Interruption of Service

I turned 25 today. Or yesterday. It's hard to tell. I was born on 6/26/86, which I always interpreted as a subtle nod to the number of the beast. So, in celebration, I post here. My mother, she spent most of my birthday trying to convince me of the gravity of 25, how it heralds the end of people giving me slack for my youth. A good point, but one I couldn't take to heart. I know I need to be so much more than I am.

This birthday was not the best. A great project was undertaken to construct chicken and waffles ex nihilo, but the waffles suffered structural breaches in phase 2 of development and the entire work was scrapped. We still ate the fried chicken, and discovered that it's quite delicious with maple syrup. I met up with another friend, but there were insults, innuendos, and misunderstandings. That one left me in a bad mood. But the dinner with family was alright, the company was lively, and I was ultimately reminded whom I could rely on.

So, a decent birthday, not going in the record books. But I realized something: I used to enjoy having everyone make a big fuss about my birthday, but now I kind of want to go unnoticed. It's better as a day of quiet reflection and joking around with bosom friends than a big-tent bombshell event. And, really, it doesn't deserve the pomp and circumstance I usually demand. So maybe the bright side of turning 25 is me giving myself less leeway for needless things.

Pig King God

Insanity. That’s what I worry about. No family history except for a brother who took Art Bell too seriously. No outward indicators ever diagnosed. But internally, I understand just how thin the wires that hold everything together are. How, if plucked at the wrong time, one could produce a discordant note that would make the mechanism rip itself apart. Drugs made the line go slack, but eventually provided a tension of their own. So I keep an uncomfortable vigil on the individual parts of the machine, waiting for the moment when the wires cross and I fall out of sync with reality.

But see, what I feared was insanity. What I deep-down kinda hoped for was full-blown theatrical madness. If the insane brain is crackling static, the mind of a madman is a symphony being performed by twelve cellists performing in thirteen different time signatures. The insane go to a home and eat jello, while the mad speak prophetic nonsense and command a strength born of crazy. In the point-buy system of life, madness is the preferred idiosyncrasy of the min/maxer, because it elevates while at the same time providing a nobly tragic flaw.

Why not skip the middleman and become a madman? Well, like all other literary diseases, lunacy requires an inciting incident. To truly go mad, I'd need to lose my kingdom, or accidentally kill a loved one. I could discover the incomprehensible truth behind reality's veil and be sucked into a world disconnected from moral and natural law. But that requires the intervention of Fate or a heavy-handed narrator. You can't just go out and take the entrance exam for Stark Raving University; you need to be headhunted. But Chemical Imbalance Community College accepts admissions year-round, and has very affordable in-state tuition.

So, I fear insanity. Because if I keep writing shit like this, it can't be too far off.

I Wish This Was The Last Time I Had To Do This

The first part is the longest. Incubation. Put it out of your mind. Do anything else. Go for a walk, do some shopping, read a book; anything that you can convince myself is vaguely constructive. Ignore it. It'll still be there when you get around to it. You can get started after dinner.

Hand-wringing: step two. Sit in front of the computer. Commit to getting started. You still have tons of time left. In fact, you have enough time to check your e-mail. And, ooh, don't you want a sandwich while you're doing that? I heard about this great place over on Sheridan that makes this salmon banh mi...

Step three. Okay, this is the point where you just get disgusted with yourself. Because, really? You can't do better than this? Isn't this the hundredth-plus time you've been stuck staring at an empty computer screen? You need to change your approach. Your whole last-minute ethos is clearly not working. Best case, you stumble in tomorrow morning sick from your two hours and fifteen minutes of sleep, toting some sub-literate agglomeration of unrelated thoughts. Next time, you start a week in advance. This time next Sunday you'll be kicking back and enjoying yourself, laughing about how trivially easy it is to get the work done when you spread it evenly throughout the week.

Step four: panic, panic, panic, panic, panic! I mean, what the hell, right? Fuck! Fuck. Okay. Okay. So it took you an hour to get a tenth of the way through it. It's cool. Relax. No, you are not sleepy. Do not do this to me, god damn it. Make some coffee! But real quick-like. Okay, just, um, just try to think real hard. Just try to fill the page with as many words as you can and edit down from there. ...well, okay, good hustle, but it's better if the words are related to the subject at hand. Coffee's ready, go! Go! Yeah! That's good, isn't it? This'll help you think. It's gonna be fine. Just bang it out and it'll be fine. Wonder what's new on Twitter?

Step five: unplug your modem.

What? Oh yeah, step six. Um, okay, this is the part where you just

Step seven: Pray to the God of the Israelites for the strength to finish this without passing out. Trust me, New Testament YHWH doesn't have enough juice to fix this mess. Look, you will never pull this shit again, got it? The walls are buzzing and you're mouth's dry from all the coffee. Maybe you should just call it a day. If you just take a two-hour nap now, you'll wake up all refreshed and full of ideas. Well, if don't just sleep straight through 'til 9am tomorrow. Hm. Maybe nix that nap.

Step Eight. Enlightenment. Clouds open, muse sings, fingers never leave keyboard.

Yes! Yes. Home stretch. You did it, slugger! Okay, think of a punchy way to end it. Waitwaitwait! I got it! How about, "Step nine: get some sleep already."

A Culture of Shitheads

Each mermaid represents a
different venereal disease.

The proliferation of tattoos as casual style is disappointing. In ubiquity, they lose their ability to signify anything other than insufferableness.There was a time (which I am very probably making up) where tattoos were badges earned by sailors upon their first circumnavigation of a whorehouse. If not that, they were shows of yakuza loyalty, ways of counting all the men you'd killed, methods of celebrating romances doomed to end in violence, or mementos of that lazy summer spent in a death camp. The tattoo was a brand, a way of irreversibly committing outlier activities to your flesh. There was a taboo, and it was well-earned.

Nowadays, tattoos are like bumper stickers: a channel for dysfunctional people to express their deeply-held obnoxious beliefs publicly. Hipsters, juggalos, nerds, and Lil Wayne are the main ideological blocs I'm referring to here. If you have twelve tattoos acquired over a period of six months, can any of them be considered special? "This tattoo celebrates that time I bought a churro with NO FILLING. What a wild ride." I'm on board with the body-as-a-canvas metaphor, but owning a paint-able surface doesn't obligate you to scribble dicks all over it.

Tuxedo Mask can't save you from a lifetime of poor decisions.

Once, in a kickboxing class, I saw that the woman in front of me had Pac-Man tattoos all over her arms and legs. I'm pro-Pac-Man, but the moment of recognition was followed by a cringe. Before I'd even talked to her, she had metaphorically screamed out "I LIKE PAC-MAN!" No one likes Pac-Man that much. Not even Toru Iwatani.

Like all modern problems, this can be traced back to Mike Tyson. By popularizing the tribal face tattoo as the new acme of socially unacceptable body modification, he made a great array of slightly less extreme body mods look not quite as insane. Rapist, recluse, trendsetter; truly, Iron Mike was a triple threat.

Read me clearly: I'm not assaulting the right to sculpt your physicality into an avatar of the ever-living Cosmic Jackass. A person's right to tattoos should be as unrestricted as their right to create Herbie the Love Bug flatulence fetish fics or put triple bookshelf spoilers on their Priuses. Monstrous violations of taste are coded into America's red-white-and-blue bedazzled DNA. But Christ, manifest enough self-respect, aesthetic sense, or just plain laziness to refrain from superfluously embellishing your body.