I will deck the halls with my vengeance.

Remember that humiliating experience? You bet you do. Like you could forget shit like that. Most people have had that one experience, that one defining moment in their childhood or High School years where your soul desperately tried to rip itself from your body to avoid feeling the anxious awkward trauma it was being subjected to. All but 30 seconds and there's something that will stick with you for your entire life, that people will laugh at you for. Something that forces you to shirk whenever you hear it, where aggravated murder will take place if it's so much as brought up. If I described your particular experience and your reaction then congratulations; you're a pussy. You've never truly lived until you've wanted to die on the spot.

I had these moments a lot. In fact I still do. By my own personal measuring stick, I've lived more than most people probably reading this. In fact I live my life through humiliating and embarrassing moments; the anomaly is when something isn't going completely to Hell. There was a young ignorant boy who should've been in bed reading Archie comics while listening to NSync because he was a boy and said that he was quiet and a bit awkward. He is not a young man, he is a boy, and a boy only by technicality because he hasn't earned his twin badges of seminal honor from the scouting crew yet. Real men learn to revel in that awkward situation and take that emotional trauma and deadweight, then throw it back in everybody's faces and laughs at them instead.

I was at a terrible school in the 5th grade while I lived with my family and relatives because we were broke and had to move in together. But life was eventually on the upturn; I got out of that house and left that terrible school. We finally got a nice two-story apartment in a closer town with one of the nicest schools in the county. After so much moving around, we were staying put.

"Son, we'll be in this place for a while. It's going to be great."
"I know, pa."

And I thought it would be. And I was in the middle of a semester so I transfered to that school. On my first day of class at this new school, I had to pee so I went into the bathroom. The door was chained to the wall and it was empty; it was greeting me just perfectly. When I was in there, I noticed that there weren't any urinals. This perplexed me a lot. I looked around for a bit and then I began to hear kids outside talking, laughing. This perplexed me even more. As I looked onward I saw shadows of people walking in. I guess I didn't have the place to myself anymore, I thought.

But then I had that moment. That moment where you realize something was wrong. A group of girls walking in, giggling, pointing, laughing at the new kid who just managed to miss the door sign and wander into the girl's bathroom on his first day of class. When I walked out, a ring of kids to greet me, also pointing, also laughing at the new kid who just managed to miss the door sign and wander into the girl's bathroom on his first day of class. I certainly was hoping that something a bit more distracting like a screaming teacher on fire or a school shooting would occur to pull the the attention off me. That didn't happen, at least not until a young anemic pyromaniac named Charles Finnegan would set a teacher ablaze before he went to High School and ironically died in a gasoline fire later that semester. That was what defined me. I wanted to run away from it. But I couldn't.

"Son, we'll be in this place for a while. It's going to be great."

Yeah I bet it fucking will.

Of course this joke was thrown in my face a lot and it stuck with me through High School. Of course this wasn't something that I enjoyed being brought up. I think most people have a running joke about them that they just get exasperated by when it's constantly brought up, and I was no different. When you bring up an embarrassing incident to a shy boy, he'll cringe. When you bring it up to a shy boy loosened up by alcohol and vicodin, he'll laugh. He'll laugh after he's used your head to sign his name onto the curb in your own blood and grey matter. I was shy and quiet and reserved growing up, but boy howdy did I go to some lengths to enact certain vengeance on certain others. A lot of times it got violent. That was no way to go about it. Curb-checking Dilly Koffman and setting Charles Finnegan on fire wasn't necessarily the right thing to do. Sure it was the most convenient, but this was a turning point when I learned that mindless violence couldn't completely solve problems. Especially when it involves personal humiliation. Tampering with the mind was a far greater idea, and that eventually dawned on me. I don't believe one could truly enact revenge through violence; submitting the individual to the same emotional trauma you were induced to is what's the most important here. It just so happens that atrocious physical violence could often do both.

Sharon Maloney. That's a name to remember. Pretty, well-developed and a straight A student. Also one of the people who walked in on me and essentially led the charge against the humiliation that ensued after that incident. Most of you noticed these girls at your High School. The seemingly perfect girl and perfect student... as long as you're in her clique. Otherwise she's the snob and the bitch that at some point in her life let's all those student ambitions eventually collapse and crush her so she either goes for the drugs or decides to start smoking something more rigid and riddled with testosterone. I was the final piece of weight that caused that support beam of hers to crumble.

This was after I became single again. That needs to be brought up for relevance and for what's about to take place here. For one particular day, a friend of mine managed to sneak a few tools to school. We excused ourselves from our respective classes, and met up in front of the bathrooms. Meanwhile for a temporary alliance, my ex-girlfriend was in one of Sharon's classes. She slipped a laxative into her bottled water. Granted we were no longer on good terms, Ami couldn't help but get in on sabotaging a bitch we both hated through the freshman year up. Sharon immediately went to the bathroom. After some mingling around, we quickly hid and left as we noticed her approaching. She immediately ran into the bathroom. As she shuffled in standing up straighter than a man with a broomstick up his ass did, she noticed something suspicious. There were urinals in the bathroom. The signs were switched. Before she could turn around, the sound of a door slamming and the lock clicking echoed in there. I walked around the corner just to see the conflicted look of anger and horror on her face.

"Well hello there, Sharon."

She was fidgeting a lot walking around. I knocked on the door to my friend.

"You're going to wait out there for an hour to stand guard, and I don't want you to interfere. No matter what you hear, you will not do a thing. No matter how much begging you hear, you will not unlock the door and you will not stop me. For an hour you hear nothing. Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes." He hesitantly replied. I nodded and approached her. My friend couldn't help but listen in on what was occurring.

"This is going to be great for me, you know that, right?" I told her.
"W-w-what's going on!?"
"Calm down, you don't want to make a scene, do you?"
"I don't have time for this!"

The sound of the doors pounding and slamming could be heard through the reinforced door.

"N-n-no no no no... this can't be happening." her voice was becoming panicked.
"Just calm down and take them off slowly, you wouldn't want anything bad to happen, right?"
"N-no, I-I refuse to l-listen to you... what are you planning to do?"
"You know you have no choice. What is it? Are you seizing up around me? That's no good, it's going to make it difficult for me to have my fun with you."

My friend's eyebrow began to twitch. He was hearing something that began to sound unsettling.

"...You, YOU'RE A DISPICABLE HUMAN BEING YOU KNOW THAT!?"
"Scream louder. See what happens, Sharon. I don't think you want to yell at me."
"THIS IS INHUMA-- what? What are you doing? What are you going to do?"
"Shut up. You're only going to make it worse."
"......W-w-W-what do you want from me?"
"I think it's more of a manner of what I want to do to you."
"PLEASE STOP THIS, IT HURTS SO MUCH ALREADY!"
"I won't. I'm going to watch you twist and fight it with a smile on my face."
"I CAN'T TAKE IT, PLEASE STOP IT ALREADY!"
"If something tears, you're going to have to pardon me."
"PLEASE NO!"
"Heh, you're going to take it and you're going to enjoy it. Let's run some water to drown out the noise."

My friend was almost ready to open the door, but he fought the urge. After a while he heard something over the water.

"PLEASE GIVE ME MORE, I BEG OF YOU!"
"Call me your master."
"MASTER, PLEASE GIVE ME SOME MORE!"
"You're lucky I'm being generous, I'll give you what you want."
"OH GOD YES, IT'S INCREDIBLE!"

My friend was now wondering what the hell was going on as he heard her moaning loud enough to be heard over the running sinks. Eventually he heard a knock on the door.

"I'm done with her, open up now."
"W-w-W-what? You're leaving?!"
"Yep."
"No NO NO, YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN DO THIS, MASTER!"
"Sorry, I've had my fun. You're on your own."
"I NEED IT, THOUGH! I NEED YOU TO GIVE ME MORE!"
"You're annoying." I turned my attention towards the door. "Alright, let's go." He unlocked the door while he had of look of morbid curiosity aimed at me. Sobbing could be heard from the bathroom.
"MASTER, DON'T LEAVE ME PLEASE!" her voice cracking from all the screaming. I walked out with a smug look of satisfaction.

"Good god, did you do what I think you did?" my friend asked, completely horrified.
"She's a really depressing individual. I think I broke her." A tone of pity was on my voice.
"Dude, if she called the cops on you, you could get expelled and arrested."
"For what?" I asked.
"WHAT YOU DID TO HER! SHE'S A COMPLETE WHORE, NOW!"
"Wait what?"
"DUDE, COME THE FUCK ON!"
"I ripped out and flushed all the toilet paper in the stalls and was handing her what was left as her laxatives kicked in."
"...Wait what." he was completely clueless.
"What the hell did you think I did to her?" I asked.

I never got an answer. But I think somewhere in there my whole moral of the story works its way in somehow.

The Phazer Project.

So I'm considering actually starting a separate blog for a story I plan on writing and infrequently updating. What is the name of the story? I have no fucking clue, but for now I'm simply calling it the Phazer Project. This will be a post-apocalyptic horror story that's taking place on a ravaged Earth. An undisclosed cataclysm has destroyed a good portion of civilization and an almost-constant electromagnetic storm across the planet has rendered most technology unusable. The perpetual storms and climate change has rendered most of Earth uninhabitable while killing off most of the vegetation.

While most of humanity dies off and starves to death, several unlucky members suffer a fate worse than death. People exposed to the electromagnetic storms for prolonged periods don't die; the electronic signals manage to separate themselves from their bodies and they end up becoming Phazers. They're nothing more than neurological impulses and impressions of people, almost like wraiths or ghosts. They possess abilities to manipulate the environment magnetically and to infiltrate and manipulate any forms of technology, which is a reason most electronics and metals are dangerous or avoided entirely. Those in that form slowly destabilize over time and eventually go insane and becoming mindless sentient masses of energy.

A large crumbling city in southern Brazil known as Genoma is the last refuge for humanity and the only place on Earth entirely unaffected by the electromagnetic storms. It's in a completely isolated system, making it impossible for the Phazers to infiltrate. Yet it's about to disappear as well; the generators are running out of power and they're both ejecting people out and barring most people from entering due to overcrowding.

Large amounts of technology are poured into creating Reapers. Reapers are both the saviors and mortal enemies of humanity; they're self-sufficient creatures who are shrouded in mystery. Some suspect they're Phazers installed into isolated systems or they're exceptionally powerful human specimens put into suits. Bulletproof, armored, self-regenerating and virtually immortal, they're meant to use their scythes and battery packs to kill Phazers and convert them into electricity to send back to Genoma.

The story itself involves one particular Reaper in general, codenamed NA 47-121. He stumbles across a Phazer who's a young girl named Anabel. She's actually been dead for over 7 years, an extremely long time for a Phazers to remain stable and rational. NA 47-121 decides to take the Phazer back to Genoma alive to study the key to her remarkable stability. Of course this draws the attention of other Reapers who want to make claims and return her themselves for the credit, and the few Phazers that hear of the girl traveling with a Reaper unharmed earns retaliation from them as well. All while psychotic human Outsiders hunt and seek to dismantle Reapers to learn the secrets of their inner-workings, the two are hunted from all sides as they traverse across the landscape back to Genoma.

I think it's an interesting premise, so hopefully I can run with it somewhere.

Gifted And Talented Education.

When I was in school, I was in a program called G.A.T.E. For those of you who don't know, it was for students who were Gifted And Talented in Education. So right, how did the kid with a GPA teetering anywhere between zero and 2.50 get into the special club for nerds? And Hell, who would want to be in it? High School is a tough time for kids, and know they'll drift into the groups for the cutters and the D&D nerds and the jocks and the ugly kids, but G.A.T.E. was the cream of the socially-retarded crop. Huh, maybe that might explain it.

This wasn't a club for smart kids. It was for kids with high GPAs, but any idiot could tell you that GPA doesn't show how smart you are. It might show you have a good work ethic, but these kids were the furthest things from smart that you could imagine. A lot of them were ugly, too. Oh Christ, that was something. Granted I was pretty ugly in High School, some of these kids looked disgusting enough to make me of all people reevaluate my self-image and go "Well, it could be worse. I could've been mauled by a dog." As my girlfriend lovingly put it, she believed the acronym actually stood for Generating Abstinence Throughout Education. I think this might've explained why it took so long for us to eventually have sex, but that's another story for another time.

There was only one real, legitimate reason to stay in this club. On the last month of school, we would get to go to Great America for free. All day. We would miss an entire day of school to have a "largely" all expenses paid trip to a theme park. I never understood it, honestly. Why would you take a bunch of pale greasy kids who wasted most of the semester locked in their rooms grinding away at homework to an amusement park? Have they even seen one? I don't think they would have televisions in their households, and the internet wasn't completely ingrained into our culture at this point so fuck all if that made any sense. How did that conversation go?

"So staff, how are we going to reward these kids?"
"Well Mr. Leland, all these kids are nerds right?"
"Yeah pretty much."
"So they probably are out-of-shape and sickly, right?"
"Oh absolutely. Especially that 'Steve' kid before Lucas put him in the hospital."
"Let's take them to a place that will completely exploit their weak physical constitutions. I'm thinking a theme park."
"Hmm..."
"And they're pasty and white from being indoors all day studying, right? The June sun will burn them good."
"That might work, although I think Charles Finnegan might be pale because he's an albino."
"Either way, these losers need some excitement in their lives, so it's perfect."
"Agreed. TO GREAT AMERICA!"

Not that I was complaining. Granted I was pasty and out of shape and sickly and had a weak physical constitution, I knew how to handle amusement park rides. I didn't know if Amelia could, though. Oh right, there was a spare ticket since a student couldn't make it at the last moment. A kid by the name of Peter Williams tried killing himself after walking in on his whore of a sister being mercilessly fucked by an eighth grade midget who would eventually die in a tragic pizzeria accident. But right, Ami came from a poor family and thus had never been to an amusement park. Some kids usually take their parents. My dad was working a lot and my mother was tending to the home's supply of liquor so that was out of the question. Mr. Leland let the girl come along, and this made for a rather entertaining experience.

Now since my family was poor and my dad didn't give me any money, my brother entrusted me with twenty dollars for this entire trip. That's not a lot of money since an 8-oz. can of soda from an amusement park cost a liter's worth of blood from your firstborn child since they apparently have to distill it and mine for the aluminum there at the food stand. And all be it, it got stolen when I got there. When I got off the bus, a few feet and I noticed I didn't feel the bill in my pocket.

"Well... that doesn't bode well."
"Hmm?" my girlfriend's very fickle attention span was caught.
"I don't think that twenty's in my pocket anymore." I said.
"...Are you serious?" Her voice sounded exasperated.
"Uh... heh heh... whoops?"
"...You idiot."

Yet right behind us, Sam Falker and his ugly friends were marveling at the 20-dollar bill they said one of the kids dropped. They had to be idiots. They had to have heard that conversation I just had. Sam Falker was actually a football player, and generally a bastard. He got good grades, but he was as dumb as a post.

"Hey, can we get that back?" I asked.
"Get what back?" he didn't hear a damn thing my girlfriend and I were discussing.
"I dropped that."
"Like hell you did." He got defensive.
"Does it have a tear in the right corner of the bill?" I asked.
"Uh..." he quickly looked at it with his big dumb eyes. "Yeah, why?"
"I know that because it's mine."
"Bullshit, you just saw it. I just pulled this out of my pocket." Now he was lying.
"You just said you found a twenty that one of the dumbass students dropped." my girlfriend interjected.
"No I didn't."
"You clearly did." I said. My voice was getting a bit rough as I spoke.
"Shut the fuck up and piss off." he belched out. What a stubborn mule. But he was a mule, and I was a malnourished boy. He would kick my ass if I provoked him any further. I left defeated and hungry as my girlfriend's snide sharp remarks cut into me for most of the day.

Of course I got to hear her shut up after I took her on her first ride ever, which happened to be the Grizzly. I don't know if you people know what the Grizzly is. The Grizzly is an entire roller coaster made out of wood and nails and other primitive tools of the trade. This ride could've been built in the middle ages, and it might've been. The first ride your girlfriend goes on should not be the most rickety coaster in the entire park where you're fearing death at every turn from the thing violently shaking itself apart. My girlfriend was a borderline mute, but I honestly had no idea she could scream that loud. I heard car alarms that were quieter than this girl. And after all of it was said and done she said "DON'T YOU EVER TAKE ME ON ANOTHER RIDE LIKE THAT AGAIN, THAT WAS BULLSHIT! I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO FUCKING DIE!" And after that yelling not a peep out of the bitch for the rest of the day.

Eventually Mr. Leland saw me hungry and poor and asked what was wrong.

"A shame everyone couldn't come, huh?" he asked me.
"Yeah, I guess."
"Like Steve."
"Don't bring up Steve, Mr. Leland."
"Or Peter."
"He's kind of a pussy, Mr. Leland."
"Or Charles Finnegan."
"Yeah, a shame about the gasoline fire."
"He was a good kid.
"Yeah he was, Mr. Leland."

Eventually I brought up how I lost the 20 I brought with me, and the man handed me a bill and told me to get something to eat. The man's generosity to this day remains in my mind. Amelia had the energy to start talking again after she managed to ingest half of a large pizza that cost every penny we had, while her sweet-talking managed to get us a single soda to share. The girl must've lost about 5 pounds from all the screaming she did. Things were good again, then I took her on Drop Zone and then she screamed some more and then threw up, and then slapped me for ever suggesting that ride in the first place. Not my fault she ate a shitload of pizza beforehand. She may be an idiot, but at least she's my idiot. Eventually the sun was beginning to set so it was time to go home. But some unfinished business remained.

My girlfriend and I managed to convince Sam Falkner's longtime girlfriend that he was cheating on her. Why did we do this? Revenge is a ghost, and that meant my girlfriend was some kind of malicious banshee out for blood. Sam and his girlfriend got into a fight and eventually broke up. The beauty behind it was by sheer stroke of luck the dumb son of a bitch actually was cheating on her. He suspected it was us, but he couldn't prove a fucking thing. Ami and I laughed our asses off at the entire ordeal. We managed to destroy a relationship that lasted nearly two years over twenty dollars.

That makes us petty, but at least those fuckers know we're smarter than they are.

An Essay: What my Political Science class has taught me.

I tried to come up with a clever title for this political essay, but whatever random witticism that usually comes to my mind eluded me during the making of this essay. Now considering the broad and ridiculous amount of topics that we've covered this semester, I would find it practically impossible to zero down what I've learned to five things. But Hell, the word "practically" never meant much to me, so let's give this a shot. While there are only a handful of specific things involving politics that this class taught me, the class has moreso taught me about the concept of how people argue and how they articulate their points and the interpretation of human morality ever so blatantly present in the discussion of politics. I already knew about a lot of these things, but interacting with people in this field has advanced my opinions behind them. Let's get this started then, and I'm going to try and make this entertaining to read because God-forbid you read anything dull.

First off, one of the most important things I've learned was how facts aren't really "facts" and they're frequently undermined in the art of debate and politics. That's an ugly truth people don't want to look at, do they? Both political sides have their own separate sets of facts to validate the arguments they're attempting to make, while both of them are often omitting important merits of discussion, usually provided by the other side coincidentally enough. A source isn't immediately valid in this day and age because of the possibility of ill-refined research or how researchers might place a personal stake in the information to slant or skew it in their particular direction. It's difficult if not impossible to find research that isn't being reinterpreted due to some sort of personal bias. But the facts can still shine through under these circumstances; if you have enough sources that appear to be pointing towards some general point, then chances are that your information is pretty stable. And sometimes it's just common sense anyway, so who gives a fuck?

This brings me to the second ugly truth that this class has taught me; people are bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling and bias will always exist, even in the interpretation and presentation of facts. Understanding the psychology of people will get you a Hell of a way through Politics. It's how Burke, Paine and Locke developed wholly different stances on revolution and the reconstruction of government. It's why stupid shit like Terrorism exists. It's why Patriotism exists. People are inherently selfish by nature and serve to only save their own asses. That may seem good to them, but in a bloated and complicated political system like the American Democracy, someone will always be getting unjustly screwed over. People know this and take advantage of it. This is why corruption will always be in politics; they just go hand-in-hand. The facts are important, but the basic idea of manipulating human psychology is what wins the political wars. It's how people can overlook and misinterpret facts for their own benefits.

Which brings us to the third thing that I learned, and perhaps the most important; the art of manipulation through language. There's that old saying that people can talk a lot yet manage to say so little, and the reason that old saying was created was because of politicians. And lawyers. But mainly politicians. Your public image is the most important thing when you're a politician, so you have to choose your words and language use carefully so you come across to the ignorant uninformed populace in a particular way that lets them know you're smarter than they are but are still "just like the average joe" as your fly private industrial airliner to political conferences collecting 100,000 dollar donations that you'll spend on manipulating them to vote you into office. Or you can come across as a completely unlikeable jackass even though you might occasionally have some valid points to put forth; no one comes to mind faster than Steve Milloy in his book "Green Hell". The man is fairly intelligent and does call environmentalists on a lot of bullshit they do with legitimate arguments, but his manner of speech is so pompous, derogatory and riddled with malice that it's almost impossible to take him seriously. In fact if it weren't for the book, I wouldn't be entirely sure if the man was literate.

This leads me to the fourth nail in my coffin of fatalistic views; Utopias are a pathetic man's dream that will never exist. This ties into the previous points being made. The quintessential concept of a Utopia will never exist without a masterful level of psychological manipulation and propaganda brought on by the government. The government has to shape and condition the populace's standards for living in order to create the illusion of happy or healthy living. This means complete control and regulation of information brought on by the government. Pretty much a Totalitarian nations are the kinds of a government where faux Utopias can emerge, but you can only keep the populace in that reverie for so long before it all goes down the shitter far enough to be rattling the plumbing in Satan's apartment.

Finally, perhaps the most important or second-most important thing your class has taught me. And that is that we're fucked. There's no elegant or sophisticated way of saying it because there's nothing elegant or sophisticated about an inevitable social and economic collapse in America. That would be like attempting to find an elegant way to watch the Hindenburg crash. America it outsourcing the living Hell out of itself, Universal Healthcare is bullshit, we have a war, we have illegals both damaging our economy while simultaneously making us dependent on them, it just spells doom. Before we knew that Business and Government were in bed with each other, now they're just fucking wildly out in the open like stray dogs during heat. The level of corruption and change intermingling at the same time is enough to keep a man stuck in his chair for a week.

So there you have it. Your class has taught me about the art of manipulating language and information so that greedy politicians will feed their own selfish and corrupt ambitions while our country is on the highway to Hell and how you say you'll be gone when we have to put up with it. Your class has managed to reinforce my already-prevalent beliefs in fatalism to an unhealthy degree. Now if you excuse me, I'm getting my tin-foil hat while I crawl into my basement waiting for the inevitable arrival of the dystopian future due to the motherland's collapse.

The lost art of forgiveness.

Let's stop and talk about forgiveness and apologizing for a second. I would like to believe that I am a very forgiving person. WHAT? I am, fuck you. When you're as neurotic and as easily prone to being upset as I am, I believe it's practically a necessity if you don't want to end up cold, alone and dead. That's something I never really understood about angry people in general; they're often aware of the voracious tempers they have, yet most of them have their heads stuck too far up their asses to realize that they need to stop grinding the axe every once in a while. And there's a dirty joke in that last sentence, but I'm too busy making a point to work with it.

Forgiveness is taken for granted far too much in this day and age. Really. For people who screw up a lot, they often fail to appreciate how much that little personality trait has let them get away with so much shit. And even if most of the screw-ups are forgiven, they're unapologetic; how many people who are forgiven for doing something prone to doing it again? Far too much than I'm comfortable with, frankly. There are those people who deserve to be forgiven, because they intend on at least trying to make sure it doesn't happen again. Then there are others who will stay the same no matter what, and it's selfish is what it is.

The word "sorry" is probably the cheapest word in the English language. If you betray someone's trust or are offering condolences to someone for tragedy and that brief, ugly, two-syllable word is all you have with you, then I recommend grabbing a dictionary and start bullshitting your way through a conversation until you pick up on something else. People think it's the magic fix-all word. Piss me off? "I'm sorry." That's all they think it takes, and they usually don't end up doing a damn thing to change their behavior so it doesn't happen again. Which again, is selfish. Others will only choose to accommodate themselves so much and be forgiving before the screw-up is given up on.

The people who deserve forgiveness go beyond that; they don't just use the words, they show it. They might try to alter themselves a bit to accommodate the people around them, or they might try to perform a gesture they wouldn't normally do under most circumstances that says "I mean it this time." What if they screw up again? Well hell, at least they could say that they didn't try. Failure isn't a begrudging thing if they were trying. Unless you try too little and you're just sort of half-assing it, but most people can pick up on that usually.

On the most trivial and petty level, apologizing and forgiveness is about who's right and who's wrong. But when it actually matters, it has little or nothing to do with who's right or who's wrong. It just means that you value your relationship with that person more than your ego, which is what a lot of people seem to overlook. A large ego is the worst thing to have in a friendship or relationship, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you should be quick to forgive, either. Some people need that ego to keep their judgments and standards realistic, so it's also possible to have too small of an ego. You know those people. Those people who say they're sorry for everything, so they just completely undermine the hell out of its meaning. At least when somebody with an enormous ego says they're sorry, you know it means something.

Realistically speaking though, do some people deserve to be forgiven for everything? No. Not saying that people can't always change, but sometimes both just have to know when to throw in the towel and go "You know, we can only do so much before we realize that something isn't working here and this is no longer worth it." Giving up isn't the sunshine, candies and lovely ending people wish for if they think they can tough it out, but sometimes that's what it takes to move on to greener pastures. Hell, sometimes it takes more strength to admit when something isn't working than to stick with it until the bitter end.

So there's your moral lesson for the day. The people who need to read this the most probably won't, so that's all I have to say on that.

A love letter.

Once upon a time there was a boy and girl. Where? At a school. Because where the hell else would a boy and a girl just frequently meet? Not the bar, not the boardwalk, but a school. Because all the world's great stories of romance, adventure and drama inevitably start at school. Let's call the boy Danny and the girl Evelyn. Dan and Eve were childhood friends so to speak; they grew up as neighbors in the same ol' boring neighborhood for fucking years. Their families were neighbors, and like all good parents they booted their kids outside to play and romp together while the adults were doing adult things like filing taxes, writing the list of people getting this year's Christmas card, and fucking each other senselessly while on edge that the kids might walk in on them locked in the evocative passions of lust and boredom.

Dan and Eve were both very normal kids growing up. Dan was kind of tall and gangly and enjoyed sitting in his room playing video games whenever he wasn't forced outside, and thus was just a bit reclusive and snide. But he was incredibly smart and well-rehearsed despite how little he got out. Eve was a short and sweet girl with a penchant for writing and while buried in indifference most of the time let her emotions bleed into her writing. And her writing was fantastic because she expressed everything she felt in it. Except anger. Eve was a tiny girl with tiny amounts of patience, and thus was quick to lose her temper. She never understood why Dan played videogames so much. She saw them like every other ignorant judgmental bitch saw them; mindless entertainment and killing, and in her case deprived of artistic value and story. She would always come over to Dan's house in an attempt to drag him outside and do random teenager things like filing stories, writing the list of people she's inviting to her sweet 16, and fucking each other senselessly while on edge that their parents might walk in on them locked in the evocative passions of lust and boredom.

Or not. Dan and Eve never really saw each other in that way. Granted Dan was kind of scrawny and pale, he might've had women crooning for him if he left the god-damn house. And Eve was short and slightly underdeveloped for her age, but she could certainly get a date. Dan and Eve as they got older both grew apart and grew closer at the same time. Dan still played videogames but Eve managed to drag him out of the house a bit more to have fun. They would have random talks on the boardwalk as Eve stuffed her tiny cheeks with cotton candy.

"Sitting out here in the sunlight makes me feel like writing." she said while spitting cotton candy up on accident.
"Eh, the weather's pretty nice I guess."
"Days like these make me feel like writing poetry."
"Have you tried getting anything published yet?" Dan asked.
"Well... no, not yet. I've tried, but I keep getting rejection letters..." A hint of exasperation was heard in her voice.
"If you had people proofread your work, then you could probably tighten it up more when you submit it. Hell, I could do i--"
"NO!" she yelled.
"For someone who talks about how much they enjoy writing and how much they write, you sure seem adamant to let anybody see your work."
"I don't want YOU reading it!" Eve seemed flustered.
"What the hell am I going to do, laugh?"

And laugh he did. Dan wasn't particularly the romantic type. He was cynical, embittered and antisocial. He father left his family for being cheated on, his mother held down a job and was sleeping around, and his brother went with his father. He was alone, in a broken family, and jaded by it. Eve wrote a lot of touchy-feely love stories and love poems and they often went over the head of Dan. Throughout this time period she kept bringing up her poem, the big one that would get her published. Dan never saw it. She worked feverishly on it by her lonesome. But she always brought it up, which baited Dan's curiosity, which never did much good anyway because would never see it. She wanted to write a memoir about love, but the short, angry girl with glasses was unexperienced in that topic. She was a hopeless romantic.

"I'll write a memoir about love eventually, just you watch." she always told him.
"You're too damn picky, you'll never find somebody anyway." Dan sardonically muttered. Eve's tiny cheeks turned red as her glasses became crooked.
"Well EXCUSE ME for having standards, you clod!" Eve was getting angry. "My perfect man is out there somewhere, and I'll find him eventually!"
"There's no such thing as a perfect person. You're wasting your time." he said.
"OH SHUT UP!" she then proceeded to grab her diary and beat Dan with it until he left. This repeated throughout their friendship ad-nausem, but like Alzheimer patients Dan and Eve still got together usually at that same boardwalk, still discussed the topic, and it still ended with some threat on Dan's stupid oblivious life that he didn't much care about at this point. Maybe that's why he found the threats so hollow.

As they got into High School, neither Dan or Eve dated each other nor did they date other people. Dan was cold and bitter and bored with the concept, and was a tall gangly pale giant to be intimidated by. Eve was such a hopeless romantic that she never saw that perfect boy to go out with. And if she did, she never said a damn thing. Remember that outside of the anger, Eve was a fairly antisocial, shy and indifferent person. And she stayed tiny throughout High School. She never got taller than 4'11", her breasts never got larger than an A cup and she never weighed more than 100 pounds. As she got older she felt just a bit more inadequate with herself and Dan was still a bastard. And this made things worse between them since Eve's happy family was beginning to frown. Her parents were getting divorced and this meant that they would eventually lose the house. At the end of her senior year Eve would have to move.

"So not much time left, huh?" Dan asked one evening they were walking home from the boardwalk.
"...Yeah."
"I'm never going to see that poem, am I?"
"Hell no you aren't." she coldly replied. Dan sighed.
"Why not?"
"Because."
"Bullshit, give me a reason."
"No." Dan's patience was wearing thin.
"You're such a pain in the ass to deal with sometimes, you know that?" his voice was raising.
"Says YOU! You're always so damn cynical, I'm surprised I put up with you this long!"
"Good Christ, is this what I get for taking an interest in what you're writing. Stop being such a bitch and you might actually be with somebody." That was cold. Dan was stupid for saying that, and Eve let him know it. She started crying and slapped him across the face.
"You're a monster..." she could hardly speak. "You want to read it? Fine!" She tore out a page of her notebook and threw it in his face. She ran off in tears as Dan stood on the boardwalk. He opened the crumbled paper and read it.

I don't love you anymore.
I would hate myself if I ever said
I care about you and cherish you.
That would be naive.
I couldn't bring myself to love you.
I would never say
that I need you.
And I will always feel inside my aching heart
You need to be forgotten.
I will be lying to you if I said
I love you.
Because that's the way it needs to be.
So I must tell the truth...

Dan didn't like what he read. He thought it was beautifully written, but it twisted his stomach. He didn't like what he felt when he read it. It made him uneasy. But he sat on it. He couldn't talk to her about it. He didn't much like the prospect.

Dan and Eve didn't talk to each other after that. Weeks passed without them saying a word to each other. Senior year closed to an end quickly. Dan went back to never leaving his house, and Eve sat in her house furiously writing while taking those occasional walks to the boardwalk, this time by herself. But when Dan was at school the other day, he overheard that Eve did in fact get that poem published. It appeared in the local newspaper.

"It's not much, but I guess it's a start." he thought to himself. His house got the paper, but his mother never bothered to read it in the morning since she was still sleeping during the day. She worked the nightshift. It was still out on the yard, in a pile next to the rest of them. Dan wondered why his mother wasted money ordering them if she never read them, but didn't question it this time since it seemed to benefit him. He opened the paper to the section for short stories, poems and other various bugger for published works. And there was Eve's poem. Dan still felt a twist in his gut when he read it, until he got to the end. It was a single line added. He sighed, muttered to himself and closed the paper.

As he expected, there Eve was, writing on the boardwalk's edge like she always did. She felt a tap on the back of her small head that made her look behind her.

"So you finally got published."
"Yeah, so? What of it?" her tone was hostile.
"You're just as short-tempered as always, I see." he muttered.
"What do you want?" she sharply asked.
"Am I not allowed to talk to you anymore?"
"Why don't you just leave me the hell alone?" her voice was beginning to crack.
"Well fine, I guess I'll just leave if that's all you have to say to me." But as he began to walk away, he heard her mutter.

"I love you." she choked out.
"I'm sorry, what?"
"I SAID I LOVE YOU, YOU FUCKING IDIOT! YOU'RE ONE OF THE MOST HEARTLESS PEOPLE I'VE EVER MET BUT I DON'T CARE! I KNOW THAT I'M IN THE BACK CORNER OF RELEVANCE IN YOUR MIND, AND THAT THERE'S PROBABLY SOMEBODY BETTER TO CONSIDER! AND EVEN IF I WANTED IT TO GO SOMEWHERE, I KNOW WE DON'T HAVE A GHOST'S CHANCE IN HELL IN MAKING IT WORK!" She was breathing heavily. She began to start tearing up.

"...I-I-I know the answer will be no." Her composure was crumbling.

"I know that. So the only thing I can do is to make you hate me, and to make you forget about me. To make myself irrelevant. That's the only way I can know for sure. And it would mean something. At least I would see something from you. I don't care what it is at this point anymore. If I can see something and then just let it die, then that's all I could ask for. Now hurry up and reject me so I can get some closure and move on with my life."

Dan sighed and sat down next to her. She was weeping uncontrollably. Her outburst drew a lot of attention from people passing by, but one glare from that crazy bastard Dan thinned out whatever crowd managed to gather.

"You're such an idiot, you know that?" he said.
"SHUT UP, YOU IDIOT!" she screamed. "I HATE YOU FOR DOING THIS TO ME YOU BASTARD! JUST GO ROT IN HELL AND LEAVE ME ALO-" Dan silenced her with his mouth and she began to calm down. As they parted, she was still crying and hiccuping.
"Pull yourself together, it's done now." He smirked as he pulled her to her feet and they began the walk home. Eve never left that senior year. Despite being a deadbeat mother who slept around, Eve decided to move in with Dan at the end of the year as they went to college together. She did end up writing that memoir about love, but she wrote it in third person to dissociate herself with that silly trifle.

That last line she added to the poem was "Read this upwards."

The schizophrenic mariachi band.

Peter Williams and Richard Tory were two students in High School. One of them dies at the end of the school year.

Peter and Richie were two very different kids. Peter was a meek, scrawny and malnourished boy who shouldn't be out in the sun as often as he should've. Peter was meek, soft-spoken and cowardly for a good reason. Peter was not allowed to act out. His mother was on antidepressants and completely oblivious to her surroundings while his father was a manager of a Rite Aid struggling to meet conditional standards for his store. His father was also a High School dropout not necessarily pleased with how his life turned out, but didn't choose to express that too often. Except he became much more open about expressing it all over Peter whenever he was ingesting alcohol, which happened to be virtually every evening.

Peter also had a sister named Alice. Alice was 14 and a freshman in Peter's High School but already has had more sex than her brother, still a virgin. There were even rumors that she's had an abortion at one point or another, but it remained unconfirmed even after her inevitable suicide during her sophomore year in High School due a Vicodin overdose. One thing was for certain, and it was that she knew how to handle a cock. Both in the sexual term and in the sense that her father was a bastard of a human being and she knew how to evade her family's malice. She was unplanned, and therefore unwanted in her family, which seemed to emphasize the need for her to fill the void in her heart and the void between her legs. At least you could call it a void by this point after how much sex she's had.

Peter suffered from social isolation at school and talked to no one. Yet who would want to listen? He emitted a benign vapidness that clenched the souls of everybody around him and made everybody avoid him like the plague spreading disease, which was ironic considering the blight spreading disease was someone like Alice that everybody flocked to. Peter was depressing to be around, and Richard Tory made this clear whenever he decided to bully him. Richard Tory was a Junior who came from a rich family and was a football player. Everybody liked Richard Tory because he was nice and friendly and criticized others for being weak, most notably Peter Williams. He was the star of Sierra High School, and all the women swooned over him when he drove into the parking lot in his fancy-ass blue sports car.

Everyone was so eager to do favors for Richard Tory, to help him out when he needed it, to support the man at every turn because he was doing so much. Richard Tory was a young man with ambition; he was stretching himself to the greatest limits to succeed, and while he let no obstacle stand in his way, he was modest enough to admit when he needed help. Everyone had nigh-impossible expectations for Richard Tory but he would die to meet them. On the other hand, everyone ignored little Peter and his aura of adolescent melancholy. And "everyone" was a liberal use of the word. Richard Tory, Christina the sophomore with DD breasts, the autistic kid who was nearly murdered, even that ugly social outcast high on vicodin and his short sexy girlfriend avoided him in disgust. He even considered that unsettlingly feminine freshman boy who fucked his sister senseless, but apparently he was burned to death later that semester in some unfortunate pizzeria accident.

Peter stole his mother's antidepressants a lot to calm himself down. Of course this wasn't a great idea to take into consideration that he was suicidal on many occasions. This was something that antidepressants capitalized on by ironically having increased risk of suicide as one of their possible side-effects due to the miracles of the medical industry. He didn't care. And every week he teetered closer and closer to the brink of ending himself, while things for Richard Tory kept getting grander and grander throughout the school year.

Then one spring morning he woke up, and went down the halls while his parents were at work. He could hear behind the locked door of his sister's room her erotic moans as the bedpost banged against the wall. Business as usual. After breakfast he went he went digging through his parents' bedroom. Deep in the closet he found the .45 handgun his father always talked about. The hunting rifle was unfortunately missing, but this would do just as well, he thought. He took as many clips as he could with him, and figured today would be a lovely day for a school shooting to occur.

Nothing was different. He was quiet, depressing and unlikeable like every other day. But a lot of students were as well. He looked at them with disgust. They gave him no pity. He'll give them none, either. The only thing he intended to do was to give them sweet release. And most notably, to kill that bronze idol Richard Tory. That heartless bastard that had everyone behind him, everyone rooting for him. While he sat in the shadows with nothing. During lunch, he went near the overhang. He pulled out the gun and started shooting indiscriminately into the crowd. People started fleeing while they heard the gunshots. He was looking for Richard Tory through the fleeing crowd. He wanted to see the coward running away like everyone else, or using them as a shield so he could get by. But he didn't see him. He shot 23 shots. He hit 17. 6 kids died while this unfolded. People heard 24 shots, but one shot was not coming from Peter Williams but going into him. The ugly social outcast just showed up to school with a deer rifle and it only took one well-place bullet through the chest to kill Peter Williams almost instantly.

Peter Williams never found out that Richard Tory wasn't at school that day. He was in the hospital after a suicide attempt. He tried to put a bullet through his head but the kickback from the gun was surprising enough to scalp him across the forehead and draw enough attention to be subdued before another round could be fired. He eventually did kill himself. At the beginning of the following school year, so there's your technicality. Alice had somebody selling her vicodin that she eventually overdosed on sometime in November during her Sophomore year. The perpetrator involved was never caught, but was thought to be tied to the murder of Peter Williams.