I went a bought a bunch of different brands of bottled water. This is a review of them.
1) Dasani — Tastes like water.
2) Evian — Tastes like water.
3) Smart Water — Tastes like water.
4) Zephyrhills — Tastes like water.
5) Fiji — Tastes like water, but the tropical backdrop makes me think I’m drinking salt water.
I tick, nervously most times. Other times because I’m not nervous and have just gotten used to all the ticking I do when I am nervous, which is often. Over the years I have collected a comprehensive list of every nervous tick I’ve ever developed. These are real. What’s going on in my life at any given time influences how many of these ticks I will have going concurrently. If my only worry is work, I’ll have one, maybe two. If it’s work, a depleted bank account, relationship troubles, and my arch nemesis has foiled one of my dastardly plots again, I could have up to four of these ticks going at the same time. It gets annoying.
1. Excessive blinking, or am I a soviet spy sending coded messages to my comrades? No. I’m not. Blinking just makes reality go away for a fraction of a second.
2. I curl my top lip in to my gums, making it look like my upper lip was sliced away. Kind of like Jim Carry as Fire Marshal Bill.
3. Muscle twitching (quads, calves, biceps, pecs). Nothing turns on the ladies more than a guy that looks like he’s currently receiving electroshock therapy.
4. Spitting. A lot. Mostly when I’m outdoors. I like disrespecting grass.
5. Leg bouncing/shaking.
6 Rubbing the back of my tongue on the roof of my mouth.
7. Sliding my fingernails under other fingernails and applying pressure to that under-the-nail part of the nail. Does that have a name? I’m going to call it the nail basement. I like pressure on my nail basements.
8. Biting skin around nails. It tastes like where my fingers have been! :) Also, it tastes like where my fingers have been! >:O
9. Cracking knuckles. I’m a tough guy.
10. Twitching nose. I’m also a witch from the 1960s. It’s weird that I feel like I have to specify which 60s I’m talking about now that we’re this deep in to a new decade, even though we haven’t seen a new 60s since the last 60s.
11. Biting the inside of my mouth until I have tough little mounds of stringy flesh dotting my inner cheeks. Thrill-seeking bacteria scale these mounds for glory and to have a story that will get them laid for life.
12. Twitching my ears/scalp. It’s my mating call.
13. Making a grinding sound with my mouth that serves no purpose but I like to believe it lets me communicate with rusty brake pads.
14. Rubbing my big toe over my second toe (XO toe?), sometimes until the second toe blisters (aka XO toe woes).
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.
I’m a pretty big deal here on the internet. As such, I understand that many of you would like to get to know me better over some light phone sex and sexting. Or maybe you want to give me a writing job. Whatever. Contacting someone can be scary in this brave new world of ours, what with so many people walking around, all with their own unique communications preferences. Luckily for you, the person wanting to contact me, I have provided all of my personal contact info below.
I look forward to talking to you!
If you’d like to contact me, you can reach me via Email at Luisrafaelprada@gmail.com
I’m also on Facebook at Facebook.com/luisprada
You can follow me on Twitter at Twitter.com/Luis_Prada
My home phone number is (548) 445-48557
My mother’s cell phone number is (328) 348-56451
If you would like to contact me through non-verbal communication, roll your eyes and turn a cold shoulder and my inherent need to be loved by everyone will compel me to respond.
I can also be contacted via a series of arrogant finger snaps that grab my attention/make me think you’re a prick because you think I’m a dog.
If you blow in to a large conch shell, I shall respond. I’m A-Sharp. Don’t blow a B-flat – that’s Aquaman’s note.
I can also be reached by setting ablaze the many oil-soaked braziers that I have strategically placed along the jagged spine of the Rocky Mountains, down through the desert plains of New Mexico, through the vast expanses of Texas, and through the swampy marshes of Louisiana before finally touching down on the sandy beaches of Miami, Florida.
If Morse code is more your speed, I got you covered. Just point your beacon toward latitude 25°47′16″N and longitude 80°13′27″W and flash this:
-.— —- —..— —. . - .- - — . —..— -.. .- .— —.
If you’re more of a semaphore person, simply wave your flags like so…
…and I’ll be all like, “Yeah, what…?”
I don’t have a mailing address.
A best friend is the final brick atop the pyramid of friendship. Below that there are many sub-sections of friendships that eventually trickle down to the base level of friendship, acquaintances — people you know and may have hung out with on a few occasions, but you don’t really know each other that well and are only brought together through other friends. Somewhere in between Best Friends and Acquaintances — probably closer to Acquaintances — is the level in which you have a semi-close relationship with someone, but that closeness is predicated upon one shared experience and no others, which, whenever you’re around this person, leads to conversation about and only about that one thing. There is no other common ground; just that one thing.
About 4 or 5 years ago, a friend of mine got in to the rhythm of throwing massive parties at his place once every couple of months. Every sub-category of friendship would show up, from Best Friends (with whom I hang out with the most during the parties) to Acquaintances (with whom I would talk to for a minute or two before trying to escape back to my Best Friends) to the mid-level of friend I mentioned above; the guy that I knew well, but not well enough to consider a close friend.
During one such party, this mid-level friend bounced from one section of friends to another because everyone on all levels was fascinated by this mid-level friend’s newest body modification: a dick piercing. One more than one occasion, this friend was whisked away to a bathroom by small groups of two or three men and women and he gladly presented his glimmering dick to whoever asked to see it. I had never seen a pierced dick in person before, and I had no dieaser to make this a night of creepy firsts.
As stories like this tend to go, I got monumentally drunk; so drunk that I had reached that level of inebriated that I began blacking out randomly during the night. I’ve never been a big drinker, so this was new to me. Huge chunks of time would disappear and I would regain awareness in the middle of a conversation with someone that didn’t even register anywhere on my pyramid of friendship, not knowing how I ended up in the back yard talking to this person when the last thing I remember was being in the living room talking to that person. It was strange and off-putting.
The night rolled on, I probably threw-up at some point, and I probably made some very bad first impressions upon people that will never put me on their pyramids.
About two to three weeks later, I’m at home, searching through the pictures on my cell phone – an LG clamshell with a terrible, grainy 2-megapixel camera. I see a picture of my mom, a couple of shots of my cats, some random pictures of unimportant things that I was too lazy to delete, and… hey, what’s this? Who’s dick is this? Is that…is that a metal rod spiked through a man’s rod?! Why do I have a picture of a man’s pierced penis on my phone?
In that moment I recalled this mid-level friend telling me about his dick piercing. Having no recollection of seeing the penis, I quickly checked my own penis, hoping I would not find a satellite antenna sticking out of it. I was relieved to discover that my penis lacked the capability to pick up Ham radio transmissions.
I then tried to mentally retrace my drunken steps through the party that I was now a few weeks removed from. I already had a hazy memory of the events of the night, but now, with the passage of time, the events were vaguer. I remembered talking to this mid-level friend about his pierced junk, and I remember being offered to take a look at it. I’m pretty sure I declined…but then why do I have a picture of it on my phone?
The mystery of the spontaneous dick pic troubled me all day. I couldn’t figure it out. At what point did I see it?
After much thought, I finally recalled one particularly foggy moment in the night in which this mid-level friend asked to look at my phone. I still had an old clam shell phone while this friend had a fancy touchscreen smart phone. So even in that moment during the party, while very drunk, I was aware enough to wonder why he would want to closely examine my out-of-date phone. It would be like owning a Lamborghini while asking to take a Ford Fiesta for a test drive.
I remembered that sometime later in the night this mid-level, dick-pierced friend handed my phone back to me. I have no clue how much time passed from the moment I handed it to him to the moment I got it back, but I distinctly remember handing it to him while in the kitchen and getting it back while in the living room. Both of those rooms were separated by a single wall, so the two events could have been separated by seconds, minutes, or even hours, for all I knew.
Another week or two passes and I still don’t have a clear answer as to why I have a picture of my mid-level friend’s pierced dick on my phone, and I’m still not 100% sure how it got there.
Then, one Saturday night, my Best Friends and this Mid-Level friend meet up at the local AMC to catch a movie. The Mid-Level friend and I never have much to talk about because we don’t know each other very well…but I had his dick on my phone, so I finally had something to discuss with him.
“Hey, I’ve got a picture of your dick on my phone” I say.
“Really?” the Mid-Level friend replies. “That was, like, a month ago. Why do you still have it?”
I had no answer to that. Well, I did, but trying to explain to another human that you’re trying to solve a mystery and a picture of a flaccid, pierced dick is your only key piece of evidence makes for a difficult conversation.
The Mid-Level friend didn’t remember whisking me away to take a peek at his dick, and he didn’t remember using my phone to slyly sneak a picture of it on to the phone. I was back at square one, and that’s where I’ve been since. I’ve come to grips with the fact that I’ll never find out how the picture got on my phone, but in thinking about it and in examining my friendship with this Mid-Level friend, I’ve come to realize something: the picture of this guy’s pierced dick is the only thing he and I have in common.
With Best Friends, conversations are wide open and can begin and end anywhere. With Acquaintances, conversations are also wide open, but there are certain touchy subjects you tend to avoid with someone you barely know, like politics, sex, and the like. But Mid-Level friends are different. With Mid-Level friends, you tend to only discuss those few moments you’ve shared; they’re your only reference points with each other. Your friendship with this person was frozen in time and stopped expanding, stopped flourishing, at a single moment, or a handful of moments. Hanging out with Mid-Level friends can be hard because you don’t know each other well enough to instantly understand how to jump head first in to a conversation. So, with Mid-Level friends, we, or maybe I should just limit it to I, tend to talk only about that frozen moment in time, as if we were two retired warriors looking back at a truly glorious battle we barely survived, arguably our finest moment. This Mid-Level friend and I, we don’t talk about battle; we talk about his dick piercing. That frozen moment in time usually begins and ends all conversation with this friend. It’s like slowly realizing you’re the main character in a sci-fi movie and you’ve been living the same moment over and over again for who knows how long.
After we’ve exhausted that subject (which usually happens quickly), we’re left with awkward silence and silent prayers, hoping one of our shared Best Friends swoops in and engages the group in conversation; reuniting the fractured, independent conversations happening in the group.
To this day, whenever I run in to this Mid-Level friend (who no longer sports a dick piercing), the very first thing he says to me is, “Still got that picture of my dick on your phone?”. I always reply with an amused chuckle and a polite no. After that, he makes his way in to conversation with someone else because after talking about his dick for a grand total of 3 ½ seconds, we’ve reached the limit of our friendship.
So, to put it succinctly, I have a friend, and all this friend and I ever talk about is his dick.
At what point did whistles become the benchmark for pristine cleanliness? What person looked at a whistle, then looked at everything else he owned and deduced that the whistle contained far less bacteria than, say, his toilet seat? Surely the whistle would have been saturated with saliva bacteria and a whole host of germs. This simile has been around for ages, possibly since long before the advent of reliable dental care. So it stands to reason that the creator of the simile probably had an ass crack cleaner than his festering mouth garbage whistle.
The whistle simile probably dates back to around the time that the giggling of a jack rabbit’s ass became the benchmark for efficiency. When you’re out on the American frontier seeking a better life there isn’t much else to do other than marvel at the supposed sterility of a whistle and gaze deeply in to the anus to a feral bunny wabbit. This was entertainment back then. Getting something done “in the giggle of a jack rabbit’s ass” was a trait once possessed by only humanity’s best time managers; the people that could get shit done without letting extraneous bullshit get in the way. The more common version of the simile (to my knowledge, at least) is “faster than two giggles of a jack rabbit’s ass”. This implies that there was once a person that stared in to the dirty balloon knot of a jack rabbit and was rather unimpressed by the speed of a single giggle. This person stared in to that asshole, watched it giggle, and thought “I can get, like, three goddamn things done in that time.” This person probably followed that thought up with a dismissive jerking off hand gesture. He was also a cocky, presumptuous asshole, for this person jerked their imaginary dick too soon. This person’s original hypothesis was shattered – utterly decimated – when they bared witness to the Hermes-like speed with which a jack rabbit giggled his ass not once, but twice. After barely being able to take note of the finer details of a jack rabbit’s ass mid-two giggles, this person was floored. He thought, “Only the Greek messenger god Hermes could accomplish a task during increments of time measured in the giggles of this specific animal’s anus.” This person would have named-checked D.C. Comics character The Flash, but that would have made him a weird anachronistic societal outcast whose references no one understood. That, or a highly unimpressive soothsayer. This person was neither of those things. Particularly, he wasn’t weird, because a jack rabbit’s ass was the prime time television of its day. Clearly a jack rabbit’s ass was dynamic enough to be so closely examined that one could potentially mine a timeless simile from one. It is safe to assume that a jack rabbit’s ass was the M*A*S*H finale of its time. At any given single moment you can bet your non-rapidly giggling ass that 105.97 million people were looking at a jack rabbit’s ass because it was more entertaining than contracting rickets and watching out for roving gangs of noble savages.
The person that was truly strange was the person that was so lonely and had so few flesh and blood idols that they believed a cucumber represented the pinnacle of cool. Cool is John Travolta in Grease. Cool is a guy that back flips on to a horse because he just doesn’t know any other way. A cucumber, while, admittedly, very refreshing, particularly in the midst of a salad with a vinegary tang, is a vegetable. And not an exciting one, either. Cucumbers ain’t got shit on bell peppers. If cucumber and bell pepper lived on the same street, cucumber would be calling the cops daily to complain about the loud live band playing over at Cucumber’s house and the bounty of used condoms he finds on his door step the next morning. Unarguably, the only time a cucumber exhibits qualities of “steady dispassionate calmness and self-control” is when it’s a pickle. A cucumber has to become another thing altogether in order to be considered cool, which is the very definition of uncool – being afraid to be yourself. This picture of a pickle wearing sunglasses and a fedora I just found through a Google image search turns my theory in to a law officially recognized by the International Institute of Cool.
And as for the person that came up with “As clear as mud”, well, he was kicked to death.
Goodnight, everyone!
