Contingency Plans

Today's header is a small collection of my favorite British people (from l to r): David Tennant as Doctor Who, Gemma Atkinson as her fine sexy self, Matt Bellamy as the virtuoso he is, and Winston Churchill as the old man longing for his schoolyard days as MC Church.



There is something simply fascinating about contigency plans for near-impossible, horrific situations.

Zombies, for example. I know several people who have a plan for exactly what they'll do when the dead walk the earth once more, myself among them. Most of them have to do with raiding the local gun store and loading up on every caliber ever. The problem with that is that people have been hardwired to believe that Zombie apocalypses require high levels of gunfire and ultimately going down in a blaze of glory. All of them, actually.

The psychological reason for this is because if you kill a zombie, you're essentially murdering people without consequence. You can't open up on a crowd of people with a .50cal machine gun and expect to get away with it. If you do the same to a crowd of zombies, however, you're a good samaritan.

So if everyone goes to the gun store to loot all the ammo they can, and it's very likely that no one is going to be willing to share, it's a large group of people trapped in the small confines of a store surrounded by zombies. Tell me if you know where that plan goes wrong.

Regardless, it's still fascinating to have all of these plans made up in your head. You take society as it is, take out a norm here and there, and you have a situation that presents you with a unique challenge.

I usually use this mind-exercise to get through boring bits of my day. Walking through a supermarket, for example (the next place people would go after the gun shop). What if there was some huge explosion outside that forced us to live the rest of our days within the store? That cute girl that works in the bakery? Well, at some point we're going to have to rebuild the human race through the first two parts of the acronym 'TLC'. When that time comes, I've already called dibs.

She may not even speak English (as that's a problem nowadays) or agree with just about anything I have to say, but I know this: she's my soulmate. I don't have a good history with people that work in bakeries, but that doesn't matter. Besides, it was either her or Ms. Pack-a-day Jane that works behind the customer service counter.

That's part of the fascination as well. You're put into close contact with people in a new society where the old rules don't apply. Where there are people in close contact and an understanding that there are no rules, there are people taking full advantage of the facts. The first few days would likely be hell. People, panicked by their new circumsatnces, would drink their way out of their soon-to-be permanent depression, gorge themselves on shitty food, and on top of that breed like rabbits.

Sex. A rapid, constant stream of sex.

That's basically why people love the idea of these stories, stories that are horrific and hopeless when you look at them on the base level: there's lots of violence and, eventually, a helluva lot of sex.

We're a funny little race aren't we?

Blue People Are Our Enemy

First of all, take time to notice the new header image. It's likely to be the main feature of a story I'm writing for the website in newspaper called "God Save Us All".

Obviously, it'll be a satirical piece.



Have you ever looked up at the sky at night, taken in the vastness of the blackness above you, and wondered if you were staring at a well-developed, intelligent alien race full of life and history? No? Am I alone on that one too?

Well just imagine it for a minute. The law of averages would say that it's nearly impossible that humanity is the only form of intelligent life in the universe. It's simply too big for that to be the case.

So what happens when (or 'if', as it might be appropriate to consider that we will be the harbingers of our own destruction) we meet an intelligent species of aliens in the future? Will it be all Star Wars/Star Trek/Mass Effect where all the species get along and seem to speak English perfectly? Or will it be like Avatar, where the humans go in and redefine what it means to "fuck shit up".

Well, let's go back through human history to find our answer. After all, history is said to repeat itself. It has a terrible memory.

Travel back with me, if you would, to around 1095 AD. There was a hip new Pope on the block named Urban. Fresh off of defeating his arch rival Cardinal Rural (who was a little bit country to Urban's rock and roll) in an epic game of "All About the Osmonds: The Official Boardgame", he needed some fresh blood.

Enter late 11th century Israel.

At the time, the place was inhabited by a fresh, new group called the Muslims. Urban saw this and said, "Muslims?! In MY holy land?! I see shit that needs to be fucked up!"

So fuck shit up he did. He got in there nice and violent like, and the vast armies of Europe slaughtered everyone that was different than them, establishing an age-old European tradition of cultural acceptance and sensitivity.

Did Urban say "Hey Muslims, I know that this is your home and all, but there's plenty more desert out a few miles that way and this place is kind of holy to us. D'you mind shifting a bit?" No, for those of you curious enough to ask, he did not. He probably didn't take into account that Jerusalem and its surrounding area was also quite holy to the Muslims, but such was the Catholic church circa 1095.

So what happens when we reach an alien world, set foot at the steps of an enormous temple that the indiginous race there spent millenia building?

"Come in peace" you say? Don't be so childish. No one says that.

"Houston, we have a temple"? Now that's just stupid. You just took an iconic phrase and bastardized it beyond recognition.

"Hey aliens, nice temple you got there. We're gonna' fuck it up now 'kay? Kay"? Now you're getting it.

The history of human aggression towards anything that has a different skin tone than them is staggeringly violent and comprehensive. The white explorers of yesteryear couldn't handle people with brown skin. What makes you think we'll be welcoming of aliens with green or blue?

The other option is them coming to us. That would be a disasterous endeavour as well. If the aliens decided to touch down in say, Congo? Where people brutally murder people with extraordinary talents because they think they're witches? You think they're frenzied and confused when little Dikembe shows off his amazing footwork in soccer, just imagine what they'll do when a whole new species of life comes down and starts talking gibberish at them while presumably pointing neon blue and green lights at them.

And if they go through the rest of Africa and see children dying because they eat too little with disease running rampant, then finish off their whirlwind tour of the world we call home in New York, where the buildings scrape the sky and people die because they eat too much, imagine what they'll think of this race.

They'll see that we don't care for our fellow kind because there's a big, blue, wavy thing in between us and them.

They'll see that while a group of evil pricks is going around a region in a country slaughtering thousands because they don't believe what they do, the best we can do is have a few popular and semi-popular musical artists play a bunch of music and throw money at the situation.

And yes, they'll see that when a country is in one of its most dire moments, the people that are paid by other people who gave them their job to bring the country out of such dire straits don't want to work past 2PM.

Maybe it's better that we stay on this little rock of ours, and when the Aliens come, piss them off enough to wipe us all out.

A Scary Future

So it's happened.

The Healthcare overhaul has been passed. What does this mean exactly? You mean you don't know? Are you fucking stupid? Really!?!?!

THIS IS THE END OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU ALL CAN'T SEE THIS

THIS IS A CLEAR MOVEMENT TOWARDS SOCIALISM

SOCIALISM IS JUST ANOTHER WORDS FOR FASCISM AND EVERYONE KNOWS THAT HITLER WAS A FASCIST SO THAT MEANS OBAMA IS A FASCIST

HOLY SHIT

Here's what your future will be like...

You and your family want to have a kid? TOO BAD! Six months into term Big Brother Obama is going to show up at your front door with a vaccuum cleaner and yell "IT'S TIME TO PULL THIS SUCKER OUT!" and use the unborn fetus to research stem cells which will undoubtedly make everyone gay.

You want to earn money through hard work and retire quietly to Florida with all the other old folks? GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF OF THE GOVERNMENTS MONEY GRANDMA! IT'S EUTHANASIA TIME! Obama hates old people. He hates the smell of their colostomy bags and the mothball-like odor that comes off of their clothes. He wants to kill old people. That's right there in the bill! Can't you see that? Are you blind? Oh! I see what the problem is! Your insurance company listed "blindness" as a pre-existing condition! AND THAT'S THE WAY IT SHOULD BE, YOU FREELOADING SON OF A BITCH!

And what about Obama? Clearly with him being the person pushing this bill through, it means that in the next 90 days he'll be carried through the streets of Washington, and true patriots like John Boehner and Newt Gingrich will be forced to kiss his Kenyan feet before he executes them for thoughtcrime.

CAN'T YOU SEE THIS UNFOLDING IN FRONT OF YOU!?!?!?!

THIS IS THE FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, FOUNDED IN 1776 BY GOOD, CHRISTIAN MEN (EXCEPT ALL OF THOSE DEISTS THAT NO ONE SEEMS TO REMEMBER)! THIS IS THE FUTURE!!!!






...If you're as intelligent as a motherfucking baboon.

In two years time, when we are in the throes of another DEMOCRATIC election, and 30 more million americans are covered by health insurance, I will laugh at the scumbags that tried shooting this down. Mark my words, I will laugh.

Maybe Two Feet

Let's try this again.

First of all, let's establish that my personal life never enters this space again. I'm a passionate person, and with passion comes some level of ignorance. There's been quite a bit of that from me. When I sit down at a keyboard and force myself to write something, and then I hit a nerve that sends me on a multi-hundred word tirade against the rest of the world, I say things that should be kept to myself. It affects me, it affects my writing. It stops here.

Second of all, there will be "someone else" dropping a few mindgasmic pieces of work on this site. Inigo Rane (I wonder who that could be?) is going to grace/dilute this site with his/my presence. It's a pen name. I thought to myself, "lots of writers have pen names. I should have a pen name" and so it was that I got a pen name.


But now that we've gotten some housekeeping done, let's get to today's "mindgasm" (working on the copyright for that one).


When I go out to "face" the Market Street deli at the end of a shift, I am often flabbergasted by the look of it. I've described before how it looks like an army of midgets has thrown themselves into the side of it (it could be little kids or some other creature under 5 foot tall, but the image is so much more funny if it's midgets), knocking down boxes of deli meats and throwing various cheeses onto the bottom of the knee-knocker (actual term) display.

Today, the third of four straight eight hour work days during Spring Break, I went out and went down the deli wall. I wouldn't have a problem with any of this if it was physically demanding to walk around the store and put something back that you don't want, say if you had a sprained/broken/otherwise torn apart [insert lower body part here].

I'm going to step out of the flow for a second and apologize for that very, very poor choice of words, just in the case that some pervert has been secretly following this blog and is in the process of inserting a lower body part where I instructed him to.

So yeah.

If they had some... physical incapability, I could understand them not going across the store to put something back. Now, I don't always know that someone who's decided to put a couple of wrapped up beer-brined pork chops where the Ricotta should be doesn't have a broken leg or sprained ankle or whatnot. I just think I'd see a few more people hopping around on crutches or zipping along in wheelchairs if it happened with that much frequency.

Of course, this is assuming that physically handicapped people don't all shop in supermarkets from 6 in the morning to 4:45 in the afternoon as a group. It's unlikely, but as President Bush said to Dick Cheney after his inauguration, "Anything's possible. Now let's invade Iraq again".

But what irks me enough to say "Are you fucking serious?" out loud in the middle of a supermarket while I'm still working there is when people pick up, let's say, a bag of shredded Mozzarella, think to themselves "Well, do I really need this?", and after some debate (presumably after thwacking themselves with some pocket-sized blunt instrument) they drop the bag of Mozzarella.

Notice that I never mentioned them moving at all, apart from the obvious motion of dropping the bag of Mozzarella. They stand in the same. Fucking. Spot. That they picked the bag of Mozzarella up in, and then instead of taking the two seconds of their life to put it back in the right spot when they decide they don't want it, maybe a foot or two away from where their hand is at any given time during the process, they drop it in some random place for some eight-dollar-an-hour part timer to pick up after eight hours of work.

I understand that I'm being paid to do it, and considering that I am getting paid to do something as easy as that I should be kind of grateful, but the fact that this problem even exists and that there is even a need for that part of my job description is just kind of irritating. I've been told that I did the same thing before I worked at a supermarket, but I'd like to think I'm not that lazy.

I was also asked today, by someone who looked like he thought the world was made of fur and technicolor rainbows (which is a round-about way of saying "high as a motherfucking kite"), if I knew where the cheese section was. Nevermind the fact that this guy clearly thought that asking this question was one of the steps towards enlightenment, but the words "dairy" are right above this big, yellow section of cheese and other dairy products in big block letters maybe a hundred feet away from where he was standing. I always thought that cheese's membership in the Things Categorized As 'Dairy' Association (or TCADA) was pretty common knowledge. This guy had glasses on too. I always thought the purpose of glasses were to fix eyesight. Clearly that was lost on this guy's brain.

As it turns out, whatever "I always thought" in relation to supermarkets is oftentimes dead wrong.

Watch out for Inigo. He's got something for you tomorrow.


My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

The Greatest Thing in the History of Ever

This is a picture of Muse. At a Dallas Stars game. My favorite band holding up jerseys from my favorite team.

Omgah.

Cloud Nine

This is what breaks were made for.

Tomorrow, as many of you are well aware, is the Muse concert. It'll be the second time that I've seen them play, but it's the first actual Muse concert I've seen. Needless to say, I am going to have a hard time sleeping tonight. That's not the only reason, though. Actually it's only one of three.

The second one is kind of weird. I woke up at 1 this morning after falling asleep at 4 yesterday afternoon. When I woke up, I watched two movies, then drove for a little bit because why the hell not, then went to the gym for an hour, then had lunch with my dad, then came home and sat around waiting for the Stars game. My day started about 18 hours ago and it feels like I just woke up. It's fantastic.

The third one is the reason for all the extra adrenaline running through me though.

At about 6:30, I was bored on my computer, so I decided to check my email. This is the first one that popped up:

Morgan,



On behalf of the Dallas Stars Foundation, I would like to congratulate you on being selected as our 2010 High School Media Day Article Contest winner. We were very impressed with your article and commend you for your hard work.



We would like to invite you out to the game on Tuesday, April 6th versus the Chicago Blackhawks. The game will start at 7:30 PM. Please let me know if this date will work for you and then I will reply with further details about the night. Congratulations again and we look forward to hearing from you soon.



Thanks!

Needless to say, a big boy like me turned into a little squealing girl pretty quickly (it was more fist pumps and jumping like a dude on a trampoline sans backflips). I lost this same contest last year and felt pretty pissed about it. I'm just beyond ecstatic to win it this year.

At the end of last week I was angrily doubting my future as a journalist, but then this comes along and makes me confident and excited for what's about to come.

I'm going to keep this short. I don't want to start bragging to make people feel bad. I do that too much as it is.

New Hobbies

I think I've strayed from the original purpose of this blog. I've seen it happen before too. When I wrote most of my notes on Facebook, they were spur of the moment, funny little tidbits that turned into self-loathing, morose pieces of trash. That's what this has turned into. I'm sad to say it too.

So let's violently thrust this thing back into that gray area between quirky and insane.


I've taken up a new hobby at work.

We have this PA system at Market Street. Whenever someone needs something from someone across the store (or in the case of several of our more lazy "team members", across a span of about ten feet), they pick up the nearest white phone, press the gray square button, and say one of a few things into it.

"Red line", not to be confused with the "red alert" system mentioned in an earlier post, means that someone across an undetermined distance from someone else wants to talk to that certain someone else without moving from their current position. So they'll say "Robert, Red Line please". Robert would go to the nearest white phone and, unless it was the same white phone that he was just called for on, pick it up and press another button to talk directly to the person who wanted to talk to him.

It's a private PA kinda thing, if you just skipped that block of text up there.

Then we have "I need a Carry out on Market Street", which is a code the checkers use to tell the sackers "Stop standing around at the front of the store with your thumb up your ass and help this "guest" at Market Street out to their car".

Now, confusingly enough, there is a section within Market Street called "Market Street". To a newcomer to the store, this can pose to be quite the confusing conundrum. If that call goes up, their first instinct is to pick up a white phone and say "Can you be a little more specific?" over the PA. I never did that when I was a sacker, since I was just so god damned good at it (apart from that whole "don't put Oxyclean in the same bag as sliced bread, you fucking moron" incident), but I'm sure somewhere along the line some smartass like me has done that.

Then there's "So-and-so has a call parked on 11(number ranging from 0 to 9)". So-and-so Jones has been with the company for years as the resident Call Parked For "Team Member". It's a prestigious position within the United family, and ingeniously it's all code for something that no one would expect.

Whenever you hear this in our store, it means that So-and-so has done something truly spectacular. "Call" is code for "6-foot tall stack of pineapples and pancake mix", "Parked" means "stacked precariously on top of", and the various "11-somethings" are different spots on the roof of the building. My personal favorite is 117, where So-and-so "Parks" a "Call" on the edge of the roof overlooking the exit of the "Market Street" area of "Market Street". It has a tendency to fall on certain "team members" when they're helping our "guests" to their "transportation vehicles" before "hustling" back into the "workplace" so they can continue their "team member positions" as "convenience clerks".

Any time you hear that over the PA, start clapping and cheering. It's truly an amazing sight.

The last thing that gets put over the PA is nothing. I mean, sure, there's the bell-sounding thing letting people know that someone wants something before they say it, but then after that no one says anything. It's just the bell thing. This happens sometimes two, three times in a row. Around so many knives, I classify this as a workplace hazard for the criminally insane. Suddenly my work experience turns into an Edgar Allen Poe poem (which I've just discovered sounds amazing, and is why people say 'a poem by Edgar Allen Poe' rather than 'a Poe poem'. One sounds scholarly, the other one sounds like a speech impediment).

But none of these are my hobbies. Sure, I've wanted to pick up a white phone and start making Chimp noises, but that sort of thing gets you "terminated" from Market Street (sidenote, I would love to get "terminated" just so I can say that Arnold Schwarzenegger is my boss).

My hobby is replying to the calls over the intercom. Whenever someone says "Robert red line please", I repeat it in a bastardized mix of a southern and Afro-American (which until recently I thought meant 'American citizen with an Afro'). If Robert or whoever it may be is near me when they get called, I move towards them, arms waving in slow motion shouting "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" or alternatively just shout "DON'T DO IT ROBERT! IT'S A TRAP!"



Whenever So-and-so "Parks" a "Call", I do what I suggested and clap uproariously.

Whenever someone says "I need a carry out on Market Street", I say "Yeah, I bet you do".

Whenever someone makes the bell thing and only the bell thing, I roll up my sleeves, take a knife out of its sheath, and carve another tally into my forearm, steadily feeding raw mystery meat down my throat.

Fun hobby.

Harry didn't think that he did a very good job, so he grabbed the nearest thing to hand, which just so happened to be a 15 inch black rubber cock, and proceeded to beat poor old Smithy to death with. And that was seen as a nice way to go. Now, that, is why you pay Hatchet Harry, when you owe.

"I AM Omega"

There are certain things that I have a tolerance for.

I can tolerate people with differing opinions. It takes some explanation on their end, certainly, but I have had enough arguments end up badly in my brief time on earth to know that bridges need to be hosed down until it's certain that they'll burn.

Today I experienced rage again. I would say anger, but that wouldn't do it much justice. This is one of those blind rage moments, where the steering wheel on your car starts looking like a chew toy and other drivers start looking like enemy combatants. Christ, even now my hands are shaking just thinking about what caused this. Despite not really being able to see straight for a matter of hours, I think I handled myself a hell of a lot better than I could have. I had one of those "hands slipping off of the cliff" moments where every fiber of my being wanted to scream bloody murder, but all that got out was a squeak. I don't want to know what would have happened if I'd screamed, and if I don't stop shaking in the next few hours, I might regret restraining myself.

And that's as much as you'll get this particular inciting incident. Something caused this. I would elaborate, but I have also learned that arguments are never won when the other side isn't present to respond. I'm not really one to mince my words in what I perceive as the privacy of my own blog, but this is one of those moments I'm going to put in the "How I Got Here" part of my best-selling memoir a few decades (and bowls of LCD-ios, Cheerios' answer to Lucky Charms' "Lucky Smack") from now. It will be in full detail, blow-by-blow, so just stay on life support long enough to read it. If there's an apocalypse between now and then, tell the asteroid/alien mothership/erupting supervolcano/robot army to kindly go fuck itself and stick around for the ending. It's juicy. Oh my god is it juicy.

It kind of seems hypocritical to hold anything back, given the subject of this particular tirade, but alas, this bridge stays soaked.

I will, however, go deep into my feelings on this matter. It's kind of therapeutic in a weird way.

Recently, and after playing Mass Effect 2 (where I steal the punchline to this set up from), I have decided on the one rule I lay out to people whose success in life directly correlates with my own. It sounds dry, overdone, and really pretty mundane given how many people have said it over the years and in what regard they have delivered it. It's vulgar, of course, but to take from the greatest angry guy in history, Lewis Black, there isn't really a word in the English language that conveys the rage in someone's voice quite like "fuck". Try as you might to find one (in my elementary school years of trying to find one, the closest I came was "frick", and that's prone to a few embarassing slip ups along the way), you just won't be able to. Thank god I stopped trying, too.

For those of you simply chomping at the bit to find out what it is, strap yourselves in.

It's "Don't Fuck with Morgan".

Doesn't that sound weird? I mean, especially coming from a fat white guy with bad acne, but just from my personality in general alone it sounds awkward.

Thing is, this is the most refined form of my "Mission Statement". I really could go into comprehensive detail, but it'd take too long. People don't have very long attention spans when you give them directions. That could just be based on my own attention span, but as I've found that there's nothing truly spectacular about me that would set me apart from a group (apart from the occasional "being an asshole" or someone who puts others in certain, unfavorable "positions"). There's no reason to believe that my attention span is the outlier on a chart of high school students.

This all stemmed from my trip to Washington DC in November. When I was there, I saw 6000 kids who all wanted to be journalists someday. That's 6000 kids who could be the only thing between me and a job as a journalist. Now, my ultimate career goal in life is to be not only a writer of some sort, but to be a world reknowned writer of some sort. I don't want my lore to end on a tombstone. I want people to read what I've written centuries from now. I want to unlock doors in peoples' minds and allow them to explore the world with the viewpoints from the extremes that I tend to offer.

When I looked at the crowds of kids in DC, I decided something. None of them are going to get in my way. None of them. If I have to scrape the skin and muscles off of their bones because they choose to impede me in some way, I'll carve my name in their fucking ribcage, but they should make no mistake: I will stop at nothing to be the best. Someday I will look down and see 6000 kids beneath me.

That is, of course, if a few of the 6000 don't get all Communist and help me to help them. If they scratch my back, I will most certainly scratch theirs. I'll even use one of those massage things from the Sharper Image.

There's middle ground, of course, but really that's just the competition. Their purpose is to show me the time to beat, so to speak.

It sounds overly confident, and really it is. The chances that I'll surpass the kids who've already got book deals at my age is slim to none, but god dammit I'm going to keep trying at it.

I will say that my new standard in life does apply to the current situation I'm in. I feel that, in a way, I am being held back and I'm getting to the point that, in a way, I'll overcome it alone. However, I keep soldiering on. I might have used a half of a resevoir to keep the flames at bay, but this bridge is smoldering.

Tomorrow, I go forward with an olive branch in my hand, the rage that threw my hands into spasms is safely tucked away in a straight jacket (although, I didn't throw away the key. Just in case). I fully expect that the next time I sit down and write one of these, this same branch will be chewed up and gnarled beyond recognition.

That's just Welsh pessimism for you, though.

I'm Mad as Hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore.

The Frustrated Bitchfest : Part One of a Million

Last night I missed an opportunity.

After nearly seeing someone almost die one night, the next I had a hell of a time. Work was smooth, easy, and almost kind of fun. Oh, what a difference 6 hours of sleep makes.

My day started at midnight, me trying to resist the urge to go jump on my new mattress and fall asleep and soldier on through a three page English paper. This lasted until about 1 AM, when my fingers and brain started whispering "fuck you in the eye" to me. I took that as a hint that I was somehow tripping balls and that the paper wasn't going anywhere. So with that I gave in and slept.

I woke up at 7, thinking I could go to my English class (that I still had to go to despite it being TAKS day) early so I could hang around with some friends until I had to go back in at 1:15. It ended up not happening that way. I had breakfast and lunch with my friends, which was cool, but I spent the rest of it at home. Better than being at school, but still kind of lame for what I was expecting out of it.

After I got to school, it went pretty normally.

In fact, everything up to 6:30 went swimmingly. After that, shit went down hill fast.

I'm not going to go into that though. That's a can of worms I'm forcing shut. I'm just going to say something stupid if I go on with that.

But the anger I was feeling swirling around inside on my drive back from the two and a half hour appointment in hell was slowly growing into rage. If it weren't for Ricky Gervais on NPR, I might have torn my steering wheel out of my car. It was kind of unsettling.

I felt this a few days ago, when I wrote a longwinded post on here about how life has decided that it will reward my hard work with a steaming pile of shit right on the top of my head. In it I lashed out at a few people, going so far as to name a few of them. I deleted it after a night's rest, mostly because I was afraid I'd lose my job over it.

It's really unsettling. I enjoy the fact that I'm fairly spontaneous, but that's started to translate into flying off the handle more than I should. For example, driving some little trash-talking shit's head into the ice during my game tonight was pretty satisfying, but it was the perfect display of what happens to me when my anger gets the best of me. The fucker deserved it, mind you, but I've long gone by the principle that violence is almost never the answer for a while. It's not like there's a diplomatic solution to on-ice arguments, but after I leveled that prick, the puck went into the corner of the other team's zone. If I hadn't been on top of the guy, I might have actually done something constructive with it.

I'm really scared that this situation will repeat itself when it really matters, like if I worked with a really annoying son of a bitch and when I was supposed to be doing something in order to earn a living, I decided to rearrange his jaw a few inches to the right.

Even more so, I'm afraid that this will carry into my personal life. I'm well aware that some people don't like my personality, which can be pretty abrasive at times. I mean, when I'm not trying to be a smartass I always end up acting like a dickish smartass. I can't imagine how much worse off I'd be if I started hitting things that annoyed me as well.

This is unfocused as hell. I'm not sure how focused I could be in my current state, but god damn.

It seems I can't have a good day anymore. They either start off great and end fucking horribly, or start with a lurch and end fantastically. There's never any middle ground.

I'm just so frustrated right now. This whole thing was a bitchfest.

I just can't wait until I actually get to start my life.

On Death

A man died at the Market Street seafood counter tonight. I was saved from the sight by a random bowel movement. It's okay, though, I'll see him when I go in tomorrow.

Yes, you read that right. I am going to see a dead man at work tomorrow. That wasn't an attempt to be funny-haha Morgan either (I suppose it's a very dry, very blue attempt).

So here's the story.

I was assigned quite a few extra duties tonight as the head honcho of our store's meat department is coming in to inspect the market tomorrow morning. One of these duties was bleaching the floors of a big vault we have to the left of the market. I got the bleach from our storage area, and just before I went to get the scrubbing brush from over in seafood, I had a thought.

"I really need to take a shit."

And so I did. It seems a bit odd to be thankfulohsothankful for needing to give Cleveland a Super Bowl ring (non-in-the-know people, the football team in Cleveland is called the Browns... taking the Browns to the Superbowl... superbowl meaning...you get the idea), but it saved me from witnessing something truly horrible. As soon as I was finished with my doodies (as opposed to duties. lazy joke, I know), I went to go fetch the scrubbing brush from Seafood. Just as I went through the double doors to the market area, one of my managers, Chris, told me to finish making the chicken kebabs that one of the meat guys, Eric, had started.

I looked around to see where Eric was, wondering why he couldn't make his own damn kebabs, and found him standing in Seafood... next to a crowd of paramedics and several of the store managers. They were huddled around someone laying on the floor. I recognized them as Jose, a guy who works in seafood.

From what I gathered in the confusion that followed, Jose had been opening a box with a knife resembling a machete that Seafood uses to cut big fillets of fishes like Salmon and Halibut. When he opened it, his arm and in turn the knife followed through, stabbing deep into the wrist he was using to stabilize the box. When I say deep, I want you to think in terms of the Marianas Trench: the bone was showing.

Jose is such a diligent worker that he went all Black Knight and insisted he was okay. From what the Seafood manager Bobby told me later, he filled an X-Large plastic glove (the largest we have) with blood. This guy was bleeding. Badly. He insisted he was okay, and just as Bobby went to call for someone to come and give him stitches, Jose collapsed inside the freezer fault.

He was unconscious, foaming from the mouth, and still bleeding pretty badly. Eric, Chris, and Bobby had to lift him out of the freezer. If I'd been there, I would've had to as well. Carrying the limp body of someone I work with out of a freezer. That's not an image I want to be stuck with for the rest of my life.

Eric, Chris, and Bobby were all pretty shaken up afterwards. Apparently in the panic of the whole experience, Jose had stopped breathing and didn't have a pulse or heartbeat for about 40 seconds. He was effectively dead for almost a minute. When he woke up, he told Eric and Bobby that he had "been on a long, dark walk". This freaked them out a whole lot.

I've seen the scientific explanation for those kinds of out-of-body experiences, but in my short time on this Earth I've learned enough not to tell a man who's just come back from death, or someone who's seen him do it, that the thing he thinks saved him isn't what actually did and is completely false. There are times for atheist diatribes, and this wasn't one of them.

I had to cover for him while everyone was catching their bearings. I thought about it all for a second. It hadn't, and still hasn't, set in that someone I see on a near-daily basis died. I started wondering about death and, as it is prone to doing, my mind started racing through all of the terrible scenarios imaginable. The images of my friends and family dying started flashing through my head. Terrible, horrible images. Luckily, before I started to curl into an insane little ball, my mom showed up at the store. Normally I don't entirely enjoy it when my mom starts embarassing me in front of complete strangers, but when she started joking around with one of the "guests" that had asked for some Grouper, acting like a dissatisfied customer to get a rise out of me, I felt as if some great weight had been lifted off my chest.

I know that the next time I go out onto an ice rink and take a slapshot, the shockwave that ripples up from the fiberglass stick into my arms will feel like a warm blanket hugging them tightly. I know that when I sit down at my lunch table tomorrow and start joking with my friends, every chuckle will feel like a side-splitting laugh. I know that when I see my dog tomorrow when I come home from school, the unconditional love she gives me will overwhelm me.

I know these things because life suddenly has a whole new added dimension of fragility. At any second, what I love most could be taken from me.

It's times like these I wish I had the faith to say that it will all be better in the next life.