Waste of Time

Throughout our lives, most of us are faced with at least one decision that will forever completely change the course of our future. I was faced with one of those decisions today. I didn’t quite know how to approach it. The potential outcomes for each option were unclear. I had no prior experience in the situation to help guide me. All I could do was wing it and hope for the best.

It looks like I made the wrong decision, and my life will never be the same again. My life is pretty much going to suck from here on out. See, what happened was….



Excuse me, I have to take this call…




Hello*.





Yes, ma’am, it is.





I’m not dead, if that’s what you mean.





A survey? Sure, I have absolutely nothing better to do.





Why do you want to know that?





Oh. OK, continue.





Hillary.





Yes, I’m serious.





It’s about time we got a chick in the White House.





Yes, I understand she’s a horrible bitch, but she can’t be any worse than the people with penises have done running the country.





Yes, I believe having a penis has influenced them very much.





Well how would you know, do you have a penis?





Then you really don’t know what you are talking about, do you? Do not judge a man until you have walked a mile while dangling his penis.

Yes, I'm sure that's how the saying goes.

Of course, with one of those you can get as many penises as you want.

Nevermind.




Are there any other questions on this survey?





OK, shoot.





Yes. I pluck my arm hair out while I’m sitting on the toilet.





I never said it was a GOOD hobby.





The soothing sound of boiling water.





Ear cushions.





Scabs.





More scabs.





Potential scabs.





Yes, you can interpret that as open wounds. Even unharmed skin, depending how broad of the term “potential” you’d like to use.





Ah, that’s easy – Hillary, again.





I know she’s not a professional baseball team.





I can TOO answer Hillary.






It doesn’t matter. Are you really interested in finding out my thoughts on these questions or would you just like to answer the rest of the questions yourself? I’d be happy to hang up the phone and get back to my busy day of not being on the phone.





That’s fine. Go ahead.





Floyd Rose





I have a tie for that one. Can I give two answers?





The Angry Beavers and Petticoat Junction.





I use the trilogical method of a pop metal hit, then the power ballad followed by the power cover song.





I don’t know what you mean.





I have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.





No, it isn’t.





What?





Um…





Hey, could you please call me back tomorrow?





Yes. Around noon. And I may want to change some of my answers, so we’ll start from the top.





You, too. Thanks for calling.





Good-Bye, Grandma Kooschnik.




I'm back. Sorry about that. But you all know phone calls are very important. Now, where was I? I don’t remember. Oh, well. I hope I haven’t wasted your time.













*Note: I usually speak in brown when I'm on the phone.

Orange On The Head

Like me, you were probably confused by the title of this post when you first saw it. It’s like one of those movies where, for the first few scenes, you have no idea what is going on, and it all gets tied together in the end.

I was tied together in the end once. It was unpleasant, but I’m happy to have experienced it. Something to tell the grandkids about, know what I mean? It’s nothing a few dozen White Castle hamburgers and a case of Stroh’s can’t cure. But, if you are tied in the end too much you may die of copraemia, which is a condition where you are poisoned by your own excrement due to constipation. Although, to be fair to excrement, I guess it’s not considered excrement until it is expelled from your body. So, we’ll call it crement. We all know how nasty it is when a sewer backs up and floods the basement. Well, it’s not so pretty when it happens inside your body. A couple of mops and a bucket of pine cleaner won’t do you much good.

What’s worse is you’ll carry this stigma with you forever. You’ll be the laughing stock of the afterlife. Imagine gathering around the afterlife drinking hole, reminiscing with other dead things:

“Jim here died while saving forty helpless infants in a hospital fire. Marge over there was killed when she jumped on a grenade aimed at the pope. Harriet succumbed to a brain hemorrhage she developed after a woman in a fur coat beat her over the head with a fire extinguisher when she threw goat’s blood on the woman’s coat. So, what’s your story, pal?”

“Er, I, um, I ate a bit too much cheese one night.”

“A bit too much cheese?! Hell, a little cheese never hurt no one!”

“It does if you eat enough to tie your colon into a permanent knot.”

Then the laughter and the finger pointing begin. You look for a way to save face, but realize it is futile when you hear a voice in the ethereal crowd say, “We are going to ostracize you for eternity, Draino!” And they’ll do it, too. And why wouldn’t they?

Speaking of why, most of us have heard the urban legend where the philosophy professor whose final exam had a single question: Why? As legend has it, one clever student handed in the completed test with a simple, “Why not?” and xe received an A+. I have a few issues with that story.

First, who gives a crap about a philosophy class? People only take those classes to satisfy blow-off elective requirements. It’s not like philosophy is a real subject like kinesiology. Urban legends are too important to our society to be wasted on trivial subject matter. Second, that professor was either drunk and forgot to prepare a proper final or xe was being too profound for any of our own goods. It seems to me that a teacher should know the answer to the questions xe sticks on a test. I doubt that xe had a standard correct answer in mind when xe created the test. I demand more effort and competence from our purveyors of higher education. Third, “why not” is a stupid answer and incorrect. That student should have gotten an F and a demerit for contempt of education (which goes on xe’s permanent record, by the way). Ask any kid under the age of twelve and xe’ll tell you the answer is “because”, which is closer to the true answer, which is “Who gives a shit?”

If I was the teacher, and for some departmental reason I was forced to give that one word, one question test, the only person I would give an A to is the one who answered, “Who gives a shit? You suck for asking such a meaningless question and I want my damn tuition back if all you can teach me is to answer one damn question, you drunk, lazy, tenured whore of a professor.” Good answer. I like the way you think. Everybody else would get an F and a note saying, “Take a real class next time. You just wasted your time and get no damn credit for this course. The answer is ‘Who gives a shit?’ which is what you should have said to yourself when your saw this class in the schedule of courses.” My one regret in life is that I never became a philosophy professor.

By now the meaning of the title of this post should be clear to you. It has certainly cleared up for me. In fact, the whole world makes more sense to me now. I’m glad. And a little bound.

What In the World Is Going On?

What in the world is going on? Have you ever considered that question? I mean, really considered it? Most people ask it as a cliché when they are wondering why a given occurrence has happened in their window of perception. They hope for a specific answer pertaining to why there is house paint in the bread maker while soggy Alpha-Bits sludge down the wall spelling out the word “moribund” and there is a slight persistent flame coating the kitchen table. If you were to answer, “somebody in Mongolia just fell off a dromedary and landed on a yurt”, you may have correctly answered the question, but it wouldn’t be the answer the wonderer was looking for. Then xe scorns you for being a smart ass, even though it was xe’s fault for asking such a broad question without intending to accept all possible answers. But if you were to tell xe the truth, “you weren’t here so we decided to fuck some shit up”, xe’d be just as angry. When you flippantly ask that question, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment no matter what answer you get. You need to ask it seriously and expect all possible answers, which is what I do.

The fact is, at any moment, there are trillions of things going on in the world, most of which we don’t know about and will never know about. There may be even more going on than that, especially if you consider events on the microscopic level. And why wouldn’t you? What are you, some kind of scopist?

A mosquito just flew up a boar’s ass somewhere. Did you know that? If you did, consider yourself lucky. Most of us didn’t. Wait a minute, a Taco Bell employee in Encino just loogied into the refried beans – and we missed it. When I consider the breadth of the question, “what in the world is going on?”, my mind quakes, and the bellboy in Alesund, Norway who just received a hundred krone tip from a guest who had those krones in his mouth prior to tipping knows nothing about it. Nor does he know he will soon have mononucleosis.

Nobody knows what is really going on. There is too much to comprehend and not enough people there to record it. Even if we tried to record it, it would take all of us to do so. Then all that would be going on would be billions of people sitting around recording other people recording stuff. That’s not much of a life for anybody, probably even worse than the life that is ahead for Anna Nicole’s bastard baby. Of course, I’m referring to Anna Nicole Jansen, who resorted to the “crapshoot” jar of semen at the Fulton County Sperm Bank because they would not accept her out-of-date “Free Upgrade To Known Donors” coupon she found stuck to a wayward nail on a park bench while she was crawling around looking for unchewed, discarded sunflower seeds. We can only hope that all worldly events are being recorded in the fabric of space-time, waiting for Ron Popeil to invent the pocket space-time fabric viewer. Until then, we must remain ignorant to most happenings.

Sure, we have news agencies that tell us stuff. Some of it may even be interesting. Some of it may even be true. But none of it comes close to representing all that is going on. I guess those news agencies choose the “important” events to tell us about so we don’t need to be concerned with the girl in Honduras who is crying herself to sleep because she thinks the boy she likes doesn’t like her because he ignored her chicken today. It is more important that we know that Drew Barrymore has been chosen People magazine’s most beautiful person. That is the kind of information we can use. It is in this manner information that is significant to all of us can be shared and…just a second here…is that really true? Drew Barrymore? Really? The MOST beautiful? I don’t buy it. I mean, she’s cute and all, but there are plenty of more beautiful people out there. What about that one chick who compulsively scratches her nails on the pew at St. James American Episcopal Church, Via B. Rucellai 9 in Florence, Italy each Sunday? She’s pretty hot. Much hotter than Drew. I wonder if the People editors even considered her. She must not have a movie coming out that needs publicity. That’s why I finished only 3,698,400,324th on their 100 Most Beautiful list. That damn Al Gore just had to cut my carbon dioxide quelling performance art segment (where I dress up as a fallen tree and mime my inability to convert carbon dioxide into fresh oxygen while playing The Way We Were on one of those giant keyboard things they used in the movie Big) from his next global warming documentary, Is It Getting Hot In Here Or Am I Extinct? Stupid Al Gore.

Take some time to consider the full brunt of the question “what in the world is going on?” Don’t limit this thought exercise to what is important to you. Luckily, we always know what Oprah is up to. But what about the lonely glow worm in the Glow Worm caves of New Zealand who loses a leg that gets stuck in a tiny crag? The lonely glow worm chooses to sacrifice its leg in order to catch an elusive passing mayfly so it can grow to become a pupa at the top of the cave where it will glow intermittently until it becomes an adult only to find that it is unable to feed and starves to death. How do we live with a clear mind without knowing about this? And what about that rock at the floor of Death Valley that just sits there waiting for something to happen to it, but nothing ever does, except for the occasional slight breeze of scorching hot air that reminds it nothing is happening to it, just like aspiring hopefuls in our society that don’t know that you have to make your own happenings, so they sit there and watch Oprah and dream of what will never be because we are all rocks on the floor of Death Valley until we do something to make us not be that. This is the kind of fun shit you will realize when fully considering this amazing question. Soon, you will realize how much life you are missing and demand more out of it. Our world, with everything going on in it, will be a better place. Who knew that ice cream bar, slapped out of a young boy's hand by his mom because he flicked a crusty dragon at her, melting on a sewer grate in downtown London would make such a difference? I did, that’s who.