Problems that Require Superheroes pt. 2

Continuing the run of superheroes for the real world beginning with Traffic Man and Mr. Bookmark, I present two more heroes that find glory in the common man, instead of those selfish asshole "crime-fighters".

Matcho Sox - You've never been more excited for anything than you are for your date right now. She should be here any minute, you would have done anything to get a minute with this girl, and she's going out to dinner with you! You know that first impression are everything here, everything must go perfectly. With that said, you're dressed in a nice dress shirt under a fine black blazer, grey dress pants and some fancy Swiss shoes. You look fantastic. That is, until you sit down and your pants hike up at your knees, and you see it... Your socks. On your left foot is a black dress sock, pulled up to knee's length. On your right, however, is an ankle length sock, whiter than snow, adorned with a Nike logo. You're almost in tears. You know Cassandra will never love you now. WHAPPOWIE! Matcho Sox comes flying in through the window, with a black dress sock in hand. He covertly places the sock under your chair before flying back out through the window he shattered earlier. Cassandra loves your outfit, especially the socks. You get married, and have kids, if you're into that.

Dr. Pollen - You've never had a better day. The sun is shining bright, the trees are swimming in the breeze, you won the grand jackpot lottery and it's just the right temperature out! Nothing could ruin this day, until... Spring allergies, bitch. Your eyes get itchy, your nose gets stuffed. Your contacts keep wiggling in your eye and you're nasal passage is unbelievably irritated. Suddenly, you're contemplating suicide. BAZZZAAP! In comes Dr. Pollen, mad genius. In his crazy man science labs, he has devised a way to fight pollen out of the air with a super trained army of anti-pollen which he engineered himself. He releases them in the air, and pollen everywhere full beneath his feet. Not today, spring allergies.

Problems that Require Superheroes pt. 1

We all know the "big-name" superheroes. Spiderman, Batman, Iron Man and The Hulk are always busy catching their names in the flashing lights. Saving the world, again! Preventing a nuclear Armageddon, again! These are guys who are so caught up in their supremacy over the average population that all they can worry about are the supposed "big issues". But what everyman, what Average Joe, is going to be affected by this sort of thing? The end of the world?! What about real people problems? For this, I propose a new band of superheroes, concerned with the plight of the average man.

 Traffic Man - Oh god, the traffic is atrocious. You're going to be late for work, AGAIN. You'll probably get fired, lose your job, get divorced by your wife, lose custody of your kids and end up on a street corner. And yet as you sit there in your car, coming to terms with your demise, there is nothing you can do about it. UNTIL... Traffic Man swoops down to the rescue. Traffic Man can fly, and is also equipped with super strength and God-like coordination. With this ability, he can actually pick up cars caught in abysmal traffic, and toss them to their destination with the perfect trajectory. If the passenger survives the flight, he will find he saved unspeakable amounts of time! Thanks, Traffic Man!

Mr. Bookmark - You're getting really into this book, now. You've flown through the last 100 pages, and you can't wait to keep going... but right now, you have to go to your Grandma's to bake cookies. You really don't want to lose your spot, but there's not a bookmark in sight. With no possible solution presenting itself, you begin to fold back the page that you're on to preserve your position... POW. Mr. Bookmark slides out from under your bed! Equipped with a full arsenal of fun and vibrant bookmarks, you'll never have to compromise the makeup of your precious books ever again!

One More Before I Succumb to Sleep

After I complete this entry, I will be at twenty-six blogs. This will be the fifteenth I've written tonight. I am not going to make it to 2 AM like I

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I did fall asleep last night before making it to 2 AM. That was what I had written, my laptop was still in my lap. What did I learn yesterday? Among the more obvious things, I learned that I've been tackling my AP Lang blog all the wrong way. Each blog entry I wrote in term one and term two was an intricate craftwork by me, built around a novel idea, full of clever word play and built with a complex essay structure. I was proud of these blogs, but I never even made it close to thirty entries, which is how many we're supposed to end each term with. Now I'm learning to play the game. At least, starting to.

There were few people that put the hours and work into their blog that I did, yet I never made it close to my required term totals. People would slap together the most half-hearted entries about the most ridiculous things, often just resorting to movie reviews and the like, and they would easily attain an "A" while doing one fifth of the work and effort I put forth. Now, my approach this year was no one's fault but my own, but there's also an issue with this grading scale. There needs to be some sort of balancing "quality" evaluation to create in addition to the thirty blog quota; because this is going to be the first term I actually reach said quota, and I promise I learned a lot more about writing skills my first two terms.

With that being said, the fact that I entered yesterday with around ten blogs published is absolutely inexcusable. I'm not trying to discount the fact, actually, I spent most of the night loathing it in blog form. It's impossible to justify my approach to this class, or academics in general, but as an expert shifter of blame, I will note that changes should be made to this grading scale in the future. 

just an update

turns out i actually started at 9:12 PM. tick. tock. tick. tock.

i wrote a short story in 7th grade that broke intermittently with that line.

tick. tock. tick. tock.

it was about a man who was going crazy. he suffered from chronomentrophobia. that meant he had a horribly serious fear of clocks. he was sitting in a waiting room to talk to his therapist, but there was a grandfather clock in the room. he shot it with a revolver. then he woke up in an insane asylum, except in the corner of the room there was a grandfather clock.

tick. tock. tick. tock.

that was the only piece of fiction i ever finished writing, beginning to end. i read it out loud for my class's writers workshop. it was the best thing there. they gave me a standing ovation. i thought i was going to be a millionaire prodigy writer at that particular moment. i'm failing AP Lang right now.

tick. tock. tick. tock.

the damned internet machine

I took a break. That was nice, I needed a break. Twelve blog entries, I've written tonight. My hand and wrist and brain hurt. I spent my brain break breaking my brain with some brainless breaking news and a whole breakfast of brain stimulation information presented to my brain at breakneck speeds. I don't know why I just did that. I'm really tired. I might compromise with myself and go to bed at 1:30 AM instead of 2:00 AM, because I've clearly ceased to be productive and my posts are hardly about things anymore (case in point, where is this going?) but that's hard to do because I wrote about this goal with such passion a couple of hours ago.

But yes, I spent this break on the interwebs. I spend a lot of time on the internet. An unhealthy amount of time, actually. It just seems like the internet was tailor made for me. Here is a machine that can do several things for me: help me socialize, help me watch television, help me find and listen to music, help me absorb needless amounts of useless information, help me look at nakey girls. I love all of those things. And it's all here in one place! Maybe if I talk to the TV during a special on Africa airing on the History Channel I can accomplish largely the same things, but that's an outlier.

Facebook. Always on the Facebooks. Chattin' up honnnies. Talkin' up mah broskis. Lookin' at pictures. Postin' neat music. I have a gnarly time on Facebook. I am on Facebook much more than I should be, and I really do anything when I am on it despite this.

Helps me watch TV. Hulu. I love Hulu. Hulu has changed my life to the extent that network television has essentially become arbitrary. I have no use for it when I can watch my favorite shows whenever conveniet to me, sans commercial break.

Music. I need my fantastic internet computer technology machine device in order to download all of the great illegally obtained music I own. I also need it to effectively create playlists and the like. And post songs I want to share with the world on the aforementioned facebookz.

Useless information? Wikipedia. Yahoo! News. Random google searches. Football. Lots of football. To some extent, I think I'm an information addict; but the information must interest me. If it does, there is no reason to assume I will not slip into nothingness over my football internet message boards for hours at a time. I do that. I do that a lot.

Porn? Yup. It's 12:42 PM. AM? 12:43 AM. That never seems right.

Writing Fiction pt. 2

One problem that my writing presents, however, is that I don't know how good it really is. I have a good vocabulary, I have a decent handle of writing mechanics. But there is something in good fiction writing that is not fully describable, not graspable through definite terms and measurements. A kind of breezy, natural flow that creates a distinct voice and tells an easily understandable story that is both interesting and engaging. Here's a sample paragraph from a fiction piece I wrote:

Of course, he could shut one eye, and still have another perfectly good one left to observe himself. He batted his right eye, testing his musings, and noted ruefully that he looked like an idiot. The skin around his face wrinkled and curled undesirably around the eye he was testing each time he attempted this. It was not a handsome spectacle; he hoped quietly that the other might look slightly more flattering. He supposed that by carefully examination of the remaining eye, he could gather some mental data on that particular appearance, work some abstract thought and ascertain within a reasonable doubt what the two actions would look like in combination. But reasonable doubt was for white criminals and unfaithful spouses, of which he was neither. So he threw his bottle up by the neck and drained it a bit more.

It sounds so damn heavy and disgusting and I largely hate it. The words just don't flow. Everything sounds choppy and weighted down by my heavy-handed word choice. It's funny because I absolutely have no interest in writing essay or non-fiction, but I've found that my concentrated efforts in that particular genre are a hundred thousand million times more entertaining and readable.

The ideas are there, but I wonder about the execution. I'd like to get into some sort of summer creative writing workshop program before I start attending a real college, KIRKWOOD RITE?!, and see how much of this can be ironed out. I've never been taught how to write fiction so there is hopefully promise to be had in the prospect that I can get all learned up and clean up my writing some more.

But more than that, the problem is I still don't finish anything! Anything! I have at least 6 unfinished short fiction stories, and I have a dozen more ideas for stories that I have yet to begin. The first of these stories dates back like two years, and I wait so long with these things that my writing style ends up changing enough between work dates that I end up scrapping the story entirely and chalking it up to conflicting perspectives. With the same author. Okay then.

Clearly, it also ties back into work ethic. It's simply not there, even in the things I love. I'm just not a finisher. A little less than two hours of blogging to be done. I might take a break, I think that's fair. Hopefully I can at least finish this. Maybe high school, too.

Writing Fiction pt.1

Writing fiction is something that I want to do with my life so badly. Of course, as I know quite clearly, I will probably not do ANYTHING with my life if I don't stop fuckin' up, yo. But let me put aside the negativity for a while and seriously discuss one of the greatest passions in the world.

I strive to do something creative. I don't know how good at I am, but I feel like I have to do something creative with myself, because that's the only thing, the only ability that differentiates me from the hundred thousand million others just like me. I'm sure I'll be just fine at business, but god damnit there are a hundred thousand million men who could do exactly what I'd do in the business would and they'd never have to lift a creative pinky. And neither would I, I guess. But it's hard for me to let that part of me go.

When I was little, I was so unburdened by the realities of the world. That's not to say that every kid isn't very imaginative, but I was like bursting at the seams. I would play fantasy games every day, at recess, in the park, at home. I would invent my own narratives for my toys, like, full-fledged story lines. My best friend in pre-school was really, really big on videogames. So I invented a fake video game for him to play with toys; I was the game master. I would direct and regulate his every movement, spontaneously create a spanning, unique tale for him to transverse. It was called Tarantula Challenge. I don't know why. There were no spiders in the "game". But I played that game with him for over a year, every time he'd come over. Apparently he would talk to his mom about it at dinner with some frequency.

I got carried away with that little anecdote, but I'd hope it helps me illustrate my point. That creativity has perhaps been repressed with age, and whittled down a bit by logic, reality and maturation, but it is despite that still at large within me. The stories I have to tell are perhaps less fantastical than they were at that age, probably less unique, too. But I still have so many stories to tell. And even when I don't, I want to be telling stories anyway.

Cooling Down

I'm cooling down now. Emotionally, I guess. I was really down on myself, earlier, which was nice because I was writing much faster. It was nice to be upset with myself for once, I won't lie. A breath of fresh, self-deprecating air. But what did I say? I said it at least a hundred thousand million times in my preceding blog posts. None of this will mean anything, because it never does!

But I'm going to keep writing until 2 AM anyway, because that's what I said I was going to do. I'm considering it a symbolic gesture to myself. I just got up and got a drink, and then turned on my phone. Then checked Twitter and Facebook. A symbolic gesture is often an empty one. I closed Twitter and Facebook just now though, I'm keeping the soda and cellular device.

Cooling down insinuates that I was at one point a state that required cooling down from. A state of undesirable intensity or something. That's how people use the phrase "cooling down". After you overreact to something, make a big scene or yell or whatever, it's always "hey man you gotta cool down". If someone is clearly too upset to discuss anything rationally, everyone tells you to "let them cool down for a minute". Once you cool down, once you're cool, everything is back to the way it should be.

But I think more literally cooling down is just the return to usual state of affairs. Not necessarily the best. Just the usual. Because for me, I think I'm probably a better person when I'm fired up like I was two hours ago. If I could capture that kind of tenacity and apply it regularly I'd probably be a 4.0 GPA student. I maintained it for an hour though, which is probably the best I've done for a while. For me, cooling down is just returning to the melancholy complacency the prevails so much of my life. I am not cooling down. I am cold.

Cigarettes and Facebook Killed Johnny's Social Skills! - or - How Human Nature at a Young Age Is Consistently Confused For Rebellion

Damn those kids! When will they ever learn?!

Eventually. Those kids will learn eventually. We all do. It seems every generation, every generation is saying the generation before them was worse than the last generation, or the generation that they were a part of. Generation. Every old man sitting on their creaky rocking chair was likely once in a potentially parallel situation as the child they are now berating with their elderly person mean-ness and 1930’s jargon, and no one seems to be able to recognize that.

But really, it's one of those inconceivably unexplainable phenomena of life. Now, mind, not unexplainable in the sense that there is no valid explanation for this; because there most definitely is, as I am currently detailing. No, instead, I mean unexplainable in the sense that no matter how many people figure it out, write a blog post about it, tie a string around their finger for sixty years, no matter what… the prejudice claims victory over logic, leaving its cold dead corpse in that waste bin where their real teeth and libido went.

It’s nothing against senior folks, blog-posting soccer moms or the newspaper columnists whose job is to make little old ladies feel alarmed enough with the goings-on of society to allow a disgustedly furrowed eyebrow, but not enough that they suffer a heart attack and die. Just like us rabble-rousing teenagers, their behavior is only a product of human nature. I don’t know what it is: a bitterly concealed jealousy of our youth, a maturely heightened sensitivity to all things awesome, a desperately needed way to channel all of the aggression built up when they stopped playing reruns of Mayberry R.F.D… who knows? All I know is that, though young people may know a bunch of old people they like, and old people may know a bunch of youngins deserving of a hair tussle, buried in our DNA is a burning hatred for each other.

It’s anything they can pick at. Those kids sure are spendin’ a bunch-a time on that there “facebooks”! I am finishing this now because I wrote this a long time ago and never finished it but I've hit 300 words and now is about passing class and throwing away my stupid pride.

Self Awareness pt. 2

Some are just kind of strange. This also sounds bad, and I still don't care. There are some people that you simply cannot figure out. These are the people who are perhaps not socially gifted, the awkward ones, the creepy ones. These guys are the ones you people-watch at the Rennasciance Fair, or make fun of on Facebook. They aren't even positively stupid, as much as they are just missing something that makes a whole. They act strangely and yet they seem to be unable to understand the ways they don't fit into society's norm. In fact, they don't even know that they DON'T fit into society's norm. For someone like me, it's impossible to imagine that. It may be delusions of grandeur or it may actually be a total lack of self-consciousness and possessing the ability to be totally at ease with yourself. Either way, I bet they have better grades than me.

It may be chemical imbalance. This one is scary for me, because this can strike at anytime. I know I'm not stupid, and though I am certainly strange, I still know how to conform to the confines of the world when it fits me. I'm safe from these things. But you're never home free. Depression, schizophrenia. These things happen to people. I have a cousin who I have been fairly close to. He was a great guy. Popular, smart, athletic. Lives in Florida, every time I'd see him I'd think he was sort of a douche but I love him, obviously. Knew himself like a book. He developed schizophrenia, though. It's been like half a year now. He will never be the same. Here was a guy who knew the world so well, knew how to play the game, knew where he stood, knew himself... All that was gone. He was posting beyond bizarre things on his Facebook. That was all I saw of it, as it happened, since I'm halfway across the country. But reading those things were enough, they made me cry a hell of a lot. First, because I didn't want this to be happening to my cousin. It's horrible. But next, because this could happen to me. Could happen to anyone. It seems like the only thing I have in the world sometimes is the ability to get lost in my own mind, think about myself, think about the world logically. I don't know what I'd be able to do if I lost that.

But that's the thing. I wouldn't do anything, because I wouldn't know. I would have no idea I had ceased to be normal, because I would lose my perspective. And that's scary as hell. Way scarier than anything else I can imagine.