Hyppo and Critter: Openminded Conflict Bias
This post is proudly sponsored by Nomsatan. It’s what’s in your belly!
Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Degeneration
I have come face to face with the devil. No, it’s not me. Not this time. I can’t talk about myself in every post, can I? Sometimes the devil comes in the form of a sweet little girl.
Why is it that when strangers see a baby, an adorable child, or a cute little dog they feel it’s suddenly socially acceptable to interact with same and/or the adults involved?
I hate that. I’ll thank you very much to stay the hell away.
My wife is one of those people. A toddler in a restaurant stands on a seat and stares at my wife. She’ll smile and wave and stuff like that. The nerve.
So the other day there’s a mom and her cute little girl in a restaurant. I was eating my tacos and minding my own business. My wife saw the little girl and smiled. Then, when the mom wasn’t looking, the girl stuck out her tongue at my wife. Three times!
Mom looked back and the little girl went back to adorable peaches and cream. Mom was none the wiser.
The behavior was calculated. The behavior was deliberate. That little girl knew exactly what she was doing. And it wasn’t an innocent act of cuteness, either. There was something vicious behind that tongue. The Marquis de Sade would have proudly declared she had a bright future.
My wife mentioned something about giving the girl a swat on her tushy. It takes a village to raise a child? Try touching someone else’s kid and you’ll be sued until the cows come home. The bank robber that brandished a firearm the other day? The cops arrested him then he was released due to a lack of jail space. Step in and do a job that a parent isn’t willing to do? The catch-and-release program will suddenly be canceled and you’ll be doing hard time. Don’t even think about trying to tell a parent their business.
Me? I mumbled something about “guns” and suddenly I was the one in trouble. My wife accusingly said, “You always take things too far.”
Hey, lady! I’m not the one sticking out my tongue at strangers, so there!
Continue reading →
2011 in Abyssiness
Work sucks. According to my wife, though, writing about work sucks more. (Stay tuned for my next post.)
So I decided to do a little science experiment. Feel free to play along and try this at home with your own blog.
Continue reading →
Stick it to the plan
Where am I going
How do I get there
What should I bring along
Are people kind there
Is peace of mind there
Will I finally belong
Cause you know ships sail their courses
And heroes ride horses
They know where they belong
But I travel in circles
Quickly to nowhere
Singing my unfinished song
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself – Well… How did I get here?
Once In A Lifetime
From the moment we are born, everything conspires to fill our heads with the word “should.” Our parents, the environment, and all of the other people how come and go in our lives essentially program what we know, who we are, and even influence that which we desire.
Boys like blue and play with trucks. Girls like pink and play with dolls.
At some point, though, after enough growth, the individual can exceed the sum of their parts. They can question anything they want about their own life. Is the religion of my parents, the religion I’ve known my whole life until now, is that the religion for me?
As you get older, you want things. Perhaps you want a flashy car or you want to get pregnant and have baby and/or rush out and be married. Do you ever stop to wonder, “Why do I want these things? What is it about these particular things?” Is it truly what I want or just the predictable output of the programming I’ve experienced since the moment I was born? How much is really me and how much is just random chance because I ended up in this part of the world and with these specific people?
You may find yourself getting out of school and taking one of two common paths – Jumping right into more school or going directly to work.
Perhaps you’ll become independent and established and have your own home or apartment. You’ll populate it with possessions and begin taking on financial obligations and debt that make regular income a very important part of your life. The more you owe, the more you have to work. Unless you are one of the few to be independently wealthy, that means you’ll be working a full-time job, perhaps more. The more you own, the more you work, and the more you want, and the more you consume. You may find yourself in a cycle where it becomes very hard to break free.
At some point you may realize you aren’t doing what you want at all. You might be doing what everything but. You may have been deceived by the should.
Lately, following the death of Steve Jobs, there has been a lot of blather about being that square peg that refuses to be placed in that round hole. Be different. Be unique. Be someone who changes the rules and changes the world. Refuse to conform. Write your own destiny and never compromise, never do what they tell you.
I can’t help but wonder. How easy is that? What would that world look like? What if seven billion people collectively said, “You know what? I’m going to do what I want. I won’t let anyone else tell me what to be.”
I don’t imagine that world would have very many ditches.
So what is your life path plan? Besides finishing high school and going to college and/or getting a job, what are these other paths? I see kids these days dropping out of high school and not getting jobs. They just sort of flounder, either living off mom and dad or bouncing from place to place, using it up, then landing somewhere else.
I don’t imagine they put a lot of thought into their future or any sort of planning on where they want to go. They just sort of exist. But what if they tried? They are actively rejecting the traditional life paths that most of us took, so what are their options to go forth and be different?
In the movie Into The Wild (based on true story) a young man graduates from college as a top student, gives away his possessions, donates $24,000 to charity and then hitchhikes to Alaska. Now that is a person decisively making a choice and deciding what they want. True, in the end, it didn’t work out quite so well, but the boldness of the choice is breathtaking. Could I do something like that? I highly doubt it.
Another year has passed me by
Still I look a myself and cry
What kind of man have I become?
All of the years I’ve spent in search of myself
And I’m still in the dark
‘Cause I can’t seem to find the light alone
Sometimes I feel like a man in the wilderness
I’m a lonely soldier off to war
Sent away to die – never quite knowing why
Sometimes it makes no sense at all
I can understand that some kids may want to reject traditional dogma and decide their own fates. But how many possible life paths are out there? What is it they can really do to achieve what they want? If they reject the traditional 9 to 5 what will they be doing instead?
I can respect a non-traditional choice as long as it is conscious, not drug-induced, and makes sense on some damn level.
I really want to know.
The boss who ated my cookie
Image source: Wikipedia
It’s time for another lesson to be learned courtesy of the Unfortunate Cookie (TM).
The boss was in the mood for Chinese and he treated the office to lunch. That’s nice. After lunch, I broke my cookie open and extracted my fortune. Something diverted my attention from the table and I turned away for the briefest of moments…
I turned back.
What the hell?!? Where was my cookie?
Naturally I played it subtle and cool.
“Where the hell is my cookie,” I demanded.
The boss looked stunned. “You wanted that?”
I tried in vain to conceal a look that screamed idiot! “Yeah, I wanted that. It was my cookie.”
“Sorry,” he said. “One you leave the table it’s open season.”
Bullshit!
“Just for the record,” I said, “it works like this. I always eat my fortune cookie. Always! For that matter, unless I say different, every bit of food that’s mine always remains mine until if and when I say otherwise. You got that?”
The boss remained the opposite of contrite. “Well,” he shrugged. “I guess we know the rules now.”
Who the fuck knew you needed a goddamn rule to protect your own damn food? Of course, this is the same guy who gulped down my grape juice because, and I quote, he “didn’t know who it belonged to.” And when I say gulped, yeah, right from the fucking bottle. I still shudder to this day when I think about how I poured myself a glass of his dribblins after that. I didn’t find out until it was too late!
Aaeeiieeeiiiieeeee! I think I begin to understand what the place where suicide bombers go to get their motivation must be like.
Luckily I had already snatched my fortune from my cookie before it was destined to re-enact a scene from Twenty Thousand Leagues Below the Sea or else it would have ended up in the bastard’s belly. He’s not exactly discriminating.
Life is a series of choices. Today yours are good ones.
–Fortune Cookie
Oh God. Another math fortune.
Let’s say I live to be 50 years old. (A long shot, I know.) That would be about 18,250 days. Now, according to my good friend the cookie, on one (and only one) of those days I’ll somehow make “good” choices. In other words, I’m smart about .005 percent of the time.
Will that one day of “good” choices be enough to turn things around? Hardly. No doubt they’ll be just enough to show me what I’m missing out on and drastically increase my misery.
About the only choice I made that day was not strangling my boss for eating my cookie, and I’m not so sure that was a good decision.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, cookie. Now that I think about it I’m glad you got what you deserved! Enjoy your reincarnation ride. Spoiler alert: You end up as boss poop.
My neighbor is parenting my kid
Pop quiz, hot shot.
Who do you think a gerbil considers to be his good friend? The parent raggin’ all the time about making choices for a better tomorrow? Or, perchance, the neighbor with the big bowl of weed who is more than willing to share?
“You just don’t understand me!” yells the gerbil on the way out the door to visit the neighbor who “understands” way better than we ever could.
Hey, gerbil. Listen up. No doubt he thinks your nose ring is great. Maybe he thinks it is awesome that you don’t have a job. Perhaps the fact that you dropped out of school impresses the ever-lovin’ shit out him. Ear lobes gauged to the limit probably turn him on. A physical appearance that makes local employers want to hurl is probably the shiznitty bomb. If that is “understanding” you then maybe I don’t fucking want to.
I have a question? Where will mister wonderful neighbor be 20 to 30 years from now? Will he even be around? Will he love you and care about your welfare the way we do? Talk about not “understanding” something. Where will your good buddy the neighbor be when the shit really hits the fan and you have no where else to turn in life? Where will he be when you face living in the gutter?
And to you, Mr. Neighbor, let me just say this: Thanks so much for everything you do for our son. Really. I can’t thank you enough. Will you be around to pick up the pieces that are left when our son finally comes face to face with reality? Where will you be when that happens? Do me a favor, will ya? Please go die and rot in hell. You’re in your 30’s now for heaven’s sake, you’ve got young kids of your own, you’re almost married (if shacking up counts) and you are playing hooky from your “manager” job at the local bank with your fake back injury. When the hell are you going to grow up? Some fine example you set for our son. You are too injured to work yet every single night at your house is party time and the beer and smokes and pot are offered up at a never-ending buffet.
Our son is lost. He’s going to have to eat the shit sandwich and come out the other end before he gets a friggin’ clue and learns to deal. But thanks for the added bonus of your help, asshole. Thanks for being there for our son.
Shouts from the Abyss 
Recent Comments