Bus Demons and Pain on the Wall

I don't have a television in my apartment. So, for entertainment I went to Staples and bought a giant piece of white paper and hung it up on my wall above my couch. And in my free time I just doodle on my wall. I usually draw on it right before I go to bed or right after I wake up so a lot of the doodles have a kind of unsettling creepiness to them.

Like this morning I got out of bed and went over to the wall and drew a giant, weary old man's head with droopy cheeks and wild, thinning hair and sad crinkly eyes.

And then I added bunny ears and buck teeth and whiskers to that. And then I gave him tiny rabbit legs coming out of his chin and little front paws coming out of the sides of his cheeks. And I gave him a little speech bubble that says,

"I want to grow up to be an Iron Chef. But that still won't stop the pain."

See for yourself. I'm not gonna lie about this stuff.

And then I woke up a little more and looked at it and thought, "uh...Andy. That's, uh, that's not quite right." But I still thought it was funny and kind of cool and that, you know, maybe I'm just a little weird.

Then I got on the bus and realized that public transportation in real life is way scarier and demonic than my giant old-man faced bunny creatures.

I get on and it's super crowded so some people have to stand and there's this girl standing right in front of me who yells out to her friend in the back of the bus, "I've never been on public transportation before!" and then the bus starts moving and she almost trips which causes her knees to buckle with laughter as she begins maniacally cackling right in front of my face.

And I'm looking up and her mouth is completely open and full of big, bright white teeth that are jutting out beyond her lips. She's got this huge grin that makes her molars visible and she's laughing and laughing like a demon about to devour a soul-flavored cheeto while she's waving a giant thermos of coffee around.

I just don't understand how never riding a bus can bring out that kind of evil glee. She said, "I've never been on public transportation before!" the way a witch in a horror movie would say, "I've never eaten human before! HAHAHAHA!" right before she flays your body and uses the skin as pie crust.

AND THEN!

Later,

Another guy on the bus was looking around at how crowded it was and goes, "Dude, this is so egregious."

Which is totally not how that word works!
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But, to be fair and to try to remain positive...I...uh...most people on the bus were not demons or misusing big words. Yet. We're all horrible people in some moments. Some are just horrible in more moments than others.

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Potential Posts to Social Media: See a guy draw on a wall and get scared by a bus! Also: explicit pictures of the rare: Weary Overweight Rabbit Man

Juniper Brunches OR What happens when I get put in charge of a running club

(edits in bold)

Hey Everybody!

If you're reading this, then you put your name and email into our computer-ma-bob. 

SURPRISE! We know how email works!

We also know other stuff like great places to run in Williamsburg and where you can buy running shorts with sunflowers and dollar bills on them.

So you should schlep on down to the corner of [CLASSIFIED!]. Since [CLASSIFIED] is  [CLASSIFIED]  afternoon, our first official practice will  [CLASSIFIED]  on Thursday. If you can't make Thursday, we meet in the same spot at the same  [CLASSIFIED]  every weekd [CLASSIFIED] . 

We like to run fast and far. Oftentimes, both at once. So, if that is something you like and you find pleasure in things you enjoy: you might find us rather palatable (<--- STOLEN/REFERENCE FROM REGGIE WATTS)

If you have any questions, resp [CLASSIFIED] nd to this email and I'll probably be able to help.

Th [CLASSIFIED] nks
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Leadership. My leadership style is like Mr. Owl from those old Tootsie Pop commercials.

Look at me with my humongous eyes and my hat shaped like either a house or an arrow indicating how I'm sitting in a tree branch while my brain is tripping all of the sky-balls.

You come to me with your problems and I'm just gonna grab that lollipop out of your hand and say, "One, TUH-HOO, THREE!" and hand that stick right back to you!

Or in other words, I'll give you an answer but it's gonna make you feel confused and mistrusting of my judgement and I'm gonna get free candy out of it.

(hehehe, look at that kid's butt sticking out.)

Any-dang-way, I'm gonna give it my best and try not to ruin too many Tootsie Pops.

YOU GON' LOVE RUNNING WHEN ANDY'S IN CHARGE! JUMPING OVER PUDDLES AND STUFF! MAKE YOU SEE THINGS THAT YOU AIN'T EVEN KNOW WAS AROUND IN THIS CENTURY! TAKE A DOO-DOO IN THE WOODS AND KICK A POSSUM IN THE THROAT!

Soak it In

You ever have everything in your life be absolutely fine? That's a terrifying feeling isn't it?

When everything in your life is fine that means you have to go out and find reasons to make it not fine. You have to find challenges and danger and entertainment and the risk is your own well-being. Otherwise you'll slowly be ground to dust by the crushing weight of stagnation.

But, to be fair, the crushing weight of stagnation is warm.

Man is faced again and again with the choice between going out into the wilderness to slay a polar bear, or a grizzly bear, or a grolar bear (grizzly-polar combo bear with the deadliness of the grizzly and the post-modern fashion savvy of the polar bear) OR choosing to stay in his cave and laugh at his cave painting of a buffalo farting in the face of another buffalo stooped down to eat some grass.

On the one hand, you're mastering the elements and furthering the legacy of your species. On the other hand,

buffalo farting on another buffalo's face is pretty freaking funny. You earn at least a pat on the back for getting us that far.

I think deep down though, it's not about how many grolar bear pelts you have woven into your hair, or how many moose burgers barbecues you have on a regular year-round basis. Or even how funny your cave paintings are.

The real triumph is the pursuit itself. Making the active choice of getting up, putting on your stylish loin-cloth/ all-natural cave-man jumpsuit, and slogging through the wilderness in the somewhat blind pursuit of a beast to conquer or a voluptuous cave-wench to have your children and potentially use as beast-bait. Or maybe something even more noble than that. It doesn't matter. Just as long as you're slogging, or toiling, or striving while the little kid voice in your head whines, "I'm tiiiiired! Can we stop? When's snack time? Can I get a drink of water? Can I go to the bathroom?"

And to me, the essence of maturity and character is saying, "No! We will toil until we can toil no more! We will fight the good fight! Be it for our country, or our ideals, or in the pursuit of a delicious cheese wheel. A job must done and we will bend our selves to its demand. And in that way we will kill ourselves. Or, at the very least, we will make our selves sit out in the corner until its ready to cooperate."

And then the essence of maturity and character puts on a yachting cap, takes out a corn cob pipe and smashes a bottle of bourbon over his chest and throws it at a tank that's about to run over a beached whale. 

The tank gets drunk and passes out on the sand while the street urchins pick its tank-pants pocket.

What was I talking about?

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So...I recorded this and put it on Soundcloud. You can find me reading it at this link.

THIS LINK

College Back to Times

One year left.

GOALS!
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-do well in the classes

-run lots

-stand-up comedies

-write lots read lots

-be a competent human being

-have fun

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That is basically the life plan indefinitely except where you see, "do well in the classes" that will be replaced with "continue to survive on my own".

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Yet another thing you could put on a Facebook or social media site advertising my blog because I refuse to venture on them: Hey America! Want to see a grown man(child) talk about his fears in terms of cupcakes and cowboys? Read this blog!

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THIS ONE MIGHT ACTUALLY BE INTERESTING:

I'm thinking of trying to record these posts and then put up the audio of me reading them. Because, as far as I can tell, there are things you can do to make your blog more interesting.

One thing you can do is put up lots of related funny pictures.

But that takes a lot of work and I can barely keep up with just making the words. Admittedly, the words alone aren't particularly eye-catching.

I'm thinking maybe an alternative could be me reading them some out loud and it would make these collections of brain dust a little more concrete and enjoyable and accessible.

So be looking out for that in the near future and then maybe this blog will be something worth sharing.

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In the mean times, in between times, here's an attempt to something:

I'm not scared of spiders. But if I run into a spider's web unawares, I will uncontrollably start waving my arms and starting making yells that sound like a dog trying to bark at the hose water it is simultaneously trying to drink, "YAH! YAAHHAAAHH! YAH!"

And my friend is not afraid of spiders. But he has a very low tolerance for people misbehaving at public locations.

So when me and friend play disc golf together, it's two hours of normal conversation with intermittent bursts of "YAAHH HAHAAGGHH YAH!" and "THERE ARE LEASH LAWS IN THIS CITY!" "PUT DOWN THAT DISC IT'S MINE!"

We're like an old, angry gay couple that have been together for so long we've run out of things to enjoy together, run out of things to hate together, and we're only left with yelling inappropriately and throwing discs of hard plastic at trees.

Because sometimes relationships mutate in weird ways. But you have to let them grow naturally. You can't try to control relationships. A guy might start out as the person you see in the parking lot every morning on your way in to work and three months later you might be going to his house to wipe his butt again because he forgot how.

Ight Height

Long time visitors may have noticed that I've oh-so-subtly changed the little word box underneath the title of this blog. As you can tell, I've pushed it in a slightly more aggressive direction.

But if you enjoy these words that I write then you should feel free to share them with others.

You could just post a status like: MY FRIEND ANDY HAS THOUGHTS ABOUT SWIMMING POOLS AND BABIES WITH FOOD CANNONS FOR ARMS!

Or if you wanted to be more subtle you could post something like: My friend Andy is nice and for the past six years has kept a log of thoughts and (for a brief period of time) pictures of food with faces drawn on them.

Or just be like: Do you need another thing to compulsively check on the Internet? Try Andy's blog.

Or you could get extra honest and be like: Look, the stuff you're going to find on this blog has no coherent structure from one post to the next. It's like a ferris wheel made of pretzel sticks that can't tie its own shoes and Andy is like the sickly innkeeper that tends to it at night while also stealing from its inheritance money. But that's just a metaphor.

But yeah, I'm not trying to hide this thing anymore. It's got my real name on it and everything.

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I bought rugs for the apartment I'm about to move into this weekend. I'm really excited because I've never owned rugs before. I've never had my own special rugs. I've punched a completely nude man in the face in a public swimming pool bathroom to save a young child but I've never owned a rug.

And I know what you're thinking, "Andy, that sounds like a way more exciting story than whatever the crap you're going to tell me about your rug."

To which I say, "Calm down. I lied. But now I've shown you how far I'm willing to go to hold your attention."

These next parts are true:

My First Special Rugs are special to me because they remind me of rice and I can imagine myself in the future sprawling out on them and feeling like I'm in an ocean of rice. But I realize at the same time that that's probably something that is only pleasing to me.

So I want to appeal to you, the reader (who is also likely me a few days after I write this), by telling you the story of how I found my Rice Rug.

One day I was out in my bell-making workshop finishing up a grand memorial bell for the opening of a building where Babies could be put dangerously close to tigers. The logic behind the enterprise was as follows: Take a baby. Put it dangerously close to a tiger sitting behind a thin sheet of tempered glass. Have a good time.

It'd probably be a good place for dangerous, rebellious single parents to meet other irresponsible single parents with attitude. You could go, drop your kid off next to the tiger pit, and then head over to the bar and there'd be a girl and you could be like, "Sup? You're not letting your kid put a damper on your thrills either? That's hot. We should go out to the trunk of my car and eat some corndogs I've wrapped in tin foil."

So anyway, a little bit later I get a deep deep
deep

deep

hankering for some bran muffins.

So I go to Target and as I'm walking to the back of the store to grab my familiar box of low-fat, high-fiber, good-time-having bran muffins I see these rugs they've got in a big cardboard box. All huddled together for warmth.

And when I see My Special Rug, I immediately fall deep deep
deep

deep

deeply in love with it. And I run to the rug and I'm like, "I'm gonna put you in a house made of dream-rainbows and Alabama-brand blue jeans!

But uh, it turns out Alabama-brand blue jeans aren't an actual thing.

So I'm just gonna sit here stroking my rug trying to figure out what I'm gonna do with the rest of my life.

Swirls of Whirls

Today I finished Infinite Jest. Hurray for me. I need to read it again.

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Something I learned at my job this summer is that I have a fear of telling people what to do. Or, more specifically, if someone wants me to do something I have a fear of saying no. But, what I discovered when a large part of my job became telling people what to do and saying "no" to kids all the time is that nothing actually happens. You can express your opinions openly to people who have opposing opinions and wants and that doesn't make you a terrible person.

But I got to use this realization recently when a guy texted me and was like, "When are you going back to school?"

And I said, "the 25th."

And then he didn't say anything for three days.

And then he said, "Okay, cool, I need to give you an inflatable above-ground swimming pool to keep in your apartment. How about I drop it off on September 2nd?"

And the old me wouldn't have wanted the swimming pool but also wouldn't have been confident enough to refuse it. The pool is basically trash and useless but going through the ordeal of taking it would've been better than the dark and mysterious alternative of refusing.

Pre-bossing-little-kids-around Andy would've envisioned something like, "You won't take my inflatable swimming pool?! This is an outrage! I will arrive on a black moose in the middle of the night and stand above your bed and whisper evil incantations that will turn your bowels to gelatin." Or something reasonably terrible like that.

But instead, I said, "No thanks. I don't need it. See if someone else wants it."

And he responded, "Well, how about I just give it to you and then you can see if someone else wants it. Sound like a plan?"

To be clear, at this point my conflict was not over this kind of jerky guy trying to force his unwanted swimming pool on me with a half-baked "plan". Something inside me almost felt bad for the swimming pool itself. I get overly attached to inanimate objects so that I start seeing it less like trash this guy just wants to get rid of and more like a sheltered animal you see in a commercial with Sarah McLachlin music.

I start seeing this neglected and abused swimming pool sitting on this crappy front lawn, half-deflated. It's got a nasty, leaky hose on top of it pouring out brackish looking water which is overflowing and running on to the head of the passed out little boy next to it who tried to do a dizzy-bat belly-flop into the pool combination trick and missed. The water washes over the unconscious boy's head and now is ruining his soggy, half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich that he'd left on a paper plate by the pool and a bird comes along and tries to pick it up and bring it back to her chicks but it's too heavy and it throws off her gyroscopic stability and she gets hit by a car and the little babies squeak and squeak from the branch just above the pool but their mommy never comes back.

DON'T YOU WORRY LITTLE SWIMMING POOL! IN THE ARMS OF AN ANGEL, YOU MAY FIND SOME COMFORT HERE!

But no! I don't need that kind of paralyzing doubt. I need to make manly, bearded decisions and weed out things that weigh me down and hold me back.

So I politely declined AGAIN! "No thanks. I don't want it. See if someone else does."

I still don't have a beard but I imagine with confident texts like that I'll be getting one in the mail any six to eight weeks from now.

Inways

I have a good job. My last day is on Monday and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna miss it. I know I have a good job because I get paid to have Snack Time twice a day. But I know I have a really good job because I can duck out of Snack Time to go goof off even more.

I left the Snack Room to use the bathroom on Thursday and as I was walking out of the bathroom I was drying my hands with a paper towel and I saw this one kid turned away from me sitting in the lobby of the building. So I go up to him and throw the wadded up paper towel at the back of his head and say in a really bored voice, "Oh. I'm sorry. I thought that was a trash can. Turns out it's the back of your head. You see, I was confused because the back of your head looks like a trash can. So I threw my trash at it. Because. Trash can head."

And then he starts chasing me around the building throwing a sunshine yellow Crayola crayon at me.

But the thing about kids is they don't quite know where the line is. Or, maybe it's that my line has shifted as I've gotten older. Like, I'll be sitting in the gym and these two kids will come up and stand beside me and one kid will be pushing the other one into me. And the kid that's getting pushed will say, "He's pushing me!"

And I'll give them my half-hearted, "staaaahp". It's more of a whine. And then within five seconds I'll have a pile of three kids falling over on me and I have to bust out the intense drill sergeant, "HEY! NO!" And it scares them but it also scares me at the same time. Because I never yell at people in real life. It's ingrained in me that if I actually yell at someone it can only lead to terrible things. So when I say, "hey! no!" there's the immediate silence of the kids getting startled and stopping but there's also the silence of me who is a little afraid the world is about to collapse. Or that the kids will assemble into a mob, realizing the strength of their combined forces, and destroy me. But you can yell at children. You can yell at children because they have terrible organizational skills.
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I had this weird dream this morning about a text I sent late last night and in the text I used the phrase, "cool beansness." Which is a combination of 'beans' and 'business'. And in the dream I was trying to imagine the sound at the middle of that word: "-nsn-" The 'n' sound to the 's' to the next 'n'. ENSNUH! And that was the whole dream. Just trying to isolate that part of the word "beansness". It's like a whimpering...snotty...crying...beatboxing...sound.

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I go about my day with a pretty sleepy, kinda detached disposition. So I've noticed that people often have a hard time imagining me doing things. Like, the idea of me being at any sort of extreme is surprising to people. I'm kinda like a manatee with surfer hair. You can't picture in your head a manatee yelling at someone. Or swearing at a lawnmower at three in the afternoon on a Saturday. Or throwing up on someone's kitchen floor. But most of the time I do go about my day with this sort of tired, blank look on my face. And strong emotions do kind of look weird on me. My face muscles don't quite know how to react and my brain can't keep up with the emotion. It'd be like if a manatee finally decided to fight back against the power boats that hit and scar them. They'd get really angry at first and be like, "RAAARGHHH!" but then they'd  get to the boat and be like, "I'm gonna...get....you!" and then they'd just be embarrassed and start hugging the underside of the boat.

That's my natural progression of strong emotion. Over-reaction to anti-climax to embarrassment to misplaced awkward affection.

Here's to the cows of the sea!

Recovery is Hard

The human body is an amazing thing. When you run, what you're doing to your body is basically the equivalent of taking a baseball bat to your car. You're just smashing it and trashing it and slashing the tires and dropping a big pile of sweaty men all over the top of it. And after a good run that's about what your body should feel like.

But the amazing thing about the human body is that it's like if you woke up the next day and in your driveway is a better car than the one you've had before. And it's because you wrecked it the previous day. It's like if someone made a car for you and said, "Does this suit your driving and emotional needs?" And you said, "Nooooooo!" and did everything in your power to ruin it and the person was like, "Fine! I'll try harder!" and purposefully set out to build something that was even harder for you to destroy.

But, the problem is that eventually you do so much damage to the car that it can't repair itself overnight. It needs more time. But you don't want to give it more time. Why would you? You've been let in on this secret process where destruction, sheer self-indulgent destruction is yielding this positive gain. It's this powerful sense of improvement that seems to run completely against the way life is supposed to be. Cars aren't supposed to repair themselves! Cake doesn't taste better the more you bake it. You can't set cake on fire and wait a couple hours and get better cake. But with running you can.

It becomes really hard to stop destroying the car when all you can think about is how much it will improve the car, all you hear in your head is, "Make it better! Make it better!". Even when the car clearly can't repair itself anymore. Even when every day the car is getting crappier and crappier you press on and break it even more because you're convinced that the next morning you're gonna wake up and it's all going to be repaired and you're gonna drive it to the Grand Canyon and drive off the edge and it will sprout wings and jet engines and you'll fly to Malaysia and be a pop sensation. And that's what's going on in your head as you continue to mercilessly wreck a struggling piece of machinery.

So eventually you have to say, "After I'm done wailing on these tail lights with a golf club for the next thirty minutes, I'm not gonna think about the car at all. I'm gonna give it a whole week to rest up."

And that's so hard to do! But, you have to trust. You have to have faith. Given enough time and rest, the car will be better.

Then you can go back to smashing the everloving bejeezus out of it.

And most importantly for me is learning to just enjoy the smashing process and not trying to use it for any specific gain. Like a race or being at a certain level by a certain time. As long as you focus on making sustainable improvements over an indefinite period of time, then you won't be as tempted to push yourself too hard to meet some predetermined level of fitness. Which is usually why I get injured.

My favorite part though is imagining the running community as a group of people all marveling over the various ruined states of their cars that they've put hours in to destroying. Just a graveyard of freakish, mutilated cars with weird adaptations and ill-proportioned fenders and the owners standing in front of them proudly, just nodding their heads, thinking, "Yup, she's a real beauty. Been taking a crowbar to the rearview mirror since I was fifteen years old and now it's the size of the backseat and the backseat is the size of a box of Wheat Thins." He's also just saying completely crazy things.

"Blackberries turn into vampire bats at night and try to do geometry in my bathroom cabinets. I'm the luckiest little bugle boy in all of Ireland!"  

Lightening

There's an American professional distance runner named Lauren Fleshman and recently in an interview at the 2012 Olympic Trials she talked about how when things get tough for her in training or races she envisions a proud, beautiful lion. She visited a sports psychologist and that was something she learned. It's an image in her head she uses for motivation and strength and courage. That seems like a really important thing to have. So, I want to make my own majestic, shimmering powerful lion image and it's gonna happen after these words.

The image starts with a barren desert landscape out in the American Southwest at dawn. The chilled night air is about to be scorched by the blazing heat of the rising sun. In the middle of the whole scene is a baby, no more than 10 months old, lying face down in the sand. The baby awakens. Its first realization is that its left arm has been replaced by what looks like a fire hose connected to a clear plastic tube of pressurized apple sauce where its forearm should be. It's obviously a failed experiment carried out in an underground bunker hundreds of miles away. This baby has grown up fast. It's been left for dead, destined to be erased by the endless sea of sand.

It doesn't cry. It doesn't whimper. It doesn't make any noise or waste energy with extraneous adorable movements. The baby is all business. It carefully examines its altered appendage, patiently stroking the cold steel of the nozzle. It won't try to eat the apple sauce. The baby has much larger plans.

About an hour goes by and the temperature is rising faster and faster. The baby sits and listens. It hears  a faint mechanical sound growing louder and louder. It realizes there's a road about a hundred feet to its left and a car is fast approaching. The baby scrambles over to the hot asphalt and lies face up in the middle of road. Waiting.

The car approaches and stops. The driver is confused. He gets out of his car to examine the baby. As he crouches down, in complete disbelief, the baby springs and grabs the man by the collar and looks at him the way an owl looks at a field mouse before it plucks it off the ground with its razor sharp talons. The baby looks at the man in a way that says, "I want this more. Whatever you have. I want it more. Your car, your clothes, your money, your life. I want it more and therefore it is mine to keep." All the while, the baby has the pressurized baby food hose trained squarely between the man's eyes.

And that's the image. A hungry baby holding the life of an unfortunate man in the palm of his tiny baby hand through sheer freakish force of will and control of his even more freakish appendage.

I am fired UP right now!

More Terrible Similes

Similes are amazing to me. You can do anything with a simile. I remember as a kid I had this dinosaur book with like three separate panels that you could flip over and there was a head-panel and a body-panel and a tail-panel and so you could make any kind of combination of dinosaur you wanted. I loved that book. I still love that book. I always loved combining stuff. A simile is like this laser in your head and you can point it at the dogs and robots-made-out-of-tuna-cans in your head and fuse them together in this hideous yet beautiful way.

I think a lot of people treat having kids like getting a tattoo. I can't understand why anyone would want to be stuck with either for the rest of their life. And it seems like once you get one, chances are very high that you're going to get another. Also, a lot of the time the people with way too many of either look like they regret some major life choices. Or should regret them. They both seem like futile attempts to make a lasting, physical impression on this already overcrowded and overstimulated planet OR the result of a night of heavy drinking.


Inner Tubes are like Waffle Irons. I'm not gonna spoon-feed you that one. You gotta work it out for yourself. Think about it. It's not dirty. Unless you want it to be.

A yard full of old crackly leaves is like bubble wrap for the outdoors. Furthermore, if a person were accidentally involved in a freak radioactive accident that rearranged their matter-y molecules and turned them into a sentient being composed of either of these things, they'd be monsters that would bring joy and happiness to small children. Which is actually way more sad to me than the typical version of that story. Here's a person who's basically walking around in a living hell, unable to ever rejoin a society that will mercilessly scorn him for a change he could not control and yet he can't even get his rightful blood-thirsty vengeance. He can only increase the happiness of the people that hate him at his own expense. I'm just saying, crackly-leaves-monster and bubble-wrap-thing, I feel your special pain. Radioactive-mass-of-pure-evil you can take care of yourself.

Swimming pools are like apartments. I'm secretly scared of both because they could have Old Effeminate Southern Men hiding and waiting to pull me down to the darkest depths of their Plantation Hole.

Commercials are like parasitic worms on your brain. But it's good because it sort of makes you aware that you have a brain and it's worth protecting. So your brain is like a baby that you keep under some ham in a basket and the commercials are like hungry wolves in the forest. And it'd be great if there weren't any wolves but at least they remind you, "Oh yeah! There's a baby under that ham! And, OH YEAH! DELICIOUS HAM!" And also, that ham is like a magic wrinkly old man named Greddis Trooperderdisdisdis. And he watches over you when you sleep so your hands don't try to escape in the night.

Well, that's the world as I sees it and am willing to report to the internet.

Really Big Snakes Or Pirate Anatomy

One time I went on a date with this girl and she had a pirate ship coming out of her chest. She caught me looking at her chest and she said, "I have this pirate ship coming out of my chest because I'm part of a family of pirates. Being a pirate is in my blood."

So I asked, "Do you have nipples under there?" since she seemed like a pretty forward and upfront person.

And she said, "No. I don't. Pirates don't have nipples."

And I said, "Pirates don't have nipples?!"

And she said, "No. Pirates never have nipples."

Right before I could ask her what pirate babies drink, a taco truck exploded out of my left nostril--no wait, I told that wrong.

It goes,

One time I went on a date with this girl and she had a pirate ship coming out of her chest. She caught me looking at her chest and said, "I have this pirate ship coming out of my chest because I'm part of a family of pirates. Being a pirate is in my blood."

So I asked her, "Do you have nipples under there?" since she seemed like a pretty forward, upfront, independent pirate female.

And she said coldly, "No. I don't. Pirates don't have nipples." Like she was offended at the very notion of something unrelated to pirates being affixed to her chest.

And I said, "Pirates don't have nipples?!" Me being rather incredulous at this point. The fact that she had grown/ had grafted on at a young age a pirate ship on her chest was somehow more believable than the utter absence of nipples. Everybody has nipples! Old people, young people. Men. Women. Boys and girls. Everbody.

And she repeated with the same indignant coldness, "No. Pirates never have nipples." As if the very foundation of piratehood rested on some sort of nipple-exclusion law of nautical science.

Then, at the most inopportune moment, right before I could ask her what pirate babies drink, a taco truck exploded out of my left nostril and--no wait, I told it wrong again.

It goes,

One time I went on a date with this girl and she had a complete pirate ship coming out of her chest. It was one of those big sailboats with cannons and black flags and little pirates running around on it. It was all the romantic notions of life on the high-seas shrunk down to size and somehow firmly attached to this girl's chest, protruding almost straight out but at a slight upward tilt so that it was not fully perpendicular to her torso. And for a moment or maybe thirty minutes or so I gazed deeply into her chest and felt the wind in my hair and the rocking of the waves and salty scent of the ocean and I saw fish jumping magnificently out of the water and all around me was an unbroken horizon of calm, majestic blue. And finally she got impatient and decided to just get the whole issue out in the open and said, "I have this pirate ship coming out of my chest because I'm part of a family of pirates. Being a pirate is in my blood."

So I thought for a while about what she said and I wanted to give a deep and insightful and respectful response because she was very beautiful and this was obviously a major test for anyone wishing to court her and the very future of our relationship was entirely dependent on my ability to be accepting and empathetic towards this huge part of her culture and personal identity but the only thing I could think of as I continued to stare at the tiny masts holding tiny white sails, having not once made eye-contact yet, was, "Do you have nipples under there?" Which, at the time, seemed like a good, straightforward, original, and interesting query to someone who probably gets asked a lot of the same old stupid questions. I tried to provide a brand-new stupid question.

And she put her hands down by her sides and leaned forward a little bit and stamped her foot on the ground and said in a harsh, staccato rhythm, "No. I don't. Pirates don't have nipples."

And I should have let it go. I should have apologized and tried to change the subject but now the very thought of having a chest without nipples seemed so alien and foreign on something so familiar. It was as if, without the nipples, someone had subtly changed the lighting on my mental conception of the human chest and now that the shadows had shifted I realized that this thing I thought I understood so well was now completely new in an utterly alarming and arresting way. My brain froze and could only manage to spit back, in a desperate, reflexive means of communication, the last thing I had heard which was, "Pirates don't have nipples?!"

She was not pleased. I was not only insulting her, but her entire way of life. She would now have to take a stand on the behalf of all nipple-less pirates everywhere. Every word sounded like a hammer driving home a nail into the plank I was about to walk, "No. Pirates never have nipples."

And luckily, before I could complicate the issue any further by asking what pirate babies drink, a taco truck exploded out of my left nostril.

The End

CHILDRE!!

My car smells like death. I left my windows down in a rain storm last week and a little mold stain appeared on the floor of my passenger seat. And I noticed the stain and the smell right away but I let it hang around because the smell was tolerable and it looked like a cute little blob trying to raise its little blob hand.

I WUV YOU ANDY!

I loved you too, little mold-blob. But after about 4 days of sitting around in my hot car in the summer, I opened my door one morning to find that you'd taken on the smell of a rotting possum. And so, today you had to be killed with malicious disinfectant chemicals.

Maybe I'm not very socially well-adjusted but I keep trying to tie this little episode into the nature of friendships, hope, and dreams.

They both show up out of nowhere and strike you as appealing in some way but after a while they start endangering your health and interfering with your daily life. And if you're a scared and lazy person like me, your initial reaction is, "I'll just leave it alone and it'll probably go away."

But it won't! You have to actively and in a somewhat toxic manner, cleanse the region so thoroughly that it will never return again!

Relationships are like mold. And you gotta manage the mold in the passenger seat of your car. You can't just kill ALL the mold, otherwise your driving...on the road of life....alone! No, you need some mold to feel alive.

You gotta manage your mold.

I guess some people would call that, "Burning your bridges."

And while that's a less pessimistic analogy, I think it's also less accurate. Bridges have too much purpose and direction and structure. Molds are messy and accidental and have weird, mysterious functions and abilities. I'm definitely more of a mold than a bridge.

Moldy...mold...bridge..man.

DONE!

It's Raining Really Hard Right Now

Let's Do Some Terrible Similes!

Her voice was as clear as the smooth expanse of unblemished skin on the pouch of fat that distended from her lower back.

The gnats were scattered across my chest like a corpse-ridden happy trail.

My energy level today was like a fork being slowly stabbed into a block of styrofoam shaped like a decapitated Curious George. And every time you pull the fork out the metal tines rub against the styrofoam and make this tiny, "REEEEK" sound.

My butt is like Atlas struggling to hold up the world and look good doing it.

The world is like a big sweaty tube sock stuffed with other tube socks stuffed with melted queso and the more you try to get a hold of what's going on the more cheese squeezes out until you're so covered in gooey melted yellowness of everything that you can't tell where you end and everything else begins.

The first thought I ever expressed out loud is like a blueprint for the rest of my life. "Mommy. Cookie. Now." In order of importance: The Attention of Others. Sugar. And immediate gratification. Although I think now I'm going through this thing where I've completely turned it around. Like, I have little to no social life, I would eat spinach with every meal if I could, and I compulsively put things off for the chance of a bigger reward later. Even if it means missing out on a reward all together. And maybe that's what it means to become an adult, to go from "Mommy. Cookie. Now." to "Leave Me Alone While I Eat A Salad and Dream of Things That Will Never Come to Be!"

Alcohol is like that friend you make when you're a little kid who is a total jerk to you but you don't understand how social interaction works yet. Like, you're hanging out with him and everything is fun and then suddenly he wants to play wrestling and he punches you in the stomach and knocks the wind out of you and you're just lying there on his backyard thinking you might die. But then a couple days later you get bored and go hang out with him again. And when you get older you laugh at how stupid you were.

I think a beautiful part of life is that you can constantly laugh at how stupid you used to be.

Fresh Breadfellows

I was doing some stretches today to try to open my chest. My shoulders felt kinda tight from some minimal upper body activity that my body is woefully unprepared for and I remember from a youtube video I watched a long time ago that opening up your chest helps improve your breathing and all around general wellness.

But you ever just wish you could actually open up your chest if you wrench your arms back hard enough? Just completely rip open your own chest cavity and watch your organs tumble out of you like squishy, amorphous Beanie Babies. I'm not trying to be morbid, I'm just saying it could be practical to have the ability to go Mortal Kombat on yourself.

I mean your organs are just sitting there in  your body all smug and protected by your skin. They're held to zero accountability. Whatever you put in you, you have to trust they're going to know how to handle it. And if you mess up they aren't going to reasonable talk to you about the difficulties they're experiencing, no. They're just gonna seize up like an old man carrying a big heavy bundle of wheat up a steep hill and he gets like halfway up and then his whole body just locks up and he rolls down the hill into a pile of asparagus and expired ranch dressing. And when your organs act up it reduces a rational human being to, "But my stomach hurts real bad!"

I want to size up my organs. I think they're taking being inside for granted. Let 'em come out and try to make their way out here for a couple weeks and then see if they become a little more appreciative. And maybe I'll let them back in if they look like they're up for the job. I figure I need to take back most of the important ones but if there's an stragglers in the bunch I'll take my chances with some animal parts.

"Sorry, left kidney. You showed a lot of heart but because of your lack of hustle I'm gonna have to go with the chimpanzee on this one."

______________________________________________________________
So yeah, ripping open your own chest. Probably a good stress reliever.

You just get fired from your job and your boss is like, "I have had it with your laziness and arrogance and lack of team spirit"

And you just swing your arms back and let your innards fly and go, "What?! What?! I can't hear you over how much I just tore my chest cavity in half!"

"Oh my-- good--what the--GOD!"

"What?! Are you mad now? Are you still mad? You were mad and now this happened. Are you mad? Are you mad at me? Are you mad at me now that my liver landed on your fruity little office carpet? That stain's not  gonna come out? Are you mad now? Are you mad that I ripped open my chest cavity?"

"I just...um..."

"Am I fired now? Do you fire me when I tear out my still beating heart and set it down next to your mousepad. That stain's not coming out! I don't even care because this hurts a lot more than I imagined. But in a good way. It's a good pain. I'm gonna go walk a quick lap around the parking lot and we can discuss the details of this development afterwards. God Bless. God Bless. As-Salamu Alaykum"

The End

Preboital

This is a thing.

You can come by and destroy my living room if you feel like it. I know you hate curtains so I made the windows naked. You can break all my chairs and put dish soap in my fish tank. You can scream like a nipple on a clothesline. Eat all my food and tell me I'm ugly. Buy me a sandwich and force-feed me in the shower. Tell me where you've been and your full-blown fears like a flower growing out of a vomited pile of breakfast.

If I only got fatter, and you lost all your bones, we could flop in a pile and melt in the sun. I don't mind if you turn off the lights and punch steaks in the dark and dream of cars giving birth. It couldn't hurt if you bought leather boots and started gambling with the trash man. You can come and pour bleach on the couch. You can paint the ceiling red and yell at the sink. Rearrange my music and buy zebra skeletons on sale. Tear out the cables and braid them out the window. I won't complain. Mess up my machine and get sick on the carpet. Sleep on the carpet. Take the carpet. Sell the carpet. Hump the carpet. Love the carpet. Dump the carpet. Give the carpet to Peruvian drug lords. Dance in a bucket with both legs in one short's leg hole. Round up all the moths in a cardboard box. Just come by.

Sweat through my t-shirts and cut up my sheets. Draw ants on the milk jug and yell hate speech in Dutch. Electrocute your doubts and put up masks on the dishes. Build a dictionary fort and peel onions on the roof. Lick the lion's mane and somersault in the ocean of a thousand rotting paintings of Ronald W. Reagan riding a rhinoceros in a sailor-suit! Leave on your leaf-cape and be leader of the ladel-brigade. Buy me a CD and a ham and book.

Just come by.

Three Weeks Left

I've lived a sheltered life.

I've never been to a funeral, or a wedding, or broken a bone, or fired a gun, or smoked anything, or left the country, or been in a car accident, or even moved. No major life changes.

And most people would probably think that's a bad thing. Changes help you grow, help you become a better, wiser person.

But I don't think you necessarily need big events like that to evaluate your place in the world. There's signs all around you all the time, you just gotta pay really close attention...and then make stuff up that's probably true.

That's what all that boredom from having nothing happen in my life has given me, the ability to pay attention to little details and then spin the everloving crap out of them.

Just today I had a memory from my seemingly uneventful childhood and realized that I was part of some sort of study in elementary school that may or may not have been used to determine if I possessed psychic abilities. It was a single, isolated incident and kids that had important things happening to them wouldn't even have bothered to notice but I remember.

 I was in first grade, doing my first grade thing, trying not to smell my pencil box too much even though I was powerless to stop it. And all of a sudden this lady shows up and takes me down the hall to this corner room that was about the size of closet. Inside the room was this girl who I recognized as someone my age but I wasn't friends with her.

And the woman goes, "Okay, Andy you're going to play a game of Guess Who."

That game where you each pick a person and then you ask questions about the other person's person to try to figure out who they picked.

So we played that. I lost. And then I went back to discretely huffing pencil and eraser shavings.

But you know that woman was looking for something in either me or that other girl! Did they think I was "challenged" in some way?! Did they think she was challenged? What was she looking for?!

So after several seconds of reflecting on that memory, I came to the logical conclusion that she must have been on the look out for supra-natural abilities in the youth of America. Had I been able to correctly guess with uncanny speed that the girl had picked 'Peter', I'd be part of an elite team working with the president to end all the wars and wage love across the globe.

All will knuckle-under to the relentless love of the Home of the Brave!
 
And I failed miserably.

But you know what? To have even been considered is a great honor. And also, it would be nice if someone could tell me why the sound of other people snoring makes me want to set all the boats in all the harbors on fire. I HATE IT SO MUCH!

Number One Attribute I Look For In Sharing a Bed With Someone: If I'm snoring. They punch me. Because that's exactly what I deserve!

(Also, 601st post.)

Chicken. It's good. I like it.

This guy I work with has made up a story that he tells to kids about this time he got shot in a drive-by shooting. And most of the kids buy it completely. Especially the ones that you can imagine committing crimes in the near future.

But beyond the obvious fun of lying to children, it also kind of says something about the power of storytelling. Like, your taste in stories and what you find interesting says a lot about you as a person even if you don't realize it.

So what I want to do now is a come up with a story for all the future stoner kids. I think I can tell who they're going to be but this is just gonna be that extra push.

I'll come up to them and be like, "Hey, you ever been to the beach with your shirt off?"

And they'll be like, "uh...yeah."

And I'll be like, "One time my friends and I drove to the beach in the middle of the night and when we got to the ocean I didn't say anything-- I took all my clothes off and ran into the waves and jumped in and for a second I was just floating in like the inky black chaos of nothingness until this wave picked me up and slammed me onto the shore. I was lying there coughing up salt water and all I could think about was how every particle of sand that my face had just smashed into could each contain their own complete universe and how in those universes there could be other beaches with billions of particles of sand that each contain their own universe and within those universes there could be another version of me eating nachos with chili and cheese on an airplane on a flight to see the world's biggest sock and maybe when he bit into one of those nachos he sensed that somewhere in a place-- in a completely different plane of reality he sensed a connection to that naked version of himself being pounded by the ocean while his friends just watched and laughed. And then, if you think about it, that kind of interaction is happening all the time. All these universes within universes within universes are bumping and grinding like the sun won't come up in the morning. There are infinite versions of you at any one time playing out your life in an infinite variety of ways. At any one second you could be licking the paint off the wall with your identical twin in your grandparents' basement. You could be flying a kite on a warm spring day and suddenly be crushed by a three hundred pound bearded woman. You could be an Olympic diver about to perform your final dive to secure your Gold medal and projectile vomit in a twirling spiral and become an international sensation, an Olympic legend who raised human waste dispersal to an art form.

And then, if you really think about it, if you really think about the limitless number of potential outcomes, not only are those events likely to happen, they are definitely happening. So once you accept that, then you have to accept that anything you imagine must be reality. So everything in your head is just as real as the world you perceive. Except for the fact that your senses are constantly lying to you. You ever see something that wasn't actually there? Or think you hear your name in a crowd? In fact, the only thing that you can really accept as truth at all, the only thing that you can say with a 100% guarantee is actually happening, are the senseless thoughts and waking dreams that play in your head! And I realized all of that on the beach, naked, and then I put my clothes on

and got some pizza."

Any kid that got excited about that story, I would be their best friend.

Blood Scrunchie

It's August!

Um, about three or four years ago I was running one day and I had this sense that running brought out this better person from within me. Someone that could confidently hold a phone conversation and could shower without needing to wait for the water to warm-up. A real he-man! And when I ran I would feel this energy that wasn't mine, it was too great to be mine, that was channeled through me.

Which is kind of cool, I think.

But I think that energy or presence has changed in a way. It went from this empowering thing to what feels like an old school track coach in matching grey baggy sweatpants and sweatshirt. He's got a bushy mustache and a whistle and a clipboard and if he were stripped completely naked he'd just look like a pile of doughy lumps covered in hair. Like a fleshy Frosty the Snowman with less magic and more a creeping suspicion that he's really into spongebaths. 

Because, now when I get tired instead of tapping into this other energy, I've just started compulsively slapping myself on the chest and saying, "C'mon boy! C'mon boy!"

Which doesn't make me feel stronger so much as it makes me feel crazy. Like he's following alongside me on his scooter, thinking that hitting me and calling me boy will make me feel better.

Combine that with the fact that all the gnats decided to come out today and now I'm covered with about a dozen of them, I've got a stray snot rocket on my chest, and I'm trying my hardest to pinch back a number 2 that missed the pre-run dump.

But that's life. Snot, sweat, poo, bugs, and swearing at nothing and slapping yourself out on country roads. If you can do something in those conditions and still call it beautiful, still take pride in it and know that even if a bunch of dead Presidents showed up on a helicopter and tried to tear you down you could still feel accomplished and worth something, you're set.

And I think I've only found that in running so far, but it's a start.

Ooooh, I didn't even talk about chafing. You wanna see my inner thighs?

No. You don't.

My inner thighs could adorn the flag of the dreaded pirate ship The Blood Scrunchie. Striking nautical fear in all the...nautical...guys.

When you think of the name Blood Scrunchie do you imagine a death metal band full of nine-year-old girls or do you think of an accordion that gushes blood with every squeeze.

It's okay, they're both acceptable.