice of the 90′s.

FUCK YEAH!!!

I finally got a chance to see Moon a few nights ago. I’ve been excited to see it for a few months now, and it finally came to a theater in town.

Here’s the preview:

Here’s the synopsis:

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of his contract with Lunar. He’s been a faithful employee for 3 long years. His home has been Selene, a moon base where he has spent his days alone, mining Helium 3. The precious gas holds the key to reversing the Earth’s energy crisis. Isolated, determined and steadfast, Sam has followed the rulebook obediently and his time on the moon has been enlightening, but uneventful. The solitude has given him time to reflect on the mistakes of his past and work on his raging temper. He does his job mechanically, and spends most of his available time dreaming of his imminent return to Earth, to his wife, young daughter and an early retirement. But 2 weeks shy of his departure from Selene, Sam starts seeing things, hearing things and feeling strange. — IMDB

I know, I know. You don’t come here to read my opinions on pop culture – you want embarrassing stories about bug infestations and fictional musical-instrument-toilets. Sorry. When something so amazing, so completely magical comes along that it can’t be ignored, I have to discuss it.

So anyway, Moon. I was really excited about this movie; it’s been getting really good reviews, the preview was pretty sweet, the premise is really intriguing to me, and and soundtrack is by Clint Mansell, who always seems to do a solid job (he also did the soundtracks for Pi, Requiem For a Dream, Smokin’ Aces and The Wrestler, among others.)

Anyway, after seeing the movie, I was a little bit disappointed. I had to spend some time thinking about it, because anytime I go to see a movie that I’m really excited about, I tend to have it worked up in my head enough that I’m let down when I actually see it no matter how good it is.

I think there was some of that in play; After some reflection, I think the movie was better than I originally thought. I really liked the premise, I loved the atmosphere, and it was nice to see a robot assistant in a science fiction movie that wasn’t trying to turn on its master for a change of pace.

Despite all of that, there were a couple of things about the movie that I found a little bit frustrating.

First of all, there’s a pretty heavy duty plot twist in the movie. I won’t spoil it, even though I’m guessing that you can figure out what it is from the preview. The twist is revealed maybe a third of the way into the movie, which it fine. The movie is really interesting up to this point. Unfortunately, I started to feel a little bit like the movie had shot it’s load too soon, because there was a large chunk in the middle that felt slowed down and stretched out. Things picked up speed again at the end, but after the twist is revealed, you figure out what’s going on, you know what has been happening on the base this entire time, and you have a pretty good idea of how the characters in the movie are going to deal with it, but the movie keeps stretching it out for what seems longer than necessary.

Exacerbating my frustration with this was the fact that I felt like there were plenty of interesting things they could’ve done with that time in the middle. The movie’s twist leads to a very stunning realization for the protagonist, and I would’ve liked it if the movie would’ve explored how he felt about what he had found out a little bit more than it did. This turned out to be the most frustrating part of the movie for me: despite spending most of the movie getting nailed with bombshell after bombshell about his life, you never really get an opportunity to find out the effect that it has on Sam.

It’s strange, too, because other than sharing the screen a little bit with a friendly helper robot, Sam is really the only character in the film. Despite the fact that every scene of the movie features him, I never really ended up feeling like I knew him very well.

Take a quick look at that synopsis again. If you see the movie, all of the information about the setting is pretty clear; you know that he’s working alone on a base mining Helium 3 and he’s two weeks away from returning home.

It’s a whole lot harder to glean any information about the main character, however. After watching the actual movie, I couldn’t have told you that Sam had found his time on the base enlightening, or that he had been reflecting on his mistakes and working on his raging temper.

Maybe I’m a little autistic, or just to dense to pick up on the kind of subtlety the movie used, but this was a problem for me throughout. It was really interesting, but when Sam explored the room with the pod that workers used to get back to Earth, or discovered the secret room under the base, or watched the video recordings of the people who had worked on the base before him, or when he managed to contact his family on Earth, I constantly found myself thinking “I wonder how Sam feels about this?” And never feeling like I ever got a very clear answer.

Despite those complaints, I still think it’s a really good film. I would absolutely reccommend it. There’s a lot to like about it, and it’s definitely worth seeing, especially if you like independant Sci-Fi. I just wish that by the time the credits rolled, I would’ve felt a little bit more like I knew what the guy I had been watching for the last hour and a half thought about all of it.

The bedbugs appear to be gone.

I’d heard horror stories from everyone I told about how hard they are to kill, so maybe they’re just hiding somewhere, biding their time and plotting their revenge, but as near as I can tell, the gallon of poison that my room is now covered in has sent them a powerful message. My only regret is that I don’t know where their dead bodies are, so I have no way to desecrate their corpses. The best I can hope to do is teabag an effigy of one. Hopefully, another bug will see it when I’m putting my balls in my paper-mache bedbug’s mouth and tell all of his friends what happened.

Who am I kidding? I would risk poisoning to get my hands on a plate of those bad boys too.

It also appears to have killed all other types of bugs in my room. I’ve started noticing that most of the bugs I see in my room now are dead. All this death in my basement has got me thinking:

Poison is really fucking awesome.

The Exterminator is doing a follow up in two weeks, and I think that even if the room is still bug free at that point, I’m going to ask him to spray some more poison and maybe sell me a few gallons of it. I can put some in a humidifier, wash my clothes in it, use it as aftershave and maybe apply it like deodorant, too. It may sound a bit extreme, but well worth the cancer risk, in my opinion. My body makes blood out of the food I eat, and I frequently eat nachos, so, when you think about it, those little assholes were stealing nachos from me. I can respect their love of fine Mexican cuisine, but pulling that kind of shit around these parts is the sort of thing that will get you poisoned.

Take note.

I’m currently enrolled in a class about East, West and unified Germany. So far, it’s been pretty interesting. I have this idea in my head that Germany is pretty stable like any other country, but the more I learn about it, the more I find out that it’s been a pretty wild sixty or seventy years for them.

Anyway, when Germany was divided in half, I guess there were these things called the Leipzig Trade Fairs. They were a chance for companies all over the world to show off all of the sweet shit that they were producing and try to sell it. During the time that Germany was divided into East and West, I guess that it also turned into a stage for East Germany to show off how well their planned economy worked. Some of it was legit, but I guess that some of it was smoke and mirrors as well; they would take goods that were supposed to go to other areas and then fill up stores in Leipzig so it looked like there were plenty of goods to buy at the store, and would show off goods at the fair that wouldn’t become available to East Germans for months or years if they ever became available at all.

One of these items was called the Purimix. The Purimix was basically a giant motor that had a lot of attachments, and it was advertised as an all-in-one device that women could use to make housework easier. It could be used as a vaccum cleaner and a food processor.

Even if you ignore the fact that it’s kind of creepy to use something to clean under the couch and then cook with, there were other problems with it. It was too heavy and unwieldy for anyone but a grizzly bear to use, cost about two year’s salary and never actually became available on the market.

I was writing a paper on the trade fairs last night, and mentioned the Purimix. As I was writing the paper, the following footnote found it’s way into my paper:

“Though certainly unusual, the Purimix was by no means the only questionable product design displayed at Leipzig; More than one fair goer was perplexed by the sight of the Blatzenstuhl, a trombone/chamberpot hybrid introduced in 1952 that was designed to help conserve the East German’s precious brass supplies, which were severely depleted by WWII.”

Now, was that footnote necessary for my paper? No.

Is any part of it true? No. If it is, it was a complete accident on my part.

So why is it in there? Because I find it hilarious.

But no good ever comes of me doing this kind of crap.

First of all, if I spent a little more time finishing the paper and a little less time filling it full of lies that are only amusing to me, maybe I wouldn’t have been up until four in the morning finishing it.

Second of all, other than making me giggle, there’s no real benefit to doing things like that. Best case scenario, the teacher rolls her eyes and ignores it. Worst case, she docks me some points. Actually, I suppose worst case would be something like “She docks me some points, burns down my house and then gives me cancer”. You know what I meant. Don’t be a nitpicky bitch. What I’m saying is that I’m wasting time adding unnecessary crap to my paper that, at best, will have no effect on my grade.

Nonetheless, I found myself unable to edit it out of the paper. I found it too entertaining.

I took a short break from working on my paper and chatted with my friend that I’ll just call “Brian”. I was telling him about the footnote, and how I knew I should take it out of the paper, but I was having trouble bringing myself to do it.

He thought about it for a few minutes.

“Well,” he finally said, “There might be another way to handle it. Maybe you take it out of your paper, or maybe I get on Wikipedia and write a convincing article about it, and you start registering websites as fast as you can and filling them full of information about the Blatzenstuhl so she thinks it’s real.”

He had a point.

If I’m going to start trying to convince everyone that it’s real, I might as well begin here.

Commence lying now.

The Blatzenstuhl

Ladies and Gentlemen, without further adieu, I present the totally real East German product, the Blatzenstuhl:

When it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, play a few bars of "Flight of the Bumblebee".

I can assure you that the image above is not a collection of photos of a man with a trombone, a chamber pot and some random Russian text all poorly photoshopped together, but in fact a copy of the advertisement for the Blatzenstuhl that was being handed out at its display during the 1952 Leipzig Trade Fair. As you can see, the Blatzenstuhl is being modeled by German movie star and Olympic weightlifter Hans Fultenstein.

The above text loosely translates as follows:

“Rejoice, Comrades! The glorious German Democratic Republic has been blessed with immense prestige and honor through the introduction of the Blatzenstuhl! Both a resplendant musical instrument of the finest craftsmanship and a container for all form of nighttime emmissions, the Blatzenstuhl will serve the needs of any man, woman or child. Whether used to store up to five litres of night soil or indulge in the dulcet tones of a fine Rachmaninoff symphony, It will be obvious to any owner that the state has once again rewarded the loyalty and diligent industry of its workers with a truly unparalleled luxury! The Blatzenstuhl’s exceptional form and function are further proof that the Western Bourgeosie swine face imminent humiliation at the hands of the inexorable and tenatious Proletariat! Take arms, brothers, and may the Blatzenstuhl play the eulogy of the lethargic, decadent West! DM 250.”

Despite a significant amount of excitement surrounding the release of the Blatzenstuhl, it’s prohibitivly expensive price and rarity made it a difficult product for East Germans to obtain, and the product, ultimately, was a failure. There are only three known Blatzenstuhls still in existance today, all of which are in the posession of anonymous private collectors.

…

And, stop lying now.

It’s a start. Next, I need to register ten or eleven angelfire sites and start ramming them full of information.

I suppose that all of this is a moot point; I took the footnote out of my paper, so I don’t have to convince anyone that East Germany created a device that you could play music with and also take a dump in.

The bottom line is that I’ve got a lot of photoshopping to do.

Have a good weekend.

So, about three weeks ago, my brother got bedbugs. My little brother is not very aware of his surroundings, so he didn’t actually know that he had them. I just noticed that he was covered in bites one day and asked him what happened. Up to that point, I’m not sure he even knew that he was being bitten. Either way, we did the math and figured out that he had a pretty serious infestation. An exterminator showed up, sprayed down his box spring and that was basically the end of it.

At least, for him it was.

My bug phobia in full swing.

After that happened, I started going a little bit crazy. Every time something brushed me or touched me, I was convinced that it was a bug. I started having trouble sleeping. The sheets would settle or a breeze would blow over my leg and I would freak out. I started compulsively watching videos and reading pages and pages of information about bedbugs. I would spend two hours before bed every night reading about how they spend all day hiding and then come out while you’re asleep to suck your blood, or how they can survive for 18 months without eating if they need to.

Then, I woke up one day with a couple of bites on my knee. I tore off my covers and found a couple of tiny blood spots on my sheets. I immediately ripped the sheets off of the bed and started frantically searching around the mattress with a flashlight. I didn’t find anything, but the little blood stains were a pretty sure sign that I had bedbugs.

My first reaction was rage. I wanted to punch my little brother in the face for tracking parasites into the house. After talking myself down, panic set in. I started frantically washing all of my clothes and bedding in scalding hot water followed by super hot drying before sealing them in plastic bags. I called an exterminator. I briefly considered throwing away everything that I owned and sleeping on a cot surrounded by gasoline and glue traps. I was ready to tear out all of the carpeting and burn it in the back yard.

And the “Covered with Bugs” sensation that I had been struggling with got about one hundred times worse. I’m guessing that I looked like a PCP addict, furiously swatting and scratching at bugs that weren’t there. As I said, my parents are out of town, and they offered to let me sleep on their bed. That didn’t really make me feel any less buggy, but I did anyway, because it freaked me out a whole lot less than the idea of sleeping in my own bed.

Needless to say, I have not been sleeping very well for about a week now. My strict regiment of jittering and scratching at imaginary bugs combined with reading about bedbugs on the Internet to make sure I kept my anxiety level nice and high kept me from getting much more than three or four hours of twitchy, restless sleep a night. Even when I was 19 and could survive for a week on a fraction of the sleep I get now and a Twix bar, three hours wasn’t enough. Now that I’m a cranky old man, I can’t even control my bowels if I get less than 10. It hasn’t been fun.

Yesterday, the exterminator came over. After carefully inspecting my room, we managed to find one bedbug. He told me that I should calm down, I had caught things incredibly early so it was entirely possible that this was the only one who had been causing trouble, and that on a scale of 1-10, this was a 1. Then, he sprayed a bunch of poison around my room and on my mattress, which was way more reassuring to me than his kind words. We talked a little bit about DDT, which he talked about with the kind of fondness that I use when I talk about my first kiss or bite of ice cream. By the end of the conversation, I was ready to smuggle some into the country and start slathering it all over my body.

After spraying everything down, he told me that I should sleep in my own bed that night. The bugs needed to come into contact with the poison, and the best way to get them to do that was to sleep on my bed so they’d come try to bite me. After a couple of days, they would die. This made me happy.

But sleeping was still a little bit tricky last night. It was nice to be back in my room, with podcasts and the box fan to lull me to sleep, but as I was lying there, I started to think about the fact that I was lying on a poison soaked mattress essentially being used as a piece of bait. It wasn’t a very restful thought. Either way, I finally managed to doze off. When I woke up, I didn’t appear to have any bites and the sheets were clean. It’s a start. Maybe I’ll be able to quit scratching like a crack addict and actually get some sleep tonight.

Now please enjoy this video of a marching band performing “Da’ Butt”.

I’ve been house sitting for my parents while they’re in Chicago for the past few days.

I remember as a teenager that house sitting was incredibly awesome. I would stay up late, watch television, eat junk food and enjoy spending a few days without anyone busting my chops.

As an adult, at least in the biological sense, it’s less entertaining. I don’t have a bedtime anyway, since there’s no junk food in the house I have to go out and buy it, which is also something I do normally, and I have to take care of their yard, which is outside, a location that is hot and full of mosquitoes this time of year.

I HAVE been watching plenty of television, though. The T.V. at my parents house is a special kind – basic digital television. That includes all of the basic networks plus a few Spanish channels and about five religious stations.

Here’s what I’ve learned from watching all of them.

Before he was the Italian Stallion, Stallone was known as "The Italian Jr. High School Science Teacher/Sexual Predator".

1. Spanish channels are awesome all the time.

After enjoying a Van Damme marathon one day, I touched on this subject earlier, but a few more days of careful viewing have only strengthened my belief that Spanish television is some of the best around. In the four days that I’ve been watching it, it’s been nothing but good looking, barely-dressed Latina chicas, action movies and professional wrestling. On Saturday, they showed Terminator 3, The Crow, Nighthawks and a Chuck Norris movie that I couldn’t figure out the name of. That’s a lot of guilty pleasures back to back to back to back. On another day, they showed WWE wrestling in Spanish. Normally, I don’t like Wrestling, but there’s something strangely fascinating about it to me when it’s in a language that I don’t understand. When I can’t tell what they’re saying, I’m suddenly fascinated. What the hell is Triple H doing in John Cena’s dressing room yelling at him? What is he saying? Why the hell is Seth Green in a ring with the two of them fighting The Big Show? Hard to say! I don’t speak Spanish! Only one thing to do: Watch until I figure it out!

Don’t get me wrong, Spanish channels aren’t without their flaws; Most of the programming only appeals to my lower brain stem, and if you watch it for too long, you’re bound to end up running into a soccer game at some point, but if you’re into boobs, action and camp, Telemundo is a solid choice well over 90% of the time.

2. I’m strangely drawn to religious television.

You have my attention. Throw in some religious rock and a guy on a snowboard and I'm yours forever.

I have no idea why. I’m not religious, at all. There’s almost never anything interesting on it, and yet, I find myself unable to stop watching. My personal favorite is JCTV, which appears to be a weak attempt at MTV for people who need all of their programming to be about Jesus. The station consists of almost nothing but religious music videos and clips of people competing in extreme sports, but they break it into 30 minute segments and give them different names that sound like Mountain Dew flavors. Here are a few real examples: “SHOUT TV” (Christian rock and some goofy guy on a badly green-screened robotic set preaching the gospel) , “G-Rock” (Christian Rock), “Extreme Video Zone” (Christian rock and clips of extreme sports), “Acquire the Fire” (I have no clue, although I love the name and am guessing it involves some Christian rock and some extreme sports), “Bomb Shelter” and my personal favorite, “Revolution Extreme”.

See what I mean? If I told you that I had just bought a twelve pack of Mountain Dew: Revolution Extreme or Mountain Dew: Bomb Shelter, you wouldn’t even think twice about it.

(I’m actually really excited, because I was checking their schedule to get the list of show names, and there’s something called “Hardcore Music” on in an hour. We’ll see if it lives up to the name. I remain skeptical, but cautiously optimistic.)

I am also strangely drawn to the women on that channel. Again, I have no idea why. It seems strange to find myself attracted to women that I know that I am diametrically opposed to on some very important issues, but I find myself sitting there and thinking things like “Yeah, baby! Lets drink some wine coolers and I’ll show you what second base is!”

I can’t decide if I think churchy girls would be unwilling to do anything, or if all of those repressed feelings and emotions would result in a night like that one in Fight Club where Brad Pitt comes to the door with rubber gloves on. What I DO know is that my brain really lights up when I’m around crazy girls. Maybe that’s why I have that reaction.

3. Always be aware of what you’re watching.

A few days ago, I was watching…Law and Order, I think. It was hot and I’m lazy, so I was in my underwear. About halfway through, I dozed off on the couch. An hour or two later, my little brother and this guy that works with him came over to grab my little brother’s checkbook. I was disoriented, but I tried to make polite conversation with them while I got my bearings. As I was sitting there in my underwear, sweaty and confused, I looked over at the television to see what I was watching.

It was Oprah.

Certainly embarrassing enough on it’s own, but it didn’t stop there. I looked up the episode so I could share it with you. Here’s a picture:

Not enough? I agree. Here’s a link to a video of the segment.

You know what I call this? "Less embarrassing than getting caught watching Oprah."

While I was talking, I took stock of the situation: I was chatting with a guy I didn’t know very well after having just woken up at three o’clock in the afternoon, sweaty, confused, mostly naked, watching Oprah talk with some lady about the vaginal canal. Probably not a good way to make a good first impression. Or maintain custody, if I were my brother’s guardian. I would’ve been less embarrassed if he’d come over and I was watching JCTV.

I love that station.

I think the point of all of this, actually, is that I need to waste a little less time in front of the television. Sure, it’s hot out and I refuse to do very much during the day, but there’s got to be something I can do that will be more entertaining and less humiliating if someone catches me doing it. I might even be able to find something constructive to do with all of that time.

Tomorrow. “Hardcore Music” is on in fifteen minutes.

I’ll see you suckers on Wednesday.

(I was really tired today and my brain never quite turned on, so I had a really hard time writing this short, scattered, incoherent post. I know that the day is nearly over, but it’s on the Internet, and it’s still Friday for sixty more minutes, so suck it. The streak is still alive! I’ll try to be more entertaining on Monday, and I’ll try to get it done faster instead of literally waiting until the eleventh hour. Enjoy the trash!)

We all know someone with some Irish heritage. Maybe they’re full-blown Irish. Maybe their father is. Maybe they had a great great grandfather from Alabama who visited Ireland once. Maybe they eat Lucky Charms. The point is, they associate themselves with Ireland in some way, shape or form.

And how do you know that this person has some kind of link, no matter how vague, to Ireland?

"Hmm... I really want the people at work to know how much I love Ireland. I just hope that this outfit isn't too subtle."

Because they won’t shut the fuck up about it. That’s why. They have an entire closet full of green, shamrock covered tshirts advertising their love of Ireland, they want to get tattoos of Celtic knots, they talk about how much they love drinking whiskey and Guinness (Bonus points if they say “Guinness” in a shitty Irish accent when they’re talking about it), they dress up as Leprechauns and listen to House of Pain. You can’t get more than a few seconds into a conversation before they have to tell you that they’re going to visit Ireland someday because they’re 1/16th Irish or that they’re Irish so they can drink Jameson like normal people drink water.

There are a multitude of reasons that I find this annoying.

First of all, as I said before, most of these people have only the loosest connection to Ireland. They have a distant Irish relative or they kissed the Blarney stone during their high school band’s trip to Europe.

Second of all, most of them know about as much about Ireland as I do. Even if their grandparents came from Ireland, they grew up in the middle of Missouri and are, for all intensive purposes, Americans.

Third of all, I have no idea why this seems to happen disproportionally with the Irish. I can understand appreciating your heritage and family history, but I’m unclear as to what makes Irish descent more important to broadcast. My last name is Czechoslovakian. A lot of people think that it’s French. Do you know why they make that mistake? Because I don’t waste time and energy making sure that everyone around me knows that my great-grandfather on my Dad’s side of the family came from Czechoslovakia. We eat Kolache when we go to see my Grandma during Christmas and when people ask me if my last name is French I tell them that it’s not. That’s when it comes up. No shirts. No tattoos. Just a goofy last name that middle school kids find incredibly funny.

Ireland is probably a nice place. I guess it’s a big tech center in Europe now, I’ve heard that it’s really pretty, and it’s world renowned for having some of the blandest, shittiest cuisine on the planet. Nothing wrong with any of that, but it doesn’t make it any more exciting than any other corner of the world, and the rest of the world isn’t wearing shirts that say things like “Kiss me, I’m Iranian” or getting tattoos that say “Luxembourg Pride” on them.

To illustrate the severity of this problem, I did a little bit of research on google. I looked for certain phrases, took the data and turned it into the following aesthetically pleasing donut chart.

Number of Results Returned By Google:

The results are alarming.

As you can see, the phrase “Irish Pride” yields about 131,000 results. The next highest number, “German Pride” had 31,800 results.

Why is this? Germans make badass cars, good beer, and some of the filthiest, most depraved pornography in existence! French people have the Eiffel Tower, really, REALLY good food and a love of Jerry Lewis, but according to google have only have a fraction of the pride that Irish people do!

Most alarming, however, are the numbers on buttholes! Every single one of these demographics has them, plus a slew of others – Abraham Lincoln, John Elway, Eddie Van Halen – name a great person in history, and chances are that they had a butthole! Despite this fact, google was able to find only two sites on the Internet that had the phrase “Butthole pride” written on them. The fact that this blog post will increase that number by 50% is cold comfort.

As is stands, I see only one solution: I need to start raising awareness about this.

Actually, there are already plenty of "Butthole Pride" shirts available. Take this one right here, for instance.

As of tomorrow, I will start doing my best to bring up in even the most casual, unrelated conversations that I have a butthole.* I’ll start running off shirts that say “Kiss me, I have a butthole” written on them* (I considered submitting this as a design to threadless.com’s typetees, but even if you ignore the fact that it would almost certainly get voted down immediately for not making any sense to anyone but the small handful of people who read this post, I’m pretty sure that it would get pulled down for inappropriate language.) I will get a tattoo of buttholes circling my arm that I can show off to let everyone know that a long, rich history of having buttholes goes all the way up my family tree.*

(P.S.: A search for “American Pride” yields over 500,000 results. Why didn’t I include that in my graph? It’s quite simple, really: because it wasn’t consistent with the point that I was trying to make, that’s why! Not only am I willing to do the research, I also know how to cherry pick to make sure the results look like I want them to! Expect only the best from mindyourowngoddamnbusiness.com!)

What was I talking about? Oh, right. Irish Pride. Maybe someone reading this is Irish, and maybe that someone is really, really proud about it. Help me understand. Why is the amount of pride so much stronger for people that are from there than what appear to me to be comparable countries? Let me know, or deal with me being an asshole about it.

And remember to hit me up for a “Butthole Pride” tshirt ASAP! You need to start letting people know, because everyone finds that kind of thing almost as interesting as where one of your grandparents came from!

Coming up next week: Finally, part three of my exploration of Internet dating (in a direction that I never expected to take), and more stories of me humiliating myself!

Enjoy your weekend.

*All lies. Shameless, shameless lies.

I made a connection between two things today:

1. I have a hard time not dancing around when I’m listening to music.

As I’ve mentioned, I got my hands on some Michael Jackson albums last week, and I’ve noticed that if you play any of the first half of Off The Wall, Thriller or Bad, I start dancing around and don’t even know that I’m doing it. I’ll be walking home from school, spacing out and listening to one of those albums on my headphones when I’ll see someone giving me a weird look and suddenly realize that I’m moonwalking and don’t know why or for how long I’ve been doing it.

The new Arsonists Get All The Girls album has been causing me similar problems. I’m aware that I’m rocking out to it, but I don’t really have any control over it.

Take this for instance. This isn’t really the best song on the album, but during the breakdown that starts at 1:55, I am physically unable to prevent myself from going full retard.

You hear me? PHYSICALLY UNABLE.

Someone has been playing Judas Priest around the Madonna statue again.

Yesterday morning when I was listening to it, I inadvertently launched my glasses off of my head and across the room. Two nights ago when I was writing, I almost accidentally punched my laptop and broke the screen. Last night when I was out running, I started punching the air and flailing around while I was listening to it. I probably looked like I had rabies. The first time that I heard it, I got so pumped up that I started crying blood. It actually turned out to be because of severe internal bleeding, but it happened because I was so exited, so I think the example is still relevant.

I’m aware of what’s happening, but I’m like a kid with ADHD: I know that I shouldn’t freak out, but I’m so fricking pumped that I can’t help myself.

I’ve also been listening to Van Halen’s self titled album, and it’s more of the same problem – if I hear eruption playing, I’m going to start playing air guitar. That’s just how it is.

This is fact #1.

2. There are companies that pay some dude to stand out on the street and wave a sign around advertizing their shit. Every tax season, you see the guy dressed as the Statue of Liberty or Uncle Sam waving at cars and holding a sign. A lot of times, I assume to help with the soul crushing boredom of standing on a street corner for five or six hours at a time, these people put on headphones and dance around. There’s one guy in particular in town that I’ve seen a couple of times who really gets into it. It seems like kind of a crappy job to me.

Then, I saw the following video:

Side note: I think that this is actually a really terrible way to advertise. Pop quiz: Without going back to the video, what was the sign that the guy was holding advertising? If you remember, you’re way more perceptive than I am. Same deal with all of those Statues of Liberty. I know they have something to do with taxes, or cashing paychecks, or something, but I don’t have a clue what the company is. I guess that it’s working, or they wouldn’t do it, but it doesn’t make sense to me.

How effective it is doesn’t really concern me, though.

What does concern me, deeply, is that I’ve been making an ass of myself for all of this time and nobody has been paying me five dollars an hour to do it.

When I first saw this video above, (thanks, metalsucks.net), I just chuckled a little bit. It was funny to see that guy playing air guitar in all black out in the sun.

Then, it all clicked into place: This job is perfect for me.

Sort of.

Do it this way, and it's kind of gay and a waste of time. Get a few H&R Block signs in there, and it's seven dollars an hour.

I’m not poor enough (yet) that I’m willing to stand out on the street for long periods of time in one spot, but, as I have proven time and time again, I AM willing to dance around like a retard if you put some headphones in my ears and connect them to an iPod with music that I like on it. If I’m going to be dancing around town anyway, I should see if I can get someone to slap a sign on my back and start paying me minimum wage while I’m doing it.

It’s like realizing that there’s a company somewhere that would be willing to give me a quarter every time that I masturbate. Maybe I don’t even need the money, but if it’s something that I’m going to be doing twelve, thirteen times a day anyway, why not pick up some loose change in the process?

So, if you’re an advertizing exec who thinks the only thing left that you need for a successful product launch is some jackass doing Thriller around town with a picture of your product splayed across his back, get in touch with me.

Just so you know, I’m not willing to give you my real name, address or contact information. You’ve got the fancy business degree. Figure it out, college boy.

I’m just kidding. If you wait long enough, I’ll probably put all of that information up on accident.

It’s the classy way to do business.

Actually, that's pretty much what it's like. This is why I never come within twenty feet of an industrial taffy puller without pants on.

First of all, I need to re-emphasize how effective antiperspirant is in preventing jock itch, chafing, and all around unpleasantness when applied to the balls. If I had known how much my quality of life would improve with a few swipes of the Right Guard over my junk after applying it to my armpits, I would’ve been doing it for years.

Seriously. It’s like I have a whole new set of balls. Sure, they still hang like they’re made out of taffy, but they smell really sporty and fresh while they’re doing it. I assume. I mean, It’s not like I’ve been smelling my own balls. What, are you a cop or something? STOP BROWBEATING ME.

Moving on.

I was cleaning today, and while my brain was on autopilot I had a strange, random memory.

I have this sweet routine with girls.

Sometimes, a girl will be into me. She will send me clear, obvious signals that she is interested. I will have no idea that this is what’s happening. Oftentimes, I am attracted to the girl in question, but I simply assume that she is being nice or having pity on me (This is for two reasons: first of all, I have some weird self esteem issues. Second of all, my radar isn’t finely tuned enough to tell the difference between the way that girls interact with me when they’re into me and when they’re just being nice. It all looks exactly the same to me. I don’t want to freak anyone out, so instead of trying to make a move, I err on the side of “She’s probably just buying me beers because she’s friendly and she’s telling me to put my hand on her boobs because she’s drunk”. True story.)

Either way, the point is that short of tackling me, showing me a powerpoint presentation and drawing me a diagram, there’s nothing you can do to make me understand that you’re attracted to me and not just a nice person. No hard feelings.

After spending a few weeks, maybe a few months sending signals that I should be trying to make a move, the girl in question decides that I must just not be into her and moves on.

At about this point, I suddenly realize that I was getting hit on, but by then, it’s too late. Maybe I flail around a little bit and try to salvage things, but it’s never worked.

This is my little routine. It’s what I do. I’m consistent if nothing else.

Anyway, that’s not the story. I write about my ineptitude with girls all the time, so it’s really nothing new to anyone who’s ever read anything that I’ve ever written before. It’s just a type of human interaction that I’ve never quite been able to figure out.

So, when I was in…2nd grade, I think, there was this chick with red hair that I was totally into, and she was into me. She was always pulling my hair and talking trash to me. I was always pumped up about this. We went through this routine for a couple of weeks. My Dad was the art teacher at my elementary school, and I even asked him to put her next to me in art.

Then, one day at recess, one of her friends ran up to me and asked me if I liked the girl in question.

In hindsight, it seems likely that if a friend of the girl who had been flirting with me asked me if I was into that girl, it was probably because my little red haired friend wanted to get her hands on my tiny, hairless balls. At the time, however, I assumed that it was because they wanted to embarrass me and use the knowledge of my crush as a tool for blackmail and humiliation. As always, I also didn’t realize that all of the flirting that she had been doing was flirting. Plus, let’s not forget the fact that I’m a pussy.

So I said no.

After that, things weren’t the same with me and that girl. No hair pulling, no hanging out with me. There was still some trash talking, but it wasn’t really good natured like it had been before.

I had completely forgotten about all of this until today, and until now I never really connected the dots on the whole “she had the hots for you, and all you had to do to make sure that you two were doing it 2nd grade-style by snack time was tell the truth when her friend asked if you liked her.”

"Look, you asked for it this way. If it's so goddamned important to you that you don't have a prolapsed rectum, maybe you should have said something BEFORE I put the costume on. Now help me find the lube and my sword."

Don’t ask me what 2nd grade style is. Maybe holding hands? Slipping her the tongue with my Go-Bots mask on? Shoving a ninja turtle in her butt? I don’t know. I’m not a fucking doctor. All I know is that if you ask me to do it with you 2nd grade-style without explaining what that means, you should be aware of the very real possibility that you will be making a very awkward trip to the emergency room later that night.

I didn’t think that my struggles to interact with people with vaginas had started until I hit puberty, so it was kind of startling to realize that I had begun my pattern at a much earlier age than I previously realized (the gap between 2nd grade and puberty for me was even further than you might think – by the time I had visible hair on my chin, my friend Dan looked like Earnest Hemingway).

It made me wonder a little bit if that moment on recess in 2nd grade was some kind of turning point for me; if I’d said “Yes” when her friend asked me, would it have started a different pattern for me than the one I tend to fall into now? Would my regrets of missed opportunities be replaced with regrets of awkward morning-afters and meaningless one night stands that ultimately left me feeling hollow? Would there be a girl out there, somewhere, who to this day would flinch whenever someone so much as mentioned teenage mutant ninja turtles?

Now that I'm looking at this picture, I'm realizing that Abe and I have roughly the same posture, hairline and eyebrows. I'm apparently a natural at casting.

I feel like I’ve just described the plot to a shitty late 80′s early 90′s movie. We could cast Abe Vigoda as adult me, and have him wish upon a haunted charm that he bought from a creepy gypsy earlier that day that he had said yes instead of no on the playground that fateful day twenty years ago.

Then, he’ll wake up the next day, back in 2nd grade. We can cast a young Fred Savage as childhood me. He’ll say yes to the girl, and it’ll seem much better at first, but then at about the halfway point he’ll decide that ultimately, he was happier with his life the way it was. He’ll spend a quarter of the movie frantically trying to figure out how to get things back to the way they were, he’ll find the old gypsy just in time, he will go back to living his life the way he was before, more satisfied knowing that the alternative wasn’t all that he had thought it was cracked up to be. Roll credits.

Are you paying attention, Hollywood? I just described a shitty movie that will be panned by critics and make you six or seven hojillion dollars. Find a way to shoehorn Eugene “I’ll keep starring in these shitty ‘American Pie’ spinoffs as long as you stupid movie executive motherfuckers keep writing me checks” Levy into the movie somewhere, and you have a bona-fide hit.

Since my life isn’t an 80′s movie (or if it is, it’s a very, very boring one that has far more death metal and masturbating than most of its peers), I’ll never know if that’s how it would all play out. It seems unlikely to me – although there are exceptions, I tend to think that it’s stupid to to assign single moments like that as turning points that somehow drastically effect the outcome of your life. I think it’s pretty unlikely that I would’ve magically grown a spine if I’d said yes that day. Although I’m sure she’s over it if she even remembers it, I feel worse about the fact that I probably hurt that girl’s feelings. Either way, it’s in the past, now, and there’s not really any way to tell what would’ve happened if it had gone down any differently.

But, if I wake up tomorrow, look in the mirror and see seven year old Fred Savage looking back at me, I’ll be sure to tell you what happens.

See you Wednesday, bitches.