The Night I Was Almost a Eunuch

           Having a truck is great. It’s the most practical thing for getting stuff from one place to another, and that means anything. I just have an S-10 which is a relatively small truck in the grand scheme of things, but that little truck has had everything in its bed from a bunch of girls, to whole trees, lawn mowers, go carts, flatbed trailers, dirt, rocks, dogs, tents, me, and occasionally it has fun things in it too. One such time in particular would have been the Fourth of July a few years ago. The bed of Rosebud (that’s my little S-10’s name) was filled just about as full as you could get her with boozes, fireworks, and gasoline.

            So out to Dr. Phil’s farm I went with the truck load of goodies to celebrate the independence of our nation. It’s not really Dr. Phil’s farm, but we call my friend whose farm it was Dr. Phil since he seems to be the one we all go to with our problems. Before any of us touched the alcohol, we went for the explosives. It must be a guy thing. The three of us, Dr. Phil, my best friend The Mexi-Jew, and me, decided to have a magic missile fight…

Have you ever seen the “Magic Missile” video on YouTube? If not look it up real fast. Type it in and it’s the first one. I’ll wait…

Yeah, we wanted to do that. It was kind of mocking the kid in the video, but kind of because all three of us are that nerdy. So, roman candles and lighters in hand we all ran in different directions. A triangle of 20 somethings pointing sparkly gunpowder filled sticks at one another, ready to yell “magic missile” as they go off. Then they did. The Mexi-Jew’s went off first. He got 2 shots off before mine or the good doctor’s fuse even reached the explosives.

            At this point I feel it’s critical to remind you that none of us had touched the alcohol yet. Just in case you thought that’s what made us dumb.

            Anyway The Mexi-Jew’s roman candle goes off first as he shouts “Magic Missile!” The ball of burning sulfur hit me right in the crotch. It burned straight through my Levis and boxers. And it burned the hair off my inner thigh. The scorch marks from that would have been enough to make this a good story, but just “good” stories aren’t that much worth telling. You see we don’t skimp on fireworks, so when we buy roman candles, we buy the ones with the report at the end. That means it explodes after it fires. That’s right, in my pants. If it had gone off and inch higher I would be speaking in a voice more than an inch higher these days.

            I threw my candle as I dropped to the ground, and the second shot out of The Mexi-Jew’s candle glanced off my side. We’re best friends; I can honestly say if our positions were reversed I would have kept shooting too. I still have those pants, and it’s now tradition that I wear them to all parties with fireworks. Later that night, our Hippy (another in our band of miscreants) got revenge for mu bruised and burnt leg by dropping lady fingers in The Mexi-Jew’s pocket. He almost lost that nipple. Over all, it was a pretty phenomenal night, as far as nights that almost make you a eunuch go.

No Time to Do Nothing

The easiest part of getting something done is the not doing it. That’s true whether you do it now and have the easy not doing it part later, or if you do the not doing it part now, and the actually doing it part later. We are lazy. We prefer to do the not doing it part first, just in case you wouldn’t have the time to do the doing nothing later. But if we do the not doing part now, the actually doing it part builds up for later, and then it’s even less desirable, because then there’s a lot of doing to get done all at once.

            Also that’s a good way to run out of energy, doing everything at once. The not doing anything part of the doing things seems to be available as a means of resting after the doing is done. If the doings build up and need to be done at once, there’s no time for rest, and the doings get done half-assed. However, in those situations the not doing anything doesn’t get done half-assed; it gets done to its fullest extent. The not doing anything is really the part that we enjoy so why not do that to its fullest extent and half-ass and drag our feet through the actually doing things?

            It seems however, that no matter how much you put off doing things, or how much you do what needs to be done so that the not doing anything time builds up, there’s always something to do in the very midst of your not doing things time. If your works done, then the grass needs to be mowed, or that book needs to get read. Perhaps the only solution to the issue is to instead of finding joy in the not doing things, learn to find joy in the actual doing part of doing things. The secret could be to rejoice in the having something to do rather than rejoicing in the getting things done. Then again, that just sounds like another thing that you have to add to the list of things you have to do. Actually if you really think about it, that would require you training yourself to appreciate something other than what you already appreciate, and re-training yourself is a big something to get done. It takes up a lot of time that could be spent not doing things.

            The other option is to do things that are impractical things that don’t really need to get done, less. Such as reading blogs, or writing them for that matter. I’m sure a quotable quote that sparked inspiration in someone to do something other than doing nothing at one point in time or another came from a blog, but the amount of crap on the internet that people waste their precious doing nothing time doing is astonishing.

            So it’s either appreciate the doing things time as much as the not doing things time, doing less things that don’t need to be done in your do nothing time, or train yourself not to sleep. That however, brings up the whole doing the re-training yourself which takes up time. In fact this thought process in itself is taking up far too much time that could either be spent doing something, or at the very least doing nothing. That’s actually a good point. I’m going to go do something, or nothing, but I’m not going to waste any more time that could be spent either way doing this.

Nubs: A Love Story

Time travel is a dangerous profession. Michael Nubstein was once a brilliant scientific mind. When he was 20 he invented the time bubble. Standing within the bubble, Michael could travel to anywhere in time and space he could imagine. That is until the unthinkable happened. Michael traveled back to the year 1950. There he met a girl named Janet. They fell in love, quite possibly more in love than any two people had ever fallen in love before. Due to a flaw in the time bubble’s design, once used to travel to a destination, there was a 24 hour period before the bubble returned to its original location and time. If Michael wasn’t inside he would be stranded where he was forever. Michael wanted so desperately to remain with Janet, but he had responsibilities to return to in the future, and Janet refused to go with him. So he did the only thing he could think of and stepped into the time bubble with her standing on the outside. Holding her hands through the barrier until the last second, he promised her that he would return. But something went horribly wrong. The time bubble disappeared into the future before either of the two lovers were ready. Michael screamed in pain as his hands aged off of his body before his very eyes. The poison of time flowed in through his open wounds and he quickly lost his mind. Upon returning to his time, the year 2000, tears filled his eyes as his love slowly vanished in the haze created by the time poisons coursing through his body. The poisons also attacked his spine, paralyzing him from the waist down.

50 years in the past Janet screamed as well, but hers was quickly silenced by the lightning created by the imperfect time warp. She was destroyed instantly. However, Michael’s hands remained, and even more impressively, they were sentient and held the intelligence of Michael. Perhaps they were saved by the emotion the lovers shared, or perhaps the fickle mistress that is time travel spared them. Either way, they lived, and they longed for a way to reunite themselves with their body lost in time, and to reunite their body with its love lost in oblivion. However, it quickly became apparent to the hands that their owner was not returning for them, and they must find a way to get to him.

The way to reunite with Michael did not become obvious to them until 1977, just a few years before Michael would be born. There was a cartoon on that introduce two young new super heroes to the world. Zan and Jayna, the Wonder Twins were the inspiration that would change the world of the disembodied hands forever. The Wonder Twins could transform into anything by touching their rings together. The brilliant hands of the once brilliant man knew what they had to do and worked day and night to create their own power rings that would allow them to become whole again. In 1980, the same year that Michael was born, the hand completed their rings and transformed into the only thing they had thought of for the last 30 years, Janet.

Janet was created as an infant, but as she grew destiny would have it that she was meant to be with Michael. The new Janet, being created from only parts of a human was not a complete human herself. Janet grew up knowing only a miserable existence. She had use of her head, her neck, and her legs, but not her torso and arms. She was also created with no feet; just nubs. She was in the lab to see the brilliant 20 year old genius Michael on the day of his time travel accident in hopes of him fixing her, but she found something else entirely. She heard a scream from the lab, and as she rushed into the lab in her special wheel chair that she could control with her leg nubs, she found a handless Michael laying on the floor sobbing; a man with no hands and no use of his legs. He wasn’t what she was hoping to find, the shell of his former brilliant self; in fact he was the exact opposite of her, but in that moment she knew, he completed her. They fell in love, got married and became the Nubsteins, and they even had an extremely fat dog and disproportionate son, but his adventures are another completely different story. This story ends in knowing that the Nubsteins lived happily ever after, taking care of one another in ways that only they could. Now do not feel bad for the Michel and Janet, for they had adventures like no others could. There was even a while where they put on fancy tight costumes and fought crime as amazing vigilantes, but that was short lived. If there’s one thing you can take away from this story, it’s this: Live life to its fullest, no matter what you have to overcome. At least you have hands.

Living With Ataraxia

I have something in common with the main character of my all-time favorite movie, ataraxia. In Lucky Number Slevin, Josh Hartnett’s character, Slevin Kelevra, defines this disorder of his as, “a condition characterized by freedom from worry or any other pre-occupation really.” Now, ataraxia is not a real condition, but rather a state of emotional tranquility. Sleven, in the movie, just has this as his constant state of being, and I can relate. It’s not that I don’t know stress; I have been stressed before. I just don’t let stress bother me. I grew up with an older sister who lived (and is still living) her life in a constant state of stress, anxiety, and worry. Seeing her cry over homework, worry about her future, and let things that were completely out of her control drive her crazy as we grew up, I decided not to live that way. What has worry ever done for anyone? It was growing up watching my sister cope with her anxieties, and my parents as well with worries and stressors of their own, that I decided to not live my life that way. It wasn’t something that happened all at once, but once I decided not to let things get to me, I remember slowly learning to live more freely. In some ways I have achieved exactly what I wanted to do, but in other ways I feel I may have let things slip too far. I care very deeply about some things, but I do live care free. I physically and mentally cannot get worked up over things. Worries flutter in and out of my mind, and once they’re gone, I never even consider giving them second glance. Now this is a strange thought, because as they pass through, I over think every pedantic detail of them, as I do about most things. After over analyzing each and every facet though, I decide how to approach the situation, and then I do it. I weigh the consequences of my actions against the potential reward. If the consequences seem manageable enough then nothing will hold me back. This just leads deeper into the ataraxia. Once I know, or at least think I know, about the negative penalties and I figuratively sign the contract saying I will gladly pay the price for my actions, I have nothing else to fear beside what I know I deserve. Most of the time the questions running through my mind with each passing idea are: How bad do I want this? What’s the worst that can happen? If the worst happens, is it even going to be more than a distant memory years down the road from now? And then I always try and ask myself, how it’ll make others feel. If your goal is to make people smile, and fall in love with life the way you have, I find that little to no bad can ever come of it. My “fear” with this is that I will continue to become decreasingly detached from the adrenalin of worry. I use “fear” loosely here because I’ve already made my mind up to live this way. It’s really more of a curiosity of how far this will go before becoming something that I’ll feel the need to try and turn back the other direction. Until that happens, if it ever dose, I will continue to dance in the rain without a coat fully knowing the cold that’s bound to follow. I will skip class and forgo homework allowing my grades to slip ever so slightly if I feel they aren’t worthy of my efforts. And I will not just fall, but rather leap headlong into love every chance I get, knowing full well that most of the time falling in love comes with a sudden stop. I will do this because the hope for positive pleasurable outcomes far outweighs any fears or doubts. Life is just too short not to live every moment on the edge with the wind at my face, a song in my heart, and scars and scrapes covering my body from all the other times I failed, but failed in such a way that I could pick myself back up and fail again.

On Love, and Eating Bugs

     Have you ever had the desire to eat a bug? Mimic Timone and Pumbaa by sucking down a squiggly slimy thing like it was so much angel hair pasta? I’m sure the thought has crossed the mind of many a young child, but I’m talking about doing this as an adult. Alright, how then would you feel if you didn’t have to eat the bugs, but you still had them inside of you? Imagine if they wouldn’t burn up in your stomach acid, but rather lived off your insides. At this point they would be a parasite, not a dangerous one, but rather one whose presence for the most part went unnoticed until it migrated into a different part of your gut, and then you could feel it worming its way around. Could you live with the idea of an insect thriving, growing, eating, dispelling its waste, and sleeping peacefully all curled up just beneath the skin of your abdomen? Worse yet, is there any conceivable way you would wish for this?

-The short answer is yes, everyone does-

     Close your eyes for just a minute… Okay, now open them again because you can’t read this with them closed. Duh. Close them when you’re done reading, and try to picture your favorite place, with your favorite song floating in on the breeze from somewhere off in the distance, and imagine it’s the perfect season to be there. Every nerve in your body relaxes. When you get to heaven this is how you hope it will be, because you can’t imagine anything more perfect. Wait, sure you could. It would be far more perfect if you had someone there to share it with. Of course I don’t mean just any-someone but rather a special someone. Like how Ringo Star answered the question, “Could it be anybody?” with “I want somebody to love.” So no matter if you’ve met this Earth-shakingly flawless individual before or not, imagine that at this perfect place at this perfect time is the first time you’ve laid eyes on this perfect individual, and you just know exactly what Shakespeare meant when he was writing all those sappy sonnets. Think about the abundance of overwhelming feelings which are erupting in this unspoiled moment. Think about the flutter of butterflies that burns with such pure desire as they beat their wings and create a hurricane of passion inside of you. Now stop, and really think about it. Sure butterflies are ever so prettier than most bugs, but they are bugs none the less. They are bugs that devour their habitats, bugs that excrete fluids and such that their bodies no longer need, and bugs that can flap their wings here and cause a “natural” disaster over there. Imagine then, how 20 or so of those things would ravage your insides as they all decide to flap their wings at the same instant. And yet, for some unknown reason, this is a feeling that comes on rare occasions to us, and when it does, we cling to it as tight as we can. We may never know why, but we enjoy this feeling, and crave it. Everyone at some point in time wishes for these “bugs” to live in their gut, and sometimes, they are a good thing and they thrive and live on for years, and help us do the same. Other times they leave us ravaged, and they die off shortly after destroying their home, and all we can do is sit, and wait, and wish for a new flutter to spontaneously spring up in our gut and allow us to dive into love again.

Instant Instant Gratification

We are a generation of people who need things not done now, but five minutes ago. This is an age of cell phones that can play a song in a matter of seconds, bring up a video despite where we’re at, and download an application to do practically anything imaginable on a whim. We have passed the greedy need for instant gratification of our forefathers, and moved onto the much more practical need for instant instant gratification. Life is too short, and not getting any longer. Why then should we have to waste a single breath on waiting for the thing that we want now? On demand TV gets it. This is the new millennium. Why is it that I still have to wait for water to boil to cook? Where is my food in pill form? Why is it that I have to waste an hour of my day driving to and from work and school? Where is my teleporter? That time driving could be spent on things far more favorable things. This here is a call to arms. I say, I’m sick of waiting, and more so, I’m sick of waiting for the waiting to stop. I can get movies and books downloaded right at home. There is no longer need for wasting time driving to the store for such things. I say it is time for everything else to follow. I want to download soda and food at the push of a button. Why don’t we have clothes that instantly wash themselves? Then we could wear the same clothes every day to complement our personalities like Scooby and the gang did. Why do I have to shower and brush my teeth? Why is there no laser wall that I can walk through that would instantly burn all dirt, bacteria, and germs off of me, and comb my hair? I don’t want my street cleared of snow when the plow drivers get here. There should be heated streets for my convenience that guarantee snow won’t accumulate on them. And whose idea was it that we should have to waste our precious time studying to gain knowledge? I want to be able to plug myself into the computer and download everything I want to know when I want to know it. Rooms that clean themselves, grass that mows itself, videogames that beat themselves; it is all in our reach, why is it not here yet? Why is it that I still have to allow a third of my life to deteriorate away with sleep? There should be a way for people to achieve the necessary effects of REM sleep without ever having to stop enjoying life. Also, there should be no need at this point in human evolution for a man to have to waste time to “date” and “woo” a woman. People should just get together and procreate. That is what we were made to do, and that is where it is going to go anyway. Who decided that the whole song and dance was necessary? The point that I am trying to get across is that this world could be a much better, much quicker place than it is. Imagine how much more anyone could get out of life if there was no waiting at all. Like I said, I’m sick of waiting for my instant gratification. I want it now, but I suppose I’ll just have to continue dragging my feet through this tiresome existence until someone comes up with a way to deliver on my needs, until the inevitable instant instant gratification arrives. That is after all where we are headed, so I cannot imagine it taking too much longer.

Don't Stop to Smell the Roses

Have you personally stopped to smell the roses as of late? Well don't, they're not that great. A corner bakery early in the morning, a pretty girl's perfume, these are the scents to enjoy. Or, maybe you have your own favorites like the smell of the yellowing pages of an old hard cover book that hasn't been opened in years. My point being that roses smell like a plant, and "stop to smell the roses" is an overused phrase ever since Ringo Star titled an album as such. It's meant as an encouragement to slow down and enjoy the little things in life; however I find that it's the opposite of how life should be lived. First off there is more on the surface of this planet than could be experienced by a single person in his or her lifetime, let alone the fact that there is literally additional oceans out there of crazy mysteries, and explore-able caves and cracks and crevices that would take forever to look at them all. Why then would anyone want to slow down let alone stop to smell anything? Life is far too short to not enjoy things while still moving onto the next thing. Additionally there are so many huge things out there, which make you question the wisdom behind focusing too much time on any little thing. The sky on a crystal clear night, far away from any city lights, is the perfect example of this. When anyone looks up, they are not focusing on any one star. People look up to see the blanket of stars engulfing the planet on which they live, in such an astonishingly large quantity that it makes them feel microscopic themselves. Now this is not to undervalue the little things or the joys that can be taken away from them. I just want to point out that if someone flies through life, meeting one challenge after another head on without slowing down in between, the last thing anyone should do is encourage them to stop and appreciate the little things. Just as much appreciation can be gained from the big things, if not more. Would you be more likely to pay to see a big Hollywood blockbuster in the theatre or a small independent movie? Do children appreciate the bigger or smaller toys at Christmas time? For that matter, do even smaller children like to play with a huge cardboard box that a gift came in or a shoebox?  So, enjoy the big things and the little things too, and do both as often and as fast as you can in order to get as much into and out of life as you can. My point being, the next time you see someone smelling the roses on the side of the road, maybe propose a more exciting activity to them, or at least suggest smelling the lavenders instead. I’ve always found lavenders to have a much stronger and more pleasant scent.