I think about the last conversation that we had. The words spoken will only be between us for as long as I live, and that’s fine. The way you looked at me when we would sit on your couch and just talk. The way your hair smelled. I can be sure of at least one other person feeling this way, but somehow, maybe because the feelings are so intimate to me, they feel unique and special. I knew this gem of a woman for a limited time, and that makes that time so precious to me.

Not that I appreciated it at the time. I was no catch of a boyfriend. But, I loved her with no less reach of love than I do my wife and indeed I would have married her given the opportunity.

I’m sorry that I didn’t return your phone calls, when you told friends of mine that you needed me. I felt like I didn’t deserve to be near you. That I wasn’t there when you needed me has done more damage than anything else in my life. If you could only know the damage I have caused myself because of my youthful ignorance, maybe you would be able to find it in your heart to forgive me. But, I never can. And I never will. It seems only fitting that I should be hurt whenever I see your face in a picture, or in the face of someone I work with.

If there is an afterlife, I look forward to seeing you again.

If I could have taken your cancer into myself to let you live, I would have done it cheerfully. I still love you, I will always love you. Michelle, I now understand what you meant when you said, “She’s your Joe.” It is an understanding I could have gone forever without knowing.

I love you.

Imagine my surprise when I figured out, when I was young, that nothing is free. Everything has a string attached. Not that I have an issue with paying a debt, but when you realize that when someone says, “don’t worry about it”, what they really mean is, “you’re going to get fucked in the worst possible way when I feel like it”, the realization is usually less than joyful.

When someone tells you that, “I just want to help”, become super cynical. This person will most likely fuck you in the end. There is a price for everything, and when you make a deal with the devil, when the check comes, you better make damn sure you have enough.

Once in a while though, “the juice is worth the squeeze”. For example, being with my wife is worth every piece of shit I have ever had to eat in the past 5 years. Blame being placed where it doesn’t belong, the pot-shots, the manipulation, the talking behind our backs… All worth it.

However, you better believe that when someone wants something from me who has treated me that way, that the tables will turn and the price will be high. Until then, I am patient. I am content with my life to the extent that I love my wife and my soon-to-be-born child, and that any attack, insult or slight, I take ABSOLUTELY personal. It may not be now, it may not be in a few years, but I WILL respond.

Until then, I will watch and wait.

That in itself is a tricky question. Well, first of all I’m thankful for my wife and soon to be born kid. This is obvious. Anyone who sees us together can see the special kind of love we have for each other. Most of the people I know (those NOT my friends category) are very much envious of this, mostly because of my often stated belief that the only marriage that I an aware of that I think is worth a shit is my own.

No one I know of has the kind of relationship that Donna and I have. It just doesn’t happen. It goes beyond love, it goes beyond security, sexuality, spirituality or anything ending in an “-ity”. My wife and I are two pieces of the same puzzle, put in different boxes and somehow, one of us was bought at a yard sale and brought together. (There is some debate as to which one of us was bought.)

Not a morning goes by that I’m not grateful for circumstance to bringing this woman into my life, and I’ll be that way forever. Or at least until we get sick of each other.

Often times we are grateful for our family, but fact is, we were born into our families and maybe we should be thankful for the fact that I could have been born to Ted Bundy’s family or some such shit, but that wouldn’t be true to who I am. The fact is that, if ANYTHING, I am thankful to be a separate and distinct entity from my family, and thankful to be a minimum of 300 miles from said family at all times. My last visit made me realize how incompatible I am with the so-called extended family life and my renewed understanding of why I left when I did. Thought I love my family, I also love not being around them, except in small doses, and a little bit goes a LONG way. Like enough to make one stop in the middle of I95 mid-Maryland and reduce myself to a sack of tears before turning back to PA of all places.

My gratitude towards family is given more to those members of family that I have adopted. Shaun and Reba (soon to be) Starke for example are respectively the brother and sister I never had. When I hang around Shaun, I am always entertained and more than that, I feel wanted. With my own family, I had to practically beg for any kind of attention, but with my adopted family, they enjoy my company. They don’t stay on the cell phone and ignore me. Granted I don’t see them nearly as often as I’d like, but I feel confident that for as much time as we spend apart, once we get together it feels like only minutes have passed. My life is better for having met Shaun in one of the darkest points in my life and for having him always accept who I am as a person and a creative entity.

So Donna, Reba and Starke, I am thankful for you guys. And I promise to not get so drunk next time so that I don’t eat all of Deb’s spinach balls…

Wow, I phrased that like a prepubescent on meth. Ah, to be in fifth grade again… Allow me to rephrase.

The “Zombie Apocalypse” will not happen, and I have no clue why people think it will. That being said I was having a conversation with a friend at work who said that he believed in the ZA, and furthermore, said that he thinks it would come very soon, like within the next few years.

Now, while we were having that conversation, I found myself getting a bit excited. Excited at the prospect of millions of people getting eaten, then millions of people killing millions more. I don’t want people to get hurt or anything, but I just want to see it. Film and TV is all well and good, but the world needs a good pestilence every now and then. Keeps the human race on its toes.

Now, I’m not one of those guys who thinks I would last the entirety of the time, but I think I would give it a good go. The idea of having my pick of women to repopulate the earth with strikes me as no mean consolation. That being said I have a question…

“Am I fucked in the head for thinking this?”

People get killed on disasters around the world and the higher the body count is, the more I giggle. Does this make me a bad person? I mean if so, fine I can live with that. But, I have such a deep-seated hatred for my own species because of the shit we do to each other, that I’m simply waiting for something to come along and wipe the slate clean, so to speak, so that humanity can build itself up, and try again to make that Thomas More-ish Utopia. Maybe we’re doomed to just repeat the processes of a fucked up dystopian society where there is always a portion of our population is fucked over on a systematic basis… 1984, here we come…

I love people as individuals, but hate the way we kill each other. I hate the greed of modern society, but can’t bring myself to help those I’ve never met with money that I’ve earned.

Maybe it’s not that I’m a bad person, I simply acknowledge that I am just as hypocritical as everyone else, at least in the Darwinian sense, and wear my imperfection on my sleeve, right here with my hatred for my species.

That being said… Zombie Apocalypse? Winning…

First, Thanksgiving was yesterday and I spent it with my surrogate family; Starke, Reba, Maddie and the attached family members. Probably one of the most agreeable nights I’ve spent on a holiday. Drank some brew, shot some Jager, and I have a splitting headache due to dehydration. I’m fine with this, but it also proved to me that I need to start drinking more.

Also, upon advice of my current boss, I have decided to start IT consulting. Where this is going to happen, and when is still up in the air, but I’m developing a business plan and other assorted pablum associated with that idea.

Holidays, Stupid People, and a Large Tangent…

But, with the Holidays coming up, I thought I would rant and rave about something which really bothers the absolute fuck out of me.

A friend of my wife’s online ended up saying something to the effect of “Stop taking the Christ out of Christmas…[sic]”

Now, I advocate religious freedom, provided you keep it the fuck out my face. Have your Christmas trees in the center of town, have your nativity scenes on your front lawns, doesn’t bother me any. What DOES bother me is that Christians try to legislate their own views and make everyone else respect them.

I say Happy Holidays, and Merry Christmas almost interchangeably, because I don’t follow Christ, and couldn’t give any less of a fuck about people’s preferences.

I don’t say “One Nation Under God” because we are NOT one nation under god, we are one nation under a Constitution which does not mention religion except by way of limiting its control over everyone.

I believe in abortion, as I believe life begins at birth not conception, and I really don’t give a shit about all your religious arguments to the contrary.

I believe that stem cell research should be funded by the state, and if you had half a brain and were educated about what that involves, you would be too. And regarding the “sanctity of life” problem that this issue supposedly raises, if you can wholeheartedly vote to send troops overseas to bomb and murder people for oil, I don’t really think you give a shit at all about the sanctity of life.

If you want to have an abortion, have one. If you don’t; don;t. If you want to engage in stem cell research, by all means. If you believe it’s wrong, fine. If you want to say Happy Holidays, do this. If you don’t want the “Christ” to be taken out of Christmas, then say “Merry Christmas”. But, it’s not your place to speak for me. Do what you do and leave everyone else the fuck alone.

And Happy Holidays…

Seriously? Do we honestly have to put up with this again?

I’m not going to say too much about this (as I only have a few minutes before I get to work) but what I will say is that;

1) If Palin wins the election, I will emigrate from the US to either Canada or the UK. I’m not even remotely close to kidding.

2) If you vote for her, you are stupid. I offer no apologies for this. I wouldn’t want a homeless guy to manage my finances, on the same principle, I wouldn’t want a stupid, hypocritical, psychotic maladjusted soccer mom to manage the country I love so much.

3) If you vote for her, you relinquish for all time your right to state that you are sane, rational or even fairly human. A vote for Sarah Palin is a vote for the retarded kid who drools in class and shits on his homework to be class president. Granted the next 4 years would have been interesting, but the reunion would suck balls.

4) I have no desire to be in one of the cities which would be hit by the impending nuclear holocaust that she would start. And yes, she would start.

5) I would LOVE a woman to be president, just not a retarded Jesus-freak.

That being said, I have to head to work. I imagine there will be a few who want to debate this with me. Please spare yourself the plummeting of my respect for you, but in all honesty, if you would consider voting for an idiot like that, chances are I don’t respect you all that much anyway…

Oh well…

The answer is surprisingly simple. I simply enjoy entertaining. YouTube and blogging are very similar in that, they’re both a kind of “scream therapy” that makes it so I don’t end up in jail for crimes against humanity. I love getting my thoughts and ideas out there because once they’re there, they have a chance to be a permanent part of someone’s psyche. And who doesn’t want to be immortal in some way?

Two facts are apparent;

- One, I have had a heart attack and could have easily died a month ago. While this hasn’t changed my mode of thinking, it HAS made it so that I am not spending any moment of it doing something I don’t want to do. And;

- Two, I have come into a deeper understanding of myself and what I’d like to accomplish in my life.

The things I want to do are simply; have fun and exist.
So for those who actually read this shit, enjoy and don’t blink, because I’m back. I missed the internet too much to ever leave for good again.

First, I’d like to point out the obvious differences between a doctor’s office and a hospital.

A doctor’s office (for the most part) you go to when you have something bothering you, or for routine care.

A hospital is (again, for the most part) the place you go to when the doctor’s facilities and resources are not equipped to deal with your problem; other wise known as “Oh fuck, oh fuck, am I gonna die?!?!?!”

It would appear to me that in both cases, courtesy is of the essence. Treating someone like they’re a bother just because you have to take a midnight shift doing something you hate to make sure your bastard child (who is no doubt the resented product of a drug-addled, migrant worker gang-bang) stays hopped up on whatever street drug he can get his hands on because his mother is too busy to spend anytime with him, is just plain wrong and makes you look like an uneducated, shiftless cunt.

So fine, maybe I’ve taken things just a bit too far by calling her a “c-word”, but in reality this particular woman deserves this epithet and many others, along with a shovel to the pan-smashed asshole she calls a face. Whatever happened to good old fashioned courtesy. I’m not speaking of kissing my wife’s ass, I’m talking about not giving her a shitty look when she is in agonizing pain and asks for relief from said pain. How about some sympathy, or failing that just a little bit of patience.

If you lack both of those things, than WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING IN THE HEALTHCARE FIELD?!?!?!

To summarize, people piss me off, my blood pressure is rising and I am weaving sleep-deprived fantasies about taking a shotgun to a McDonalds.