Villains

I think that the idea of a purely evil character exists almost solely in fiction. People are never completely good or completely bad and I recognized this at a very young age. So, while other kids talked about how awesome the Ninja Turtles were or who their favorite GI Joe was, I was one of the kids who loved Shredder and Storm Shadow. My favorite episode of any cartoon in the eighties was when the good guys and the bad guys teamed up to fight a mutual enemy, probably a drug dealer. In my head, I tried to figure out what was pushing these people to achieve their goals in a way that hurt so many others.

I think that is the difference between heroes and villains. Heroes are serving others while villains are serving themselves. That's why Dracula is a jerk but that Twilight guy is a hero. The Twilight guy smashed a van to save his girlfriend but Dracula is all about his own survival. When I was a kid, bad guys always had a basic plan of "I'm going to take over the world" but then what? Maybe they had a really good plan for humanity's future but in order to make it work, they had to strip certain freedoms from people. Is that a good or bad thing? Perhaps if mankind operated more like a giant beehive, we could achieve much more. In stripping away those freedoms, I guess that would be the ultimate evil, though. People have to want to follow a leader or at least be given the illusion of choice.

Whatever. Here's an awesome Lordi video.

Day 21: Ugnaughts

So we pick up where we left off and this is the 21st non-consecutive day I have been blogging. Hooray! I'm having a lot of fun. I really intended to include a short story or something besides just regular ol blog updates but things don't always go as planned.

That actually is what I want to talk about. Ugnaughts are these little ugly, pig-faced oompaloompa-looking mugs that are in charge of garbage disposal or something in Bespin Cloud City in the Empire Strikes Back. They are responsible for C3P0 getting disassembled and now I have officially talked too much about Star Wars.

Kids love these guys.

The reason I bring these guys up is that it's also a good name for the little things that go wrong over a day. I know at the end of the day, I lie awake and stare at the ceiling, tallying up all the things that go well and all the things that went wrong, swearing vengeance on all my enemies...well, maybe not that extreme. Some days, though, minor infractions against me eat away at me. Those are the ugnaughts, just working the flames of their thought-forges and making me concentrate on the wrong thing. Every night, before I sleep, instead of thinking of what went wrong, I should be thinking what went right. For starters, I'm still alive. I might not wake up that way but for the moment, if I'm still alive, that counts for a lot.

I'm trying to think of the counter for ugnaughts but I honestly can't, especially in the Star Wars universe. First of all, every single dwarf is a jerk. From the jawas that tased R2D2 to the stupid dingleberry ewoks, none of these little people are something I could say represents an entirely positive force. In fact, my favorite part of Star Wars is the lightsabers but I'm not going to say "Before I go to sleep, I like to ignite my lightsaber." so I guess I need to step out of the SW universe and figure out a good sort of slang for these sorts of things.

Seeing as we are also on "U" and there is something I like very much that starts with "U", I think I'll call my little end-of-the-day-positive-thoughts my "undeads". See, when I go to sleep, it's like that day is dead and over. If I keep the positive things in my head, it's like they are surviving again and so this happy thought zombie baby floats on and keeps me warm when I feel like the world is full of stupid, horrible ugnaughts that only want to dig little tunnels in my brain for more of their kind to take root. It's cheaper and healthier than what I used to do, which is drink until I pass out.

Day 20(22): Troubled

We live in an old apartment that just randomly decided it didn't want to have internet anymore on Saturday. Couple that with a family emergency and we have no blog for Saturday! If it had been any other day except Sunday, I would have been able to use the library computer. Here we are, though and you will take what you can get! Let's be real, though, I'm just doing this for me so I guess I'll take what I can get.

I wanted to talk about a really cliche phrase I hear thrown around, "troubled, usually followed by teen. This has become completely meaningless as of late. I know people now who have real problems and I think "Oh man, no internet, I am really troubled by this" but the honest truth is it was a minor inconvenience. Yes, I do work online so it was slightly annoying to have to adjust my schedule to catch up on work that I missed but that's a total first world problem. In fact, that's not even a first world problem anymore, it's just a moment to breath and not be inundated with information for a little while.

The second part of that, though, the "troubled teen" phrase, that's what bothers me. You know what troubles a teen the most? Being a teen. It's that point where you are still treated like a kid but you're also expected to act like an adult. I've been around a teenager long enough now to realize that it's the point where you feel like you know enough to function in the adult world but it's also the point right before how little you really know. I enjoy talking to teenagers if only for the sometimes hilarious misconceptions they hold. Likewise, they can often be surprisingly insightful.I think that's the source of their angst. If I was one second Yoda and the next second Jar-Jar, I would be troubled, too.

I think I don't really have any right to use the phrase "troubled" anymore and that's what troubles me. When I was a kid, I pictured myself living on the edge in some kind of anti-establishment pipe dream. I am so far up the establishment's butthole right now, I'm almost Republican. That scares me because it feels like there was so much left that I wanted to do but now I'm being led down a slaughter chute towards an inevitable, boring death. I think I read that occasionally, a cow will suddenly buck up and try to escape from the single file line that leads into the slaughter house but between the mass of bodies behind him and the narrow path it's on, the cow can't escape and dies anyway, just the same as any of the others. I know I'm not a special snowflake but I guess I just wanted something more for myself and at the same time, I am pretty comfortable with where I'm at. It's a really satisfying yet depressing existence.

Day 19: Storygames

I really like to play games and I have a hierarchy of game types that are all divided in to subtypes but I'll share only the broadest categories. Currently, I am slogging my way through Borderlands 2 and I have a queue of other games to play on the Xbox. I think that as much fun as video games are, though, it isn't better than an actual board game. There's something about the tangibility of the pieces, having something with weight that you can move and place yourself, relying on other humans to play by rules that you all agree on. A step above boardgames is role-playing games, which can be like modular games that each person who plays experiences differently. Beyond that, though, and oddly almost contradicting what I said about tangibility, is the story-game. They share several similarities with RPGs but a story-game is about creating something for yourself or your group. Some of them can create artifacts of the game afterwards that resemble little short stories but for the most part, the whole thing exists in the player's mind.

It's incredibly rare to find a group of people who even want to play a regular session of Dungeons and Dragons but gathering people for something that is a bit more experimental and hard to explain can be a near impossible task, especially given an environment where indoor activities that aren't video games are almost anathema. So, we go one stage deeper and find the solo story game. When I try to play an RPG solo, I have fun but it takes up a lot of space and it can be hard to keep track of everything. With a story game, it's basically writing a story with a set of guidelines so that even when I'm the one who is writing it, it can still surprise me.

The role playing game community has always thrived on the creativity of it's players and it is here that story games grew out of. Independent gaming has produced some really amazing stuff and I'm going to link my two favorite completely free rules for solo story gaming. These are both from a contest that is held yearly so there are more on the way and the contest wraps up in February. These each hold a sort of fantasy leaning but they can both be easily modified to offer support for anything from noir to sci-fi to high school drama if that's what suits the player.

Spider's Dance

This is a game about a family of spider spirits traveling through a world. You create the map of the world, you tell the story of each spider's journey and you progressively show the spider's effects on the world as each one travels through the world. This could also be played as a sort of round-robin writing game.

Turning Leaves

I love this game. The potential to create a world, populate it with characters and slowly build more and more on to what is already there is amazing. If a person was suffering from writer's block, just reading through the character creation in this could knock plenty of ideas loose. This one also uses playing cards to determine certain story elements and index cards for each character(you create six to begin but create new ones in certain in-game milestones) as well as a player created map. It's all very interesting and a perfect time killer for a long ride somewhere or just a rainy day. However, when you really start getting into it, you won't need to search for an excuse to play.

Day 18: Quitter!

I was late. I'm typing this at 1 in the morning and it's bugged me all day that I posted an "R" blog yesterday when we were on "Q". Whatever. I'm just going to power through because I am really enjoying writing daily but the silly false pretense of doing the alphabet is getting old. I still plan on continuing in this fashion but when I'm done, I'll probably keep writing daily only it won't feel as forced because I'm not keeping to some kind of imaginary time table.

                         That was a disclaimer. This is actually about the song Quitter from the Toadies.

 I don't know what it is about the Toadies but their music is very visceral. With only a few words per song, the main guy that writes the songs can tell a bigger story. It's sort of like a jazz album but where in there you'd be listening to the notes that aren't being played, you're listening for the words that the lead singer isn't saying. This is not only my favorite Toadies song but one of my favorite songs ever. It's one of those songs where it's vague enough that it works for every break up you will ever have and, with the quiet breakdown in the middle, it's the perfect song for drinking and crying or drinking and then calling someone and yelling at them. I like the vagueness but it's not too vague like a Linkin Park song, which is so completely formless that any angsty teen can point the lyrics at whatever teacher, parent or ex that they want to be mad/sad about.

I bought Rubberneck, the album that Quitter was on, one day and then, about a year later, I was reading some music review blog and hearing about the Toadies and thinking "Wow, I've gotta get this album!" and not realizing that it was sitting on my shelf the whole time. The problem was, when I bought the album, I was young and not quite fully in the world. I had moved out of my dad's house and lived with some friends from work. A year later, I had my heart broken a couple times and realized that maybe life doesn't get better, sometimes it just floats along on the same level. Some knobs move up and some move down but there's always a median and it seems to stick to where I think it should be.

"Quitter" is a song about a relationship that ended. However, it's also about life in general. It's almost like that sort of introspection that happens at the end of a relationship. I could practically imagine the singer staring in the mirror and saying these things. "I thought I was getting something right." It's about failures on his part and someone else giving up on him and how angry and useless that sort of relationship can make a person feel. I think it might also be about murdering an ex's new significant other, too. I'm pretty sure most of the Rubberneck album was about murder on some level, though, so that's a given.

Day 17: Retail

I hate and love retail stores. I like to find all the new stuff I've never heard of, especially when it's something I would have never found out about otherwise. I've been exposed to a lot of new movies, music and even food because of the recommendation of a customer. That's nice. There's a dark side, though, and it doesn't exactly hide beneath the surface.

People who have never worked retail treat retail workers like automatons made of flesh. As a retail worker, a fun experiment is to say no to something. People lose their minds when that happens. I guess it's like waking up one day and finding out your toaster has this whole other life outside your house and you want a slice of bread transformed like you've had it every other morning but he's like "No, man, I'm hung over and I only came in today to talk to the microwave but then the refrigerator made me stay and I told him I'd stick around but I am not in the mood for this right now so just give me some space." Of course, when you're on the clock, your job is to do stuff for people. It's just that there's a difference between hourly workers and indentured servants.

There's another problem that is becoming worse lately. Kids are apparently just being dropped off at whatever store their parents are near. I can't understand telling a kid to go to a toy section and look around inside of a Dollar General but that's actually how I was raised. I think the difference is that as kids, me and my siblings knew that the chance to wander around a strange store and look at toys we would probably never get to actually play with was a privilege but kids today seem to just assume the world is theirs for the taking. Under better circumstances, I'd be proud but there is a difference between walking quietly down a toy aisle and running through the store, throwing footballs and frisbees around. I don't work in retail any more but the urge to trip a small child still remains. I guess I should probably apologize in advance to any relatives because the holidays are coming up and there are more and more screaming little maniacs around me every year.

I guess retail can be lucrative and fun but maybe I just suck at it. I can't stand being told what to do, I don't want to tell other people what to do, I don't like being forced to help people and I dislike the general public. I do like putting stuff away when I know where it goes, I like getting a discount on stuff and I like people thinking that I know what's going on as long as they don't ask me any questions about it so I think those were the reasons I stayed in retail for as long as I did. Also, I needed money.

Day 16: Passion

What is passion? It is literally defined as "strong and barely controllable emotion". Every time I think about people who talk about something they are passionate about, it's often something trivial. I could describe myself as passionate about video games or Star Wars. In fact, I could describe myself as passionate about a lot of fictional worlds and pretend places. So, why is it that I feel so passionless when it comes to important things like politics, health or religion? I will literally stop what I'm doing if someone says that the Star Wars prequels are better than the originals. If that same person says that they're voting for Romney or Obama, I keep walking. Obviously, there are some things that people are set in and no amount of arguing is going to change their mind. I guess that's why I can't be passionate about those type of things.

I love to sit around and discuss anything and everything. Fiction is set, though. Lightsabers need focus crystals and the Enterprise needs dilithium and that's just the way those things work. In life, nothing is concrete. For every reason that someone gives you to vote one way, there are just as many to go the other way. I talked about this with my brother but it bears repeating. I will jump out of my seat and find the nearest computer to google some random fact about a movie or a video game to make absolutely sure that it's right but when it comes to what I put in my body, sometimes I have no idea what I'm eating.

Life is tenuous at best and each day could be the last for any of us or for all of us. The universe can literally destroy us without any warning and we can't really do anything about it. Why be passionate about something completely irrelevant in the long run? I guess there's a sort of feeling of some sort of order, even if it's not real. There are real things I'm passionate about. I'm passionate about my significant other, even if I don't always show it. I'm passionate about protecting her and her children, whatever that may entail. I'm passionate about figuring out what to do with life, which seems like a cop out but I don't think it is. There's no definite answer to why we're here or what we're supposed to do and I think it's up to each individual to take responsibility for their own life. Apathy is easy and I'd be lying if I said that sometimes, actually most of the time, I take that route because it's easier to say "I don't care what you say" than to try to justify my choices or rationalize whatever it is that I'm doing. I guess right now I'm trying to find a way to express my passion without letting it control me.

Day 15: October

There's is something in the air around this time of year that gets under my skin. It is probably a large part of why I'm doing this blog-a-day thing, because I think October lends itself greatly to creative energy. I don't know if it's some sort of ancient, mystical alignment of seasons and time or if it's just that I have a lot of good memories that revolve around October but this is definitely my favorite month.

There's Halloween, that helps. I love to try to think of a good costume, although I went last year without one and that might be the case again this year. With Halloween coming up, you get all the great candy. I know there was a comedian who talked about this but every year, I think "I'd like some candy corn" and then after about ten pieces I remember that candy corn is not good. Then, I spend a week where I just don't ever remember that I don't like candy corn and I eat way too much of it.

October also sends all the TV channels, websites and magazines into horror movie list mode and I think that's my favorite part of the month(besides the candy, but not the candy corn). I have to watch Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Slither, Night of the Living Dead(the original), Dawn of the Dead(the remake with that guy from Modern Family), Evil Dead 1 and 2, Army of Darkness and Vampires. While I love horror movies, they inspire mostly laughter. I think the truly scary stuff is what resides in our own minds and so I usually like to find something scary to read. I just finished rereading some old HP Lovecraft stuff and also John Dies at the End, which were great. Right now, I'm browsing through SCP and browsing creepypasta but the absolute best thing that has stuck with me for a long time is Ted the Caver. Someday, I want to write something that resonates that well, with that growing sense of dread that builds up and it just ends with no definite resolution. I love it.

I guess October is also the moment before the hectic holiday rush, the last bastion of sanity before the floodgates of relentless humanity open and flow forth, yelling and frothing at the mouth with a "the sign said 5.50 but they charge me 5.60 and there's only one Furby left so let's fight everything" mentality. That's it. To be honest, it starts earlier and earlier every year but it's not in full swing until the day after Halloween. Working in retail is terrifying, Being in public is terrifying. I wish I made enough and had a job that allowed me to remove myself from society until December 27th. Here's to October, the final moment of the year before the world goes mad. That's a bit melodramatic. Here's to October; I love candy!

Day 14: Ninjas!

A monkey, a ninja and a gentleman.

I realize that this topic is done to death on the internet and in real life. When I was a kid, ninjas were not quite everywhere. I remember watching a movie called "Unmasking the Idol" and leaving that movie thinking "Black ninjas are awesome and red ninjas are jerks". I rewatched that movie a few years ago and found out that it was actually horrible but in a kind of likable, ridiculous way. Shortly after we watched this movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came out. So now, my friends all had a sort of touchstone for ninja stuff. The best thing about ninja turtles was the toys of the basic figures came with crazy extra weapons that "real" ninjas used.

I researched the whole ninja tradition and the various weapons. Yes, I did research even though I was ten but of course, it wasn't about anything that was relevant to school. It was about ninjas. I learned a lot of cool stuff but there was a lot of conflicting information. What I took away from everything was that ninjas were the poor man's hero. A rich guy could be a samurai but anybody could be a ninja. I always thought that was cool that in a society that was so concerned with loyalty and knowing ones place, a ninja just did whatever he wanted.

Of course, I also knew about Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow from GI Joe. Storm Shadow was probably my favorite ninja ever because first of all, his name is Storm Shadow and second, he dressed in all white. I suppose that if your primary job is stealth and sabotage, wearing blinding white is probably an occupational hazard. I always looked at it like he was just that good and really cocky about it.

Ninjas! Wearing bright outfits and firing loud weapons! Masters of deception!

 

When I was a kid, I don't think I ever really connected with any super heroes. Batman was a rich brat and Spiderman was a science genius. Superman was an immigrant. Punisher was the guy I liked the most but he was a psychotic, violent vigilante and also some kid stole my action figure of him. Ninjas were the guys I looked up to. For some reason, I thought I could be a ninja. It was just a matter of changing how you look at things. There were dozens of ninjas; Ninja Gaiden and the guy from Shinobi, those two up there, all the Turtles, the guys from Mortal Kombat...I guess I figured that even if I wasn't the best ninja, there was a spot for me somewhere.

Day 13: Metal

I realize how weird it is to introduce this topic only a short time after devoting a whole post to how much Blink-182 meant to me but that was one band and this is a whole genre. Metal is awesome. There's no way to get more pumped then to listen to some metal. The specific band or song is not usually important. Metal is visceral, almost primal music that speaks to something deep in my old lizard brain.

So, just like how my love of hip hop began with a lot of Christian rap, so too did my love of metal start with Christian rock. As a kid in the 80s who loved rock but was also Christian, of course I listened to Stryper. I also listened to Petra and Bloodgood and some others I don't remember. What I didn't know was that when my mom was gone, my dad would play Led Zeppelin and other old rock that kinda primed me for metal. My dad also played Mark Farner because even though he was the leader singer of Grand Funk Railroad, he became a Christian artist. Don't get it confused, though, both of my parents had music secrets. When my dad wasn't around my mom would play country songs that might not have been entirely Christian, chiefly Garth Brooks or Brooks and Dunn, but that's a separate topic.

As soon as I got a job and money, one of the first things I bought was an Ozzy Osbourne tribute CD filled with covers of his old songs redone by Pantera, Sepultura and others. At the same time, rap-metal was picking up in popularity so I'm not going to lie, I also bought a Limp Bizkit CD. That's beside the point, though. I started working at Hastings and eventually learned about the magazine BW/BK, a magazine that came with a CD every month that was filled with some popular bands as well as up and coming bands. Every month, I learned more and more about the amazing music that I loved. The true turning point for me, the point where I said "Yes, this is for me" was when I went to a concert and actually interacted with other metal fans. It was a wild experience and made me realize that some music has to be experienced live.

I can't really say that metal is the best music. I think music is too subjective to ever say that any one genre is the best. I will say that any song with lyrics growled over wild electric guitars and pounding drums is something that makes some people happy and some people angry but I think that's what really makes any music good. It provokes an emotional response. So, if metal makes you want to punch someone in the face, that's a good thing. Just punch the air, though, so you don't get in trouble, I guess.

Day 12: Lost

I never watched the show Lost. As a person who never watched the show, I won't even know what's going to happen when they do the Lost ten year reunion special. There's a fog monster and polar bears but the bears are from a comic book and John Locke is a guy, I think. Also, one of the hobbits in Lord of the Rings is in there as a rock star and he has tattoos and does drugs. So, these people live on an island because their plane crashed and they have to survive on this weird island with bears and monsters and hobbits. It's really weird that I haven't seen this yet.

On this island, there's a pregnant lady(maybe) and she has a baby monster or a dream about a monster or maybe she's not pregnant. Also, there's a love triangle because any show that is very popular has a love triangle because people like to imagine what they would do if they were in a love triangle. Maybe I didn't watch it because love triangles are too complicated for me, I can barely manage a love line, right guys? I don't even know what that means.

The weirdest thing that happens when you tell people that you haven't watched Lost, the first thing they say is "Don't even bother, it's so dumb. They were dead the whole time." Another thing they could say is "Don't even bother, I'll just ruin it for you right now." Where were those people before I watched Unbreakable, huh? Man, I need to update my references. I've heard that it tries to tackle philosophy and uses lots of symbolism and it sounds interesting but it's one of those things that helps when you're watching it when other people are also. It sucks to be the guy who wanders into a conversation with some "You guys ever seen Lost?" because if they were interested, they're probably done being interested in it and if they haven't, by this point they probably don't care either way. Oh, now I see why it's okay to spoil it.

So, in conclusion, Lost is a show I have not watched.

Day 11: Knowledge is Power

I love to hear people that think they've got everything figured out. You can tell a lot about people by how much they think they know. Being around a college campus, there are plenty of kids that will saunter into a room and assume they are the smartest person there. There are kids that just got out of high school, that have not been out in the world or have but only for a year or two, and they are walking around the campus of any nearby college and thinking "My teacher is an idiot! I could teach that class." Well, I wrote that they were thinking that but the honest truth is most of them flat out say it.

I worry about people who build their selves up like that because the longer they go on in the delusion they live in, the harder it's going to hurt when it crashes down. The biggest problem is that when you only know a little bit, it seems like there's a lot that you know about one specific subject in comparison to your total amount of knowledge. The more that you learn and the more that you realize there is to know, the more you realize there is so much that you don't know. There's so much that nobody knows, that human minds can't even understand or comprehend yet. At a certain point, knowledge is terrifying.

Knowledge is power and power corrupts so knowing everything is absolute power and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So, the most evil being in the universe would be omnipotent and the most benevolent being would probably seem pretty stupid. I don't believe that transitive property works, though. I think that foolishness can be powerful, too, because with enough knowledge to seem like you know what you're doing, you can trick a lot of people into doing whatever you want. That's how scams work. However, a little more knowledge (or just basic empathy) could make the people in charge actually worth following.

I was originally going to just make fun of stupid college kids and stupid people who think they are so smart(unironically, I might add, which makes me a huge jackass) but I was just watching the vice presidential debates and now I'm really depressed because these guys have learned a lot of things and they can spout a lot of facts. They know a lot. I forgot, though, that knowledge does corrupt without the wisdom to use it properly and I just don't think that anybody who ends up in charge of things seems to have any wisdom.

Day 10: Joseph

It's probably a little bit of a cop out to pick my own name as the J word. The problem is that I don't think I really set any ground rules. Anyway, I think my name is cool now that I've gotten used to it. When I was a kid, I didn't think Joseph sounded good. Joseph was Jesus' dad but I never imagined Jesus' dad to be a cool guy. I always imagined him as a dour, boring guy and that was only reinforced as I grew older. God had sex with his wife or at least impregnated her and then made Joseph raise his kid but then killed that kid as a sacrifice to himself so that people didn't have to keep sacrificing goats and lambs to him. You know what else God could have done? Told the people to stop sacrificing goats and lambs. "You know what, I'm God, I made you all crazy and I assume you're going to sin so why don't we talk about it instead of spilling blood every time." All of that was made moot when Jesus miraculously came back to life after being beaten to a bloody pulp, whipped and stabbed until he was a mangled mush of meat. Alliteration can't make that sentence feel any better. I''m way off topic here.

Wait, one more bible thing. Joseph was also the guy who could interpret people's dreams. He was also the brother that all the other brother's hated so much that they tried to kill(if I remember right) then sold into slavery, then told their dad "Sorry he's dead" and that was that. Then he was in prison. Then the pharaoh had bad dreams and a guy that was in prison with him remembered that Joseph could read dreams but the guy forgot about helping Joseph for several years. So, the pharaoh made Joseph in charge of rations or something(by the way, I'm not googling this, just going on memory from Sunday school). Then his family came in to get rations and he played some kind of prank on them and then he revealed he was alive and everybody cried and then they were all a happy family. The problem I have is everybody was happy mainly because he had all the rations so the brothers could all choke down their murderous blood lust against their sibling or they could starve but I always had the feeling they still wanted to kill him even more because he was so freaking lucky. I could be missing something here, though.

Do you know what "Joseph" means? I do because I like to read so people sometimes buy me bookmarks and bookmarks usually have either animals, rainbows or happy faces with inspirational slogans or the meaning of your name. That's it, that's all the professional bookmark makers do. "Eagle with 'Climb high' pasted over it, which seems ridiculous because eagles can fly so why would they ever climb but whatever let's get lunch." Bam. Best job ever.

The point of all that nonsense was that I owned several bookmarks that reminded me that "Joseph" means "He shall add". That's kinda messed up because this company knows that "Joseph" who has the rainbow bookmark that says "You can do it" and uses it to mark his place in Chronicles of Narnia is a little fat kid. Come one. Just lie to the kid. Tell a kid named Jason or Max or Mason that his name means "He shall add".

Day 9: Insane Clown Posse

Let me preface this by saying that everyone was stupid when they were a kid but that doesn't mean that stupidity is exclusive to kids. "Kid" is a pretty loose term, too. Some people are still kids well into their 30s and they are also stupid. There's another important distinction, too, because some people are childish, some people are naive and some people are just stupid. I can't stress that enough.

You happy little fool.

                                                                     
                                       
So, as a stupid kid, I was also shy and awkward. I lived about 90% of my life inside my own head. My older brother was boisterous and personable and people loved him. I wanted to be like him but he was also six feet tall and super smart. The weird thing is, I was also a little bit jealous of my younger brother, too, because he also made a lot of friends, especially in high school. The other thing about me was I loved rap music but until late middle school, all we listened to was Christian music and I found out later that Christian rap was mostly just regular rap with certain words replaced with "Jesus" or "pray". That's not to say there are no good Christian rap groups but, oddly enough, I found most of when I was much older.

Okay, I'm in high school, I'm a nerd and an outcast, oh and my aunt loves the Jerky Boys. We listened to one of their albums over and over. Well, on the radio, a local station has some weird rock group called "Insane Clown Posse" take over the station for a while and I was interested because their name was funny and they happened to be touring with the Jerky Boys(that might actually be Jerky Boyz because it was the 90s and "z"s were everywhere but whatever). Anyway, then they played one of their songs and I realized I had heard them before but I didn't know who they were. I also saw their video for House of Illusion and thought it was awesome because I was fifteen and I hadn't really been exposed to things like weird freak shows and rapping clowns.

With the knowledge of who these guys were, I suddenly saw them everywhere. My dad is a huge comic collector and he always had an issue of Wizard close by so I saw that these guys had a comic in the works. Around that time, they also  were showing up in the WWF, which I loved because I was a teenage male in the late 90s and their  marketing was aimed directly at me. Then, my younger brother showed me this album called Great Milenko and I guess from their I just dug deeper and deeper into the life of an ICP fan, aka a juggalo. After graduating from high school, I felt aimless and stupid and instead of doing something cool like going far away to college, I got a job at Hastings. There, I had access to everything I loved and I started obsessively collecting ICP merchandise.

I guess the reason I loved the band so much was they hit the right notes (no pun intended because if it was, that would be almost a crime) with me as a young, confused person. First of all, it gave me an immediate identity as a juggalo. In addition, their raps were something I could practically have thought of myself because they loved all the stuff I liked, like horror movies, D&D and sweet sweet vengeance on whoever made your own life difficult. But as I gained a clearer vision of who I wanted to be, I found that ICP lost it's luster. For one thing, they began to take their own false bravado, which I had always thought of as being played for jokes(a clown thug is ridiculous and should only exist in comics and possibly video games based on comics). I think that as a kid, I was naive enough to believe that two white guys who painted their faces and did some simplistic rapping over circus beats weren't seriously thinking they were gangstas but twenty years or so later, the latest ICP album has a song called "Ghetto Rainbows", as if multimillionaires know what someone in a ghetto goes through. Full disclosure, I haven't listened to the song but I am not going to so if you do and it's actually touching and heartfelt, great.

There are lots of other reasons I lost touch with the band. People that I liked and genuinely respected usually reacted with thinly veiled contempt at the band. The idea of being a juggalo was appealing because it's supposed to be a clique for people who weren't cool enough to be part of a clique. Then, some people at my sister's high school decided to beat up kids who were dressing like ICP but weren't doing the makeup right. Good job, kids. How shitty would you feel if you thought "Well, at least I'll fit in with these losers." and then some assholes jumped you because you dressed like rappers you liked but you "did it wrong". So, any sense of community was slowly broken. Then there was the idiotic girl ICP fan who said really stupid things like "I hate people who have a rebel flag on their truck. They are racists and we should blow up their truck and hang them." and about the Gathering of the Juggalos, a giant festival ICP throws every year, "You can just feel all the love around you, you just have to go and you'll understand." My girlfriend pointed out that's what a lot of people say about church, too. That brings me to ICP's shitty pseudo religious status. When I was a kid, one of the coolest things about them was they had this set, clear goal of releasing six "Joker's Cards", six albums based om these six different creatures inhabiting the Dark Carnival. Then, on the sixth Jokers Card, they revealed that the Dark Carnival was God and they sincerely hoped every juggalo would find him.

Seriously? I was in shock when that happened. What kind of bullshit was this? Part of the reason I liked them was I was going through my teenage rejection of my parent's religious values and moral ideas but I really liked the idea that these creatures inhabited this carnival and they kept tally of your sins and meted out justice against evil doers. What a cop out for ICP to basically say "Oh yeah we like Jesus". After that, I felt like everything was just shitty cash grab music. I remember buying the album after the sixth joker's card album. It was called "The Tempest" and all I can remember is buying it for a road trip and taking it out before I had even left city limits.

After all this stuff, though, I was still willing to give them a chance. My siblings(minus my older brother) loved them so much. In fact, the retarded girl that said the stupid things I quoted earlier is the mother of my brother's kids. The final nail in the coffin was when I lived in Detroit. Yup, ICP got street cred for being from there, even if they were actually from Warren. I had the privilege to be in that mess of a town around Halloween and I thought I was lucky. I was talking to a guy I worked with, a Detroit native, and I mentioned I might check out Hallowicked, the annual ICP concert and he raised his eyebrows and just shrugged, more confused than anything. I always assumed that even if Detroit natives didn't care for ICP, they would know who those guys are. I was wrong. It's even worse than hate from Detroit, most people don't care about the band either way. I always said that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. Detroit is pretty much indifferent about these clowns.

I kept my CDs for about a year after that for sentimental value, mostly. I think last year I finally sold them after they had sit gathering dust for the longest time. To be fair, though, I sold all my CDs that I could because I have Spotify and that pretty much covers nearly anything I'd ever want to hear. I guess I don't really care about the band anymore but there's this really perverse fascination that I have where whenever I hear about something that they did, I call my younger siblings and ask them about it. The reaction that this unbelievably bad band can stir in people is amazing. It's like a fierce Democrat defending Obama's horrible debate performance or a staunch Catholic trying to justify all the boy-touching priests. In a way, I'm really glad that people still love them but in the same way that I'm glad people like horrible movies or TV shows, because if these people exist and not only find others like them but even procreate then life is completely absurd and unpredictable which means there is no grand design which means that ICP still being popular proves free will and the absence of God.

"10 years from now I'm going to hate you guys so much. Let's hug."

Day 8: Heart

There's so much to say about this one word. I'm not going to talk about the band, mostly because all I know is the song Barracuda and that's only because of Guitar Hero. They are awesome, though. I also remember that it was the worst element in Captain Planet. There was a fire guy that could burn stuff, a wind girl that could blow stuff around, an earth guy that could make earth quakes, a water girl that could shoot water and probably freeze stuff and then the heart guy, who had a monkey. I think his power let him control animals and possibly people, which actually sounds pretty useful. Nevertheless, as a kid, I think most of us wanted to shoot fire.

Anyway, this is another vaguely serious post about hearts and breaking them and rebuilding them and...you know what? I'm not gonna do that. Well, I sort of will. But not seriously, though. Listen, hearts get broken. It's a natural byproduct of being alive. Someone's going to die or your significant other is going to find someone else or you're just going to grow apart from someone that you thought you'd be friends with forever. A lot of guys will probably say that that last one isn't really heartbreaking but the truth is, platonic relationships that fall apart can hurt more than romantic relationships because it's harder to express any sort of sadness since most people will think you're a weirdo for investing that much in a platonic relationship. The problem is, we do.

I've said it before, not here but somewhere out there on the internet, that if a heart is broken, all you can do is pick the pieces up and super-glue it back together. In the process, bits and pieces disappear and the heart grows smaller. When I was younger, I think I misinterpreted this, though. When you have to rebuild your heart over and over, you keep track of the important pieces and only lose the parts that you weren't using anyway. So, the parts that love are still there but they're more sensitive and so you have to be more careful with them. Caution is put into every relationship going forward but once those people make it past your defenses, you find that you can love them stronger than you could love the people that broke your heart before.

What does that mean? I don't really know. Hearts are just muscles. Love is just a feeling. It's fun to analyze them, to spin them around and really try to figure them out. The weird thing is that the more you examine them, the more detached you might become. But maybe the more you examine them, the better you'll understand them and the more in tune you will be with them. Understanding yourself is important and I guess it starts with knowing your own heart.

Day 7: Guitar

That was the hugely popular Gangnam Style song that's been floating around the internet for a while. The important difference between this one and the hundreds of other remixes and parodies is that they used an acoustic guitar. Actually, I just checked and there are a bunch of acoustic covers of the song but most are from guys who need to be punched in the face. There's a weird split between skilled guitarists where it's either sincere players or smirking douchebags. I say that as a guitarist because I'm not really skilled. I played in middle school and part of high school for a total of about five years but before that, I truly loved the sound of the instrument. It can turn anything better.

That was an ICP song that gained popularity for it's ridiculous lyrics and silly presentation. Yet, when you add a few earnest vocalists and a guitar, it really becomes a wonderful song. Yes, I guess that's kind of cheating since that guy is actually playing a ukulele but that's pretty much just a tiny guitar. Okay, well that does detract from my point but I don't really know what my point is. The acoustic guitar is a beautiful instrument. I can play it, too, and I guess I wanted to drop that fact in here somewhere. Continuing with this video heavy blog, I'm just going to post one of the first songs I ever learned to play and one of the only songs I can still play just from muscle memory.

This video gets bonus points because he looks like the first guitar teacher I ever had. The second one looked like Ned Flanders without the glasses and my very last one looked like the hippy from the elephant show(Sharon, Lois and Bram's Elephant Show, I had to look it up and now I have the song stuck in my head but I will not post that video. If you want to have an 80's children show theme song stuck in your head, I'm not going to be an enabler!).

I think it's important for everyone to have at least a basic understanding of music. I think everyone should be able to play at least one song on something for the same reason that I think people should have to work in retail and fast food service. Once I understood how something is done, not only were my criticisms more valid but my ability to discern between bad music and music I don't like became much better.

I can't end this blog about guitars without saying that Desperado was a huge part in making me actually pick up the instrument. I love the sound and I love the feeling of playing it but the idea that just because I happened to be carrying a guitar case made me similar to Antonio Banderas in any way was a big selling point. It's probably the same reason that some Firefly nerds like to wear brown coats, comic book nerds wear shirts with their favorite character's logo or LARPers wear capes. I used to carry my guitar case and pretend it was a rocket launcher or a machine gun and occasionally, I'd imagine it could also function as some sort of hovering motorcycle because I'm still a Star Wars nerd above all else.

Day 6: Fudge

While I do love the chocolatey delicious snack, I'm actually talking about covering up the f-word with "fudge". It's an awesome idea. Usually, when someone is resorting to profanities, the situation is dire or at least dramatic. So, replace a word with the heavy gravity that people place on the ol f-bomb with a ridiculous word that happens to share the same first two letters.

I should have started writing this earlier because I'm really fudging up right now. I fudged up earlier because I was going to write about fighting games but now I'm just writing some nonsense. Fudging nonsense.

Okay, you know what? I'm going to call this a win and I'm going to continue the alphabet blogging thing. Fudge it.

Day 5:Emptiness

There's a really odd belief in Western religion that emptiness is something to be avoided. As a kid in church, I used to constantly hear how God has filled a void in someone's life. I first started learning about Eastern culture and beliefs in high school which is also where I started to re-evaluate what I believed. In addition to the Tao of Pooh, which is a kind of beginners guide to Eastern philosophy, helped to explain the lofty ideals of Taoists and Bruce Lee's own book, the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, was also useful to learn a different way of thinking.

I'm writing from memory here so forgive me if I misrepresent something here but Taoist belief is basically chasing emptiness. Another way to say it is to be like an uncarved block or an unsculpted piece of clay in that you contain potential but you remain without definition or a clearly defined role. This belief ran counter to the Confucianists, who believe that each individual should fill a specific role and everyone should act according to certain prescribed laws. It was the idea that emptiness was a state that people should strive to achieve that I really latched onto as a kid. The idea is still very interesting to me.

An empty space retains the potential to be whatever you need it to be. Think about how exciting it feels to move into a new apartment (well, imagine that you have those moving guys with you and you don't have to lug a couch upstairs or carry all the pieces of your desk into a room and rebuild it yourself). To tell someone that the feeling of emptiness is somehow wrong is misleading. Emptiness is something to embrace. It's a state that never let's a person completely define themselves as one thing. Before a container is full, it can hold anything. Likewise, when a person is in that state, they can be anything. Emptiness is not a problem, it's the fear that so many options presenting themselves can sometimes cause.

So, when I hear someone say that they filled their emptiness with alcohol or drugs, I think what they mean is they fought the emptiness with those things. With an open mind, there are infinite possibilities and that is terrifying. Those things dull the horror that the void presents. Unfortunately, that is also what I believe religion does. To believe that there is someone who controls everything, who is omnipotent and yet still makes time to maintain a personal relationship makes the infinite much more palatable. Easy doesn't always mean better, though. Life is frequently hard, frustrating and confusing and sometimes comfort is hard to find. I take comfort in the emptiness that I keep inside me because I know that no matter how directionless life seems, there is always so much potential in me. We are never dead as long as we allow ourselves to remain pliable, shifting and undefined.

Day 4: Dude.

There's not a lot of time for foreplay (which is a shame because I do love that sort of thing) so let's get right down to this: I have found the perfect sentence and it is this: "Dude." Yeah, I did just use a double colon, so what? I'm trying to enlighten you here. "Dude." It's so versatile. Did an acquaintances mom just die? Did a car just explode? Are you high? "Dude."

I don't even know what dude actually meant. Something about cowboys calling non-cowboys dudes and then surfers picked it up and then ninja turtles. That's how I was introduced to the word "dude". The ninja turtles called each other dudes all the time and girls could be dudettes. Awesome. However, it wasn't until my cousin came back from California and was an actual, honest-to-god skateboarder, (which blew my 8 year old mind). Well, I shouldn't hype him up too much, he was just a kid who could ride a skateboard but that was already two steps ahead most of the people I knew in early 90s Albuquerque. Anyway, my cousin (Steve) invited me over to play Nintendo one Saturday morning. Steve was, as far as I remember, one of the coolest kids ever and I was a chubby little goon so our conversation was mostly one syllable exchanges and 90% of what Steve said was just different inflections of "Dude."But each subtle shift in tone and pitch conveyed a different meaning.

On seeing the goofy boss from Mario Brothers 2 that shoots eggs at you? "Dude..." On losing to said boss? "Dude." When he handed me the controller, it was "Dude?" and then, when I managed to beat that boss, it was "Dude!" There's no way I can convey just how different it was each time but I do remember trying to play it cool at school on Monday. One of my friends was describing something and I just nodded my head. When he reached a point where I was supposed to respond, I just exhaled a slow "Duuude." Bam. That was it. No, I wasn't suddenly the coolest kid in the school. Absolutely not, that never happened. But I did find the word for when words failed me.

There's nothing that this word can't fit into. I defy anyone to find a situation where it's not appropriate. If you can think of one, then the problem is actually you. Come on, step your game up. Use it right or don't use it at all. No, scratch that. Use it some more, work out the kinks and figure out what you're doing wrong. Keep at it and then you'll see. Then you will see.

Dude.

Day 3: Comedy

Well, today I didn't really think about what I was going to do because yesterday I pretty much settled on what I was going to write today. That's not entirely true. I was going to do comics but that term can refer to several things so I decided I should specify that I'm going to actually write about comedians. Then, I thought about it for two more seconds and just decided to write about comedy, which is incredibly broad so strap in cause this might take a while.

I think comedy is actually too broad to sit and write a couple paragraphs about. So, I'll try to hone in on what I love about comedy. I guess one thing about comedy is that it's usually positive. Often times, a sense of humor is what keeps people, myself included, from completely self-destructing. Christopher Titus, one of my favorite comedians, comes from a terrifyingly broken home. His mother was literally insane but incredibly genius-level gifted. She also murdered his stepfather. His father was half-insane and abusive and yet he became a person who makes a living by making other people laugh. Specifically, he makes people laugh at how bad his life was. The same can be said about several of my favorite comedians. David Cross, Patton Oswalt and even Dane Cook are people who dig down and find these horrible, depressing stories about growing up or about what's happening in the world and turn them into something funny. I always admired that about any comedian.

That brings me back to comedy. I love comedy that involves the absurd. When I was a kid, the first joke I ever learned was "Why did the elephant step on the marshmallow? Because he didn't want to fall in the hot chocolate." Every time I think about that joke, there's some new dimension that adds to why it's funny. The weird thing about most people's brains, though, is that everyone immediately recognizes how ridiculous the whole thing is and the only reaction that seems appropriate is to laugh. I think that's why I love comedy so much; it's a good analogy for life. I mentioned earlier that comedy keeps people safe from themselves. I think with a good enough sense of humor, a person could survive anything. Sometimes I think that if Sylvia Plath or Kurt Cobain learned to crack a joke, maybe they wouldn't have gone out the way they did. But maybe that's not fair to them. Anyway, I think I'm diluting my point.

Comedy is the absurd but it's also the serious made silly. It's the pope in over-sized sunglasses or a break dancing Stephen Hawking or... well, to be honest, I think by attempting to define comedy, I'm taking away from the essence of comedy. Part of something being funny is the spontaneity of it, the "you had to be there" moments that really can't be explained. A joke is always the best the first time you hear it. Surprise is the most important factor in comedy. So to try to define comedy, to try to separate the absurd and ridiculous elements of life, is like dumping bottled water into a cup of tap water and then trying to only drink the bottled water.

Day 2: Blink-182

There were so many choices to pick from today. The obvious one would have been to do a review of Borderlands 2 but I don't think I'm at a point where I can review it right now. I could have gone with a comedy option and wrote a couple paragraphs about Buns or Boogers (because my sense of humor is 10 years old) or I could have done a whole post about the creeping horror of male pattern Baldness that is slowly making it's way around my head. Instead, I found inspiration when I sat down to write and turned on my music player.

Blink-182 is one of those bands that I really like but I don't own any of their CDs. I also wouldn't usually admit that I like them right away but they are just one of those bands that I discovered as a teenager and they just kept appearing at the right time with the right song to capture a certain mood as I grew older. At certain points in my life, I've been reclusive to the point where it was work, go home and just listen to music until I fell asleep. There was always some specific track from Blink that worked it's way into the mix.

"Dammit" was one of the first songs of theirs that I remember hearing and was one of the first songs I downloaded on Napster. Consequently, it was also one of the eight songs I put on my first MP3 player that held a whopping 32 mb of music. It perfectly summed up the feelings of high school and the general malaise that being almost out of school and almost eighteen brings on. "The Rock Show" was what I thought I was looking forward to as I grew older and moved out of my dad's house, first in with my older brother and then with some friends. "Feeling This" was appropriate for the first half of the year lease we took out on this amazing house that became a real party spot. Then, one room mate got pregnant and the other had a rough break up and in between all this stuff, I went through my first real relationship and the horrible fallout from that. So, "I Miss You" became the track to play while wistfully thinking about what could have been. Slowly, I came to grips with reality and started to understand that some people will just use others and then throw them away. "Stockholm Syndrome" was the track that got played over and over.

It's appropriate that three of the most listened to tracks of theirs were from the self-titled album because I think that was the album that they really put a lot of themselves into. I know most people would probably write this band off as cheesy pop-punk, the kind of music people only listen to because they don't know any better or they just have bad taste. Lyrically, though, Blink-182 is like any other good band. Some of their songs are silly, fun party songs but even those tracks are self-aware enough to be sung with the appropriate smirk, as if to say "This is not who we are all the time but this is what you want, so here it is".  They have been around for almost twenty years now and I think they figured out that if they do just enough of whatever people want to hear, they can really do whatever they want and eventually the two things start to merge until their audience is just people who want to hear whatever they want to play.

I guess it was only recently that I took a step back and tried to make a clearer definition of myself but I really couldn't do it by music because this is a band I love, but so is Jurassic 5, Slipknot and Garth Brooks. There's not really anything that is off limits when it comes to me and music but blink-182 was there when I didn't really completely understand how important music is and they just stuck. I really considered changing the topic to Ben Folds Five half way through this article because I still have this feeling that saying I like this band will somehow ruin my social standing. Still, I guess this is one of those things that is just bouncing around in my head and I wanted to just lay it to rest here. Also, I procrastinated and ended up writing this at about 11 pm. I'll probably start earlier tomorrow.

Alphabet Challenge-Day 1: Alphabet Challenge

Okay, so I started blogging again regularly about two weeks ago and it was supposed to be like warming up for a marathon but I don't think that was really what it was like. It was more like getting ready to cross the English Channel by taking lots of baths. So, originally, it was to be me and my friend Ben doing a blog a day each about a topic that starts with whatever letter is the consecutive letter of the day before...I have a bad habit of explaining things and making them more confusing than what they actually are.

Today, we start, although I may need to give Ben a little tap tap tapperoo to get him back into writing. When I was younger (also angrier and lonelier), it was easy to write because there was nothing else to do and no one to really talk to to work through whatever was bothering me at the time. I threw everything on paper or computer screens and that worked pretty well. Presently, I'm not magically cured of all ailments and I'm not fueled by hugs and butterflies but I have someone to talk to regularly when something starts to eat at me. Usually, she spots it before I even know I have a problem, which is incredibly useful for staying close enough to well-adjusted.

I told you all that so I can tell you this: writing isn't hard. Writing something that you're proud of or that serves some sort of purpose is, though and I feel like I can't really write what I would like to read. The day after I post something, I'm looking at it, rereading and over-analyzing every little detail. That is why I thought Ben and I should do this alphabet thing (not to be too presumptuous, Ben, but I think we suffer from the same problem). I guess it's kind of cheating to use Alphabet Challenge as my "A" topic but I want to put in writing my specific goal so I can look at it and say "Yup, I can do this" and, if I end up not doing it, I can at least say I legitimately say I tried. If I can also just write without that little nagging critic popping up and questioning the point of what I'm doing, too, that would be another success and a movement towards my ultimate goal of someday getting paid to write.

Tomorrow is the "B" blog and this should continue for 25 more consecutive days. If it doesn't for whatever reason, I will probably still blog regularly but the challenge would start over in the month of November. You know what helps me write? Comments! I know I don't have a lot of official followers on google, I think more people read this than is shown so if you want to suggest topics starting with whatever letter, feel free to do it here.