Everyone Has a Type, Mine Is Bold Face

There's a building-sized poster up promoting Portland's lacross team. I have no idea what the name of this team is due to the fact that the advertisement largely consists of a very dopey-looking guy in the team jersey with the caption "actual size" in large bold letters. I guess that kind of tritely stupid advertising is still very relevant and cutting-edge in the sports world, where negro integration has finally settled down and women are still looked at as something funny to fill time in between real sports played by men.

But I digress.

LR and I were driving past this towering advertisement featuring a man who is not what I'd call intimidating even at 50 feet tall when this conversation began:

"Ugh, he's NOT cute."

"My friend Uzumaki loves that kind of guy, he's all over the huskular goofy sort." Uzumaki is a wonderfully crazy friend of many years who is currently dating a cop because you really do need special training to date certain personality types.

"I don't think I really have a type."

"Me either" I say. "Actually, I really do have a type. Pick the worst idea in the room and that's who I'm all over."

It sounds self-depracating but it's true. The only guys I have any real, strong, romantic connection with seem to be the ones that treat a relationship like it's a protracted war of attrition with occasional bloody skirmishes from time to time. I'm only happy in a relastionship when it's in constant flux and neither of us has any idea where it's heading or what the body count will be when it gets there.

Part of me worries that I'm too afraid of intimacy to really connect with someone that I can see myself happily retiring with someday. The sort of dangerously normal fellow who'll read you the news in the morning long after the thrill of sex has left the relationship.

The rest of me thoroughly enjoys a challange, and reels at the idea of ever being happily settled. To me stasis is a kind of living death. To be so completely connected to the minutia of my daily life that I'm always the exact same person from one day to the next scares me. I don't want to get to a point where I define who I am by my daily rituals and quiant IKEA furniture.

If this means that I can only date men who are proficient in four to five styles of hand-to-hand combat and know exactly how to disable an opponent within a few seconds then so be it. At least this way I won't get bored.

Best Warcraft quote EVER!

"...check out Rough Trade. Queer guild on Proudmoore. Remember man, slap you around, push your face in the pillow, cum and then leave your apartment TOPS play Horde. Bitchy, sloppy, “hold me in your arms” bottoms play Alliance."

This guy is an odd character with some real issues, but he makes me laugh often.

Paranoia and You, A Practical Guide

My good friend LR was recently given a wonderful little book by one of his psychology professors. The Paranoid's Pocket Guide is a delightful collection of literally hundreds of reasons that you should spend every day of your life cowering in a corner somewhere, alternately sobbing and vomiting as you realize just how utterly and thoroughly boned you truly are.

Some of the gems found within:

"Nearly a third of all bottled water purchased in the United States is contaminated with Bacteria." E-Colicious!

"Deadly new germs are emerging around the world at a startling rate. Equine morbilli virus, which causes a potentially fatal respiratory illness, was discovered n Australia in 1994; blood banks do not yet screen for recently discovered hepatitis G; and Bartonella, a bacteria discovered in 1990 can cause illnesses ranging from cat scratch fever to fatal heart-valve infections. Humans are exposed to this germ from cats carrying infected fleas. Medical researchers are baffled and expect to see many more unknown mysterious diseases." Are you sure you washed your hands? With Soap?

"In one year over a ton of explosives, including dynamite, C-4 plastic explosives, ANFO, raw ammunition nitrate, and blasting caps has disappeared from commercial sites in Georgia, California, Oklahoma, Idaho, and Indiana." Waiter, I'll have a side of pipe-bomb, hold the nails.

"Remember those hostile memos you wrote to vent at your boss and then deleted? They're still in the computer system - along with your cover letter to the headhunter, that screenplay you've been working on during office hours, and all of the other files you think you've destroyed. The chances are very good that your company will hire a data-retrieval expert to resurrect files that employees have deleted. That is, if they haven't done so already." What ever happened to the good ol' Suggestion Box?

"Bathroom sinks cause over 45,000 injuries every year." Maybe you should start brushing your teeth in the kitchen.

And my personal favorite:

"If you urinate when swimming in a South American river, you may encounter the candiru. Drawn to warmth, this tiny fish is known to follow a stream of urine to it's source, swim inside the body, and flare it's barbed fins. It will remain firmly embedded in the flesh until surgically removed." What's that itching sensation?

The bottom line of all of this being; you have so very many reasons to live your life in constant fear of the world that if you kow-tow to even one of these tiny demons of doubt you'll spend the rest of your life crushed under the weight of all of his friends. Fear is, after all, a package deal.

Letter to the Editor

I'm finished with harboring rancor for the people whom I feel I have been wronged by. The short-sighted ex, the two-faced friend, and the sleazy bosses who used me as a placeholder. I see these people out and about and cannot say anything to them because my chest seizes up with loathing and loss. The silence I hold inside of myself is like a vice. It crushes the air from my lungs and the words from my mouth, words that left unspoken continue to bore into my psyche like angered maggots, slowly devouring my nobility.

A man I once worked for said to me that hating someone is like drinking poison every night before you sleep. It can only ever kill you, and leaves your nemesis unchanged.

So I have to let all of this go. I have to find the path that allows me to keep who I am and still lets me to cast off this weight of antipathy I've been carrying for the past month. I have to remind myself to see these people as people. People composed of infinite flaws and infinite possibility, the two things that make us great and beautiful creatures. I have to remind myself that we all do what we believe to be right, none of us thinks we are monsters, and none of us know the mistakes we make until they are cold and buried in the tomb of our personal history. To continue to define any other person in my life by the mistakes they have made will only lessen me as a person, and it's not something I'm willing to do.

So I'm sending all of this destructive pathos out into the world as a letter, signed with hope rather than tears.

-Zeroes-

Down-Size Me

Sometimes in life all I really want to do is launch into a bitter tirade against the infinite capacity for poor behavior that tends to pop up in my fellow humans from time to time. To verbally shake my tiny fist at the uncaring heavens and tell the whole of Creation to go bugger itself for making such a flawed machine. In all fairness though, I am just as much a part of this flawed existence as the next guy, and beating myself up hasn't shown much success historically.

But I get ahead of myself.

On Friday, April 28th, I was handed my final paycheck at CC Slaughters with the impressively non-specific message of my bosses wanting to "ramp up the daytime". I accepted my paycheck, handed in my keys, said goodbye to the assorted friends and coworkers that were in attendance that evening (without ruining their night by letting them know of my recent firing) and went home to enjoy a quiet evening of reflection. I've often been of the opinion that business is business, and getting emotionally worked up about it does not change the realities of the situation. Much as getting fired for the third time in my life does not change who I am as a person, how I behave during and after such an event directly reflects on the caliber of my person. So I remained calm and upbeat. After all, now I wasn't going to feel obligated to show up at 10 the next morning to help them haul trash out of the basement. Because really, who wants to get up before noon on a sunny day and get covered in garbage?

Four days later I discovered that I was fired to be replaced by someone whom my employers felt was more youthfull and attractive. I will withhold my personal feelings on this person's overall virtue as gossip is the true heart of darkness.

To say that my opinion of the situation took a turn for the less-than-sunny would be a mild understatement. I currently feel as though I hold within my chest a white-hot fragment of pure malevolence. It is as though I am being powered solely by the great gravitational stresses put forth by a quantum singularity forged purely of my disdain for all of the people involved in this incident. Everything I do lately is discolored by the poison of malice that circulates through my system where once there flowed only innocuous, innocent blood. The plus side to this being that my time in the gym is proving to be very productive.

I'm under no illusions that every person at some point in their life will be mistreated by others solely on what can only be described as superficial standards. None of us are strangers to the callous ugliness that all humans are capable of. In fact, I have to consider it something of a good sign that I can still feel the sting as sharply and truly as though it were my first time. It means I haven't let myself become embittered, and for that I am both proud and thankful.

I console myself in the fact that I am not the only person I know who feels this situation was poorly handled, and that my replacement will have some large shoes to fill. Though the small-minded and utterly human part of me may hate every fiber of his being at the moment, I ultimately hope he does well in life. My former bosses I'm not so sure about, but I get the feeling that these roiling waves of antipathy will pass; to eventually be replaced by a simple sense of calm pity. Pity and pointed dislike, but mostly pity.

I'm not entirely sure how to end this particular entry, because it is not yet ended in my mind. Simply know that I will be just fine, my finances are quite in order and my friends are many and wonderful.

-Zeroes-