Sh*t I've Had To Explain To My Mom In The Last 24 Hours

     1. If we're playing Uno and I throw down a wild card and call "Blue!," and then on your turn YOU throw down another wild card and call "BLUE!," you haven't actually helped yourself. At all.

     2. A pomegranate is a type of fruit; it is NOT a type of dog. 

     3. Non-alcoholic egg nog, by definition, means that there's no alcohol in it. Because that's what non-alcoholic means.

     4. Black Friday is not a "racial thing."

     5. The Dallas Cowboys and the Texas Longhorns are NOT the same football team. Nor do they ever play each other. And if they WERE the same team, they REALLY couldn't play each other.

     6. Falling asleep during a board game is not a strategy.

     7. My name is Larry. I am not the guy who is married to your daughter, and also she happens to be my sister. We're not from Arkansas. And we will wear name tags if it helps.

     Turkey up, y'all.

Holidays, Nazis, and Dominoes

Exactly.

     Tomorrow, my daughter and I will travel to Oklahoma City to spend Thanksgiving with my younger sister and her family. My sister and I are very close, and I believe the reason for that is when we were younger we tried to kill each other. And no, that's not me being metaphorical. At least two or three times in childhood we actually tried to kill each other. But since we mostly got our ideas about how to kill each other from cartoons, and since anvils and actual sticks of dynamite were not easy for kids to get their hands on (even in Texas), our plans never worked out, and so we mostly just argued and bickered and hated each other's guts, as only siblings can. 

     Now she's one of my favorite people, and what we have in common is that we both managed to survive our childhoods - including the Family Gatherings. I deliberately capitalized "Family Gatherings," in the same way I would capitalize "The Troubles," or "The Depression," or "The Spanish Inquisition." Because if you could historically combine all of those events, and put them through a sausage grinder, what you'd get would be a typical Thanksgiving from my childhood.

     My Aunt Lillian had a ranch in Marble Falls, Texas, and it was a favorite gathering spot for holidays. The kitchen was large enough to accommodate the many Patrick and Rutland women who loved to cook and bake, though several of them had far more passion than skill. And some of them were experimental in the way that Nazi scientists probably were during the war. I swear to God one year one of my aunts made something she called an Idiot Salad, meaning it was so simple that any idiot could make it. It was green. Not salad green. Chernobyl green. There may have been jello involved, and I know for a fact that marshmallows were in there. In a SALAD. I thought she named it that because only an idiot would eat it. Or perhaps a drunk uncle, of which there were several. (I just went and Googled "idiot salad," and have discovered several recipes. The common denominator seems to be that, in order to be an Idiot Salad, it must contain no food that actually exists in nature. Recipes like this will almost certainly usher in the End Times. Please stop cooking FOR the Apocalypse, guys.)

     Nowadays, my little sis and I are about creating new traditions. The first new tradition is called "Fucking Relax And Have A Glass Of Wine Already," which is kind of long but very specific. The way it works is, when I see my sister starting to get a little manic in the kitchen, because the turkey isn't browning just so, or we're two and a half minutes late getting the stuffing in the oven, my job is to pour a glass of her favorite red, hand it to her and say, "Fucking relax and have a glass of wine already." We agree this is a wonderful tradition, and we practice it as often as we can. Everybody wins. This runs hard on the heels of another new tradition, mostly for me, called "Will You And Your Scotch Please Get Out Of My Fucking Kitchen?!?" Again, win-win.

     Last year at Christmas we started playing dominoes. I thought I would hate it, but it has quickly become one of my favorite holiday experiences. To watch my ten year-old daughter and my mother (who is quite a bit older than ten) go head-to-head, and to listen to them trash-talking each other, cracks me up as few things can. Last year I sprayed a mouthful of perfectly good 12 year single malt all over the table because, in the middle of a game in which my mom was actually winning, she actually started talking shit to her own granddaughter. We play a version called Mexican Train Dominoes, which is pretty easy to learn but has a definite strategy of fucking each other over as often as possible - making it, really, the perfect family-time game. (The first time I heard the phrase Mexican Train, I was thinking of something very, very different. Nevermind.)

     I never used to look forward to family gatherings. Maybe it's because I'm less uptight than I used to be. Maybe it's because my personal life isn't great right now, and I simply need to be around family, because at least it's familiar. Or maybe it's because the torch has passed, and now it's up to my sister and me to set the tone for the holidays, which we do by remembering what the Family Gatherings used to be like, and not doing any of that. All I know is, I'm really looking forward to this week.

     I'm taking the laptop, by the way. Because some funny shit is almost certainly going to go down, and I will post it as quickly as I can. Promise me you'll post your funny shit in the Comments section, because dysfunction is more awesome when we share. Gobble Gobble, Motherfuckers.

     LB

     

     

Music, Weed, and Adult Cakes

You'll understand in a second.

     The following is an actual text conversation I had with a good friend yesterday. In order to protect his identity, I will call him Farrah Fawcett. Because it makes me giggle:

     Farrah Fawcett: Not all pot smokers do other drugs, but all druggies smoke pot.

     Me: You're like the Yoda of drug philosophy.

     Farrah Fawcett: Thanks? Haha. I've been obsessed with red wine and weed today...

     Me: Hmmm. That song practically writes itself.

     Farrah Fawcett: Muddy Waters beat me to it.

     Me: Figures.

     Farrah Fawcett: Next time Ian [Moore] is here let's go. Seriously.

     Me: Agreed. And thanks for liking the blog.

     Farrah Fawcett: That's like thanking me for liking chocolate and pussy...

     Me: Which, also, thank you for that image now.

     Farrah Fawcett: Sounds like a Ween song, huh?

     Me: It's not?

     Farrah Fawcett: Probably. I know chocolate cake gets me in trouble...

     Me: I just Googled it. It's not a song. But I did find half a dozen erotic cake stores that will bake you a chocolate vagina.

     Farrah Fawcett: I kind of like them at different times.

     Me: Yes. And for very different reasons. I hope.

     These are the kinds of communications I have on a pretty regular basis. Which only proves that I have the most kick-ass, awesomest friends, ever. Plus, now you're thinking that a dead Charlie's Angel is regularly texting me, and talking with me about her obsessions for red wine and weed. And chocolate vaginas.

     I win.

I'm Working On It. Seriously.

     Short entry today, you guys. I have got to get back to work on the book, which I guess now is as good a time as any to tell you that I'm writing a book. Yes, it's a memoir. And yes, it's probably going to be called Making Sh*t Up, and there will probably be a catchy sub-title, something that will make you smile quietly to yourself. There may be one or two stories from the book that I wind up sharing on the blog, but that's all. If and when I get the thing published, I will shamelessly beg you to buy a copy, and to tell your friends, and I'll probably make wild promises to come and see you, to personally thank you for supporting the book. I might even buy you a drink. Or ten.

     But first I have to finish the fucking thing.

     You guys have made this space a popular destination in a short amount of time, and for that I thank you. Thank you for visiting often. Thanks for sharing me with your friends, family and co-workers. Thanks for coming with me through all of this funny and often not-so-funny shit, for leaving comments and being supportive and believing that these stories and observations and occasional drunken rants are worth taking the time to actually read and share. I love you. Seriously. Including you guys in Malaysia, because I don't actually know anybody in Malaysia and have no fucking idea how you even found this space. Keep it real, Malaysia. 

     Back soon, y'all. Keep the light on.

     

     

     

     

Technically, You CAN Go Home Again. But Holy Sh*t.

I seriously thought about burning the fucking thing to the ground. And that's healthy.

     See that? My old house. I was back in my hometown this weekend, because I needed to get away from the shit storm that is my personal life right now. I had the most awesomest time. I saw people I have not seen in decades. We had drinks. We laughed. I learned things about my friends that I did not know when we were all young together, mostly because I did not actually talk to people back then, because it was painful. Instead I was funny, and somehow I (mostly) successfully passed that off as conversation. 

     So Sunday morning I said my goodbyes, and there were hugs and exchanges of contact information and promises to keep in touch, and I decided to grab a cup of coffee and take a drive around my old hometown. Cue the Bruce Springsteen soundtrack. First up, my old high school:

It did NOT look like this when I went there.

     When I went to Conroe High School, it looked as though the state of Texas had collected a bunch of old institutional buildings, like, say, prison blocks, mashed them together, threw some linoleum down on the floor, spent a great deal of time searching for the most outrageously cheap and probably dangerous cafeteria food, and told us all to show up Monday thru Friday, from 7:30am to 2:30pm. Now it looks like the Parthenon. I didn't get to go inside to see what changes they'd made to the interior, because it was Sunday and the school was closed, and it was locked up pretty tight, and I know this because I spent several minutes looking for a way in, and apparently that whole time I wasn't thinking about what a middle-aged guy trying to get into a high school on a Sunday morning might look like to a passer-by. No police were involved. High school: check. Time to move on to the cemetery.

This is my father's gravestone. Don't make it weird. It would be weird only if I put up a pic of another guy's headstone who WASN'T my dad, but I liked his name more, or he had a pithy quote on his stone that made me giggle. That WOULD be weird.

     I don't often get back to Conroe, but every time I do I come here. It's not a sad moment. It's just a reminder that I'm above ground and he's not, because he made a choice that I will never make, because my kid is awesome and she thinks I'm awesome, and he missed out because she would have charmed the shit out of him. Cemetery: check. Last stop:

Wow. I thought it was a shit hole when I lived there.

     Turns out it's abandoned now. It's ridiculously overgrown; there's trash in the driveway. I actually felt pity for this place, this inanimate building where I lived, and my childhood died, and my sister's too. Look at it. We've all moved on. It's still dying. I wanted nothing more than to put this awful place out of its misery, and if I'd had some accelerant and a lighter you might be looking at a very different picture. (Dear cops: in the highly unlikely event that something DOES happen to that place, it wasn't me. As far as you know.)

     That was never home, anyway. Home is not that building you live in (that's just where you sleep. Sometimes.) Home isn't what, it's who. It's your best bud who had a crazy uncle with a Delorean, and for one glorious week during our senior year, he let us drive that fucking thing to school. It's your pal who was a couple years behind you, and you haven't seen him in literally, like 19 years, and he invites you into his home for the weekend as if you were just there last month. It's your beautiful friend who is still beautiful, and you find out that, even while you were having a truly grisly childhood, she was having one, also. And you never knew. And it makes you love her even more. THAT'S the home I choose to remember, y'all. Those guys were my home.

     So, yeah. I can go home again.

You Are NOT Making Memories. You Are Making Axe-Murderers.

And that's why therapy. Right there.

     The holiday season. It's upon us. And I say that while holding two equal yet utterly differing points of view in my head: 

     1) Yay holidays! Thanksgiving and Christmas and food and parties and friends and family and claymation TV specials about reindeer and snowmen, and holiday music and eggnog spiked with whiskey just like Grandpa used to make! 

     2) Fuck.

     Holidays weren't battlegrounds when I was a kid. Or at least if they were, I was blissfully ignorant of it. I don't ever remember my family arguing over religious observations versus secular ritual. No disagreements about commercialism taking over everything, or how we had to respect everybody's holiday traditions, or fist-fights about whether it should be called a "Christmas" tree or a "Holiday" tree. (Which, for the record: in my house it's a Christmas tree. Not because I'm working hard to "keep Christ in Christmas," but because it's ALWAYS been called a Christmas tree in my family. Also I've checked, and Christ isn't actually IN my Christmas tree, because if he was it wouldn't BE a Christmas tree, it would be a Jesus tree, and I would charge people to come into my house and watch me cut down the Jesus tree only to watch it rise again. How awesomeness would THAT be?)

     Do you see the screaming child? Do you see the benevolently smiling Santa having to physically restrain the screaming child, so that he does not jump off the lap of the elderly, brightly dressed STRANGER that his parents just plopped him down on? (I have no actual memory of this event, and it's pretty obvious from the look on my face that I am aggressively trying to suppress it, even as it's happening. I really hope I pissed in his lap.) Why as adults do we work so hard to make moments, instead of just letting them happen?

     The holidays are a stress category all by themselves. And I know this. Because I watch Family Feud. This year promises to be more than the usual stress, and that's largely (but not entirely) because I went and fucked things up in my own home, and now there's that on top of holidays, and I don't know if there's enough booze in the universe to make it even a little bit functional, but I absolutely intend to find out. What I'm going to TRY and do is just let the holidays happen, and not try to pretend that everything is all holly wreaths and roast duck and candy canes up my ass. If my daughter doesn't want to sit on a jolly fat man's lap (she's ten now, she fucking better not want that), then I'm not going to make her. And if she wants to be a little sad, or a lot, because of how things are this year, then I'm going to let her. That's not a Burl Ives song, but it's honest. (If you don't know who Burl Ives is, you're too young for this blog. You can only keep reading if you promise to Google him, but I'm warning you now, he's dead. Also, his music was kind of sappy. Hence the reference. This shit all makes sense in my head.)

     I hope you have an awesome couple of months just letting shit happen. Instead of - you know - making shit up.

     See what I did there?

     LB

     

     

13 Things You Don't Know About Me

Goddammit.

     Yesterday a friend of mine posted on her Facebook status something she called "7 Things You Don't Know About Me." Now, my friend is funny, and as I read through that post I laughed, and then I snorted, and then I had to stop drinking my mojito because I was about to shoot it out my nose. And so, when I finished reading her post, I hit the "like" button. My way of saying, "Well played. Damn near shot mojito out of my nose."

     What I DIDN'T know is that I had unwittingly fallen into one of those oh-so-insidious Facebook traps, where if you hit "like" on it you're then obligated to continue it, like a chain-letter from Jesus or a Ouija board threat. Now I don't put any stock in that kind of thing, because I'm not superstitious, but I also know that if there is such a thing as luck in the universe then I have the excessively shitty kind, and if something actually DID happen - like, say, an asteroid collided with the earth and wiped out humanity, or God got bored and decided to rapture all the church folk today at 5:52pm CST, or we actually had a zombie apocalypse - then I worry that somebody, or a lot of somebodies, would go, Hang on. Did Larry continue that Facebook game about Things You Don't Know About Me? He didn't? THEN WHY THE FUCK DID HE HIT THE "LIKE" BUTTON?!? And then all of a sudden, I'm THAT guy. The one who caused giant asteroids to collide with earth on the same day as the rapture and the zombie apocalypse. Because I didn't continue a stupid thing on Facebook that I didn't even know was a thing. 

     So fuck that. Here are 13 Things You Don't Know About Me:

     1. When I was 15 I fired a gun in the house on accident, because I was just that stupid. The only casualty was a bathroom window. And I may or may not have shit my pants.

     2. I have battled my entire life with a feeling of helplessness, or lack of control. 

     3. I would rather clean all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue than eat brussel sprouts. 

     4. I have never smoked pot, and probably need to knock that off my bucket list at some point.

     5. I am currently in psychotherapy. (The professional kind, not the kind where you get blind drunk and bare your heart to a bartender, though I've probably done that a few times also.)

     6. Clowns scare the shit out of me. If you ever try and scare me by dressing up as a clown, I'm pretty confident when I say you're gonna die. I promise to feel bad about it. Eventually.

     7. I regret that there are girls I knew in high school that I really liked, but I didn't have the guts to ask out on a date. 

     8. The first time another kid was mean to my kid, I actually thought through the ramifications of punching a child in the throat. 

     9. I man-scape. Because I care.

   10. My favorite snack as a kid (and one we could actually afford) was Miracle Whip on white bread. Today the thought of Miracle Whip makes me violently ill. 

   11. Two years ago at Christmas I got an ear and nose hair trimmer as a gag gift. And now I use that fucking thing all the time. 

   12. I'm a damn good kisser.

   13. IF the world ends via asteroids, rapture or zombies, it will not be my fault. Because I played your stupid game, Facebook. 

     Seriously, though. If you tell me that something bad will happen if I don't share your Jesus post, I probably am coming to find you. And punch you in the throat. 

     LB

     

     

Zombies Wouldn't Want My Brain

     I had lunch today with a really good friend. And we were talking about some pretty important, pretty serious shit. And then our server brought our food to the table. And it was all downhill from there, because this is exactly what happened in my brain:

     Server: Here's your chimichanga.

     

     My Brain: Chimichanga. Chimi-changa. Sounds like an aboriginal tribe somewhere deep in the Amazon rain forest, living off grubs and howler monkeys. Oh shit, now I'm thinking about eating people. That reminds me of Soylent Green, that movie with Charlton Heston set in 2022 (which is actually not that far off), the one where he figures out that the only company producing food anymore is making it out of people. Why the fuck am I thinking about eating people? No way can I eat this chimichanga now. I am literally thinking about an obscure, totally made up Amazonian rain forest culture that is walking, hand in hand, into a giant meat grinder, and ohholyshit wasn't that a scene from Pink Floyd's The Wall, where all the school kids with piggy faces or something were literally marching into a huge meat grinder, and kiddie-sausage was coming out the bottom? I so need them to take this plate away right now. I need nachos. And maybe tequila. Anything that doesn't sound like I'm about to eat something that makes me a cannibal. Or a zombie. SHUTTHEFUCKUP, brain! Seriously!

     My Friend: How's the chimichanga?

     Me: It's people. 

     My Friend: What?

     Me: It's great.

     THIS is why, if you ever go out to lunch with me, you should be okay with booze. Because otherwise, a serious conversation about really important matters concerning family and friendship and spirituality is likely to wind up being a one-sided diatribe about not-real aborigines and rock 'n roll and food made out of people. And maybe zombies.

This Isn't A Feel-Good Post. Seriously.

Holy shit, y'all. Being depressed sucks.

     I spend way too much time in my own head. A psychologist would likely point out that this behavior is a coping mechanism I developed in childhood, probably even before my father killed himself. Things are so much better in my head. For one thing, I’m a better person in there. In my head I’m not short-tempered. I’m not envious of other people. I don’t lie. I have confidence and ambition. Sometimes I’m still a superhero in my own head, but no longer the spandex-wearing type; more the middle-aged superhero who wears jeans and sneakers, and takes the trash out, but can still pick up a car and throw it the length of a football field. Or maybe fly.

     I’m sure it’s not healthy, all this time I spend in my head. Real life becomes more difficult. Like the reality of, say, getting out of bed. Or doing the most normal, mundane things, like helping your daughter with her homework, or taking the car to get serviced, or talking to another human being. My whole life I’ve been labeled an extrovert, and I suppose that’s mostly true, except for the whole part where there are days and days that I’m scared to walk out the front door. Or answer the phone. I’m not an extrovert on those days. I’m not a get shit done guy on those days, or the laugh-a-minute guy who's always got at least three witty ripostes in his back pocket. On those days, I don't eat. Or sleep. On those days I’m the guy who wears a hoodie, with the hood pulled over his head. In the house. On those days I’m the guy who stares out the window for a really long time before saying, Nope. Fuck that. It’s too big out there. On those days I begin to ask myself just how much like my old man I really am.

     I’m having one of those days.

     To give you some context of how stupefying and train-stopping this shit can be, I will tell you that, since I wrote that previous sentence, I have been sitting here, staring at it, and doing nothing else, for over forty minutes. That is completely not normal, especially for a guy who is easily distracted by shiny things. (I just spent the last ten minutes staring at the word "things," until I swear it started to crawl around on the screen, but maybe that was just my eyes, or maybe it's this new laptop that I just bought yesterday and it has some strange word-crawling feature I activated on accident, and now I'm gonna have to chase all my words down and get them back where they belong, or maybe the fucking thing is haunted, which at this point I'd be okay with because at least I'd have to think about something, like the fact that my laptop is possessed, and I don't even know a real priest. Shit.)

     Days like this I really wish the universe would give you a time-out. A 24 hour free pass on life. Keep your hoodie on, watch movies that distract you, if only for a while, don't answer the door or the phone, existence can wait. Yes, you're still going to have to deal with the mess you've made - just not today. That's a really inviting proposition, and also a really scary one. Because I can see stretching one free day into two, into ten, into a month... you get my drift. Past a certain point, you'd become a snake eating its own tail. Which would suck, especially if snake doesn't taste like chicken, as I have been told my entire life.

     So, this is me being honest about where I am today. I'm not asking you to fix it. But if you're also having one of those days, they hey, you got company. 

     And I got an extra hoodie.

     

     

      

Thanks And Sh*t

Thanks, you guys.

     I started this blog a little over three weeks ago, because I needed a space where I could be me. Free of cultural restraints and concerns, free of social politeness, a place where I can say what I actually goddamn think without having to run it through a dozen mental filters to figure out whose feelings I'm going to hurt. I must not be hurting a lot of feelings on this blog, because in three weeks I'm approaching 1000 page views. Now, that's not a shit-ton. That's not a stop-the-presses moment. But it matters to me, because what I'm taking away from almost 1000 page views in less than a month is that I should keep on truckin' with this thing.

     So I'm going to. Because you've made me believe that I can, and that I should. And I really appreciate that. I've recently done some things to blow my life up, and not in a good way. I'm trying to grow the balls to start talking about them here, because my current story (as all of our current stories are) is inevitably tied-up with my history, some of which I've already written about. I'm not trying to generate sympathy or compassion here; I'm just telling stories, mostly true and, I hope, mostly funny, even if they're funny in an ohmygodthatissofuckingtragicwhyamilaughing kind of way.

     If you think this shit is funny, or thought-provoking, or anything at all, I hope you'll share it with other people, maybe people I don't know but you do. And I hope you'll start leaving some comments, because your feedback and your stories are just as important. Your shit matters.

     Anyway, thanks. Really. And I'll see you again real soon.

     LB

I Had To Learn Martial Arts Because My Mother Dressed Me Like This

Holy shit. 'Nuff said.

Thinking and Sh*t

So, pretty much. Yeah.

     I've been doing a lot of thinking, you guys. About thinking. And what I think is, I haven't been doing enough of it.

     Let's talk about what I don't mean when I talk about thinking. I do not mean the process you go through in deciding whether to cook chicken for dinner, or throw the family in the mini-van (that you would secretly like to paint with flames on the side, but can't) and go get burgers. I do not mean your musings over whether or not Alien vs Predator was cinematic genius, or the worst piece of celluloid shit to hit the theater since Friday The 13th Part 9: Jason Kills The Cast of Riverdance. Technically those things are thinking, but they are on the ass-end of what I'm talking about.

     Cognition is an entire group of mental processes. Yeah, it includes decision-making (burgers, and Alien vs Predator sucked ass), but the higher-order stuff is attention, memory, producing (and understanding) language, reasoning, and problem solving. That is what I'm getting at when I talk about thinking, and I think I'm not doing enough of those things. I think most of us aren't. And it's starting to worry me. 

     In addition to being a class clown, I'm pretty confident in stating that I was a thinker in school. In high school especially, I had two particular teachers who simply wouldn't let me skate when it came down to applying my mind to the hard work of thinking through a problem that was bigger than my little world. So I say thank you to Carol Dusebout, a history teacher at Conroe High School who ran a class my senior year called Advanced Social Science Problems. She had me thinking through the problem of global terrorism in 1985, when a lot of my classmates were chiefly concerned about who they were going to feel up after the homecoming game. We learned fucking statecraft in her class. I came out of that experience with a serious desire to pursue a career in foreign relations, until I discovered that I could make people laugh for money, and I didn't need to go to college for that, and I was poor and would rather make money than give it to somebody else. Like college.

     The next thank you goes out to Anna Doyle. She was my English and Lit. teacher my senior year, and she ran a program some of us were in called GT (gifted and talented, which really was just another way of saying we particular kids liked to read and write more than most, probably because we weren't very athletic or popular, and as such had extra time to read and write). Where Ms. Dusebout pushed me into thinking about the wider world, Ms. Doyle pushed into my face (and brain) James Joyce, and Shakespeare, and Orwell. She made me understand through systematic thought that poetry was not just for pussies. She made me read things that I actually had to read. Anna Doyle. Carol Dusebout. I don't know where you are, but I love you both. 

     Somewhere between high school and Middle Age, I stopped devoting real time out of every day to the habit of thinking. I became quite good at reacting, which is not even in the same zip code as thinking. Thinking takes time, and time is something we as a culture increasingly believe we don't have enough of. We are too busy to think, because we have demanding jobs and demanding children and demanding social obligations and demanding media, and all of them demand our time and are clamoring for attention that we have less and less of because our minds are pulled in so many directions that, instinctually, almost as a survival mechanism, we become reactive.

     And what, dear reader, is the cost of living as reactives? Well, for starters, we're less open to new ideas, or at least ideas that are different from our own. We tend to gravitate to information sources that we believe are in line with what we already think about things, rather than seeking different opinions about complex subjects. (More often than not, we just avoid complex subjects.) We synthesize. We simplify. We post memes on Facebook that are grounded in neither fact nor truth, because they're how we feel. And rarely could we truthfully say they're what we think.

     What do I believe in? WHY do I believe it? What kind of a person do I want to be, and to what end? Do you believe you can come at those questions with a derisive picture and a pithy quote on a social network? Fuck, no, you can't. Sci-Fi Author Theodore Sturgeon said that "ninety percent of everything is crap." Don't believe it? McDonald's. People Magazine. TMZ. Any music by Miley Cyrus. The series finale of Lost.  We're buying into the ninety percent, and it's not good for us. Did you ever read H.G. Wells' The Time Machine? The Time Traveler jumps ahead into the future, only to find out that we basically solved all our problems with technology, and have evolved into a bunch of slack-jawed, puny, pinkish, lazy-asses who lay around all day and eat melon. 

     And that's what this is really about, you guys. I don't want to see you turned into a bunch of slack-jawed, lazy-ass melon-eaters. Because I love you. And I fucking hate melon.

     Let's get back to really thinking about shit. It will require time and effort, and something will probably need to come off your plate. My belief is, it'll be worth it. If you don't believe me, then do like Pooh: