Life Lessons: Why the Voice in Your Head Should Stay in Your Head

When you spend a large portion of your time in various public settings that are notorious for excessive amounts of moments that boggle the mind and cause you to question your faith in the collective humanity of us all (think public transportation, congested urban centers or churches), it is important to not let the running commentary in your head become vocalized commentary. Now, you might be thinking that surely this is not that difficult, but when you spend as much time people watching as I do, it can be quite a chore to keep the odd comment from slipping out.

A few months ago I was standing in front of a train station enjoying a cigarette before I had to go and catch my train home and as per usual, the second a cigarette is lit in a public place, the Vultures start circling. Whether it is the teenage kid too young to buy his own smokes, the homeless guy that cannot afford his own or some random bloke that has never smoked a day in his life, everyone notices and starts to converge on the smoker. In this situation I keep my headphones in and do my best to ignore the requests for a cigarette while silently judging and trying to figure out the story behind each question. This day was a particularly ridiculous day as I had reached double digits in the request department and I was feeling a little bit annoyed when an overly aggressive individual did not so much ask for one but rather demanded a cigarette from me. Normally I would just shake my head and go about listening to whatever was playing on my phone, but something about this guy made me pull my headphones out and verbally answer him in the negative. Mr. Aggressive started mumbling to himself about assholes with no manners to which I should have chuckled to myself, placed my headphones back in my ears and let him walk away, while making statements about the person in my head, which I was in the process of doing when one of inner thoughts accidentally became an outer thought. As the guy was walking away I mumbled something about broke ass people and their sense of entitlement, which was just loud enough for Mr. Aggressive to hear. He turned around and approached me again, this time making sure that my personal bubble was not a thing.

A normal person might have considered trying to defuse the situation, but when faced with a dilemma, I always seem to take the road less traveled. I laughed at him and said, “what, are you going to attack me because I wouldn’t give you a smoke?”

Somehow Mr. Aggressive managed to infiltrate my bubble even further and responded, “I’m going to kick the living shit out of you because you’re an asshole.”

Once again, the appropriate response to a statement like this is probably not laughter, but I have never claimed to have ever had an appropriate response in my life, so I laughed at him and made some sort of comment about how I thought it was funny that the guy who had gotten pissy about not getting a free smoke was claiming someone else was an asshole.

At this point I was fairly confident that our exchange was about to become less verbal and more punchy, which in all honesty was not something I was looking forward to as I am a much better punching bag than I am a puncher, but I knew that I had brought this on myself. I could see Mr. Aggressive making the decision in his head to escalate the conversation and as he balled his hands in to fists, I could see out of the corner of my eye that our exchange had gotten the attention of the Transit Security guys who were making their way over to where we were standing.

I helpfully warned Mr. Aggressive that the police were heading over, to which I either expected a sucker punch or a quick backing off, but rather than acting like a remotely rational person, Mr. Aggressive took one look at the Transit Police and bolted shoulder first right through the closest Transit Cop. The other Transit Guy tried to chase after Mr. Aggressive, but there was no way that anyone was going to catch him that day.

The Police questioned me briefly about what happened before letting me go and catch my train home, but not before the guy that was bowled over gave me some very helpful advice, “you know, this all could have been avoided if you could figure out how to shut your mouth.”

I wish I could say that I took his words to heart, but every now and then I have one of those moments when what I should say in my head ekes out of my mouth. Luckily it has not turned in to the sort of debacle I faced that day, but it is only a matter of time until it happens again.

An Experiment in Creepiness

What I am about to admit to doing lately will strike most of you as me being a complete and total asshole, and given how I actually feel about myself on any given day, it is a probably a fair assessment filled with way more truth than I will ever actually admit to myself.

I have been flirting with the idea with actually meeting a member of the opposite sex to possibly get serious with for the first time in a long time, but I had come to the realization that I do not meet the sort of women one would consider settling down with, unless you were considering settling for Chlamydia or Herpes. As a man of low moral fiber, I tend to attract women of similar fiber which is normally right up my alley, but I have a desire for something more in my life, so I took to everybody’s favorite Internet meat market, Plenty of Fish.

Initially, things started off pretty well for me, as I exchanged a few messages back and forth with a couple of very sweet and interesting young ladies that had caught my fancy. Unfortunately, when it came time to actually meet each one in the reality of human interaction, I found them lacking in the ability to converse with other human beings. I tend to be more attracted to nerdy individuals with a slight introverted quality (honestly, the shy quiet type are usually the freakiest of freaks when you actually get them in to bed), but that was when I was trying to get in their pants, not start a relationship. Now, as much as nature abhors a vacuum, I was finding that I abhor people who cannot carry on a conversation. Plenty of Fish was turning out to be a bust, so I did what any complete dick would do in my situation, I started trolling the site because I had discovered that as much as PoF was full of people like myself that were looking for love outside of their normal circles, it was full of desperate ho bags and little girls looking for the “one.”

As I have mentioned before, I had trained in the fine art of judgment and condemnation which is the modern-day Church, before rejecting it wholesale to forge a path that actually made sense to me (though I guess my path has led to this, so it is hard to determine if I might have miscalculated just a little bit), so for the ho bags I would post long diatribes concerning their sinful ways in overly long messages designed to infuriate and frustrate before ultimately propositioning some sort of weird sex act because I could no longer “control my own sinful urges.” Surprisingly enough, none of them took me up on my offer.

Strange, I know.

Living in the part of the world that I do, it easy to find a very large contingent of born again Christians under every rock and in every nook and cranny, but with PoF, most of the born again Christians seemed to fall in to the little girl category (just to clarify, I refer to young women in the age range of 18-19 as little girls. They are naive, and desperate to find their life-mate, with no sense of how the real world actually works.) Profile after profile of young Christian women can be found on PoF, all looking for their knight in shining armor to be the perfect gentleman who will also love Jesus as much as they do her. I was tempted to just send some terrible sexual messages, but I figured they would get a line or two in before they deleted it, putting all my hard work to waste. These messages could not just simply be a disgusting message filled with filth and perversion. No, in order for this trolling to be a success I had to take a longer view when it came to how I messaged these bright-eyed youngsters.

I came up with a carefully formulated four message system to really dig the perversion worm in to their eyeballs.

First, I would always lead with the super-friendly, innocuous message to introduce myself and extol my virtues, laying the groundwork for how amazing and strong of a Christian man I was. Out of the twenty messages I sent, I received fourteen replies.

The second message was my favorite to write by far as I got to explain how I came out of such a dark background, full of addiction and loss. I was lost but now I am found. It was all very sad and uplifting at the same time. Out of the second round of fourteen, I managed to throw a perfect game as all fourteen of them replied to let me know how much they loved that I had come so far in life and that they praised Jesus for what he had done in my life.

The next message was the bait for my little trolling trap. I wrote back to all of them my thanks for their encouragement and my desire to maybe move on to actually meeting in person. In this message I also laid out the boundaries I believed that a Godly couple should maintain in order to keep their relationship holy. I explained to them that in order to maintain purity we would have to keep our eyes upon Jesus and that we would have to strive for sexual purity in order to have a relationship that will last forever. The guidelines that I came up with were ridiculous and included such gems as we could physically kiss each other as long as we had a three-second tongue contact cutoff as well as we could cuddle, but never under a blanket as that implies sexual activity. Some of the other rules I came up with were sure warning signs that something was up, as the fourteen dwindled to six. The one rule that as surely the tip-off for the more discerning of the fourteen was that in the heat of the moment we could explore our urges as long as the groping was above the underwear and for no longer than ten seconds. The fact that even six of these girls responded to this message positively was kind of shocking to me, but I was pleased as it meant I got to finish my trolling gloriously.

The fourth and final message started off with, “I think God gave me a dream about us last night…” From my experience living in a Christian College dormitory, any conversation that starts off this way is going to be incredibly entertaining and ultimately perplexing, but never before had the sentence been used the way I was about to. I went on to describe some pretty detailed sexual acts that God had placed on my heart, but that it was okay, because God had promised to keep us pure and sanctified as there would be no actual penetration and our virginity would be maintained.

Pleased with myself, I decided that I no longer wanted anything to do with PoF and prepared to delete my account when two of the final six girls messaged me back and were completely on board with my bullshit. I was shocked and appalled, mostly at myself for having corrupted two young girls who were too dumb to understand what kind of people exist in the world. Maybe it had something to do with my previous life as a Pastor-in-training, but I could not bring myself to corrupt two young ladies. Under normal circumstances, I would not be above playing some mild head games to get some nubile action, but I had just convinced two human beings that God wanted them to enter in to a sexual relationship with me.

I may not be the best person in the world, but even I have a line to draw in the sand.

My PoF account was deleted immediately.

I am a creep.

A Comeback (of sorts)

Sometimes I am what could be considered a terrible blogger. I have been known to start a project, only to abandon it a few weeks later when the source of my inspiration departs and my willingness to to follow through on new ideas shrivels and dies. I do have projects that I keep running on a much more consistent basis than others, and though I love all my work as one would a child (albeit a child I have left to go “buy a pack of smokes”), when I have abandoned a project, it normally stays abandoned.

Then there is this blog.

For the sake of full disclosure, I started this blog as an anonymous way to deal with some of the darker aspects of my psyche that had been threatening to take over. I was not in a good place emotionally when the first words were typed in to this vessel of inner-trash. Since those few weeks of creepy honesty, I had largely forgotten about this little blog, until someone randomly left a comment that popped up in my throw away email account. While my life has steadily improved since the initial impetus for writing what I have here, I cannot help but enjoy some of the freedom that came with being able to throw the diarrhea of my mind out into the world without fear of reprisals or judgment from people who actually have to look upon me on a daily basis.

Hence, I am back and I am ready to unearth the dredges of my mind for random people on the internet to enjoy (or at least consume. Enjoy does not seem like the appropriate word here.)

As with most everything in my life, do not expect to find serious soul searching, as everything posted here will come with a fair bit of tongue in cheek humor combined with a cynical and sardonic outlook on everything.

If you want deep, go to a therapist (or Soul Pancake. I fucking love Kid President). If you want garbage, pull up a chair.

Either way, kindly go fuck yourself.

Cheers,

A Strong Sense of Ironing

Fuck Religion

In spite of the title of this post, I want to assure you that I have no problem with anyone having a different personal faith than myself or disagreeing with anything I have to say on any subject. I think having a personal belief system is a good thing for people, as long as it is not used to oppress people or is used as an excuse to act like a shit-bag. In fact, at one point in my life I had such strong convictions when it came to my own faith that I spent four years of my life training to become a Pastor so that I could lead a new generation in to the open arms of God.

Primarily I am going to focus on the Christian experience, as that is what I am familiar with, and once again, this is not a personal attack on religion, rather it is anecdotal evidence of what happens when the Church in North America fucks up.

When I joined the Church (also known as giving my heart to Jesus), I was in a bad way. I was fresh off of becoming a convicted criminal, was severely depressed, addicted to hallucinogens and was in condition to be a functioning human being, so when someone asked me if I knew where I was going to wind up when I died I answered, “Anywhere but here would work for me.”

The guy I was talking to was a local youth pastor that had seen me over the years transform from the A-student to the train wreck and he wanted to help me, so he started inviting me out to Church events. I am pretty sure that I said yes to his invites because I was desperate for someone to give a shit about me for the first time in a long time and it felt good to believe that someone would actually take time out of their day to worry about me.

One night they had a special guest speaker whose story reflected mine in what seemed like some incredibly eery ways (I was much older when I realized that dysfunctional people have similar stories more often than not), and when he asked if anyone was sick of the life they were leading, I was the first person to raise my hand. He talked to me about what it meant to give my life over to Jesus, how He would heal me, forgive me and allow me to live a life reborn from the past pain. It sounded amazing, and I wanted to leave all my hurt behind so badly, I accepted his offer and repeated the Salvation prayer.

I will always be grateful for that moment, because as much as I have rejected plenty of the churches doctrines, if it were not for those people taking care of me early on, I probably would have wound up dead by twenty-three. Over the years I worked hard to clean my life up and live the good Christian lifestyle, which was really good for me and taught me a lot about self-discipline and accountability to myself and to others, but beneath the outward facing Christian was the cynical person that was taught to question everything and not take the world at face value. I went to a Bible College to study, and it was in that environment that I began to get a better sense of who I was and what had led me to where I was. The fear of rejection is what had pushed me in to the Church to begin with, the same fear that had driven me to drugs, alcohol and crime. The difference this time is that the people I was worried about leaving me if I did not follow their lead were not expecting me to act like a thug.

In my mind’s eye I had this image of what my peers were like when I was not around and in spite of how stupid it sounds, I would envision them sitting in prayer circles and having deep theological discussions in quiet tones. It was based on zero evidence from my interactions with them, but I felt like I had to live up to their standards otherwise they would notice that i was a fraud and would expel me from another family.

The moment I realized that all my preconceived notions concerning these people was wrong happened one night when I was hanging out with a girl I had grown quite enamored with (and had a sneaking suspicion that she was God’s choice for my future wife). We had gone for a late night walk around the campus and were relating stories about ourselves to each other. At this point I had kept pretty quiet about my past as I did not want to scare off this cute girl, but I was falling hard for her and figured it would be okay to open up, so I told her pretty much everything. After I had finished my story, we sat in silence for a couple of minutes, her looking contemplative and me looking like a person trying not to panic, knowing I had screwed everything up. Just as I thought I was going to lose my mind over the silence, she broke it with a, “sooooo….” followed by her hand grabbing my penis through my jeans. Apparently she had an incredibly weak spot for bad boys and although she wanted to maintain her virginity, she loved doing “butt stuff.” It is kind of funny how random anal sex with a girl you were convincing yourself was your future wife can change your whole perspective on the people around you. No longer was I surrounded by saints that i did not feel I could live up to, instead I was surrounded by a bunch of fuck-ups like me who were all trying to find a level of acceptance amongst each other. My teachers were no longer teaching life altering lessons about a God who loved unconditionally, instead they seemed like stories about an abusive boyfriend (“I’m sorry I hit you baby. You know I love you. It’s just when you disobey me I get so angry and can’t control myself. Baby, I promise to never try to kill you with a flood ever again. See, I got you a rainbow. You love rainbows. now you know I will always love you.”)

I was still not ready to break ties with a community that had brought me in out of my bullshit, but my desire to actually do anything to forward the church agenda was greatly diminished. I could still see how religion can be beneficial, but the more I saw how the church approached the rest of the world, I became more and more disillusioned by the whole mess. By the time I graduated Bible College I had pretty much decided that I was not going to Pastor which seems like a waste of four years, but the life lessons I learned while in school were invaluable and was part of how I came to be who I am now.

In the spirit of how I have managed to form this blog so far I give to you, my gentle and sweet readers, another list explaining why I have abandoned Christianity. Because, fuck it, why not?

1. The Church is notorious for being ass backwards on many social issues.

How often can a group of people be so wrong, so often and still be treated as a legitimate voice in modern society? I am specifically speaking about the churches stance on homosexual marriage, which is basically to yell “it’s Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve,” at the top of their lungs while claiming that God loves everyone as long as you do not want to bang a person of the same gender. Though, to expand the horizons of the churches utter contempt of logic one should examine how the church has handled feminist rights, environmental issues, the poor and segregation. They do not exactly have a strong track record when it comes to doing the right thing.

2. The Church is full of frauds and charlatans.

As per usual, I am painting with a broad brush here as I know some fantastic people who are not indicative of what I am about to say.

One of the largest ministries on a world-wide scale is called Hillsong and it is based out of Australia. It is a powerhouse ministry that sells millions of live performance CD’s every year, they run television programming, make millions off of teaching materials and sell their public speaking services for large chunks of cash. This is not in and of itself a bad thing, but they are supposed to be a non-profit charity organization, yet the heads of their ministry are filthy fucking rich off of the backs of their followers. They use state of the art facilities to produce popular music projects and television shows, yet they have the gall to ask people to donate to them on top of what they make from their various endeavors.

I have sat through more than one service where the speaker spent the entire time talking about sacrificing one’s wants and desires for the benefit of the gospel and ask for a special offering for their ministry only to see them drive away in a car that is worth more than everything I own.

The church has become a money-making conglomerate that preaches sacrifice while living as large as humanly possible. I have no problem with Capitalism in action, but when you are lying to the people who have given you their trust just so you can squeeze a little extra out of them, then you should kindly go fuck yourself.

3. The message of the Gospel is kind of fucked up.

Here is a quick theology lesson for you: God created the world, man fucked up, man gets punished (repeat until the Romans show up). God gives man a second chance and sacrifices himself as a human-God hybrid, but if you do not follow God-man, then you are royally fucked when God-man comes back to smite the shit out of bitches.

When you read the Bible you are supposed to be gleaning from it a tale of God’s everlasting love and patience for his creation, unfortunately, that is not really how it reads. God is kind of an asshole that seems to hang back and wait for an opportunity to fuck up someones day, and He absolutely enjoys it. he commands his armies to commit genocide on a regular basis because he does not like the gods that other people worship. When Jesus shows up at the scene He takes the fairly simple ten commandments and makes them almost impossible to live by,  for example at one point he tells a bunch of people who even think about a girl with lust in their hearts is the exact same as boning her, which is insane and kind of ignores some fairly deep-rooted base urges. Then, in order to pay for the crimes of humanity, Jesus kills himself (he was God, he had the power to not die, so he essentially committed suicide) and comes back from the dead to send his disciples out in to the world to spread his message, which they do. Horribly. There is so much in-fighting amongst the early church that they have to set up special councils to deal with all of the bullshit that is going on all over the place. Then the book ends with all of the good people ascending in to new bodies to live on the new earth while the rest of humanity burns in a lake of fire. I think there might be a battle between the good and bad people somewhere in the middle of that, but I was not exactly a great Eschatology student.

Needless to say, God comes off as kind of a churlish dick.

 

Well, I probably just pissed off a lot of people.

 

 

How Much is too Much: A Bachelor’s Guide to Masturbating

When I started this blog oh so many days ago (it was three days ago for you sticklers), I had started to keep count of how many times I masturbated in a week with the intention of having a funny anecdote to write here as part of my experiment in personal uncomfortableness. I figured that I would have a large-ish number by the end of seven days seeing as I am going through a bit of a sexual dry spell and I have stopped going to clubs and bars altogether, because I would like to form an actual adult relationship with someone who does not involve an early morning walk of shame (for either of us).

So, I started to keep track of my masturbatory habits and after two and a half days I think it is safe to say that I may have reached a point in my self-pleasuring life where I have found the “too much” realm of self-pleasuring. I thought that thirty would be a ridiculous number to have at the end of seven days, but when that number gets applied to two-and-a-half days, the funniness seems to drain out of the situation and is replaced by a sense of sadness, and I do not know if you are aware of this, but sad masturbation might be the second-worst form of masturbation possible (nothing beats grief masturbation).

Thirty times I have gone to town on myself, really striking home the point that I might have a problem. I mean, it is not the worlds worst problem to have, in fact I think this might be considered the least problematic problem a person can have. It is not like I am blowing off work or friends because I have to get one more tug in (though I have used the work bathroom while on a break a couple of times), and I do not think that it makes me a sexual deviant (the barely legal fetish I have fills that role). What it comes down to is that I am a young, virile human being that has decided that strange is not befitting for a grown adult trying to live in the modern world. Granted, masturbating ten-plus times a day is probably not lending itself to the image of a being a grown-ass man, but at least in this situation only myself and my hand have to deal with the walk of shame from my bedroom to the kitchen. Plus I do not have to share a post-coitus smoke with anyone.

Yup, grown-ass man,

So You Wanna Know how to Talk to People, huh?

There is something I do not understand about people (okay, there are plenty of things I do not understand about people). I see it time and again when I am out and about town and it usually involves a young man trying to talk up a young lady (or a young dude trying to talk up a young dude, a lady chatting up another lady or a lady chatting up a dude. This is an inclusionary blog) and failing miserably. You can see the nerves from a mile away, the lack of eye contact and you can read the stuttering on their lips from a mile away. Or if you are at a social gathering, you will often find at least a few people hiding in whatever corner or shadow they can find, intimidated by even the most casual of glance in their direction.

Now, someone is going to read that, see themselves in it and get pissed off because they are an “introvert” and how dare I call their lack of social skills out and say that it is a bad thing. Okay, fair enough, maybe I am being too harsh, or maybe you have failed at life. That is not for me to decide (just so you know, I already decided). I am not an expert on social disorders, so I am probably out to lunch on everything I believe on the subject of social interaction, but my limited anecdotal evidence in regards to legitimately introverted people is that they have the ability to carry on conversations and will do so when given the opportunity. They simply do not go out of their way to put themselves in situations where they will have to actively approach people and engage in social niceties.

I am a very social person. I can carry on a conversation on just about any subject, even if it means I am lying out of my ass with “facts” that I have no valid reason to know. I am not an Alpha-male though. I do not have any desire to control a room and have it focused on me, in fact I work better in smaller numbers. If I can get a captive audience of one to three people, I can create magic with my words. I will weave stories and paint pictures all night if given the chance and I do not even think twice about it. While other Alpha-male types view this as a threat and challenge to their power and authority, even to the point of confrontation, but I never view myself in that regard. I am the kind of class clown that only affects the people in my immediate vicinity versus distracting the entire class.

What kind of advice can I give to the people who want to improve their social interactions? Let us look at this in list form. ‘Cause that’s what I do (Mark Henry reference).

1. It is all about the confidence.

We all have subtle social cues that we give off and pick up on, but if you can become aware of the ones that you are giving off, you can greatly improve how you react to people. When someone approaches you, what do you do? Do you lower your eyes, cross your arms and lower your voice? Your body language suggests that you are intimidated by the person approaching you and unless they are looking to give you a swirly, you are subtly telling the person that you are not worth their time. Your body language needs to be open, starting off with how you sit, stand or lean. Keep proper posture and square your body so that you are facing whoever is talking to you, look the person in the eye and talk in an even cadence and rhythm. If you look confident, most people will not realize right away that you have dick all to say, they will just assume that you are a good listener while your brain is screaming at you to say something, anything.

2. String some words together.

A lot of people have a huge fear of public speaking, which is a completely normal and valid fear. No one wants to look stupid in front of a group of people, but I think that fear has dispersed its way in to smaller and smaller group settings. On more than one occasion over the last year, I have been trying to engage someone in conversation, only to have said person do everything in their power to avoid having to actually get involved in a situation where they might have to talk. At first I though it had something to do with me and my approach, but I started noticing it outside of normal social occurrences, plus I am pretty fantastic and easy to talk to. People have trouble even doing small talk at a grocery store or coffee wait-line, instead they will take out their cell phones and get engaged with their phone screens versus the person standing in front of them trying to carry a conversation.

Part of the problem is that i think people are afraid to look foolish in any way, so they actively avoid scenarios where that is a possibility. While I have developed an ability to fake my way through most conversations, I understand that you have to be kind of a dick and incredibly arrogant to do that on a regular basis. What I suggest, is that you learn how to actively listen to what people are saying to you, and learn how to form questions based on what you are hearing. That seems pretty straightforward, but it is actually quite difficult to actively listen to other people without spending most the time they are talking trying to figure out what you are going to say next, and when you do not have something to follow-up with what someone says, you must suffer the awkward pause. Coming up with a simple question lets you stay in engaged in the conversation, you appear interested in what the other person is saying and you are giving them a chance to continue on in the conversation. If they are talking about a subject you are familiar with yet you do not feel comfortable talking about it, try using non-committal phrasing to remain engaged in the conversation. A simple, “oh yeah I heard about that,” or “I know, right?” keeps a conversation flowing until you can build up some courage to contribute something a little more relevant to the conversation.

3. Keep your eyes off the gibbly bits.

Ladies, this last part here is for the fellows. You can keep reading, as I might have a nugget or two for you, but this is primarily for men that find themselves in a party-type situation. Okay, you are able to fake your way through confidence and forming words, so you have taken your skills to a bar and you are ready to make your move. You see a pretty young lady standing by herself at the bar, so you sidled on up the bar and you offer to buy her a drink which she accepts. It is time to work your magic! You think you are killing it, but she finishes her drink, thanks you for it and promptly disappears. What the hell just happened? What were your eyes doing? Were they looking in to her eyes, or were they exploring her body? Guys, if you walk up to a lady wearing a low-cut top and short skirt or dress, do not be ashamed to give her a quick once over with your eyes as you introduce yourself. Ladies, if you walk up to a guy with his balls showing, you should probably call the cops.

After you take a quick glance, control yourself. No one likes a pervert, and staring at her chest the entire conversation will paint you as an awkward pervert with no social grace. You may want to sleep with her more than anyone else ever, but you need to control your urges until a more appropriate venue arises (trust me, you will be able to figure out when it is appropriate). Now, if you have read anything else by me, you are probably screaming the word hypocrite at me, because you know I was caught checking out my former bosses posterior on a daily basis. I was not trying to sleep with my boss, nor was I being overt about it. Plus, this is my blog and I can be hypocritical and contradictory towards myself all I want.

Deal with it.

Depression: the do’s and don’ts

Disclaimer: This is not a self-help blog and following any advice derived from this nonsense will be detrimental to you and the act of the living

Before we delve in to any sort of helpful nuggets of information, let us get one thing absolutely and perfectly clear: if you are suffering from depression, go and get help. It is nothing to be ashamed of in any way, many thousands of people battle depression in silence every single day and sometimes it ends well while other times it can have a horrible outcome. I am an exception to the rule in that I battled depression for years, yet managed to come out the other end of it relatively unscathed without an ounce of professional help. That is not how that story usually ends. Do not be afraid to ask for help.

Now back to our regularly scheduled garbage.

 

I know I keep teasing an origin story of sorts that will show you, dear reader, where I came from and how I came to be the incredibly well-balanced and socially adjusted person I am today, and I promise it is coming soon. This however, is a look at how I was able to turn the corner of my life and grasp it out of the mire of depression and self-loathing that had left me a barely functioning person. I am also a fan of lists, so I will present this in an easy-to-understand list for your reading ease and pleasure.

What are the things that you can do to help yourself?

1. Drink. A lot. Also, drugs.

You will here from a majority of people (all of whom that are much more qualified than I am to tell you these sort of things) that drinking and drugs are a poor mans coping mechanism and will do more harm than good in the long, medium and short run. Based purely upon my own anecdotal evidence, I think those people are wrong. Sure, you could go to any Psychoanalyst and get your head tinkered with while filling out multiple prescriptions of chemical-changing, laboratory approved drugs, but all that will tell you is that you are broken and you need drugs to fix it. You already know you are broken. You feel it every day you do not want to leave your bed and face the sun. Why would you want to fill your body with chemicals that you can barely pronounce the names of when you can self-medicate yourself with chemicals that you can pronounce like Smirnoff, Northern Lights or Mushroom? If you have to force yourself to go out in to the world, at least do it on your terms and in your preferred altered state of mind.

2. Stop caring about your body.

If you are going to walk down the path of self-medication, you have to abandon all personal care and attention you have towards your physical body, which simply makes perfect sense and will contribute toward the sense of detachment you need to deal with depression effectively. You stop viewing your body as your own and you are now able to view the world as a finite and small place in which you are just renting out some storage space for a limited time. You can fill that storage space with whatever you want to make it feel better, and there is no consequence as it is temporary. You can decorate the walls with junk, pile boxes everywhere and invite whomever you want inside because you no longer care about the decor. It will all go away eventually.

3. Give up.

I need to make sure that you understand that when I say give up that I do not mean end it all. That is not helpful for you or anyone else. When I say give up, I mean that you need to resign yourself to the fact that you are not in control of anything in the world around you. It is giving up in the sense that you concede the daily fight to the world. It has won, you have lost and you need to be okay with that. You no longer have to worry about fitting your square shape in to the worlds round hole. All the randomness and chaos that makes up life will not matter to you anymore because you no longer have to worry about trying to conquer it to make yourself happy. The freedom that comes from not worrying about ever having to be happy again can actually be one of the happiest moments in your life.

4. Become whatever other people want you to become.

You are now fully self-medicated, you do not care what you are doing to your body and you have given up on the world and yourself. You are now ripe picking for the social pressures that comes from wanting people to like you. Even though you have given up, you probably have a gaping hole in your heart from years of rejection from your parents and peers, and now is as good a time as any to develop a false sense of community with whoever will take you. I would adapt who I was based entirely on who I was trying to sleep with at any given time, which is bonus because sex is the best way to judge your self-worth. If you are having lots of it, you are golden. If you are not, you need to figure out how to convince sex to come to you, hence you become a chameleon. Does that goth girl make you feel funny in your loins? Start wearing black eyeliner. Fill your life with distractions and you can forget your depression for minutes at a time.

 

Now, what are some of the don’ts when it comes to depression?

1. Do not kill yourself.

This is really the only don’t that I have for you, as this is the one way to make positively sure that you will never actually deal with your depression and you will ruin the lives of more than one person in the process. I have been there, contemplating the end of it all and envisioning how much my suicide would hurt the assholes that had caused me so much pain, and I have even been close a time or two. It is a very dark place to be and while every time I have been in that head space I have been able to step back and let perspective change how I was feeling in that moment, I understand that I am not the norm in any way. You need to understand that the pain you feel will go away, along with every good feeling, accomplishment and highlight of your life if you decide to take the permanent way out. When people think about you, it will not be the good things that you brought to the world that they will remember, instead the memory of your life will always be prefaced with a black mark of anger and sadness.

 

 

 

 

Stupid is as Stupid Does

Like the man who comes to a fork in the road and chooses the road less traveled, if I approach a decision that can either have a positive outcome or a negative one, I will more often than not choose the negative outcome. In fairness to myself, this is something that I have realized about my psyche and I have worked hard to overcome my inability to be a functioning human being, but not before I gave my all to make sure I wound up either dead or in jail.

When I was eighteen, I had a fairly firm belief that I would be dead by the age of twenty-three and I lived my life accordingly. While I managed to avoid letting myself fall down some of the darker holes that were before me (heroin, cocaine, meth), I made up for those avoidances by diving headlong in to some of my favorite vices (alcohol, weed, mushrooms, hallucinogens and ecstasy). Some people can handle their recreational drugs and function like normal people, but I was not one of those people. It might have had something to do with some pretty severe depression or that I was using chemicals to try and run away from the real world, but I became a train wreck of a human being.

I went from being a straight A student to a high school dropout over one summer of intense partying that included a month long bender that I have very vague memories of that ended with me waking up in a ditch covered in bruises and one hundred miles away from home (Not really home. I had been kicked out of my house on my seventeenth birthday, hence part of the depression, but that is a different story with a different moral).

In the middle of winter that year, I was drinking with a bunch of friends and somehow we found ourselves wandering around the streets well after midnight full of Vodka and weed. A normal person would probably throw up in an alley, piss in a newspaper box and maybe cause a tiny ruckus, but that was not in the cards for me. At some point during the festivities, we found ourselves outside of the home of a known pedophile and for some reason that made perfect sense at the time but has been lost to sobriety, we were preparing to break in to his house. I think we were going to steal his multiple tins of tobacco, which wold have made some sort of broken sense, but once I was in the house that was not what happened.  Instead I found myself hiding in a closet waiting for a convicted pedophile to come around the corner so I could jump out and smash him the face. The rest of the night is still pretty much a black hole of memories, but after waking up in a jail cell the next day I can say with some confidence that the rest of the night did not play out in my favor. After getting booked and having the police explain to me that I had in fact attacked the guy, I was told that people had seen us enter the house, so the police were waiting outside as we made our escape. I was charged, tried and sentenced within a month and was left with a permanent criminal record for breaking and entering. At any point that night I could have pulled the rip cord on our shenanigans, but I was not possessed with the wherewithal to know how to make any productive decisions in regards to my life.

Since that night, I have worked hard to get my life in to some semblance of order, and even writing about that time of my life feels like I am writing about another person. Though I do not want you to get the wrong idea about where I am now. While I have managed not to burn my life down to the ground since then, I have managed to get myself fired on multiple occasions because my mouth does not know how to keep words from leaving it and I have made more than one naked, drunken mistake.

My ability to not make any huge life changing mistakes has improved, and you might even mistake me for a productive member of society if you were ever to meet me on the street, but at the end of the day I often feel like a homeless person pretending to be a suburban gentleman. I can say and do the right things, but just under the surface I am waiting to throw my feces while sputtering gibberish.

When Your Girlfriend says she sees Gnomes, GTFO

If I can make one claim in this crazy journey we call life, I will always be able to claim that I know how to pick the crazies out of a crowd. The problem with that is once I can clearly see them and comprehend that some mental malfunction is going on, I make doubly sure to get them naked and in my bed as quickly as possible before attempting to commit to a long term relationship. I do not know if it has something to do with the way I was raised (hint, it does, but that is a story for another time) or if I cannot commit an act of casual sex with someone who has gone coo coo for cocoa puffs without feeling incredibly guilty, but it is a common occurrence in my life.

The first time I knew I had the magical touch, I was a scant sixteen-years old, and I was hanging out with my brand new girlfriend halfway up a mountain, where we sat, snuggled in each others arms, and watched the sunset. It was a beautiful night, we were young, carefree, full of hormones and alone, so we did what any normal sixteen-year old couple would do and we made out furiously for about an hour. At one point, while we were giving our lips and hands a rest, we found ourselves on the subject of our childhoods, which meant I got to tell stories of how insane my family was and how glad I was that I did not wind up like them. I told my stories and expected her to regale me with a few stories from her childhood, but I was not prepared for her to say, “I see gnomes. I’ve seen them since I was a little girl. They would come in to my room and watch over me while I slept. My mom has seen them to. They are like my silent protectors.”

Anybody else probably would have split right then and there, but I was a man of much more testicular fortitude, by which I mean she had slid a hand down my pants and completely erased the conversation from my brain for the next ten minutes. It is kind of weird to discover that your girlfriend is nuts and have sex for the first time within minutes of each other, but that set the precedent for future entanglements. I wish I could say that I broke up with her within at least days of her startling revelation, but alas I cannot, as the relationship continued for another six months after that, and it was finally her that broke up with me. In my defense, she was my first sexual encounter, and she was a very willing and able teacher which made it very easy to look past the crazy.

While I never quite reached that level of crazy in a relationship ever again, I was able to dip my toe in to a rather large variety of mentally unstable relationships before I came to the fundamental crux of the matter. It was not that I had a thing for the unbalanced, it was more that I was a barometer for the depths of crazy within a female subject. It is a simple formula that I devised that I believe should be adopted by Psychiatrists everywhere:

Step 1: Am I attracted to said female?

If yes, move to step 2. If no, then she is no crazier than the rest of us.

Step 2. Is said female attracted to me?

If yes, move to step 3. If no, all is good in the hood.

Step 3. Have I slept with her before actually having a legitimate conversation?

If yes, move to step 4. If no, I should probably marry her on the spot.

Step 4. Has she mentioned gnomes, gang stabbings, pregnancy, Jesus or love within the first day of meeting?

If yes, you are fucked. If no, you are probably still fucked.

 

There you have it, the surefire test for all things crazy.

Being forewarned is akin to being forearmed, but not like Popeye. That guy had some freaky forearms.

 

How to Make Sure you are never Promoted

I have had a number of jobs over the years, running the gamut of manual labor, customer service and retail. In my own personal and completely unbiased opinion, I have been the best of the best at all of them, but that means very little when the people above you fail to recognize the awesome that is contained in my flesh. It hardly seems fair that I have never risen above the rank of a supervisor, seeing as I have the skill and ability to be the CEO of any number of Fortune 500 companies.

Over the years I have had the opportunity to examine my life and get very introspective concerning my professional failures, and I think I have cracked the code. It is not my skills at whatever particular job that are deficient, as those are always top notch. Rather, it comes down to the intangibles, the things that I say or do that make people question my ability to advance in to more of a leadership role. With these revelations, I am going to give you the (oddly specific) tools you need in order to get ahead in life.

 

1. Do not tell customers that they should not be allowed out in public.

You are probably saying to yourself, “that seems like a no-brainer. What kind of moron would ever say that?” Well, if you must know, this kind of moron would say that. Granted, the customer in question had just thrown her garbage at me and had told me I should not be allowed to work in public because I had the gall to ask her to place her garbage in the receptacle provided versus on the floor where it was currently sitting, but that is no excuse. I should have thanked for throwing her trash in my face as it made it much more convenient to place the garbage in a trash can. That was my mistake.

2. Refrain from calling your overweight, lazy boss a fat sloth.

Once again, this should be basic common sense, but it needs to be stated for people, as common sense is not exactly a common thing anymore. When you are working your ass off all day in a sweltering environment while your direct supervisor walks around with a clipboard versus actually helping (which is part of his job description), it is very easy to bad mouth that person when they are not around. In fact, one might even call it cathartic. Unfortunately when your unhelpful boss is lurking behind a pile of boxes within earshot of your conversation, it is probably best not to refer to him as a “fat, lazy sloth,” or refer to his genitals as having an air of vagina about them (not that there is anything wrong with being a woman. In fact, the best worker at that job was a woman who could work me under the table). The higher-ups tend to frown upon that particular form of verbiage, and it is a surefire way to dig a hole too deep for you to climb out.

3. Do not treat people that are not paying as non-customers

Having worked in a coffee bar and a gad bar, I have had my fair share of people come in and use the facilities on a permanently regular basis, and for the most part t is not a problem. I do not mind when you come in on a hot day and order nothing but water because I understand, you need water to survive. However, when you come in every single day and order nothing but water or use the bathrooms as your personal ball scrubbing room, crack den or cocaine table, it becomes very difficult to treat you like a valued customer. While I am sure you meant to leave the feces on the side of the toilet as a gift and a sign of respect, I did not take it that way. Instead, I started coming up with ways to annoy the non-paying public. If you order water every day, I flat out lie to you and say that our water is now a dollar a cup which goes to lowering our carbon footprint, or when you ask to use the bathroom I will tell you that our bathrooms are closed permanently as a number of people have filed complaints about getting herpes and Hepatitis C through the use of our toilet seats. Unfortunately, the people in charge want you to treat every single person as a customer, regardless of whether they actually pay money or not, and that was my mistake. I made the assumption that only people that bought products from a company were considered customers, and I paid for my mistake.

4. Do not sleep or try to sleep with coworkers

This once again falls under the “duh” category, but time and time again this is a problem in every place of work, and is an issue that is not just applicable to me. Unfortunately, it is a trap I have fallen into on more than one occasion. At first, it starts off as simple texting about work-related things, but as time goes on you become more familiar with each other and a rapport begins to build. This when you need to take control and make sure the rapport stays casual, because once you send the “wanna fuck?” text, you have gone too far. If they reply back, “sure, you at home?” then you have completely boned yourself figuratively, and your coworker literally. Now, maybe you are thinking that two grown adults can ride the pleasure pony and leave it at that, and you may be right, but you do not know what kind of unforeseen consequences can arise. The first, and the most apparent, is that an attachment could accidentally form that you had no intention of sparking. In fact one party or the other simply wanted to bump uglies while the other party is determined to start a relationship. That makes things awkward, especially when her best friend that knows everything about her is also one of your coworkers. Having someone stare daggers at you forever is less than a fun experience. Another problem that may arise is the information that may arise after the fact about both parties involved. An example of this might be that you are trying to repair the professional relationship you have with the injured party when you discover that the bucking bronco twenty-five year old you thought you bagged turns out to be a fairly aggressive eighteen-year old. Your look of shock makes the other party inquire about your age in which you either have to lie and say something like twenty-two, or tell the truth and say thirty. In this case, lie. Lie, lie, lie. The truth might cause someone to accuse another person of cradle robbing and that is super uncomfortable for everyone involved. Avoid sleeping with coworkers, especially the over-developed teenage ones.

5. Avoid checking out your bosses backside on a daily basis

I recently discovered that women have a pretty decent sense of when a male is checking them out. I did not know this until very recently. I was working for a rather attractive female boss who was excellent at her job. She worked hard, did everything amazingly and was a pure joy to work with. In fact, she was one of the best bosses I had ever experienced. She also happened to have one of the nicest posteriors I have ever worked with, and I often found my gaze drawn to its shapely outline on a daily basis. I was never lewd about it, I never made any comments about it and I was subtle about how I was checking it out to the point that I was positive she had no idea. It was just a nice bum attached to a wonderful boss. During a candid conversation with her about our lives and what we were working towards, she came up with this dandy of a question, “so, you know that I know that you have been checking my ass out for months now?” I once again considered lying and denying everything, but due to the nature of our professional relationship, I figured that I was not in any real trouble outside of feeling embarrassed, so I told the truth and answered “nope, I had no idea that you knew.” Aside from teasing me about it endlessly for the rest of our time together, all she said was, “women are pretty aware when a guy is checking us out. You should keep that in mind.” I took her advice, but judging from the amount of promotions given out to everyone that had not checked out her ass every day, I think it is safe to say that she had no intention of advancing the pervert.

 

So there you are, some simple rules to keep you advancing up the corporate ladder. Use these to your advantage and one day you will be the President of the world.