Random Thoughts: September

I spend the vast majority of my life pondering very random and usually very strange things. I wish that for just one day you could get into my head and feel the constant churning of subjects and the very intense analysis of things that, at the end of the day, really don’t fucking matter beyond “just slightly.” I sit in my non-fiction class and wonder what it would be like to have Explosions in the Sky playing in the background of my life all the time. I go to work, and while I’m supposed to be researching and writing an article about the swine flu, I’m thinking about how awesome of a band name Mother Effort & The Foolish Its would be, or how dope of a website domain name whatifwenamedit.com would be, and about how I should start using words like “dope,” and “dig,” or “dangit,” or anything that sounds sweet and starts with a D much more often. When I’m in the shower I wonder if the inception of universal healthcare would make medical marijuana easier to come by for someone with no tonsils and a pornography addiction.

I don’t know if anybody else’s head works this way, and to be honest I don’t really care, because I only care about myself and hate all of humanity except for guys. (Did you get that? That’s my new and creative way to say I’m a misogynist.) All I know is that my thoughts can be described as sporadic at best, and that about once in every five times one of these random thoughts comes into my head, I write them down. I’ve written a spattering of entries for this burgeoning website of incoherent rambling and straight-up bullshit that have been titled “Random Thoughts” or something to that effect, but those, like my thoughts, have been very unpredictable. So, I had an idea the other day. I’m going to start collecting these random thoughts I have, and do an entry of them at the end of every month. If you don’t like them, that’s fine, and I completely understand. I probably wouldn’t want to sit around and read the random thoughts of some dude, and if you feel that way then I hope you can spend the time you would’ve spent reading this doing something productive, like saving the print industry or mapping out the migratory patterns of all the loose women in your immediate vicinity.

But, for the rest of you...

***

--I dig the restaurant Subway, I really do. I mean, that place is dope, but dangit it can be stressful. Think about it. You go in there and get in line to get a hoagie, and they just start firing questions at you. It’s like a double-edged sword, too, because you either roll in there with no line, and they start throwing questions at you before you’ve even decided if you want to go healthy (wheat) or happy (Italian herbs and cheese), and as soon as you mumble an answer to that one, they start throwing around questions about cheese. They always ask you what kind of cheese you want, and what if you don’t know what kind of cheeses they have? If you’re not a Subway veteran, you might think that they serve swiss there, and ask for it, at which point the person waiting on you will give you a scornful look that all but says “your parents never even really loved you.” On the other side of the spectrum, you can go in there in a line behind eight people and have enough time to figure out exactly what you want and to play an entire game of Monopoly on your iTouch, and you can get through the bread and cheese, and even the toasted or not question without any real confusion or inconvenience (aside from the fact that you just stood for 20 minutes behind a man that has ordered 12 fucking sandwiches because he must be a Mormon bringing home dinner for the entire family). But then you get to the vegetable portion of the ordering process, when they begin to fire questions at you again. Initially, you knew that you wanted lettuce, tomato, onions, black olives, green peppers, jalapenos, salt, and pepper, but when they start asking you, all you can do is say the first two items you’d wanted before you feel bad because they keep reaching in and grabbing more and more shit to put on your sandwich when they should be helping the 80-year-old woman behind you that’s getting dinner for the entire fucking nursing home. I think the franchise tried to remedy this situation by offering “the works” option, which is when a patron utters that they want those words and they automatically get most of the usual sandwich vegetables applies automatically. The problem with that is, though, that pretty much every single Subway employee has a different perception of what “the works” includes--despite the fact that its inclusions are on a sticker right in front of them and the customer. One day, a lady tried to put carrots on my sub. Fucking carrots. On a sweet onion chicken teriyaki. I mean, come on.

--I like to visit the website postsecret.com when it is updated every Sunday, and I wonder what it would be like if somebody from your hometown read the message on the postcard and then saw the town from which it came from (it’s sometimes very visible on the cards, obviously), put two and two together and realized that it was you who’d written the card. One example of this would be a postcard I saw on the site that came from Germantown, Maryland this week that read “I’ll only have sex w/ my students in my dreams” repeatedly. What if you were a high school teacher and your principal saw that on the site and was immediately like, “That was Mrs. Fucking Mason, goddammit, I know it. She’s always telling Roy she can tell he’s been working out because his delts are just popping. I knew that shit wasn’t normal.” Fuck, that site could be used to catch criminals.

***Update: Shortly after I wrote this one, I checked on Post Secret again and discovered that the address they send the cards to is a Germantown, Md. address. I’m a fucking idiot.

--The other day I was in class, and the girl I sit next to was talking to the girl in front of her. I was sitting there attempting to mind my own business and thinking about what it would be like if morbidly obese people were considered extremely sexy and skinny models were considered outcasts and misfits when I heard the girl in front of me say, “My Dad’s boyfriend’s sister...” Just think about it for a second.

--Have you ever gotten drunk and not remembered everything that happened to you the night before? Well, I have once or twice, and when I do, the first thing I think the next morning is about how much I’d love to know just exactly what I did the night prior. I’ve always thought it’d be really cool if you could wake up and replay your entire evening in one of those “previously on” segments they always play before television shows start. Like, instead of an Entourage “previously on” (that would go something like this: Vince banged some chicks and sucked at acting, E was the biggest douchebag known to man, Turtle wore a Yankees flat brim hat and smoked a bong, Drama drastically overestimated himself, and Ari yelled a lot of random shit at people), it’d be like “Previously on ‘Scott was wasted again last night’: It started out as a nice and relaxing Tuesday evening, and he was going to take it easy and drink two bottles of wine while sitting at his computer and typing fucking stupid random thoughts, but then his friends asked him to go out. He drank the bottles of wine anyway, and chased them down with a few shots of bourbon. Following this he played ‘parkcore’ the entire way to the bar, where he just barely made it in after dropping his identification in a puddle outside of the entrance and right in front of the bouncers. After drinking a few beers, he began to belt out the lyrics to ”Still Fly“ by the Big Tymers even though the actual song playing in the background was ”Party in the USA,“ by Miley Cyrus. After this, he requested that the DJ play ”Party in the USA,“ by Miley Cyrus, and offered to dance with him if he would...etc.

--I’m sure that, although I disagree with a lot of people concerning a lot of things, that everyone that reads this can agree with me on this one statement: weed makes you hungry. Everyone knows it, even if they haven’t tried it (which I haven’t, I have a D.A.R.E. license plate and take that shit seriously, but I have heard things), and I’m not sure why, but it’s supposed to produce quite the appetite. So, I’d like to make a modest proposal: why not legalize marijuana for one day of the year, and make it readily available to the public? I mean, only one day per year couldn’t hurt that badly, could it? And the day I’m thinking of is Thanksgiving. How fucking cool would that be? You could pass a couple of ceremonious blunts around the table for you, your brother, Aunt Ruth, Grandpa Thaddeus and the whole crew to just get ripped on thirty minutes before dinner. At the very least, you’ll be out of it and actually be able to convince yourself that the Detroit Lions are a good football team, and at the very best you’ll be geeking out with your cousins and having a gravy chugging contest. That’s a win-win.

I can see how this might cause some problems for professional sports, though, because their random drug tests for the month would be completely null and void. Ricky Williams would immediately love Thanksgiving.

--I was writing an article at work the other day concerning the Pennsylvania Wine Association’s new marketing campaign that includes something called a ”Libation Vacation.“ This is something they’ve decided to push (because of the economic downturn) that is supposed to attract people to visit PA wine trails instead of taking vacations that are further away and much more expensive. Part of the campaign includes the PWA inviting local bloggers that specialize in food, drink and travel to a wine trail, in hopes that they will write favorably about their experience and encourage others to go get hammered. For some reason, I haven’t gotten an invitation yet. This made me think about how terrible it is to be a resident of Pennsylvania if you’re also a borderline alcoholic. This is absolutely THE WORST state to get drunk in if you’re trying to do it after 9 p.m. and don’t want to go to a bar (which is to say, you’re trying to get drunk by yourself). All of the beer distributors and liquor stores close at nine or earlier, and you can get booze nowhere else. Also, residents of PA pay some of the highest taxes in the country and also some of the highest college tuitions. Fuck this state.

--I was talking to one of my friends the other day, and she told me that 30 % of women do not get off. I don’t know if she meant before the age of 21, or 30, or ever, but I immediately thanked about 8 different deities for having the good fortune of being a man. Because a typical guy can get off anywhere. And I mean anywhere.

--Throughout most of my life I’ve been very averted to commitment to women and the prospect of a long term relationship. This could be for a bunch of reasons, but I think I’ve pretty much outgrown it. The one thing about that whole deal that still gives me pause is when I see couples that have been together for a while, and they seem to kind of hate one another. At the very least they resent each other. I think this might be because once you reach a certain point in a relationship, you start to kind of get comfortable and fuck up in ways that absolutely would not have flown at the beginning. You get to a point in the relationship where things that would have happened at the beginning and resulted in an immediate break-up begin to seem almost trivial, and it’s kind of like people’s standards get lower and lower when they actually have a significant other. This is something that I don’t understand. I know that people can say ”Well, once we’ve been together so long we can’t just throw away everything we’ve had and all the time we’ve spent together over something like that.“ In other words, people learn to forgive, which I’m completely fine with...when it comes to certain things. I just don’t think you should feel like you have to forgive someone just because you’ve been with them for a period of time that you couldn’t get back anyway, unless you have a fucking Dolorian. Think of it this way. If you start dating a new girl and she cheats on you in the first month, you’re going to (unless you’re a total fuck) break up with her, never talk to her again, and probably write a bunch of emo songs about how big of a c-word (cheater, duh) she is. Does it make any sense at all to stay with that person if they cheat on you two years later, just because you’ve spent a lot of time with them and don’t want that all to go to waste? In my mind, if someone cheats on you, all of that time was a fucking waste anyway. There is no other part of life that mimics that, and I don’t know why relationships should be any different. That’s like going to the hospital for a major surgery and realizing that your health insurer doesn’t cover a full frontal lobotomy, but being like, ”Oh, fuck it. I’ll pay for the whole goddamn thing, because I’ve been with HighMark since the early 80s and don’t want to just throw all those years down the toilet. Some things are just more important than my own health, you know?“ It’s like sticking with that stock you bought in Enron back in 2001, just because you don’t want to waste all that time you spent looking their numbers up in the newspaper. Sometimes, you just have to sell the stock.


Now, after I wrote that part about cheating, something came to mind that’s from a conversation I had with my dearest mother shortly after I’d discovered that one of my ex-girlfriends had cheated on me. I was going on and on about how unacceptable cheating is and how I didn’t give a fuck if I was married to someone or not. If they cheated on me, I was out. She told me that maybe that wasn’t entirely fair (which immediately made me think that maybe I really am a postal worker’s child) in some circumstances, since people change through the years. I tried to pay creedence to that, but then I came to my senses and realized exactly what I’d do if I found out my spouse had cheated on me and I had children. I’d gather those little buckaroos around me in their little playroom, give each of them a Klondike (before fucking dinner!) and lay it all out for them. It’d go something like this: ”Hey kids. Well, all that yelling and shattering of the good china and what not that you probably heard earlier most likely has you a little bit in the dark, and I just wanted to be the first to tell you that your mother and I are getting a divorce. I wanted to try and stick it out for all of your guys’ sake, but Mom’s been doin’ Larry from accounting, and I just can’t abide that. Bill, it’s like you keepin’ on with that whole Young Republicans thing even though you know the dude that was president for the past 8 years probably wasn’t doing the right shit. You just realize that you fucked up a little bit, and you move on. You don’t keep going red just because you wasted a few years doing it. Shit. And Macy, fuck, Macy, you’re only eight years old, so you probably won’t remember any of this shit in a few years anyway, but damnit, it’s like you keeping on playing with those Barbies you were so fond of even after you found out they were made with 9/10ths esbestos. Take it from me, young one, it’s not worth getting cancer just because you spent your formative years playing with a piece of fucking plastic. And Jason, well, Jason. I have nothing really to say to you, since you’re always reading books...maybe that’s not a waste of fucking time, and if it is, your old man isn’t ready to face that sad truth yet. Anyway, that’s the deal. Who wants to go to Dairy Queen? What Macy? No, Mom’s not coming. She’s in the bedroom we used to share crying because I tricked her into signing that pre-nup all those years ago when I said it was a modeling contract!“

--I absolutely would not want to be on a commercial for E-Harmony. How embarrassing would that be? Well, I guess not as embarrassing as those commercials for once daily Valtrex, when there’s a couple talking about how one of them hooked up with a burner in high school and as a result caught a serious case of the herp, and the other one is a clean sexual being. And they’re trying to keep it that way. Why would you want to go onto a commercial and be portrayed as that person for the rest of your life? You know people would see you and be like ”Oh, shit! It’s the Valtrex girl!“ Aim a little higher. Try auditioning for a Kotex spot, or something.

--I’ll tell you something else I don’t want to be: sober on December 21, 2012. Allegedly, according to the Mayans, that’s supposed to be the day that the world comes to an end. If this is true, I don’t think I’ll be able to do much personally to change it, so I may as well go out kicking. So, on that day, I’m going to get completely blitzed and try to fulfill everything on my bucket list (mainly sexual fantasies), just in case the world ends. (Personally, I don’t think it will end, and find it odd that people base this hypothesis on the fact that the Mayans stopped making their long ass calendar on that day. I don’t think they did this because they thought this would be the day the world would end, but because they were too busy running away from all the white people trying to fucking kill them to keep making some stupid calendar.)

--Phoenix University is kind of a weird entity. Their main marketing tactic is to show people that they can do all of their college work from the comfort of their own home and in their pajamas. Fuck that. Who wants to be in their pajamas all day? If you’re going to be sitting there all day on your laptop, go naked, and when you have a web conference with your classmates flash them the goat real quick.

--Earlier this month, I was leaving my apartment complex with a couple of friends at about noon to walk up to the Intramural fields to begin our tailgating for that evening’s football game. I was drinking a beer (my first of the day) and enjoying myself when an undercover cop car pulled up next to us and asked for our identification. They then proceeded to site me for having an open container in the borough of State College, where it is apparently illegal (this was about 50 yards from University Park, where there were probably about 75,000 open containers being consumed right then and in a far more dangerous environment). While one of the cops was writing my citation (which always seems to take about half a fucking hour, for whatever reason--potentially illiteracy), I asked the other if she had been assigned to work in State College, or if she’d actually decided to work there.

”Well, I’m a State College Police Officer,“ she said.

”I know,“ I said, because it was fairly fucking obvious. ”That doesn’t really answer my question. Did you choose to work here?“

She told me that, yes, she did indeed choose to work in the area.

”Um, why?“ I asked. ”It seems like all you guys do is give college kids citations and deal with a bunch of stuff that really isn’t that interesting at all.“

She then went on to tell me that State College is a good place to raise a family, and that she likes it here. ”I mean, it’s different than working in a city because we don’t get shot at every day and it pays a lot better.“

I was aghast at that statement. ”You get paid more than officers that work in a city?“

”Yeah, a little more.“

”Like, more than the people that get shot at every day?“

”Yeah.“

”But isn’t the whole point of being a police officer so that you can actually make a difference and stuff?“ Right then her partner came out of the car and handed me my ticket, and began to instruct me on where I had to go to pay it. He also told me that my fine would be determined by the district magistrate and would be ”about $80.“ Good thing the female cop wasn’t in charge of determining my fine, because I think she took my remark about making a difference to the head, because she had one hell of a furrowed brow that made her look like the principal from Matilda. The next week, I went to the magistrate to pay my fine, which came out to $153.50. For having an open beer and not causing harm to anybody.

No wonder people dislike the police.

--I dig Barack Obama, and I voted for him. I never thought he was going to be the nation’s savior, or even that he was the best person in the country for the job, but he was the best one running. He was the lesser of two evils in my eyes, and I still stand behind my decision to vote for him, and don’t think he’s doing a very bad job thus far. I think people should keep in mind that the President is treated very differently from everyone else, in a way that only football quarterbacks are treated. The President gets the credit for triumphs, and they get the blame for the low points, whether or not they were even very instrumental in making either one happen.

But, really, did he have to go on ESPN before Monday Night Football earlier this week and talk about Hispanic Heritage Month? I really don’t think that was important at all, and it’s not because I have anything against Hispanics at all (I understand it might seem that way if you take my question and let yourself make assumptions, but I assure you that I don’t), it’s just that I think he has other, more important issues to be preparing speeches about. Obviously, there’s the economy, there’s war, there’s healthcare. More than all of those, I though Obama should’ve been talking about breast cancer. The entire reason he gave his little speech was because October is Hispanic Heritage Month. October also happens to be Breast Cancer Awareness Month, as you can probably tell by all of the pink gear football players have been wearing. The way I see it, Breast Cancer Awareness is much more important than honoring Hispanic Heritage, and it should be addressed as such. Think about it: 40,610 women are expected to die of breast cancer this year. That’s a lot of people, and it’s a disease thats awareness should be spread as far as possible in an effort to find some more effective ways to battle it, and, maybe someday even cure it. How many people do you think have died because they didn’t get honored for their ethnicity? I’d say zero.