Guess What, You Guys

A cold bead of sweat detached suddenly from my forehead, and fell hopelessly towards the earth like a very salty acorn falling from a very sweaty tree branch in early autumn. It landed abruptly on the green beans below with a heart-saddening “thwump.” I stared at the pile of limp vegetables with anguish. The sweat droplet surely was not the first molecule of sodium to which these beans had been introduced, of that I was quite certain. The tepid bath of salt water from which I had retrieved them minutes prior was proof enough of that. I wrapped my trembling fingers around the glass shaker in front of me, overturned it above the plate, and shook it with a ferocity even I did not expect. The lackluster result of this effort could not be mistaken. Four measly flakes of pepper were ejected, three of which landed on the grimy table. I frowned.

To my immediate left, an infant no older than 6 months was scowling at me with a very convincing, adult-like expression of disgust. I could not help but wonder if there had been some reason for her to hate me, of course aside from the obvious reason that she is an infant and therefore an idiot. After some thought, I concluded that while it was quite probable I had done nothing to arouse such anger, it was unlikely still that I would ever confirm this with her, mostly due to her being an idiot.

I turned to my right. A severely old woman sat across a small table from a younger woman who was also severely old. The first woman was painting her fingernails a deep maroon, and on her face she wore a grimace that befit her age. The second woman was talking with great passion about her cat. Between the two women sat two mugs of tea, hopelessly retaining what little heat they barely ever had in the first place. Around the younger old woman's chair-back hung a nylon handbag, which bore a screen-printed photograph of two smiling children. A Christmas gift for Grandma, no doubt. I shut my eyes and groaned.

It was time. I saw no legitimate reason to prolong it any further. I lowered my head and squinted at the fried chicken thigh lounging suspiciously by the green beans below me. With one hand firmly rubbing my left temple to coax away a headache that simply would not cease, I raised the thigh to my lips and, with grand trepidation, took a bite. A wave of sodium washed over me and carried with it a sheer force that made my ears ring. I dropped the thigh to the plate in horror and lunged frantically for the nearby glass of water.

My clammy fist clamped down around nothing.

The cup was gone.

Dawn was upon the quiet mountain town of Templeton. The Sun, anxious to shed its light on the world for another day, peeked out from behind its planet-sized hiding place and simply said, "Hello."

The Sun had never done this before. Since the beginning of time, the Sun had always risen silently, without a single peep. But today, for reasons unknown, the Sun spoke. Its massive voiced boomed the deafening word, and the shockwave spread across Templeton like a wildfire. Houses shook. Cars honked. Streetlights swayed. Cows mooed indifferently, then continued eating grass. Cows are not easily startled.

"Auughhh!!" Jack's eyelids rocketed open and he leapt out of bed, stumbling to the bedroom window and in search of a source of the massive greeting. What he saw through the foggy pane of glass the same damn street he'd seen every day for 46 years. The ugly pink house next door. The uglier light blue house across from that one. The yellow one next to that one, where Percy cut his hand off in the mailbox door flap while tripping on peyote. Jack's eyes darted around the scenery for a full sixty seconds, looking for any sign of life. One by one, front doors opened on the houses. Through the doorways emerged the same figures Jack had seen emerge from those doors for 46 years, eyes squinting outward towards the street.

Jack took a step back from the window and grasped blindly for the bathrobe he had draped over the chair the night before. He whipped it around himself, tied the belt in a knot, and hurried towards his own front door.

Out in the street, a small crowd was growing. The neighbors stood around conversing amongst themselves. Constance, from the pink house, spoke to her husband Thomas in a hushed tone; she was obviously shaken. Thomas looked through her, blankly. Thomas and Constance hated one another.  

Richard, from the blue house, was standing on his lawn in red boxers and a sad-looking off-white undershirt. He wrinkled his nose, then sneezed. There was no ‘bless you” in reply, and Richard frowned. Hardly anyone talked to Richard these days. In the past year, he had become obsessed with nutrition, and most conversations with him turned quickly towards his disturbingly-aggressive juicing regimen. The odor of kale emanating from his skin was overpowering.

Percy stood in the street, his bare feet on the cool blacktop, and his blue eyes pointed upwards towards the Sun. He scratched his head with the stump at the end of his arm and furrowed his brow. “Has the Sun always worn sunglasses?” His question hung in the air.  Jack’s foggy morning glaze turned upwards towards the life-giving orb in the sky, and the expression on his face slowly turned to one of horror.  

“Time for breakfast!” boomed the Sun, and from behind it emerged two cartoonish arms, each Mickey Mouse gloved hand gripping a steel driving range scoop piled high with raisins. Shocked screams echoed off of the town’s quaint buildings. Constance fainted. Thomas ignored her. A car honked again. The cows continued chewing.

Look me in the eyes. Okay, if you can't find me, find a picture of me and look at that picture deeply in the eyeballs area. Actually, if we don’t know each other, don’t look at me deeply because dude seriously stop staring at me, or I am going to have to punch you. LISTEN, just METAPHORICALLY look me in the eyes, and tell me that you’ve never once wondered what you would do if you had yourself a nifty little time machine. 

Bzzzzt, sorry, I have bad news for you. Time travel is not an exciting topic anymore. The idea of traveling through time is blasé, so much so that the mere thought of it causes me to use douchebag words like “blasé.” Every film in the past 20 years that’s used time travel as a plot device has done so out of what seems to be sheer, pathetic desperation for an unpredictable-yet-underwhelming plot twist. Anything is possible if you just GO BACK and DO IT AGAIN. The audience is too distracted by the agonizing threat of another plot twist and they lose sight of what’s truly important in the any half-decent science fiction film:  contorted, overacted facial expressions.

But there is also good news, everyone! You, as taxpayers (I am assuming you pay your taxes) (Hey! Pay your taxes, deadbeats!) are probably funding someone’s career in STILL taking time travel seriously. It’s not a widely-publicized position, and in fact, I’m willing to bet you’ll never notice. If that guy died, you would not see a noticeable change in your tax withholdings. But nevertheless, someone out there has dedicated his life to proving that Ashton Kutcher could have gotten that girl to love him without going back in time a bunch and eventually losing his limbs and drowning or whatever. And the sad part is, even with that awesome career, he probably still has a water cooler in the office where he complains about something.  

You take life seriously. Your plight is a terrifically difficult one; it is a struggle and it’s most important that you are not the only one who knows about it. Everything is a goddamn dilemma and let’s all frown about it until nothing is done and we all feel worse. I know that everyone really just wants to feel specifically important and so that is why I’m about to tell you this awesome point.

You are without a doubt, the only person with your specific set of problems. No one else on earth has the same things to complain about. Isn’t that neat? Sure, a lot of people are [understandably] infuriated that their phone loses signal across the same half-mile on their commute home. And all kinds of people are also angry about their neighbor dropping acid and watching Happy Days reruns at 3:30am. Surely, someone out there is annoyed that her kid laughs like Fran Drescher. And without a doubt, someone ordered a sweater in blue and they sent a navy one instead and God dammit I already have a navy sweater, is someone seriously out to ruin my life? 

Your problems are Your Problems. Each one is probably not specific to you, but if you write out a list of things that piss you off right now, that list is going to be really, really unique. And that’s pretty cool, if you ask me. Next time you are angry about your job or spouse or girlfriend or Warcraft guild or dog or dog’s tail or the President, and wouldn’t it be so much more relieving if I just updated my Facebook status with how tough life is it is, I want you to really think about how unique you are and how everyone probably already knows that, AND/OR, doesn’t care.

Let’s face it.  It is still completely a lost cause for you to ever become a real princess or a real astronaut. Sweetheart, princesses are born into royalty or are super hot, and it’s likely that you are not Kate Middleton material. True facts o’ life. And the US canceled its manned space program, so calm down, young Joaquin Phoenix. Start putting your eggs in the “Virgin Galactic isn’t a huge goddamn publicity stunt” basket, and maybe you’ll get into low orbit one day.

Hi, everyone. I would like to take a quick moment to remind you that it is already 2012. Twenty. Twelve. Two oh uno dos. The Chinese Year of the Eastern Mongolian Panic Attack. We are all plummeting towards our respective, yet inevitable end, and literally nothing that you do would even approach the concept of preventing this. Your particular unavoidable demise could come any day now, but what have you done with your life? Got your GED? Hit an innocent pedestrian with your dad’s Volvo? Peeled all the stickers off of a Rubick’s Cube and reapplied them so it looks like you solved it? We can all tell you did that, dude. It’s so obvious. And, dude, it is not as if owning a solved Rubick’s Cube means you were the one who solved it. You’re aware that they’re... like, sold that way, right? Even if we didn’t know you’re a total cheater, we would probably just assume you were too chicken to shuffle it up when your grandma gave it to you as a Flag Day present when you were in the 7th grade. All I am saying is, you are simply not making any large-scale progress in life by claiming petty fraud as personal accomplishment.

If you are a human being who is alive on Earth right now, you are obviously aware of the concept of the Bucket List. It’s a list you make when you’re getting old, and it is filled with grandiose crap you hope to do before you buy the farm. This list (so named for its inventor, Listley von Bucketsburg) represents much of our collective inability to enjoy life to its fullest. We’re not even able to enjoy life to its semi-fullest. If life is a box of chocolates, then the amount of the box that people truly enjoy is equivalent to that one weird chocolate one in the top left that’s filled with like, pistachio butter. Basically, our lives sound delicious, but taste like pure garbage.  Your bucket list is jam-packed with things that sound suspiciously—no, outrageously—impossible (#322. Skydive off the Eiffel Tower! Yeah!!) and then you spend your life finding out that, yes, your instincts were correct, it is not possible or legal to base jump off a national monument and parachute into the metropolis below without having a surprisingly large reserve of expendable cash to use for bribes. But, Paris police, beware: I AM going to bribe you to let me do that before I kick the buc—ohhhh, THAT’s why they call it a Bucket List. Man, the von Bucketsburg family is NOT going to be happy about this one.

One of the best parts of writing a world famous blog is how people are super excited about new material and how everyone waits with bated breath for the next post, and how that level of excitement never diminishes, no matter how much time elapses between posts.

One of the best parts of writing an up-and-coming (read: "categorically obscure") blog is that people will inquire about your planned blogging schedule, but they will do so in passing and the frequency of these inquiries quickly diminishes from "maybe once or twice" to "literally never." This is a good thing, for someone who requires zero outside motivation to be a regular blogger. But it is unadulterated kryptonite for someone who has "Taking Initiative" problems in the creative writing sector.

I say all of this (Are you still with me? WAKE UP) because nearly eight months elapsed between this post and the previous one. No one is to blame here. You are not to blame, because you are just a faceless orb which represents my vast, dedicated readership, so it would be unfair and I believe scientifically impossible to blame something like this on an abstraction. I personally am not to blame because I am incapable of making mistakes, and that is that.

But it is not to say that I do not foster some remorse for the fact that this tragic lapse of time has occurred, and that we are all at least seven months older and absolutely no months wiser, due to a series of freak cosmic coincidences which cleaved the bond between you and a hypothetical improved you, who might have read what should have been written in this blog. If I could have predicted it, I would have stopped it, but I am not some kind of clairvoyant superhuman. I am just a regular old human with zero human flaws.

With the past behind us, and something like 300 days left ahead of us before the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar tick tocks Ke$ha-style down to zero and we all either perish in a lake of fire or wake up on December 21 and look around sheepishly because we've made total idiots of ourselves with this whole Mayan apocalypse thing, with ALL OF THAT ahead of us, I am confident that we can work together and get back on track here, because that is what OBSCURE BLOGGING IS ALL ABOUT.

"Overconfident rambling is tantamount to effective communication, because I said so."

Since the dawn of that thing that is inside our skulls, full of blood and stuff, making us do most all the things we do (everyone please pause to admire the psychology degree on the wall behind me), we humans have really not gotten along all that well. We've gotten along pretty well, considering the 200,000 years or so we've all been putzing around the rock beneath us in our modern state. We're all still here. We're definitely not in bad shape. Look at this!

Really, that's not too shabby. We're of the least concern, according to ourselves, on a list we made. Certainly if that changes, we really need to start being concerned. Moving up on that list is like all of humankind passing by the first stage, Accepting that we have a problem. But we're not there yet.

That is not to say that we are incapable of pointing out terrible character flaws in our society.

What I am going to do here is bring you through a complaint arc that will end in an epiphany. If you get to the point where you're impatient and cranky with my complaining, and you want me to stop complaining, well, the X is right up there in the right hand corner of your screen. Yes, I'm aware that Macs don't have anything to click up there in that corner. That's called a subtle slam on how impatient and cranky Windows users can get, and face it, you all just got totally slapped.

So here's a thing I have never really liked. Reality television. I guess we could say that Survivor started the whole thing. Since I am not an expert, I am going to guesstimate that Survivor, Big Brother, those early shows were the point at which reality programming saw a massive boom in popularity. So we're talking, what, 11 years now?

For a long time, I hated it. I could not stand it. It wasn't just the fact that everyone was obsessed with it. People have been obsessed with things before, and I have not always agreed. People have been crazy about country music for decades and decades and I have always been crazy about immediately changing the station to anything else. Big F'in deal. What was so infuriating about reality TV was how I felt like I was one of like three people people who didn't like it. When Survivor aired, the next day, I would have not known that Survivor had aired, and so I wouldn't have known that the gay guy won an ugly Pontiac SUV, and I was a PARIAH. "What? You didn't watch it? Get out." True conversation. Can't believe my English teacher said that to me.

Time passed. Fewer and fewer scripts were written. People were hooked on these things. I soon realized another thing about it. Shows which I felt like were the lowest common denominator of intelligence level, and appealed to the lowest common denominator of humans, were beloved by people whom I saw as equals. What was I missing? I'm not any more worldly than these people. I'm certainly not any better than them. I share fart jokes with these guys and laugh about really really dumb cartoons, but when it comes to talking about yesterday's Viva La Bam, Jesus Christ, I find nothing funny about that guy skateboarding into a Lamborghini and fracturing his eyeballs. What is wrong with me?

Show after show got made. Some premiered to bigger viewing numbers than the Pope's funeral. Survivor: Compton. The Hills 90210. Real World Road Rules Alaskan Pipeline Challenge. So I Think I Can Drive Drunk. My Mom Got Me Pregnant. I Didn't Know I Was Asian. I was beginning to fear for the very fabric of American society.

But recently, I had had a few beers, and I turned on the History Channel (I have fun when I drink, you guys), and the show Pawn Stars was on. This unassuming program is about a few guys who run a pawn shop, into which people come with their crap, to find out it's ancient Egyptian crap and is worth six hundred million dollars. I watched a many-hour marathon. The History Channel routinely plays marathons of their own shows because let's face it, there are only so many Hitler documentaries out there.

Soon thereafter, I wondered, aloud, to no one in particular, why I watched that show for so long. No one is going to think I'm cool for watching Pawn Stars. Besides the sexually-charged-yet-extremely-lazy pun in the title, it's the least cool-sounding show I've ever heard of. But here's what I realized: It has information. Full of it! The guys get these things from people, and they bring in experts, and the experts give you a little blurb about how, like, members of the Gambino crime family were Sicilian but there were Russian associates, though they were not true mafia members because you have to be Sicilian to be a made man. It's informative. And I know, it is NOT REAL. None of this really happens off the cuff, but at least I feel like I've learned a little something.

Herein lies the revelation. The shows I truly loathe, the Jersey Shores, the Real Housewives of Who Cares Where, the 16 and Pregnants, the Teen Moms, the Keeping Up With The Kardashians, the Big Rich Texases, these shows have damn near one dimension. This dimension, this crutch, is people arguing.

I've watched my fair share of these shows and, far and away, the one thing people do more than anything on these shows is argue. No one likes each other! They hate each other to the core! They all want to tear each others lips off and use them to plug their own ears so they don't need to hear anything but their own muffled voice inside their own giant ego heads.

It's not the so-called scriptlessness; humans can be funny on their own. Not everyone can be, certainly not MTV reality stars; but some people are just funny. Take a look at improv comedians. And it's not the format. Though, as a friend reminded me, multiple camera angles in a candid shot means the shot had to be staged. It's not all of the obvious flaws that are kinda annoying about reality TV. It's the entire premise of these shows that gets me. The whole thing is fake, except for how much these people hate each other.

So here are two things that distance me from the average fan of situational reality. 

a. I have no sick interest in watching people be miserable. Uncomfortable situations are not funny to me. Meet The Parents is a shit salad of a movie franchise. The Office stopped being funny when The Office relied primarily on awkward pauses. When people are just bickering over nothing, wherein I might see "terrible" and "not interesting," others seem to find what I now call Argumentertainment. Dear Oxford English Dictionary.

b. It's fake! A lot of people think it's 100% real. People got MAD, SO MAD! when it was suggested that The Hills was scripted. The Hills, where Heidi Montag got $600,000 of silicon put into her to make her look like a blow-up sex doll glued to two Hindenburg zeppelins. But even when they are told it's fake, it's still somehow real to them, dammit.

In my unending pursuit of satiating my insatiable hunger for useless facts, I went to Wikipedia to look at the July 2nd article, to see what happened on July Seconds past. #Saturdayactivites. Amidst a whole array of very uninteresting events (The Treaty of Tordesillas was ratified today in 1492 by Spain?? Sacrebleu!), a few of them stood out to me. And while I do not have anything worthwhile to say about any of them in particular, that does not mean that I cannot find plenty of things to say about them, which I plan to do, so buckle up! PUT ON YOUR SEATBELT 35 years ago today, South Vietnam fell and the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam was formed. Now, it is no secret, or perhaps it is, but very very soon it will definitely not be a secret, that I was not alive during any part of the Vietnam War (public knowledge now). Not when it started; not when it ended; not during the whole middle part when all of those dirty hippies were really quite unhappy about the whole thing; not even for the 10th anniversary party of the end of the war. But I am alive after it, which makes the next observation legitimate. It is, right now, only 35 years later. That's not that long! It is basically the lifespan of an rather unhealthy human (or of a frighteningly healthy dog). Why is it that I hardly ever hear about the Vietnam war? I feel like it should at least be a topic every ONCE in a while, right? Not necessarily in the sense of, "How was your day honey?" "It was good. I cried about the Vietnam War at lunch." "Me too. Let's talk about it." That makes me wonder: in the 35 years following the American Civil War, how awkward was everything in America? Those first few sessions of Congress after the war ended must have been palpably uncomfortable. It has to be, by far, one of the best examples of the “Daddy just hit Mommy at the dinner table” analogy (R.I.P. Dane Cook). Also: How did it work living on the border between the Confederacy and the Union? The entire top of Virginia borders Kentucky, West Virginia, and Maryland, all Union states. It is not as if the border of Virginia is an Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade bottomless gorge, separating the states (right? I am pretty sure that is not the case). There had to have been situations where literally down the road from your house, past the Wal-Mart Supercenter mall, is another country. A country which you despise, and whose citizens you spend most of your waking hours either killing, or thinking up inventive new ways to kill them. Next Yankee sumbich I come cross, I’ma see how many live chickens I can ram down his throat until he dead. Right now the record’s eightn’ a half. Speaking of Wal-Mart: forty-nine years ago, on July 2, 1962, the very first Wal-Mart store opened in Rogers, Arkansas. Neat! That must have been an exciting occasion for the 250 citizens of Rogers. Today, there are, not exaggerating, seventy-eight million Wal-Mart stores worldwide. They just opened a new one on the surface of the Sun. Going to Wal-Mart back then could not have been the shopping spree nightmare experience that trips to Wal-Mart have become today. Sure, cars were big in the 60s, but very few people had SUVs. You could not transport, in one trip, all of the groceries and supplies you'd need for a month (spent in a bomb shelter, like 60s people worried would happen, haha, so dumb.). Physics would not allow it. I would know, I am a scientist. I worked at a Wal-Mart once. Not in Wal-Mart, calm down; outside of one. I worked for a temp agency, and an organization hired me to go stand outside the store and hassle entering and exiting customers, asking for their email addresses, so this organization could spam them with anti-Wal-Mart hate mail. You know, normal college jobz, haha lololol. The only catch here was that Wal-Mart mostly services the giant (gigante) Hispanic population where I live. I am not Hispanic (also not a secret, anymore). To give you an idea of how effective I am at conversing in Spanish, this organization might as well have sent me to Saint Mary’s School for the Blind and told me to entertain the students with my mime act. Last thing: 130 years ago today, someone shot US President James Garfield, who died a few weeks later from the wound. Did you know this? It's okay if you didn't! I consistently forget who the third assassinated president was. Not like I am called upon all too often to recite the list of assassinated presidents, that would be weird. To my knowledge, Garfield was neither a super awesome, nor a terrible leader. I’m sure he was fine, just adequate at his job; but he got killed! Someone walked up and shot him! The Secret Service really, really did not learn their lesson 15 years prior with the whole Lincoln thing (that is the proper way to talk about a terrible public murder, by calling it a “thing”). James Garfield: Rest In Peace, Buddy, and Sorry I Forgot You Didn’t Just Die Normally Like Other People

Summer has befallen the northern hemisphere. That is not an opinion or anything. It's quite literally past the point where days are getting longer up here, north of the Equator, also, north of the country of Ecuador. Why do they get to lay claim to that word? They really should share it, I mean, many other countries fall on along the Equator. Maybe not all that many, but definitely a handful. That would be like changing the name of Russia to Snow. The great country of Snow, part of the former Union of Snowviet Snowcialist Republics. The capital of which, of course, would have been Iciclegrad. Obviously.

I find it particularly interesting that, once you are no longer in school, the idea of summer becomes a quickly dissipating memory. I desperately would love to reminisce here about the great joys of summers past, but that seems like it would be terribly depressing to not only me, but mostly to me, as I am he who matters.

To be honest, I kind of don't even remember summers. What did we even do for summer when we were kids? At the risk of sounding like the lame grown up lawyer version of Peter Pan in 'Hook', (Hook reference quota, CHECK), I really have trouble imagining what in the hell I would even do today with three months of just unadulterated nothingness. It does not sound like the non-stop, uncontrollable parade of amusement that I remember.

I definitely remember going outside a lot. I guess the pool was a thing, bikes, stuff like that, but I am really more curious what we as kids did outside of "normal business hours." That is to say, what kids USED to do, back when they had to invent their own fun, before top-quality screen-based entertainment, specifically of the interactive variety, was readily available to literally almost everyone and cost as much as a small-to-moderate-sized handful of ripe kumquats. Let's face it, Carter and Reagan Babies (oh you were born in the HW Bush era? Shut up. There could have been iPods in your hands before you even stopped believing in Santa Claus). Pick one piece of technology you use today purely for entertainment. If you had that thing when you were 7 or 8 years old, you and I know that you wouldn't ever have done shit outside of your house. You would have sat in there, playing Super Mario Theft Auto of Duty 4 until your eyes, ears, and thumbprints were bleeding, and we would all now be a nation of lazy, overweig- whoops, nevermind.

But in the time before all that, before American childhood imagination was replaced by Sony presents Apple iCreativeThinking Suite for Toddlers Aged 2-15, what did we do? It is certainly not like I went to Bally Total Fitness and just got jacked and tan out of boredom when I was 8 years old, right? I feel like I would remember At Least that much.

Side Question: Maybe this is the death of my childhood innocence (which, fun fact, officially died when saw Pauly Shore's 'In The Army Now' at the age of ten), but was the ice cream truck driver always automatically assumed to be a straight up pervert criminal molester nightmare? Or is it our modern society, hell-bent on finding new means by which our childrens' lives are in grave, unavoidable danger, which has sullied that profession?

“Nothing prepares you more for the real world than an obscenely well-established Internet presence.”

Charles Robert Darwin, The Origin of Tumblr (1916)

I cannot stress enough how much I agree with Mr. Darwin on this one. Of course, his famous statement has been proven time and time again, quite exhaustively, by every single wealthy, respectable research institute, and by no means is there is absolutely any reason for you to go fact-checking it. Stay with me here.

I am going to be telling you some things and many of them will surprise you. First and foremost, a fact of which you were likely unaware is that, while it is grammatically illegal and functionally lazy, starting a piece of literature with a block-quote like the one above is the number one most effective means by which the author can both draw the reader into the narrative, and simultaneously bore the reader to tears. I say that only because I feel like you are all wondering what that sickly feeling is in your stomachs; it is the motion sickness caused by the roller coaster of emotions through which I have just put you. It is called literary genius, and i have most of it.

The second most effective method by which the author can draw in the reader to the point of boredom tears is using mind-numbingly proper grammar at all times. Those of you still reading at this point will notice that I have adhered now to method one and method two, in order of effectiveness, and also in order of appearance.

What I am trying to say is that I have started a Tumblr blog for the following well-thought-out, logically-sound, and absurdly-irrefutable reasons:

Facebook is seriously getting on everyone’s very last nerve and everyone definitely knows it.

Twitter lets the poster use 140 characters or less in order to make a statement, and anyone who posts several simultaneous tweets in order to get his or her point across is tried and convicted of figurative Blogging Treason and thus cast into the figurative Blogging Lake of Fire for all of figurative and literal eternity.

While we refuse to admit it publicly, there is nothing that satisfies each and every one of us more than to see a notification that someone has Liked or Commented on a Facebook post, or that someone has retweeted your tweet. It’s like the stork delivered you a baby, but when you unravel the handkerchief, it is actually a baby (hi there, baby! aren’t you the cutest) but the baby metaphorically represents your self-esteem and it just went up a little. That analogy was really dumb. Moving on!

There is a lot of mindless drivel out there on the Internet. No one is arguing that. For example, I spent three (3!) hours last night on YouTube trying to find a video of Elton John singing “Tiny Dancer” but specifically one where he sings the high notes in the chorus. Did you know? Surprisingly difficult! I only found two. The rest of them, he sings a low harmony and some backup singers do the high notes. It accomplished nothing in the grand scheme of anything and it most definitely was a waste of time, one of the more wasteful wastes of time that I can readily think of. Even describing it was a waste of time! MOVING ON AGAIN