Who Let the Dogs Out?

Well, if you'd stop your Whooping for just a second I'd inform you that,on Monday, they, in fact, let themselves out. I'm not talking in a cute self-sufficient dog-door they go-out-as-they-please way, or in an Internet traveling e-crap directly into your computer's recycle bin Aibo way either. I'm talking about opening doors like the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park. We live on a very dangerous road and we don't want them to get outside. Our road is busy, narrow, and our section has no sidewalk and low visibility because of a hill. It'd be great fun for sledding on until you were cut to shreds by early morning rush hour. We've known our bigger dog could open the gate to our back fence and we stupidly thought that tying the gate closed with twine would be enough to keep them in. Our dog must come from a Nautical background (or at least must love the taste of twine) because as I was printing out some 1040EZ's on Monday I saw them run into the neighbor's yard.

Irritated and a little worried, my friend and I went outside to try to wrangle them back to our yard like that Twilight Princess mini-game (Whoops a plenty). With a pocket full of treats I began my search and soon found our little dog, Bella; however, Jesse was nowhere in sight. I picked Bella up and trotted over to our yard to put her safely inside.

The sequence of sounds that happened next are burned into my memory: The screech of brakes being slammed on, a sickening thud, an "Oh shit!," the yelps and whines of my dog in pain, and my final but futile WHOOP!

I told my friend, "Fuck. Jesse's hit. Go," and we both ran up to the street to find her. I didn't want to see her because I was expecting something straight out of Rodriguez's Planet Terror, some sprawling mess of guts and gore. In the 20 seconds between hearing the horrible sounds and reaching my dog my mind began to oscillate around a set of lows and highs in a way that even I'd have trouble putting into a Roller Coaster metaphor. I'd grasp for silver-linings thinking, Well at least we won't have to buy as much dog food anymore. I'd shoot blame at myself along the lines of If I hadn't wasted so much time getting Bella in I could've gotten to her. I'd just pray she wasn't dead. The sight of her looking back at me in pain put me in a huge low, but also reassured me that her injuries weren't too bad.

I've been playing a lot of Mario vs DK 2: March of the Minis recently and so I think that's why I'm quick to use it for explanation. Jesse and Bella were like two Minis on the move. Bella was tottering along an easy path and so I focused my stylus swiping to setting her up near the elevator door. Jesse on the other hand needed to be guided through the biggest onslaught of Gorilla Minis, Fire Wheels, Piranha Plants, and Shy Guys which I hadn't been totally aware of. So of course she had been immobilized. The thing about MvDK2:MotM is that there is no reason to send your Minis to the goal unless they all get there in an orderly chain for the highest combo score and Jesse, the Golden Mario, wasn't given enough attention. Fortunately, in the game there is a reset option in life there are dog hospitals.

We rushed her to the vet's office in my friend's car. I'd lifted her like she was a dog made out of paper and she seemed to be fine with only a cut over her eye and a bum leg. The vet said she was in a lot of shock and that her hip might have been dislocated, she was lucky though and they'd call me when they found out anything more.

Being in a situation like that puts your low points in perspective. Sure you feel like shit for letting it happen, but you also are the one who acted cool and got help. The adrenaline rush gets you feeling like a Superman. Then at home you are just waiting and dreading for a phone call with bad news. That's when I, of course, turned on the news and saw the stuff about VA Tech. Talk about taking your newly found sense of perspective, chewing it up, and then spitting it into a spittoon and then planting it in your garden, watering it, and watching it sprout into a tree and then eating the fruit from the tree only to find a worm (like the worm from the Bookworm flash games) in the fruit that tells you all about what lows really are. Here I was dreading some phone call about my dog's well being when 26,000 parents were all waiting for phone calls to find out if their children had survived. And yet I was so shaken from the dog experience I couldn't do much but feel more concern for Jesse (She's fine by the way, she can't walk to well and is pretty out of it, but she didn't sustain any major injuries).

Life is a roller coaster and Blogs are like Cedar Point. They catalog the ups and downs of our day with cool metaphors and emoticons (sometimes links and pictures if I wasn't lazy). The best we can hope to do is ride them, hold on for dear life and when coming out of a wicked loop yell out a big ol' Whoop!

Rollin' Rollin' Rollin' Rollin' What!

Times I've realized that I'm pretty fat:

1) Upon recieving my full rack of Jack Daniel's Saucey Rib-o-rama from TGIFridays I said to the waitress, "Whoo boy there is no way in hell I can eat all of these ribs." Of course I devoured them and didn't even feel full so when the waitress came back and saw my totally clean plate I had to pretend to be stuffed and not want dessert even though I wanted the Mocha Cream Cheesecake Sundae really badly.

2) I am trying to stop drinking so many soft drinks to get back the rock hard abs I used to have in my Lacrosse days. Since I've cut out like 1,000 calories of my daily diet I've been snacking on Lil' Debbies and Airheads all throughout the day to compensate. My poop's been smelling funnier too.

3) Just tonight I went to this place called The Vortex in Hotlanta and I got a burger called "The Coronary By-pass," which is a burger with bacon, cheese, and a huge fried egg on it. Yeah, I finished it in like 3 minutes and wasn't full at all, in fact I think it was such an improvement over my normal diet that my arteries unclogged some because I was coughing up this nasty blood all night.

If TV tells us anything though it's that even the fattest of grossies can get some bangin' milf wives if they can star in their own sitcom. Power to ya, King o' Queens. Peace out.

Don't Count Your Eggs... EVER!

This Easter Weekend I did nothing but drink. That's how we celebrate it down South-- we start after the Good Friday service and don't stop until 12:01 AM on Awesome Monday. When I arrived back home from visiting a friend (a Georgian bootlegger) my mother looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, "Oh, my pious, loving child." If I heard her wrong it is because I was truly smashed and I know she'll forgive me. I was laid to rest in my room upon my bed, wrapped in swaddling old comforters and the curtains were closed. I slept and vomited for quite awhile and, like our Lord, rose again on the third day. OK, actually I didn't wake up until Thursday morning so technically you could say I rose on the fourth day. But come on, I'm not a pro like the Big Jeez.

What awoke me from my recuperative state was something truly horrifying: The Telephone. I don't allow any phones upstairs where I live (I do have a cell phone but I only text message on it and play Snake), but sometimes when there is a moment of silence during my anime (which I keep on in the background 24/7/365) I can sometimes hear a ring from the downstairs phone and it terrifies me.

The reason is that when I was young I shared a room with my younger brother and like all little boys we'd stay up late and have pissing contests all night (of course we called them weeing contests). Aside from distance and accuracy we'd often times "Sword Fight" where we'd cross streams (LOL insert Ghostbustaz joke haha) and make a CLANG-ish sound effect. I guess our mother had had enough of our late night clang-abouts so one night she came in our room with this Playskool full service telephone from our mock Secretary's desk in the playroom. Over and over she screamed, "RING RING! RING RING! SLEEPY BOYS DON'T SAY A THING!" While chanting she'd whip us in the legs with the phone over and over leaving us in tears and our legs covered in welts. After a few nights of this the mere sight of the phone in our rooms would leave us shivering and cowering, unable to get out of bed or make a single sound effect (which tore us to pieces inside because we'd been on a Police Academy binge). Of course as we grew older and our leg skins grew tougher we, of course, grew bolder. However, our mother was too smart. Realizing that the plastic phone wasn't having much of an effect on us anymore she went out and bought a real phone with really hard parts. Our night time rebellion was quelled before it even had a chance to get off the ground and wee wee.

Good story, you might say, but what does this have to do with Easter? Well, do you remember how in my last post I likened hunting for eggs with hunting for Wii Remotes? If not just scroll down. If you are a first time reader then scroll even more down. If you don't have a scroll wheel then go buy a better mouse, dummy! Anyways, imagine (if you will) if out in your yard (where eggs are traditionally hidden) every single egg-sized patch of grass had a telephone (miniature, of course) next to it. And what if to find eggs you didn't go outside and look in every single patch of grass for them, but sat inside with a phone book and called each individual grass patch and asked them if they had any eggs inside of them. Hmm, seems more like work than a fun game, like Smear the Queer, so to speak. Now couple that with the fact that you are deathly afraid of using telephones because you were beaten with one as a child. There is no way in hell you are going to keep me inside on Easter and have me call around for eggs.

So it is with Wii Remotes. I bought myself a Nintendo Wii last December after waiting in line at Target for 3 hours in the cold. I felt like I had achieved something great, or at least bought something great. I found out that Target might have some Wiis (Easter) in their store through an Internet Rumor (Scripture) not some creepy ass phone call (Beelzubub). Getting a Wii by itself is like getting an Easter Basket, Wii Sports is like that fake grass stuff, and the Remote that comes with the system is like ONE LOUSY EGG. If you are the kid who's mom makes him wear those gay knee socks and suspenders, and you've shown up to the Egg hunt with bed-head and you've only found one egg... You are going to be next Queer to get Smeared.

So here I am with just one Remote and the ever present threat of getting smeared for it, what do I do? Every morning for the next month I go to every possible store that could sell Wii Remotes and I go inside and look for them. I don't call and I don't whine about it--I persevere. Nine times out of ten I'm going to leave the store empty handed, but after searching and searching, day after day, I finally walked into a Toys R Us that had just gotten in a shipment of Remotes. And, just like the Easter when I was seven, I paid the man $140 so that he could fill my basket with eggs and my heart with the Spirit of the Season. So next time you want to know if a store has a game or whatever in stock remember what Easter is all about. It's about getting out there and getting your hands dirty and it's about love.

Christ is Risen indeed!

Think about this-- in America we hunt eggs for Easter, not for food but for fun. When we leave our houses to line up at a store for hours in the cold, again, it isn't for food but for a fun new Wii. So now in this the Season of the Spirit, think about all those around the world who have to hunt for food or wait hours in line for a daily ration, and how when they take those meager portions home to their families they aren't greated by a shiny new Next Gen console but by a stupid Gameboy Color. Ever try to play one of those by fire light? No, of course you haven't. That's because we live in a country where Easter Bunnies and George Bushes paint our eggs for us.

I'll talk more about America's food hunt (The Hunt for Wii Remotes) when I return from my Georgian Easter Revival.

Stooping to a Newer Lower

Well, I'm back. After some extensive online polling and wikki'ing I discovered that, not only would Cloud totally beat up Snake, but that most people consider it lower to have a successful updated blog than an outdated one. I've finally done some soul searching and looked into my heart and decided that I want to start up my blog again and try to keep filling it with content about my down-trodden life. Over the past few months I've been in a place so low that even I'm ashamed. I'm of course talking about that dark hole, the ultimate low, The Omega Void!!!

Googling "omega void" might lead you to believe that I'm talking about an online point and click game, but The Omega Void (or TOV) came to me in a fever dream when I was twelve. I had just finished reading a couple chapters in a Xanth novel (I'm not sure which novel it was but I'm pretty sure it fell between A Spell for Chameleon and Night Mare, but I know for a fact it wasn't Castle Roogna, trust me) where the main character had asked some witch girl to marry him through the use of some sexual pun. The witchling's father finds out about his proposal and voices his complaints about them with a shocked yet sexual pun. Seems pretty harmless, but when coupled with the fever-addled brain of a chubby twelve-year-old the by-product of Xanth and sleepiness was a dream portal which allowed me to glimpse TOV!!!

To visualize TOV I want you to think of that black sphere that powerd the ship in the movie Event Horizon. No, you're thinking about the golden sphere from Sphere. I'm talking about that movie with the guy from Jurrasic Park. Yeah the main dude not the guy from The Fly or that snake movie, yup, that guy! Ok, so TOV is kind of like that sphere only that it appears at first to be completely white. It then slowly begins to turn black like the waxing of the moon (only from top to bottom) until the entire sphere is black, and at the exact moment that it completely turns black the father from that Xanth novel exclaims, "You're getting married??" Never have I been so filled with fear like the times that I saw TOV turn completely black over and over again in my mind. I woke up sweating and wondering who put sticky glue in my bed.

So, now ten years later I've finally told the world exactly what TOV looks like, but what is it exactly? Ok, here goes: The Omega Void is simply the place where any and all creative ideas go when they are not written down.

Have you ever thought of a hilarious STD joke while you are trying to sleep only to have completely forgotten it the next morning, and they you curse yourself and the gods for not having a pen and pad by your bed and wonder if they put sticky glue in your bed? Well I had plenty of pens and pads and all sorts of gizmos and whatzits near me and I still out of pure laziness decided not to write them down. The Omega Void has been sucking the creative life out of me for the past seven months. I did manage to draw some comics (that I plan on posting) and I have written down ideas for t-shirts, but if I don't share them with my fellow Blogosphere inhabitants how on Earth am I going to get comments?

So I'm back and I'm going to take you down a new and exciting ride through my life. If you were wondering where the amusement ride analogy was well wonder no more, because you are about to go down the wildest water slide of your life. Ever been to White Water in Atlanta? Well next to the Gulf Creamer is a ride my brother and I deemed Black Baby Splash Down. You sit in a tube and plumet through a covered, pitch black tube. Here's where the creative spin comes in because before you are two paths; one leads to The Omega Void, it's the easy path, it's the path you like taking because it lets you play Warcraft and jack off sad and alone in your room with no outside contact; AND THEN there is another path, a path that when taken leads you to something new and exciting--a pit filled with black infants. You do what is only natural and you scream in the most high pitched voice you can muster so that all the people at the bottom will think you are a scared little girl. But what comes out of that dark tube? An out-of-shape white guy in his early twenties. Those people are going to laugh and they are going to comment about it on your blog. And that's a good, good feeling.