I might have only recently turned thirty years old this year back in the month of May, but I was a crotchety old man who was confused by the world long before I grew up to become the lame, overweight, khaki-wearing accountant who stands before you today. Although I’ve never been shy about voicing my complaints here on this blog, there has been a handful of topics that never quite made the cut simply because I figured that I was the only person cranky enough to complain about them. People who bitch online usually do so because they’re seeking a way to validate their gripes. With that being the case, what good is it to bitch about something esoteric or obscure if you’re pretty certain that nobody else will care? Case in point: Pierre Bernard’s Recliner of Rage is an amusing comedy bit premised on the futility of complaining about topics that nobody understands.

Maybe it’s the old age talking, or maybe I’ve just gotten crankier lately, but I think it’s time to speak my piece about some of those things that only seem to bother me. Here’s a warning to you, gentle reader: Your level of recognition and interest will very likely waver while reading through these bullet points. Don’t say I didn’t tell you so.

• Douchebags with Microphones

  Am I the only one who hates those pushy announcers at live shows who are never satisfied with the first round of applause? You know what I’m talking about:
  

  “Hey folks, how is everybody tonight? Oh come on, you can do better than that. How is everybody tonight?”

  I fucking hate those guys. I swear, they must have been one of the main contributing factors that led to the creation of the sniper rifle. Okay, that’s harsh. But at the very least, they must have been a significant contributing factor leading to the creation of the “backhanded bitch-slap”, am I right?

  

  When an announcer asks the crowd to applaud once, I usually oblige him politely. The second time he asks, I fold my arms and sigh. If the announcer is especially obnoxious, and he asks the crowd to applaud a third time, I cup my hands and begin to boo. Go work out your middle-child insecurity issues somewhere off the stage, asshole.




• The Constipated Anime Grunt
  

  Why do anime characters always sound like they’re either constipated, asthmatic, or like they’re constantly getting blown? If you have ever watched anime while listening to the original Japanese language audio track, then you might have noticed that there is basically no such thing as a silent moment in anime. Actually, come to think of it, there’s no such thing as subtlety in anime, either. Everybody is always grunting in exasperation, stammering on some half-formed thought, or gasping like they’re choking on their bipolar medication. Every moment in any given anime has been compulsively occupied by some form of verbal garbage.

  For an example of what I’m talking about, I invite you to watch the first four minutes of Young GTO, Episode 4. Take note of all the grunts, groans, gasps, moans, giggling, and gurgling noises that the voice actors make. Is everyone okay with that?

  I grant you, anime characters often have a good reason for making those crazy noises, because somebody is always suffering from a nervous breakdown, or getting their ass kicked in an anime flick. Anime characters always seem to exist between the balance of two basic operating modes: (1) Extremely violent and pissed off; or (2) Flabbergasted and overwrought with miscellaneous emotion. What the hell ever happened to that level place in between, where people react to the world on a neutral setting? For that matter, what the hell ever happened to the subtlety of silence?

  Please don’t mistake my meaning, because I actually do enjoy watching anime. I just wonder why anime directors always insist on filling in the silences with all of those irritating grunts.




• The Awkward “Next Gen” Look-Away
  Star Trek: The Next Generation is an awesome show despite its numerous, trademark flaws: the sterile off-ship set designs, the tedious battle scenes shown entirely from the bridge, the terrible acting by all of the extras, and all of those ridiculous, “Oh shit, the Holodeck safety protocols are offline” episodes. But above all other gripes, the one thing that bothers me most about the show is the terrible stage direction put on display during all of those two-person, heart-to-heart dialogue scenes.
  

  Does anybody know what I’m talking about? It seems like every time two characters find themselves in the middle of a private conversation on Next Gen, one of them inevitably interrupts the flow of the scene by walking across the room, and then continuing the conversation while facing their back to the other person. It’s such a stilted, artificial maneuver that absolutely reeks of melodrama, daytime soap operas, and live community theater. My suspension of disbelief immediately vanishes every time I see it happen — and it happens way more often than it should. As a fan of the series, I find the Awkward “Next Gen” Look-Away oddly insulting, because I get the feeling that I was never meant to notice the ridiculous maneuver on a conscious level. It’s as if the show’s writers and directors never gave their fans enough credit to suspect that somebody like me would one day stand up and shout, “Why the fuck do the characters keep turning away from each other like that? Is that how people communicate with each other in the 24th century? That’s completely fucking stupid.”

   
   

  The Awkward “Next Gen” Look-Away is such a weird, unnatural maneuver. In a television show where the actors walk around wearing automobile air filters for eyeglasses, and crazy rubber prostheses glued onto their foreheads, any additional displays of outlandish theatricality are simply redundant. There’s no subtlety or subtext added to the scene by something as lame as the Awkward “Next Gen” Look-Away. That maneuver is about as subtle as Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge lifting his VISOR to wink at the camera before delivering the following monologue:

  “Commander Riker, I believe this is an appropriate time to tell you something deeply personal about my past. Before I do that, however, please allow me to awkwardly walk five steps in this direction. I’ll keep my back turned to you for a while, which will enable an awesome, over-the-shoulder camera shot with my face in the foreground, and with your face slightly blurred in the background. You see, with these five steps that I am taking while walking away from you, I am providing a visually symbolic representation of my desire to ‘walk away’ from my past. Then again, I am walking away while I’m reminiscing; so am I, in fact, walking towards the past instead? I’m going to turn around now, mid-sentence, in order to face you and to add further ambiguity to the question. The past may always be behind you, but it also always faces you no matter which direction you face.”

  

  Pretty awful, right? I quoted that speech verbatim from an old Dr. Pulaski episode. Every episode centered around that bitch is total trash. Anyhow, all I mean to say is that Lieutenant Commander Data’s oft-derided poem,“Ode to Spot”, has ten times more nuance to it than all of the Awkward “Next Gen” Look-Aways combined throughout the history of the show. I love you to death, Next Gen, but your people have got to look each other in the eye a little more often in order for me to take them seriously.




• Insulting Assumptions at the Crosswalk
  

  Call me crazy, but I consider it a personal affront whenever somebody walks up from behind me and presses the crosswalk button when it’s clear that I’ve already been standing there at the street corner for a while, waiting for the “Walk” sign to turn green. I know how to cross a street, asshole. Do you believe me to be such a helpless person, that I would so passively stand on every street corner that I encounter, praying for the winds of fate to sweep you into my life each time just so that you could enable my journey forward by helping me click a befuddling, magical button? Get the fuck over yourself.

  Show me enough respect to assume that I understand the concept of a crosswalk button, and maybe I’ll spare you the intricate details about the many ways by which you can go fuck yourself.




• Bizarre Self-Censorship by The Roots

  This is an old gripe of mine from way back in the day. First of all, do we have any hip-hop fans in the house? I’m a longtime fan of hip-hop myself, and I’ve learned over the years to take the good along with the bad. Although I can think of a lot of good things to say about hip-hop music, there are also many embarrassing aspects of the genre which put me on the defensive, and which compel me to justify my reasons for listening to it. The one thing I’ve always appreciated about the hip-hop band, The Roots, is that they have never given me a reason to be embarrassed about being a fan of hip-hop. The Roots are all about consciousness, intelligence, clever lyricism, and skilled musicianship. Needless to say, I’m a big fan of their work.

  

  Even so, there is one small thing that has been bothering me about The Roots for the longest time now. On the explicit, “uncensored” version of their hit 1999 album, Things Fall Apart, The Roots have scratched out the word “bitch” from at least two of their audio tracks. That is to say, at least two songs on the album include the word “bitch” in the lyrics — and for some reason, somebody saw it fit to censor the portions of each song where that word is spoken. Now, I’m all for the eradication of misogynistic lyrics in rap songs, but I think the approach that The Roots took on their album is completely ass backwards. Why would you even include that word in your lyrics if it was your intention, down the line, to censor it out of the end product? What makes this self-censorship even more ridiculous is the fact that the album is full of all other kinds of profane words, like “shit”, “motherfucker”, and the N-word. Why is it okay to say all of those other words, but not “bitch”? I really don’t understand the point that The Roots were trying to make with all of that self-censorship.

  To hear what I’m talking about, go ahead and take a listen to the YouTube clip of the song, “Dynamite!” down below. You can hear the word “bitch” scratched out of the audio at 1:29.

  Dynamite!

  For further illustration, check out the clip below for another song from the album titled, “Don’t See Us”. The word “bitch” is scratched out at 1:13. Interestingly, the word “whore” is not censored out, and can be heard clearly just a second before, around 1:12.

  Don’t See Us

  I’ve been Googling this album for years, and it seems as though nobody else out there is complaining about the censorship inconsistencies on Things Fall Apart. I’m going to go out on a limb here and proclaim that I am the first person in the world to call out The Roots on the issue of self-censorship.

  Personally, I would prefer to listen to an album without any obnoxious audio censorship scratches at all. If I wanted to hear all that noise, I could have just dialed into my local hip-hop radio station instead of listening to what was supposed to have been a polished, professionally produced album. The Roots should have either left all of the profanity on their album untouched, or they should have had a band meeting a day before entering the recording studio in order to come up with an alternate, friendlier word for “bitch”. Might I recommend the word “Pulaski” for future reference? I’m just saying.




• Terminology Inspired by the “Good Samaritan” Parable

  Is it safe to assume that most people who grew up in Westernized societies know the biblical parable that Jesus tells of the “Good Samaritan”? As the story goes, an unfortunate Jewish man gets his ass kicked by some bandits, and is left for dead along the side of a road. Two fine, upstanding Orthodox Jewish men (a priest and a Levite) pass by the injured man, but they don’t offer any help. Later on, a third man, who happens to be a Samaritan, comes along and shows the injured man an extraordinary amount of care. The point of Jesus’ parable is to illustrate the importance of showing compassion to your neighbors, which is hopefully a sentiment that we all can get behind, regardless of our beliefs. What made Jesus’ parable so provocative for its time, though, was that it portrayed a Samaritan in a positive light.

  Back in those days, Orthodox Jews and Samaritans despised each other due to their fundamental disagreements over religious doctrine. By casting a Samaritan in the role of the helpful neighbor, Jesus was making a point of showing that the qualities of kindness and human compassion are far more important than our individual beliefs in esoteric, religious dogma. I can’t help but think, though, that the spirit of Jesus’ lesson began to tarnish as soon as people started referring to this parable as the story of the “Good Samaritan”.

  

  The way I see it, the phrase, “Good Samaritan” is basically an archaic variation of a centuries-old, prejudicial slur. When Jesus originally told the story, he just referred to the guy as a “Samaritan”. Later on when people started retelling the parable, they started calling the dude a “good” Samaritan, implying that the majority of other Samaritans out there are bad people.
  

  “Samaritans? They only adhere to the Pentateuch, so they can all go eat a dick. Oh, but not that one, though. The Samaritan from that biblical parable which Jesus tells is one of the ‘good’ ones.”

  Am I being too touchy about innocent terminology? I don’t know, maybe. It just seems odd to me that in this modern day, we would chastise a person for making a remark like, “You’re a credit to your race”, all the while the phrase “Good Samaritan” has become so ingrained in the lexicon, that you could find hundreds of examples of hospitals, laws, and charitable organizations all over the world that bear that very name.

  I’m telling, you man: If, one day, I ever came across a hospital named “The Good Chinaman Medical Center”, I would flip the fuck out. I couldn’t be held responsible for the inevitable shit-storm that would follow. Like, you know. I’d probably stomp home and blog about it in a very stern tone. Or something.

As always, there’s plenty more to bitch about, but I think I’ll call it quits for now. I can only dish out so many complaints in one sitting before even I want to slap my own damn self.

So, this is what it’s like to gripe as a thirty-year-old. It’s funny, because even though nothing much has changed between twenty-nine and thirty, everything somehow seems a little more significant these days. Maybe that’s wisdom catching up to me. Ain’t that some shit?

Love is in the air, my friends. This February, my chest swells with gratitude and gladness for having found the love of my life — the one girl with whom I want to share every Valentine’s Day for the remainder of my living days. So I guess I’m no stranger to love these days. What a wonderful thing to be able to say. I consider myself lucky to have found a girlfriend as kind, as loving, and as supportive as Diana. Yet luck had very little do with keeping us together for the past seven years. If you’ll forgive me for my presumption, I’d like to share with you some insights into my relationship so that others out there might also reach the peak of romantic bliss, just as I have. True, there are happy couples all over the globe flourishing in a variety of different ways, but there is only one true way to be as happy as Diana and KZ. This one goes out to all of the lovestruck gentlemen of the world who find themselves in need of some romantic advice.

• Rule #1: Never be complacent.

  Relationships require more than mere passion and raw emotions. A healthy relationship requires effort, commitment, selflessness, and reciprocity. All of these requirements amount to a very tall order, but it’s a profoundly rewarding thing when you and your partner manage to get things right. In short, never stop trying.





• Rule #2: It’s okay to daydream when the conversations get dull.

  Let’s face it: women like to talk a whole lot more than men do. Every strong relationship should be built upon a foundation of good communication, but sometimes the temptation to daydream is just too enticing to resist when your girl spends 30 minutes describing the tedious minutia of her uneventful day. Go on and drift off. It’s okay. You deserve a mental holiday every now and then. It’s not like you won’t hear her tell you those stories again a minimum of twenty times.

  Sure, you may occasionally get in trouble when your woman realizes that you aren’t paying attention to her, but the risks are far outweighed by the benefits of daydreaming. For one thing, daydreaming keeps your mind sharp if you do it correctly. Chicks dig a man with a sharp mind, and a strong sense of imagination. Daydreaming also goes a long way to keep you sane when conversations press on the limits of your patience. But the best thing about daydreaming during a boring conversation is that you’ll always have something new to learn about the next time you decide to pay attention. Don’t feel guilty for allowing your mind to wander. Embrace the discovery.





• Rule #3: Show her all of the best aspects of your personality, but also hide nothing.

  Never stop dating your girl even long after you two have moved beyond the awkward dating phase. It’s all too easy to grow complacent in a long-term relationship, but try to put your best foot forward as much as you can so that she will always see the best that you have to offer. Having said that, it’s also important to understand that your less admirable qualities are bound to show through on occasion, so don’t treat them like a dirty secret. By all means, always try to show her your best, but also be honest about who you are.

  Consider the case of Mouthy. I always do what I can to show Diana the very best of me, and she adores me for it because I kick so much ass. Despite that fact, Diana also understands that I’m a human being with my own weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and brittle frailties. I express the essence of those lesser qualities through Mouthy, a hexagonal hand puppet whom I create out of paper chopstick covers every time I take Diana out to eat at an Asian restaurant.

  

  Mouthy wants so desperately to make friends with Diana. Unfortunately, Diana spurns Mouthy’s every attempt to strike up a conversation. Invariably, Diana always finds a way to wrestle Mouthy away from me, and she’ll shred him to pieces before my grieving eyes. Given that Mouthy is made of paper, and given that Diana has demonstrated an alarming propensity for destroying him, Mouthy is the living embodiment of weakness, vulnerability, and brittle frailty. Mouthy’s fragile weaknesses mirror my own. His suffering is my suffering. I do what I can to show Diana my very best, but I also accept the weaknesses of my own constitution.

  

  It’s interesting to note that Diana can so callously destroy a part of me without showing an ounce of remorse. That’s the stuff of psychopaths, man. This aspect of Diana appears to be one of her own character faults. Even so, Rule #3 is a two way street, and so I choose to love Diana anyway despite her moral frailty. That’s just the way true love works.

  Diana loves me for who I am. For better or worse, she accepts all of the things that make me KZ. Diana loves me in spite of Mouthy. Diana loves me because of Mouthy. All you need is a little emotional honesty to make things work.

  
  
  

• Rule #4: Keep the fires burning by inserting a little mystery into the mix.

  The specter of boredom is an unfortunate reality for even the most loving and compatible of couples. Over time, long-term relationships define themselves on dedication and stability rather than impulsiveness and excitement. But who’s to say that the fires of passion are destined to die?

  

  The best way to prevent familiarity from breeding contempt is to spice up your days with a little mystery. This goes a long way to keeping your girl interested and emotionally engaged. Using myself as an example, I have recently formed the habit of arbitrarily abbreviating my sentences so that I only say the first letter of a number of strategic words. Diana finds this practice of mine mystifying, yet mysterious — confusing, yet completely irresistible. Here’s a portion of a conversation that I had with Diana sometime last week.

  Diana: Guess what, Kevin. I reached level 15 on my Smurfs game.

  Kevin: Oh yeah, great. That totally justifies the way you monopolize my iPhone all the time.

  Diana: Yes, it does. See, I can harvest all kinds of cool crops, like peas and strawberries. And sometimes Papa Smurf will send me on missions where I have to go out and look for lost smurfs. There’s also mini-games and Smurfette!

  Kevin: Yeah, yeah, GFY.

  Diana: GFY? What does that … hey, screw you! You “go fuck yourself”.

  Kevin: Whoa, that’s not what GFY means. It stands for, “good for you”.

  Diana: God damnit, I fucking hate it when you turn everything into an acronym. Why don’t you talk like a person and use actual words?

  Kevin: First of all, GFY is not an acronym. An acronym is an abbreviation made up of initial letters which form a pronounceable word. Secondly…

  Diana: I don’t give a shit. I’m just sick of having to decode all of your sentences.

  Kevin: Yeah, yeah. GFY.

  Insert some mystery, keep her guessing, and keep things spicy. She’ll thank you for it in the long run.

  
  
  

• Rule #5: Create no-win situations to remind her of what she has.

  Sometimes the best way to remind your girl that you’re the best choice for her is to confront her with a lighthearted, no-win situation. By stripping away the possibilities for choice from a strategic number of situations, you are gently guiding your girl toward the understanding that you are in possession of the key to a number of life’s hidden truths, which is totally hot. Again, using myself as an example, consider this conversation that Diana and I recently had about our Netflix instant queue.

  

  Diana: What do you want to watch tonight, Kevin? Battlestar Galactica or Desperate Housewives?

  Kevin: You mean B-Star G or Desperate H-Dub?

  Diana: Fine. Do you want to watch B-Star G or Desperate H-Dub?

  Kevin: What the hell are you talking about? Why are you abbreviating your words like that? You mean Battlestar Galactica or Desperate Housewives?

  Diana: You are such a dick, you know that?

  Kevin: I know a lot of things, Diana. You know what else I know? I know that I love you.

  Diana: Yeah, right. My fucking hero.

  I don’t mean to brag or anything, but apparently, I am Diana’s hero. It’s only taken her a handful of no-win situations to realize this fact.

  
  
  

• Rule #6: A well-placed “I love you” can go a very long way.

  As exemplified in Rule #5, saying “I love you” at precisely the right time can disarm your girl, and remind her of how much you mean to her. “I love you” is a wonderfully magical statement. It has the power to enchant her in the midst of a romantic moment, or to melt her heart in the middle of a heated fight.

  

  You should also consider the value of “I love you” for its ability to make you look like the sympathetic party while recalling the events of a lovers’ quarrel. Case in point, here is a continuation of the conversation that I quoted in Rule #5.

  Kevin: I know a lot of things, Diana. You know what else I know? I know that I love you.

  Diana: Yeah, right. My fucking hero.

  Kevin: I truly mean it. I love you, Diana.

  Diana: Fuck you.

  See what I mean? Who’s the bad guy from that particular exchange? Just three simple words transform your everyday, awesome KZ, into a tragically stoic martyr of love. The utterance of that simple phrase at precisely the right moment has made me out to look like a modern-day Casanova. I’m a KZ-nova, if you will. Don’t you desperately want to be like me, now?

  
  
  

• Rule #7: Resist proposing marriage for a minimum of seven years.

  This method seems to have worked for me. I imagine you will be able to employ the same strategy with similar success. Your girl may give you grief for not proposing to her sooner, but she will also respect your resistance, as this will be interpreted as a display of manliness and cavalier strength. Chicks dig manly men of a rebellious nature almost as much as they dig abusive douchebags who treat women like crap. Show her your strong, principled, masculine side without venturing into the realm of douchebaggery, and you’ll be golden.

  

  
  
  

• Rule #8: Fantasy and role-play are great tools for spicing up the bedroom.

  Sometimes keeping it real is overrated. Sometimes it’s more fun to indulge in a little fantasy before bed. Head over to Diana’s Awesome Blog at www.KZSucksAss.com to read all about Rule #8.

  

  
  
  

• Rule #9: Complimenting your girl while she’s getting dressed is a great excuse to cop a feel.

  Try this one the next time you enter the room while your girl is getting dressed. “Hey, honey, have you lost weight?” As soon as she looks down to examine her body, reach out and cop a free feel. Whether your girl believes in the sincerity of your statement after the fact is irrelevant for two reasons: (1) Even if it was just for a brief moment, you raised her personal sense of body image and self esteem; and (2) You got to cop a free feel during the exchange. In either event, it’s a win-win situation. It’s fun to desire, and fun to be desired.

  
  
  

• Rule #10: If you are as insufferably annoying to your girl as I am to Diana, then be sure to thank her this Valentine’s Day for putting up with your ridiculous shit.

  Diana may swear like a sailor, but she has the patience of a saint. I’m lucky that Diana tolerates me in spite all of my self-indulgent, juvenile antics. Diana, I am the happiest that I’ve ever been in life because I have you by my side. Every moment and every day with you is a reason to celebrate.

  

  I love you, Diana. Sincerely, I do.

  
  
  
  

You see, fellas? That’s how it’s done. Cap it all off with a brief display of tender sincerity, and she’ll eat it right up, and let you get away with murder. Ain’t love grand?

Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody.

One of my favorite stand-up comedians, Emo Philips, tells a relatively benign joke that kind of creeps me out whenever I think about it:

“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”

The connection between the brain, consciousness, and human identity is really a bizarre thing. The brain is this squishy, unassuming organ that resides in the head, and it processes countless actions per second. It is the source of conscious and unconscious thought. It dutifully delegates commands to regulate respiration, digestion, muscle control, and immune system defense. It performs all of these actions in perfect concert with each other, and yet it perplexingly remains a mystery to itself. If it weren’t for the benefit of research and education, a person’s brain could potentially remain unconscious of itself throughout an entire lifetime. The thought of that is strange and unsettling to me.

In Julia Sweeney’s one-person monologue, Letting Go of God, Sweeney aptly illustrates the tension between biological truths and human perception:

When I think of myself as my innermost being, I just don’t think of it as a body function. My brain creates this idea that my “self” is not it “self”. I mean, I think of my “self” as something separate looking out from my eyes, listening through my ears, pulling the strings that make my body move. And that’s because the brain is not able to perceive its own functioning. And this is true for all of us, by the way, right from childhood. When a child is told that it’s their brain that thinks … they don’t think that their brain is them. They think their brain is this thinking, computing machine, something that is added to their “self” to help them understand things. And yet the mind is what the brain does, just like pumping blood is what the heart does.

So what is consciousness, and what is self? And how much room is there left for the existence of a soul? I’m afraid those are questions that I’m just not equipped to answer.

The more I think about my own brain, it seems stranger, and more unfamiliar to me. Yet isn’t that a strange thought to have? My brain — the computing center of all my feelings and thoughts — is unwittingly disturbed by its very own mundane existence and processes. There is a cyclical conflict inside my own head that exacerbates with each revelation, and with each reaction to those revelations. I think of my mind, and I realize that it’s just a function of my brain, and it spooks me to think that there is an entity within myself that can be so intimately intertwined with my identity, and yet it feels so distant and unfamiliar. But then my brain pushes back, almost as if it were offended by the very thoughts that it just created, and suddenly I find my head folding and unfolding in a perpetual spiral of self-doubt and confusion. It all just makes me very dizzy.

I consider the sensation a mild form of madness, something akin to the distress that Linus from Peanuts feels when he becomes aware of his own tongue.

These are the kind of thoughts that keep me awake at night. It drives me crazy, because I know my brain knows better than to provoke a fight with itself right before bed. This is probably where all of the insomnia comes from.

“Good Grief” indeed, Lucy.

“Just look at it!” this opportunist must have said to himself. “That animal’s back is perfectly contoured to form a mobile, steerable seat for my ass, and the animal itself is just tall enough so that my feet don’t touch the ground.”

Poor horses. They got the evolutionary shaft.

Among this bounty of undervalued books, I found and purchased an old, worn copy of Garfield Takes Up Space.

Just recently, I finally got around to reading the book. I love Garfield, and so of course I enjoyed the book from cover to cover. When I reached the last page, though, I came across something that made me pause. On the upper left corner of the inside cover was a handwritten message: “Sassy was there & here!” The ampersand was modified to look like a heart with hooks and bubbles hovering above and below it.

As I’ve mentioned before, I find something fascinating about graffiti in public places. Just as equally, I get this visceral kick from discovering handwritten notes in previously handled books. There’s an entire world out there of subtext, secret monologues, raw opinions, frantic notes, and words literally written between the lines. What a wonderful thing it is to open a book and to immediately understand how the words within affected the reader who came before you. It’s like you’re taking a glimpse into someone else’s subconscious mind, and your shared experience with this stranger suddenly becomes all the more meaningful.

As I stared down at Sassy’s note to the world, I realized how sad it was that the potency of her message had to die so that I could purchase this discounted Garfield book. How many others would have seen Sassy’s note had I decided not to throw this tattered old book into my paper bag?

So today of all days, before the close of the year, I’m getting the word out. Sassy was there & here!

So instead of subjecting you to a trivial, self-indulgent list of things that make me happy, why I don’t I just bitch a while about trivial things that piss me off? Somehow, I think, this kind of exercise strikes closer to the heart of things.

Here is my list of petty grievances, organized in no particular order.

• The misuse of Amber Alert signs, utilized for the purpose of breaking people’s balls. The Amber Alert Program was enacted in 2002, enabling law enforcement agencies to quickly disseminate information about time-critical child abduction cases. Many Amber Alert signs have been erected near highways all over the United States.

  


  

  When used properly, these signs display critical information about kidnapped children and their suspected abductors. More often than not, however, these signs display public service slogans designed to nag you and to remind you of your duties as a responsible driver. During most major holidays, the signs command you to “Report Drunk Drivers – Call 911″. Every Fourth of July or Cinco de Mayo, the signs remind you that “Fireworks Are Illegal”. And on ordinary days, the signs pester you with “Click It Or Ticket” or “Don’t Speed – Save Lives”. Just once, couldn’t the people controlling those signs either post something positive or festive like “Happy Holidays”, or just turn off the damned signs? And don’t even get me started on the Schwarzenegger administration’s proposal to post advertisements on Amber Alert signs to generate revenue for the state of California.




• Dim traffic signal lights with bad visibility from varying ranges. While we’re on the subject of driving, I hate those traffic signal lights covered with glossy lenses that make the entire strip of lights appear to be shut off until you drive within a certain proximity of a traffic intersection. I tried to do some research online before writing about these lights, but I came up with nothing. I don’t have an official term for the offending lights, and I don’t understand the science behind the lenses, but what I do know is that they are ridiculous hazards.

  Most traffic signal lights in the United States are bright and visible, day or night, from any reasonable distance or angle. But there is an obnoxious handful of traffic signal lights on the road that are equipped with these terrible glossy lenses that make all of the colors look dim, and you don’t know whether you should stop or drive through until you’ve almost entered the intersection. “Stop” and “Go” are two concepts that should not be equivocated so easily.

  


• Crowd participation. There’s nothing I hate more about attending a live musical performance than being pressured into clapping along with a beat. I’m not trying to crap on the value of shared experiences, but I’m sorry: crowd participation is bullshit. I didn’t leave my house to act as a ghetto metronome; I’m here to be entertained. Clapping along with a song is tedious, and pretty much every crowd grows tired of the game midway through any song. I predict that shit and roll my eyes every time audiences start it up, and I’m always right. I clap my hands only when I believe that I’ve been given a reason to.




• Gratuitous live, on-location reporting by television news journalists. The news is a highly time-sensitive subject. It makes sense that so many TV news journalists report live from remote locations, because sometimes you don’t have all of the facts until just a few minutes before you go on the air. What I find irritating, though, is the culture of television journalism that emphasizes the importance of reporting live and on the scene at all possible times, even when it’s not relevant to do so. In my television-viewing lifetime, I have witnessed such bullshit as a local news correspondent reporting live and on the scene at 11 o’clock at night from some vacant, outdoor venue where an important event happened twenty years ago. I don’t understand this phobia that news agencies have of allowing their correspondents to comment on recorded images while they sit comfortably in the broadcasting studio.


Problems with audio/visual feeds and disruptions by obnoxious bystanders would greatly reduce if these TV professionals would just broadcast from behind a desk more often.




• Astrology. It’s difficult to understand how so many intelligent people can buy into the concept that objects in outer space have a direct effect on the personalities and behaviors of human beings. We’re talking about objects occupying space hundreds of millions of miles away from Earth. How the hell does the alignment of planets have any impact on my development as a person? If you believe that the positioning of planets at the moment of my birth is an indicator of what’s to come throughout my adulthood, then I contend that the arbitrary positioning of objects on Earth at the moment of my birth also plays a significant role on who I will become.

  I think it bears mentioning that when I was born, my father’s Buick Regal was parked 58 meters away from the hospital entrance. It is because of this fortuitous positioning of my father’s car that I will be a generous person with a sunny demeanor and a strong propensity for juggling, ventriloquism, and taxidermy. Had my father parked 57 meters away from the hospital entrance, I would have been a surly, cranky asshole who hates everything and everybody. I really dodged the proverbial spooky-superstitious-matter-and-space-altering-cosmical-tarot-death-card-Scorpiquarius-Year-of-the-Rat-Gemini’s-Twin-Little-Dipper bullet. Thank Zeus! I mean, I don’t believe in anything else that came out of Greek mythology, but I inexplicably accept this dubious correlation between celestial bodies and human bodies.




• DVD commentary banter containing spoiler alerts. I’m a special features geek. I watch a fair amount of television shows and movies on DVD, and I almost always make time to listen to the commentary tracks. The one conversation that I’m tired of listening to is the one that seems to pop up in every commentary track ever recorded. Invariably, somebody on the commentary track wants to talk about a plot point that will be revealed either later in the movie or later in the episode, but they voice their hesitation since they don’t want to spoil the surprise for the viewer. Eventually, somebody else in the recording booth asks, “Who buys a DVD and goes straight to the commentary track without watching the original content?” Then the commentators have a good laugh over this nugget of insight and carry on as though they were the first people to ever have this conversation. There goes another two minutes of wasted commentary time. That’s two minutes’ worth of lost revelations.

  I realize that DVD commentary tracks are inherently a waste of time, but the least that these Hollywood professionals can do is have the courtesy to get a freaking clue about their own industry before they waste my time with this moronic running gag in their commentary tracks.

  


• Birds that swoop low to the ground when they’re flying across a street. Fuck birds. They can fly while the rest of us can’t, and yet they always swoop down into harm’s way in front of my moving car when they want to cross a street. I’ve nearly crashed into a couple of them in my time. Look, birds: the whole point of flying is being able to crap on us land dwellers’ heads all the while you stay out of our reach. If you birds are going to squander your ability with these daredevil antics, then you deserve whatever misfortune becomes of you when you’re not looking.

On this Thanksgiving Day of 2008, I give thanks for all of these petty grievances. They keep me irritated, they keep me human, and counter-intuitively, they probably keep me sane. Seriously though, fuck birds.

“One day, when I was quite young,” my friend Wendy once wrote, “I saw a graffittied stop sign saying, ‘stop thewar,’ and I spent two days trying to figure out what thew ar was.”

Wendy’s recollection has always reminded me of a story of my own. One day at the age of thirteen, I was waiting in line for a ride at an amusement park. I noticed that somebody had carved onto a wooden post the words, “Jesus is Bord!” I had no idea what that meant, and I kept wondering what this person was trying to say. Maybe it was something as profound and as bleak as, “Jesus has lost all interest in our silly human games.” Or perhaps it was more of a blasphemous non sequitur like, “I am Jesus, and I am sick of waiting in this long line.” It wasn’t until three months later that I realized that the most likely story pointed to two authors: one to write the original message of “Jesus is Lord,” and a second one to carve a capital B out of the letter L. The world seems far more mundane once you take the mystery out of graffiti in public places.

It’s the excitement of the mystery, anonymity, and raw emotion behind graffiti that makes it so intriguing. I have never felt passionately enough to deface a public surface with a drawing or an earnest opinion, but I often wonder what goes through the minds of those people who do. Surely they understand that you can’t change the world by writing on a wall, don’t they? Perhaps they do understand that, but sometimes the most important thing is merely knowing that somebody somewhere can hear you. That’s almost admirable in an idealistic, sentimentally quixotic sort of way. Graffiti is vandalism, and I sure as hell don’t want anybody spraying up my house or my fences, but there’s something so primal and so urgent about it that I just can’t deny the inexorable humanity of it all. Sometimes the desire to be heard outweighs common sense and common courtesy. Sometimes graffiti is fucking cool.

Amongst rapper Mos Def’s many memorable rhymes, an excerpt from his song, Speed Law, has always stuck with me:

Get your power, your masks and capes snatched
Brooklyn take what you can’t take back
I know a lot of cats hate that
All I can say black
There’s a city full of walls you can post complaints at

Perhaps it’s silly of me to romanticize the vandalism of public and private property. Graffiti, after all, is obnoxious. It’s selfish and unsightly and invariably offensive to somebody. It’s the human equivalent of urinating on a tree to mark your presence. Although there is a growing movement of legitimate graffiti artists who have turned the medium into a viable art form, and although some disenfranchised idealists have written some powerful things on public walls over the years, the vast majority of the world’s graffiti amounts to hateful smut or hackneyed catch phrases. I guess as in all things in life, our only recourse is to tolerate the bad along with what little good there is to find.

Like it or not, the desire to be heard is a universal human constant — a necessity like laughter, friendship, water, and air. It is a deeply ingrained need that both inspires and taints the human heart. When Simon & Garfunkel sang about the words of the prophets written on the subway walls, they were tapping into the human desire to be heard in a paradoxical world where people struggle to communicate, all the while the technology enabling mass communication steadily improves. We have our blogs and our special interest forums and our Facebook accounts, but there’s no substituting a blank wall facing a busy street. We pee wherever the hell we want to pee because we are human beings, goddamn it, and we have a right to be heard. Just stay the fuck off my lawn and write on my neighbors’ walls, okay, humanity?

One October, twenty-something years ago, I was a five-year-old boy sitting at the kitchen table staring at a pumpkin. By the end of the night, I would have a jack-o-lantern to call my own. There was no such thing as a child-friendly pumpkin carving knife in the early 1980s, so the most that I was allowed to do was draw a face on my pumpkin, and leave the actual carving up to my grandfather.

Not understanding the strategic disadvantages of drawing on a pumpkin with a ballpoint pen, I did what kids do and gave it a go with the first pen that I could find. Even as a child with a five-year-old sense of aesthetics, I was severely disappointed with my efforts. The triangle eyes were lopsided and round. The triangular nose was centered, but was equally awkward. Worst of all, though, was the mouth.

My intention was to give my jack-o-lantern a wide grin with vampire fangs. I started with the top half of the mouth and drew two prominent fangs that any vampire would be proud of. Then came the bottom half. I started on the left side of the mouth and carefully formed the bottom lip of the smile. As I was arching the pen underneath the top half of the mouth, my pen slipped at the most disastrous moment, and my pen stroke scribbled through the sharp angle that was supposed to be the first fang. I stared horrified at my disfigured jack-o-lantern and slowly came to accept the fact that Halloween had been ruined. Forever. Angrily, I stabbed the ballpoint pen back into the rogue mouth line and scribbled haphazardly with disgust, great frustration, and kindergarten angst. I threw my pen down onto the table and stormed out of the room.

My father let me cool down for about twenty minutes and then called me back into the kitchen. When I reentered the room, my brother, Jonathan, was still designing his own jack-o-lantern, and my grandfather was seated across from him, busily carving the pumpkin that I had so furiously abandoned. After a few halfhearted attempts to stop my grandfather, the pumpkin was carved, smiling defiantly at me with its hideous grin. I didn’t have the verbal or emotional vocabulary to express this at the time, but as I stared at that orange sphere of immortalized failure, I was overcome with a mix of feelings. I was ashamed of my terrible illustration, and I was embarrassed that my grandfather had so lovingly interpreted my ridiculous scribbling as an honest and credible attempt at self expression. That jack-o-lantern was just as much a testament to my temper and my propensity to quit as it was a testament of my grandfather’s support for his grandson: the young, budding artist who would one day embark on an earnest quest for true inspiration.

Of course, I was five at the time, and I didn’t have the capacity to express all of that effusive sentimentality. I was just a kid staring at the most sarcastic jack-o-lantern in the world, trying my best not to punch a hole through that stupid, taunting face. I guess I’m old enough to say this now, so I might as well say it. When I look back on that day as an adult, I remember those moments with good humor, and with an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Thanks, Grandpa. Happy Halloween.

I’ve grown to tolerate haunts over the years, but I still can’t love them.  I’m still a little sour on the idea of paying money to be hassled by screaming wackos who  get in your face and threaten to touch you, but who never do.  If I wanted to spend money to experience that level of abusive frustration, I’d be much better off visiting my neighborhood S&M strip club.  At least there, they touch you a little after you pay extra.  Speaking of which, part of the reason why I’m a little uncomfortable with haunts is that they subject me to the same kind of mental and moral dilemmas that I experience in strip clubs, but in far more hostile settings.

There’s a similar element of dehumanization involved in haunts as there are in strip clubs.  In either setting, people place themselves on display for your amusement, inviting you to regard them not as people, but as scenery — as props in an elaborate stage production. A stripper on stage transforms herself into an object of sexual desire, and your enjoyment of the show depends on your ability to objectify the performer. The show seems a lot less fun when you you start looking the stripper in the eye instead of staring at her curves, and you imagine her applying your folded dollar bills towards her rent or next month’s car payment.

In an oddly analogous way, your enjoyment of a heavily staffed haunt also depends on your ability to suspend a portion of your human empathy. Within the confines of those haunted mazes, cast members become monsters, beasts, and supernatural fiends. They pop out of dark corners with intimidating growls and screams, or they stare at you blankly in the center of a room beneath a macabre layer of fake blood and graphic wounds, forcing you to find a path around them. When these cast members confront you, you have a choice between recoiling in fear and fleeing the “monsters” at your heels, or laughing with good nature and smiling at the cast members — the people who are placing you in this ridiculous and socially awkward situation. Those who cringe and flee suspend their disbelief just long enough to believe in their tormentors’ lack of humanity. On the other hand, I feel a little guilty for laughing and smiling at the cast members because it almost feels like I’m celebrating my own dignity at the expense of others who would willingly sacrifice a little bit of their own dignity to frighten me. Those are the kinds of situations where I feel like I can never win. I’ve never walked out of one of those haunts feeling anything else other than relief that the ordeal is over.

Halloween approaches fast this year.  Soon it will be the 31st, and then it will be November.  I just need to hold out a little longer, and the whole ordeal will be over.  Freaking Halloween.  What other time of year can you walk down the street armed with a chainsaw and a bloody hatchet and people will regard you with smiles of approval?  I’m just looking forward to better days, when the only people whom I will overtly objectify are strippers and exotic dancers.  Man, that’ll be sweet.

Salvation implies distress, strained existence, discomfort and insistence to persist without so much as an explanation as to what we need to accomplish in our mortal state. The coil, they call it. Coil and recoil, life and death, it’s all the same meager sentiment, this jumbled mess. The debts we retain in life extend further than a grave or the confines of generations or decades, the waves of fate ever failing to respond to our devastation, our indignant rage, the demands and indictments in favor of explanation, justification for indiscriminate destruction, incessant hate. Humanity has been set ablaze, and who in God’s name are we expecting to tend to the flames?

Salvation is change, a means of relief from intolerable heat, and moaning, indefinite need, greed for desire’s sake, the sake of revisions to escape the weight of lamentable lost purity. Salvation is the culmination of dreams, the subconscious growing with ever more contempt, yet each day we rely on those depths to keep us afloat, to live in the exclusion of savagery. Many fail. Yet those dreams drive us forward, mere vessels of tendons, bones, water, delicate flesh, and self-transcending selves in need of a destination worth attaining, a justification for this retched state in which we toil and grieve and exist on the insistence of fear. Such is life, and such is us. Salvation can’t seem to come soon enough.