In which knives and whiskey are combined in great amounts.

I think there comes a point in everyone’s life when you seriously consider reporting one or several of your friends to the police. This sort of thing can come about for a variety of reasons, from simple petty envy to witnessing them brutally murder Johnny Stompanado, or maybe just overhearing that they think Comrade Leader is getting a bit on the paunchy side.

If you’re anything like me, this sort of thing happens about once or twice a month. I’ve come to imagine that it follows the phases of the moon, or maybe it’s just some sort of “male period” which, in place of mood swings, cramps, and bloating, “that time of the month” manifests itself in serious recklessness and the kind of driving you usually only see on the fringe channels of cable television.

This happened on Thanksgiving, of all days. And, as something I can really give thanks for, it did not involve me.

I’ve had to hold off on this story to allow one of its participants ample time to return to his country on the other side of the ocean, because there’s a serious chance that if I had explained it to the internet while he was still here he could have been kicked out of his house, or at least seriously fined.

Let me tell you how I came to learn about this.

It was early December, and I had just returned to Austin from a short stay back home in Houston. I hadn’t spent more than a day in town when I heard from my friend Jameson that “something really awesome” happened on Thanksgiving and that then “something really, really awesome” was the result. This put a suspicious squint in my eye and it gave my hackles a raise. “Awesome” is a word that can have so many meanings, and when coupled by such repetitive adverbs it takes on a much more ominous tone.

“What does ‘awesome’ mean here?” I asked.

“It means that it’s something that you can never tell anybody ever, most of all the people who live with Dolf,” he explained giddily.

I gave him a lingering stare. “This doesn’t involve why that canvas tarp on the back of your jeep is missing, does it?” I had a vision of malformed lumps of earth next to some blank stretch of highway, and maybe a face plastered on the back of milk cartons piteously inquiring if you’d seen them, if so, call this number…

“No. That’s back at my parents’. This is something, something…” He stopped to grasp the words and, finding them, he leaned in and made a motion towards me like he was giving me some precious, invisible present. “I want to say one word to you, just one word…”

I listened carefully.

“Knives.”

Alarm bells began ringing.

Jameson insisted that he could not explain what happened without the presence of Dolf, and so we arranged to meet up down at the usual pub while they hashed out the details. Hopefully I would come away from this without being implicated in anything.

So as evening fell on a fairly chilly December night, I sat down at a tiny corner table, flanked by Dolf and Jameson, and wondered exactly how much beer I would have to drink to provide a sufficient chaser for what I was going to hear.

You may remember previous stories of Dolf and Jameson. Dolf is the somewhat gigantic Dutch gentleman who was previously seen blowing away turtles and bellowing questions about whether or not a certain irate Christian had an achy pussy. Jameson is the one who wound up manhandling said Christian. You get the picture.

Dolf was visibly excited. “Oooh, man,” he said, “we cannot be telling anyone about dis, ohkaye?”

“This has more buildup than prom,” I said. “It had better not end with a Schnapps-inspired whisky-dick like most proms, either.”

“Well, it’s not that crazy,” said Jameson.

“I don’t know, it’s pretty crazy,” interjected Dolf.

“You’re just freaked out because we fucked up your house so much.”

“Off course I am! Der wer holes in everytink!”

Holes? What the hell did that mean, holes?

“I don’t even give a shit anymore,” I said. “Just tell me what happened.”

And they did.

Keep in mind that this is mostly second-hand. But it’s also true.

* * *

It was Thanksgiving, and much of the general feasting was over. Jameson had retired to his parents’ house for the night with the harmless intention of remaining horizontal and taking in as much bad television as possible. (This is his Plan A for any occasion.) At around ten-thirty he received a groggy call from Dolf requesting his company.

“Hay, Jaime, de entire co-op is gone. Why don’t you come over here and we can drink?”

Jameson assented, and he soon arrived at the co-op with a liter of Powers in tow.

Powers Irish Whiskey is sort of like a lubricating substance for a shoot down the evolutionary ladder. I’m not sure why, but each time that people go about drinking it (and they could be anyone – this rule applies to the chairman of the local PTA along with that fellow who starts his morning off with a healthy dose of vodka) they suddenly find themselves slapping their chests, hooting, and throwing punches. Or feces, depending on the sort of party they’re at.

Things could be worse. They could be trying to dance.

So Jameson pulled up at the co-op with the alcoholic equivalent of a bomb dangling from his index finger. Now, a co-op, if you don’t know this, is a rather shady establishment filled with young, idealistic, and also somewhat addled young people with increasing degrees of moral and artistic idealism. This one, like most or all of them, was a large, ramshackle house with big creaky stairs and couches that had been dutifully punished by years of drinking, smoking and… well, and other things.

One of the “other things” was Dolf sprawled out on one of the couches in a T-Shirt and shameless Euro-briefs casually smoking a cigarette like this was a fine and dandy way to meet guests. Jameson should have been happy he wasn’t naked.

“Hallo, Jaime,” said Dolf. “How are you doing?”

“I’d be doing a lot better if you’d put on some pants, guy.”

“Oh, right,” he said absentmindedly, and retreated to sheathe his manliness in some very tight corduroy pants.

As the co-op was empty of people who had Very Strong Opinions on smoking and Willie Nelson, Jameson and Dolf proceeded to get pretty loud and foul with their celebrations, chainsmoking Marlboro reds, pounding whiskey (“all de whiskies”), and pushing the generally conceived level of boorishness to the breaking point. At one point a friend of Dolf’s came over to have one single beer, but as the volume of consumed whiskey increased, so did that of the music, swears, and eventually colorful sexual and racial epithets, and she hurriedly excused herself lest things turn unpleasant.

But as time passed the music and the whiskey failed to engage their attention, and they decided quite arbitrarily that they were now bored. This was obvious by how Dolf suddenly and loudly announced, “I AM BORT.”

Some things you just can’t argue with.

“Darts,” said Jameson wistfully. “We need darts. And a tuba full of pudding,” he added jokingly.

“Well, I don’t really know what de fuck you’re talking about, but Fred has darts,” said Dolf. (Not Fred’s real name.)

“Well, then, what the hell are we waiting for?” asked Jameson, and the two of them scampered off to Fred’s room to retrieve the dart board, probably caroming off of every solid surface available in the process.

As it turned out, Fred had “darts” only in the loosest sense of the word. He actually had the friendly, safe, magnetic darts that were appropriate for, say, autistic hemophiliac kindergartners who think that everything is swallowable. The set was basically a magnetic board with a bunch of these blunt little button magnets with fins made by someone who had probably had aerodynamics explained to them by a Bornean tribesman who had once seen a plane fly overhead.

It lacked the requisite manliness you find with pub darts. These were eunuch darts, castrati darts. They had no puncture, no bite.

But, for the moment, it was all our two wayward protagonists could find. Grumbling with dissatisfaction, they clumped back downstairs and hung it on the far wall of the living room. And so they began playing “darts.”

Jameson insists that the darts were of poor quality, and that was what contributed to the, shall we say, errant directions the throws took. Most notably the darts seemed to be very attracted to the swivels and bars on the foosball table. Me? I say it may have had something to do with how the contestants had a half a liter of whiskey in them apiece. That usually puts a shine on the world you can’t ignore so good.

“These things blow,” remarked Jameson.

“Yah, dey really do.”

Then Jameson’s noodle spat out a shuddering pile of an idea. “You know, if we had real darts we could draw a dartboard on the wall and just play it that way.”

Dolf nodded. “Eyah. Or we could even trow knives at it.”

They both nodded, staring off into the corners of the room as so many philosophers and deep thinkers have done before.

Now, no one is really sure who suggested what happened next. They claim to have simply forgotten the moment of conception, the real words and speaker lost in the whiskey-fueled haze that had overcome them. But I prefer to think that the words were left unsaid, just hanging in the air, waiting to be acknowledged.

And those words were: “How about we throw knives at the wall?”

Before you ask, no, this is not the sort of conclusion that you can shout “Eureka!” after announcing it. But the suggestion had been made, and I guess fate is inexorable. I don’t know what sputtering brain cell made a connection with that thought and then proceeded to adamantly court it, but it stuck in their respective craws and, gosh guys, what goes together better than drinking and amateur knife tricks? It’s like mayonnaise and gummy bears, or Christians and Lions, right?

“I’ll get the knives!” cried Jameson, laughing with inspiration, and he hurried off to their kitchen, where he picked up – follow me, here – several massive, nearly foot-long steak knives that were capable of filleting a fully grown, whole tuna. (This is how it was expressed to me – I have no knowledge of these areas)

These had more “bite.” Nay, no eunuchs they.

Jameson, logic-impaired and skipping along the boundaries of the psychopathic, burst back into the room with the massive knives in hand. Dolf, seeing the ten-plus inches of sharpened steel, erupted into sputtering giggles of disbelief.

“Oh, man,” he said. “Dis is totally going to rock.” He then paused as he was struck by an obstacle. “How do you trow knives, anyways?”

Jameson shrugged. “We’ll learn.”

Dolf nodded. “Ehrm. Okay.”

“Right,” said Jameson, and looked at the knife in his hand. He shrugged. “Well, here we go.”

And he took the handle in his hand and hurled it at the wall, winding back and stepping into it and rotating his shoulder and everything. A real Nolan Ryan of a knife-pitch.

This is the part where internet and role-playing nerds alike will join up in a unified cry that this is not the correct posture for throwing knives. The Society of Creative Anachronisms surely has a dozen such classes detailing the proper technique, and they can probably already criticize form and stance. Let me inform you, however, that if ever there were some people who really didn’t give a piss-soaked fuck about throwing knives properly, it’s the two guys we’re talking about here. So shaddup.

As you can expect, the throws did not go well. They would slam into the drywall sideways and then – holy shit – bounce back towards the throwers, tumbling their way across the carpet and smacking into the furniture. The knives stopped about two or three feet from the contestant’s knees. Foot-long steel teeth were raining around their toes.

Did this deter them, even for a minute? Did it fuck.

“I do not tink we are doing dis right,” observed Dolf, and if you expand that statement to the night as a whole you can come up with a few solid assumptions.

“Maybe we should throw them harder,” suggested Jameson.

They tried. Of course they tried, because – as men – harder was the answer. I would have thought the same thing. When isn’t it? It works in anything, from the arcade, trying to wrestle the joystick into submission, to foreplay, when you try to wrestle the… uh, the….

Well, never mind. Suffice to say that everything is secretly the equivalent of using an oversized mallet to propel a little metal tube up a pipe to hit a large bell.

I don’t mean to make these two sound like stupid guy-guys, but at the moment I can only assume their brains functioned only in the most primitive of ways. The only thing they succeeded in doing was punching more holes in the wall.

“Dis is really stupid,” said Dolf.

Jameson, however, was struck with yet another idea. (In this story he produces several “ideas.” Be warned.) “Hold on,” he said, and he returned to the kitchen. There he got one of the smaller steak knives, with blades of only about three inches or so, and he hurried back to the living room.

“Hey, Dolf,” he said. “Watch this.”

“Watch what?” asked Dolf. But before he could blink, Jameson had hurled the knife at the wall.

In moments of pure adrenaline the world stands still, crystallized in motion like it awaits your very command. Sort of like Fry when he drank all that coffee. I suspect this is what overcame Jameson’s considerable inebriation. The knife twirled through the air with indescribable perfection, bleary light winking along the edge of the blade, to bury itself, quivering, an inch deep into the neon green wall.

They both stood and stared at it.

I like to think it was making a noise like poinkapoinkapoinkapoinkapoinka.

Liter of Powers? $32.36. A few packs of Marlboro? $10-15. Suddenly realizing that you are an unstoppable killing machine?

Priceless.

“OOOOOOHHHHHH SHIIIIT!” said Dolf in a half-whisper.

Now, “Oh shit,” like “awesome,” is a word that lacks any real quantifiable value. It could mean, on the one hand, very good. But you know, it could also mean very bad.

Needless to say, Jameson took it to mean good.

“I’m going to go get all the knives!” he said cheerfully, or as cheerfully as someone can when uttering that phrase.

They then began to hurl, in quick procession, up to twenty or more knives at the living room wall, not actually aiming at anything, but simply trying to make them stick. I really wish I had been there to see this, preferably a safe distance away, say, across the street with a pair of binoculars. Two of the knives were problematic, as they were “crazy-fuck-all-curved-to-shit” and would not stick, no matter how hard they tried. They laughed, they cackled, they upbraided and ridiculed each other. They basically went nuts.

This may sound dangerous, and yeah, it is. But the real problem was when the knives didn’t stick, and when their durable handles instead punched quarter-sized holes in the drywall. All the rest were just little slits. They were noticeable, yeah, but they weren’t, you know, holes.

I like to think of a large troupe of attractive, horny women suddenly and inexplicably trotting up the front steps, trying to find the only guys still in Austin during Thanksgiving break who were looking for a good time. Having heard the laughter and the loud music, they look at each other and smile, saying that here, surely, is a party in the mix. Here, surely, are two proud studs who would be up and raring for a fun time, possibly ending in vigorous and undignified coupling.

And they would come up the steps, look in the windows, and see two large, howling men standing beside a pile of very murderous-looking knives, throwing them willy-nilly and whooping like savages.

And what’s really funny is that something like this happened. With a hilarious twist.

For it was then that Jameson and Dolf suddenly became aware that someone was knocking at the door.

It’s moments like these that unite all the fellows in the room. They made wild-eyed eye contact and froze, each of them holding weapons, stopped in mid-throw.

And then in the window there appeared the face of, oh, let’s call him Marcel.

I could say Marcel is gay. I could. But that would be underdoing it. That would not do this particular gentleman justice. Let me put it this way – this person is so unabashedly homosexual that he has gone right through gay and out the other side. The first time I met him my gaydar completely failed me – not because I didn’t realize he was gay, but because I didn’t even realize he was a guy. He went beyond ambiguous gender. I just sort of stood there, stunned, and then asked someone, “What the hell was that?”

(Author’s note – this blind spot will probably get me into real trouble should I ever meet any transvestites.)

I like Marcel. He’s a perfectly nice person. He even knows a bit about classical music, and what higher compliment can I pay him than that? It’s just that when he drinks and abuses drugs, which he has done before, he does tend to hit on every guy in the room. And I mean aggressively, uncomfortably hit on. You can’t call people a homophobe for not liking that. That’s like calling a girl who gets mad when a guy grabs her ass a “manhater.” For example, this forces me to recall one moment during the “Nearly Naked Party,” which I attended in kilt, when he and a friend of his cornered me and asked me some very impertinent questions which I don’t care to repeat.

And at that moment he was flying through candyland on some sort of toxin that I have never encountered, and he had happened to fall upon these two gentleman caught [i]en flagrante[/i] in lethal destruction. I can only assume he was drunk and on coke and whatever the kids are doing these days, oh you crazy kids and your drugs. And he had somehow found his way to the co-op.

It’s a testament to his state that he kept knocking for nearly a minute while Jameson and Dolf stayed perfectly still.

After a while they had a wordless conversation. Both of them put the knives down and, stiff as boards, walked over and opened the door.

A few beats of tense silence.

“Hallo, Marcel,” said Dolf suspiciously.

“Hay, Dolf,” sang Marcel, and stumbled into the room, not aware at all that Jameson and Dolf were silently exchanging communications that consisted entirely of, “OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK OH-”

They probably expected Marcel to freak out. There were weapons of increasing size scattered about the place like murder confetti. (By the way, wouldn’t that be a cool band name?) They both had eyes wide as saucers as they expected Marcel to suddenly yell, “What the HELL have you guys been doing?”

Instead he launched into a slurred rant about how he had broken up with his boyfriend, and how he had just gone out and gotten SO fucked up, and oh my God, this is all just crazy, I don’t know what to do. Neither, of course, did Dolf and Jameson. Marcel remained totally oblivious to everything that was going on. So, still looking at each other with furtive glances and with about a dozen knives sticking out of the wall (not to mention about nine or so on the table), they sat down and silently “entertained” Marcel’s company as he complained about his deplorable situation. They could not alert him to what was going on around them, so they had to stay perfectly still and quiet.

I think this is what is called “playing possum.”

Marcel vented most of his drug-fueled angst and then, perhaps out of habit, suddenly became amorous at the most hilariously inappropriate time, save that of a funeral or a botched surgery. He turned to Dolf, who was seated next to him as though he had been stuffed by a not-very-dextrous taxidermist.

“Wow, Dolf, you always dress so well,” he crooned. “You always wear the nicest things, don’t you?” He began to rub Dolf’s collar and shoulder, kicking Dolf’s “alarmed” sensation well into “oh fuck this shit.”

Nothing takes the zest of out of a night like having a gay dude drape himself over you and stroke your anatomy, I don’t care how many knives you were throwing beforehand.

He abruptly stood up. “I YAM GOINK TO BED,” he announced in a deep baritone, and then got the fuck out of there.

That left Jameson and Marcel in a room full of knives.

“Yeah, me too,” said Jameson quickly, and he pulled a blanket over himself and lay down on the couch. Then he shot out one hand, fumbled around on the wall for a moment, and turned out the light, perhaps hoping that Marcel would forget what he saw here and maybe that Jameson was there at all.

Of course, he didn’t. Instead he insisted on “sharing the blanket” with Jameson.

I don’t know if you remember much about Jameson, but I’ll put it this way: he looks like a man who should handle raw meat regularly. I don’t care if he kills it, butchers it, ships it, or cooks it, Jameson looks like the sort of person who would casually walk in with a blood-stained apron, clean gore off of his arms, and enquire hey, dude, did you get your car fixed or something.

He is not precisely what you could call “queerbait.”

And yet Marcel, perhaps out of just a kneejerk “I’m drunk!” reaction, proceeded to try and feel him up.

“Come on,” he whined. “Share the blanket with me.”

“No.”

“It’s a big blanket.”

“Dude, Marcel, it is NOT going to work,” insisted Jameson.

“Yes, it will, look,” said Marcel, and tried to squeeze in beside Jameson on about 3 inches of couch space.

“No, it won’t, look,” said Jameson, and gave the slightest twitch that sent Marcel sprawling onto the floor.

“All right, fine,” said Marcel, and lay down at the bend of the couch. However, he still felt highly ardent, so he began rubbing – Jesus God in Heaven and Hell – Jameson’s feet.

“For the love of GOD, Marcel, I don’t know what you think is going to happen, but it’s NOT going to happen,” barked Jameson.

“APPArently,” pouted Marcel, and promptly passed out.

For the moment, the moral of this story shall remain, “Kids, don’t do drugs.”

* * *

Marcel awoke the next morning with no knowledge of how he got there. After sputtering, “Wha? Who? How? Wha?” for a minute or so, he promptly bugged the fuck out. He never even noticed the creative wall decorations Dolf and Jameson had installed previously, which is hard to believe, but he didn’t. Then Dolf walked in, eyes red and skin pallid (or as pallid as he gets), and he saw what they had done.

“Oooooooh, fuck,” he groaned.

And then they took this, possibly the least dignified picture of all time:

http://imagesocket.com/view/S5000386b8c.JPG

What about this DOESN’T scream “meth-head” at the top of its lungs? Note the disheveled hair, the confused, hapless expression, the slightly glassy eyes. Note the [i]cutlery that has been inserted into the wall.[/i] Note the smattering of holes that fall across the face of it like it’s some relic from Kosovo.

Did I mention you should never do drugs?

An hour later, Jameson and Dolf were sipping coffee and staring at it, torn between appreciation and horror.

“It is good dat Marcel came over, otherwise who knows [i]what[/i] we could have trown knives at,” said Dolf. He felt one hole with his finger, looking more dismayed the deeper he could go in.

“It’s drywall, dude, we can just patch it up,” said Jameson. “Easy as hell.”

“Dis is really, really bad,” said Dolf. “I don’t… I don’t tink we have dis color anymore.”

Jameson, ever the optimist, shrugged. “We could just paint over it.”

“Paint over it?” said Dolf, looking dubious.

“Sure, why not?”

“And paint what? We don’t have dat color, like I said.”

And Jameson’s mind supplied the answer immediately. See, he’s always about three thoughts away from one thing, and it starts with “TEX” and it ends with “ASS.” Or just “AS.”

“We could paint the biggest indoor Texas flag-wall in the fucking zip code, that’s what we could do,” he said fervently.

Dolf’s eyes glowed with that suggestion. He had enthusiastically adopted his temporary homeland, and he wouldn’t have any qualms at all in doing the decorative version of “FUCK YOU” to the entire Co-op.

And so – and this part is amazing – Jameson went to work. After that, he went to [i]work.[/i] It was only for two hours, but he did, and as he plugged away doing whatever the hell it is he does when he’s not glowering, Dolf broke out the drywall spackle, compass, and ruler, and proceeded to sketch the most geometrically perfect and [b]FUCKING HUGE ASS[/b] Texas flag that I have yet seen. Jameson picked up the paint on the way over, and the rest is history, especially as the members of the co-op trickled in from their vacations to find that there was about 90 square feet of Texas in their living room.

* * *

As soon as I heard that I dissolved into laughter. I demanded we rush over to the co-op immediately to look upon this creation. They’ve hung several flags over the Texas wall to try and cover up its glory, but they just can’t. It is seriously huge.

This is probably the greatest photo of all time. I’m quite drunk in it, to boot.

http://imagesocket.com/view/S5000468ebb.JPG

And that was Thanksgiving.

I miss Dolf.

Politics: A Summary

As we as a people and, indeed, as a species in general, stand upon the cusp of a new era, it becomes prudent to look back upon our long and mottled history and try and understand what has directed our history and development so far and what will decide our interesting and probably short futures. I believe I can say without fear of rebuttal that nothing has governed our existence more than the concept of – wait for it – politics.

(For dramatic purposes, imagine that someone behind you is shaking a piece of posterboard to make thunder noises. Wait, scratch that, just think of actual thunder.)

Yes, there isn’t much in this world that is more important than politics. Well… Well, that is that “sex” thing. And food. And money and such, I mean, I don’t know about you, but like all of those thingies quite a bit, and…

Ah, but now do you see how this works? Politics, d’yesee, is a method of organizing these elements, or at least disorganizing them in a superficially orderly process.

However, it strikes me in these latent days that many have no concept of what politics is or even how it works, or, as is more likely, spectacularly fails to work, and so I thought I would sit down here and set the world to rights so people can rest easy in their beds and maybe send me some money or a beer.

I’ll begin by saying that I am not a “politician.” Nor am I “politically active.” I am also not “active” in any sense of the word, hence the “bedsores.” I am, however, unusually proficient in the use of “quotation marks,” which surely points to a high IQ or at least a pompous sense of superiority that’s so close that it makes no difference. If you ask what my credentials are, I’ll have you know that I have a certified degree from Dave and Busters for “Professorology,” and this degree is so academically fantastic that it even has a dinosaur riding a skateboard on it right next to my name. He even has on sunglasses, which means he must get “laid” a lot.

I have also watched a whole lot of television, and on the Sunday mornings when I am so grievously intoxicated that I cannot get off the couch or even change the channel I have occasionally been forced to watch news programs. And, having listened to white men with well-parted hair and women with drilling, nasal, New England accents loudly discuss things like “tariffs” and “homosexuals,” I think it’s safe to day that I know just big fat armloads about politics and can safely compose a semi-competent essay explaining it. With swears.

So I shall now explain to “internet” in no uncertain terms how politics works, how to get involved, and the best ways to go about letting everyone know that you are now a Person of Opinion and everyone in the whole wide world should Listen To You.

Let’s begin with a discussion question.

What is the difference between a “tariff” and a “homosexual?”
Answer: A “tariff” is a colored scarf worn by homosexuals to discern rank within the homosexual community. Blue is the best.

I am sure that whetted your taste for more political intrigue.

The lesson begins with history.

THE HISTORY OF POLITICS
Politics was invented by the Romans during B.S. 1944 mostly because they were rich as hell and had nothing better to do at the time. Most of their history had been spent killing other peoples like the Gauls and the Celts and the Phlegms and such, and so having run out of people to disagree with they then decided that it would be just a corking idea to start disagreeing with each other. Julius Caesar came up with the fundamental idea of politics when he was at a dinner party and no one was paying him very much attention at all, and then while he was feeling very sniffy he suddenly was struck by a bolt of inspiration, or possibly he was drunk.

The Fundamental Definition of Politics: Politics is a method for rich men to stand around and yell at each other and just generally ruin a good time.

Thus the first dinner party fell victim to politics when Julius Caesar started hollering about, oh, I don’t know, pig farm subsidies, which was another thing he invented right the hell out of nowhere. Everyone was pretty stunned, and what was really odd was that people began inventing Opinions about things and started yelling back, because even though they hadn’t the foggiest idea as to what pig farms were or even subsidies, they knew they didn’t like it/liked it and by Jove they wouldn’t stand for this anymore, even if there wasn’t a “this” at the time.

Historical note: B.S. 1944 is the first “this” that would not be stood for. Sitting did nothing to help, nor did “that.”

The next years were full of turmoil as the Romans began trying to jump on the Politics Bandwagon, which is like a normal Bandwagon except no one knows where it’s going. They eventually developed a highly ritualized method for politics:

A politician was the richest, loudest, angriest person with Opinions and Views and Such.

A citizen was a person in a crowd who is yelling. You did not need to yell words to be a citizen.

People with vaginas could not be citizens. Vaginas are also known as hoo-hoos.

A foreigner is another word for corpse.

The politicians now had a word for themselves other than “shithead,” so they were all very pleased with each other. But after a while they began to get restless and began to have Opinions about Opinions, namely about how one should go about having Opinions and yelling about them. They then developed the political process, which went thusly:

Step 1: A politician stands up and raises his arms in a very formal fashion.
Step 2: Yelling.
Step 3: The first politician sits down and another one stands up.
Step 4: Yelling.
Step 5: The other politician sits down, at which point one of them is promptly stabbed to death.

Interesting Political Note: Jesus was the first politician to get “Holied” to death, which is an acceptable if unorthodox way of Politics. The H in Jesus H. Christ stands for Herbert.

This all worked very well and good for a while, but other than the gratuitous stabbing the politicians started to wish more people could be a part of this wonderful procedure. They then began to formulate a way to get everyone involved in stabbing, but unfortunately there weren’t enough daggers to go around. So they instead came up with the process of voting, in which the senator who got the least yells was the one who was going to get shivved in the knards.

Definition of Voting: Voting is a way to avoid being involved in politics and still feel involved. It is sort of like a magic wand, only it shoots apathy and a false sense of satisfaction instead of stars and glitter and Patronuses.

Constant yelling and stabbing went on for about forty thousand years, or some equally ridiculous amount of time, until the Vikings showed up, who were inordinately good at stabbing. They stabbed the hell out of the Romans, which was pretty funny. This is why pasta is illegal in Sweden, and if you bring pasta to their country they make you rancid fish called “lutefisk,” the “lute” meaning “you’re pretty much fucked, buddy.”

Let’s review the Roman definition of politics.

Yelling = Politics = Voting = Hoo-Hoos = Stabbing = Herbert

Therefore, girls = evil.

The Vikings had a different way of deciding politics, namely that whoever was the best at stabbing would be the guy to listen to. The Vikings were pretty “kick ass.”

The Vikings were in control of Europe (white person land) for about thirty years, possibly more. They developed the idea of Kingship, which is sort of like being a Hitman for God, who is a big guy in the sky who doesn’t like you at all. The King would get to wear a silly hat and ride around feasting and smiting and making people hit the dirt with sticks until plants grew, at which point he would take the plants and burn them. It was a pretty simple system, because the only thing the King had to yell was “Shut the fuck up!” or the equivalent thereof depending on what language he spoke or if he spoke any language at all.

Eventually, though, the peasants (dirty folk) got tired of seeing their plants burned, so they created the Magna Carta (A Discovery Card plan) which was basically the equivalent of, “No, you shut the fuck up!” This was called “civilization.”

This was a landmark event in the tourist trap of history.

Eventually people remembered the Roman way of voting, which they now called “democracy,” which translates into “built Ford Tough.” This was sort of odd as Ford wasn’t around yet, to which this astute political historian says why the hell not. They eventually picked back up with the stabbing and the yelling, mostly in (surprise) Italy, where a man called Machiavelli came up with this idea:

Instead of walking over and stabbing someone, wouldn’t it be easier if you paid someone else to do it for you. Everyone agreed that this was a pretty profound development, and they celebrated by torturing and killing Machiavelli, which just goes to show what thinking gets you.

Interesting note: Machiavelli is now a word for a very bitter kind of coffee. I don’t suggest you order it.

Then some pretty boring stuff happened, most of it concerning France.

Eventually England came up with a pretty great idea: for a long time people had been yelling mostly because they thought they were better than other people. Citizens thought they were better than foreigners, men thought they were better than women, Dairy Queen thought it was better than Sonic, and every country thought they were better than every other type of country. But then King Henry, or maybe Prince Harry, or someone, suddenly remarked, “You know what I sure do like a whole lot? Money. That stuff is pretty darn-tootin’.” (Direct quote.)

Then England decided something very important: Instead of killing other people because we think we’re better than them, why don’t we just try and make a whole lot of money.

This put a real change on a lot of politics. Up until now the usual political cry was “Shut up, [insert ethnicity/gender/nationality/caste rank/sports team fan here].” Now the cry was, “Shut up and give me my money.”

This was “capitalism,” and its foremost proponent was Milburn Pennybags, whom we have immortalized as The Monopoly Guy. Capitalism meant that people could now vote in dollars rather than total stabs or yells, and rich people wouldn’t have to yell at all. Poor people could not yell, otherwise the factory foreman would beat the teeth out of their heads, possibly right into the next person’s head, thus giving them some sort of crazy shark grin which would be pretty cool to see. And so on.

This is the modern political process that we have, minus the Southern accents and confetti and balloons. Now that I’m finally done with all that history horseshit, let’s talk about modern politics and how you can use it to annoy those around you.

MODERN POLITICS AND THE USES THEREOF

These days, politics is a way to get as little done as slowly as possible while making everyone mad as hell and ruining things like dinner parties or work environments or the bumper of your car. It is also a way to instantly lose friends and begin disliking television shows, movies, authors, and celebrities because they have Opinions that are not Your Opinions, therefore making them little better than inbred mongrels wallowing in their own shit. The transformation is instantaneous, like backwards alchemy.

Let’s discuss modern politics.

The Inner Workings of Modern Politics

Politics today is easy as hell. Eventually the head honchos began trying to make it as applicable to as many people who had beliefs or money (preferably money) as possible, and so today it’s marvelously color-coded. Here’s one way to distinguish what beliefs you have that will govern every choice in products, entertainment, or social life that you will have in the future:

Question: Which is better – red, or blue?

If you picked Blue, then you are Liberal, also called a Leftist or a Faggot. This means that you think everyone should have abortions whether they want children or not and gays should have vigorous intercourse right on your front lawn. If you’re not up to a lot of sexual and religious experimentation such as tossing a fella’s salad or joining the Bahá'í Faith then you’re in a lot of trouble. You probably spent a lot of time in college or are part of a union, or you might STILL be in college and receive your information about the world as a whole through one source, Jon Stewart, whom you watch while righteously baked. Huzzah. Worse, you may even be foreign. According to you, we should immediately stop using gasoline even though there is no real practical alternative and it would require completely reconstructing every major urban area that exists along with the transportation, which is just a tiny little thing, right? You probably have a really irritating, whiny accent that is either agonizingly piercing or totally inarticulate, a direct result of being born above the Mason-Dixon line. Only homosexuals should be allowed to raise children, which would be tough what with all the abortions that'll be going on, and we should dissolve the concept of marriage, religion, gender, and morality until we merge into a dirt farm commune where everyone has crabs and no one has any concept of possessions, mostly because you gave all your money away to lazy ethnicities and the poor.

If you picked Red, you are a Conservative, a Right-winger, or a Nazi Fascist Bastard. You believe that anything can be solved with a healthy dose of religion, child abuse, or killing it via shooting it in the face or bombing it from the safety of your oil-money mansion. You believe that either education or compassionate economics are the devil, and you are either very, very rich or very, very poor. You don’t care for guvmint. On any good, decent person you should always be able to find a Bible, a chastity belt, and a .357 magnum with several rounds already fired because you just love Jesus that much. When you talk, it sounds like you're gargling tadpoles, which you may actually be doing if you're from Arkansas. Religious and ethnic minorities should receive about as much attention and concern as that possum you ran over on the way over to the prayer meet, and should those folks continue getting “uppity” then a great idea would be to quietly and surreptitiously herd them into industrial rending vats to process them into feed to cut spending on your various livestock, thus increasing your profits tenfold. Global Warming is about as realistic as the boogeyman or a trustworthy Muslim, and your car should weigh more than your house at all times. You’re not even sure what a “gay” is, but you don’t like it very much. Probably some sort of shirt. All news outlets have a left-wing bias, as do the American people and the entire world.

So that’s that. That’s who you are as a person. I suppose I could give you a bit more support about what you believe, but remember – politics isn’t about what you believe, it’s about who you hate. The “why” doesn’t matter, only the volume of your dislike. But I guess we could have a quiz as to what you believe.

Question One: From what do people derive rights?
A. From the Christian God, and the morality He has naturally ingrained in us.
B. Well, “rights” is a subjective term, as each culture and history creates their rights only in accordance with their viewpoint of the world, which is unique and impenetrable to outsiders. What we need is toleration of different understandings of the archaic, Westernized concept of “rights,” which is completely outdated in the first place.

Question Two: Abortion – How about it?
A. I agree with Dr. House, babies and fetuses are sort of like a tumor to be removed with about as much ritual and dignity as clipping off a fingernail. I should have the right to grow my fingernails and decorate them as I wish, as they’re mostly an accessory to my life, nothing more. Same thing with those tiny angry humans.
B. Every baby is one of God’s stars that emerges from the labia of the vagina to brighten up the whole world with its glory and Good Works.

Question Three: You meet a Black Person. What do you do?
A. I give them all of my money.
B. I give them all of my money because I am utterly terrified of K-N-E-E-G-R-O-W-S ohgodIhopehecanthearus.

Question Four: What do you think of the world as a whole?
A. We should save it by sitting around and having deep, heartfelt discussions about who we are as people and how we can grow and understand so long as we love each other and respect each other’s decisions, no matter how outlandish they seem to us.
B. Nuke the fucking bastards.

Question Five: What about the National Debt?
A. What the hell is that?
B. Yeah, what the hell is that?

Question Six: What do you think of the EU?
A. I think it’s got great graphics but the loading time [i]sucks.[/i]
B. I’m not going to answer these questions if you keep making shit up.

Question Seven: Religion.
A. Pfffft.
B. YEEEEEHAW

Question Eight: What do you think of art?
A. If it doesn’t have bald eagles and flags and fireworks in it and is priced at under fifteen bucks, it’s smary smarty-pants horseshit.
B. Art is too confined in these primal days. Today art should no longer be constricted by the medium of music or graphics – a sonata of Chopin or Shostakovich or a painting by Magritte can just as easily be expressed by seeing a ballerina with death’s head make up explosively defecate upon a picture of the Virgin Mary while a nude man sadly plays a one-stringed violin, his genitals held suggestively before her face. As the light fades, they place their hands over their eyes in endless shame.

Question Nine: Israel or Palestine?
A. Boxers.
B. Briefs.

Question Ten: Is it ever good to end a quiz on the number nine?
A. No.
B. Definitely not.

THE ANSWERS TO THE QUIZ
If you carefully answered all the questions to the quiz then you lose, because what sort of retard has the time for that sort of shit.

HOW TO INTERACT IN POLITICS

Lots of people will tell you that politics is about registering or voting. They couldn’t be more wrong. Just as ancient doctors thought sneezes meant your head was filled with space-demons, modern civics professors think that voting has something to do with beliefs. The truth is that voting is an abstract concept that can never be engaged in and you should never seek to do. It’s a myth, like Bigfoot, the Ghostbusters, or the female orgasm. What politics is really about is being as obnoxious as possible at all times.

You can become politically active in a number of ways. One of the best billboards for your beliefs is on the bumper of your car, because there is no occasion better fit to communicate your ideals than when people are sitting bumper to bumper on the goddamn freeway because some fucking moron three miles ahead of you doesn’t know how to use his shit-ass side mirrors. This is the perfect time to sit down and bond with the enraged and weary people around you with short, meaningless, insipid phrases like NUKE THEIR ASS AND TAKE THEIR GAS or a picture of a Darwin fish graphically eating Jesus alive. People love this sort of thoughtful stuff. That’s what makes politics great.

This called “rhetoric,” which is the process of taking a word that means something, like “right” or “true” or “turtle,” and making it meaningless by saying something like, “Unless America can rightly conquer the truthfulness of all turtletry, we will be forced to eat every true American child on the planet alive. Right?” And so on.

I also suggest reigning in any conversation, no matter how mundane, to the subject of whatever subject you heard on the radio five minutes ago. Here’s a stupendous example:

MAN ONE: I sure hope it doesn’t rain today.
MAN TWO: It probably will.
MAN ONE: Yeah. You know those weathermen.
MAN TWO: Don’t I! What a bunch of clowns!
POLITICAL GENIUS: Yeah, just like President [BLAN]! I mean FUCK that guy! HOW CAN ANYONE BELIEVE THAT SORT OF CRAP!
*TEN MINUTES OF HORRIBLY AWKWARD SILENCE*

MAN ONE: ...you seen 300?

This brave soul has made a foothold on the shores of intellectualism with the ships of belief, and now the shock troops of dutiful internet research will mercilessly slaughter the villagers of ignorance, going on to raid their food stores of impracticality and brutally rape the sobbing women of closedmindedness. And so on.

The internet is also a good way to inform people of your beliefs, but I’m not going to touch that shit with a forty foot pole. Ten guesses why.

The ultimate place to triumph in the political arena is when you and a bunch of nice, sociable people are sitting down to have a good time. You could be all together at Christmas for the first time in five years, or maybe a friend of yours threw a really nice party with cocktails instead of Keystone Light and Jungle Juice. Everyone’s having a really good time, people are warming up to each other, and we’re all having fun.

That’s when you spring into action.

Start talking about Michael Moore, Hotel Rwanda, abortion, or Crash. These plus alcohol always results in crucial, widespread victories over those who are not civically minded. Grab your shit-stirrin’ stick and let ‘er rip, because this is the magic time, this is when the beauty happens, this is when, from the agonizing labor of day-to-day boredom, you can give birth to a new age of enlightenment. All you have to do is make sure to be as loud as possible about whatever the hell is on your mind. Take your stance and don’t let up. Logic? Who needs it? You can’t argue with the type of logic that doesn’t exist! We need controversy. That means you win. You win, boys and girls. Just like Julius Caesar, the father of politics, you have followed on in his noble tradition, celebrating victory over those of lesser intelligence. And I mean, hey, things turned out golden for him, right?

Right?

…wait, really?

Oh.

Hello, Internet.

Should I have ever thought that there could be a life that warranted people eagerly waiting to know its intricate details, I can say without hesitation that I would have never suspected it to be mine.

This is a precept that I still devoutly believe in.

As far as the internet goes, I bet I can count my e-acquaintances (or e-Quaintances) on one hand. To make it even more specific, I bet I can count them on a hand that belongs to the victim of a very serious industrial accident. That’s how internet-savvy I am.

I am still not entirely sure how the internet works. After shuffling around and squinting at my computer for a prolonged amount of time, I have concluded that “internet” is a natural resource mined somewhere in the boonies of Michigan and is delivered to my computer by invisible goblins. It seems to be the only reasonable assumption that one can make. I have spend days at a time moving the cursor of this mouse around trying to stir up or distract the goblins so perhaps I can capture one and adequately examine this “internet,” but so far all that’s happened is that pictures of naked ladies have appeared on the screen. I can only assume that this is a peace-offering by the goblins to placate my inquisitive forays, in which case these goblins have very questionable taste indeed, what with how many of these ladies aren’t actually ladies at all.

So this may actually be the virtual equivalent of standing in front of a closet and yelling at your clothes, because there’s actually no one there and no one is listening, nor will they respond. You’re just alone, in your room, distracting yourself. I know, I’ve done it at least twice the week in an effort to inspire my pants to crawl onto my legs of their own free will, but I must not be a very good motivational speaker as they just hang there, looking all pantish-like in the closet.

I suppose I must introduce myself to the internet, as technology as advanced as this surely must suggest a community in which taste, class, manners, and grammar are all considered qualities of the highest kind.

Hello, internet. My name is Robert. I am a young man who is sitting, right now, in a chair at work writing things to you. It is about as interesting as it sounds. Although I applied for the position of “Vice President in Charge of Making Money,” they instead gave me one of these tech-support jobs which means I argue with Michigan soccer moms over a phone line that must run through at least six out of the seven seas before finally reaching either of us. I have considered simply beatboxing into the microphone as this would probably be more soothing to both the caller and myself, but my manager has loudly disagreed upon this point several times.

I’d like to make this simple and just say that I am Sarah, plain and tall, but unfortunately my name is not Sarah, and I’m not quite tall, rather tallish. I don’t know if I’m plain or not. I would say that I resemble the lovechild between a potato and a long, tall stalk of grain, and I lack any distinguishing features in such a deliberate way that many find it worthy of prosecution. I am commonly seen slouching about with a look on my face like I was recently abducted by an unmarked van right off the street and was just dumped right on this corner, not sure how I got here or why. This is usually the case more often than I would care to admit.

A neat fact: in this chair I am capable of spinning around a total of six times before severely regretting it.

I have started this blog for several reasons. The first was that I sat down and decided, you know what, the world should know about me! Then I wrote a few sentences and realized that, you know, there really isn’t anything worth knowing. I suppose I should just sum it up right here.

INTERESTS AND OTHER HORSESHIT:

1. Drinking - I enjoy drinking. Call it a “thing,” but I believe I am from a time that dates back to, say, the 1930’s, because I believe that the world looks much better with a stiff drink in your hand. There are plenty of Puritans out there, I know, who would solemnly shake their heads and say, “Now, Robert, one can’t go about enjoying life. Life is about gravity, and productivity, and apple pies and quilting. Now go back to your home, eat some clean white bread, play a few rounds of Scrabble, and then read a Bible Passage before going to bed.” Well, I think apple pies sort of suck dingus. Quilting is about as fascinating as, well, I’m trying to find something less interesting than quilting, so I guess all I can come up with is watching quilting. Whereas alcohol, on the other hand, makes me physically indestructible. It makes me morally infallible. It makes me capable of passing (or “phasing”) through physical barriers. One time I drank a bottle of gin and punched a hole in God. It was pretty sweet. And so on.

2. Politics - People often ask me, “Robert, where do you stand in politics?” And I usually say, “I don’t. I sit in the back and stay very quiet.” This is because there is no better way to ruin nice fancy dinner parties than bringing up, say, abortion, or genocide. Very nasty stuff. So, when it comes to politics – shaddup.

3. Music – I usually describe my musical tastes as “shit you hate.” I enjoy weird, nonverbal avante garde bands in which the climax is an overweight, barely clothed man dressed in a ragged swan outfit swirling around on the stage while yelling. Well, it’s not quite that bad, but it’s close. I’ve recently become fond of the Tin Hat Trio. I think Tom Waits is God (not the one I punched a hole in), but most people don’t know him (but regularly claim to know God on a personal level). I like Irish music of the type that angers people immediately or incites ridicule. I also like Classical music, possibly the least popular out of the bunch.

And etcetera.

Another neat fact: When I am wearing my headset, I am only capable of spinning around in my chair three times before doing serious damage to my face and computer. The computer is worth much more.

I read a shitload. I watch a shitload of movies. I have no problem with sitting down and watching three movies in a row. Some people’s faces curdle and begin whining like they are little girls whose pigtails have been pulled upon, but I’m a man, baby, that’s right, I’m such a man that I have no issue with lying still and looking at a box for six hours. Take THAT Tom Selleck. Who’s the man now?

I suppose now is the moment in which I wind down to the one defining quality of this blog, besides its uselessness. As of this moment in my turbulent and often illegal life, I am attempting to have a book publish.

Gasp. I can hear it occurring. A massive drop in oxygen levels around the globe as someone realizes, to the protestation of every bit of reason in their heads – someone wants to be a writer.

Y’know, it seems like a pretty usual thing, almost to the point that no one notices anymore. Everyone has a goddamn book or story or some idea they have in their head that they think will make them a billionaire. Everyone WANTS to be a writer. A few even are working on books. A few even have finished them. A few have started them several times, much like smokers and quitting. It’s an eternal characteristic in a certain cross-section of mankind that we can always be found sitting around, scratching away on paper or stone or mud, thinking that here we have wrought such a series of words that it would make the gods above us weep with inspiration. Also, it has vampires and sex and guns. And some sort of conspiracy, I don’t know.

But I’ve worked on books before. This is my third, honestly. The first two weren’t worth a crap, or even half a crap. Well, maybe a little of the second, but honestly, I’ve been writing and writing until I decided I had found something remotely acceptable, and I’m trying like hell to get it published.

So hooray. I wrote it in about two months or so and it’s gone through a lot of edits, but on the whole I think it’s fun and I wasn’t trying to do anything other than entertain. Which I hope I did. I have no high-minded opinions of me or my ideas or even my writing, other than, shucks, I’d like for more people to read it. I just think that’d be the tops, folks.

As of now, it’s being reviewed by two agents. One “just barely” passed on it, saying that she liked the hell out of it but it just wasn’t her cup of tea, thus doing the basic equivalent of walking up to me, gouging my heart out of my chest with a rusty spoon, eating it raw, placing her mouth against mine, and then heartily vomiting, causing the remains of my heart to spray out of my heart-hole and other holes like some sort of awful supersoaker. I tell you, it was a treat. I mean, the one thing that’s worse than a thing that doesn’t work is a thing that just barely works.

But so it goes. Hope for the best and expect the worst, because this is likely a year-long effort. Writing it was the easy part, getting someone to like it, well… That’s where Sisyphus comes in.

And until then I suppose I’ll keep writing. And drinking. And whatever.

Places I have been kicked out of or asked to leave:
Baskin Robbins
Bed, Bath, and Beyond
Taco Cabana
The Purple Turtle
Kerbey Lane

And that’s all. I’ll always have “internet” to keep an eye on.