How Bob and I save Christmas, part 2.

The quickest way through a man's heart is through his stomach, which happens to pass through the liver. After sacrificing Midleton's finest to escape from a tent riddled with a bunch of a elegant young men ready to pleasure themselves while watching a woman fornicate with livestock, I was going dry and I was getting very irritable that I no longer had any whiskey to drink. Because you see, the thing that makes the winter cold that much more bearable is a river of liquor to subdue the local populace into a near-comatose state of inebriation. Also it can be used as a fire-starter in several instances, but I would opt against this if you're handling some of the ritzier alcoholic beverages and you have other fire-starting tools at your disposal, like matches or adolescents dressed in several layers of clothing. It's also known in an ironic sense that large amounts of liquor can kill your sex drive, so after the recent break-up with my girlfriend before visiting Washington I've been dilating my blood vessels constantly to keep the heat-seeking moisture missile's targeting system offline.

Unfortunately this is the land of the hicks, meaning there's hardly going to be a saving grace like a 7-11 out here, let alone one that sells high-quality Irish Whiskey. And with sub-zero temperatures sweeping through, my donkey finally froze to death and collapsed to leave me stranded. I pulled an old-fashioned survival technique and cut the filthy animal open to live inside its innards during the snowstorm until morning seeing as how I couldn't see three feet ahead of me. Inside the animal, slowly sobering up and freezing to death I looked back on my miserable life, thinking about that cunt who dumped me, how Bob disappeared or is still at the donkey show. And I also had the charred and deformed mass of what was once a woman snuggled right next to me like some body pillow recovered in a chemical fire. Considering the whiskey dick was wearing off and my throbbing libido was coming back to haunt me, in my desperation I looked for whatever random orifice on the dead hooker that wasn't seared shut like a flesh welder. Like some disgusting hard candy, the tough outer shell still had a soft creamy feeling, so I indulged myself until I fell asleep.

I woke up about an hour later, still freezing my nuts off but the snowstorm died down. I was eager to crawl out of my donkey house only to see a Holiday Inn across the field that I was slowly dying in. And god-almighty, a liquor store. Hesitant to leave my new lover behind, I slowly dragged my corpse girlfriend with me through the snow across the street; she was stiff as a board, so it wasn't that difficult. I waltz into the store, still hard as hell from blue balls. I had to be very careful not to knock anything over as I made my way through the slim isles. Of course long slim corridors that are hard to get through only made my mind race even more, so I had to be quick and grab my whiskey before I caused any collateral damage while I was there. I got to the counter, and realizing I forgot my wallet, I pondered to myself if my new friend had anything. I went outside where I left her and checked her pockets, unaware whether it was actually a pocket or a crack in her charred skin that I was reaching into. I eventually found her wallet with several 50s in there. Awesome. I also looked at the ID in her wallet. In a disturbing plot twist, her name was Amelia, the name of my girlfriend in High School. This also explains that despite being a burnt husk of a human being that she still looked damn good, especially with those C-cups I remembering cherishing. I was in immediate mourning knowing that I ended up killing her and that she got involved in the underground industry of livestock porn after we broke up, so I figured I would pay my respects and bury her. But I can take solace in the fact that I ended up sleeping with her for real this time instead of the atrocity that happened the first time we tried consummating.

After I buried her in the snow, I shed a tear that froze before it hit the ground. Good bye, my beloved; a shame it had come to this before we could make amends. Being depressed, I figured now would be a better time than ever to get drunk beyond reason, but while I made my way into the store the shopkeeper pulled a gun on me. Apparently he saw me burying that corpse and figured I did something terrible, but instead of explaining it to him I jumped behind the shelves in his store as he unleashed a hail of bullets in my direction. I grabbed the nearest molotov I found, stuffed with with shreds of my white T-shirt and threw a flaming bomb over my shoulder in the poor man's direction. I heard it shatter and the man started frantically screaming, telling me that I've clearly struck him. I run out and steal the gun he dropped while he ran and flailed throughout the store. I grabbed my whiskey, but I couldn't leave the man; god forbid he suffer the same fate as my girlfriend. So I shot a bottle of bourbon on one of his counters and the spark set the entire liquor store ablaze. That meant by contrast, the man wouldn't be out of place in the environment. I figured he could learn to live with being on fire in Hell, so I'm prepping him for his soon-to-be new environment.

As I escaped, I saw a ring of torches outside. It was a mob of psychotic killers, all pants-less with erections that they could fly revolutionary flags off of. It was the bunch of horny men from the donkey show, clearly out for blood. I went off into the snowstorm and prepared for war.

How Bob and I save Christmas, part 1.

I went and visited some relatives in Washington for Christmas last year. To be perfectly honest, it didn't sound like a very inviting prospect because if I hate my mother, then it would only be obvious that I would hate my mother's side of the family almost just as much. I knew a friend up there that I visited whenever I got the chance, but the man seemed to have changed since I saw him last. Let's tentatively call him Bob.

Bob and I were bored while we froze our asses off outside.

"Bob, why the fuck aren't we indoors? Your house isn't that far from here."

I say that because Bob lives in the countryside where the Amish apparently invaded and used whatever dark witchcraft they wielded to curse the grounds from ever being paved. Not that it would help since there must've been around 3 to 4 inches of snow on the ground. Now wandering the Washington wilderness alone with Bob, it can be a rather stressful endeavor. Bob was a bit of an eccentric fellow; he was superstitious to say the least. He was randomly pissing on the trees we walked by, saying he was "spirit-herding and creating a barrier of trees to trap his latest harvest" but I personally thought he was bullshitting me just so he can show off his impressive package, seemingly unfazed by the chilly night air. He was wearing shorts in sandals with a tye-dye T-shirt while I was dressed in enough layers of clothing to stop a bullet. Bob is an odd fellow, but I had reason to suspect that Bob was on drugs that cold wintery night due to his behavior that seemed even more out of place than usual.

I wasn't one to complain, because I was cold. When I'm cold, I become irritable, and when I become irritable, I start to drink excessively, and that's something that warms you right up in 15-degree weather. As I drank, I kept asking Bob "When the hell are we going to get to your house?", slowly growing impatient with him as he simply responded "Just a little further now, Conrad." Don't ask where the fuck that nickname came from, but for some reason Bob always called me Conrad and occasionally threw rice and flower pedals in front of me as I walked, apparently blessing the ground I treaded on. I believe Bob thought I was the devil, but he always confused me and my brother so I didn't hold it against him. He's also colorblind, so he can't tell me--a man white enough to look deceased and my brother who looks like a beaner-apart from one another. Of course this made me question if he really knew where the hell he was going, but Bob always pulls through in the last moment.

Eventually we saw a tent and Bob told me the carnival was in town, so we should go inside and warm up. Against my better judgment I did, and as I wandered in, it was indeed warmer. But there were a lot of shady people. There was a scantily-dressed woman within this ring of people, and all the men were gazing lustfully at her as they undid their belts. I did not like where this was going. That woman is going to catch a cold in this weather; she needs to put something warmer on immediately. These men were clearly giving her their jeans and pants to warm her up, but what about them? Another man came out of nowhere made his way into the center.

"Thank god, this person looks dignified. Maybe he'll halt what the hell is about to unfold here and help this poor woman."

He was carrying a leash with him. And I saw an animal. I immediately started chugging my whiskey because I knew where I was. Bob, god bless him, had led me to a Donkey Show.

Now this wasn't necessarily the first time I was in an enclosed space with about two dozen men jerking off, but it certainly was going to be last. I immediately started freaking out, but I didn't want to work my way through the crowd; God knows how many erections I would have to grind against to make my escape, and considering these were new clothes, I didn't want to get them dirty. So what did I do? I jumped into the center of the ring of people where the woman and the donkey stood. If I could redirect the crowd out of my way, I could leave. So I used the last of my whiskey and set the poor woman on fire. She ran screaming for the exit, as would be expected. The crowd avoided her because apparently fire is bad, then I got on the Donkey and gallantly chased behind her to make my exit.

It's a beautiful world we live in.

Bullshit and lies. Everybody knows the worlds sucks. Well there's the irony in the title. A new story of mine has started and a separate blog is called for so it doesn't get lost in the more independent works and general announcements here.

http://itsabeautifulworldwelivein.blogspot.com/

This particular tale centers around Alan Capan's odyssey through a shitty life and how he tries to pull himself out of it. Sometimes in healthy ways, but mostly not. As you can expect from most of my works, this won't be a particularly bright tale, so there's your viewer discretion. I don't intend on it to be incredibly long, though. So hopefully I might actually finish this story.

And expect a few minor updates soon. It's July, which means Christmas is coming.

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.