Each Other We Believe

Fans of coherence, feel free to leave now. You've been warned.

I once had an English professor in college who was a hippie. And not, like, the well-dressed functional hippie that you can't really tell is a hippie until they either get close enough for you to smell the pachouli or start sharing their feelings about the way soil feels between their teeth when they chew it. This guy was a full-on, balls-out headband wearing hippie.

Ready for a shocker? It was in a writing class. (I know - a hippie who fancies himself a writer. What are the odds? 30%? 35%?) And, since I was young, impressionable and launching myself into a lifetime of debt paying his salary, I listened to everything he had to teach the class. Some of it made sense, like "Proper punctuation is cool, but it's okay to occasionally break form if it gets your point across better." Some of it made no sense, like "When you're writing, each word is like a person. It needs to have a life of its own." What could that possibly mean? Anyone? Does a verb need a 401k plan?

Anyway - as college professors are wont to do on the days that they're too lazy / stoned to come up with a lesson plan - we were often assigned little in-class activities for the whole period that were intended to somehow make us better people. One such exercise was to sit and write non-stop about everything that popped in our heads for an hour with no filter and no topic. (Of course, given that these were college students at a conservative southern university, most of the essays turned out to be 6-page declarations of how much the writer wanted to bone some girl in his chemistry class, or how much of a "fag" one has to be in order to be a Cowboys fan. What did you expect? Hamlet II: Back in Slacks?) This activity was supposed to put us at one with ourselves and the planet around us. Honestly, that's what I thought camping was for, but, hey, this guy is the expert, right?

So, since I'm feeling a bit like a hippie today, I'm going to give that a whirl for a few minutes. What else am I doing on a Monday? Random discussion of everything I can possibly think of (On a blog? What are the odds? 30%? 35%?) starting... now.

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Great, I'm thinking about writing and I'm a masochistic douche, so naturally, I'm torturing myself by thinking of all the things I've always wanted to do on the blog and never got around to. For example, I've always wanted to end a sentence with "perchance," but every time I sit down and actually write something, I immediately forget it. I'm like the guy that goes to Best Buy for batteries and comes home with a DVD player, 3 new CD's I'm never actually going to get around to listening to, a few Whopper Jr.'s from the BK Drive-Thru next door and no batteries. Why is it so hard for me to remember these things? Is it because I'm an idiot, perchance? I'm putting that on the table.

Speaking of CD's I'm never going to listen to, people who sit near me at work must think I'm insane. They'll see me sitting at a computer with a pair of headphones on, suddenly stopping and staring at the ceiling with my eyes closed, then scribbling a sequence of numbers down on a piece of paper like I'm suddenly channeling a signal being sent to me from aliens like Jodie Foster in Contact. From an outsider's perspective, I'm either insane, or about to build a wicked bad wormhole machine that improbably sends me to outer space's fake Pensacola to see my dad, played by David Morse, tell me that I'm not ready for answers.

(Couple of notes here, by the way. I have no problem spoiling the endings to movies that are more than 10 years old. Accept it or stop reading. By the way, Kevin Spacey was Kaizer Soze. Also, if aliens sent a giant sequence of numbers and images like that that turned out to be instructions on how to build a time machine using technology that we don't understand, what are the odds that we'd get it right the first time? I mean, I occasionally struggle putting shit from Ikea together because their manuals don't have words. I'm supposed to believe that we could put together a wormhole machine correctly using the tab A goes into slot B method with no discussion of theory? I'm more cynical about the success of that venture than James Woods was.)

Going to try to slip back into the original story seamlessly here... So, when I'm scribbling the numbers down? That's me hearing a song and trying to sort out how to play it by using the numbers to represent relative notes. Nice and nerdy. I'm thinking about it because I just did it. I'm listening to a CD I bought a good 4 years ago and never listened to until today. Do other people do this?

Casual Fridays are a good start, but I think companies ought to go further with it. Every day should have some sort of theme. Like, we could have Slightly Drunk Wednesdays, where everyone is encouraged to go out and have a few drinks at lunch before they come back into the office. Who doesn't win here? Bar owners would welcome the boon. "Hump Day" could suddenly become a much more literal term than everyone expected of it. That asshole, Gary, that sits near you would act out and say something stupid to your boss like, "Nice pants, gay wad," or "You know what would help your new proposal? My dick in your mouth," and end up getting himself fired once and for all. Fucking Gary...

Or, you can have Say What You Really Think With Impunity Thursdays. Instead of strained interactions covered in veiled niceties, you get to hear things like, "Gene, all of your ideas are stupid and everybody knows it," or "I spend half my day here daydreaming about fucking Karen. Did you know that? Everyone else here is very ugly," or "I'm not actually doing any work today. I've barely worked all week. I'm not sorry." Sure, at first, it might be a little strained, and I'm sure nobody is going to like hearing about how much of a jackass they really are or how silly they look in those green pants, but after a few weeks, it could get therapeutic. Gene might start thinking before he speaks, for example.

Gene Simmons needs to get over himself. Irrelevant to my point, but true.

Facebook is supposed to be like a MySpace for grownups, but its not. It's just another social site where people list their interests, activities and put pictures of themselves from 1998 when they were much thinner. If you're a young socialite, this sort of thing can hold your interest and give you a chance to network. If you're an old married person, it's just another opportunity for you to realize just how boring the rest of the world might find you.

I propose a social site for older married people who couldn't give a shit about amassing 800 friends or whether or not their site is able to crash every browser that tries to open it with all of the silly-assed javascripts and streaming videos. Instead of interests and activity calendars, all it would have is a picture of your face, what you have your TiVo Season Pass set for, what you're having for dinner and which part of your body hurts the most.

To the average college student, that would be tremendously boring. To me, that's ideal. I'd say, "Hey, this Dave guy has a the entire 2nd season of Who Wants to Be a Superhero recorded and they're having Five-Cheese DiGiorno's tonight. Maybe I ought to send him an email asking if we can swing by for a few." And Dave would get my request, see that I'm recording Flight of the Conchords and having steak on the grill Tuesday, and ask if they can come by then. Maybe he'll know a good doctor that I can get to look at my bad knees too. Who doesn't win with that setup?

I'll bet the guy that invented argyle is really proud of himself. He sits on his giant pile of cash and thinks, "It was just a bunch of diamonds woven together! I'm stealing money, baby!" He and the guy who invented the Olympic logo might be friends on MySpace.

"Hobbies: reading, watching movies, putting simple shapes together into patterns and profiting from it, biking"

"Heroes: the guy that designed the fallout shelter logo and Dr. Rubik"

I briefly stopped typing to go find that URL. I guess I broke the rules and my connection to the world around me is now forfeit. Maybe I'll just go camping instead. But for some reason, I didn't want to assume that the fallout shelter logo is something everyone has seen before. What if you live on a farm, y'know? Are there fallout barns somewhere? And assuming would just be rude. Sort of like assuming everyone has seen Contact.

I've been writing for a few minutes now, so I'm pretty sure my word count is well above the threshold I normally limit myself to. Do other bloggers do this? I need to be in some blogger support group for people that freak out over stuff like this. "I like to sometimes write entire paragraphs and make sure I don't start any words with vowels just to see if I can. Also, my skin crawls when I think about meta-tagging. Does anyone feel like giving out a hug right now?"

So, when exactly did we agree to stop using the word "jive?" I still do it from time to time, and it seems I'm the only one. And if we've moved away from the word entirely, I'll accept it, but I'm going to need to know what the official replacement word is. I think "wack" tried to have a bit of a renaissance about 15 years ago, but what are we using today? Please submit your suggestions along with a self-addressed stamped envelope so I can send you your official thanks.

Am I the only person that thinks "ColdStone Creamery" sounds like something a drunk girl might experience at the end of a really sketchy and inappropriate frat party? Whenever I type it into Google, I'm always afraid I need to have the Moderate SafeSearch feaure on. "Dear god... how can those guys sleep at night!? She's going to wish her friends didn't ditch her when she wakes up tomorrow."

I don't claim to know everything, but here's something I do know. If I come across a band, and their band name is a single violent word like "Macabre," or "FingerKill," then I'm not going to like anything that band ever does.

In fact, the idea of ever hearing, "Daddy, I want you to meet my new boyfriend, Remus. He's one of the eight guitar players in FingerKill," is enough to make me want to start sharpening my skills with the trident right now.

Furniture made out of wood is cool because people rarely think of wood as dead trees. If you were sitting on a chair made out of compressed kitten corpses, you might not be as comfortable. And if I wasn't just writing everything I thought of, there's no way I'd have let that out onto the internet. I'd have stuffed that into the "no publish" file along with "I wonder if compulsive gamblers have higher rates of herpes" and "Asians have great calves." Just not the kinds of things one talks about, really.

Wow. This is really going well. Herpes? Racism? What next? My PIN?

Maybe I ought to stop here.