It's not illegal if it's love, part 1.

So one particular day I was walking down the street because I'm not a lazy son-of-a-bitch and I don't always need to drive places, and I saw a young girl on the side of the road in a box. The box said "For Sale" as she looked at me, apparently incapable of talking. This was a space age box capable of speech, and also I'm poor with grammar. Anyway, this was not an uncommon sight in the bay area. With the influx of those filthy immigrants, a lot of children are born into homes that are unable to support them, so you see a lot of strays out in the town just causing a ruckus like the mongels mongrels they are. And I mean really, who cares about children anyway? Youth is wasted on the young, and the only thing children are good for nowadays is burning through your wallet and rotting in your house on the internet all day.

Out of pity I fed the little scamp some Skittles and lint I had in my pockets and continued on my way. A few blocks later... I noticed the bitch was following me. Now this is why you never feed the strays; they'll follow you home because they know you have food and they won't leave you alone.

"Go on, get out of here." I shouted at her.

Shooing her away, she simply trotted back towards me after I turned my back. This was going to get irritating since she clearly couldn't understand English. The girl must've been no more than 10 or 12 years of age. Amidst the disheveled mangy appearance there was a bit of charm there, and I bet she cleaned up nicely. Of course I was being entirely unrealistic in letting her trail behind me; my house wasn't the best place to keep homeless children. The interior of the house was too small for another to accommodate inside and there were too many other wild animals outside to keep her chained up in the yard. And the box said "For Sale" so I was technically stealing as well. I didn't really know what I was getting myself into.

"I'm home." I said. There was my manfriend who I shared the house with, cooking in the kitchen. Delicious lasagna and pasta. Being gay, he was a master chef.
"...What is that?" he asked, pointing at the small child.
"It followed me home. Can I keep it?"
"Oh god-dammit. Did you feed it on the way back?"
"Uh... maybe?"
"You idiot, you don't feed the strays."
"Oh please, how bad could having one be? I was found on the side of the road by my parents too."
"Lucas, your parents are abusive alcoholics and one of them is dead from vomiting up blood."
"Exactly, we would be much better parents." I say this because my manfriend and I are married, predominantly for the tax and insurance coverage. This is California, after all. And after a retreat from Georgia, the man found some solace in coming to a dump like this, but was caught off guard by the amount of wandering children out in the street.

"We can't afford her. Take her to the shelter." he said. I adamantly refused.
"She'll probably get put down like the rest of them." The poor thing didn't have a damn clue what we were discussing. "Besides, she had the energy to follow me 2 miles home on Skittles and lint. I'm sure she's strong enough to be put to use." He finally gave in.
"Ugh, fair enough." he sighed. "But I swear to God, she better not end up like the other one."
"I have no clue where Erin went."
"I think she got stuck under the house when we finally decided to board up the crawl spaces underneath."
"I did." A voice came from under the kitchen floor.
"Be quiet."
"The hell, if you're looking for me I'm under here, get me out!"
"Shut up, no one asked you." He stomped on the floor.
"PLEASE GET ME OUT OF HERE, I CAN ONLY LIVE ON DIRT, WORMS AND TRAPPED STRAY CATS FOR SO LONG!" The orphan clung to my side.
"Dammit, shut the hell up. You're scaring her." I stomped on the floor with enough force to shake the house.
"IF YOU KEEP DOING THAT, I'M GOING TO GO DEAF! YOU'D BE SURPRISED HOW WELL THE ACOUSTICS ARE UNDER HERE!"
"Let's walk to another area of the house. That bitch is getting annoying." my manfriend said.
"Agreed." The three of us left the kitchen into the living room, walking as loudly as we could in the process.
"OH GOD IT'S SO LOUD UNDER HER--Hey a cat. Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere kitty kitty kitty..."

* * *

"Alright so first thing's first," he said. "Where are we gonna keep it?"
"Uh well, I got a cubby space underneath my bed." I was a part of the glorious master race of people who owned bedframes that functioned as dressers. Winter's a bitch though because a shitload of mold gets up in there and I have to clean the drawers regularly. But the stray probably had a hell of an immune system so I wasn't worried about that.
"I don't know, she seems too big to fit underneath there."
"Yeah..."
"Oh, I got it!" he got excited.
"What?"
"We'll cut off its legs, then it'll fit."

I think they did things differently down in Georgia. I had a feeling that despite not speaking English, the girl's slightly unnerved expression meant she might've had a rough idea what was being discussed.

"That's horrifying."
"Absolutely not. Get prosthetics that we can put them on when it needs to do work, and then we take them off so it can fit and it can't run away." As flawless as his logic was, I was opposed to this.
"Eh... prosthetics cost money. We're going to be paying enough with her here, so maybe down the road when we're more financially stable we'll consider it."
"YOU DIDN'T SAY THAT WHEN YOU CUT MY LEGS OFF!" the floor yelled.
"Oh god-dammit, nobody's talking to you."
"I JUST ATE A CAT, AND I THINK I'M GETTING SOME KIND OF SALMONILA POISONING FROM IT. IF YOU COULD CALL THE HOSPITAL, THAT WOULD B--"
"Fuck it, we're going for a walk."
And went for a walk we did. Of course, this was made easier because we didn't cut off our orphan's legs. We'll need a place for her to sleep and such, but I have a feeling things will be eventful in the coming weeks.

Join the fight against the scourge today.

So today I was out chillin' with people I say I'm friends with but I'm really just bored and lonely, and I realized how much I hate ugly people. Now I know I'm not a prime slice of manwich sexiness like everybody else despite the fact that many of my hobbies include manly pastimes like misogyny, bear wrestling and gay sex, but I just realized that maybe I don't like people because a lot of them think they're attractive when they clearly aren't. I would rather spend the 10 hours a day I'm awake staring at a monitor than to be out in the real world witnessing the child of Lindsay Lohan and a Walrus come thundering down the street like she has something to be proud of.

Now against common belief, there isn't a lot of ugly people that exist in the real world. It only just seems like it because the venomous glares they dole out can penetrate any and all crowds they're creeping through and will thus immediately draw all attention to them like a black man would in Idaho. And that's a lot of attention; my cousin's ex-boyfriend was a cableman for Comcast up in Idaho and nobody would let the poor bastard into their houses to fix their TV or internet because they probably suspected that he was there to steal it. But I digress, ugly people are noticeable, but they are not significant in number. In fact, a lot of people think they're ugly when they clearly aren't, which is a valuable waste of effort and resources that could be spent making the real ugly people feel ashamed to be alive.

I came up with a list of qualifications that's been approved by the FBI on how to racially profile and discriminate people based on their nationality and general level of attractiveness. They use this to catch terrorists. I'm serious, they even made a chart for it.


Child molesters are saving lives by convincing families to keep away from them, thus keeping my neighborhood free of pesky children I would've murdered by now.

Now as you can see, the uglier somebody is, the more likely they are to be involved in terrorist actions since they have a grudge against people who judge them for how they look, and after a while they stop caring about their appearance and start spending their time doing more nefarious things like stealing candy from babies or having sex with livestock. Whereas the more attractive somebody is, the more likely they're pleased with how life is going because everybody likes attractive people, regardless of whether or not you're a complete dick. But there's a drop-off, if you notice. Sometimes people are just so god-damn ugly that they have no drive in life and can't be terrorists. Then there are those people who are so suspiciously gorgeous and sexy that they're going to eventually fly their private jets into a mall because the DOW Jones dropped below 12,000 that day. We can also deduct from this that Harrison Ford burns down and pillages orphanages, but this isn't something we didn't expect from him.

So how do you know you're ugly? Let's look at a bunch of standardized generalizations we use for this.
-If you have a moustache or neckbeard. Rare exceptions can pull this off, like Burt Reynolds.
-If people glare at you in disgust when you're not looking at them, but nervously laugh and pretend to be friends when you engage them in conversation.
-If you take your hair-styling tips from the 80s.
-If you're on the internet for more than 5 hours a day.
-If you hate people.
-If you listen to any genre of music that characterizes disgust, hatred, or self-depreciation.
-If you're Gary Busey.
-If your BMI is divisible by a prime number greater than 17.
-If your BMI is equal to your shoe size.
-If you have enough acne to look like somebody affected by a serious STD or the bubonic plague.
-If you're a minority.

If you mean at least 3 of these qualifications, then there's a chance you might be ugly. Remember that these are generalizations, and there are exceptions to the rule. Except the Gary Busey rule.

What pisses me off more are common misconceptions associated with being attractive. Fat people get a lot of flak in our culture for being ugly. Not to offend fat people but in most cases this can be true. As I stated in previous rants, how attractive somebody might be to others depends on the level of pride they hold in their appearance. While this is true, it will only take you so far before you realize you can't tastefully show off your new leather belt when your rolls of gelatin are hanging over it, gently fluttering in the breeze.

Pride will only carry you so far before people realize that holy hell you need to start taking better care of yourself, or start adopting a wardrobe that involves sticking your head into paper bags. I'm sure your parents like their car just fine, so I doubt they would want to sell it and start investing money in Catapillar to haul your fat ass to school.

Of course with this, most people immediately think that thin = attractive, and this couldn't be farther from the truth. Just like people can be groteque balloons of bile when they're obese, nobody wants to have a significant other that needs to be weighed down properly so they aren't carried away by a strong tailwind. If you're a man and you're dangerously underweight, then chances are you're frail, lean and lacking muscle mass. But men losing weight is almost never entirely the problem since most of us realize being large and big and intimidating is important into scaring that woman at the bar into sex she doesn't really want. WOMEN, I'M CALLING YOU OUT ON THIS.

There was one particular instance in High School where after I broke up with my girlfriend, a girl had the truthful audacity to call me ugly. Now I certainly was; I wasn't getting any pussy with the current condition I was in. Even that powdery crackhead Dave was probably getting laid more than I was, but he was a gymnast too, so I'm going under the assumption that he was gay. And this was back when that wasn't something to discuss. But right, this bitch called me ugly. Being offended, I snapped back "Nobody would want to fuck you, anyway. It'd be like taking a Model T offroading; you would shake, snap and rattle apart." Which is true. Ladies, there's a threshold where you can lose too much weight, and if your chest could be used as a washboard to do my laundry on, then you've clearly crossed it. And men like tits and ass, and without proper weight distribution that ass will begin to turn concave while your breasts will shrivel up like raisins. WE LIKE MEAT ON OUR BONES. God-damn, if we wanted tiny women, most of us would be pedophiles.

Of course one of the biggest determining factors to this is style. Style can make beautiful people ugly in just a heartbeat. It can also make ugly people less ugly and make us reconsider sending them to the camps to be executed. This varies among cultures, as styles can be perceived differently depending on your environment. The one group of people I would consider universally ugly are the goth and emo clique. There might be attractive people in there, but I can't see through all the eyeliner and haphazard clothing that looks like it was stitched together by a drunk Edgar Allen Poe buff missing several fingers. I never understood how people think it's attractive when it looks like you were sexually assaulted in a crafts store. It beats the piss out of me.

Most ugly people wonder why people treat them differently. Why? Because they should be treated differently. Ugly people do the world a great disservice by burdening others with their appalling appearances, making their friends ashamed to be associated with them. They make people look down on them because they have self-esteem issues, and that can kill the mood of just about any well-lit party where people can visibly see each other. It perpetuates misguided standards in attraction that will only create more ugly people. And most importantly, most of them are inherently evil and feel like they've been wronged by society. Usually because they have been, but that's besides the point.

Just remember one important thing, you can't help solve the problem by hiding it from ugly people. Granted hiding them solves our problem, it can help theirs by letting them know it, and letting them know it often. Ugliness is not an irreversible condition. You can change it if you catch it in time. Anybody can eventually join the ranks of the beautiful. Or at least be able to go out in public without reenacting my 21st birthday party and have a bunch of people throwing up from alcohol poisoning.

Fulfilling a promise.

There are some experiences that just stick with you for the rest of your life. Many of them are exhilarating; they're heart-racing and manic, and the intensity of the danger at hand as adrenaline pumped through your veins ingrained something into your mind. Others might be tragic. You can be emotionally burdened and have the misery beaten into you furiously as you attempt to forget that trauma and let the past be the past. While some might be enlightening; you just learn something new and it's always going to come in handy. Oh right, did I ever tell you folks when I visited a sex shop?

This old story came into my head when I was up in Victoria last summer. My family late at night were going through a Burger King when in the same shopping district was an Adult Store. The windows were barred and they looked like they had lard sprayed onto them; just thick inconsistent layers of disgusting whitish spray all over the windows to intentionally fog them. To keep the peering eyes of judgment from gazing in. I wanted to know what kind of spray they used to fog the windows so I could do it at my house to keep to my business in my room, so I asked my dad if I could go in. My sister was also mildly curious but disgusted. The man outside informed me I could do it myself, and he had videos that guided me through the process of doing so. He then informed me they were the security videos from inside the store, and after thinking what the customers actually did to get that thick film of slime on the windows, I gagged and left. But that wasn't the first time. Right, the story.

The first rule of thumb is to make sure that you don't go in alone. Going alone makes you the kind of sleezeball that will get you judged by others for being lonely, desperate, and a lech. Going in with somebody suddenly makes it an adventure with a bounty of relics screaming to be discovered. You would be surprised at the stuff that they keep in these stores. The unfortunate victim at the time was my girlfriend. Now after a first extremely awkward, extremely unnerving sexual experience that will never be discussed under the penalty of death, this seemed like a good idea to... well, get some good ideas. But if you people have read any previous stories, you would know that Ami is an extremely shy, withdrawn, bashful, socially-awkward individual. Nothing will drive that point home farther than taking said person to a sex shop. Oh dear, I had to get her high to convince her that it was a plausible idea. Besides, it couldn't be that awkward, right? Right?

The manager of the store either must've been stoned out of his mind or he simply didn't care that two 15-year olds were glancing through his peddling station of sleazy goods looking for something to indulge themselves with. Everything about the place seemed off. You were cut off from the rest of the world while you were in here. The apocalypse could occur, and you would only figure it out when you stepped outside. The air was... different. You felt like just breathing was making you contract any airborne STDs, which don't exist anywhere else but in a sex shop.

Going to these places, there's a lot to uncover. There's a lot of books and videos and instruments and doo-dads and our young ignorant minds couldn't stare at any of it for more than a second before being overcome with an intense combination of laughter and shame. This was back in the good ol' days where not everybody used the internet for porn because books and magazines were still the norm. It was like wandering into an abandoned library for smut. There were pornography magazines from eras that I didn't even know had pornography in active circulation. I guess those people in the 60s just started doing loads of drugs and started taking pictures of themselves sucking and fucking and contracting Gonorrhea and HIV without a care in a world. Those were beautiful times, weren't they?

"Ohhhh... my." Something caught her eye.
"Eh, you find something interesti-- Oh merciful Jesus what is that."
"I think that's supposed to go i--"
"Oh good Christ you're kidding."
"The picture of the woman spreading her legs like... that says otherwise..."
"Dear lord, it's like King Arthur left Excalibur in here."
"I think I would break something trying to get that up the--"
"Ami no."
"It's definitely bigger than y—"
"AMI NO."

Then we found another odd tool. It was something that was akin to a thong, except it had a penis in the front. I never saw anything like this at that point in time.

"...What in the hell would anybody do with this?"
"It's clearly for women." she responded.
"Why would they want such a thing?"
"Uh... lesbians maybe?" I then scoffed with disgust.
"Lesbians don't like shlongs. If they did, they wouldn't be lesbians now would they?"
"...Fair enough."
"Still disgusting."
"Maybe it's for a woman and her boyfriend t--"
"I SAID NO, AMI."
"That would explain the bottles of lubrica--"
"FUCKING HELL, SHUT THE HELL UP AMI."

Then we found the video section. With little booths. Tiny, dirty little booths where they showed clips of the dusty old VHSs playing their wares. Those tiny little booths smelled like something. I couldn't quite describe it. It smelled like someone ran a train on a horse in there and forgot to clean it up. It was intoxicating. It was disgusting. It was irresistible. What we saw on those tapes were abhorrent and vile, and it robbed us of our innocence as we were just visually violated. But we couldn't look away. Then Ami glanced at me, dead gaze on my face as she recalled.

"You know, after watching all these videos, I'm surprised you haven't--" I interrupted.
"Fighting with all my willpower, thank you very much."
"That must be har--"
"POOR CHOICE OF WORDS."
"That must be difficult here." Now she's messing with me.
"I'm thinking of those lewd images of my relatives I stumbled across to kill any urge."
"...Why?"
"God forbid I disgust you in any way with indecent thoughts."
"...Right."
Bringing a 15 or 16-year old young man to such a place was a poor decision upon recollection. I demanded to depart immediately. Ami was busy looking at her wallet while gazing at Thor's Hammer of Mjöllnir before hearing me shout "OH HELL NO." and dragging her away by the hood of her sweatshirt out the door.

* * *

"And that's how it would go." I declared.
"Interesting story. You should get it published." she said.
"It would be interesting, come on."
"Do you really think they would let us into a sex shop?" Ami asked.
"Maybe if they didn't care."
"I don't even think there's a sex shop in Manteca." she said.
"We've never been to the West side, there might be. A lot of old and shady places there."
"Lucas you're an idiot."
"I like how you just wondered how we would get in there and yet didn't question any implications of your behavior once we got in."
"Can it."
"The Hammer of Mjöllnir would be a definite buy."
"Get bent."
"It's probably bigger than I am, I don't see why you wouldn't."
"I'm getting the strap-on so I can f--"
"AMI NO."

It's not a block, it's a whole damn wall.

Writers Block sucks.

I think most people have been in those kinds of situations before. Where you have the idea, the drive to get something out there. "I FINALLY GOT IT! THIS ONE IS GOING TO BE THE BIG ONE! I CAN SEE IT NOW, I'M GONNA TURN IT ALL AROUND!" Then when you finally sit down to write it, you just stare at the monitor for a while. You look down at your hands; they're completely still as they rest on the keyboard. Nothing's happening. Like an undisciplined dog, you start swinging them around and slamming them into things in hopes that they'll start working. Then you smack them on the metal railing to your keyboard tray and your palm is now bleeding. But son of a bitch, 20 minutes later and all that effort and blood of wildly flailing about, and the page is still blank.

It's almost become detestable; to have an idea you want to write but as soon as you open up the word processor, you can't articulate a damn thing. It's like an infant with a strive to be educated and to learn something, so he opens up the hardware in the kitchen drawer to hopefully become a prodigy in engineering. Instead he gets his head tangled in an extension cord and he inadvertently lynches himself on the door knob. The only thing you can think about is what you could be doing other than this. I could be playing Starcraft 2. I could be grinding in WoW. I could be jerking off. I could be on Facebook. I could be out getting drunk alone. I could be reading. I could be doing something CONSTRUCTIVE.

And it's frustrating as Hell. You got a bunch of things going, and when you get hung up on one thing, you just want to do that one thing. Can't do it? Fuck everything else. Everything else is on hold. It almost makes you want to bore out the part of your brain so you forget and stop giving a fuck and get to work. It almost makes you want to kill yourself. And that's almost a legitimate statement there. Everybody has a tool to articulate and channel negative emotional responses into. Mine is writing. I can't write? I can't vent. I can't vent? I start to get anxious. I start to get anxious? The string of arson reports in the county start rolling in.

But right, projects projects projects. The first thing I intend to get done is the Christmas story finale. That's actually mostly done. The entire story concept is complete, and I've written about half of it. The next part is the second chapter to It's a beautiful world we live in. And next is something I haven't discussed yet. A fanfic. Oh dear, I can't believe I'm starting one of those again. Those are the shit-tier of stories in writers circles. Don't care, I'm writing one. It's going to be Etrian Odyssey, so it sort of doesn't count since the series doesn't even have a damn story for the most part. I'll essentially be making shit up at this point, I just don't have to come up with a backstory or history of my own.

But right, there's your update. Don't expect another for a while. I still have to shake this shit off.