These days, I’m walking with a limp, and a large portion of the backside of my leg looks like there’s a huge, dark bruise. It’s kind of gross and fascinating at the same time. I considered posting a picture of my messed up leg in all of its internal bleeding glory, but my better judgment won the fight, and I decided instead to post an awesome picture of me snap shooting from behind a spool.

Man. It almost looks like I know what I’m doing.

So I guess I’m out of commission for the next month or so. In the meantime, I’m limping with a gimp leg. This is all a very strange and new experience for me, because until now, I’ve never in my life had a legitimate reason to walk with a limp. I’ve seen people do it on television and in the movies, and I’ve passed by the occasional limper or two while shopping at the supermarket, but I had never walked a mile in a limper’s shoes until recently. Truth be told, walking any stretch of distance is kind of an ordeal for me right now.

To be honest, I’m a little bummed. I’m benched from my favorite weekend activity for a while, and I’m still a little self conscious about my limp. It’s not like I have anything to be ashamed of for walking around with a bum leg. I guess I just don’t like drawing attention to myself, and inviting people to make all kinds of assumptions about me because of my uneven stride. It’s strange how something like a strained hamstring can take you back to all of those childish, playground insecurities that used to plague you in elementary school. I’m an adult, goddamnit. I should conduct my affairs as if I don’t give a shit. That’s something to strive for, anyway.

In an effort to combat these insecurities of mine, I’m putting my faith into a simple remedy — turning my awkward limp into a defiant swagger. Life is just so much better when you incorporate a little swag into the mix. With each shuffled step I take for the next four to six weeks, I’ll be singing to myself the hook to “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” from the Hustle & Flow soundtrack. The only difference is, in my head, I’ll be replacing the word “pimp” with “gimp”. Yeah, I know, that’s kind of sophomoric and obvious. If you have a problem with my remedy, then I invite you to tear your own hamstring, and to sing along to whatever song that you so desire.

Four to six weeks. Ugh. That’s too long to wait for the next opportunity to shoot some people in the face. You know, it really is hard out here for a gimp. Here’s to you, November. I’ll be seeing you soon enough.

Remember me, friends, long after my final breath. Remember that there once existed a man whose heart beat against the same rhythm as yours — that he once laughed as proudly, roared as mightily, and had his heart broken as readily as any one of you during the span of his modest and unremarkable moments. Listen to your most personal motivations, your silent and unshared intentions, and know that I once felt similar things, and understood those notions as privately and as earnestly as you do today. Remember me, friends, and never forget that the commonality of experience binds us by unspeakable means.

Across all measures of time, our hearts shall bleed among tides of unlikely unison, and we are left no choice but to believe that tomorrow is a day worth seeing, that there is a reason to keep the human spirit from receding. Remember me, friends, for I once lived, and loved, and dreamed as honestly and as imperfectly as I knew how to, and was moved to tears beneath the vastness of the same stretch of unrelenting sky to which you offer your prayers, your songs, your sobs, your errant gazes, your wild cries, recollections of stolen moments, and exhalations of private sighs.

Remember me, friends, long after my final breath, and ages since the days when I lived my life with the irrepressible desire to believe. Remember me, friends, for I was once a man who lived and breathed.

GOD: In just a few hundred years from now, think of how backwards your civilizations will seem to your descendants.

KEVIN: Maybe you have a point. Even modern day people are still pretty gullible. Look at the second rate garbage that we consider miracles today: peanuts and potato chips shaped like Jesus; people discovering the shahadah written in Arabic on fish scale patterns, and in cracks on rocks; fuzzy rings of light that are supposedly apparitions of the Virgin Mary; fake-ass television evangelists curing afflictions on the air. It would all be laughable if it weren’t so goddamned sad. We’re all so desperate down here to find meaning in the least significant of things. What kind of Divine Plan are you playing at, God?

GOD: First of all, the television evangelists bother me, too. As for the peanuts, potato chips, fish scales, rocks, and rings of light — I guess I was being too subtle.

KEVIN: Oh come on!

GOD: You know, it’s not as if I suddenly stopped caring one day. I’ve been keeping an eye on things the whole time.

KEVIN: I’m sorry to say this, but it seems to me that you either don’t give as much of a shit about humanity as you claim to, or you simply have no more control over the outcome of events than I do. At the very least, can we agree that you simply don’t multitask very well?

GOD: I do a little more than I think you give me credit for.

KEVIN: Right, miracles are happening all the time, aren’t they? Small miracles, they call them. I guess human gullibility wasn’t exclusive to biblical times.

GOD: You honestly think that all of the believers throughout history who bore witness to miracles merely fooled themselves?

KEVIN: What if I said yes?

GOD: Then I’d say you’re full of it.

KEVIN: If you really are God, then you can’t say things like that. It’s beneath you.

GOD: I’m tired of people presuming to know what I can or cannot, would or would not, or should or should not say.

KEVIN: That’s pretty funny.

GOD: Why?

KEVIN: I’ll tell you later.

GOD: It’s hard to keep secrets from me, you know.

KEVIN: So I’ve been told.

GOD: But you don’t believe in everything you’re told, do you?

KEVIN: Sorry God, I don’t believe in blind faith.

GOD: Neither do I.

KEVIN: Then I guess we’ve found some common ground.

GOD: An entire planet’s worth.

Am I the only one who cuts himself short in the middle of a road-rage-fueled, obscenity-ridden tirade after being cut off in traffic because I’m paranoid of dying in a car crash mid-sentence, and I don’t want my last words to be, “Go fuck yourself with a sharp rusty fork, motherfucker”?

I’m having a hard time figuring out whether that thought process makes me an optimist, or a cynic.

Hasn’t the world realized yet that I’m old, and tired, and incurably lame?

I guess I still look young enough on the surface to some people, but sometimes I feel like I’m a million miles away from my actual age. There comes a day in every adult’s life when he looks at the world for the first time without the benefit of a youthful, wide-eyed sense of discovery, when he beholds the tedium of his daily routines and the echoes of inevitable decay, when he steps aside from a lifetime of expectations and regretfully whispers, “Is this all there is to life?” I’ve lived that moment once or twice. If you stop and listen closely enough, you can almost hear God muttering Douglas Adams’ immortal words: “We apologise for the inconvenience.”

The rituals of existence find us willing participants in a dance of misdirection, misplaced faith, the placement of utter certainty in the least definite of petty assumptions, multiplied to the point of absurdity. This is the state of living.

On a completely unrelated note, I just thought I should mention that 2011 is the year that I turn 30. I think I’m handling it pretty well so far.

If I were a comic book super villain, my origin story would probably begin sometime around December 1991. I was just a nine-year-old kid back then, but there came a day many Decembers ago when I formed the presence of mind to reliably differentiate fiction from fact. I thought things through during that Christmas season, and I came to the conclusion that Santa Claus is a fraud. All these years later, I’m still not ready to forgive Santa for never having existed.

No Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. This is a truth that every adult in your life has known, yet they’ve all been bullied into silence by some bizarre social norm which requires adults to deceive naive little children for as many Decembers as possible. It’s okay to grieve, child. A part of your innocence and imagination has just been shattered, and you’re left with the unsettling revelation that not only does Santa Claus not exist, but also with the knowledge that the adults you’ve known have been lying to you your entire life. You asked them in earnest to tell you the simple truth about Santa Claus, and they repaid your sincerity with whimsical double-talk and bald-faced lies. Yes, Virginia, it’s okay to cry. Adults are condescending, deceitful pricks.

Fuck Santa Claus, man. From the moment your child discovers Superman from watching television, you begin warning her that there is no such thing as the super power of flight, because you can’t bear the thought of your kid jumping off a roof with a blanket tied around her neck. When your child starts playing video games for the first time, you start reminding her that there is no such thing as a “Reset” button in real life, because every choice and action has a consequence. When your child sees you doing household cleaning chores around the house, and she then asks why you don’t just clean things up by waving a wand like Harry Potter, you sit your kid down and explain to her that magic isn’t real, and that good things come to people who work hard. Make-believe is awesome, but we place boundaries on our children’s imaginations all the time so that they don’t grow up to become ignorant people who wallow in self-delusion.

It’s not my intention to degrade the value of childhood innocence. I just happen to think that the tradition of lying to our children about Santa Claus is the biggest crock of shit of the Holiday season. Maybe I was an abnormal child growing up, but I genuinely felt embarrassed and betrayed once I realized that my parents and teachers had been lying to me about Santa Claus my entire life, and all because they figured it was “for my own good”. At the age of nine, I learned one of the shittiest lessons that a kid could ever learn: “In the end, you can trust nobody else except yourself.” Merry Fucking Christmas, overly-sensitive, nine-year-old KZ.

A couple years have passed since 1991, and I’ve come to terms with the fact that Santa Claus makes for a pretty decent mascot during the Christmas season. The myth of Jolly Old Saint Nick is a fun tale to tell, but why do so many of us consider it a child’s entitlement to be deceived every December? Some might argue that belief in the Santa Claus myth helps stimulate our children’s imaginations, and that it promotes a festive atmosphere filled with fun for the kids. I don’t deny the truth of that argument, but I do have to question its merit.

Christmas has so much more to offer than Santa Claus — so much more than the mere crassness of all that materialism and bribery for good behavior. For Christian parents, Christmas is a time to remember Jesus, and to celebrate all of the values that Jesus held in the highest esteem: love, kindness, friendship, tolerance, and faith not only in God, but faith in the common humanity that binds us to our families, friends, neighbors, and even to our enemies. Even if you’re not a Christian parent, and yet you happen to celebrate Christmas in your own secular or ecumenical way, wouldn’t your children benefit more from an emphasis on the value to be found in the season’s spirit of love, kindness, and peace, versus an emphasis on a silly story about a fat judgmental magic man who trespasses on private properties without remorse, and who spends the majority of his time stuffing his face and judging everybody?

Christmas is the time of year when we celebrate that lofty promise of peace on earth, and good will toward men. I know, that’s some corny shit. I don’t care if it’s corny, though. Every December, I look toward the stars, and I convince myself to believe — if only for a moment — that one day in the future before the end, humanity will finally get things right. I guess you could accuse me of hypocrisy for speaking out against delusions and lies, all the while I place my belief in impossible things. There’s probably some truth to that criticism. But hey, you know what? At least my delusion doesn’t make lame excuses to get your children to sit on its lap. That’s the creepiest shit ever.

In closing, Santa Claus can go F himself in the A.

Merry Christmas, kids.

“Inside thoughts” are the kind of ideas that are probably best kept to yourself. They are the mental processes that fuel those off-colored remarks which jeopardize careers, end friendships, get you punched, earn you sideways glances, and make you want to die the moment you vocalize them into words. I’m talking about the kind of thoughts that recklessly escape your mouth like a drenched and agitated cat bolting away from an involuntary bath. I’m talking about those moments in life when you silence a room because you’ve said too much, and much too loudly. “Of course there’s a way,” you proudly proclaim. “Haven’t you ever heard of glory holes?” Try that line out if you enjoy awkward moments marked by a horrified silence. I’ve been there.

A staggering variety of messed up shit pops into my head on a daily basis. On the whole, my inner sense of discretion filters out most of those inside thoughts from my blog entries, and when I engage in polite conversation. Sometimes though, on occasions like today, the best way to stay sane is to let loose, and to unleash a deluge of inside thoughts onto a hapless crowd of onlookers.

Assuming I still have your attention, let’s get started with the indiscretions.

• 

  My girlfriend, Diana, is an animal lover. She never fails to comment on the tragedy of roadkill when she spots a dead animal in the center of the road. “Poor possum!” she’ll cry. The sight of a dead animal is never a pleasant thing, but I never let things like that get me down. I always assume the possum had it coming. He was probably embezzling money from his employers down at the possum insurance agency. He must have also been a lousy drunk — the kind of douche who would come home sloshed every night after work wearing his brown fedora and his tiny maroon necktie without a collared shirt, and who would spit on the cold plate of dinner that had been lovingly set aside for him, all before beating his possum wife in a savage, drunken rage. Fuck that possum, man. He totally got what was coming to him.

• Assuming there is such a thing as an afterlife, and assuming that Heaven and Hell actually exist, how can we be so sure that Hell is the ghoulishly terrible place that everybody makes it out to be? Heaven is where the virtuous people go, and Hell is the final destination for the dregs of humanity — the non-believers and the sinners. Most religious traditions would scare us into believing that Hell is a place of infinite agony designed to punish people for their unrepented sins. But what’s in it for the Devil? Why would he kick your ass in the afterlife for pissing off God? Doesn’t the Devil get his kicks from defying the will of God? I’m not saying that I have any desire to go to Hell, but who’s to say that, once you got there, you wouldn’t be greeted by a throng of high fives, defiant AC/DC music, kick-ass beach parties, and and an endless buffet line full of pizza, beer, and devil’s food cake?
• Speaking of wicked people, is it wrong that I see Adolf Hitler’s mustache on the back of my cat’s leg? Her name is Madam Beasley Meowington, but I like to call her Hitler Foot.
  
• This next inside thought isn’t a very private one since I’ve talked about it before among a number of my friends. I think it’s still worth mentioning here in this post since most people call for my immediate crucifixion once they hear me admit to it. Here goes.
  

  I’ve never understood the hype over Jerry Seinfeld. I don’t think he’s very funny. He’s a clever guy, and his observational humor can be pretty insightful at times, but neither his sitcom nor his stand-up routines have ever made me laugh. Yes, I’ve seen Curb Your Enthusiasm. Yes, I think that show is pretty damned funny. That’s probably because the show has very little to do with Jerry Seinfeld. Yes Joie, I know. You and I can no longer be friends now that I have declared these thoughts publicly in writing. I’m just not a stickler for a tickler.

• During a recent conversation, a friend of mine remarked, “I could never work in an animal shelter because I couldn’t stand to see an animal put to sleep.” My mind immediately went to a dark place, and I started to giggle. I pictured my friend working as an animal shelter volunteer, happily playing with an exuberant little puppy inside one of the socializing rooms. The play session is interrupted when a solemn man with a stern face enters the room. He is brandishing a pistol in an unconcealed holster. “Ma’am,” he says, “could you please turn around for a moment?” My friend complies and turns around. There is a moment of silence, followed suddenly and abruptly by a loud pop. The next sound my friend hears is the door slamming shut.

  This might be a good time to remind you that inside thoughts reside in a place where good taste goes to die.

• One of my favorite weekend activities is playing paintball. I make no claims to being a bad-ass, or to being any good at the sport. I just happen to find the game incredibly fun.
  

  In the dozen-or-so times that I’ve gone out to play, it’s always been on a recreational field full of novices and newbies, just like me. Often times, you encounter a good number of young preteen kids on those “rec ball” fields. I think it’s awesome to see young kids playing the sport. It wasn’t until I hit my late twenties when I finally mustered the courage to play paintball. Those little kids have a lot of heart, and a lot of guts. I really do admire them.

  Having said that, I have to admit that a very small part of me derives a perverse pleasure from lighting up those young kids with paint. I don’t enjoy it because I’m a bully. I enjoy it because little kids make for excellent target practice. They’re quick, and they’re small, and they’re usually more agile than the average opponent. Also, they usually have a lot more stamina than me because I’m a squishy, aging slob. There are few moments in life that are more satisfying than those times when you snap out from behind a bunker, shoot off a string of paint, and then you see your opponent’s hand rise in the air as he calls himself out. The victory is only made that much sweeter when you realize that the arm being raised belongs to a ten-year-old kid. Good game, junior.

I’d better cool it right here with the inside thoughts before I alienate anybody with good taste who might still be reading this post. I’m starting to feel a little exposed right now, so this is probably the ideal time to stop. Thank you for your patience, gentle reader, and for playing your part in this dance of indiscreet madness.

It’s such a simple thing, taking health and vitality for granted. When everything is going well, it’s all too easy to forget that we are very much physical beings. I live the majority of my life under the false assumption that I exist inside my mind — somewhere on a heady, cerebral plane. It takes miserable weekends like this one to drag me down from that lofty perch, and to remind me that we are all captives in our fragile, untidy vessels.

I know in time, my health will return, as will my gray, cynically sunny demeanor. Before that day arrived, I just figured it was worth marking the occasion with a well-placed groan, a weak and wheezy whisper of a gripe.

Well anyway, there it is. I’ll see you healthy folks in December.

For a good while during my early childhood, it never occurred to me that the darkness of night was something to be afraid of. Back then, I had no idea that malevolent spirits lingered in the shadows, or that vampires and demons flourished under the cover of night. How could I have known that spectral figures were watching me through blackened windows, from the corners of poorly lit rooms, or from the limitless void of black revealed through my open closet door during the late hours of the night? I’m not entirely sure how I became aware of the dangers of darkness, although I suspect the influence of television and movies probably had a lot to do with it. All I know is, I formed an irrational fear of darkness around the age of five, and I insisted on sleeping with a night light for a very long time. I think I was close to twelve or thirteen when I stopped relying on the comfort of protective light to fall asleep.

Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if nobody had ever taught me how to be afraid. I spent so much of my childhood living in mortal fear of ghoulish spooks that never existed, or who at least never cared enough to benefit from my fear. How and why did I ever begin to believe in something so ridiculous, so destructive, so disruptive to my otherwise happy and uneventful youth? I look back on all of those anxious nights, those times when I would desperately lurch towards a light switch whenever I was confronted by the blackness of an unlit room, and I recall those echoes of my earlier days with a hint of sadness. I wasted so much energy, and effort, and time, fearing for my safety in the face of some fanciful, macabre uncertainty. Of all the stupid things that a young mind could venture to understand, why did I have to fixate on such a poisonous form of make-believe that crippled me so completely? It all seems so juvenile and silly from my perspective as an adult nowadays, but I still remember the grip of frightened significance that used to tinge my every attempt to fall asleep at night.

I’ve had plenty of years since then to look back and remember. I’m still wondering who exactly it was who originally planted those fears and thoughts into my head. Maybe it was television. Maybe it was my peers on the playground. Maybe it was a demon in a forgotten dream. Or perhaps I’ve only ever had myself to blame. In truth, that’s probably the best answer. Then again, back in those days, I was just an impressionable kid. Maybe I learned about ghosts and ghouls and spectral fiends from the same people in life who insist on propagating the lie that Santa Claus is a real person. Without the proper guidance, the minds of children might ignite with all sorts of ferocious notions. It’s not all just harmless fantasy, and fun and games out there, you know. I’ve got the emotional scars to prove it.

I’ve also got some physical scars to prove it. Just the other day, I totally got scratched on the arm by a pissed off ghost while playing a game of Bloody Mary. No fooling. Want proof?

There you have it then. I know what some of you naysayers are probably thinking. You’re thinking to yourself: “KZ, that wound looks remarkably similar to the kinds of scratches you get while playing with your aggressive cat, Momo”. My response to that is, you know nothing about cats; and furthermore, you know nothing about the devious realms of darkness, the sinister and spectral happenings which transpire on the edges of the Shadow Empire. Tempting the darkness is a dangerous game, my friends. Think of that ghostly gash on KZ’s arm, and remember.

Ah, to live among the dreams as intentions melt away, those gentle drifts of repeated steps — an elaborate dance with so many steps — it fools the dancers from perceiving each day’s events as anything other than novel and uniquely unseen. You seem to have mistaken the things we do as deliberate acts.

The thesis of existence unfolded many pages ago, so many words repeated either in ignorance or in spite of the cycles of times, and of writers, and of words. Of words do I sing, for without words we have no meaning, no commonality of wretched being. We’ve become so good at finding new and better ways to repeat the things we’ve always been meant to say — those words that are, and have always been, essentially the same.

The first page. This is the way it begins.