The Shadowman and the Irrationality of Humans

The common understanding is that humans are irrational.  You can leave off the "beings" part.  Instinctual?  Sure, yes.  Emotional?  Mhm.  Logical?  Ehhhhh... sometimes?  Reasonable?  By turns.  The common understanding is that humans are rational.  It's unfortunate that the base assumption is so.  Where it is born, who knows.  My thought is that the seed of the assumption is formed in the assumption that you are a human and you're decisions and behaviors are rational to you and have furthered your survival and existence so if another human exists their behaviors and decisions must be rational too because they are also surviving.  Something along those lines.  It gets reinforced all over the place from every angle and channel of input.  You get it.  You are rational.  Why would you choose to do something that would jeopardize your very existence?  You don't have a death wish.  You are alive!

Humans are irrational.  Please stop building arguments and drawing lines in the sand from the standpoint of echos reverberating from advertisements and observed actions sculpted into frameworks and canned calls and responses and your pasts and your futures.  We are not rational.  Beings?  Sure.  Yes.  Rational?  No.  Rational some of the time?  Sure, yes.  If you want to make it absolute, one or zero, then we are one.  No being or thing is rational all of the time.  Okay, some things are.  Coins are rational.  Geometry is rational.  Math is rational and even when it's irrational it's rational (I think... I knew mathematicians existed and played at the fringes... pretty sure that foggy math is still relatively...  okay, maybe not... you get the point).  Alright, everything is irrational!

In all seriousness, life has been very frustrating trying to understand why events bring out expressions of concern for well being and continued survival in strange ways.  The most recent shooting is not a tipping point, but mumbling to myself while I worked through the day and the following day was telling.  Enter vice and criminality.

When the argument is made that laws have to stay the way they are because the criminal element will find a way to get what they want regardless of what laws are or are not in place and the citizenry must be able to protect itself from this shadow force, I cringe.  That shadow is being cast from the rational mind inside.

Is there a criminal element in the human population?  Yes.  Is that criminal element rational?  Of course not.  The percentage of the human population that makes up that criminal element is extremely visible and equally small.  It skews perception.  How much of that perceived element is gratified and punched up by the echoed reinforcement of  "I am a rational human being and criminals are humans and therefore also rational."  It is incredibly basic.  If you make laws to prevent something from happening or encourage something to happen to promote survival, a lot of humans will see the outcomes, understand mutual survival, and continue to be.  Those same communal laws will be ignored by some humans for all sorts of reasons and interactions and protein chains and chemical reactions.  We are not rational!  As much as you want to believe it.

Let's bring it to weapons. I need to be able to purchase a weapon capable of defending my life against the criminal element.  The rational criminal will find a way to get the weapon they want.  I need to be able to get one capable of answering whatever challenge that may be and limiting my options is sending me to certain harm.  You're flinching away from your own shadow.  Life is insecure.  Life is irrational.  The penalty for your crime is twenty years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is 40 years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is 80 years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is consecutive life sentences.  It's the principle!  The penalty for your crime is death.  You don't understand how much I've been through!  The penalty for your crime - will never be able to influence some humans actions.  That population is a lot smaller than advertised.

So you have to carry a gun because if you were them you would have a gun and you are rational, unlike them, and you follow the law because the law keeps everyone alive and well and they'd have one anyway because that's what you would do.  You have to protect yourself against the irrational ones.  Sometimes it makes me giggle the way people perceive laws because we see their statements about them and wonder how much of their conviction comes from what they've observed and how much comes from the little voices inside their own heads that they mash and thumb down and keep inside because they are reasonable humans doing what's best for human survival instead of slamming the door shut on who they are only to have it pop open a slip with a loud screeeeeeeeaak an inch or two because the bolt didn't quite seat to the strike plate, but the door's hinges are stout.

Getting what you want, when you want it, when you need it, if laws and community prohibit it, is not nearly as easy as television and hearsay and books and articles make it sound.  How many times have you followed an instruction manual to the letter and failed?  How many times have you gone to a holiday office party to be sociable and improve your image and come away exactly the same as you arrived?  How many times have you turned right on a red lit intersection with a dedicated right lane lamp because you were late and the lanes were clear?  How many times did you walk fifteen minutes away from the bar to get a pack of smokes and fire one up on the way back to the bar because they didn't sell them there and disallowed smoking on the premises?  The easy stuff.  The forgivable stuff.

Ramp it up.  Imagine that gas station is thirty miles away.  Imagine that intersection has five cameras pointed at it.  Imagine that party was organized by you and you showed up fashionably late too.  Imagine holding that instruction manual in your hand, closed, as you flipped the switch to "on" and the entire K'nex set whirred, wobbled, and cracked to pieces in seconds.  Getting what you want, when you want it is not an easy task, but it's fun to think hypothetically as a rational human.

"If I were them, I could do that.  I would do that!  If we are to survive we must make sure that if they do that (they are rational because that's what I would do and I am rational) we can stop them."  No, you couldn't.  It's hilarious and frustrating at once.  If I want to do drugs, I will find a way to do drugs!  No, not really.  If it's convenient, why not.  The feeling may pass.  The chemical programming may or may not.  The decision making is tied to the chemicals and past experiences hard coded upstairs.  It may take a while to shift.  It may never shift.  If it's not readily available, fifty one miles is just too damn long to go get it so I'll stew and grind on with my life without it.  The rational addict goes to get it, makes a way, finds someone who knows someone who heard about someone that was seen somewhere once and goes there to meet them for lunch.  The irrational human stumbles on through the next day and the next day and sits down some afternoons to cuss quietly or aloud and does something else with its time until it becomes a little more convenient and sometimes reflects on why its so upset in the first place.  Sometimes it kills itself, sometimes it hurts others, sometimes it decides to drive fifty one miles to ask a question.  Sometimes it decides now is now and another day is another day.

It's guffaw disappointing when the shadowman is invoked as a reason to do or not do something.  The shadowmen are arming themselves, laws be damned; do you want me to die?!  The shadowmen are circulating drugs all over the place; what of the children?  The shadowmen, the shadowmen, the shadowmen!  Without laws keeping step with the threat of the shadows no one is safe!

Yes, no one is safe.  No ones safety is ever guaranteed.  That goes back to when humans had to worry about giant nocturnal multi-legged hunters stealing away their curious young.  People die.  People will be killed.  Someone may murder you.  Someone you know.  Someone you know may murder someone you know.  People find ways to get what they want or need and laws don't stop them no matter how much they have to risk or harm themselves to get it.  The answer isn't lowering the threshold from irrational decision to action.  Raise it.  Otherwise you might as well be trying to fix a hole in a canoe by punching more holes so that everyone is treading water.  If everyone is under threat of drowning we are all safe, right?  Another terrible analogy.  Believing making something proven and observed to be extremely hazardous to other people readily available to everyone to level an imaginary playing field is just flat laughable.

Why are you so afraid of the shadowman?

Who's been whispering in your ear?

How do you not see the upside-down superimposed on what you advocate for and not pause?

We are not rational people.  Hearing arguments bounce back and forth with real ramifications, buoyed by this ghost echo of an assumption of reasonable behavior, it's stupefying.  The invocation of this evildoer for all seasons with no regard for law or just basic basic basic irrational humanness is disheartening.  But we are rational people.  We will survive.



///The Shadow

Breaking the Horse

Sometimes it feels as though I can do no right.  What happened in my past lives to be cursed so?  I lost a cat yesterday.  I gave him everything he wanted.  I gave him everything he needed and then some.  It makes no sense.  I can still feel him.  I can still see bits of him in my vision.  I can still smell him.  His ears smelled like french toast sometimes.  He was only about two years old.  I have to remind myself that I didn't kill him.  I wonder if I did perhaps by accident.  I flushed my fish down the toilet a while back, but that was because I shouldn't have had them to begin with.

I thought I did pretty good with him.  He was my chief officer on board my ship.  The other guy was my first mate.  The first mate has been promoted.  I'm sure he didn't want to get his promotion that way.  He keeps meowing constantly to call up the deceased.  He doesn't understand that our chief officer is gone for good.  I kind of don't understand it either.  As soon as I touched him I knew he wasn't just sleeping.  He was my cooking buddy.  I'd meet him in the mess hall to talk about our course and how to squeeze a little more oomf out of the engines.  He was my napping buddy too.  My sleep in pal.  He'd lay on my phone so I wouldn't have to hear it.

No, no, no, sweetie.  Come back to me.  I need you!  My first mate needs you too.  We had a good crew.  Was the music too loud?  Was the bass too heavy?  Did I not keep the temperature high enough?  I couldn't turn it up any higher.  It made my nose bleed too much.  What did I screw up?  Who's going to wake me up in the morning now?

I thought about burning his body for a very long time.  Give him up to the air and the stars.  I'm giving him back to the city instead.  It's where he came from.  If I gave him to the stars, he wouldn't know what to do with himself.  I am from there.  He is not.  He'll be home.  I am glad our paths crossed.  I do not know how to explain it to my first mate.  If I spoke cat, I might be able to.  I'm not sad.  I am angry.  Why didn't you tell me?  Did you?  Did I kill you?  Involuntary manslaughter? Agent 001 Jack: K.I.A.,  Mr. Morton codename "Lauren": K.I.A., Chief Officer Torus: K.I.A., First Mate Boots "Hatswitch" Mustachio: T.B.D.

I am happy though.  One of the last things I remember doing with him is letting him climb up my jean leg and hook his claws into my hoodie all the way up my back so he could get a good perch on my shoulder and ride around up there while I walked through the ship and pointed out the things he liked to sit on from the view of his colossus.  We were a fabulous team.  I thought we'd have more time to enjoy our voyage.  He loved to sit in my lap while I wrote in my notebooks.  He'd rub his face on the corners of the pages and make little wet nose prints on the backs of my hands and the paper.

Each week, each month, each year, I am trying to break the horse.  I am trying to break myself and exercise control better than I did the year, the month, the week, before.  Sometimes with success.  Sometimes with failure.  Some of the voices scream "somebody has to pay!!!"  It is unreasonable.  It is irrational.  I want to cut you open so badly.  I want to hook my hand into your mouth and press my fingertips underneath your tongue until the break through the skin behind your chin and rip as hard as I can and hear the sucking pop of your jaw breaking away from the rest of your skull and listen to you drown bleeding into your own esophagus.  Somebody has to pay.  I am trying to break that horse.  I am trying not to hurt myself to show you what we want from you.

Happiness is fleeting.  Pain endures.  Pain is infectious as is happiness.  I am not broken.  I am tired of dealing with death.  The horseman that rides with me.  Our ghost army behind us.  Having to continually modify not by choice, but necessity.

I know I have to use my words more.  Not just more, but with greater frequency.  I have to use art more to break the locks and the seizing to escape the killing fields.  I have to pay more respect to the blast radius and recognize that it is not a game and if I take it too lightly, if I lull myself into believing it will sort itself out without careful and constant monitoring I will wake up too late and infection will spread far and wide defeating the entire purpose of closing the cycle of violence began a generation before my birth.  I am trying to break myself.  I am trying to limit myself.  Meta-jail is real and I have to do my part too.  You are there for a reason.  You can manufacture happiness.  The children are always present, do not listen to them, no matter what they say.  While you've been ignoring it, the factory floor has been busy and now coming to that basement and seeing the stockpiles of things you only imagined existed my heart falls.  Where the hell were you when the furnace fired again?  Where the hell were you when the new blueprints were spread out and the flywheels started turning again?  I tried.  Try harder!  This is not a game!

It is good that some mobility has been lost.  There are those you cannot reach and it is good.  It is important.  Remember why you laugh, jackal.  The freedoms you have were hard won, do not give them up easily.  Do not give them up lazily.  Take time.  We have been patient and we will not shed it.  A crew of two instead of three may not be so bad a thing as you imagine.  The first mate will adjust and embrace his promotion, regardless of how it came about.  Know that, do not say it, know it.  You did not skin him.  You do not wear him.  He will be remembered.  Bury the tools and keep an eye on us.  I will.  Somebody has to pay, but not today.

I took a long walk around the city.  A very long walk.  Control rage.  You were born.  Get over it.  I was born on the twenty second of April in nineteen eighty five.  Remember what you are doing.  I was born into conflict.  I was born into violence.  I was born into love too.  I was born onto a battlefield not of my own making and that is okay.  That is alright.  We learned, we grew, we got stronger, we learned how to kill and how to eat, how to feed ourselves, how to breath, how to hide, how to fight, how to see in the dark, how to trap, how to sleep, we learned and we grew.  We learned our genealogy was a lost cause and our history before our time will never be mapped.  We figured out the tree was a hangman's and the damage was already done well before we opened our eyes for the first time on Staten Island.  We understood hunger and the sound of an empty stomach and the shiver.  Do not forget the mission.  Lay a road map for those that are coming after you are gone.  Do not forget what it is you must fulfill.  Even though your heart is kind of small you were built for something more.  Embrace it.  Learn the truth and love your life because you only get one shot at it.

Your shipmates will help you.  Your inmates.  Your internees.  They will help you along the expedition through space and time.  They are part of the fold, jackal.  Use the words, not the weapons.  The child will come and go.  Supernature is simply part of the spectrum you were born with.  They are not demons or angels or phantoms and errors.  They are not only that, please stop crying sweetheart.  You will die and you will take all of them with you and they will be gone for good too.  That's okay.  I don't know if Torus saw them too.  I don't know if he felt them.  I kissed him before I let him go.  I rubbed his fur into my nostrils and ate some of his whiskers before I put him back in the trash where he came from.  I hope you're happy you disparaged him saying he came from a dumpster.  Pluto used to be a planet.  We want to name a constellation after him.

I dislike my bad wiring so much.  I know I cannot increase my strength, my power.  I cannot be allowed to break down the electrified fences and razor wire atop.  I cannot let it go.  I cannot be allowed to make more money, it will turn into more combustion chambers, more cylinders, more lead, more trigger mechanisms, sights, and chemicals.  More wires, dead man switches, boxes of nails and washers, nitrogen, ammonia, and springs.  More casings and pellets and carpet knives.  Bang on the left ear so it all falls out of the right ear.  With greater knowledge comes greater responsibility and I am not sure I am to the task.  We absolutely are.  For the love of God, get the hell away from me.

Who massages your shoulders?  Who plucks your eyelashes?  Who sets your makeup?  One gold tooth.  Break that horse.  Change those shoes.  Wash those gloves.  I need more power.  No, you don't.  I do!  NO YOU DO NOT!  Imagine the kingdom we could have.  No.  Do not lie to me.  I am not lying.

I definitely wanted to become a musician.  A composer.  A librarian.  To get lost in the stacks and get paid for it because alphabetical order never lies.  Growing up, so many have lied to me.  Washing dishes and playing the bubbles like a battlefield always put a smile on my face until standing on a milk crate on Brighton Avenue I heard them screaming at each other and I tried to wiggle my ears to remind them that I was standing there and they started to say he's listening and they took it upstairs, but I could still hear them.  My nose is running again.  No blood though, that's good.  I haven't pissed blood in a while and that's good too.  I know how it ends, I do.  I am halfway home.  Remind ourselves not to do anything stupid.  Remind ourselves the visions are just that, visions only.

Time will fly and before we know it we'll be polishing my skull and looking at the healed fractures and running our fingertips over them like welds on an engine block trying to reverse engineer the forces and machines and hands that made them.  Do you have a torque wrench?  A shoeing hammer?  An arc welder will do in a pinch.  A continuous retrofitting.  We were built for a war, but the war is over.  It is not.  We were built in war time and repurposed.  Built not to feel.  Built to not need to see.   I got out.  I got out.  The horse must be broken.  Distance must be kept.  Do not lose heart.  Finish the deal.

Enjoy the view from the edge of the arm of the Milky Way and do not curse Sol or Terra.  Aboard the ship we are secure and secured.  Take care of the equipment and don't stay long.  Coexist.  Someday you too will shut down, but understand there are many paths to that end and much to be explored before the channels go dead.  Do not forget where you came from, do not be consumed by where you're going.  I am not broken.




///Chairlift - "Guilty As Charged"   ...footprints on the carpet....go on and punish me...

///El-P & Killer Mike - "Early"

Ramping Up

I have been ramping up to this, and I have been a little bit absentee as well.  Side by each.  It has been tough getting back to here.  Circuitous. Among other words and expletives.  It has been a very difficult cycle of days.  I do not know how else to place it.  Everything is back where it belongs.   A lot of argumentation internal.  It catches up with you and before you know it you are dying while still breathing.

It;s been tough though.  But what hasn't?  Production has lapsed, but what is avoidable?  Art is up however. Graphics.  Graphics and graphic design.  It;s tough sometimes when people talk to you and say they/re artists, but you know in their hearts they are not.  It ruffles feathers and rumples collars.  It's difficult to tell them otherwise because, in the telling, you are admitting skill and I have a hard time, still, admitting that I know what I'm trying to do, for the most part, on easels.  Given easels.

If you look at your reflection, sometimes what you see is not what you know you could be, given everything that came before; that hesitation, those devils and those guns, are what keeps me from being a shameless self promoter, but are you hiding in the trees?

The point is that it is all an elaborate dream and there is no way you can spin manslaughter 2 into mistaken identities and a lack of coverage or maybe it's just black town.  I don't know.  Hard decisions.  I know how much you are supposed to take, but how much am I supposed to take.  Against the wall.  Am I supposed to want sex or is sex supposed to want me.  Is the BIC pipe a one hitter in the sense that you use it once or is it a one hitter in the sense that you can't light crack twice?

I don't know where to go from here, but I'm not quite sure if I should be so entertained with the idea of the opportunity to leave.   Cash money, mother nucca.  It just drives the nerves sometimes.  It's hard to admit failed suicide attempts.   What you can do though is tape up your wrists and throw some fists.

Not to get oxygen necessarily, but just to get inside your britches.  Feel your (can't spell it) huch spa.  Feel your id on the outside and taste a little blood, instead of digesting it.  There's too much blood and sunlight to go around.  I am trying to draw a line between pretending and good acting and I am having a difficult  time of it.

Sometimes things go down in a fashion that breaks your heart.  Sometimes your older sister whiffs on painting your nails.  Sometimes things go down in a way that throws shit out of whack.  Sometimes the throwing is enough to reframe ideas about things you've been mulling.  I don't know if this is better or worse than talking in third person.   It is difficult to be concerned.

What was I going for?  Chronic masturbation.  No,  Laughter.  Nod your head because I know that I;m right.  I'm not the capital G.  I'm not nothing either.  Hang out with me in the middle ground.  I swear I'll love you like I've never loved myself.  Andd I won't promise to make you happy.  And I won't promise anything more than 18 hours out, but I will.  I won't, but I will give you one year with the dragon in one day and rape is a device of the lesser and if you would be considering kissing me now I would not be opposed

to standing there


///track not found - lets get back up on that horse.  I'm sorry I left you.  Please be kind.  I'm coming out of left field in a full sprint out of the clear blue sky

Stand Up Act 7 (the sex chapter part deux)

Stand Up Act 6

I'll start this off by saying sometimes you just have to not listen to yourself. In fact there are a lot of times you have to not listen to yourself. It's probably the one thing that stands out the most, if there is such a thing, that tells you that you do in fact live in a society with rules and that those rules keep things civilized and that the reason this is called a civilized society is because these rules are in place to keep you from killing people and that you are not as civilized as you want to be, but not because you could, as Dov put it, kill someone if they were close to the couch, because you could on most days, but that these rules are in place to keep you in your place and let a very small fraction of the population do whatever the hell they want. And so that you can't off people that serve an essential function without repercussions. American Idol would not exist in a society without well thought out murder rules. You have to remind yourself that you can't kill everybody. Don't listen to yourself.

At most you get one. If you're crafty you get several dozen. If your religious you get several thousand. Civilization is nice though. You can go to the corner store and buy Wise potato chips. You get internet access and a toilet that flushes and a shower that can put out two kinds of water. Two kinds! Which is always good, because life is hard for most people and the stink of work definitely needs to be washed off on a regular basis or everyone will know just how hard everyone else is working. But you get one, and you have to spend it wisely. So don't waste it on a union rep.

I went to my union rep and asked about health benefits. A natural course of action. I haven't had health insurance since 2007. Or was it '06. I can't remember. When you're in college you go to the hospital only when going to the on campus nurse yields the kind of results where you are pretty sure you've been shitting blood and their best answer is not even a note that will excuse you from missing class, but is instead a baggie with a Popsicle stick and a list of instructions for getting your poo on it, as though you don't know that shitting black is probably a bad thing and that pain in your intestines that feels like pac man driving around on razor blade tipped twenty twos inside you is something you would totally fake to postpone turning in a paper you already finished. But anyway, my job is killing me, and I've gotten to a point where I feel entitled enough to ask that I not have to pay for the repairs, so I don't feel like my body is coming apart every morning, because I've been told several times by various upper management folk that I am a "good worker".

"Good" meaning malleable, I think. Easy to force. At any rate, I quit that job. Partially because I realized that I didn't need that job to be able to buy deluxe toilet paper. It was an insurance policy for a different time. And after I quit I went out and bought toilet paper that's like four sheets thick and still fits on the standard toilet paper roll bar. If that's not the joy of science I don't know what is. I mean, you're telling me that this thing has twice as many individual squares with four times the thickness and that engineers spent years finding ways to make every square centimeter of it feel like wiping my ass with a frostingless cupcake? You're telling me that every single time I have to use the toilet for an extended, and embarrassingly so, period of time, the upside is I get to wipe my ass with a slice of three layer wedding cake? Hell yes.

Everyone should get to enjoy that at some point in their life. "For just a few cents more, every child in the Congo can enjoy the runs in a way they never knew possible." Not that extreme though. I guess that's how you know you're kind of poor. When toilet paper and drinking too much milk because you're not getting enough protein through solid foods turns you way the fuck on and you're main thought throughout the day is "I am going to shit so good tonight, you have no idea." But that's beside the point. The simple pleasures in life should not be overlooked. Neither should the "everybody gets one" rule. Even with the everybody gets one rule, there's some flexibility. But anyway, let's get to the sex.

There should be another rule. Besides everyone getting to wipe their butts with cupcakes, and getting to off exactly one (sometimes more) people. There is another. That rule is this: if you are not at all athletic you are not allowed to propose threesomes. Ever. I'm just saying, three people engaging in sex at once is a difficult proposition to wrap a head around, mentally. It's a pretty huge burden. Especially when the three people already get along decently well to begin with and just like hanging out. When you throw the three banger on the table it's like placing a stack of unbanded 100 dollar bills on a table with a bunch of drunks and waiting to see who will move first.

Is someone going to try and sneeze and blow it off the coffee table and offer to pick the bills up and pocket a few. Is someone going to place their beer a little off and spill it and rush to be the first to clean it up. Is someone going to spill their beer and everyone just watch the liquid spread. Who's going to be the first to touch it? The answer is me. I am going to grab that stack, hold it up to my nose, and fan the bills, because it smells so damn good, but I'll put it back down, sans Criss Angel magic tricks. Because I don't have time for nonsense and staging and camera work. For instance, I know this trick called "is this your wallet" and in this trick you have to guess what I'm holding behind my back. If you guessed one standard red clay brick, you are correct. The illusion is complete when I come see you in the hospital two days later and ask you "is this your wallet?"

But that should be a rule. Have you ever tried having a three wide NASCAR race with cars that can't keep up? It's frustrating as hell. It's like trying to cross the street when you're six years old, on your way to school, and the crossing guard keeps shoving you back onto the sidewalk, saying "stop right there. no wait. not yet. hold on. Just sit still for a minute" and half of the hour is waiting for them to get back into the state of the moment and green light you while you do suicide sprints across the two feet of concrete before the black asphalt. It's insane. If you can't have effective sex with one person, you are not allowed to talk to a second party period. Because, believe it or not, masturbating on your knees on someone's coffee table while everyone else watches, gets old. Pretty quick.

It's like taking children out of remedial mathematics and believing they can somehow do differential equations. It's just not going to happen. What do you mean you need a smoke break? Are you insane? We're ten minutes in to this and you need a breather... to be able to breathe less effectively? What kind of sense does that even make? And then you're standing in the middle of the room with one person nodding off from too much alcohol and the other dry as a sandbox, but trying to fake their way through it like a job interview, so you wipe your spooge on their collection of tv remotes and pack up shop and leave expecting to be done with it and you go to bed and the first thing you wake up to is a text message asking what you're up to at 8 fucking A.M. when you just left their place at 5, didn't get home till 5:15 and didn't fall asleep til 7:30 A.M. because you had to yank it all over again except this time everything went the way it was supposed to the first time you schemed it up when they first asked you.

If you are not athletic enough to entertain one person you are not allowed, at all, at anytime, under any circumstances, to complicate, what is otherwise a healthy relationship by Rocco Siffredi's standards on a reserved day when he's not feeling it or otherwise coked out of his mind, a healthy friendship between persons. Let's face it, it's easier to hang out with people that meet your criteria of people you don't mind being seen with without people asking questions to the tune of "wow he/she must have a great personality because they're ugly as hell... I wonder what keeps them together", than it is to hang out with ugly folk with good hearts. The bonus being they're attractive and have good hearts to boot. If you physically can't keep up, you keep your Goddamn fantasizing mouth shut. Period. It's not that hard. Nothing worse than an orgy of one. Well, there are some things worse, but the list is thin.

Alls I'm saying is, there have to be rules. The rules that are in place are there for a reason and there need to be more rules to cover other basics. If you are grossly overweight, you do not get to propose anything. If you are not grossly overweight, but have exceedingly poor musculature you do not get to propose anything, because keeping yourself happy is sometimes a chore, and the last thing anyone needs is to have their hands full trying to do the jobs of two other bodies and yourself at the same time. It's like going out with friends and everyone says: yeah lets get the giant nacho boat. The truth of the matter being that the friends just want to watch you eat it. How is that fun, at all? Spoiler alert, it isn't.

Goddamn, people are retarded. But rules are important. You can't kill idiots. At least not all of them. Apparently you can't fuck 'em either. Life lessons. Just trying to pass on the knowledge with a smile. A bitter smile? Sure, why not. They both look the same if your toasted.

End of the World, so Plan For It

I have a unique problem.  It's a lot like when you run into the end of the internet regarding a particularly niche topic.  You expect it to go on forever. Porn doesn't just end.  What do you mean there are a fixed number of videos circulating that feature fisting and prolapsed orifices and cake sitting. But thats how it is.  There's a finite anoint of magic out there and eventually you end up with a paid subscription to stuff you saw years ago.
Thats pretty much impossible to plan for.  I have done more planning for the end of the world, in all it's glorious senarios, than I have for the eventuality of getting to the end of sub neighborhoods and niches of the web.  What do you mean the supply of singing dogs can't meet my continuous demand for watching dogs sing songs to cats playing pianos!  What do you mean there's only one video detailing how to break down and reassemble I bicycle cassette using household tools?!

It happens.  My problem is more of the pornographic type.  I have run out of ways to masturbate.  Flat out run out of ways to do it.  Maybe it's just that its overdone, but I think it's more along the line of there are only so many ways to pleasure yourself and I've pretty much exhausted them all.  I've gotten to the end of my intranet and there's nothing else there, but white space.  Of course I could begin inventing.  I am about as creative a blue collar mind as anyone is likely to encounter in their life time.  I could do it.  However, I am very much concerned that things might get dangerously elaborate.  Dangerously elaborate masturbation leads to candidacy for the list of one thousand exceptionally embarrassing ways to die.  That is something, I think, I don't want.  Not yet anyway, as I plan to die in a so grand a fashion that there is literally nothing left of me to bury or put in the ground.  Something fast and fiery and adventurous... something that is not auto-erotic asphyxiation<- which is totally played out anyway.

It's something I never planned for.  Mainly because, like the internet, I never really thought I would traverse all the available avenues and find myself right back where I started.  Figured those streets would and could go on forever.  So I guess I will invent, and plan for the eventually of running out of ways to invent.  Every world ends.  Plan for it.  Would be my advice.  Yet another life lesson learned.

Stand Up Act 4

Act 3

So speaking of sex, I am, like the fraction of people on the face of the Earth that is left when you subtract the fraction of people having sex and the people required for them to be having sex with and the people having sex with inanimate objects and the people having sex with animated objects that are not human, not having any. Not in the sense of Madea, prototypical, big body, big attitude, possibly half black half hispanic chick who is for some reason also part Italian and who speaks just enough Spanish to half mast men between the ages of 15 and 15 at heart "ain't havin that", but more like it's something that just doesn't happen to me. Which is of course not at all my fault.

It's out there. If I could walk around with my fly down all day and not get immediately arrested and or tackled by angry citizens and patriots of so called decency, I probably would. When I was a kid, I've been told I once spent a day naked. Just a-walkin around doin my thing sans robes. I don't remember that at all, but I wish I could because it sounds like the most awesome summer day imaginable. Nothing but deluxe jumbo sidewalk chalk, empty chalk boards, water guns, and G.I. Joes. Or maybe that was just a dream. I may very well have dreamt that.

Not to stray too far, but I just remembered I kissed someone in a dream I had the other night. That's kind of fucked up. Who the hell was it that I kissed? What if they show up in another dream and they're pissed off because I don't remember them from the first one and they try to stab me to death with a snapped off tea cup handle, because we were for some reason having tea on top of an 18 wheeler barreling down a train barreling up the train tracks in the middle of one of those stupid riddles where the answer is that the entire premise is false and you'd know it if you paid attention with more brain cells than you can muster for just about anything at 5 in the afternoon without having to be asked long winded questions about bullshit scenarios you'll never actually have to deal with in real life unless you became a train conducting mad scientist sociopath with a taste for apples, pizzas, and buckets of multicolored marbles.

At any rate, it's not my fault, but if I never had sex again I don't think I would be particularly ticked off. Don't get me wrong. This is not a complaint at all. It is an observation that if I were to offer myself up to women on say death row I would probably get passed over by the entire starting rotation twice before getting picked up by the bench warmer still running her case through the appellate courts because I do not understand how that interaction is supposed to work on a pretty basic level. If however I were to offer myself up to the men on say death row I would probably get passed over by the entire line up too, but probably not twice, because let's face it, when you're staring down the barrel of a death sentence in solitary confinement every person you meet is basically the last man or woman on Earth as far as you'll ever know and "if you give a dog a bone" and so forth... ...I don't know what the chick half of that is... Unless they have tv in there. Then all bets are off. If I watched more television specials about how bad ass the bad asses in Federal "holy fuck that prison is hard core compared to my life" on the Discovery channel I would know the answer to that. But I don't. Life is full of mysteries. I think I do live in a magical and fucked up time. Here's why: by the time I reach a point where I will be desperate to get laid and/or lay someone technology will in all likelihood have created an affordable artificial human being that I can purchase to satisfy my every whim and thus complete the compartmentalization of myself into the American technological socio strata and finally make me utterly oblivious to the larger issues of human existence and thus quite happy. You remember in the Matrix when the humans were all hooked up to that machine? What if the machines found it much easier on processing power to stimulate the body instead of the mind directly with a feed of images through the eyes and attendant nose and mouth nonsense. I bet the crotch uplink to the matrix would be the most awesome piece of technology ever. Go to the future and steal one. Is what I would do. Screw finding the machine city. I was just go steal one of those and go nuts until my brain stroked off from a lack of oxygenated blood.

Like the mystery of why any woman on the face of the Earth would ever complain at any age that no one wants her. I personally do not believe that there is a special one person out there for anyone. I won't say that I know it for a fact, but I will say that I'm pretty damn sure just about every relationship that was a sure fire thing that I've seen up close for an extended period of time has basically become either a business agreement, a perpetual fire drill, or has been blown apart with more permanence and finality than a gross analogy about female plumbing and giving birth to triplets. Or maybe I'm just cynical.

Sad ladies out there who believe for one reason or another that you will never be loved, answer the following two questions: Do you have a vagina? Can you work it? If the answers to either of those questions is "yes" then fear not (knowledge of what "working it" is need not bear particular significance). Someone will take an interest in you to gain access to your vagina and perhaps discover along the way that you're a pretty swell person too. Or maybe the other way around. They might think you're an awesome person and hang out with you for a while and get to know you because you really are great company and then one day they might walk in on you while you're in the bathroom and discover that you have a vagina completely by accident and then stumble backward in disbelief before screaming for the deliverance of Jesus himself and go into shock because their best buddy has been a transvestite all along, but then they'll come out of their coma a few weeks later and have wonderful relations or something equally romantic. So don't sweat it. No need to fret. No need to write brutally long entries in your diaries with the daisies scribbled on them next to the balloons and other squiggly shapes your hands draw because your forearms are about as strong as damp marshmallows wrapped around found twigs. Someone out there in this big world wants to stare deeply into your eyes and whisper those magic words "I want to plow you" when they're fifteen beers in and haven't noticed that you've been sipping the same one for the last four hours.

Kidding. That was pretty harsh. But not as harsh as listening to women bitch about not getting laid or being unlovable. Not my fualt. But seriously, ladies, you're all wonderful most of the time. Some of you are awful all of the time, and some of you I wish were guys so we could hang out all the fucking time, get drunk and play football and videogames and fistfight and get into shit with other people at bars and basically piss excellence 24/7. And some of you are wonderful all the time. Or at least all of the times that I get to interact with you, because human interaction is really not my ultimate forte. At any rate I'm gay anyway so not only am I not interested in hearing about it from a logical standpoint, I'm not interested in hearing about it from a physiological stand point, and that means I'm way serious because the word I just used to expound upon my previous standpoint is twice as big. So it's twice as serious. It's the rules of English. Can't be helped and even if I could change them I wouldn't because changing them that drastically again would be like changing a clown's outfit so many times that he ends up wearing a three piece suit to a children's party, painted in white face, with the red nose and rainbow hair and that would scare the shit out of kids. Imagine if they thought that when they grew up they would have to work with clowns. Never knowing if their stapler had a joy buzzer attached to it. Never knowing if the next filing cabinet they opened would fire spring loaded snakes into their eyeballs or if their boss would mandate the entire office carpool in Fred's Huyndai accent with the seats in the back that aren't large enough to fit a baby folded up into a briefcase. That would be a nightmare for them. Not far from the truth, but a nightmare nonetheless. so I'm not going to do that to you with language. Encouraging irresponsibility is a shameful and hilarious thing that is to be, if anything, encouraged.

So what do I do instead of sex? I punch walls sometimes. Relieves stress in that same way and they both eventually end in tears and sore muscles. The only difference is after punching walls I don't need to take a shower. That and I can punch walls in public. Can't use sex toys in public. They will either lock you up or... ...throw money at you? Life lessons don't mix well with logic. Moving on though, I want to keep this light hearted as I have a habit of falling into myself like a cat into a toilet.

I'm still getting used to living alone. It's not a bad thing, but I was just thinking about it before I got sidetracked. For the majority of my life prior to age 25 I was either forced to live with other people, opted to live with other people, or had a space of my own in which to isolate myself, but could at any point choose to come out of that space and join a close knit public space of human beings. Since I've gotten too old to comfortably hang out in that space without freaking people the fuck out eventually and since I can't force myself to live with other people or force other people to live with me if I wanted to I am in the strange territory of lone man's land. It's been a learning experience.

The biggest thing you have to get used to is having no one around to tell you when you've got an exceptionally terrible idea that should not be pursued any further than it's inception, but much like when you were little and thought maybe if you watched where that little white puff of tree pollen went and followed it to its destination it would help you figure out where it could have come from and why it had the power to catalyze wish making, simply glimpsing the idea is enough to demand a second look. And then a third look. And then a fourth look, but it's drifting out of sight so if you want to make out its details you're going to have to pursue it, but only just a little. Just enough to get a better look. And then before you know it you're building a system of tubes to enable you to water the plants in your bathroom with your urine instead of getting sleep before you have to be at work in four hours.

The second biggest thing you have to get used to, well I should say, the second biggest indicator that you're probably not ready or used to living truly alone yet is when you realize you try to talk your way around the messes you made so that you don't have to clean them up. I don't mean like you tell yourself you'll clean it up later, I mean you hit the full blown "I didn't spill that so I shouldn't have to clean it up" argument. With yourself. Right after you the milk you were pouring on your cereal got a little too enthusiastic and did it's milk dance right over the edge of your bowl. When you're standing in your kitchen on Sunday morning bargaining with yourself and telling yourself that you'll take out the trash, but if you do you'll have to treat yourself with a beer and doggie biscuit for helping out because most of that trash isn't yours anyway and you've been taking out the trash and washing dishes all your life to earn a place to sleep and you shouldn't have to do it here and now in a place you are paying for outright. But you both know there's no chamber boy to lay out your formal shorts and take out the trash so what the fuck have you just been blathering about for the last hour. Just wipe up the milk and get on with your day. And that's when it hits you. You're still not used to getting up in the morning and having a sink full of dirty dishes with no one to blame but yourself and even then the understanding of your culpability escapes in the face of the simple and ridiculously sound reasoning that "maybe someone else did it".

Did I say sound? I meant unsound. About as sound as sex jokes in an STD clinic. Laughing yet? Me neither, but I do feel slightly better about myself so maybe you should too, if it works that way. I don't really know how that rule works.