Stick This Science in Your Pipe and Smoke it, Yo!

Have you ever watched National Geographic's "Extreme Universe"? You should if you can take the heat! It's the equivalent of watching a bunch of sooper brilliant scientists throwing themselves a really bitchin' rave. There's a British narrator who is obviously the puppet master of the whole affair. He speaks about things like the Kuiper belt, cloud formations and solar winds in this darkly menacing yet smooth and sultry tone that would suggest that he's backing you up against a wall to just bang the sweet life out of you. For every 1.5 words he speaks, about twenty-five images vaguely related to the topic at hand flash across the screen. There's a lot of time lapse shots and white flashes and electronic music. It's totally extreme to the fuckin' max!

The best part of the show is the "scientists" part. They talk about hard science with confidence! There's never any of that sad business you see at parties where the one, solitary, way-too-smart-to-be-for-real dude tries to field drunken questions like "Why's the Sun so big?!" all night long. Poor guy. He's just trapped there in the kitchen, visibly scanning his painfully large brain, desperately searching for normal people words and pop culture comparisons miles beneath his wider understanding of the universe, all so that he can placate the questioner and make them go away.

It's like watching someone try to find a needle in the haystack of human stupidity. The explanation will almost surely boil down to something like a quote from Everybody Loves Raymond and a math equation with letters in it. That, along with a lot of ferocious gesturing and blinking as if to try to blink himself into another room, behind a plant where you can't find him. Nobody wins in that scenario. Your shallow curiosity is left unfulfilled and now the genius is uncomfortable.

But not these geniuses!! No way, bro! They deliver the goods in plain English with genuine enthusiasm and a demeanor that says "As soon as I'm done bringing you turds up to speed on wormholes, I'm goin' home and gettin' laid! That's right, I got some wormholes of my own to explore tonight. How do you like them apples?!" There's even some obese Kenny Rogers type character in a cowboy hat who demonstrates how strong the winds of Neptune are by sandblasting a raw chicken to bits! WOAH! Wind is some gnarly shit! The only thing that would make this show even cooler is if everybody wore sunglasses.

I don't even know if I'm really writing about this right now or if I'm in the middle of the longest seizure anyone has ever had. All I know is that it's 4:30 in the morning and last thing I remember seeing was Extreme Universe. That's how extreme it is, dudes. It's so fuckin' hostile, it scrambles your brain and makes sleeping not happen. Like ADHD on steroids wrapped in crystal meth. SCIENCE!!

***Donation Button Disclaimer!***

Alright, dudes. I am well aware that as of right now, the majority of you guys reading this thing (whatever this thing is) are friends of mine. Or friends of friends. Or enemies of friends. Or my mom. Whatever you are, you may be feeling a bit cheesed out about the little donation box I just put on my page. To those of you who find this tactic super gross on my part, I understand. But please allow me a moment to plead my case!

Thanks.

Okay. First of all, I thought about posting ads on the page. I even did it for a minute and was overtaken with that horrible, itchy feeling doing something to other people that you don't like done to you gives you. I HATE ads. They steal your life force. So, I thought a tiny donation box would be the lesser of two evils. Also, there are a couple of things motivating me to keep this thing going right now.

1) A deep and sincere wish to not die, homeless and alone in a puddle of my own urine. Therefore, I should probably earn money doing what I love to do. I love to cut hair. It's pretty dang fun but I love to write about weird shit even more. If I could actually do exactly what I am doing right this second (not the apologizing for money grubbing part, but the writing part) for the rest of my life, I'd be the happiest camper in the trailer park! For reals.

2) The husband and I are moving to England in a year. An American dollar is worth about one square of toilet paper in England. Therefore, we are going to have to come up with about a football field's worth of toilet paper to make this work. Every bit of cash that comes our way is going into savings this year. So donations would help pay for toilet paper for our personal use!

So, yeah. There you have it. If you like reading this thing enough and have the cash to spare, please feel free to donate. If you're all like "go fuck yourself", feel free to not donate. If you're super broke, do NOT donate. No matter what you do, I appreciate you stopping by my page and I hope to see you again!!

Don't worry. I can't actually see you. Thanks, friends!

Shaking My Fist at the 3:30pm Night Sky.

I just watched a gazelle try to outrun a tiger on television and got jealous of the gazelle's ability to actually run. It's okay, I win. The tiger killed it. It can't run now.

You're seriously not supposed to break a sweat from folding towels! I need to get the fuck out of my apartment and breathe some real air. The problem is that while the real air is twenty degrees, the air inside my apartment is about ninety degrees. Why is it ninety degrees? Because my downstairs neighbor lady is roughly one million years old (give or take a year) and cranks her heat up so high that it radiates up through the floor. I've become strangely acclimated to it, even though smothering heat combined with Seattle's two and a half hours of Winter daylight makes facing the outside world seem about as appealing as brushing a dinosaur's teeth. So basically, I'm turning into a baked potato with hands and a face. I can't take it anymore. I'm gonna walk around the block! I may even go two blocks! I'm feeling crazy!!

Aaaaaaaaand there she goes. Ol' Tubby Wubberson out on her "Take that Winter, you stupid, stupid dick!" waddle around the block. She'll probably just end up at the conveyor belt sushi joint down the street again and really go for the gold like she usually does. Plate after plate of super healthy deep fried fish doused in mayo, then rolled up into salty rice with more mayo dumped all over it. Yum. The best part is that this particular chain of sushi restaurants is known for lighting their dining area up like a grow house. So, even if you tuck yourself into a private little corner, satellites in outer space can totally see you stuffing your face through the ceiling.

Wish her luck. She needs your good vibes to pull her out of her gross hermit funk. She needs you to tell her to stop referring to herself in the third person. She needs help to stop asking for help. She needs help.

xoxo

New Years Neverlutions

Every new year is a gift. It's an opportunity to loose the shackles holding you to that brick wall of failure called "last year". It's a whole new world of possibility and promise of something you don't have but want really bad. Therefore it is important that you make that something attainable for yourself by embracing those qualities that make you who you are. This means acknowledging not only your strengths but your weaknesses, too. My weakness is my strength. It's an ability to get through life marginally unscathed by my shitty outlook on it. But who doesn't want to better themselves once an occasion to do so arises?

It is because of my wish to become a better person despite a total lack of interest in self improvement that I have tailored this year's resolutions to my horrible attitude, using non-committal language and reverse psychology. On myself. They look something like this:

"I should eat more cereal. I should ONLY eat cereal. Cereal is the Water of Life."

"Saving money is stupid. Who saves money?? What are you trying to save it from? A shark attack?"

"It isn't nice for parents to deprive their children of the magical feeling only saying the f word in public can give you. I should probably be the one to show those kids how it's done."

"Going to the gym is exactly like begging a staph infection to hop up onto your body and live there."

"I need a drink."

I think if I stick with whatever the hell these declarations are, I might somehow make something happen, sometime. Maybe. I don't know. It's not really up to me, is it? But good luck to you! I hope all of your New Years wishes come true and that you become the awesomest person you can possibly imagine yourself to be this year. You deserve it! Just make sure your New Years resolutions are in a language your more dickish side can understand so it doesn't feel left out of the process. Otherwise it might strike out when you least expect it!

Now get out there and have yourself a Happy New Year! I'm going back to bed.

Pizza War. What is it Good For? Absolutely Nothing.

Do you ever pull a pizza revenge? Probably not because you're an adult and you don't see food as a form of ammunition. But just in case you're curious, it's when you start your day with something really delicious and terrible for you, like biscuits and gravy and a bloody Mary. You're feeling all warm and happy, maybe a little tired but life is good. Lunch rolls around and you're all like "You know what you want, tummy?" and it's like "No! What?" and you go "A HOTDOG!!" and it's like "Hooray! You're a genius!"

You get on a bit of a roll...someone offers you a nice cookie or a slice of cake and you go "Hey, tummy. Is this cool?" and it's all like "Define cool." and you're like "Um, are you looking at this cookie? It's totally covered in pink frosting! That's the Webster's definition of cool." and it's like "Reeeeally?? You NEVER eat the ones with pink frosting! Does that mean I get to slave away on sugar and Crisco all afternoon, on top of all this mystery meat? I cant wait!"

Such negativity on the part of your stomach not only cuts through your enthusiasm like a hot knife but just plain hurts your feelings. You want to get back that best friends, you-and-me-against-the-world feeling the two of you shared not minutes before. So you eat only half of the cookie in an attempt to appease your stomach but course, by this time you've pissed it off and it doesn't appreciate any attempt at compromise. It's like that roommate who pretends to love partying until you try to host a party, at which point it starts bitching and moaning about having to work at 7 am and could you please throw away your own beer cans for once?

So it pitches a little tantrum which forces you to back off the snacks for a few hours but at this point, you're getting a bit resentful, yourself. Isn't this your life? Shouldn't you be able to eat whatever you want without your belly going AWOL? It's so unfair! You patiently wait for the tantrum to subside so you can get back to your super fun day and end it on a good note. You've got a pizza on the way and you don't want it to get cold!

An hour or so goes by. All seems calm on the battlefront and that pizza ain't getting any warmer so you hastily seize your moment. But no! It's too soon! You just walked into the eye of a perfect storm! What seemed like a past tense tantrum is now a super volcano of anger and mutiny! It's like you broke a battery in half and ate it.

"FUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOU!!" you scream to your stomach as you reach for slice after slice of pizza, gorging yourself until you don't even know where you are anymore. You can no longer hear the cries for mercy, for you are far, far away. "YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!" Eventually you pass out on the couch around 4 am. Like so many times before, you wake up feeling bloated, thirsty and alone. Sometimes the price of battle is too high. In the wise words of Dan Folgelberg, bearded songster of the '70s:

"Lessons learned are like
Bridges burned
You only need to cross them but once
Is the knowledge gained
Worth the price of the pain?
Are the spoils worth the cost of the hunt?"

If "the hunt" is pizza and the "the spoils" is your own body, then, no. Obviously no, they are not. Eat a salad.

Bathe Different

I was watching a slasher film the other day when something very strange happened. I realized that seeing some poor girl get hacked to pieces by a chainsaw made me feel absolutely nothing. No fear, no empathy, nothing. I began to wonder if I had finally become the psychopath I always knew I had it in me to be. Then suddenly, it dawned on me that I had just been to a video arcade prize shop the night before where I was raped in the peepers by these:


If you can't tell from the small photo, they are rubber ducks with celebrity faces on them. I thought to myself "Wow. Those are the most life-alteringly fucked up things I have seen in three decades of existence." But they weren't for long. I turned the corner and was greeted by this:


If you could cook a nightmare down to some purer form, grind it into a powder and snort it up through a large straw, you could then begin to appreciate the sheer terror I felt as this stared at me from behind the plastic. What's worse is that in order to win one of these monsters, you'd either have to be some idiot savant of gaming and beat every game in the arcade three times over or blow your entire mortgage on it. They cost roughly 180,000,000 points. I think a tiny, plastic soccer ball cost 50,000 points.

Other highly prized items included seat cushions vaguely resembling the ghosts from Pac-Man. Of course, they had to be won individually so until you complete the collection, you just have three flat ghost pillows sitting out of context in your house. There were lots of stuffed animals which would start to fall apart on contact with your skin and several nearly life size, obscure characters from very outdated Japanese video games. I didn't stick around long enough to find out, but I'm pretty sure the grand prize was a framed photo of the arcade franchise's CEO flipping the winner off with both hands whilst being blown by a hooker.

So, you see, I now no longer have feelings. I'm like one of those ghost cushions, alive but not alive, waiting to see the weirdo that won me drag another child down to his basement to "play video games" with him.

The Road Home is Paved With Fruitcakes

It's Christmastime. A time for giving, a time for family, a time to reflect on the months behind us and look forward to the months ahead. But most of all, it's a time to eat weird, gelatinous grandma food. Year after year I have struggled to understand how the type of food every cell in my body begs me not to put in my mouth has come to be a time honored tip of the hat to Jesus. I think I may have finally stumbled onto a likely hypothesis:

One day, not so very long ago, everyone over the age of 70 was whisked away together to some sort of magical jellyfish planet where they lived for ten years. Everything was all colorful and special and glazed there. It was the best time of their lives. But alas, as we humans tend to do, they overindulged in the bounty of dense, rubbery foods the elderly love so much not to have to chew. The Jellyfish people grew increasingly resentful as their food supplies dwindled. Then one day, without so much as a warning, the old people were violently ripped from their gummy paradise and exiled back to Earth with nothing to eat but Earth food.

Cold, shivering and devoid of joy, they hastily pieced together a menu consisting of wobbly cakes molded into shapes, unnaturally pigmented fruits contained within bricks of sickly sweet bread, and strange, translucent gravies. Indisputably disturbing as each of these concoctions are, these pale comparisons to the bountiful fruits of a superior planet are all these poor refugees can muster up to pay homage to a golden age. A better age. Though not a one of these elderly folk dare speak of this time for fear of being dismissed as batshit crazy, they toil away each Christmas to bring these dishes to our tables and share a small fraction of unknowable bliss with us, their loved ones.

It is a mourning, a celebration, a prayer. I think these people hope to be returned to what they see as their home and who would want to deny them that? This is why you eat their food. Because even though you know it is fucking disgusting, you love your grandma and want her to get to Jelly Heaven. Merry Christmas, everyone! Please pass the fruity rum cake balls with dates and candied pineapples. And a shot of something to wash that shit down because it's not going down on it's own!