Sunday, December 26, 2010

$@*& Words

If you've never met me...don't.  But if you have met me, you're probably aware that I'm not exactly a user of the gentlemen's English.  I randomly and sometimes without consideration to proper sentence structure, insert a tasty sentence enhancer, as Spongebob's Patrick calls them.  So instead of, "Pass me the salt please, Grandma," I might say, "Pass me the damn salt please, Grandma."  Might not be proper but she's sure as hell not gonna drag her feet passing me anything ever again.  But therein lies the problem.  Situations where I find myself sitting down in a fancy eatery probably aren't the same situations where I can call my dinner companion an asshole at the top of my lungs, as I frequently am wont to do.  According to some it's not nice.  Apparently it's not proper.  But why?

Welcome back.  But seriously, why?  I scoured the known internets looking (and if anybody who reads this scours and actually finds something, I was drunk when I scoured so...) for some goddamn reason that if I would have said goddamn reason in a room full of grown-ass people, more than half of them would have looked at me like I just adopted a box of newborn kittens and then sold them to a butcher...not because he wanted to own a dozen cats but because of the eating of them...possibly after wrapping them in bacon.  Yeah, like that face you just made, exactly!  Why are there words that exist in language that make people turn their noses up at you in disgust?  They're just words, right?  Why is the word shit any different than the word poop?  
The only thing I could find resembling anything close to an answer about this ridiculousness is that, apparently, Social Norms dictate swears.  I'd like to meet this social Norm/Norms and ask what their problem is with my dirty mouth.  I'd like to imagine the Society of Social Norms meeting in school gym, dressed like the Women's Temperance Unions of the 20's, complaining about how they heard someone say H-E-double hockey sticks.  I point out the women part because it's hard to imagine a man there unless his wife dragged him there under threat of taking away his Monday Night Football.  


Don't get me wrong, when I'm in a public place and I hear some street-tough high schoolers dropping the f-bomb every twelve seconds, even I think that's unnecessary.  I'm not saying that I walk onto a crowded playground every day and let out a string of expletives that would make Tarantino cry in his milk, but when I'm out and about, I like to, you know, speak like an adult.  If I say ass instead of butt or damn instead of doggoneit, what is the big deal?  They are all just words.  It's just that some stuck up priss got his/her feelings all hurt for no good reason, which seems to be the norm in America these days, and decided there were things their baby ears couldn't hear.  Well, shit, is one of my favorite words, has been since I've been able to talk.  I also love the word poop, and if you wanna know why, say it aloud to yourself or write it down.  I dare you not to laugh.  Shit and poop are the same word.  At the end of the day, they mean the same exact thing.  But, children can say and hear poop.  If they hear or say shit, they get to see Santa gunned down in front of them.  Who decided this!?


And it isn't just swear words that are taboo.  Some of the words that sometimes find their way into my vocabulary and have been there for a long time, aren't even swear words.  Some are words that are used to describe certain groups of people in this day and age and those groups of people find those words offensive.  The silly thing about most of these words is that they have several different definitions and only recently became 'offensive' slang.  Words like retard and fag and gay, words that, used in the right situation, are perfectly harmless to say.  Back in my day, you really didn't get in trouble if you said, 'that math assignment was gay', because in most instances, math was and is gay.  Gay as in stupid, not gay as in homosexual.  I think my generation was in a race to get in Guinness for Most Words That Mean the Same As Stupid.  I can understand that when said in a derogatory way against a person, they can get offensive.  It's the context, right?  Yeah, I bet that if I was in a crowded room and said, 'Quick, someone retard the growth of that hibiscus!' or 'Someone throw another faggot on the fire!' I wouldn't get away with it.  Someone in that room wouldn't know that retard means slow and faggot means bundle of sticks.  Someone would have a fake conniption fit and I say fake because at the end of the day, most people who get offended by derogatory words are just doing it because it makes them feel like a good person...which usually makes you a selfish, terrible person.  


I guess I can understand the snafu over derogatory words being used but I guess I'm just the kind of person that would never call a mentally challenged person retarded as an insult just like I would never call a fat person fat as an insult.  Just gave myself a little brown nose there, didn't I?  I would call an asshole retarded, though.  It's definitely all about context, it's just too bad that good citizens don't have the wherewithal to think more than five seconds before they jump to shit on everyone else's fun.  I know that young minds are being taught these words and the wrong ways to use them, but young minds can first be taught to be good people you know, by their parents, instead of by some random stranger they overheard saying fag in the mall.  


If we're gonna start making it socially unacceptable to say some of these words because human beings just can't help themselves, then every word that has ever been incorrectly used to insult someone has to go too.  So a short list would be: white, black, Asian, girl, lesbian, Jewish, cracker...do I have to go on?  My solution is, instead of writing a list on your child's brain of words that are naughty and will get them sent straight to Satan, we send the entire population of the world through an extensive training course on quote/unquote bad word usage and context.  It would cost uber-billions of dollars but when I'm in public around a lot of worried-about-everyone-else-cause-Jesus-said-to mothers, I want to call math retarded and I want the mothers to go, "that's true, it is stupid!"  Cause it is!  Why isn't anyone thinking of me in this situation?  Anyone?  And let's stop on this warm holiday to thank and bless the MPAA and the FCC just a little bit.  If it wasn't for them, we'd be hearing the fuck and Jesus words in the wrong context on TV and we'd be denied the random, gratuitous violence that barely earns movies a PG these days.  Hooray for priorities and Merry Christmas you antiquated dickwads.  The 1600s called and they want their Puritan, witch burning ideals back.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Voting Is For Old People...It Is.

So the vote is coming, today to be exact.  Except for all the people who already voted early...whaaat?  There's this thing about voting that puts me off to it that I can't quite put my finger on.  I guess if I could decide exactly what I want to vote for, that would make it a little better, but it's not exactly easy to pick what you want when you have to vote for a person and the person stands for a hundred different things.  Oh wait, no, I guess we've narrowed it down now to two choices.  You either get the baby-killing liberal or the Jesus-freak conservative.  Glad we have freedom of choice here.


America loves to divide itself.  As a strong nation, what better way to show your strength than to point out your differences every minute of every day?  Hell, our government is basically running on the fumes of that idea today.  'Instead of having our people's interests in mind, we should just all agree to think exactly the same way.  Unless you're the other guys who all think the opposite, but still all agree.  Bam, government.  Now let's vote.  Oh, 50/50, how the hell did that happen?  Let's waste millions bickering now until we go on vacation.'  That's what CSPAN is like in my head since I couldn't possibly bring myself to watch it.  I can't believe that a country stood united for a couple months after a horrifying disaster and then effectively began to split itself right down the middle and now is like a not funny episode of the Halo comedy show, Red vs. Blue, with actually more violence and name calling if you can believe it.


Republican.  Democrat.  Those are our two choices.  Yeah sometimes the Independent guy wins, but what are there, two of them in Congress?  Great.  That'll sway the tide.  Really, when it comes down to it, people just vote the same color all the way down the ticket, which doesn't sound like a good thing to me.  I'm sure that there are those average normal people who do their research and vote based on that.  That's a good thing.  But seriously...I'm guessing that 90% of the voting population, while watching daytime court TV, get all of their information from those awesome advertisements.  As far as I can tell from those ads, the way to get into politics is to be better at calling your opponent a dick.  And you can literally say anything you want, including slander, in those ads.  I'm sure that's exactly how George Washington and Thomas Jefferson imagined the American voting process turning out.  Also I'm sure if Washington thought of the invention of the TV, his wooden teeth would have blown straight out of his head.


And the best part is, that when the politicians finally get to the part where they have to decide things that affect us as people, you know, the people that elected them, instead of working together to sort out problems, they take the same sides on every single issue.  Bill proposed by a Democrat in a Democrat run country?  Republicans must destroy it because...well there's really no reason except that they're sore losers.  And it happens the other way around too.  I used to think Republicans were the bad guys but, they're really all bad.  It's tough to get up the urge to vote when you feel like you're voting in another bickering idiot who is just going to look at his name tag, see what color it is, and follow everyone else who has the same color name tag.  Oh and it costs a lot of money that according to everyone we don't have.  Do we actually have to pay off the national debt?  According to some of our men in power, the world will end soon so we probably won't have to.  The hypocrisy is hysterical too, now that the liberals like the government, the conservatives hate it. Years ago, the Bush years, when Democrats said anything against the administration, they were chastised for not blindly loving their president.


So, I think I would vote...if I didn't have to rely on people.  Because, and I don't know if any of you know this, and yes I started the sentence with because, people are liars.  People say things they don't mean to get things they want.  And people like money.  And they make deals with people for money.  And the whole damn system is rather corrupt, in my humble and completely uneducated opinion.  I'm sure there's a couple good people in there but, the division of the parties and their inability to get anything done when America needs it most proves otherwise.  America voted for change last time, and now the other Americans are voting for another change, I'm just wondering if any of this voting is ever going to put someone in who actually changes anything that the population is ever going to be happy with.


So when you go to the polls this Tuesday...or already did since I'm damn late in writing this, uh...I don't know what point I was trying to make here.  Only vote if you know what you're talking about?  Don't vote based on your favorite color?  Voting is lame? Stop watching political commercials?  Stop believing anything rich white people say?  I don't know, I said a lot of things that nobody probably cares about because it seems to be the hip thing to vote these days, just because.  Everybody at Columbia wanted me to vote, but I think they wanted me to vote for legalization mostly.  And thanks to the year 2000, I don't believe that my vote matters in the prez election anyway.  If anyone can convince me otherwise, that's cool.  But I guess I'm not hip or with it and I'll probably get yelled at a lot because while I was writing this giant thing, I forgot to vote.  Oops.


Oh and just to piss off people with Fox News stuck up their rears...I get all of my news from Jon Stewart and the Daily Show and of course Colbert.  And I believe every freakin' word of it.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Regulars No More

Have you ever lost something and not realized how much you depended on it until it was gone?  A giant empty hole in your soul appears and no amount of late night video games, classy southern bourbon, or re-runs of Cheaters can fill the void?  We all have our routines, our niches that we inevitably fall into in our day to day lives.  We're humans, that's what we do.  We find patterns that make us feel comfortable.  Our niche was a bar, a pub to be precise.  For nearly three solid years, the question of 'What are we doing tonight?' was usually answered with, 'The Pub.'  It started off as just another place in town to drink a couple down on the way to somewhere else to do the exact same thing, but as we frequented the joint, it became more than a boozy pit-stop.  Within less than a month, we went from being nameless customers to near 'Norm!' status.  It became our Cheers, our Moe's Tavern, our Paddy's Pub, and we could pretty much do whatever we wanted.  We were safe there and 99.9% of the time, the owner's fought hard to make sure we felt that.  And all was well in the universe...except for global climate change and politicians...everything else was well. I guess not cancer...  When tiny cracks appear in a flawless facade, sometimes you fail to notice.  You're used to it being flawless and it's the furthest thing from your mind that something could be wrong.  But under the surface, factors beyond our control were tearing apart the one haven we had, the only one we'd nurtured over a three year span and now that it's gone, closed with little hope of returning, it's painfully apparent how much we relied on it being there to suit our drunken needs.  

There were some people that didn't rely on it as much as we did.  People had issues with it, it's understandable.  People have their own opinions, their own preferences and it sure as hell isn't my place to tell them they're wrong.  But it wasn't the people who just didn't like it that bothered me, it was the people that outright despised it, and either assumed I felt the same way, or worse, knew that I was a regular and still decided to let me know their insecure feelings about it.  It takes a certain kind of asshole to tell you to your face that something you like is insignificant, or terrible, or stupid.  And I'm not talking about differing opinions here.  I'm talking about the kind of person that walks up to you while you're wearing say, a Led Zeppelin shirt, glances at your shirt, and then sticks their nose up in the air and says, "You know that Led Zeppelin band is a real sack o' shit."  And as you stare at them, dumbfounded, they gurgle through a list of reasons that they most likely read on Let'sHateEverythingThat'sPopular.com (or in Rolling Stone, but that would be the opposite since they like everything in that brown nosing publication).  They're like Patrick Bateman regurgitating what the newest in-complaint is, word for word from the message boards right before they axe you in the forehead.  It's those stellar blobs of humankind that really get to me because of how forced it seems for them to spew hate when their casual, and truthful, opinion would work ten times better.

It's easy for me to sit up here on this rather tall horse of mine and act like I'm some kind of keyboard saint but...nope, no buts, it is pretty easy.  'Cause I went there, and drank there, and kept going back there because that's where we could go and have a good time.  And the people that apparently couldn't just sit back and have a good time and felt like it was too dead, or too expensive, or too uptight, well maybe that wasn't your joint.  Maybe you shouldn't have bitched about it when you weren't there and then kept going back week in and week out and spending money there, which suggests you did actually enjoy it.  Maybe you should have stopped going if you were so adamant about it.  Maybe you could have found a less classy, cheaper, hole-in-the-wall dive bar that sells rusty cans of Schlitz for a nickel where you could find more of your fellow hill people.  Hell, maybe then you could have found a woman who actually viewed your veiled innuendo as dashing.  Probably not...even hill people have standards when it comes to their siblings.  In the end, nobody forced anyone to go there and nobody forced anyone to stay and nobody forced anybody to stage one of the most ill-conceived boycotts in history, although a lot of us did appreciate the humor in it all.  


So now, we wind on down the road, like the end of an Incredible Hulk episode, searching for that next Mecca of booze, billiards, polite conversation, and the same goddamn karaoke song week after week.  One day we'll find our destiny, our place in the night, and we'll sit there, sipping our Gin Rickeys, and our children who we irresponsibly brought out with us will say, "Daddy, tell us about the Pub."  And we'll all chuckle and light our cigars with our hundred dollar bills and say, "Heroes drank there once, long ago."  And they'll be like, "Who?"  And we'll say, "Go to your room." 

Sunday, October 3, 2010

In the Beginning...There Was Blog

Ha!  The title sounds like someone was talking and then threw up at the end of the sentence.  Blooggggggg.  Gross.

There's a certain feeling I get when starting one of these things and I can feel that feeling rising up now.  I feel like I have to be poetic, bust out my thesaurus (I swear many more people secretly use one than I ever thought even knew what the hell a thesaurus was, it's crazy the way people think people talk) and use classy vocab words I would never say, and write with a structure of the Power Writing days of fifth grade.  The simple fact is I write like I speak and those lucky few that know me know that I am no linguist.  And I mean, a blog?  Really?  Get outta here!  No, wait, don't get outta here.  Stay here and read, cause that's why you've been drawn like a moth to the moon to a blog site, rite?  I mean right?  And what better activity for a bored, south-sub-suburbanite, nerd-since-birth to do with his time than to type up every little emotion and thought that runs through that gray mass the eggheads have named a 'brain?'  Actually, I can think of about a zillion things, but if I'm stuck here, than so are you.  I've got some stuff to say, none of it very relevant, a lot of it crass.  I mean, I started it with half a Bible quote and then made a joke about vomit.  It's uphill from here, right?  I hope to not offend on purpose unless purpose is made, but I probably will offend and sometimes with a purpose and in those times most definitely on it.  That's usually why I write these puppies to began with, these word vomits with an end game, because something offended me or made me think.  And usually when I get offended by something I make an effort to think and understand why and putting it down on eee-lectronic paper is a soothing bit of therapy.  

But I could always write my feelers down on The Facebook (in theaters now), yes?  Facebook feels too high school year book to me, not the kind of place for the serious thoughts and opinions that a reputable blog on a random site on the internet is made for...especially this blog of mine.  Nobody wants drama with their long lost high school chums, they want to write in their end of school year book every day.  Instead of 'Have a good trip, See you next Fall!' we write 'Hey there's your face in a small cube next to tinier cubes with all those other people you know!  I'll glance at it again tomorrow!'  Spoonfuls of sugar and sunshine it is, or that's what I think it's supposed to be.  And I'm not knocking Facebook, I think it's a great tool to stay in touch and for people to tell us when they're eating dinner or using the can, I just don't think it should be a soapbox for grievances, although it's too often used as such and sometimes with a baffling attempt at anonymity.  'Hey I hate you, you know who you are!'  And now, so does the Northern Hemisphere...thanks.

Now a random internet blog penned by one of the six billion folks on Earth and read by even fewer, that's my kinda soapbox.  And I kinda like to write, so what better than to catch the loose shit spilling out of my brain on a daily basis and throw it down in cyberspace?  But I do tend to rant.  If you've gotten this far, you figured that out.  I do tend to tangent...don't think that's the right usage there...but I'll give it my best to stay on the track.  And I gotta try not to make this a 'listen to me bitch' blog or a 'look how goddamn cool I am' blog or a 'I deserve to be heard, shout from the rooftops, loudest is right, Glenn Beck' blog.  Although I do go on a tear (really English language?  Tear?  Tear?  Unoriginal swine) once in a great while, I promise to attempt to try to make an effort not to bitch...too much.  But we do live in a world where if someone bitches loud enough and long enough, some poor sap will give in and give them everything they want.  So, I guess if that's the case, we'll just have to see...