The Easy Out Clause

Crazy lady introduces herself. We hit it off. Crazy lady tells me she's not interested in a relationship. We make out a lot. Crazy lady gets blasted and tells me she's falling for me, but isn't going to let it go any further. We have sex. Crazy lady tells me she doesn't wanna' see me anymore. We make up. Crazy lady tells me she loves me. I don't hear from her for days. Crazy lady tells me to leave her alone. I laugh at the unbelievable insanity of the entire situation, wash my hands of it, and happily oblige.
Since I'm sure she'll read this, considering the last time she told me she didn't want anything to with me she bitched me out within twenty-four hours for the post resulting from her blatant insanity (see: Crazy lady tells me she doesn't wanna' see me anymore), here's a little open love letter. Mature? No. Liberating? Oh, you'd better believe it.
You? You're a fucking vulture. You're the reason guys like me become guys like the one you're still hung up on. You're the reason that men and women don't get along, because by the time people like you are done creating bastards out of decent men with your amoral, inconsiderate bullshit, they've already dicked around enough women to create even more selfish bitches. Sure, we could argue about which came first, but it wouldn't matter. You're perpetuating the cycle. You're drawing out the battle of the sexes.
And in the end? You're the one who loses. There's no crawling back this time, so please save us both the embarassment and don't try. There is no amount of humility that can buy you another shot at being more than just another notch on the bedpost, another mistake, another pothole on the road to happiness. To you, I was the guy you were afraid to admit you loved. I was the guy who was good enough to make you fall, and would've made you happy if you weren't too afraid to give me the opportunity. I was the guy who could've, possibly, if you'd dumped all your baggage off sooner, been something real.
You? You were just another headcase, one of many in a long line of nihilistic sluts who fuck early and leave even earlier.
You were number thirty-one.
You were beneath me.
And now? You're a bad memory.
Peace, bitch. I'm out.

Brevity. Or not.

So after careful consideration, I've determined that the only way to truly know yourself is to seperate yourself from any and all attachments. Friends, family, job, home, society. Total seclusion, armed with nothing but your instincts, and exercising nothing short of total honesty regarding your reactions to every situation you face in the savage wild.
On the other hand, fulfillment, and thus, happiness, comes from action, and actions in the wild have no meaning beyond survival. No helping little old ladies cross the straight, no stealing a candy bar because you're positive that no one's looking, no indecision stemming from socially ingrained concepts like right and wrong, morality and depravity. So, in a sense, one could argue that accomplishment is only possible through interaction with a society, though not necessarily a community.
The objective then, if the preceding concepts are held as truth, is balance. Integrating one's self with society without losing one's autonomy, accepting a mutually understood code of ethics without submitting completely to it, without becoming nothing more than just another copy of a template that someone, at some point, made the decision was ideal. That person, after all, possessed individual will, created a standard, and set it into action, thus creating the ideal society that you risk allowing yourself to become engulfed in.
Without accepting the rules of a society while keeping one's mind open to the possibility of a flaw, a chink in the armor of social order, the world would fall into a stagnant routine, and growth would become myth, evolution a forgotten concept, progress an impossibility, and the status quo a dictator of itself.
So there're no answers here, no epiphany, only opinions, ramblings of a borderline insomniac trying desperately to find or make a place in the world, and the echoes of men who've lived since the dawn of time who dare to question what they're told and attempt to find a better way, their own way. You swim upstream to either drown or find the source, and when you get there, you're faced with yet another question. Leave it as it was, attempt to shore it up so as to make the journey of the fish you passed along the way less difficult, or block it off, thus leaving everyone in the river twitching in their final moments, some deprived of momentum, others robbed of something to rail against, and a painfully select few laying in the same place they fought to stay in, watching the swimmers on either other side of the spectrum dying despite their own hopes and dreams, fear and dread.
So many questions.
And I'm out of caffeine.
'Night.

The 90s were bullshit, man.

So by the time I started really getting into music, I was probably like nine or ten years old. Well, to me, that was an awesome time to jam out. You could turn on the radio and flip to any alt station you wanted, and there was always something good on. It was like a law, at all times, something had to be playing that just rocked your fucking socks off. Tonight, I looked a few of those songs up on YouTube and checked out the lyrics. If you ever get the compulsion to revisit your old favorites, let me just say this.
Don't. Seriously, like ever. I don't care if you're two steps away from blowing off the back of your skull and the only possible thing that can stop you is revisiting some old alternative music to remind you what it was like to be an enthusiastic, wide-eyed child. Save yourself the trouble and just pull the trigger, because you're only setting yourself up for disappointment. Anybody remember a band called The Spin Doctors? Yeah, those guys need to be assraped by the business end of a shotgun for the level they've put me at tonight in terms of disappointment.
Fuck childhood.

And gettin' out on bail the same fuckin' day.

Dear Uncle Sam,

So I was looking back on my misspent youth this morning, and I remembered that I loaned twenty bucks to this pot head in high school. I mean, it was a decent chunk of change for a sixteen year-old kid, but it didn't break me and I'd just gotten paid, so I figured 'What the hell?'. I was thinkin' though, since you seem to be in the business of picking up greedy assholes' debt lately, think there's any chance you could throw some scratch my way?
Now, I know what you're thinking. How is giving me money because I was dumb enough to loan money to someone when the likelihood of ever seeing that money again was so slim that it could hardly be measured? Well, personally, I think the answer's obvious. It'll stimulate the economy! No, seriously, I know it sounds like the most illogical thing that's ever come out of a down syndrome baby's drooping, drooling mouth, but giving me money because I gave money to Johnny Rolls More Than An Olympic Gymnast, thus putting a dent in the country's collective coffers and driving everyone further in debt, will be good for the everyone in the long run. Just think, if you do this, I'll have twenty bucks that I can loan to another asshole who can't afford to pay me back! And then...
Y'know what? Nevermind. I just realized that ultimately it'll put everyone in a worse position than where we started, because paying off bad debt on behalf of people who are stupid enough to extend credit to those who haven't earned it and have no apparent way to pay it back is something that only an irresponsible, morally bankrupt bastard would ever consider. Silly fucking me.

Regards,
Rem Phoenix

I love that word.

Y'know, this entry was like four or five pages long, but if you've read one hate diatribe inspired by a woman, you've read them all, and I try to maintain an element of originality here. So, in an effort to curtail the redundancy a bit, as well as inject a much needed dose of maturity into this collection of rants, I'll just say that putting faith in someone who has even more issues than I do was a mistake, I should've seen this coming, and I have no one to blame but myself.



...Also, you're a cunt.

The Anti-Viagra

So I have a friend who, despite recent developments, has actually been a really cool person for the last few years. We talk, we laugh, we make frequent sexu--okay, I make frequent sexual comments to her and she doesn't hit me for it. All things considered, pretty solid dynamic. I'd probably do just about anything for her, shy of putting a gun in my mouth and pulling the trigger. After heeding her recommendation that I rent and watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall, however, I kind'a feel like I should.
Five minutes into this movie, I knew how it was going to end. Ten minutes into the movie, I wasn't sure I wanted to find out if I was right. Twenty minutes into it, I shit you not, I swear I was convinced that I'd never have a full erection again. This movie obviously wasn't written to attract a male audience. I'll admit I laugh when someone gets hurt as hard as the next guy, probably even harder, but seriously, how many times can you cringe through some jackass crying over some celebrity bitch without wanting to reach through the screen, pull the actor out of it and scream into his grotesquely assymetrical face? "You tool! You mother! Fucking! Tool! How the hell can you have even a sliver of self-respect after allowing yourself to be portrayed as everything that every man in the fucking world fears his son will grow up to be!"
I know, I know, it's just acting, right? Just a fun time in front of the screen watching people react humorously to unlikely situations. If that's what you're thinking, go fuck yourself. I've got a fucking cramp in my abs from keeling over in agony from watching this piece of shit. I don't give a rat fuck how popular the movie is. Y'know why it's popular? I'll tell you in one word. Women. More specifically, women who need to feel like they have ultimate power over the opposite sex. Women who need to feel important so badly that they'll drag their friends, and their friends' friends, and all the poor bastard boyfriends associated with each tier, to watch someone pretend to be a whiny little love sick bitch because his girlfriend is fucking someone else. Women who will repeat this over, and over, and over again, their egos getting blown up to the size of a stay at home soccer mom with a thyroid disorder, until they finally feel assured that they're holding the power because, hey, if they leave their current love interest for a retarded pop star, he'll go to Hawaii and make an ass of himself. It's how it happens in real life, right? Right?! Please God, just let me feel beautiful again!
Long story short, I'm actually gonna' take the financial hit and not return this movie to the Red Box I got it out of. Instead, I'm gonna' go down to the beach Sunday night, start a bonfire, and commit this God-awful disc to the subsequent blaze, for no other reason than I want it to experience the closest possible thing to Hell in case there is no such place for inanimate objects. Anyone who wants to take a stand against whiny emo bitchery, bring a six pack and join me. Anyone else, keep waiting patiently for the next ego bang. I hope your ass spreads so wide that the subsequent bedsores litter it's rotting flesh in such a way that it looks like the surface of the moon after being bombarded by nukes, you fucking sheep.

Look, up in the sky!...is he really wearing that?

Ladies and gentlemen, my job sucks. Between pretending I give two shits about the mouth breathing bottom feeders that walk into my department asking for "That cord that connects to that thing to do that whatchacallit," hiding my unadulterated contempt for the corporate shills that make up management and pretending to be shocked when one of the many, many flaming homosexuals that've been hired because, well, it's California, comes out of the closet, I really don't have much time for daydreaming. However, a thought came to me when I was listening to random Mexican 491 trying to describe what he wanted in high-speed Spanish after I told him, twice, that I didn't understand.

We live in a dangerous world. Between the ever-present threat of nuclear war, the AIDS epidemic and fat women who still, for some reason only God can possibly comprehend, think they look good in revealing clothing, sometimes it's easy for a recovering comic book geek to wish for some ethnically diverse, super-powered group of selfless adventurers to fly by in their supersonic jet that they managed to acquire without any apparent source of funding and save the day. Well, unless you're a recovering comic book geek with the kind of cynical personality that can look at a baby and think to himself "At some point, Charles Manson was probably an adorable, thumb-sucking toddler, too." Then you immediately get into The Zone and start thinking of reasons why the world would suck even more if superheroes existed.

First of all, a subset of humans who can fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes couldn't possibly be far removed from the rest of the Earth's sentient bipeds. The presence of superheroes would inevitably bring about the presence of supervillains. You think I'm an asshole? Just wait until Johnny Traumatic Childhood suddenly discovers that he can make lightning shoot out of his palms. All those wedgies and date rejections he had in high school just left a crater where your favorite multiplex used to be. So much for the Iron Man sequel, suckers! Hell, we'll entertain the idea of a supervillain coming into his own just because. No sordid past, the guy's just bored. This has the potential to be much, much worse. Ultraprick with a grudge against jocks might stop at using his anthropomorphic knife fingers to make sure the captain of the football team sings like a ten year old choir boy for the rest of his life. You get a guy who can blow shit up with his mind and wants to fuck everything up just to see what happens? Insurance brokers'll be pissing their pants in the first fifteen minutes.

If that's not bad enough, think about what happens whenever somebody gets really good at something that everybody wants to be good at. You'd never admit it, but when the realization hits you that you'll never be that guy, your opinion of him suddenly drops like a cock at a senior citizens meeting. Now, with people who can set themselves on fire with a thought, save the world and not even smell like burnt hair afterwards, you're gonna' get mighty envious with the fucking quickness. Mobs form for the express purpose of proving they've got bigger dicks than the dude who just saved a bus full of retarded kids while breastfeeding a newborn puppy, and all of a sudden you have really big piles of corpses killed completely out of self-defense, just because the middle-age stockbroker got a hair up his ass over not being able to freeze oceans with his breath.

Breeding poses an issue, too Believe it or not, but there are actually women out there who choose mates based solely on how they believe said mate's sperm will mingle with their egg and ultimately create the most awesome offspring ever. So let's say Susie Sorority manages to shack up with some ruggedly handsome superhero. What happens when one of the kids turns out to be a dud? The firstborn can run the mile in less time than it takes a virgin to get off fucking a head cheerleader, but his younger brother, well, he's got a decent free-throw. "Why can't you be more like your brother?" is gonna' drive up the suicide rate in this country so fast you'll start wondering if Emo's been declared the only music able to be legally played for the rest of eternity.

Hell, fuck breeding, just think about how you're gonna' measure up to these broad-shouldered knight errants? You think it's hard finding a date now? Wait until you're suddenly in a wooing competition with some gargantuan, green-skinned behemoth who, let's face it, is pretty likely to have grown at least somewhat proportionately. Suddenly that sports car doesn't seem so great, does it, sparky? You'll be lucky if the eighty year-old widow with shingles and halitosis down the street looks at you twice.

Lastly, government regulation. Marvel ran a little story arc called Civil War a while back that featured their world's American government trying to regulate superhumans' usage of their powers and force them to get a license to superhero (fuck you, I'll use superhero as a verb if I want to). Folks, you have to fork over a hundred bucks just to fish in this country. How long do you think it's gonna' be before some South-bred politician puts his foot down and declares war on all these flying, spandex-clad fanboy wetdreams come true? I give it a week, a month tops, before the skies have so many missles flying around trying to take out the chick they called a gift from God the day before because she pisses Super Unleaded.

So before you go all giddy fantasizing about a world where Milo Ventimiglia can swoop down and end all the world's problems in five minutes with a sweep of his emo haircut, chew on that for a while. There are no easy solutions. Especially with Halloween around the corner. You think it's hard to find a costume now? Just wait until the indecisive horror film fanatic who just figured out he can punch through mountains comes to town. Have fun being the Easter Bunny every October 31st for the rest of your life!