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.

The Army Advances

A man stood on a hill, surrounded by nothing but open plains. His longish dark hair blew in the wind, flailing aimlessly around his face. He was getting annoyed with the single strand that seemed to be constantly getting into his eye as if it was on a mission to inconvenience him, but there were people watching, and the last thing he wanted to do was make it look like he wasn't dramatically gazing out into the future.

"Orders, sir?" a peon said from behind him. This was it. This was his moment. He'd wanted to deliver an inspiring speech since the urge to join the military had first hit him as a boy. He took a deep breath, waiting for the words to hit him. They didn't, or at least if they did it was more of a love tap.

"Onwards," he said unimpressively. Had he no restraint, he would have cursed aloud right then and there. There was no increase in the volume of his voice, no rasp in his voice that acted as a tell for his daunting life experiences, and, most regrettably of all, no emphatic finger point. He'd blown it.

"Onwards!" the peon shouted to the rag-tag team of soldiers, which amounted to maybe five on a good day when you didn't count all of the wounded that stumbled behind them, still climbing up the hill. All of them seemed to groan in unison. Onwards was not a popular course of action, it would seem. That or they were as disappointed with the man's delivery of the order as he was.

The man waited as the soldiers crawled by. Even their horses, guaranteed by the Royal Stablemaster to be the finest and most attentive in the land, seemed to have given up on life. The peon stood next to the man.

"What's our course of action, sir?" he asked, wearily looking at the wounded soldiers who brought up the rear.

"Onwards, for now," the man said.

"Yes sir, but after that?"

"The invasion commences," the man said. That was a good line, he felt. It could have used a slightly better delivery, but the material itself was pretty decent.

"Sir, shouldn't an invasion force be made up of more than seven able bodied men?"

"Not when we have our secret weapon," the man said, trying on a menacing grin. Its effect was lost on the peon, who only raised an eyebrow in confusion instead of cowering in fear.

"What would that be, sir?" The man looked at the peon, trying to pick out whether or not he was joking.

"Well I..." he started, "I figured you'd know that."

"I don't, sir. Please inform me."

"No, I mean, I put you in charge of inventory for a reason, peon."

"My name's Reikker, sir. Sergeant Reikker."

"What'd I say?"

"Peon, sir."

"Freudian slip. You'll have to forgive me."

"Whose slip?"

"Forget about it. Not important. I asked you to keep a track of inventory. Have you done that?"

"Yes sir."

"Then you know about our secret weapon then."

"No clue, sir."

"Okay, read me the inventory slip." The peon pulled a rolled up scroll out of his pouch, unfurling it and perusing over it for a few moments.

"It's not good, sir."

"What've we got?"

"Not much, sir."

"Gunpowder?"

"No sir."

"Spare swords?"

"No sir."

"Daggers, even?"

"No s- wait..." the peon examined the scroll further. "No sir."

"Okay, what does the sheet say we have?"

"Nothing, sir."

"Nothing? I know we have something."

"Not according to this sheet, sir."

"Well what does the sheet say?" The peon looked over the scroll again for a long few moments.

"We ain't got shit, sir."

"You've already said that, peon," the man started raising his voice, unsuccessfully trying to sound like he was holding back a hellish fit of rage through bared teeth. "What does the sheet say?"

"That is what the sheet says, sir." The peon flipped the scroll around to reveal that the sheet read just what the peon had said: We ain't got shit. The man stared at it dumbfounded.

"We don't have enough resources to have anything worth putting on the sheet, so we use what little resources we have to put that we don't have anything worth putting on the sheet on a sheet."

"It would seem that way, sir." The man didn't move, keeping a half-defeated, half-mortified look on his face.

"I'm starting to think we might not win this war on my good looks alone."

The Plunge List

Let me start off by clearing something up, as a few people don't seem to be able to grasp this concept quite yet. When I write that I'm going to do something on here, it rarely if ever means that I'm going to jump straight into it without thinking straight, and in some cases it'll never happen at all.

So let's get into the first NotInspiredByWhatSeemsLikeALifeChangingExperienceAtTheTimeButReallyIsn't blog post I've had for a while.

Recently, I've gotten sudden urges to go online and purchase some cheap form of transportation to anywhere. One of those "buy a ticket on the next flight out of the airport" kind of shindigs. I'm just fascinated by the thought of abandoning everything and just roaming around the world without having to worry about when I work next or how dismal my grades are or whether or not the apple of my eye returns any sentiment I might show towards them.

I suppose this is something everyone desires, the whole bit about no responsibility and whatnot, but I think this is pretty deep-seeded in me.

I've decided that I'm going to put "see the world via a boat and other outdated forms of transportation" on a list. Not a bucket list, though. I think it's implied that I'm going to see the world before I die. No point putting that on a list for the rest of my life. This is a more short-term list, or at least my currently optimistic self believes it'll be short-term.

I call it a Plunge List. Things I want to do before I take the plunge and get married. Don't get me wrong, it's still my ultimate goal to get married, have kids, and father children who'll keep me rich well into my seventies using their prodigious plate-spinning abilities and other obscure talents that only a person like me would exploit in their own children. But there are certain things I want to do before then, and that you could probably only do before then quite honestly.

1.) See the world via a boat and other outdated forms of transportation- I specify two things here: being on a boat because being surrounded by the ocean and seeing the sunset glisten on the waves every night is something that appeals to me and the other outdated forms of transportation because they're slower. Planes and automobiles just aren't as romantic as going by at a pedestrian pace on a train or something.

But the "see the world" part is the most important phrase in #1. The thing I'm most jealous of my parents for is that they've seen the world. I looked at one of my dad's old passports a few months ago and saw stamps on the back pages from countries that don't even exist anymore. Granted, the Congo isn't exactly a tourist trap (though by the name alone you'd think they'd know how to throw one hell of a dance party), but the fact that it's a.) in Africa and b.) not in Plano appeals to me greatly.

I want to walk through the streets of Rome like Caesar once did. Not in a toga or anything, but just the whole general walking thing. I'm pretty sure they did that a lot back then.

I want to go to the French countryside and replace my less-than-impressed image of France with the beautiful one that I hear so much about.

I want to go to New Zealand and Fiji and all of those other exotic sounding islands and view what an unscarred and untouched world looks like.

And yes, I want to go to Tokyo and just hang around a street or two for a few hours. One of the great things about comedy is that it can write itself sometimes, and I'm pretty sure people-watching in Tokyo would be the prime example of that.

2.) Fall from a great height- Don't look for a hidden meaning in this, because there isn't one. I literally just want to just fall out of something- a building, a plane, whatever- and land safely on the ground. This would probably be easier described as skydiving, but I'd actually prefer it if I just went without a parachute and either slowed myself down by waving my arms rapidly or got caught by something.

I hear there's some place near Las Colinas that lets you jump off of a platform and into a net. That kind of thing just screams "Do me" in the least sexual way possible.

3.) Find my tree- Now this one does have a pretty deep back story behind it. It's a metaphor, obviously (I'm of the mindset that no coming of age story is complete without at least a slight allusion to a tree. Don't ask me why, it's just one of those things that just is to me), but when I first thought of it it kind of wasn't.

The first time I ever meditated, which was last friday, I had images of white waves crashing over the crevices of my mind and washing every slightly poisonous thought away. When I went back the next day, there wasn't really much to clear away, so instead the waves revealed something to me: a lone tree sitting on a tall hill overlooking several other, smaller hills. At first, that was it. Just a tree. Just sitting there being a tree.

But then I saw myself sitting under it, looking at the sun slowly tuck itself away behind the horizon. I had my head against the trunk (this is worth noting because I despise the feel of tree bark and I'm pretty sure every little insect that ever decided to be a dick and bite or otherwise inconvenience a human being lives inside of trees) and smiling with a look on my face that said "Yes, life, I did just make you my bitch".

Then I thought about it more, focusing on that tree. Then I saw myself there again, but there was someone beside me. I didn't see her face, I didn't catch her name, and I'm fairly certain that it wasn't someone I know at present (which makes it sound like a one-late afternoon under a tree stand, but wait until just after the closing parenthesis and you'll know that's not the case), but I'm positive that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Despite the complete lack of knowledge of her identity, I know exactly who she is.

Of course, when I say "Find my tree", it's just saying finding where I feel at home. I'm not entirely sure I want to spend the rest of my life in Plano, but really it's difficult for me to imagine living anywhere else. The final act of my three part quest would be finding such a place and watching the sunset with the most beautiful woman in the world.

This was fun. I miss writing these without feeling obliged to.

On Meditation

I'd like to describe to you the feeling of a clear mind.

Today I woke up once again realizing that you can't spend every second of your life in the presence of people who bring out unbounded happiness. My bed has shifted between a safehaven and a box of solitude in the last few weeks, but now I'll see it as something different: a place of rest. Nothing more and nothing less.

I was wrestling with raw emotions today once again, overcome by the feelings I get when I'm around a certain, wonderful person. I woke up, got my paycheck, and came home to finally rid my left ear of the water that had decided to live there in the days prior.

Then I went out and bought a soccer ball and ran around a field with it.

Then I went home and finished the second season of The Last Airbender.

Then I had a talk with someone. Someone who revealed things to me that I was desperately needing to hear. Afterwards, I got up, went outside to my patio, pulled up a chair facing my back yard and the angry skies above it, and I closed my eyes.

I've never experienced and out of body experience before, and I'm sorry to disappoint you in saying I still haven't, but what I DID experience on my patio lacks a concrete definition with out of body being the closest thing to it.

The sky was grey then. Barely any light was leaking through the clouds. But I saw light over the darkness. Beautiful, white light flowing through my mind like waves on a beach. With every concentrated breath I took, another wave washed over me. Hours earlier I felt downtrodden, apprehensive, and pathetic.

Now I feel... cleansed. Every emotion that's flowed through me in the last two weeks has suddenly fallen away. I'm completely free of previous inhibitions and now, thanks to someone's revelation, happy in knowing that the person who kept me from falling into an abyss days ago has someone to tell her how spectacular she is.

And that's what describes me right now. Happy. Happy on the verge of tears. I feared what horrible things and thoughts this day would bring, but now I don't feel a thing.

I'm ready to move on.

Breakout

There exists a wall, in front of which is hope, ambition, feelings of warmth and joy, and the bliss of ignorance, the bliss that cannot be regained once it is lost.

Behind it is the truth. The truth, at its best, can at be at most only slightly worse than what lies on the bright side of the wall. From there it descends to the worst things imaginable.

Optimism brought on by summertime romances is turned into a bleak outlook on a closing timeframe.

Only a few weeks. Oh what you would give for the truth to be so much brighter. Oh what you would give for “slightly worse”.  There is so much you could do, so much you could say.

You could tell her what she means to you, tell her your world is brightened by her written words, blinded by them when spoken. Tell her that while the earth around you descended into the darkness, you were held up by a single, wonderful thread.

But then that wall comes down, either with a brazen crash or with the expert craftsmanship of an artisan breaking it down brick by brick. The truth is seen, whether it is on cue or not, and everyone feels slightly disappointed if not mortified by it.

With the fall of the wall comes the swarm of the things it was holding back. Though it does not lead every swarm, Death commands the horde in one way or another.

But it begs the question, at what speed would you prefer the inevitable charge to come? Brick by brick? Slowly, painfully?

Or all at once? Brief, eviscerating?

The horde that has stormed across the place a wall once was has decided to try me with both. Disappointment leads the first group. No brick remains in its fortified place and he has descended upon me, the strength of an army pulling at my heartstrings.

Death leads the second and he is slowly on his way, biding his time to make his ever-growing shadow seem more ominous and, in the long run, more painful. He will hang over the lives of many on his journey towards the final blow, and he will do it with a smile on his face.

The prick.

Inigo Rane feels like he's been hit by a Mack Truck at present. It may or may not take him several days to recover. 

This is dedicated to Morgan's life in Plano, how sweet it was while it lasted.