Do you know what your kids are smoking?

I can’t really understand how this works. It’s like pushing a sweet potato through a jelly bean. Or maybe that’s just me. Oh, right. That’s just me.

The state that hates monkeys is thinking about evolving their laws to allow drunk people to serve on a jury.

And it’s gonna make you thirsty.

It works on so many levels.

I wish I could draw.

Meet Blackjack. The hard rockin’ history behind a powerful lead vocalist.

Spinal Tap, eat your heart out.

I used to like Texas. Now I can avoid them both.

Do you like spending your client’s money? Are you looking for an award?

The Atlanta Radio Experiment Concludes.

Star Trek TNG Home Theater.

I love your product. It is delicious.

Leave it to science to figure out how to be happy.

Just be careful what you get.

So I can’t seem to get rid of these Police tickets. I tried eBay, I tried Craigslist. There’s glut of them online. I saw one guy on CL selling 2nd row for below face value. Truly a buyer’s market. So then I just started calling people. Everybody I knew either didn’t want them, or already had them. I even called two, count em’, two, ex girlfriends. You can see where this is going.

The first one was great. Had a delightful conversation, despite the fact that she is going through some personal and family shit that is so horrific it pretty much makes anything the rest of us deal with look like free ice cream. The other… well, I knew it was a bad idea, and I did it anyway, and I honestly don’t know why. Other than I hate myself, and I’m really desperate to not eat $500 worth of tickets. It did not go well.

Surprise, I’m not going to go into it. Much. Obviously I can’t be objective about the whole situation, and she made it clear she doesn’t like me talking about her. She was actually convinced I was calling her to instigate an argument just so I could rake her over the coals here. But she’d admit anything I’ve said on here is completely true and far less than what I could. I have been simultaneously apoplectically pissed off and paralizingly devastated for months, and I’m pretty impressed with my restraint. I also don’t have anyone to talk to, so there’s that. I will say, despite my anger, and despite what she thinks, I don’t hate her, and I really do want her to be happy. I can’t turn that off. I’m saying that for me, because she was quite adamant that she doesn’t care what I think, and genuinely confused as to why I cared what she thought. But I do hate what she did, and I especially hate how she did it, and I’ll leave it at that.

To her credit (I think), she has tried to explain it to me several times, and I really do think she believes her explanations should make me feel better, or at least make me understand, but every subsequent explanation simply unleashes another revelation that kicks me in the balls. I’ve written dozens of pages of stuff over the last few months to try to work through this thing, but I’m not going to subject anyone to that. It seems there is no figuring it, so I’m not going to talk about it again.

But to answer your questions, Dotsy, yes, I did have fun. I had quite a bit of fun. But when you’re told the only reason someone’s with you is because they feel sorry for you, it tends to retroactively spoil most of that fun.

As for your other question, I don’t know that I did learn anything about myself. I think that may have been what I was looking for when I called. To at least learn why I’m never enough. How someone can say I’m not worth the effort. How someone could say they wish they’d never been with me. How someone could still accuse me of things that I didn’t do, and question my motives after years of devotion. Those would probably be valuable things to learn. But like she said, it’s not about me, and as it turns out, never was.

Anyway, the Police tickets are still available. 16th row. Make me an offer. Clearly, I’m desperate.

Nifty little video for a mediocre song.

It was quite some time after it was over that I realized I had had a rather unusual education experience. I went to a very small prep school. Sort of comically small. I think my graduating class had twenty one people in it. I went to that same school for eleven years. Some students came and went, and some of us were there the whole time, but for the most part it was basically like spending a decade of your most formative years locked in a room with the same twenty people every day.

From what I’ve gleaned from pop culture, the experience itself was fairly similar, if somewhat skewed out of necessity. Cliques might consist of a single person. An embarrassing incident with one fellow student might be literally impossible to escape, as you’re sitting next to them for eight hours a day. For years.

We had the jocks, and the nerds, and the cool kids, and the rich kids, and as we got older we had the stoners and the sexually active. But the compression of an entire subculture into one kid can make for some pretty warped socialization skills. Or lack thereof.

Every year, maybe one or two kids would leave, and one or two new kids would show up. Or some years, our class of twenty or so remained 100% intact. What that means is, in eleven years, I maybe met fifty kids.

As for myself, I’d say I was even more of cliché than the slutty girl who’d take almost anyone in the closet (note I said “almost”). Obviously, I wasn’t cute or cool enough to be one of the cool kids, yet I wasn’t nearly smart enough to be one of the nerds. I was by no means a natural athlete, and the only sports I had any skill at all were singular endeavors like skiing or tennis. And it turned out I wasn’t even very good at those. I didn’t have a particularly rough time; the cool kids picked on the nerds, the nerds steamed at the cool kids, the jocks got their cranks jerked by the sluts, and everybody pretty much left me alone. In other words, surprise, surprise, I was a bit of an outcast. Like I said, pretty cliché. I was smart enough to know I was too ugly to be anything but the funny guy, so that’s what I worked at. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But it kept me from being pantsed a few times.

I’ve surmised over the years that this insular, static childhood is what accounts for my inability to properly socialize as an adult. I don’t really embrace change very well. I don’t really like crowds of strangers. Frankly, just meeting someone new for the first time generally shuts me down into a fetal position. I also don’t like to dance.

But I didn’t start writing this to talk about me.

One of the girls that came and went was a cute, gangly blonde named Sarah. She was a kind of a goofball, but in hindsight, clearly she was one of those girls that would be quite a looker when she got older. She wasn’t poised and pretentiously beautiful like the popular girls, and she wasn’t a brainiac, and she wasn’t a stoner or a nerd. Like me, she didn’t quite fit in. She had a smile that was almost too big for her face. She would bellow this huge, cackling laugh whenever something struck her funny, a laugh completely devoid of self-consciousness – a hearty, shameless laugh requiring confidence that would be unusual to find in a woman of any age, let alone a teenage girl. And as memory serves, something would strike her funny all the time. She loved to laugh. And not the cruel laughter usually found in girls. Her laughs were pure. I don’t remember her ever saying a mean thing about anybody. I’m trying right now to picture Sarah without that big Julia Roberts smile, and the picture just won’t come.

Obviously, I liked Sarah. She was still a teenage girl, with teenage girl sensibilities, so she didn’t think much of me. She always had crushes on one of the cute boys, though I don’t think she ever got one. Which is a shame, because I’d bet she’d have been a lot more fun than one of the popular girls. She was the kind of girl I would have liked to have spent more time with if I had been the kind of boy that could do that sort of thing.

I haven’t seen Sarah since I was probably 14 or 15, and until the other day, probably haven’t thought about her since I was 16. As enormous as the cast of girls in a teenage boy’s mind is, the competition is fierce, and turnover is just a fact of life.

The other day, I heard she killed herself. I don’t know how, or more importantly, I don’t know why. It would be easy to say “I’m shocked” or “She didn’t seem the type,” but the fact is she may have had a darn good reason. Or she may have just been tired. I have no idea what happened to Sarah in the last twenty years. Life can be a real bitch on wheels. Whatever it was, it was probably pretty bad, and I’d venture to guess she didn’t deserve to be in the kind of pain it takes to check out. That kind of pain I’d like to reserve for the popular girls. Or the slutty girls.

That’s why I’m going to die alone. Happily.

15-year-old performs on what I imagine is sort of Japan’s American Idol. Complete with strange Japanese subtitles.

Speak says Tupac was the best and that he doesn’t want a war. C’mon. Check.

I tried to get my delightfully mendacious ex to go to the Creation Museum when it first opened, but she poopooed the plan. At the time, I thought it was just because she hated the idea of a literal interpretation of the bible, and the closed-minded zealots that propagate that interpretation. Turns out she just hated the idea of spending time with me.

Anyway, it’s just as well, because the museum has been so successful, they’re planning a half million dollar upgrade. More animatronic Adams riding T-Rexes! Road trip!

Someone told me the other day I should get a companion dog.
This is why I don’t think that’s such a great idea.

Praying for rain in Atlanta doesn’t quite pan out.

Now, this guy, he has the right idea.

I’m playing Half Life 2 now, and I’m up to :38.

Like the immature teenager I am, this seems like a legitimate expense.

#101 – “You’re not the kind of person I want to spend my life with.”