11/18/2010

 
Dust blew over the town, as it always did whenever there was a slight breeze or even when a cat with allergies walked by. There wasn’t much to impede it from doing so, spare a rickety sign that stood, barely, next to the dirt road leading into town. The town’s inhabitants had just learned to deal with it, and how to dress so the thin layer of red dirt (that would undoubtedly cover them by the end of the day) would compliment their entire ensemble.

Sable Shepherd attempted to close his mouth before he got a side of dirt to go with his breakfast, but he did so too late. There was now a layer of earth-toned grit covering his teeth. He spent the next few seconds trying to wipe all of it off by furiously rubbing his finger against them while simultaneously trying to prevent any further dirt invasion.

The breeze had died down completely by the time he had reached the sign at the edge of town. Old Man Joe was sitting in his rocking chair next to it, his shotgun resting on his lap. Sable had never really seen the point of Joe’s shotgun. Beside the fact that there was really no reason for anyone, whether it be looters or random passersby, to enter the town, the shotgun looked as if it would fall to pieces if someone even thought about pumping it.

“Sable, my boy!” Joe shouted obnoxiously loudly when Sable got next to him. “Glad you could make it down!”

“It’s really not that big of a deal, Joe,” Sable said modestly.

“No really it is!” Joe said. “Young boy like you’s got lots to do, being so young and all. I’m flattered that you’d walk yourself all the way out of the way down here to help out an old bastard like me.”

“Really, Joe, I literally live not even three hundred yards away from this very spot,” Sable said, pointing at his rickety shack of a house not even three hundred yards away.

“That’s your place?” Joe asked as if it was the first time he’d done so.

“I come out here every week and tell you with absolute certainty, that I live not three hundred yards away,” Sable said, slightly annoyed. “Every week, Joe.”

“You didn’t come down last week,” Joe argued. Despite the fact that he’d actually come over twice the week before, Sable decided any ensuing argument would likely bear a resemblance to someone smashing their forehead repeatedly into a brick wall.

“What do you need me to do?” Sable asked, crowbarring the conversation in a completely new direction.

“Sign’s broken again,” Joe said. Sable walked out in front of the sign to see it in the exact same condition it had been in the last time he’d seen it. It was a few pieces of wood lazily nailed together with “Stae owt u stooped bastards” written across it in white paint. It was about as intimidating as the geriatric man with a severe case of dementia that stood guard next to it with a rusty, likely self-destructing firearm, which was to say not at all.

Every time Joe had told him that the sign was broken, Sable had to restrain himself from asking if that had anything to do with its message or at least the general omission of any particular lexicon. He’d always found it beyond strange that Joe had little to no grasp of the written English but had somehow learned to spell a word as long as “bastard” perfectly.

Sable gave the sign an expert’s glance, feigning that he was actually putting serious thought into what was wrong with it. After a few seconds, he crossed his arms and stroked his chin to further sell his dedication.

“I think I see what’s wrong with it,” he lied. He pulled a hammer out of his bag and walked behind the sign so that Joe could only see his body from the waist down. Sable smacked the back of the sign in a random spot thrice. It did nothing to help the sign, in fact all it really could have done was weaken the wood, but all Sable really needed to do to convince Joe that he’d fixed the sign was to act like he was doing something a legitimate repairman might do.

“There,” Sable announced as he put his hammer away and dusted off his hands. “Good as new.”

“Don’t know what I’d do without you, my boy,” Joe said with a toothless grin and cackle.

“Oh, Joe,” Sable said putting a hand on Joe’s shoulder. “You’d probably be just fine.” Joe started to shake his head and tried to say something in disagreement. “I’m serious, Joe. You really don’t need me to do anything for you. I’ll probably see you next week.” He patted Joe on the shoulder before walking back towards town.

“Thank you!” Joe shouted after him after he’d grown sick of the silence that had only lasted for a few seconds. Sable waved his hand in the air without turning to look back.

After a few minutes, he reached the front steps of his house. He climbed up onto the patio, making sure to avoid the weak board of wood on the right side of the second step. He slid the latch on the door open with a bit of difficulty, having to put more force into the motion than was reasonably necessary. He’d have to fix that at some point, he thought to himself.

He stepped into the house, the sunlight from the doorway catching the dust floating around in the air, revealing just how awfully dirty the house was.

There was a racket from across the living room. Sable squinted to see what in the dark corner could have caused the noise. He’d hoped it was something different from what it usually was, but he was not extremely surprised to see his housemates Carter and Hannah scrambling for misplaced bedsheets to cover their nudity.

“Oh, don’t worry about covering yourself up. You’re already having sex in the fucking living room,” Sable said as he closed the door. Carter gave him a salute, causing a corner of the blanket he had been holding to his chest to fall, revealing half of Hannah’s reasonably endowed chest. Sable shook his head, completely unimpressed with what Hannah had called her “Money Melons” after having seen them countless times before.

Sable had always wanted to point out that any mention of the word “money” even remotely close to the name of or euphemism for a sensitive and not-to-be-talked-about body part often created shady and unwanted presumptions. Then he was already reminded of a poem he’d stumbled across: “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise”.

He continued across the living room to a mostly broken ancient oak door. The lock was the only perfectly functional part of it, not by mistake or random chance. He opened it with a combination only he knew and closed it shut behind him, waiting for a loud click before he felt safe in proceeding down a very narrow staircase. It was a dimly lit staircase, but like the patio steps at the front of the house, Sable had figured out the pattern of motion that spared him the experience of falling down a flight of stairs to what would likely be a very painful and fairly pathetic death.

After safely reaching the bottom of the steps, he pressed his hand on the door leading to his private sanctuary. He always took the time to make the transition into his solitary slice of heaven a special few moments. After a few deep breaths, he pushed his way through to the other side.

He was instantly hit with a familiar, musty aroma. Books. Countless thousands, perhaps even millions, lined the enormous walls of what looked like an ancient temple. He’d found the place after he’d managed to work his way through the oak door when he was three. Upon telling Carter and Hannah of his wondrous find, he seemed to remember getting a less than excited reaction.

“What’s the fun in that?” a slightly chubby Carter had said to him. “You just look at words for hours on end, just to learn a story? That’s what Old Joe’s for! And he usually fires his gun when he’s done too!”

Sable reminded himself of that quotation daily, letting it serve as a reminder that he could have things so much worse than he did. While Carter and Hannah spent their childhoods running about with Robby Tennyson from down the street and “accidentally” stumbling upon the function of their reproductive systems and the pleasure they so often brought, Sable spent every waking hour scouring through the pages of the library’s books.

He’d started with history. Large books, strongly and ornately bound, containing the stories of humanity, fro its beginning to a point in time that was always marked “End Days”. The stories described a constantly changing world full of wonders and love, but also of tragedy and bloodshed. As the stories went on they became more and more violent, stopping abruptly after a passage labled “The Turmoil of Late 2078”. Sable had read the last line of the history books by the time he was five. He looked for what came after the so-called “Turmoil”, but the next book he picked up looked different from the others. It was far smaller on the outside, and the words contained within were arranged strangely.

Hoping to return to the style of book he was used to, he continued down the line only to realize that the next several books were written the same way. After trying twenty or so and not finding any further Histories, he looked carefully at the cover of the smaller books. There was one glaring similarity. A name that had been repeated several times over the course of the Histories: Shakespeare.

He read through the works of the one the Histories had called “the Great Bard” in a week, yet still he thirsted for more. Spending every available hour he could in the library, he read all of the books on the first floor by the time he was eight. Ten years later, he had reached the bottom floor of the enormous structure. It was a good hundred feet from the ceiling and, unlike the other floors, it stretched for at least two hundred feet in every direction.

Sable flicked on the lights he’d installed along the pathway to the edge of the top floor, making the dust-covered walkway barely visible in front of him. He walked down the path, making sure not to run into anything he might have left lying around the last time he’d been there. When he got to the end of it, he pulled a lever on the column to his right. After a few crashes and bangs, a machine attached to the ceiling started pulling a makeshift platform up from the bottom floor. When it reached the top floor, Sable hopped over the railing onto it, sending it slowly back down.

It took a few seconds for the makeshift elevator to reach the bottom floor. Sable was thankful, as always, that it hadn’t collapsed midway down and plunged him to an altogether unpleasant death. He stepped off of the platform and walked to a large chair that was sitting at the end of a row of books. He found the marker on the shelf for which book he was to read next, pulled said marked book from the shelf, and plopped down onto the chair.

It only took him a few moments to get lost in the pages. Suddenly, Sable Shepherd had transported from the humble town of Pleasant to the recesses of his own mind.

The previous collection of paragraphs were my gift to you, kiddos. I wrote this in a quality journal with a quality pen and, if I do say so myself, it turned out to be a pretty quality start to something. There's work to be done, obviously, but there's a lot of potential in this one. Interesting stories to tell, characters to convey, and messages to be subtly wedged in with all the grace of a crowbar. 

I promise I won't make you wait long for chapter two.

IR

Happy November

Morgan Smith is dead.

All hail the new king, Morgan Smith.


Could I have put forward the idea that I find myself a changed man in less morose terms? Perhaps, but then I wouldn't have gotten your attention as effectively.

There was once a time, as the prior entries in this blog are testament to, that I found myself being a helpless little boy being thrown around in rough seas, having little to no control over how I felt about the way my life was unfolding around me. That little boy's gone. He grew up a bit. He went through a stage where how a group of other people acted controlled just about every aspect of his life.

But then that little boy said "Fuck. This. Shit. Fuck it right in the ass," and took control.

If the little boy hadn't taken a long walk off of a short pier about two weeks ago, the tone of this entry would be completely different. I'd be moping about my shortcomings and whatnot, filling the internet with the same whiny background noise it produces in excess.

But recently I've found reason to be happy again. Recently I've found people who make me feel good about who I am. People attentive to the needs and feelings of their friends. Recently, life is good again, and I feel amazing about the fact that it was my drive to cast aside negative thoughts that made it that way.

I love college again.

I can't wait to go home and see everyone again, but I'm less desperate to do so now.

10/31/2010

   

From across the bar she could barely see him, the man dressed in a steel gray suit. He almost mixed in the smoke, his black hair and dark brown eyes being her only indications that he was actually there.

But, oh, what an impact they made.

She caught his glance once. Just the once. That's all he gave her. That was all he needed.

Something deep inside of her drew her to him. He hadn't said a word or even given her a sign that he was even interested in something only she had to offer. She just knew he was what she wanted.

Spectre noticed the attraction, for it was he who created it in the first place.

Mind-walking wasn't necessarily an easy thing to do, even though it was a talent that didn't need any special kind of cultivation. It just needed practice, as most things do.

His first mistake was to think he could change someone's mind outright, find the idea and radically change it. It wasn't until he'd accidentally killed someone by way of driving them insane that he realized that he should probably be a bit more subtle in his approach.

So then he only changed small things in small increments. In the case of the sleazy bar crawler with a slightly above average body, it was her attraction to dark eyes. Nothing major. Certainly nothing that someone might take into consideration while weighing someone's validity as a spouse. But it was enough, in his case.

The thin crop of attractive people, both male and female, in the establishment, with the sole exception of a blond man who could have passed as a bronze Ancient Greek statue if he was told to stand still for a few moments, worked in Spectre's favor. All he had to do was give his target a general disdain for hair lighter than her own, an all-encompassing stroke given how dark hers was, and give the Golden Boy with devilishly good looks an insatiable lust for women with strange accents.

The fact that probably the only female stand-up comedian in all of Grazenburg with what could actually have been classified as more of a speech impediment than an accent happened to be the evening's entertainment also worked extremely well in his favor. The fact that she happened to be a good stand-up comedian did not, however. His target seemed to enjoy the show more than the members of the opposite gender in the establishment or the remarkably strong beverage in her hand.

To alleviate this slight inconvenience, Spectre listened in on the comedian's act for a few seconds.

"So dis cow be walkin' roun' like in the field, righ'," she started, giggling to herself about the upcoming punchline throughout. "An' he sees dis otha' cow sittin' thera'. An' he siz, "Owrite mate. You heard 'bout dat Mad Cow disease an tha'? Righ' scary innit?". An' the otha cow he siz... he siz... "Righ', yeah mate. Is righ' scary n' tha'. Make you glad we is squirrels dunnit?""

Despite the almost indecipherable delivery of a joke Spectre had always liked to tell as sort of an icebreaker, the joke hit just about every one of the patrons' funny bones, including Spectre's brunette target. After a bit of pondering, Spectre did a little bit of rummaging around in the comic's mind and convinced her that she had an irrational hatred of minorities.

It didn't take long for her new found racism to work its way into her previously successful act. She followed up her crowd pleaser with a less-than-appreciated remark about the economic stability of black people, much to the chagrin of the large family of at least twenty black people in front of the stage.

Spectre's brunette was having no part of this ignorance and turned her back away from the stage in protest. That was when she caught Spectre's glance. After the ten or so seconds she spent staring deep into his eyes, she found herself moving across the bar towards him. She stood speechless in front of him for a few more seconds before she regained her ability to converse.

"I...I'm..." she started.

"Katelyn," Spectre interrupted, the corner of his mouth coyly rising upwards. "I know, dear. I know."

"How did you..."

"I don't think you'd believe me if I told you, darling."

"I don't know, I've heard some crazy shit," Katelyn protested, clearly not trying to impress Spectre with the breadth of her vocabulary. "The other day some guy told me he had to wrap his dick around his thigh when he wasn't using it. You know the crazy part?" Spectre, thoroughly charmed, shook his head to indicate he had no idea what said 'crazy part' could possibly be. "He actually did."

"Bartender," Spectre called to the clearly overworked man behind the bar after realizing that he was still going to need what amounted to a mild sedation to enjoy the rest of his night. "Strongest thing you've got." The bartender nodded hurriedly. Spectre turned his attention back to the boringly-named Katelyn. "How fascinating."

"So how did you know my name?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you I guessed, would you?" Spectre asked, hoping she was stupid enough to say yes. Instead she revealed that she also had an almost unbearably annoying laugh, crushing Spectre's dream of an easy conquest with every high pitched hiccup she let out.

"No, silly."

Spectre's drink arrived just in time. He didn't question as to what was in it. Instead he just gave the bartender the idea that he'd already paid for the potentially lethal concoction and took a sip of it.

"Well," Spectre started, shaking his head in an effort to fight off the remarkably potent kick and almost repulsive taste of the cocktail, "I read your mind and changed your idea of what an attractive man is so you wouldn't take that perfectly adequate body of yours over there to that blond boy toy."

He motioned his hand at the blond he'd dealt with earlier. His once-formidable adversary was now in a heated argument with the group the comic had offended earlier on. The words "girl of my dreams" and "most beautiful thing in the universe" came out of the blond's mouth a few times, confirming that Spectre's efforts had worked their magic.

Katelyn looked at him and laughed again. Spectre took another sip of his drink nonchalantly. Katelyn then realized he wasn't joking.

"You... can control my mind?"

"Oh no, no, no," Spectre scoffed. "Nothing as serious as that. Just individual thoughts. Small things. If I got too ambitious I might damn well kill you."

"You're lying," Katelyn giggled.

"Am I?"

"That's not even possible."

"You want proof?"

"Yeah." Spectre sighed and took another sip of his drink, which was already starting to taste a lot better.

"When you looked over here, across a smoke filled room and saw a man in a gray suit with dark features, you didn't think "That's just some guy" or "No way in hell". You thought "Yes. Yes indeed". Didn't you?" Spectre said in the smoothest of voices. He pulled Katelyn in close and stared into her eyes. "I saw you across that bar and I told you something. Do you know what that was?" Katelyn, her eyes wide in awe, shook her head slowly.

"You want to be bad," Spectre whispered. "You don't know why. You just see this man across the bar and he makes you want to rebel, to strip down to your most primitive form and just go insane. Isn't that right?" Katelyn nodded slowly. "What do you want, Katelyn? What do you want to be?"

"I... I want to be bad," she stuttered. Spectre flashed a smile. A deliciously evil smile. 

"Outside. One minute," he said.

"Why?"

"You're going to be bad," Spectre replied, brushing Katelyn's chin with his thumb. She almost darted away from the bar and through the door to the outside shortly afterward, leaving Spectre alone with his quite possibly radioactive beverage. He downed what was left of it with a swift flick of his wrist. The alcohol didn't take long to slap him across the face just as quickly.

He stood up quickly, buttoning up his suit jacket, and made for the door.

*****

This is a little vignette for a character in what I hope is going to be a well-planned story. If you recognize the name, it's the same character from the story about the Cobbler. I want to say it's called Fiction Friday. Check it for a bit of light reading.

Live well, my homies.

A Conversation From a French Textbook, Translated and Extended

Thomas: (How many people are in your family?)
Robert: Sorry?
Thomas: I said how many people are in your family?
Robert: That's a strange question to ask upon meeting someone. Usually I get "hi" or "how are you". Way to break the mold, anyways.
Thomas: I try.
Robert: (We have seven: my dad, my mother-in-law, my mom, my two brothers, my sister, and me. My sister is married and lives in New Orleans), in case you were wondering or needed a target to fix your probable habit of assault and subsequent murder of random young people.
Thomas: You just listed your mother in law before your own mother.
Robert: I wanted to announce that I was off-limits lest you were of the homosex.
Thomas: And you did so by failing to mention that your wife is also included in your family of seven people?
Robert: Well I thought you meant how many people are in your family in a 100-mile radius. My wife is currently out of town.
Thomas: Right, because that's immediately what you should think when someone asks you that.
Robert: You're the one who I needed to convince that I wasn't gay as to protect my anal virginity.
Thomas: Okay, I'll prove to you I'm not gay.
Robert: Good luck, bum boy.
Thomas: Your sister, (Is she younger or older than you? How old is she,) in other words?
Robert: Well, good on you. Now I just think you're a sex offender.
Thomas: Answer the damn question.
Robert: (She's 28.)
Thomas: Mmmm... ripe.
Robert: Sorry?
Thomas: (What's her name?)
Robert: You're starting to scare me, bro.
Thomas: What's her fucking name, asshole?!
Robert: I'd probably tell you if you weren't panting and shouting obscenities.
Thomas: Tell me her name or you will lose your anal virginity.
Robert: (Her name is Sarah)! Jesus Christ!
Thomas: See you later!
Robert: Goodbye!



Basically, while reading through my French book today, I noticed that the little conversations two people have are often kind of creepy and not things people would really ask even if they were good friends. Anything in parenthesis is actual dialogue straight from the book, in case it wasn't obvious, and the last two lines are the normal little salutations that usually finish off those stupid little exchanges.

10/3/2010

Yesterday was a very, very strange day.

It started in a town about 20 minutes outside of Kansas City. If you'd told me three years ago that I'd be in Lee's Summit, Missouri a day before I turned 19, I might have laughed at you as obnoxiously as I could. That's what I tried telling myself as the day started off on a sour note. I wanted to harness the knowledge that I don't have a plan for everything these days and it's just good to lay back and just enjoy it.

That would have been a lot easier for me to do if I wasn't so paranoid about everything and everyone around me, but still I tried.

And for a stretch of about 30 minutes I lost my grip completely. I'm terrified of what will happen the day that I lose control for more than 30 minutes, but hopefully the epiphany/vision/realization that I'm about to describe will hold that off until I've hit the stage in life when I don't have anything to complain about.

I sat alone in my room last night from about 7 to 8. I'd anticipated going out and having a chemically enhanced good time, but those plans changed fairly suddenly and for some reasons I'm not aware of. At first I was really, really angry. One of those mindsets that could only be described as livid or infuriated.

Then I felt desolate. Alone. Homesick.

I haven't been homesick the entire time I've been here. I haven't missed an awful lot about Plano except my dog an my friends and family. I credit a lot of that to the fact that I've found a group of people here who I enjoy being around. I've already confided in some of them about things that I have trouble letting out to just anyone. I really thought that I'd found a little niche here, something I was scared I wouldn't find at all.

But suddenly, in the course of 12 hours or so, that changed. Suddenly I was sitting alone in my room with the whole world against me. I tried watching football with everyone in the lounge, but I just didn't find myself enjoying it. So I went into my room and, after a few minutes of sitting on my bed, I called my dad and talked to him.

That was about when I broke down. I wanted to go home. I wanted to sit on the couch and have my dog press herself up against me. I wanted to stroll lazily out of bed at some ungodly hour in the afternoon and make myself a quick breakfast. Shit, I even wanted to throw on a bleach-covered polo and go clean a meat market.

But then I got over it.

I can't really describe it any better than that. I was sitting down in my room, now with a group of people I can safely call my friends, watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall. At 11:59 I went over to my fridge and got out a bottle of Dr. Pepper I'd been saving, then I waited until the clock struck midnight and cracked it open with a toast to the room.

And since then, it's been pretty smooth sailing.

It might sound kind of bi-polar, but I assure you it's not. When the clock struck 12, I was hit with something that I apparently missed around this time last year: I'm an adult. Holy fuck, I'm an adult.

All of the shit I'd been stressing over for the previous few days were the problems of a child, a high school student. Almost as soon as I turned 19, I realized that I'm no longer either of those things. I don't need to be stressing about any of that anymore.

So I decided that I'm just not going to.

I guess I grew up last night.

9/26/2010

If you are reading this, you are doing so for one of two reasons.

One of them is that you're sitting in your FIG class right now and going through everyone's blogs and you've just now come across mine. If that's the case, excuse me for a few minutes while I do some housecleaning for everyone else.

The other reason is because, like me, you've heard the term "swearing like a sailor" and have never actually seen or heard a sailor swear before. Now while I'm not a sailor, I have some swashbuckling/sail-hoisting cred. Captain Morgan is my nickname after all, and I didn't get that for my weekend activities either. I had to earn that nickname.

And by earn I mean host a bi-annual balsa wood sailboat competition in the pond behind my house in the Hamptons. My point is, when you see that little blue box with white text in it on Facebook, you come in expecting to learn how versatile four letter words starting with "f" can be.

But why am I telling you all of this I (figuratively) hear you asking? Well, mainly it's for those of you who are in the second group. The first group of people have no idea what lies beneath this entry and, for the most part, it'd be a great thing if they never did. Right now I'm just letting all of you "regulars" know that this is a minor blip on the radar. Regular programming resumes after today, so sit tight while I earn some points for my college money.

Okay, the first group of people can come back in at this point. I swear I wasn't talking about you behind your back.


My favorite journalist can't really be called a journalist. In fact, I'm pretty sure the fact that he's even being called or considered a journalist would be beyond aggravating to him. Perhaps unfortunately, he's been called the most trusted name in news in the past few years. Nevertheless, he has my dream job. If I could do what he does, I'd die happy. Who is this renaissance man, you ask?


Jon Stewart.

He lives in New York, makes fun of people for a living, and earns somewhere close to the modest sum of $6 million a year. There's just nothing that can beat that.

The comedy part aside, what Jon Stewart does on his show is really what every journalist should do. If John McCain was to come out and say something tomorrow about how he thinks Bananas shouldn't be eaten south of the Missouri River and there was a tape of him ten years ago saying that Bananas should ONLY be eaten south of the Missouri River, Jon Stewart would find that tape and call him out on it.

By the same token, if President Obama came out and said the same thing (though since he's most definitely a SocialistNaziMuslimElitist, it'd probably be caviar instead) Stewart wouldn't hesitate calling him out on it either. It's the kind of mindset that every TV journalist should be in.

Also:
http://www.prosebeforehos.com/video-of-the-day/09/24/jon-stewart-on-the-bill-oreilly-factor/
http://www.businessinsider.com/jon-stewart-on-oil-spill-2010-6

I mean, come on now.

Observations via a French Textbook

I haven't just written in a long time.

It seems more and more that every time I decide to come on here and write it's always because of girl problems or because I want to rip someone apart piece by piece. As the first post on here says, and as many detailing the fact that I haven't "just written" in a long time, this place was made so that I could sit down and splurge random nonsense that someone somewhere might find funny.

So I was looking through my French textbook today in class.

Today we learned, or in my case re-learned, people description words. Things like old, young, fat, skinny, tall, small, etc. Then I noticed a few things.

First of all, it seems like it's a rule in all foreign language textbooks that the little cartoon showing the difference between "old" (in this case, vieux) and "young" (jeune) has to include a number of things.

1.) An old man that is clearly stuck in his glory days, quite possibly because of Alzheimer's or a slight form of Dementia. This means that he's wearing a vest over a long shirt and, to top it off, a bowtie. It kind of makes me think that the dude is remembering his days as a Riverboat blackjack dealer back in ole' Mississippi. He used to hit or stay with the best of him, presumably at some of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn's sexy parties (Sexy parties probably didn't happen in either of their respective books. I didn't actually read them. I just figured the reception they got meant that there was at least one mention of an orgy).

2.) An old man that is clearly stuck in his glory days is standing very awkwardly next to a boy at least five decades his junior, and the boy doesn't seem to have any problem with it. In fact, he seems like he's more than okay with it. He's enjoying having pre-historic crotch-al regions within two feet of his face.

And then there's the fatties.

Is it just me, or is it kind of socially acceptable for an old woman in glasses to be fat? I don't think I've ever looked at one in disgust (unless they're one of those fuckers that scoots around Market Street in a Hoveround instead of getting off their asses and walking). I can look at morbidly obese women in their 20s and find it absolutely repulsive, the same going for men of just about any age.

But for some reason, when it gets to women above 50, any fat they may have just kind of becomes acceptable for regular members of society. They might still get called a fat cow at 49, but as soon as they cross that 50 threshold it's as if they've earned that fat. I'm not about to come out and say that I understand the pains of menopause of childbirth, but if the several red wine-inspired conversations I've heard on TV about the both of them lead me to believe that both of them are horrible beyond words. Who am I to say a little paunch isn't completely okay at that point?



Again, this was a refreshing little shindig we had here. I'm kind of looking forward to the next one I think of.

Also, in the news department, I've decided that I'm going to try my hand at Improv comedy. There's a club on campus that plays Whose Line is it Anyways?-style improv games on Thursdays. I'm probably going to redefine what it means to suck, but I'll have fun and meet people, so there's that.



There are two types of people in this world: Those who like Neil Diamond, and those who don't. My ex-wife loves him.

The Wall

I believe I owe you a brief explanation.

I haven't posted on here for over a month. This hasn't been because of anything particularly tragic. In fact, the last few weeks of summer and the first week of college have been the best weeks of my life, bar none.

For some reason, though, I just haven't been able to write. I sat down in the 8th floor lounge in my dorm with a pen and a notebook and tried to get that little spark of inspiration that sets me on writing tirades, but for some reason I haven't been able to find it.

I tried typing something, but after a few paragraphs I read over everything and hated it. I had poor word choice, I didn't seem to have any direction planned out, and I didn't have any one liners that needed setting up. It felt like I was forcing it and it wasn't budging.

This is that "writer's block" I always thought I was immune to, I suppose.

Running the risk of sounding morbid, could it be sadness or general discontent that drives my writing? I hope not. I hadn't planned on being morose in college.

I think I'll try my hand at a story now. Hopefully I can pick up on tangent.

Swagger Odor Blocking Body Wash from Old Spice: A Review

I've been thinking about how to start off this review for a while now, but I think I've finally found what to say.

Hello ladies.

Do you remember the feeling you got the first time you wrestled a bear into submission and later discussed the finer points of smooth, romantic poetry with it later that evening? Do you remember the utterly euphoric sensation you got when you realized that broken bones were nothing more than a slight inconvenience and you snapped your tibia in half to reveal that such a realization meant that the sound of your bones cracking was replaced by Debussy's "Claire de Lune"? Do you remember how satisfying the realization that you had become death, destroyer of worlds was?

I remember. Because right after I tried new Swagger Odor Blocking Body Wash from Old Spice, I did all of those things. I even climbed up a scale replica of the Eiffel Tower I built in my back yard entirely out of matchsticks and proclaimed my feats of pure manliness to the world.

My experience started when I saw the bottle on the shelves of Tom Thumb's hair and body care aisle. Bewildered by the vast selection of lady-scented body washes I saw before me, the red and black bottle that only barely contained the raw majesty of Swagger Odor Blocking Body Wash from Old Spice stuck out like an elephant in the middle of a den full of impeccably groomed lions (read: my room).

I transported the bottle home and immediately reposed to my shower, at which time I lathered the aromatic gel on my skin and fell into a scent induced hallucinogenic coma in which muscular black men wearing only towels to hide their waists told me of my destiny. My destiny, they told me, was to use Swagger Odor Blocking Body Wash from Old Spice every day for the rest of my life and be generally fantastic.

When I awoke from the coma, I was transported by an army of small woodland creatures to my bed made of rose petals and cashmere upon which I sat. The inspiration then hit me to write this review.

Look at this screen. Now to your floor NOW BACK AT THE SCREEN. Now back to your floor. That floor is empty, dull. You can fix this by pouring a gallon of Swagger Odor Blocking Body Wash from Old Spice over every square inch of that floor.

Now look back at your screen. You're reading the words that I'm writing because you enjoyed the ones prior to it. Now look at the piece of literature closest to you NOW BACK TO THE SCREEN. That literature is inadequate. It does not possess the earth shattering power that these words do. If the author used Swagger Odor Blocking Body Wash from Old Spice and not some lady-scented body wash, their words might at least put up a fight to my vastly superior substitutes.

Now look back at your floor.

Your floor is now diamonds.

Survival of the Coldest

The wind whistled by her ear, disturbing the cornsilk locks resting on it. She opened her eyes. Her vision was blurred, but she could make out the full moon in the sky featured in a frame made by an opening in a wall of the structure she was in. There was a man crouching just under the opening.

Her vision started to clear as she slowly sat up. The man was young, maybe in his mid-twenties. His hair was closely shaven and he was wearing a tight, sleeveless shirt, showcasing his chiseled arms. He turned his head in her direction.

"Good, you're awake," he said. She rubbed her forehead.

"Where am I?" she asked.

"Up high, in a treehouse," the man replied, looking back out of the opening in the wall. "We'll be safe here for a while." As her vision got progressively better, she was slowly able to make out what was past the opening in the wall: vast, open plains lit only by the moonlight and populated by hordes of roaming corpses.

She wasn't dreaming then, she decided. She'd woken up in the same hellish world she'd been knocked out in. She took another look at the landscape. They were very high up in the air.

"A treehouse?" she asked.

"Yeah," the man said, seeming unsure about whether or not that was the right answer. "There's another word for it, but I'll be damned if I can remember it. It's high, though. Really high."

"Well how long can we stay here?"

"A while."

"How long is a while?"

"Until the zombies get here?"

"Well seeing how high up we are, that could mean forever."

"A few things wrong with that," the man said, turning his body towards her as if what he was about to say was quite lengthy. "First of all, these" he picked up a rifle and shook it to indicate that he was indeed talking about the guns, of which there was a decently arranged set in the corner of the structure, "don't have too much ammo in them. Second of all, food just doesn't replenish itself." He picked up a handful of empty wrappers next to him and tossed a few in the air.

"And third?"

"Zombie ramp."

"Zombie ramp?"

"Absolutely. That's our biggest problem right now," the man said. He could tell she didn't quite follow him. "You see, when the zombies find out that we're up here- and trust me, they will find out that we're up here- they're going to do all sorts of crazy shit to get at us. The zombie ramp is actually the least crazy out of all that they could potentially do.

"It starts with just one of them. That poor bastard figures out that there's food at the top of the tree, so he does the smartest thing a zombie can do and gets as close to said food as possible, which leaves him flailing his arms upward as he presses the rest of his body against the trunk. Then his buddies start noticing all the movement and see that something's up in that tree just like the first guy did. Then they get as close as they can.

"This is when it gets real shitty for that first guy. These zombies, they'll do anything to get that food, even if it means trampling other zombies to get there. So from then on in it's kind of like a domino effect. With each horde that joins in the hunt, the pile of trampled zombies gets taller and taller until there's a nice little ramp right into this little treehouse. Then we're food.

"There you have it," he said. "Zombie ramp."

"So what's the alternative?" she asked, unimpressed by the longwinded story. "We climb down the tree and fight our way through a crowd of zombies with brains on the brain?"

"Funny you should say that," the man said. "I've seen lots of people get torn to shreds by those bastards, but they always seem to avoid the brains while picking through a corpse. I hadn't really noticed it until a little bit ago. You see, I burnt the walls of this one little settlement down so that I could draw all of the zombies' attention away from me and..." He stopped abruptly, noticing that her face suddenly transformed from a confused stupor to a furious glare.

"You're Torch?" she asked him through clenched teeth, slowly getting to her feet. "You're the bastard who let twenty people die because you wanted to save that precious little car of yours?" She was moving slowly towards him, her fists balled up tightly. The man started to back away, rubbing the back of his head.

"Surprise!" he said with a weak chuckle. She stopped moving towards him. She started to tremble in anger. It was as if she transferred the motion in her legs to the rest of her body.

"You bastard!" she shouted. "You fucking bastard!" The man put a finger to his mouth and waved his other hand in her face.

"Quiet! Do you want every undead piece of shit in the valley to hear you?"

"You destroyed a whole city- a whole city! Just so you could drive away in that fucking Cadillac?"

"Be fair, it wasn't really a city..."

"You killed twenty people!"

"Well, I didn't kill them. The zombies did. I just burned down the walls so the zombies could kill them. Well, I didn't do it because I wanted the zombies to kill them, but I guess in saving my own skin I'm somewhat responsible for their horribly painful deaths." She hit him square in the jaw. The punch didn't have a lot of weight, but the suddenness of it made the man stumble. "Ow!"

"Get out of here. Get out of my sight!"

"Woah, woah, woah. I save your sorry ass from getting turned into a three course meal, and you repay me by hitting me in the face and telling me to leave?"

"You burned down a whole town!"

"It wasn't a town, god dammit. At most it was a settlement."

"Semantics? At a time like this? Are you fucking serious?"

"Hey! Communication is part of what's kept you alive through this whole outbreak. It wouldn't kill you to use it properly." She was absolutely irate. So much so the inappropriateness of the man's comment didn't seem to matter as much as the sudden urge she felt to let out a blood curdling scream.

Giving into the temptation, she did just that. The man covered his ears to avoid the brunt of the wail. After she was done, there was silence for a few moments. The silence was broken when a low-pitched, dumb-sounding groan answered the shriek. The man rushed to the opening in the wall, poking his head out of it and looking down.

He saw a wave of zombies moving towards the base of the tree. Hundreds of them. It was probably closer to a thousand, if his eyes weren't deceiving him.

"You happy now?" he said to her. "Hundreds of our best buds just heard you bitching about how badly I fucked up. I was hoping they'd move on after a couple of hours and we could walk our way out of here, but no. Clearly my past is more important than our continued survival."

"There has to be some way down. How did we even get up?" she asked, ignoring the chastising remarks.

"We... I climbed. I climbed with you on my back," the man said. "That's another thing. I carried you on my back while climbing a hundred or so feet up this tree and my reward is a punch in the face."

"Yes, because clearly my past is more important than our continued survival," she mocked.

"Hey! You can't do that!"

"Get to the point, asshole!"

"Alright, alright," he said. "Jeez." He thought for a moment. "We can't climb down now. That'd take too long. By the time we get down the whole gang's already gonna' be waiting for us." His eyes glanced over to the guns in the corner, then to the planks of wood holding the treehouse in place.

"Do you have a fear of falling, by chance?" he asked her.

From the Vault: Ward C

The visitors walked down the hallway, led by a brutally boring doctor in his mid-60s. He was a strange old man. He wore glasses thicker than lead and combed his hair over in an effort to hide the deteriorating, almost rotting skin on his scalp. He was also German. His name was Werner.

"Zis is Vard A," Werner said, rubbing his forehead in an effort to perhaps find something relatively interesting about Ward A. It didn't work. "Ve keep a lot of sick people in Vard A". The less intelligent majority among the group of visitors were genuinely interested, surprised even, at the revelation that there were indeed sick people inside a ward of a hospital. The slightly more intelligent minority were completely apathetic. The extremely intelligent duo marveled in Werner's redundancy, only barely resisting the urge to clap sarcastically in his face.

Werner moved slowly down the hallway, which was extremely poorly lit and decorated (the fading picture of a beach severely clashed with the dull turquoise paint job that was smeared along the walls). He labored with every step. Any rational person would have thought that he was on his last few breaths or, realizing the futility of the skin bag that they were confined to, that his bones were trying to escape from his body and he was slightly more focused on keeping them from shooting out of place and impaling a nurse that was just passing by than on walking faster than an inch an hour. Unfortunately, there were only two rational people in the group, and they were both too busy counting the tiles on the ceiling and wishing for a brutally painful death.

The group walked by another set of double doors, clearly marked with a giant "B".

"Zis is Vard B," Werner said, again rather redundantly, "Zis is our research and development vard of the hospital. Ve are currently vorking on stuffing lab rats into containers ze size of test tubes. Ve call them CLRHs." Werner beamed proudly at being able to find something other than "ve research things here" to tell the guests. He promised himself a cookie for his effort.

"What's a CLRH?" one of the dimmer visitors asked.

"It is a 'Cylindrical Lab Rat Holder'," Werner replied, "Ve use it to hold lab rats. In cylinders." Steve, one of the rational thinkers, had recently come into possession of a firearm and was negotiating the terms of a mutual suicide with the other rational thinker, his companion Natalya. It was somewhere between their agreement that a "pre-death quickie" was out of the question based on the logic that such a thing would only be considered if "every living soul (male, female, both) no matter what race, religion, or even species were to be extinguished from existence, leaving only you, Steve" and the actual loading of the weapon that Werner said something that actually piqued their interest.

"Zis is Vard C. Normally ve vould show you around in zer, but recently ve had quite a nasty accident involving vun of ze more... insane patients." The majority of the group of visitors made an overly visible effort to veer clear of the double doors marked "C", as if the area in front of them was just a facade and anyone that stepped on their tiles would fall to a fiery, rather uncomfortable death.

Steve and Natalya looked at the door, then at each other, then at the gun, then at each other again.

"We should go through that door."

"Yeah we definitely should."

"I mean it'd be a crime not to."

"They're asking for us to just step right on through."

"Wouldn't hurt to just clear out the pipes a little bit before we did though..."

"Last form of life on Earth, Steve. 'Kay? Then we'll consider it."

"Even plants?"

"Even plants, Steve."

"That doesn't seem physically possible."

"I'll MAKE it physically possible."

"So what are you, God now?"

"No of course I'm not God. Don't be so blasphemous."

"You're the one who said she'd do anything with a pulse even if there was a dude right in front of you practically begging for it."

"So I have standards, what's your point?"

"My point is sarcasm isn't a sin and beastiality KIND OF is."

"Shut up. Let's go through the door."

"Yeah let's go through the door."

The rest of the group had already gone past four more lettered doors over the course of the couple's argument, leading both Steve and Natalya to believe that either time had sped up while they were deep in conversation or that Werner had donned a pair of roller blades and had proceeded to briskly glide down the hallway at what was, at least to him, an alarming rate.

The two stood in front of the door labeled with a big "C", took a deep breath, and pushed themselves through it. They were met with a strange sight: a completely white room, so white that it was hard to differentiate the walls with the ceiling and floor, with a man standing in the middle in a tuxedo (which included a shirt that seemed to be absolutely soaked in blood. The two tried to process all of what they were seeing, but their thoughts were repeatedly interrupted by the faint sound of elevator music. Steve looked at the man, who hadn't moved an inch since him and Natalya had entered the room. He was smiling from ear-to-ear.

"You've got a bit of blood on you," Steve said. The man looked down at his shirt as if this was the first time he'd noticed that his undergarment was soaked in a warm, red liquid. 

"Well would you look at that!" the man exclaimed rather cheerily, "No problem." He proceeded to rip the shirt completely off of his body without disturbing the tuxedo jacket or his bow-tie, which remained in the same place it had been before he had thrown off his shirt. The garment landed on the floor with a squelch, somehow managing to have stayed in one piece. The man didn't seem to mind that he'd just ruined a perfectly good shirt, and had gone back to smiling broadly and the room's new entrants.

"Hi-ya folks!" he said, "My name's Eddy! I'll be your tour guide today!" The man, whose name was apparently Eddy, moved for the first time since Steve and Natalya had entered Ward C. He darted over to a door and opened it for the two, motioning with his hand that they should proceed down the hallway on the other side. The two obliged.

The hallway looked nearly identical to the first room in Ward C in that an untrained eye couldn't perceive its depth, but it was also very different in that it was populated, however sparsely, with other people, including one strange man whose eyes were darting around the area as if he was convinced that a swarm of men with swords were about to jump out of the woodwork and slice him to bits, a fate that could only be curtailed if he was always looking around. What made the man stranger was his choice in clothing, or a lack thereof, and his hairstyle, or a lack thereof. There wasn't a single hair on his body, perhaps explained by the shaving cream and razor he had in either of his hands. 

Eddy dashed pass Steve and Natalya, looking at the man straight in the face.

"Hi-ya Bob!" he said exuberantly. The man screamed uncontrollably, spraying shaving cream all over himself and almost immediately shaving it away. Eddy patted him on the shoulder, an action the man didn't much appreciate, screaming even louder before piling a mound of shaving cream on the patted area. "Good talking to ya'!" Eddy said. He continued down the hallway. Both Steve and Natalya looked at the man with great interest, following their clearly insane tour guide further down the hallway.

"What's his problem?" Natalya asked.

"Extreme Chaetophobia!" Eddy exclaimed, "Guy's scared bonkers by hair! Can't stand the sight of it!" He stopped walking and put his hand next to his mouth. "Keep this between you and me, but I think he's not all there. You know... mentally." He started walking down the hallway again almost as quickly as he'd stopped, leading the couple to another door. The room on the other side wasn't even half as bright as the hallway it stemmed off of, and only featured a man sitting at a desk.

"I looked on in interest as Eddy and the two strangers entered the room. The woman was quite attractive. I contemplated asking her out for a nice meal on the town followed by the sweet fruits of my naturally charming labors. The man looked like an idiot and I wanted to punch him," the man at the desk said in an oddly familiar accent.

"I'm flattered!" Natalya said.

"I found it disturbing that the woman knew what I was thinking even though I hadn't even said a word. It terrified me to the bone... but it also aroused me slightly." Natalya and Steve's eyes grew wide at the comment. "It was a good thing that I was sitting at a table, otherwise one of the room's new entrants might have noticed my sizable erection." The room was silent for a few seconds, but the peace was cut short by a loud thud from under the desk. Natalya turned around and left the room immediately afterward. Steve remained still.

"Dude... nice..." he said.

"I found the man insufferable. I was trying to decide whether I should take his life or my own... and how I should do either..." the man's eyes shrank as he said it. Steve turned on his heel and left the room. Eddy followed and closed the door behind him.

"What the hell was that?" Natalya exclaimed.

"Oh that's Ricky..." Eddy said, keeping a smile on his face, "He doesn't actually talk to anyone at all! He just records all of his thoughts in his Captain's Log!"

"So he has an internal monologue... that he says out loud?" Natalya asked.

"Precisely!" Eddy said.

"...and he thinks he's Captain Kirk?" Steve asked.

"Precisely!" Eddy said again, matching the first time he'd said it rather eerily. Natalya looked at Steve and shook her head.

"Only you," she said.

"Hurry up you two!" Eddy exclaimed, "You'll miss your assignments!" Intrigued by the mysterious event to which Eddy was referring, the pair followed him down to the end of the hallway, where they went through another door into a room that was identical to the first one in Ward C. There was another man at a desk, but this one was feverishly filling out papers.

"Hey Johnny! Natalya and Steve are here for their assignments!" Eddy said. The man looked up at the two. 

"Ah yes. Natalya, you get Parthenophobia. Steve, Teutophobia," the man at the desk said. Natalya turned to look at Steve. She then began to scream hysterically. All of a sudden, Eddy spun around and kicked her in the face, sending her to the ground.

"WHAT THE HELL MAN?!?!?" Steve shouted rather angrily, "What's Parthenophobia?"

"Fear of virgins," the man said.

"Aw dick move, man. Dick move," Steve said. He looked at Natalya, who was still breathing, but hadn't moved since Eddy, who was strangely still smiling as widely as he was when he had first met the couple, had kicked her in the jaw. He then realized that he too was given a phobia, but he was unaware of what it meant.

"What's Teutophobia?" he asked quizically.

"You're about to find out!' Eddy exclaimed. He pushed Steve through a door and into a dull turquoise hallway. The group of visitors, led by Werner, were all staring at him.

"Ve vere just going to see ze uzzer vards Steve," Werner said.

Steve began to scream hysterically.