A General Inquiry

Today I have a question for you. I'm not going to tell a funny story or prepare some sort of commentary on life. I just have a question for everyone and anyone that takes the time to read this. So here you are:

Think about the worst nightmare of your life. Imagine that the very dream you are most scared of is real. It could be anything, from monsters sleeping under your bed to a goldfish eating your family. Whatever horrifying thing it is that you imagine in your sleep, that is what I want you to picture at this moment. Now, imagine that that nightmare isn't just real, but it happens over and over and over, every single day of your life.

Let's continue with the family-eating goldfish dream. Imagine that every single day when you wake up, a goldfish eats your family. The next day, your family are all alive and well like nothing ever happened, and then MUNCH! The same goldfish eats them all over again. The next day is just the same, as is the one after that, and the one after that. No matter what you do, no matter what you try, every single day this goldfish eats your entire family.

This is where the question arises. How do you escape that nightmare? You cannot sleep, because in your sleep, you give birth to the nightmare, and yet you cannot be awake, because when you are awake, you live the nightmare. Every night recycles your family, just to have them eaten by a goldfish when you wake. And yet, if you stay asleep, the goldfish will eat your family in your dreams. So, again, I ask the question:

How do you escape a nightmare that exists in real life?

SCREEEEECH

It's raining again today. Last time it rained in San Antonio, the forces that brought it on decided to turn it into a hurricane as I were halfway through walking to my car. Needless to say, all my books in my backpack were ruined. Thanks again, God.

Let me take a second to address a side-note. I still don't believe in God. I don't believe in fate. However, when shit just keeps going wrong, it's easier to have someone to hate. Blame is the best way of dealing with what feels like a constant stream of diarrhea. So, in summary, no I don't believe in God, but I'm damn well going to blame him because you do believe in him, and if you believe he's responsible for the goings on of the world, then guess what. This is all your God's fault.

Back to the point, it's raining again today. Rain in San Antonio is a funny thing. It's like ice in a place that only freezes for a few weeks of the year. When it starts raining in San Antonio, everyone begins acting like chickens with their heads recently cut off; they run round and round until eventually they drop.

So, I was driving to school in the rain. Unlike the rest of the city, I am not that bad at driving in the rain. It's pretty easy if you plan to aquaplane. It's also pretty easy if you plan for other people to do the same. San Antonian's don't plan for either of those things. They continue doing 70 on the freeway, the continue to wait for the last second to break, and they continue to drive while texting and talking on their cell phones.

I pull onto the freeway about 10 mph under the speed limit, just in case of hidden puddles, with some guy about 6 inches from my rear bumper. I can see his face, through rain soaked windows, as he gets angrier and angrier that I'm not doing the posted 70mph which he feels is essential in a downpour. As soon as we get onto the freeway and off the on-ramp, he guns it and whips into the lane next to me.

This is where I laughed. I knew exactly what was about to happen, because unlike him, I'm not stupid. With the rapid acceleration, the changing of lanes, and the abrupt motion of both his actions, his wheels spun beneath him, his car lost its grip on the road, and over he went into the next lane. With all the intelligence of a moron, he slammed on his breaks, something you should never do when skidding because you just increase the friction of the tires and keep on going as you were. In his case, he kept changing lanes. Unfortunately for him, the next lane was grass. Off the road he went in his Ford truck, straight into the grass. But he still didn't stop. He kept going left, into the grass, further and further until the sound of metal on cement echoed across the freeway as he slammed straight into the cement blockers separating the two directions of traffic.

It's funny to me, when people don't think before they act. It's even more funny to me when they get punished for it.

Becoming Hank

For the first time in my entire life, I have what is known as "Writer's Block." I've tried everything to find some way of getting words from inside my mess of a brain and onto paper, but for the past few weeks I have been almost completely incapable of doing so. I think the problem is based on a flaw at the start of the writing process. See, its called Writer's Block, which reads to me like there's a block in your brain stopping the words going from head to paper. But my head is empty. I have nothing. I have no ideas, no clever lines, no anything. I can't even seem to throw together a fucking sentence.

The funny thing is that I have, in the past, written some of my greatest pieces when upset or depressed. And yet now, I am upset and depressed and unable to write, making a bad situation even worse. I can't even throw together an entertaining blog.

So what do I do instead? I drink. I drink a lot. I smoke. I fuck. Sometimes, I do them together. Life is more fun in combination. And then I wallow. And when the day is done, I go to bed, wake up, and do it all again. Occasionally I'll sit down and try to squeeze out a word, but when I stare into the darkness of my head, my brain separated from the one real skill that I have in my life, the one vent in my entire world, I light up a smoke, throw the base of a bottle into the air, and I drink away the darkness.

I have, in every aspect of my life, become Hank Moody. And I don't like it one bit.

Talking to Ghosts

So let me kick this off with a pretty important piece of information: I don't believe in ghosts. That being said, there are still plenty of times in life when the things that we do or don't believe in are tested. Tonight was one of those nights.

I was sleeping, or maybe I wasn't. I can't quite tell anymore. I don't exactly fall asleep so much as I lay there and sort of drift off and sort of stay awake. Still, that's how I was, somewhat sleeping, and then I wasn't anymore. I woke up. I woke up and in my bed, behind Rogue who always sleeps next to me, was someone else. I don't know who it was, or what they were doing in my bed, but they were there, watching me.

Me, being the extremely masculine man I am, almost had a heart attack. I am proud to say that I did not soil myself, but I think I actually came pretty close. So, there I was, in bed, having a heart attack, as some random girl smiled at me from behind my sleeping dog. And then the person was gone. I was left in my bed, heart pounding as it burst back into life after a heart-attack, and my dog sleeping peacefully.

So, given the fact that I don't believe in ghosts, here's what I think happened. Either (a) I was still dreaming, even though I was awake, or (b) I am going bat-shit crazy and am starting to imagine people in my life that don't really exist.

Honestly, I hope it's the latter. I'd like to be absolutely, unarguably insane. They give you padded walls that way.

Trying to Write

I have a problem. I can't seem to think of anything to write. I want to write something, but all that's in my head is a string of ideas that are about how terrible life is, and I feel like I exhausted that bad-boy yesterday. I feel like if you are going to talk about how bad life is, you need to take a little break and try to talk about how great it is. So, let me have a quick attempt at that, seeing as I don't know what it is that I am going to write about in this blog today.

Life is pretty great. Sometimes there is sun, sometimes there is rain. I don't like rain. But sometimes I like sun, if it's cold out. I like cold. Cold is pretty great. Sometimes people look stupid in front of other people. That's pretty funny. I like it when that happens. Life is also pretty great when someone gets hurt in a crazy way, like slipping on a banana peel or swallowing a jalapeno. Those things are pretty great. It's also great when people sneeze more than 10 times. It's annoying, but it makes me laugh. They say a sneeze is 1/10 an orgasm. I sneeze twice. I bet those 10 time sneezers wish they could sneeze 10 times, simultaneously, instead of in succession. It'd be better that way.

But what I really like, and this is pretty selfish, is when someone elses life sucks more than mine. I often pretend that I have this "higher-than-thou" situation in my writing. I like to pretend I am not part of the rest of the worlds terrible problems. The truth is, I'm just as terrible a person as you. I love it when I'm feeling like shit, and I run into someone who's feeling worse. What's better? Sharing a bad mood. Bad moods are like a disease, one that can only be healed by giving it to multiple other people. It's delicious.

Basically, life could be great if I were pretending, but you guys know me well enough to know that I don't believe that for even a second.

Hey, look at that. I wrote something, even if it is shit.

Life Will Kill You

There's this idea that there is something bigger out there, something watching over us. This idea is spread across the planet through so many means. It's spoken of in terms of God, it exists in fate, and people constantly talk about it as if eventually this "something bigger" will make everything better.

It's a really nice idea. I wish it were true. I just don't really have it in me to believe it. And, because of that, I want to try something that not enough people are willing to do. I want to present the other side of the argument.

People say that life is a gift. A gift is something given, regardless of desire, to someone. A gift can be loved or hated, and regardless of how it's received, it's given all the same. With almost any other gift, it can be returned, ignored, discarded, loved, or re-gifted. Life, however, does not fall into any of these categories. Life is a gift that is given, like most gifts, without any choice. The only option the receiver has, however, is to take that "gift," and learn to make it their everything. There is no choice in how its received. The only way out is death, but even in death, life was still a gift that the person lived with for as long as they were around.

So that moves me onto my counter argument to something bigger being out there. Call it God, call it Fate, but the idea is that there is something bigger out there, guiding us and giving us this gift of life and making sure everything turns out well in the end. If this is actually the case, then whatever it is that is "bigger" is a horrible, horrible creature. It gives this thing that it calls a gift to people, and it expects them to appreciate it. But let's look at the big picture, shall we?

People are terrible creatures. They kill each other without reason. They pollute, they steal, they murder, they rape, they reproduce to unimaginable levels, they spread disease, they withhold goods and services, they are corrupt, they are evil. And so this gift of life is given to humans, who are forced to exist within humanity, one of the most horrible species in the known universe.

And live we do. We go through the routines of life, committed to the false idea that everything will end up okay. In truth, nothing is ever okay. People get married wrapped up in the delusion of finding happiness when the reality of the situation is that 2/3 marriages end in divorce. People make friends in hope of searching for some form of connection, but in truth, these people are just as wrapped up as anyone else in making themselves happy over everyone else. People turn to God to find hope for something better than life, when in truth all they are doing is praying that this shit-hole of an existence isn't all that there is.

And so here's my counter argument to the idea that everything has purpose, that everything will eventually work out for everyone in the end. The only guarantee in life is this: One day you will die, and then, if everything was absolutely horrible and meaningless, at least it won't be that way any longer.

Goodbye My King

I have always been a very strong supporter of the internet. I feel like something as powerful as a device that allows all people in the world to come together as one single, malfunctioning brain must be respected. With that being said, I have always felt that there just isn't something right about a system that invites everyone and anyone to express their opinions. Stupid people just shouldn't be allowed to speak. But, unfortunately, that's not how the first world works.

There has always been, in my opinion, two different types of internet users. There are people who use it as a business and communication tool, and then there are those that use it as a social networking device. The business users follow regular writing protocol, or at least try to. Often, you get an email from a company that looks like it was written by a five year old, but that's just the byproduct of poor education. Then there are the social networkers, who use the internet as a means of destroying the English language in whatever way they see fit. They'll take a perfectly normal sentence like:

Today I took the bus through the tunnell to East Whereversville.

and turn it into:

tday I tk de bus thru de tunl 2 east wrsvil

Now, I have always accepted the social networking style of writing as a side effect of giving lazy writers the power to communicate through text. That is, I have always accepted it until today, when it bled over into the real world and corrupted everything I have ever believed in about the internet.

Here is a copy of an email that was sent to me by a professional writer, someone whose job is strictly to write. This poor individual gets paid to do one thing, to communicate with the companies consumers. I won't give you the poor sods name, but I will tell you that this email was sent to me from Case-Mate.

Here it is, and I'll go ahead and boldface the two parts that killed my soul:

Dear James,

Thank you for your inquiry.

Your order was shipped thru the USPS and it may take between 5 to 10 business days for delivery. Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions regarding this order.

I hope you have a wonderful day :)

Regards,
[censored name]
Customer Experience Group

I realize these are just two measly errors, but this was a formal letter form an online retailer to a consumer. This is how it begins. This is where the death of English starts.

So, before it's too late, I just want to bid you farewell my dearest King's English. You have done me proud. I will miss you always.