When I awoke 2 hours later, the sight was still fresh in my mind.  What would possess this kid to fuck himself up so unfashionably and yet, still be seen at a lame coffee house like Starbucks.  I mean, if he really did carry the “fuck you” attitude he seems to represent to the world, I would think he’d be at some indie coffee house or not at one at all.

Did he dress like that to convey an attitude?  Or was he just screaming for attention; to be not just another nameless face in Santa Generica of Southern California?  It really boils down to those two facts.  I mean who REALLY feels comfortable in a 2 foot high spiked mohawk?  There is one other remote possibility and that was he was in some sort of theatrical performance and he was in costume, but I highly doubt it.

I then started to wonder about my own question, and subsequent answer.  And I think I found it in looking at my own history.

In high school, I had jock itch.  So, I turned to sweatpants.  It wore them EVERY day and had them in EVERY color because quite simply, they didn’t press on m groin and cause a grotesque amount of itching.  I never told anyone that because it was embarrassing.  But the sweats took an already out of step kid and made him that much more out of step.  It was my equivalent of a spiked mohawk.  The sweats came in wild colors of magenta, neon blue and on days of malaise, flourescent 80s green.  Saying I cast myself out of social centers was an understatement.

Then came the true height of the 80s.  I remember one summer, I vowed to get in step with the fashions; to not be the outcast I was setting myself up to be.  I went to Willowbrook Mall in Wayne, NJ and invested a heap of Roy Rogers Fast Food and Family Restaurant wages into truly horrific fashion choices.  I became a parody of the 80s, not an icon of it.  Donned in parachute pants, a shirt like Michael Jackson’s in his “Thirller” video and a belt that wrapped twice around me with “stylish” holes all along its 3 foot length, I entered 11th grade feeling like I was going to be the ultimate fashion plait.  It lasted all of about 3 days as I remember the parachute pants were making my nuts a scratching post as the heat from the vinyl would make a tropical depression down in my nether region transform into a category 5 hurricane.  So it was back to the sweats.

In college, I entered the 5th largest university as a nameless face, so I turned to a multi colored plaid golf hat which I wore everywhere.  I probably looked like a first rate tool trying to be someone amongst the masses.

By the time my 3rd year of college came, I had lost my identity entirely and decided to have a makeover from a friend who claimed he was a great surfer.  I should have known better when I realized he was from Wisconsin, but I threw better judgement to the wind and donned Vision sneakers, surfer Ts and board shorts and a visor.  A VISOR!!!!  What the fuck was I thinking?  I CAN’T EVEN SWIM!  And I was dressing like a surfer?  I wouldn’t be caught dead in a pool, let alone in a place with waves!  That lasted about 5 months before I realized that my nuts didn’t itch as much as they once did and so I was able to start wearing “normal” clothes.

So I guess what it all boiled down to was a lack of identity, lack of confidence in who I was since I had no idea who I was and a desire to cause attention to myself in order to give meaning to a pretty meaningless existence.  I purposely outcast myself in a weird self fulfilling prophecy that I would always be on the outside looking in and made myself ostracized to the masses.

Now, I am 42.  I can honestly say that that phase has passed.  The fashion choices I make now are just plain BAD.  Too baggy of pants, old men shirts and lames shoes.  But the worst part is, my ignorance stems from the fact that I just don’t know what looks good or modern.  So, with Hilda’s help, she discarded literally 85% of my wardrobe (her “OUT” she would shout as I showed her each article of clothing still rings in my head) and today, I am off to replenish some of the flotsam and jetsam of my bad fashion sense.  Let’s hope she knows what she’s doing.

We all have issues.  Some of those issues turn into volumes in and of themselves.  And then once in awhile, there is a VERY minor issue that is more like a trial subscription to a different magazine, but it comes and goes without much thought.

I have issues.  You have issues.  We all have issues.  The question is, can issues be worked through or just plain managed?  My feeling is there is no all or nothing.  Some issues CAN be worked out.  Others can’t.  Psychology has always fascinated me.  There can never be a one size fits all solution to the same problem.  For instance, if someone can’t achieve sexual intimacy because of a guilt feeling toward sex, some people can work through their history on where the train derailed, others learn to live with it and grapple with it when it arises.

Part of people’s problems as a whole is not understanding what their own issues are.  This is where “self awareness” comes in.  By self awareness, I mean being able to really know yourself thoroughly; to understand your shortcomings and strengths and more importantly, to have them not come charging into your everyday life creating problems in your relationships.  Allow me to provide a textbook example of the psychology of an issue.

All seemed well between Hilda and I.  I had lunch with her one Saturday.  She said she was planning to meet me at a pub after work.  Quitting time came and she called from her car saying she was asked to check out her nephew’s rash so she will meet me for dinner afterward even though she really didn’t want to go to her family’s pad.  She got there and they had dinner ready, so she said she’d meet me for dessert.  Plates were washed and she was too tired and was opting out.
THE PSYCHOLOGY: I interpret that as she would rather do something she did not want to do rather than see me.  Then it lead to me thinking she was just not that into me anymore.  Which led to the realization that I would never hear from her again.  In this case, I did not transfer my psychology to being angry at her which I think most people would do.  I transferred the anger to myself tearing myself down.  I think much of domestic abuse, verbal abuse, psychological abuse of a partner comes from a person not recognizing their own dysfunction and transferring it to their counterpart.  Self awareness is in very short supply.

So, how did I ever get from  Point A to Point Z and fill in these huge holes in my head?  It comes from THE ISSUE.

THE ISSUE: This stems from low self esteem.  In my head is the voice that tells me that I am not worthy of someone’s love, to ever be a priority in someone else’s life and to always be the guy who people love to be around, but not WITH.  So, where does THAT thought come from?  My low self image is a part of my miswiring.  And I am indeed miswired.

THE HISTORY: My low self image comes from early childhood.  Between being the smallest kid in the class, even smaller than most of the girls, to never being able to compete athletically, to being picked last for every team, to never being chosen to be someone’s square dance partner, to batting .000 for three years of little league , to being used as a battering ram by my dad, to being made to ALWAYS feel out of step with humanity, it is little surprise why I developed a low self esteem.  I never felt worthy of being someone’s boyfriend and rejection after rejection were experienced when I would FINALLY venture forward and go out on a limb and ask a woman out.  So everything piled up into an issue, if not even a volume or two of baggage.

But now, it is too late to actually rewire myself.  The electric was laid over the course of 42 years and quite frankly, I can’t restrip from scratch everything that has happened.  So, I have learned to insulate the bad wiring.  I am in a constant state of psychology always battling the voices in my head that is the issue.  I have to recognize that it is the ISSUE that is speaking and not reality.  People that don’t have this issue usually cannot understand why I just don’t pull up the bootstraps and quit my whining.  They usually look at things like this as an excuse.  Well, I am happy for them that they are so stable and functional.  But these are the people that usually have more issues than me and don’t recognize it only to have it manifest in their own personal life, most probably in the form of unhappiness.  As I wrote prior, everyone has issues, including people who don’t think they have issues.

The reality of what happened with Gilda is just what happened in reality.  She went to see her nephew, she had dinner, was too tired to meet for dessert.  It had absolutely nothing to do with not being into me, not putting me a priority or anything else deeper than that.  And after discussing my issue with her, she is more aware of what my problems are and knows now what I deal with.   I am glad she is understanding and not one of those women who just don’t want to deal with their counterparts issue and move onto the next broken and less self aware person.

I’m tired of stupid people.  I’m tired of responding to stupid people, but still, I find I must.  I ran into someone today who still thinks 9-11 and Iraq were connected.  That same someone thinks Islamists are out to convert the world.  I can’t stand people who rave about the movie “Inception” when in all reality, that movie is garbage.  Yet they just tend to gloss over it, letting the waves of ignorance wash over them without the slightest of higher thought.

Stupid people are everywhere.  Now, I am not calling myself an elitist.  I think people are stupid for a number of reasons.  Let’s analyze, shall we?

1.  Laziness:  It takes just too damn much work to educate yourself even though with today’s tech, education is a few clicks away.  For instance, someone sent me a bunch of drivvel after Katrina’s debacle in the form of an article that stated that after a 1929 Category 5 storm destroyed them, they picked themselves up by the bootstraps and rebuilt without government help.  And with this tidbit of pseudo information, he went on to ramble on how he is sick of people asking for handouts.  A few clicks later, I was able to forward to him the record of all hurricanes documented for 1929 and none hit New Orleans.   So here was a guy absolutely nullified by a bit of faked information which he was too lazy to research on his own to see if it was true.  These are the same people who want government to determine what their child should watch, read, and learn in school.

2.  Denial:  Because of deep seeded beliefs and ideologies, they are absolutely cut off from ANY new information contrary to what they believe getting through their cranium.  Godforbid if they opened their minds and actually processed a different point of view.  Because they have absolutely no humility that what they may know is wrong, they are in complete denial of what may actually be real.

3.  Fear: I think many people are actually AFRAID of thinking for themselves because then they realize that maybe they are in the situation they are in today because they have a lifetime of stupidity.  And then they can’t blame OTHER people anymore for their own misery or status in society (or lack thereof).  These are the same people that cry about how cigarettes gave them cancer and they were manipulated by big tobacco.  If they actually overcame the fear that what they did they did to themselves, they would be that much more miserable.

4. Ignorance: You will find these people were the “C” and “D” students of society.  These were the kids of yesteryear that can barely comprehend the payout structure on a lottery let alone the complexities of the Iraq invasion and subsequent overthrow of the Baath party.  To them, the “Baath Party” will always be a poor man’s alcohol induced soiree with a tub substituting as a jacuzzi.  These people will never understand the dynamics between the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in Iraq.

5.  Hubris: These are the people who beat their chests and believe their god is better than your god, their country is better than our country and frankly, their beer is better than your beer.    Humility is nowhere to be found in their dictionaries.  They believe we should just nuke em all and let God sort em out.  Their motto is “Fuck em all” even though they are the ones who will ultimately be fucked.

These are just a few reasons off the top of my head that they are blissfully ignorant and choose to stay that way.  I get razzed on how my attempts to educate are actually interpreted as snobbery, but to be honest, it is just more frustration than it is elitism.  I am far from an intellectual giant; I have just chosen to consume information wiser than most people.  I can only request that of you too.

A) Ask questions even if it coincides with your own philosophies.

B) Realize that EVERYONE has an agenda.

C) Stupidity is a disease which must be cured one mind at a time.

D) And it is stupid to think you can cure everyone.  But to give up trying is well, just stupid.

A Venti black iced tea with one Sweet and Low.

Let’s go through the ingredients and materials needed for such a mind scrambling conundrum.  First, you have the plastic cup.  Second, the ice.  Third, the actual pre made iced tea and finally, the most cryptic part of this, the packet of Sweet and Low.

For all you math majors out there, that’s four parts making up the whole.  And rest assured, up to 75% of that concoction will be made wrong 85% of the time.

25% THE CUP:  Now this is the LEAST amount of error I have encountered.  They usually just grab the right sized cup and write the contents on the side of it.  So I have full assurance that if I were to ever order JUST the cup, I would be certain that my order would be filled correctly 100% of the time.  But unfortunately, an empty cup does not a good beverage make.  And so comes the mind blowing variables.

25% THE ICE:  Ranking close to the odds of THE CUP, THE ICE is usually filled correctly.  Sometimes, they skimp on the ice and it is melted before it even reaches the pick up counter.  But blame that on the off chance the tea was just brewed and is still hot or just an incorrectly filled cup with ice.  But either way, it’s a low percentile of error.

25% THE TEA: Yes, this accounts for 50% of the errors.  I get passion.  I get green.  I get half lemonade-half black.  And the combinations of black, green, passion and lemonade in every imaginable mixture.  I think I even once got ALL of them in one cup.  I felt like a lottery winner that day!

25% THE SWEET AND LOW: Now THIS is where it ALL falls apart.  And for the record, I used to put the packet in myself, but a barrista with a sweet smile and the ability to forever change the wiring inside my skull convinced me to just mention the Sweet and Low when ordering and they will add it.  So I did and things went smoothly for a little while.

I am one of the few people who can taste the difference between Equal, Splenda and Sweet and Low.  I know my artificial sweeteners like nobody’s business.  Equal is too mild.  Splenda tastes like, well, the best comparison is sweet metal.  But Sweet and Low actual tastes sweet without an aftertaste or being artificial.

Now for all of you who are about to rail on me screaming that Sweet and Low has been known to cause cancer in lab rats and it says so on the packet, well, wake up!  That was eliminated long ago because they found that the levels of saccharin needed to give those rodents cancer was the equivalent of feeding humans a gallon of it per day, mixed with an IV drip of it every other hour followed by a saccharin enema.  In other words, 1 packet of Sweet and Low each day has about as much cancer causing crap in it as say, bottled water.

The barristas give me Equal.  They give me Splenda.  They give me TWO Sweet and Lows.  They give me a Sweet and Low with their classic stomach churning sweetener.  It’s when they do that that I almost hurl on the spot as it’s like drinking Log Cabin syrup straight out of the bottle.  One historically horrific time, they actually made my drink wrong THREE TIMES IN A ROW!!  THE SAME GUY!  I mean that either takes a whole lot of dope smoking or just a desire to fuck with the customers.

So now, mix it all together and you see why the variables for such a simple drink can absolutely blow the minds of people like myself. 50% of the drink has about 123 combinations thereof and so I roll the dice every time I order my Venti black iced tea with one Sweet and Low.  I guess the easy answer is to just step up to a REAL drink with 12 adjectives like most of the patrons do, but that would be my interpretation of selling out and I am not a sellout.  Selling out will be documented by me either sitting at Bux writing a screenplay, highlighting passages in a Bible or talking loudly on my cell phone hoping everyone in earshot realizes I am doing business with muckety mucks who are probably getting their orders wrong at the other Starbucks across the street.  But before that will ever happen, I will be ordering a grande half-caf mocha frappucino with extra caramel and extra whip with a spleen.  And then, I will expect for you to shoot me on sight.

The million dollar question is, “Are some people BORN lucky?”  I am a firm believer that they are.  I am also a firm believer that I am NOT one of them.  Everytime my friend Susan goes to Lemoore Casino, she wins hundreds to thousands of dollars on the same keno machine.  My friend Jim gets good cards at poker.  I walk by the slots in Vegas hotels and hear nothing but bells and whistles and cheers from the other patrons.  But me?  I am always stuck in the mud when it comes to Lady Luck.  The bitch never smiles on me when it comes to games of chance.

Now let’s get the disclaimer out of the way.  Yeah yeah, some people are born with bad genes and I have been lucky enough to only have to endure 3 wisdom teeth extracted, a broken finger and two stitches in my skull from a rock fight.  But that’s not really luck.  That’s genetics and some people have quality ones and some others don’t.  It is an interesting fact that my mother’s maiden name was “Eugenides” which translates from Greek into English as “good genes”.  So I do have that going for me.  But again, that’s not really luck per se.  I am talking about games of chance.

It’s always been like this.  You know those seven tiles you get to pick at the start of Scrabble?  K, X, P, B, S, S, and Blank.  Backgammon?  1-2, 5-1 and 6-3 are my opening rolls du jour.  Scratch off lottery tickets?  All I get are the silver filings on my clothes for the next 6 hours.  Raffles?  Hardly.  Chinese auctions? Forget it.  Coin flips?  Always the other side.  Rock, Paper Scissors?  I’m internally bleeding within minutes.  Slot machines? Spaces across the board.  Roulette? The ball hops off the wheel.  Craps?  The dice roll off the table.  Carnie games?  Fat chance.  The list goes ever on.

I do remember one carnie I went to as a kid, I think it was the St. Phillips Bazaar and I swore I would FORCE myself to have luck.  I invested something like $23 into one of those fixed carnie games and FINALLY got my $2 glass mirror with The Who etched into it that I had been trying so desperately for.  Now, for starters, why I even WANTED The Who is beyond me as I had no clue who they even were.  But a win is a win and I walked away high as a kite.  But as luck would have it, I tripped and it smashed a mere 12 minutes later assuring me of another 7 years of downright hellaciously bad luck.

There was one time in which I blew my proverbial luckload .  I actually once won a 15 inch black and white TV.  You can see how long ago it was because they were actually MAKING black and white TVs.  I mean, think about that one.  There will be a day sometime soon when kids will be like, “They consciously CHOSE to make a TV in black and white when there was color available?”  But the win was a win nonetheless and I remember going absolutely jizz crazy thinking I had just won a million dollar lottery.  I was whooping and hallowing and making a general fool of myself, but hey, I was only 11, so that gave me the green light to go batshit.

And there was one time that I actually DID break the cosmic toilet flush of luck by being at a poker table where two other people won a jackpot in which the entire table shared some of the prize.  Pull?  $1200.

But barring those two fleeting moments, luck has always been something this side of a unicorn and leprechaun; myths that you hear other people have witnessed like sightings of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster or UFOs.  Luck just does not reside anywhere close to Paul Peter Argyropoulos.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t keep trying.  I do continue to play the lottery hoping against hope that I have been building up my lifetime of lucklessness for a HUGE orgasm of a win.  But yesterday, I threw my hat into a very big contest.  Apparently, this swank museum in Chicago is awarding someone 10K and a stay in their museum for 30 days.  I guess that is not a contest of sorts as it seems more like employment.  But I made my video, filled out my application, took my photo and am throwing my chances against the wall that I will get picked for the challenge.  Frankly, I think it’d be a great opportunity.  The 10K is just icing on the cake, but it is a kind of contest that I really wanted to roll the dice with.  So with that said, I ask you to all do me a favor….

…wish me luck!

She rambles.  I ramble.  So what’s the difference?  I think it’s the delivery.  She has these esoteric, lofty comparisons of life like how you should take an avalanche and make snow cones which is just another tired take on the lemons-to-lemonade comparison.  It is very educational insofar as I do not want to be a blowhard longwinded armchair philosopher.  NOT that I am calling her a longwinded armchair philosopher, mind you.  It’s just that her blog is a little, well, dry.

For instance, she talks about how music can inspire your soul and get you thinking about life and blah blah blah.  Me?  Fuck that.  I am ALL about the hook.  If the song has a hook, then I am all over it.  She talks about the deep possible stories between a homeless man talking to a business yuppie on a street corner that she witnessed.  In my mind, I have twisted it into some type of solicitation for prostitution from Mr. Wall Street looking for some low budget loving.  She has these gloriously sweeping analogies on how some things in life are simple like hummingbirds floating between flowers.  Me?  I hire the Mexican to come with a weedwhacker to mow down the fucking garden and then take pot shots with his b-b gun at the hummingbird.  In other words, I want my blog to be colorful because I think colorfully.  Well, make that OFF color.

The Art of Rambling is indeed an art.  It’s taking the mundane and making it germane without you realizing it.  Once you start making all these fantastic Dali Lama-esque allegories and life lessons, you lose the audience.  To keep the masses entertained, you need to throw some spices into the stew.

For example, let’s go back to her music musings.  She expounded upon the relevance of music and lyrics and so forth.  Not me.  To me, music is 90% escape, 5% meaning and 5% this crap they have filtering through the sound system at Starbucks.  I mean really guys, REGGAE?  More like REALLY gay.  I mean JESUS… we are in FUCKING VAN NUYS, CALIFORNIA!!!  Like do I see ANY Carribbean themed ANYTHING in this place?  There isn’t even a black person IN here!  Godforbid if they piped in some 80s tunes.  Instead, it is the 92 minute version of “I Shot The Sheriff”.

I digress.  Music to me is something to sing along to and for that reason, it needs a hook.  For those who are oblivious to “the hook”, it is that part of the song which you walk away to still echoing in your head that sticks like bubble gum to the bottom of a shoe.

It includes guilty pleasures, rock mantras, big hair bands, one hit wonders, obscure songs from Broadway plays…ANYTHING goes.  I’ve got a tune from Schoolhouse Rock, “Man of La Mancha” and the opening theme from “The Adventures of Pete and Pete” all in the same playlist.   If you could psychoanalyze someone based upon their iPod contents, I would be committed on the spot!  I’d be thrown into the deepest padded room and be forced to forever listen to the 92 minute version of “I Shot The Sheriff” until I was begging for dreds and a bale of marijuana.  I have a slew of one hitters and no namers that have some of the best hooks ever known to hit a recording studio.  Substance?  So overrated.  Give me a dose of Britney Spears’ “Circus” any day over the 23 minute Pink Floyd masterpiece “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”.  If it’s bubble gum, I’m blowing bubbles.  But any sign of actual substance, you can just keep it to yourself.  I guess what I miss most of all are the days when fun did not come loaded with judgements and deep meanings (aka the 80s).  Just like this blog, empty calories are sometimes just the thing you need.  So, on behalf of all those superficial people out there, for this installment, I hope you snacked well.

Now, with that said, enemies are made at many different turns.  Some just happen because you may just LOOK like someone the other person didn’t like in their past.  Some happen by accident through some bit of poor judgement on your part that sticks for the duration of life.  Some are by the mere fact that you are already behind the 8-ball contending against a lifetime of stereotypes and misguided lessons passed on by the people in another person’s life.  But some enemies are made because of the honesty that I wrote about a few sentences up is not appreciated by the person receiving it.

Today, I very well may make an enemy with someone I have no intention of making an enemy with.  But here is the rub of it.  If you are throwing out a product open for public critique, you need to rise above the personal sting of the critique and empirically process it without equating that to a personal attack.  In layman’s terms, get over yourself and ask if what I am spitting has some weight to it.

I am not sure how I even navigated to the blog of a co worker, Stacy Halbach (her married name escapes me), but I stumbled upon her musings, much like the ones I do here.  I read about 12 entries on how she is pedaling to publishers her manuscript of a book she wrote  and her receiving rejections.  One of her posts involved a comparison to life with speed bumps and how to approach both in terms of speed; slow, medium or get some air Mach 3.  She told of a situation between her and another woman at the gas pump which she inadvertently made an enemy of.

Her three choices were: ignore her (go slow), acquiesce and apologize (medium) or fight (Mach 3).  She felt she took the middle road and she acquiesced and apologized.

Now immediately, you see the problem.  Her VIEW of what the middle road is was not even close to what a middle road is.  Ignoring her should not have been even a choice as that is not going forth with speed, it is coming to a stop and avoiding the speed bump entirely.  Yeah yeah, I know, ignoring her IS actually a choice, but it is a real lame one.  Her assessment of choices was wrong to begin with.

But none of the details of this situation is the point of my entry today.  The point is, I have no idea how she will receive my critique.  I told her that her solution was boring, and it WAS boring.  She talked about her zen approach to this potential conflict.  Rarely does zen make for a good story and knowing that makes all the difference in storytelling ability.

I have always been a good storyteller.  A large part of me LOVES and THRIVES on conflict.  Call it being Greek, blame it on me being from Jersey, attribute it to Short Man’s Syndrome, whatever the fuck it is, I have a HELL of a lot of good stories, and many times they involve conflict.  This gas station powderkeg could have exploded into a plethora of stories, but it fizzled into a very unremarkable display of nothingness.  I suggested next time, fight like your life depended upon it.

I do like to critique and I think this has made enemies in my lifepath.  I remember I critiqued a screenplay from a coworker of mine.  I pored over the thing THREE TIMES and made three separate sets of notes.  I think the notes were longer than the screenplay.  Our relationship was never the same after that.  I made an enemy by being honest.

I want to be honest with Stacy.  I love her to death.  She throws AWESOME parties which I still want to get invited to.  But I really want her to improve her writing.  And I wonder if she gets an honest critique of it.  I once took a writing class and the most important info I gleaned from the $620 pricetag of the class was to NEVER give the piece of writing you want critiqued to someone you know because you will never get an honest criticism.  I think it is because of that very notion that I am honest and  is usually the proverbial deal breaker in my relationships.

I have to ask Stacy, does she REALLY love to write?  I actually do.  I have been keeping a daily journal for now something like 17 years.  I look forward to writing in it and it takes precedence over most everything.  It’s a passion.  I have been writing poetry since I was seven.  I lived on word searches, cryptoquotes, Scrabble and Boogle as a child.  I would win contests of who could make the most words out of a single word.  Graffiti had its place at one time in my life.  But the irony is, I hate reading an that includes my own swill.  Even these blogs I pore over so that every word is spelled correctly, punctuation in its proper places.  I see misspellings on her page and can only wonder if these are in her own manuscripts.  Poor grammar and misspellings are those speed bumps when it comes to reading.  You want the road to be smooth, and the reader to not bounce around no matter how small those bumps may be.

Anyway, I inadvertently accidentally may have turned other people onto my blog because I had to give my blog address as a verification for posting a comment.  And lo and behold, it now has a link to here.  I was happy with 5 fans, but I may be getting more traffic than I wished to at this point.

But I must say, I do applaud Stacy and anyone who throws their stuff out there for rejection.  I just hope she can rise above my pseudo venom and take what I spit out for what it is, just a critique.

I was en route to the court when I noticed puddles on the ground getting more extensive as I drove.  By the time I got to the halfway point, I received a call saying the lessons were cancelled.   And so I decided to have my morning workout at Starbucks.  Yeah, I know, I am not burning as many calories as an hour and a half of tennis, but I could suck down some iced tea which would eventually lead to a flushing of my bladder which is in itself healthy in a different way.

Well, as I sucked down my Venti black tea with 1 Sweet and Low, sure enough, the urge to purge came on.  I made my way to the urnial.  All went swimmingly well.  No stray splashing, steady stream, good color.  Even the anticipated shiver came at the right spot.  Tap tap tap; back to the table.

But then I got to wondering… why the hell do I shiver at the end of my evacuation?  Now although this thought will probably turn off my friend Christine who reads this, it very well may intrigue my friend Donnna who is in the medical field.  I got to wondering, WTF is up with the shiver?  It’s always been there but I never really thought about it until this morning.

I started my research online.  Apparently, there has been none done.  It just isn’t worthy enough to research it.  Wouldn’t it be a hoot if the pee shiverers of the world had some unique antibody that cures cancer or reverses aging?  What, our disability is not good enough for the medical community?  I bet the people who don’t feel the need to research this are not shiverers.

I started to think about the social implications of the pee shiver.  I mean us guys stand at the urinal and we tend to not consciously pay attention to the dude alongside us.  But the truth is, we actually are quite aware of what is going on inside the crapper.  There is an unwritten, unsaid etiquette that when you enter a commode, you should leave a urinal open between you and the next person whenever you can.  And if perchance there is that God awful stainless steel trough where you just hang out like horses in a summer scorcher, you give ample distance accompanied with looking up and away so as to not catch the other guy’s junk in your peripheral vision.  And of course, when sitting on the crapper itself, you wait until there is someone utilizing a hand dryer or there is a conversation going or there is no one else in the water closet to let out that blast of methane and last night’s dinner that has been storing up for the past 8 hours that would scare most little kids and pets alike.  And let’s not forget, we opt to maintain radio silence during the deed so as to not break the moment and hex the task at hand making it an aborted moment having you to suffer another 1/2 hour for you to make another trip back to the men’s room.

But the shiver is something very physical that I wonder, are the other dudes around me noticing my convulsion?  Did they blink and miss it?  Do they share in my affliction and can relate?  Is there group therapy for pee shiverers like myself?  And do non pee shiverers just think that the shiver they just witnessed was just something this side of an orgasm, and can only WISH they had something that gloriously pleasurable as a shiver, when in reality it is not even close to either of those two adjectives.

My research revealed nothing.  So I can only give my own theories, the first scientific, the second, science ficition.

1) The nitrogen found in urine reverses in the urethra, reverse flows back up to the bladder releasing inside it causing a shiver.  My evidence that this is happening?  Absolutely none other than I can spell the word “nitrogen” correctly.

2) The aliens that keep stealing my shit have implanted a non detectable microdot in my bladder wall and I am now part of some twisted interplanetary subscription web service where members get to send a shiver into any implantee of their choice.  If that is the case, then where do I sign up because I think it would be a blast to make the dude in the next urinal have a shake because well, there was an empty urinal between us available when he came in and he broke men’s room etiquette!  A good shiver or two could perhaps teach him a lesson!

Yes, that can be the only verdict for my reckless abandon of 1st degree murder.  You could even call me a serial murderer as I have been killing for over 35 years.  And although my closest friends and relatives kind of had this idea that I could be a serial murderer, they really didn’t give it all that much thought.

My prey cannot really be quantified per se.  I mean I am not like the Green River Killer or the BTK serial murderer.  And I have no real stories like Gacy or Dahmer who end up in dark anthologies of mass murderers.  My victim is not a tally that can be easily measured.  What I am guilty of killing is time.  And boy have I murdered a lot of it.

The genesis of me becoming the serial killer that types before you today lies in childhood.  I was one of those kids who chose to play by himself rather than reach out to neighborhood kids.  They always tended to play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers.  I was more high brow opting for my own adventures inside my head moreso because no one wanted to join me in a game of Congressional Lobbyist and Senator, a VERY riveting game if you gave it half a chance.  Sure, not a whole lot of physical contact, but the paper cuts could be VERY brutal if you were not careful.

I created games on my own.  I would routinely play chinese checkers and chess by myself.  I even enjoyed playing Monopoly by myself, trying hard to outwit me but somehow always falling short and losing the game nonetheless.    And me being a sore loser would end up with something being destroyed by my wrath.  Now don’t go throwing in my face how by logic, I also WON the game because somehow that winner was not me, even though it WAS me.  Yes, I was an odd kid with an even odder outlook on life.

But soon, I found that I was choosing more to entertain myself because I pretty much had more fun with myself than with people.  This didn’t mean I was a hermit.  It just meant I was very adept at passing time with myself as opposed with other people.

My Atari 2600, my Atari 800XL were all instrumental in me becoming the future killer.  The arcades also contributed.  How many Saturdays was I waiting outside Willowbrook Mall’s famous Fun N Games arcade waiting for the doors to get unlocked?  And how many late nights was I up posting messages on the BBS systems in the North Jersey area.  (For those of you who do not know, BBS systems were mini internets that a person set up inside their own home which could only have one person logged onto it at any one time.  And they had threads which you could leave messages on and some really crude online games all without graphics).

I started to really kill time as I started to acquire hobbies.  I had this one REALLY bizarre hobby as a child which involved me keeping a journal of every cigarette ever made with an account of its tar and nicotine count.  I had it sectioned off into 100s, lights, ultralights, hard pack, soft pack, menthol.  It was just downright weird.

Then I started keeping lists of all the Tom and Jerry episodes ever made.  And then I started keeping a journal of every license plate.  It was borderline obsessive compulsive behavior rather than hobby.

Next came baseball card collecting and chasing down those sets.  Wacky Packages followed suit and then came Alarm record collecting.  Each one had the common denominator that they were all solo ventures not needing a counterpart to partake in the sheer orgasm of jotting down a Kansas license plate or finding out the nicotine count of a Chesterfield.

The Alarm was a Welsh band in the vein of U2 who never really caught on like them, but still had talent nonetheless.  I was for about 3 years actively chasing down, documenting, researching memorabilia from them.  That killed a LOT of time.  I guess it was during college that I really honed into the idea that I was not just passing time anymore, I was actually killing it.  I found I opted more to be with myself than mingle with other college folk.

I took a lot of my free time when I got a job at the PBS affiliate in Phoenix to invest time into learning the equipment; editing, switcher, camera, and the like.  That killed PLENTY of Saturday nights.  When most normal people were busy getting laid, I was finding the absolute thrill of regenerating vertical interval timecode on beta tape and could not understand for the life of me why ANYONE would choose to pursue sex over that.

By the time I got to Bakersfield, my skill at massacring time was legendary.  I had rollerblading, Java Jazz, journal writing at length, writing books about Wacky Packages, the gym; the list was long.  And when i got to Los Angeles, I added poker playing, metal detecting, road tripping to Laguna Beach and now, online blogging to the weapons of choice.  All the while, time keeps becoming collateral damage.

Well, today, I decided to kill some time yet again.  I actually logged onto CNN.com to watch at length the work they are doing on the famous Deep Horizon Oil Spill vent.  I was actually riveted as I watched the underwater subs unscrewing bolts, trying to loosen pieces of the topcap and actually cheering when they finally were able to pry loose a piece from the cap.  I would have continued killing time had I not actually had REAL plans with a REAL person.

I had lunch with Hilda and it was over a Kobe burger at Ruby’s that I realized that I had not been passing time all these years, I had actually been murdering it.  Should I be held up to account for my sins?  Perhaps.  But to be honest, I don’t feel all that bad about it.  Like a psychopath, I have no remorse for my murders because ultimately, I am in a good place.  And I don’t encourage people to follow my path.  But I do say, when time does slow down for others to where they have a crash course with what they call “boredom”, I find the concept absolutely alien since I am an expert on never being bored.  Somehow, I think I have obtained the skills from my kills to never have to worry about ever being bored.  And for that I am grateful even if it has come at the expense of lost time.

Now please excuse me.  I have some more CNN live oil well capping to watch.

I was living in this patch of desert called Bakersfield, California and I was convinced by Laura, a friend of my friend Donna, to join her on her trip to Greece.  I had not been there in over a decade so I figured why not.  But, I was sort of seeing this woman in town and I really didn’t want to leave her behind for fear she may get back together with her fiance.  Now, don’t even remotely try to wrap your head around that for fear that it might just explode.  That’s not the backstory at hand here.  What is important about it is that she said, “Throw caution to the wind on your trip.”

Well, the trip started out pretty miserable for me.  I found that I really did not want to strike out from Laura or her stepbrother Dean’s side for fear of, well, who knows exactly why.  But I was either glomming onto them or just shuttering myself up in my pension’s room.

Our first island stop was Mykonos.  Laura and Dean did nothing except party beyond hard and crash during the day.  By the third day, I realized I was so out of my element on Mykonos that I truly felt like a stranger in a strange land.

One morning when Laura and Dean were absolutely cashed out, I woke up and decided to venture out for a day trip to the uninhabited island of Delos, rich with ruins and rubble.  It was a short 45 minute boat ride from Mykonos so I could be there and back before nightfall.

I got to the rock and ascended the tallest hill.  From up above, I could see the world below me.  Off in the distance was Paros and Mykonos and Naxos.  I turned in 360 degrees to see the blue waters below me.  And the wind was kicking something fierce.  I felt more alive than I had ever been.  I was alone atop the hill when Veronica’s words hit me: throw caution to the wind.

With that, I stripped down and sunbathed for about 3 hours in the wind and glorious warmth.  I felt refreshed and clear of mind, like I realized I was my own person and didn’t have to rely on Laura and Dean for my trip itinerary.  Right then and there, I realized I could shape and form my own experiences.  It truly WAS  independence day for me.

Things changed entirely when I got back to Hotel Delos.  I told Laura and Dean I was going solo for a bit.  From there, I experienced Paros, Antiparos and Folegandros.  I got myself into some misadventures.  I experienced things I never would have and learned that there are some very definite plusses to travelling solo.  It was because of Delos I was able to find autonomy and move forward not only with my trip, but my lifepath.

The ironic thing is that toward the latter end of the trip, it was me who was figuring out our itinerary.  I encouraged the two to go to Rhodes which turned out to be both their high points.  I found our swank pad Kolitsani View based on my sister’s recommendation.  I spearheaded our jaunt to Crete and the Minoan Ruins.  Things turned around 180 degrees.

Since that day, I have now ventured to 36 different Greek islands and experienced more than I ever thought I would or could.  I am blessed for that July 4th.

So every Independence Day, I remember Delos and the gift it gave me.  That and a VERY bad burn on my bum.  Note to self… areas not usually exposed to sun, burn quick.