I’ve been doing some freelance stuff for a site called ManCave, which is run by Cracked columnist Brendan McGinley. Luke McKinney, another Cracked columnist, also writers for ManCave regularly. I’m in good company.
I’ve already written about 5 or 6 articles for them, but this is my latest. Enjoy my writing, no one!
I wrote this, therefore you should read it. (I’m really good at SAT analogies).
Dear Crow Outside My Window,
Shut the fuck up.
Sincerely,
The Guy Who Isn’t Afraid To Use His Box of Nerf Guns For Evil
We all have low points in our lives when we get down on ourselves for no reason. The one low point I often revisit is I tend to think I’m not good at anything. I think people that are genuinely good at something, whatever it may be, can be summed up in a sentence or two. I don’t think I have that one sentence summary.
“Fred? I’ll tell you something about Fred: If you have any questions about home repairs, talk to Fred.”
“Amy, she’s a film buff. You want to know anything about movies, don’t go to Wikipedia or IMDB; ask Amy.”
The closest thing I have to one is…
“Luis? Oh, yeah. He’s the guy that owns a pair of cargo shorts that have an unnecessary strip of cloth on the zipper that he always pees on. If you have any questions about peeing on zipper cloth and getting pee on your legs, Luis is your guy.”
That’s my specialty. I can piss on zipper cloths the way Michael Jordon put a ball in a hoop. That will be my legacy. I’ve pissed on more strips of zipper cloth than anyone else, ever.
The sad thing is that’s probably just me being hopeful. There’s probably someone else out there that’s fantastic at peeing on that zipper cloth. Compared to him, I’m a bumbling rookie in the peeing-on-strips-of-zipper-cloth game. He sees me peeing on my zipper cloth and he smiles and says, “Keep working at it, kid.” And then I’m back at square one thinking I’m not good at anything.
And why is he watching me pee on a strip of cloth attracted to my zipper? Because that’s what the world’s greatest pisser of zipper cloth does. He doesn’t get paid, so like David Carradine in Kung Fu, he just wanders the earth; perhaps trying to find a pisser of zipper cloths worthy of dethroning him from the position of the best pisser on zipper cloths in the world. And when he finds me, he will be extremely disappointed and he’ll head off in to the sunset to find someone else that thinks they’re really good at pissing on cloths that have no business being attached to zippers.
I’ve had some work done.
I’ve had my eyes peeled, my ears opened, my nose upturned, my eyebrows raised, my ears bent, my legs pulled, my shoulder chips removed (which lifted some weight off my shoulders), my teeth gritted, my fingers crossed, my brains racked, my hair let down, my tongue tied, my upper-lip stiffened, my head leveled, my skin thickened, my nose browned, my chin kept up, and my eyes enlarged to match my stuffed stomach. I’ve had my feet lightened, and thus, my foot-print reduced, which gave me room to flip my head over my heels.
As a result, I’ve had my wits sharpened, my words honeyed, my horizons expanded, my hopes raised, my expectations lowered, my spirits lifted, my ego inflated, and my reality augmented.
I may have had some work done, but I’ve saved face. I am long in the tooth, so I hope I don’t go belly up because this is costing me an arm and a leg, and I’ve had to give a pound of flesh. But it’s not like I’ve had my arms shortened and my pockets deepened, so it’s no skin off my nose.
Speaking of the dreaded N-word, Rick Santorum may have said it. I talk about it here…
Wow. I had no idea this still existed. Whoever’s running FunnyCrave now reposted this. It must have been sitting in the FC archives from when Adam, Ian, and I made the switch from Scenic Anemia to FunnyCrave back in July of 2009. The article was originally written at least a few months before that. I never ran it on FC because we thought the site would be big and we didn’t want to start off with something that could potentially offend a lot of people.
Man, we were dumb.
Anyway, here it is. I haven’t re-read it, so there’s probably an embarrassingly high number of spelling and grammatical errors.
We’re all prejudice in our own, unique way. We all indiscriminately hate a group of people. For some of us, it’s a race of people, or a nationality, or a religion. For others, like me, it’s subgroups of people that I have something in common.
I wear glasses. I’m near-sighted. All people that wear glasses share a common struggle. No matter how good we look with them, we’re all a little too close to either Harry Potter, John Lennon, Buddy Holly, or our grandmothers. It’s a struggle.
But far-sightedness? People that claim to be far-sighted? Bullshit. How can you see stuff that’s way over there, but you can’t see stuff that’s right fucking here? I hate those people. Their condition is completely illogical. It’s bullshit. They’re liars. Fuck them.
I don’t hate them because they’re black or French or Muslim – the old forms of prejudice — it’s because they make no sense – a new form of prejudice.
Old prejudice is your grandmother (“Don’t those negros smell funny?”), which is why you don’t want glasses that make you look like her.
New prejudice is colorblind and doesn’t care where you’re from or who you have sex with or what deity you’re BFFs with; new prejudice is boring. All of the hugeness and importance of prejudice is dying out and is being replaced with lame and whiny, like a cool underground band that gets bland as they get richer and get further disconnected from their hardcore roots, when they would inject heroin and Pixy Stix in to their brain stems. Now they’re all driving mini-vans and take Lipitor and worry about the salt content of crackers.
New prejudice has nothing to do with our cultural identities, the things that make us the people we are, it’s all about our sub-cultural identities, which make us the people we are specifically; the little things.
“You like Twizzlers, huh? So…what was it like strangled by the umbilical cord during birth? ”
“Ugh. You used comic sans to type my birthday card? Don’t worry. There’s always prime real estate in hell for people like you.”
You might have an X-Box and you think people with Playstations are faggots – you’re double prejudice; old prejudice and new prejudice.
When you’re being prejudice on a broad scale, it’s exciting and interesting. When you’re prejudice on an individual level, it reminds us of how truly uninteresting we all are. If I hate you because you’re black, that’s interesting. You can’t help being black, you have no say in what color your skin is, yet I hate you. The psychology there is fascinating. Old prejudice is illogical, yet it somehow feels like there’s more substance there. If I hate you — truly, deeply hate you, in the purest definition of the word — because you love Twilight, that’s pathetic on my part – completely justified, but still pathetic. As with your skin color, I shouldn’t give a shit.
Martin Luther King was right in dreaming that his children should one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. The one thing he didn’t realize is how extremely petty and boring it would make us.
That’s the problem with our constant need to reach perfection; the closer we get, the less we hate, the more we get along, the more we see eye-to-eye, the more open-mindedness we employ when we discuss the big issues that mankind has been dealing with for centuries, the bigger and more important our petty differences become. We all have an instinctual need to close ourselves off in to little groups and hate each other from within our own bubbles, and we’re going to hate within those bubbles regardless of how accepting we’ve become.
I want nothing more than for all of us to be the ideal of perfection, the way that sci-fi authors write advanced, benevolent alien civilizations – loving, kind, accepting of each other. But if we became so accepting, all of our art would be about people agreeing and respecting each other’s ethnicity, race, class, religion, and beliefs. That sounds lovely, until our need to hate something about each other over something, anything, kicks in. At which point, the Canadian prime minister mentions that he loved the ending of LOST, and the American president, who once wrote a 17,000 word diatribe on the IMDB message board titled “Spoiled Sheep’s Milk V.S. The Ending of LOST: A Taste Test Told Through Free-Verse Slam Poetry,” carpet bombs Toronto.
As a means of wish fulfillment, we would start writing stories and passing around urban legends of a time in human history when we hated each other because of our color or religion. The much wiser humans of the future will look fondly upon us – the “us” of today — and will look at us like cool outlaws with mystique, the way today we see cowboys, and bikers before Harley-Davidson had a chain of family friendly theme restaurants. Their version of The Fonz will be a catty YouTube vlogger that doesn’t hold back when gossiping about which Hollywood stars are menstruating. Their version of Martin Luther King Jr. will be a man demands equal rights and treatment for those that wear jean shorts.
By becoming better we’re going to become the least interesting species of sentient creature in the galaxy. We’re going to be the Canada of space – not particularly evil, which is nice, but not particularly fun either. Earthlings will become the galactic version of the guy at the party that is compelled to tell you the excruciating story of the mustard stain on his tie.
That is our future, and I fucking hate future us. We’re going to throw the worst parties.
I love you Mass Effect. But why did you make loving you so hard?
I was pretty well pissed off by the end of Mass Effect 3. I ended up writing a 2,500 word rant about it.
