Stuff Television Taught Me

"I think I need more knives."
- Unknown

I've learned a couple of things lately that tell me a lot about what's going on. The first is that for about $150 you can purchase about 180 knives of all shapes and varieties through a special late-night offering on the info channel. Appropriately labelled, 'The Knife Show', all of your psychotic, sociopathic, PETA-hating, dismembering tendencies and primal urges can leap from your brain stem and come to fruition right on the front page of real life for just $149.99, and they'll even pay shipping and handling.

Just what in God's name a person would want with 180 knives, I can't imagine. And not kitchen knives mind you, serated gutting knives, green-beret knives, hunting knives, chop-a-head-off knives, even a 36" Kitana blade, all for 79 cents a piece. If you don't believe me, just look for it next time your surfing through tv channels late at night looking for something unbelievable. As you can imagine, the hosts of this show are quite remarkable too. A flannel-wearing white guy who looks to have completed all 3 years of middle school, and bears a resemblance to Al Boreland from 'Tool Time', swearing about how this deal changed his life and is worth every penny. And why someone would take knife-buying advice from his co-host, a middle-aged white woman who looks more like a Martha Stewart stand-in and speaks with an almost Ivy league proper, is just as baffling as the fact that this show is really on TV. But it is.

It almost seems like a set-up. Some secret federal operation to find out who all the real sick fucks are out there and get their credit card numbers. If that's the plan then I'm all for it, but if this really is a real show, sending real knives real cheap to real people who are awake at 3am, and were just-thinking about how they need more knives in their life, God help us all.

The Complex

Maybe I'm the weird one. But I just don't understand a lot of the things that my contemporaries do. Something is just wrong with the way we entertain ourselves. Specifically I would like to address what we'll call the Facebook/Myspace complex. These two dot-coms are the behemoth heavyweights in the new age of internet-social networking as far as I am aware. I used to be a casual visitor to these set-ups, but over the past few years my usage been forced to wane for a number of reasons which aren't really the point of this diatribe.
First off, I would like to point out the irony of the term internet-social network. The word social is generally used to describe behavior that occurs in the company of others. Whether or not the typing of nonsensical internet banter on someones wall constitutes socializing, I will leave up to the jury to decide, but I respectfully reject that notion. As I sit now on my couch typing, I just don't feel social. The fact that I'm on this particular .com as opposed to another is going to have very little bearing on those feelings. No matter what website I choose to go on, I will still be here on my couch exactly where I wanted to be, enjoying the quiet and collecting my thoughts.
I have really come to dislike people who take internet life too seriously. I want them out of my life for fear that they will poison mine with their tomfoolery. I overheard a conversation a while ago that changed my life for the worse.
I overheard two mid-twenty-something young ladies who appeared to be grad students of some kind talking at a bar when one of them put forth some supposedly factual information that the other found somewhat shy of believable. Upon hearing the disbelief voiced by her friend, the first young lady adamantly retorts "Ya-huh, it's all over facebook!!"
After my own disbelief was overcome by my convincing myself that she couldn't have possibly just cited an internet website as social authority, the first semi-coherent sentence I was able to arrange in my mind involved repeated use of the words 'fuck', 'cretin' and 'loser'. Followed immediately by 'God help us' and my subdued resignation to the fact that this very conversation was probably taking place thousands of times a day nationwide.
I'm sure I'm the minority in having this feeling, but you simply cannot be a functional adult human if you can't mentally separate real life from cyberspace. It doesn't matter if it's a social network, let it stay on the fucking internet. It's bad enough that this nonsense exists, but at least it used to be confined to a computer screen. You bring it out of that little box and you fuck up the whole order of things.
And as a sidenote, nothing good comes from the myspace/facebook complex. Name one good thing that has happened in your life as a result of it. You get reminders of your internet friends birthdays? Is that the best you can come up with? The whole thing just has setup written all over it. Can you imagine how many relationships and friendships have ended off of nothing more than the strength of the internet? Just think about it: the incriminating message written on your girlfriend's wall; the ill-timed drunken photo that some conniving frat-party smut tagged you in on a night that your boyfriend thought you were home studying for your finals; the bump-out of the myspace top 10. The list goes on. Why even tempt fate, hasn't she taught you she's not to be taunted? Furthermore, these sites are fertile breeding grounds for the elusive internet-weirdo-creep-fuck, and nobody likes that guy.
Anyway, all of this stuff is too much. Do you think it's ever gonna end? We can't really enter professional adult life and still feel the need check our myspace friend requests from someone we haven't spoken to in 4 and a half years (invariably because you never really liked them), or some creep who saw you out and about 3 weeks ago and tracked you down through mutual friend pages, can we? But my personal favorites are these people. On the rare occasion when I go on this rant in person, I always encounter one of these, "Yea, myspace is creepy, I only deal with facebook." And then nod their head comfortably, as if to say 'I'm a safe internet weirdo-creep-fuck'. They're the same fucking thing, don't be delusional. Some people love it, I just ain't one of them, and I will continue to impune. But if that's your style to be on there several times a day, do you. Just please, please, don't drag it into the real world.

News for Thought - 10/29/07

Mailbox Hit By Meteorite Sells for $83,000

NEW YORK -- Two of the world's most famous meteorites failed to attract buyers at an auction Sunday, while an ordinary metal mailbox in Georgia zapped by a falling space rock in 1984 was sold for the unearthly price of nearly $83,000. The small piece was offered at auction by Darryl Pitt, curator of the Macovich Collection, the world's largest collection of space rocks, who traded the museum a Martian rock for the Willamette chip in 1998. In spirited bidding, the mailbox -- somewhat the worse for the experience but with its red metal flag still bravely in the "up" position -- went to an unidentified bidder for $82,750 including the buyer's premium of 20 percent. A tiny piece of the rock itself, less than an ounce, went for $7,700.


Dog Steps On Gun, Wounds Hunter

TAMA, Iowa -- A Tama man was injured when hunting dogs stepped on his gun. Officials with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources said James Harris, 37, was pheasant hunting with a group about three miles north of Grinnell when the accident happened.Officials said the group had shot a bird and when Harris went to retrieve it, he put his gun on the ground and crossed a fence. As he crossed the fence, hunting dogs stepped on his gun causing it to fire.

Harris was shot in the lower left leg. The investigation is continuing.

Police: Man Wanted Sex With Corpse

TAMPA, Fla. -- A Gulf Coast man was taken into custody over the weekend for what police said was a plan to kill man and have sex with the body. Police said Kevin Wade Daley, 50, of Citrus Springs was arrested and charged with criminal solicitation to commit first-degree murder in connection with the plot. Citrus County sheriff's officials said they were tipped off by a friend of Daley who said he was alarmed when he heard of the suspect's plans. Police searched Daley's home and confiscated his computer.Officers said Daley discussed his intentions to have sex with a corpse during phone conversations.

Dueling Romeos

A man can under no circumstances, ever get into a physical altercation over a girl. It should never even enter the adult male mind to possibly fight another dude in an attempt to win the affections of a female.
It's ok to fight as a last resort inasmuch as it goes towards the defense of your wife, or maybe even your girlfriend depending on the circumstances, but if she's not your girl, don't be a dumbass.
I thought this went without saying, but once again being in this tiny biologically experimental fish-bowl called law school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where all sorts of wild varieties of odd-looking flamboyant species go to great lengths to demonstrate their social ineptitude, I find myself disappointed in my fellow human beings.
I was told the other day that this exact scenario actually happened. A fisticuff scuffle between two first-year law students at the local bar. They actually fought over who was gonna get her. I can only imagine what the dialogue was like that fanned the flames that ultimately boiled over into this final act of stupidity. Whatever it was, broken down into its simplest units of idiocy it must have been something like this.

"I want her, she's mine."
"No way, I saw her first."
"Let's fight!"
"Ok!"

Now you can use your imagination to envision a geeky-looking fight between two fellas who spend their days on gmail chat while they're in class supposedly learning about proper citation formats and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
This kind of shit just can't be allowed to happen anywhere! Have we learned nothing about life in the 10,000 years of modern man? Are we really still basically cavemen that just happened to figure out how to make pyramids, the steam-engine, television, the internet, and Starbucks?
Don't EVER fight over a girl, it doesn't make sense no matter how drunk you are. There's too many of them, more than enough to go around, and sadly more than enough that will happily do just that.
At the end of the story it seemed to be suggested to me that to my amazement, the female in question has actually selected the "winner" of the "fight" to be her mate-of-the-moment.
I plead to any young women reading this, please don't ever condone this ridiculous behavior. You CAN NOT pick a guy who got into a bar fight over you. It's just retarded, and if you do, know that you are part of the problem. You are taking us all back in time, many millenia to the days when a man could just pick a girl, render her unconscious with the nearest blunt object and drag her back to the bachelor-cave for a little of the old in-out. This was an amoral, lawless society that is best left in our past. Ironically enough, in this case it was perpetrated by two future duly appointed defenders of the law, who just seemed to forget pretty much everything for one night. Let's all try to keep this from happening anymore.

Brian Billick

Brian Billick might be the worst coach in the history of the NFL to ever win a Super Bowl. I have maintained this since the year after they won it. He has produced a consistently inconsistent team, and an unstable, boring, predictable, generally ineffective offense since he has arrived in Baltimore.
The defense was good before he got here, and he has had little to do with the success on that side of the ball, but even the defensive dominance has started to fade as teams have learned that all they have to do to win is get rid of the ball quickly and avoid turnovers, put up 2 or 3 scores of any variety, and the impotent offense won't be able to make up the difference. This is a simple recipe for defeating the Ravens, and now the whole league knows it, from the Bills to the Browns, good thing we don't play the Raiders this season. We have the talent at every position except quarterback, but even that's no excuse because the Bills proved that you can beat an elite defense with two rookie playmakers in the backfield. Sooner or later, the coach has to be held accountable, he's coasted for 7 years off of one Super Bowl victory, it's over now. Time is up, the thrill is gone, as should be Brian Billick. I plead with Ravens ownership to free us fans from the burden placed on us every single Sunday of viewing a talented team constantly achieve nothing above mediocrity. Brian Billick is the antithesis of a good NFL coach, his team is consistently unprepared to play football on Sunday, see him out the door.

News for Thought

Whenever I find myself extremely bored, my new thing to do is to take a look at the US news headlines on cnn.com. This is some of the most bizarre shit I've ever seen, and further proof that everyone is slowly going crazy. Here are just a few things I saw that I thought were noteworthy.

Woman Finds Naked Stranger In Bed

HAZEL PARK, Mich. -- A woman returned home to find a naked stranger asleep in her bed in her Hazel Park home. Police said the man had been drinking and had blood alcohol level of 0.17 percent, the Daily Tribute reported.The woman said the man offered her $14 and some marijuana for sex.The man said he was told the woman was a call girl. She denied those accusations, but said she was a waitress at an adult night club.

Man Using Samurai Sword Seeks Revenge on Wrong Person, Victim Loses Finger

MILWAUKEE -- A drunk samurai sword-wielding man seeking revenge on a former friend had the wrong apartment when he attacked a man and severed the victim's pinky finger Sunday morning, police said.

Homeowner Offers Burglar Breakfast

SAN ANTONIO -- A man said he had a heart-to-heart conversation with an armed burglar over a cup of coffee after he found him stealing his belongings from his home on Sept. 11. "I said, 'What are you doing here?'" Swanson said. "He said, 'I'm taking your stuff and it's too bad you showed up.'" Swanson said he gave the burglar all the money in his wallet and offered to listen to his problems over breakfast.He said Hernandez told him he couldn't pay his bills or afford to buy food for himself.Swanson said he ended their conversation with a prayer and a hug.

Hungry Man Rips Head Off Duck

Wisconsin -- Members of an upscale retirement community reported seeing a drunken man staggering around a duck pond in the building's garden. When confronted the man grabbed a duck and stated "I'm hungry, I'm gonna eat it." Then proceeded to yank the ducks head off of its body before beginning to chew on the wriggling neck. He was later arrested and charged with misdemeanor intoxication and felony animal cruelty.

The Phenomenon of the Law School Level Jumpers

All I want to know is, who teaches these people how to interact with other human beings?

I will put forth just a few of the brief episodes I have witnessed in this, the first month back to school. The following are all limited to perpetrators who have been known for less than a month by the offended (being either myself, or a young lady friend of mine who supplies more material than I would ever want to encounter first hand.)
Episode 1
I was in the hall one day, walking around trying to arouse the attention of no one, when all of a sudden from down the hall someone shouts,
"Yo, M. Breezy, what up!"
M. Breezy? I pause in my mind and wonder for a moment. Surely this person can't be trying to address me, and better yet who the hell is this person, for no one that I am actually friends with who would have my permission to address me by nicknames would actually behave in such an unnecessary manner. Sure enough, I turn around and it's one of theses new kids who's name I couldn't possibly expect to recall, trying way too hard to make a friendly impression. Many may think I'm being far too angry with such a response, but I just find it irritating. Stick to the script, you want to talk to someone, talk to them, there's no need to try to spice up everything. Is it fair to just assume someone is a nickname person who likes having people yell for them down hallways? Maybe I was creeping around quietly because I was trying to avoid someone, you never know. Now, my attempt is blown to smithereens, and I have another person to avoid in the hallways.

Episode 2
I witnessed first hand, the unilateral institution of a kiss-hello program between a close friend of mine, and a gentleman newcomer with whom she had been acquainted for all but 3 weeks. Wow, ballsy indeed. And ridiculous. Now I realize that this is quite normal in some cultures, fine. The east coast of these here United States is not one of those cultures. Who in the world could have possibly let this young fellow slide along the pathway of life for upwards of 2 decades without letting him know that this is not acceptable behavior? I find this particularly scary because it leads me to believe that it had to be reinforced somewhere along the line. Such behavior is not something that spontaneously arises in one's mid to late twenties. Therefore, in previous episodes of his life, situations were such that girls he had known for equal or perhaps even less time responded tastefully to this institution. This is gross. You can't just walk around putting your lips on people. Especially people who have expressed no prior sexual consent to your advances. This is not Europe, people don't just kiss for fun, it's intimately tied to sex over here, and you generally don't do it to people who haven't given you the green light. Unless I'm the one who's crazy, and please feel free to comment. Where do these people come from?

Episode 3
Same perpetrator as Episode 1, same Offendee as Episode 2

Picture this. A young lady, walking through the halls at school on her way to a classroom, when her attention is requested by a young fellow with whom she is only superficially acquainted. He holds out his arm in some sort of primitive, inspective gesture and utters forth, "Let me see." and looks towards her buttocks. As if that's not enough, he continues in the most sneeringly perverse of molester tones, "Mmm, yea, that ass is getting fatter. Must be all that sex I heard you were having this weekend."
Fortunately for my health, this one had to be relayed to me, as I was deprived of the horror of witnessing this tasteless act firsthand. I may have just choked to death on my own disgust if I had. Now, as I did not witness this event, I'm not sure exactly what her reaction to this was, but I imagine it was somewhere between speechlessness and absolute abhorrence, with a twist of putridity expressed in her face making it look kind of like a small child's the first time they mistake a slice of lemon for a piece of real fruit, for anything less would merit a phone call to her parents to tell them they apparently had all of the wrong answers. Speaking of parents with wrong answers, this young fellows parents must have set some kind of record on the SAT for defying even the law of averages and managing to fill in not a single correct dot. How else could even one parent raise a male child to believe that such behavior is at all appropriate or acceptable? Or maybe they did, and the new thing now is to just say fuck all the rules and go apeshit as soon as you get out of earshot of home base, because I just can't see how else this could happen.
What is going on?

Interest Renewed

After a hiatus over a short summer of total non-productivity, it seems time to revisit an old hobby, so here I stand. After being away for so long, I looked at the title of my own blog and was almost upset that it makes me seem like such an angry person. I'm not really that angry I don't think, its just that things upset me, and I like to bitch about them in writing, where I can organize my thoughts as they leave my head. That having been said, I don't want to seem quite so angry anymore, but I will still continue to vent my social frustrations as they arise.
Now that we've got that sappy shit out of the way, on to my first grievance...

Please, Somebody Help Me! Tell Me It's Going to be Alright... Lip GLoss?!??

What would you do if you were just walking along one day, minding your own business on your way to pick up some food and beer for your own survival purposes, and your sojourn was suddenly interrupted by a passerby. You may not mind someone stopping your in the midst of your business to ask you for directions, or if you could tell them what time it is, but your reaction may differ if someone just stopped you and accosted you with absolute nonsense conversation. Say this person stopped you with an inquiry such as this, "Isn't my lip gloss cool?"
What do you do? If someone seriously thinks that this topic is something that interests you enough to spend time entertaining their half-witted banter, what is your response to them. Something tells me that it wouldn't be to join them in rendering a song and dance about how cool their lip gloss actually is. So if this is the case then why in the FUCK, (and pardon my profanity but that's what how I feel), why in the FUCK would you ever let somebody tell you that SHIT on the radio over, and over, and over again. Does it become catchy, is it less stupid the 43rd time you've heard it? No? Then why the fuck are you listening to it, and why is nobody else kicking up a fuss about this shit. I refuse to believe that I'm really the only one here who is going crazy. And you can't even turn it off anymore, shit is on the radio, it's on the internet, it's all over the TV, I can't even stroll down the street without hearing that or some other nonsense music and just wanting to go somewhere where this shit doesn't exist.

Images, and First Impressions, Or, "...and bitches love it!"

The following are just my thoughts.
Dating has always been a silly word to me. I've never really done it, and I really can't say it appeals to me at all. In the conventional sense, all it really amounts to is something like a college visit for a high school student. When you see them for the first few times, you're just meeting their idealist representative whose only job is to sell you on potential. The school you're visiting could turn out to be the best school in the world, and the person you're dating could turn out to be everything they're projecting themselves to be; their idea of your dream-come-true in a person. But odds are they won't, not if reality has anything to say about it.
Ask a person you know to describe what their "type" is, and listen carefully to the answer. Then afterwards, ask yourself this question: In their answer, was there anything at all unpredictable about their response, or anything that can't be assessed with a simple, superficial, glossing-over of the person in question?
If the answer is yes, take comfort in knowing that you have a friend capable of functional thought, because everybody's answer should contain some element specifically tailored to their desires that is otherwise unusual, and can't be readily assessed by exchanging glances and awkward, pre-fabricated conversation over a poorly cooked meal (a date.)
If the answer is no, which it invariably will be, know that there are millions of dating people who are aware of these cookie-cutter images people have of their own ideal sexual counterpart. People who are willing to go to great lengths of imbecilic expenditure, and general duncery to engage in debaucherous romps with their fellow humans. It is in this mold that these folks cut themselves. Not because projecting an image that achieves this end has anything to do with the actual personality from which it emerges. In fact the only thing it tells you for sure is that this person is so focused on this one idea that they're willing to suppress all other elements of their personality just to show the world that they fit with the rest. If this is a trait that one finds desirable, have at it, and good luck with that is all I have to say.
The event that brought this concept to mind took place at a very close friends home the other day while we were outside having a few beers, relaxing, and talking. One of the individuals who we were hanging with was asked about a tattoo that he had on his arm, and began to show it. "It's a picture of St. Michael." He says. And on the other side of his arm, he had the full prayer inscribed against his bicep.
That's nice, almost pious I thought. It's a relief to see some sort of dedication to a belief in something, so profound as to etch it on one's body.
"Yea, and bitches love it!" He retorts.
Wow.
People will sell you anything if you're willing to buy it. My advice to everyone who shops in these stores is, hold on to that receipt.

...but I do eat fish sometimes.

Maybe I'm just crazy, or arrogant, or something in between, but much of life has just completely ceased to make sense to me.
This is an admittedly small and irrelevant piece of the pie, but it's very demonstrative to me of exactly what I mean when I speak a line that some of those close to me may have heard me utter once or twice, 'Nothing makes sense anymore.'
I just don't understand the whole vegetarian/soybean/"I only eat fish" culture. First of all, absent some physiological allergy to meat products (which I've never heard of), why would a person subject oneself to this type of nonsense? Meat is great. You ever had a really great piece of steak? If you can't appreciate that, don't even talk to me, it's like not liking sex, what is wrong with your brain? Okay, fine, you might want to abstain from sex until you get married, or you might be scared of the clap, or whatever, but you know you like sex, it's simply what makes us human. A good piece of meat is the same way.
If we were meant to eat only vegetables, we'd only have broad, flat teeth like cattle, or any other grazing animal that makes it's living off green stuff. But it wasn't enough for you peculiar folk to just eat vegetables all the time, no no, you had to make a point of letting all the regular folks know about it, as if we're the abnormal ones. You gotta have all the 'Whole Foods' %100 recycled paper grocery bags folded up in a nice, neat, highly visible stack in the corner of your kitchen. But you people know all of your shit is bullshit, it's evident in your own products.
Just the other day, I heard this young lady tell me her dinner plans for the evening as we were leaving a study session. She says to me, "I'm going home to finish cooking my dinner." Naturally I replied "What are you having tonight?" To which she replied "Soy-sausage, yum..." My brain actually vomitted down my throat a little bit. "Soy-sausage?" I replied after my involuntary burst of laughter subsided. That, right there, is how you can tell something is nonsense. When it just doesn't even sound right.
First, have you ever tasted a soy product that didn't end in the word sauce? Yea, correct, gross is the word you were looking for. Second, if this shit was really worth anything, they wouldn't have to make it masquerade as a great-tasting MEAT-product for it to sell. I mean, I've never gone to a nice restaurant, taken a look at the menu and seen a filet mignon dressed up like a bushel of alfalfa. You know why? Cause filet mignon is great, it doesn't have to dress up as shit, cause you want it, and it knows that. If soy was good, they wouldn't have to make it seem like something else. Soy ice-cream, vegetarian burgers? Soy-milk!? Soy can't have milk, because milk by definition comes from breasts. Mammary glands, hence the word mammals. Animals make milk, not plants. Grow up, all of you, or just leave, please. It's better for us all. And when the fuck did fish stop counting as meat? Do fish have roots and leaves and photosynthesis that I missed in all of my high school biology classes? How does this make sense to anyone?

The Measuring Sticks of Life, OR, Why I Can't be with a loose woman

Life is kinda like a board game in that it has a simple objective. But games are a bad analogy for life because people associate them with fun. It ain't all about fun. Sure you can have it, but that can't be your measuring stick of life if you intend to accomplish anything of substance.
The 0bjective of life is to build yourself to a point where you can have offspring, and raise them to be successful adults capable of doing the same thing. Everybody's idea of success if likely to vary, but my idea of success is to be able to make some kind of contribution to humanity. You have to try to make things a little better than they were when you started out. Otherwise, everything is to shit.
As an adult, it can be argued that the accomplishments and relative success of your offspring are the measuring stick of your own success. If you raise good kids, you've done your job. Moreover, as a man in particular, the greatest thing you can do to fail as a man, husband, and father, is to raise a little girl, to become a promiscuous woman. (If you don't believe me, just ask any good father with a daughter what his deepest darkest fear is that doesn't involve death.) The reason is obvious, and self-contained. If I personally raise my daughter to become a "ho" in the parlance of our times, I have quite simply, FAILED. High school, college, law school, my career, everything else I could have done will be overshadowed to me by that glaring hole. Not to say that I don't care about my son, but it's different. It's fathers and daughters, and mothers and sons, we all know this. You have a different sensitivity about your opposite-sex child because you know your own sex, and you know what they're trying to do to you little girl (or boy as the case may be). If I select a woman, to be my children's mother, and she's laid out with 2 dozen men, what can I really expect her to impart to my daughter but more of the same? For whatever reason, I understand there may be extenuating circumstances, but the result of her mix of nature and nurture was hoedom*. Wouldn't I be a fool to make that gamble on the future prosperity of my little girl?
Think about it. If you don't want your kids to grow up and become drug-addicts, you don't go looking for your future mate at the heroin-overdose clinic. Why should hoedom be any different? To me, it's not. It's that simple.
So my only request is this: If any woman ever finds herself interested in me (for what reason I couldn't imagine but that's a different topic), if you've got a body count anywhere near half of your age, keep right on walking and save us both the trouble.
I'm out.

Things Grown Men Just Can't Do (suggestions welcome)

One cannot call himself a grown man if he still hath not mastered the art of urination without dampening the toilet seat...

Under no circumstances may a grown man make a nickname for himself and try to make others use it.

Nor can one call himself a grown man if he uses the phrase, "Getting my grown man on..." - thanks to M. Singleton

A grown man may not boo-hoo at ANY time
especially after getting his ass kicked in an oral argument in his first year of law school

A grown man cannot wear flip-flops outside of the house if he is not at the beach (this includes man-sandals)

Video games are fun, but the successful grown man cannot spend any considerable amount of time playing them...

In fact, it is best for the putative grown man not to invest in any video game systems, for they shall surely lock him into the notorious 2nd childhood...

A grown man may not seek credit for doing things that he is supposed to do as a grown man

A grown man cannot obsess over such nonsense as rims for his car and ringtones for his cell phone...

A grown man cannot address women as "bitches"
Some of them may act bitchy, and some really are bitches but don't over generalize, furthermore some things are just rude and that's one of them

A grown man cannot be involved in the club scene

A grown man cannot overuse the words "dude" or "yo"

There is no reason for a grown man to EVER participate in a dance-off.

The Man-Crush.....enough said

A grown man shall not send another grown man text messages

(not) my life...

An unfortunate side-effect of living in an ethnically heterogenous society such as America, is that there are always going to be cultural divides amongst people. The one that gets the most press for obvious reasons has always been that between blacks and whites. Over time, a natural consequence of close interaction with each other is that in certain places, the edges start to blur a little. So what do you do when you're one of those people who grow up with one foot in each shoe?
"You're a Huxtable" everyone would say to me. "He's not really black." Others would say. "You're so white." yet others would suggest. But it was funny to me how quickly I became black when I was pulled over one time after I may or may not have been spent the night speaking to Mr. James Beam for a few hours. When the rubber hits the road, all bets are off.
I will always be exactly what I am. A fortunate upper-middle class raised black american male. It's not exactly commonplace I wouldn't say, but I'm not exactly a spotted unicorn either. But what has always been present in my life, is someone trying to push me from one group to another. People trying to force their own conception of my identity upon me. Some do it jokingly, some with hostility, some in outright anger at the fact that since I was raised to pronounce words properly I can never call myself black. If this isn't the most backwards shit I've ever heard. Think about it... What are they really saying? And this is just one side of the coin, the other side isn't any better. I'll get to that one later, but for now, just something to think about.

Everybody's an ASSHOLE

I have to apologize for my vulgarity, but my new take on my fellow people is that everybody is a fucking asshole until they show otherwise. I'm tired of it, people deserve no more credit. I was at the bar the other day discussing this and similar matters with my man Mike, (who's one of the ever-shrinking list of people in my life who help to serve as my last bastion of sanity), when this girl walked by. A black girl she was. She had some kind of braided hair on half of her scalp, the other half shiny bald like a nice new pair of brown leather loafers. The braids looked kinda stiff and were flipped into some sort of curl over to the bald side. Through her ear, there was a bone. A bone that looked like at some point in its history, it did its work in the leg of some unfortunate woodland creature who met its demise in some certainly horrible fashion, and donated its once vibrant femur to some knucklehead, hipster-dufus jewelry shop, whereupon it was purchased by our wonderful specimen of humanity which now stood before me. She had nazi-style leather boots on her feet, and some baggy, maroon burlap pants. As she was leaving the bar, she turned to her friend, and out of her mouth came the phrase, "We're going to turn that mother out." My mouth opened to say something, but I just couldn't find the words in my vocabulary to express my precise thoughts at that moment. Mike I'm sure was experiencing the same thing. But what was so disturbing is that no one else so much as batted an eye. If they thought about it at all, I'm sure it was something like 'She's expressing herself'' or, 'she's being her.' You can justify anything if that's how you think. And surely they do. This is life? This girl is a real person? This is normal? I'm done. Everybody's a fucking asshole.

Untitled Rant about Modern Sex-Society and Advice to Future Women

There comes a time in every boys life where he realizes that he can't use sex as a justification for everything. Boys have a habit of seeing everything through the jaded lens of explanation called, "I'm getting pussy." If they are, then they feel like no matter what they are doing with themselves, it must be right, otherwise they wouldn't be fucking. The problem with that is that nowadays, girls who are supposed to be the sexual selectors of the bunch have really started slacking on that front for various reasons. They have gotten so accustomed to outlandish, pointless, reckless male behavior that they have come to accept it as par for the course when it comes to boys. It's always been like this in a way, except before, there were limits to the extremity of male behavior. Now in the cellphone, internet, MTV Kanye look-alike-contest age, the fire has started to burn out of control.

But girls like out of control. 'Girls just want to have fun', is arguably the worst and most disturbingly right song in the history of garbage 80's music (which is a long history). Everybody wants to have fun, but when you start to grow up you see the practicality of tempering that with a sense of reality. People just generally seem allergic to reality these days, but that's a whole different tangent.
It should not be acceptable for a girl who wants to get married and have a family to take a grown-boy as her partner-to-be. We all know who the grown boys are, they're still living in that second childhood if they ever got out of the first one. When you hear a girl talking about how there's no good guys, it's because she invariably had a man-child somewhere in her past.
But what she doesn't realize is that perhaps it's her very selectivity that is leading her to these poor prospects. Pick better, don't blame them. If you demand it, you will get it.

Whatever happened to fresh air?

Everyone loves to feel like they're on the inside. Even when they have never even opened their shades to see what's lies outside their window.

A while ago I overheard a cell-phone conversation of a guy who was a few years below me in high school. He was most upset at the friend of his on the other end of the line. The subject of his ire was this. "Who let that dude into Play-on Playa Facebook group!?"

Yes, you did read that correctly. Why? Why must my precious, albeit frequently squandered time be burdened with such nonsensical verbal junk-mail? Simply because I go outside?

Is this what people are afraid to open a window and see. It should be, but it's not. I know this because I see the people behind this engaged in myriad other examples of childish prattle at all hours of the day for equally unreasonable reasons. These are the same people that want to claim 'Cool' by reinforcing their sense of in-group with their cro-magnon cohort that hypes up each other's absurd notions.

This kind of shit can't be going on outside my window all the time. There are still people who think, yet for some reason it has become cool not to. Beyond that, it has even become cool to chide the thinkers for their work. I suppose it always has been like this to an extent. But that doesn't make it a good idea.

I'm not saying I think I'm better than all of these people, but I'm trying my hardest to weather this putrid, storming confederacy of duncehood*, and I could use some help cause it's a mighty strong stench. Everyone please remember to open your windows now and again, there might be fresh air outside.