All purpose phrases

I need to break my habit of wanting to pronounce purpose as porpoise. Man.

When I was about twelve, I started to notice that there were a few phrases that could be used for almost anything. They were ideally ambiguous, vaguely familiar to people (via pop culture, in the best case scenario), and short.

I first became familiar with this phenomenon after a trip to the doctor's for my yearly check up. Probably I was around ten at the time. When my mother left me alone in the waiting room, I noticed a series of "growing up" pamphlets, designed to help struggling parents explain to their kids what exactly dicks and ovaries and pissing fetishes are. Two in particular caught my eye.

The first one featured a paternal figure sitting on a couch, looking at his son, gesticulating into the air while he apparently talked to the kid. I say apparently because for all I know, he was just doing some kind of guppy impression or demonstrating what a nice set of fillings he had. In any event, on the inside it had such pertinent questions as, "What's a vagina?" and "Is my penis normal?"

"Well," I thought, "How timely. I've just begun to question my dick's normality, and I heard someone say vagina once in a dirty context."

I surreptitiously swiped the booklet, along with another one called, "What happens if I masturbate too much?"

Later, I was perusing them in my room when I heard my mother coming towards the door. As she was about to open the door, I frantically stuffed the reading matter under my bed, and shouted the first thing that came to my mind.

"CHECK IT OUT NOW FUNK SOUL BROTHER," I screamed, in a falsetto that, in better times, could have netted me a position in a band where the people look moody and wear things that are trendy, but not trendy enough to label them as sell outs. This is important to them, because they must retain their street cred.

Incredibly, my mother stopped. She didn't open the door. She'd heard, at some point, Fatboy Slim's Rockafeller Skank, and was trying to figure out what the lyrics meant in this context, coming from her apparently castrated son. In the time it took her to realize that it was just gibberish, I'd hidden my contraband naughtiness and taken out a copy of EGM. I just sat on my bed, triumphant, and replied to her inquiry, "Yes, I would like some super hero themed underwear."

I felt awesome. Deception was my world now, mother. Oh, yes. You couldn't see the sly fox that your darling son had become. I casually stared at her, pretending, in my mind, to be Sean Connery in James Bond, right before he ordered a martini or revealed to the world that under the suit, his chest had the appearance of a caribou fur draped maggot.

Since then, I've evolved in the way that I use these phrases. In the proper group of people, a well dropped, "RUNNNN! Get back to dah choppah!" can be a useful way to buy myself some time to explain why I'm wearing a Madonna t-shirt. I hunt for those phrases now, in magazines and movies and music.

I even managed to net the last available Mountain Dew at the supermarket the other day by stunning the obese man reaching for it with, "Can't step to this!"

Yes, the depressed middle aged woman in the aisle who was fantasizing about getting married to the cashier at register three and moving away somewhere romantic and maybe she'd finally get a foot rub that fucking pig at home never gives her foot rubs maybe she should kill him, yes she clutched her child closer and eyed me with the same suspicion she normally reserves for the waiters at Red Lobster when she thinks they've added things to the bill.

Dammit, though. It was worth it.

I'M MAKING COKE IN MY GARAGE

...by which I mean a home brewed batch of Coca-Cola imitation, of course.

I noticed a while ago that if I just stayed on my computer or read a book, only moving to go to school or to exercise, I'd get depressed. I'm the type of person who likes a good project, a good activity. I'm the guy who would run into a Boy Scout's meeting and laugh at them for being homophobic, and then come back later and steal their bird house building materials so I could make my own. It's just who I am.

When I'm not creating something manually, I can't help the feeling that I'm not doing anything. Logically, sure, I can tell myself, "You're doing something. You're writing that essay, you're masturbating at a frequency that is both record breaking and disturbing, you're reading that book."

However, it's like there's a part of my mind that refuses to believe that. It's a skeptic. If I'm not able to quantify my accomplishments occasionally, and do it quickly, it rebells.

So I make little projects for myself. Stupid things that don't take long most of the time, occasionally big projects. Last week I bought some coconuts from a market, shaved them and sanded them, and made little tropical glasses so that I could put on a colorful shirt and recline and feel like I was in Hawaii, if instead of a beach, Hawaii had a great view of one of my dogs licking his asshole.

Also, I like run on sentences. It's as close to stream of consciousness writing as I can get without feeling woozy.

In any event, I chose to make coca cola substitute this weekend, because that sounds fun (I have a warped sense of fun) and delicious.

Here's a link, if you're curious. I have the sneaking suspicion that that website is designed for middle aged women looking for things to cook, but I put a mustache and a fake set of testicles on my monitor to make it more manly, and now everything is just dandy.

Porn has the right idea

Yesterday, I was watching TV and a commercial came on advertising Bowflex. They had this huge, ripped guy exercising, and a voice over that was so enthusiastic it made my balls hurt.

However, isn't the point of advertising these days to get people to empathize with the fictional guy on TV, working on getting those sculpted buns? Having a huge dude proclaiming the efficacy of the system doesn't really give them anything to relate to. Unless they're deluded to the nth degree, they're probably going to realize that they don't look like that guy, and they won't ever look like that guy.

In porn, people have started replacing ripped, muscled guys with pudgy, pasty, middle aged white dudes with body hair that's somehow unsettling. The reason being, as far as I can tell, that they've realized their market demographic: pudgy, pasty, middle aged white dudes with body hair that's somehow unsettling. The last thing these guys want to see when they're watching porn is someone who'll intimidate them. It's just going to remind them that they're sitting at home in a dark room, holding their small dick and sweating unpleasantly while they try not the think about their wife's cottage cheese thighs. Having these big walking towers of cock and muscle is just a slap in the face to the poor man.

So, why hasn't this been extrapolated to normal advertising? The only downside is that the advertising corporations don't have someone to show off what could be, if only the viewer would get off of his ass and buy their shit. They've lost that.

However, they've gained the knowledge that all around America, there's out of shape guys who are still watching that infomerical because they haven't been scared away by the fact that their wife thinks of the guy on the Bowflex commercial during sex. Instead, there's someone they can relate to. He's got the same problems they do: hairy ass, no muscles, a filthy attraction to that girl who was on Jeopardy the other night. They can relate. Hell, if he can look stupid pulling on those rods while wearing a sweatband, so can they.

Oh, and if you're pudgy, pasty, white, and middle aged, but you have body hair arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way, just disregard this.

There's no one left who I can safely like

I was talking to someone yesterday, and they made a comment about how arrogant those guys who sat with baseball caps on in sport stadiums are. I thought, "Fuck, I thought I could like those people. Who's left?"

Environmentalists are all skinny hippies with art degrees, the salt of the earth is just old dudes who aren't educated or old dudes who are educated but pretend not to be. Liberals are hypocrites, conservatives are fascists, the left wing is turning into the right wing and the right wing is turning into those people you see on the bus who are reading a KJV and want you to know it.

The problem that I'm having right now is that, for whatever reason, I haven't been able to fit into any social group. That would be awesome, under normal circumstances, because not fitting into a social group is, in itself, a social group, and they're pretty cool and they have chicks who wear jeans and shirts that say things that they don't understand.

The real issue with my situation is that I don't mind most of these people, with their social groups. I don't (oddly) even think I'm better than them. So I have no sense of superiority I can share with a collective, I have no struggle I can bring up with people and say, "Man, look at this struggle. It's fucking hard. I wish other people had to deal with this stuff, maybe then they'd understand us."

Most people understand me. There's not much to it. The biggest struggle I deal with is normally the fact that when I shower, I knock over my bodywash container a lot, and it leaks out and then I have to buy new bodywash, and that sucks, because then my bodywash costs are excessively high, and that's terrible.

So it's always been a delicate balance for me, finding some social group who almost everyone can agree to dislike, and finding some social group that everyone can agree to like. When I was 12, I just got some Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and I was in with that crowd, and then I pretended to like WWF and I was in with that crowd, and that was pretty much it. Most recently, I actively proclaimed my distaste for people who like My Chemical Romance and advocated a reevaluation of American morals so they'd jive with the kids of today. That worked for a while, but then everyone started hating My Chemical Romance and too many people finally realized what relativism was, and I was back to square one.

So I'm out of people I can like, I'm out of people I can dislike, and I'm out of bodywash.

Which is terrible.