Tales from the Black Sheep
Well if I didn't put all those crazy things that go on in my head somewhere my brain would explode. Do you know how hard it is to get exploded brain out of furniture? VERY!
It was raining. Not the kind of rain where you would not even think to go outside, but the kind of rain that you know will go on for hours and is just heavy enough to put gloom in your day.
“It would be raining” thought a young hooded character as he hustled down the street pushing through similarly dressed people eager to get home or wherever they were going. In a way he was glad for the rain, now he wouldn’t look so conspicuous in his hoodie, he was trying to avoid being noticed after all.
“Why?” He silently muttered
“Why am I doing this when I know it will cause more trouble than its worth. Maybe not for me but for him.”
The boy rounded a corner narrowly missing being splashed by an oncoming taxi. He saw the sickeningly bright sign heralding the nearing proximity of his destination.
“I should turn around. I should just forget what would the harm in that be?” But he knew what the harm in that would be. He knew that if he turned back now he might as well walk right into traffic seeing as if he turned back he would be resigning himself to a life of misery. That was the reason he was meeting him here, a chance, maybe his only chance, to escape. He had walked past the front windows of his destination. The neon sign of a smiling star looked down at him mocking him with a permanent smile he could never have.
“Shooting star cafe,” he thought as he peaked through the large front windows.
“I’ve been here so many times but this is the first time I actually want to be here…sort of.”
His slight shoulders fell as he spied him, he wasn’t hard to miss.
“Well, no backing out now” the boy said as his trembling hands pushing open the door causing a tiny bell hanging above the door to chime.
His contact, who was sitting in the far corner of the cafe lifted his head to see the boy and he smiled. For some reason seeing him smile made the boy feel sick. Regardless, he shuffled over to the table and sat opposite of him. They made quite the sight, the boy was slight and thin and his table mate a reputable giant. He was big, but not in the fat sort of way, in the walking mountain sort of way. The giant leaning across the table and whispered in a voice that matched his physique,
“You can take your hood off, you’ll look more suspicious with it on than off.”
The boy shook his head,
“They know who I am, it will only be a matter of minutes before he is notified.” his voice sounding oddly feminine following that of the giant.
the giant chuckled a little signifying that he didn’t think much of this vague threat and motioned for the boy to remove his hood. The youth’s hand rose but then hesitated, he could still back out, no one had seen him.
“No. It is too late” The boy thought as he removed pulled back his hood allowing a wave of voluminous golden locks to cascade down her perfectly almond face. She shook them out allowing them to fall about her face shading her eyes like sapphires glistening behind a golden waterfall.
“We will not have very long,” she said in a voice like crystal. “If it is raining by the golf course it is likely that he will be heading home soon after a few drinks with his….friends” she tossed her golden mane back with a flourish that comes natural to people of beauty. For a moment the giant was stunned, he had forgotten just how beautiful she was. he regained his composure quickly though and said,
“Don’t worry, this won’t take long. At least I hope it doesn’t”
The beauty nodded and then for a while they simply stared at each other. She raised a perfectly arched golden eyebrow, “Well?” she prodded.
“Right sorry!” The giant apologized startled from his amorous stupor. The beauty was, for the most part, undisturbed by this as it happened painfully frequently. All her life it had been this way, without even trying she ensnared people with her beauty which put her in her current predicament. She loathed her beauty, it had indeed ruined her life.
According to her father she was unearthly gorgeous from the day she was born. Had she known what trouble this would cause her she would have crawled right back into the lifeless abyss of her Mother’s womb. Her father said that when her mother died giving birth to her, her life transformed her into the beauty she is today. That just made her fell like a movie cliche. She was cursed. She realized very quickly that beauty is a both a poison and a cure. People were nice to her, much nicer than they should be the kind of nice you withhold for members of the royal family. It didn’t help that he father was a powerful political figure. It was sickening. When people spoke to her they spoke like they would to a doll, caramelizing their words to remind her of how pretty she was. No one would get close to her though as if her beauty reminded them of their flaws or how imperfect they were which is something no one wants to think of. People didn’t see her as a person, they saw a priceless jewell. Untouchable and only good for looking at. She also became accustomed to the stereotypes associated with people of beauty; helplessness, nativity, arrogance, and stupidity of which she was none. She prayed and screamed to God to make her ugly. She even thought once to burn her face but she of course could not follow through with it knowing that if she were ugly she would be worth even less especially to her father. He most of all made her into a bird in a gilded cage. After her mother died he saw her as his only memory of her and could not let her be tarnished. She was rarely permitted to go outside and he spoiled her rotten to show his affection. As she grew older she tried to establish a non-material relationship, as in truth all she wanted was his true love, but he was distant and broken when it came to real emotions. Eventually she gave up on that venture. She soon found out that she was much more than a doll to him but a coveted business pawn. In a ruthlessly cold fashion he promised her off to him without a second thought. And that is where she is now, a bird in another man’s gilded cage, his gilded cage. To her it was like being thrown into an iron maiden.
“I uh….wanted to talk to you.” The giant almost whispered.
The beauty tried very hard not to roll her eyes. “Well I hoped you were going to more than just stare at me.” she thought. Wait, was that nervousness in his voice? She eyed his bulking frame and swore that it was shaking ever so slightly. Could he be afraid?
“Yes?” she prodded again hoping that the rest of their conversation would be a little faster paced.
“Well…I was thinking…that maybe..” he paused and looked around and scratched at his arm nervously.
“Oh god he’s blushing” the beauty thought and stifled a slight giggle because for someone like him that was infamous for his aggression and brutality it was a fairly comical site. She couldn’t believe they were having “the talk” the one where he asked her out. She sighed internally, “they can argue it until the end of time but the universal truth still remains that men are all alike.” She began to prepare her rejection speech but then gave it some thought. On any other day she might actually say yes, after all he wasn’t bad looking. He was just…well big and that is a little scary. He was also sharp at the same time like his body was made of angles whereas she was smooth and curvaceous in all the right places, or so she was told. Even without her sculpted face she had hips and long graceful legs that could tempt the Gods. And as far as breasts go, the lord spared no expense on her. Combined with her pale alabaster skin her figure alone was enough to drive nations to war over her. They were opposites, he the dark and her the light. Angles and curves, sour and sweet, etc. It would have been poetic and she smiled at this.
“I want you to run away with me!” The giant blurted.
Her smile fell from her face and smashed into the table. Had she not already been so pale her color would had diminished several shades.
“You wha-wha-what?” she said staring at him mouth agape. She looked for madness in his deep green eyes but found there was nothing, nothing but confidence his anxiety and trepidation gone.
“You are joking right?” cliche to ask but it just tumbled out and she already knew that he was not. Her heart had already sunk before he affirmed what she already knew was the truth that he was deadly serious. Her heart fell more for him than herself, someone had undoubtedly heard him making him a dead man. Had he just asked her out he could have been pardoned as a hopeless romantic but this….he would have him killed for this.
For the first couple hundred eons or so life with the unicorns was great. They were ageless and intelligent so intelligent that they crafted magic and technology together like tinker toys. IT was proud of them but at the same time painfully sad. Watching unicorns prance around also becomes boring and IT created additional creatures; dragons, goblins, giants, etc, and these too added to ITS listlessness. IT could only watch IT’s creations like a voyeur, as it could only do two things; create and observe and for the most part they were unaware of ITS existence. At least they were until their own adventures in the scientific realm led them to not only become aware of IT but to also communicate. In their quest for knowledge the Unicorns probed IT for answers about the universe and the age old question of course which IT answered truthfully in IT’s naivety. The answers drove the unicorns to madness.
How could the creator the seemingly perfect being have created the universe on accident? How could IT have made the Earth simply on a whim? How could their existence, no, the existence of everything, been created for the express purpose of entertaining a cosmic entity? The unicorn’s logic, in combination with the irrational emotions previously discussed, drove them to one conclusion: their creator was corrupt and impure. This conclusion lead to an even more irrational conclusion, that the impure must be destroyed and that they, with their superior intellect and power, were to be the hands of destruction, that is their true purpose. However, they could not obviously kill what they could not touch so they convinced the creator to create himself a solid body so that he might experience their world first hand. IT was thrilled but also a bit disgruntled that It hadn’t thought of this idea before. Regardless, It created for Itself the body of what we would now recognize as man, except for about three feet taller and a lot stronger. It mattered little to the Unicorns as no sooner had he created his body had they bound him in magical chains and trampled him mercilessly for although he was as eternal as they his senses were on a supreme level meaning that he experienced the sensation of pain beyond comprehension or explanation.
The Unicorns then began their conquest of destruction and declared war on the world forcing the creator to watch his impurities be sloughed from existence. The Unicorns found that in their war and torture of the creator that they were truly happy for the first time, little did they know that their bodies served as magical crucibles that had created evil from their madness. That’s right, unicorns also created evil and brought it into the world wrap your head around that! Anyway, things were not looking great for the rest of the creatures at the time. Sure the dragons were strong and the giants as colossal as a mountain, but the Unicorns created magical weapons that could reduce even the fabric of reality to nothing. They could conjure black holes, warp gravity, transform the very stuff of life into a weapon of death. Also, the unicorn’s had an unrivaled bloodlust for battle that made them particularly terrfiying. In short, the other magical creatures were royally screwed.
The Creator saw all of this and was overcome with despair. He pleaded with the unicorns to stop and sadly his pleas were met with indignation and many hooves to the face. Fortunately, after an especially lengthy slaughter session, the unicorn’s arrogance had lead them to let their guard down just about the time a final revolt took place. They all died of course, pathetically, I think at best they managed to destroy the Unicorn’s Museum of Art, anyway, the point is that one noble dragon made it through to the Creator and sacrificed himself to free him from the magical chains. Sadly, his eons in confinement had left him severely weakened and it was not long before the Unicorn’s had him cornered once more. At this point he was really wishing he actually could destroy and create instead of just the later because he would like to lay the smack down on these unicorns. And that is when he had a brilliant idea, sort of. Using the last of his power, the created spawned a race in his exact image, an army of super intelligent, magic capable, hyper humans, that were pretty much on par with the unicorns. And thus began the war between the first men and the unicorns and what a war it was!
Well the war went on for ages and for the most part the unicorns were getting dominated. Mostly because in his haste the creator completely forgot to throw in a sense of principles, battle conduct, and the concept of fair play. The unicorns may have been evil bastards but at least they didn’t stab below the belt as it were. Anyway, the Unicorn’s numbers dwindled and desperation began to set in. They had one last ditch effort that was fairly irrational in its own right. You see, after a forever or so the unicorns had fairly well mastered inter-dimensional travel and how pocket dimensions worked. So, after luring the majority of the first men to the lair be feigning surrender, they intended to suck all the first men into a pocket dimension and then hurl it into a black hole or the sun, whichever sounded more evil. This might actually have worked if the Unicorn’s incredible vanity and arrogance didn’t cause them to monologue about their plan just before pressing the button (happens every time). There was a struggle and in the confusion both parties attempted to activate a pocket dimension of their own to fling the other into and we all know what happens when two pocket dimensions exist at the same time. We get a big olde rift that just starts sucking up everything into the void of nothingness. Both man and unicorn and a mime, lord only knows what he was doing there, were sucked indiscriminately into the vortex until only a few remained. Fortunately, the rift stabilized back into the two pocket dimensions it was meant to be and dragged the last of the Unicorns and their technology into the dimension they are trapped in today. As for the humans, only two remained at the time and one of them used his life force to close the dimension so that at least one man could live.
And that last man inherited the Earth which at this point was an absolute shit hole. The last man sought to fulfill the creators dream, or at least what he assumed it to be, and repair the broken world. So he split himself into two parts which were supposed to be identical but well he did just survive a terrible war and whose to say he didn’t deserve a couple of drinks? Anyway, so man and woman were created and the rest is history…….THE END!
But not really!
The last unicorn still lived albeit in another dimension. Still he possessed just enough technological resources to make a cloning machine and a dimension hopper. He swore on that day that he would amass an army of himself and one day finish what his race had started. And thus began the secret saga of the second Unicorn human war.
Well Comrades and Commandos, school is upon us meaning that the blissful festival that is summer has come to a close.
I don’t know about you but I am currently scrambling around trying to get into school mode while thinking of final summer things that I can do, none come to mind regrettably (except just now I thought of having an all night gaming session hmmmm). Like all students I am worried about classes, meeting new people and not having them hate me instantly, and how on Earth I’m going to balance this year’s schedule/work/social life (speaking of meeting new people, I decided that I am going to try very very very VERY hard not to be content with keeping to myself in class as well as being more friendly to new people as opposed to awkward and snarky). I’m sure you have 1,001 things to worry about as well but there is one thing that should be on the pinnacle of your list of woes and that is the impending attack by unicorns.
Yes I said it, unicorns. Every minute of every day there is at least one unicorn actively plotting your demise and depending on their plans for you, said demise could come tomorrow or years from now. It is a well known fact that if unicorns were an actual prominent life form on this planet they would harbor nothing but hatred for humans. Sadly for us though, they are a prominent life form that thankfully spends most of the time in the shadows and in their own parallel dimension. That is not to suggest that they are not actively engaged in their hatred of us, far from it in fact. They are constantly plotting the end of the human race however, as they buildup for that moment they have had a bloodied hoof in all the chaos and violence known to mankind.
You might say, “But but, mankind has brought upon its own pain. Are you suggesting that the holocaust was not really Hitler’s fault?”
No, of course not you silly fool. What I am saying is that when those unspeakable acts were committed Hitler wasn’t really himself, technically he was dead. All of the world’s most heinous criminals were dead at the time they committed their crimes.
Most people would agree that the most distinguishing feature of a unicorn is their horn. It is believed that the horn has magical properties which, in a manner of speaking, it does. The unicorn’s horn has two special properties apart from being almost as hard as diamond and a great place to hang an air freshener….or use to roast marshmallows. One: it produces a voracious type of virus that has the ability to reanimate dead cells as well as catalyze a hyper recovery stage that would revert the infected to their prime state. In short, it can bring the dead back to life. What the virus cannot do however, is restore cognitive faculties i.e. the lights are on but there is no one home. That is where the second function of the horn comes in. The horn is also capable of emitting the thought resonance of the unicorn which, when comes in contact with a blank brain, activates it to the same resonance. So in summary, a unicorn is capable of killing someone, bringing their body back to life, and then possessing them. Not just anyone though, the person has to be about as corrupt and evil as the unicorn itself. The unicorns figured this out when they tried to turn Abraham Lincoln. The man was just too damn honest. So what they, they being the police service at the time, thought to be a bullet wound was actually a unicorn horn wound. The unicorns then possessed a random person to take the blame for it. They also turned Shakespeare in an attempt to cause a revolt by writing just terrible plays. This of course backfired and Shakespeare became the literary phenom that we know and begrudgingly love (sorry folks but most of his stuff is just so illogical and a bit cornily dramatic for my taste. I mean what girl honestly falls in love with some dude she’s only spent about 15 hours with total and then decides to immediately kill herself because she can’t have him anymore? I bet she didn’t even know what his favorite color was). This is when the unicorns discovered that they were naturally talented writers who knew?
So yes, unicorns are evil necromancers who would like nothing more than to bring disastrous ruination upon our heads and brutally murder us into extinction. You’re probably thinking, “Well why don’t they? Its obvious they have the upper hand.” Well the answer to this is simple, they can’t. They can’t because they no longer belong to our dimension and can only exist in it for approximately 30 seconds at a time. So yes, unicorns are evil necromancers from an alternate dimension etc and if your mind isn’t blown yet you’d better get some paper towels and some bleach because it is about to splatter everywhere like a kid that had too much birthday cake. Let us start at the very beginning, a bit of an redundant statement i know, like the very very beginning of everything.
In the beginning were the words and those words were, “Whoa…..it is really dark! It’s a little spooky not going to lie…..who am I talking to?” these words for spoken by IT. IT being the creator of everything mostly because it was nothing and something at the same time. IT had no body because there was nothing, but even if there is nothing there is reality and that is what IT was. So IT was god and it was bored as shit. IT had no gender since those had yet to be created and it had no name and please don’t ask how it said those words when words also didn’t exist as this was all speculation on my part so shut it! Anyway, IT wandered through the darkness of space, which also didn’t technically exist yet, (you get the point right?) until it spied the tiny almost microscopic blip of light that was to be everything. The everything it was our universe, technically it was all universes. So what did our naive IT do? IT touched it of course, who wouldn’t? But when IT touched the everything, remembering that IT is reality, the everything became something which is now what we live in. In short, IT caused the big bang merging itself with everything. Hopefully you got all that and even if you didn’t it really isn’t important for the rest of the story I just like to be philosophical every once and a while.
So IT now was in the universe and IT was still bored as shit. Sure the big bang was hella exciting but after that nothing happened, well things were happening but they happened reeeaalllly slowly, like waiting at the doctor’s office slowly. So IT decided that it was going to make some friends. Since all that was around was cosmic dust and such it made a big ball out if it (remember that IT is really still a child I’m sure you enjoyed playing with a ball when you were still a stupid useless little sack of fat and tears….sorry, I don’t really like children).
And then IT thought to ITself that it should try making something that moved on its own and after some trial and error i.e. the beginnings of greek mythology i.e. chaos, mother earth, father sky, all of that eating your own children and throwing mountains on people nonsense (don’t worry IT was like “What the fuck is wrong with you things!? This one just keep raping people for NO REASON!” and scratched that version of Earth and tried again with slightly better results). So after that…episode… IT created plant life and small critters which were fun for a little bit but IT soon realized, after IT created attention spans, that IT’s was very short so IT set out to create the most complex life he could think of. The life form that would reign over the Earth and entertain IT. IT created the unicorns. The first unicorns were noble, graceful, surprisingly good at guitar, and pretty much everything you would expect from pop culture unicorns. However, their biggest flaw was their wisdom, as with wisdom comes logic, and when logic exists there is also irrational extremes, and with irrationality comes emotions very very dangerous emotions but we’ll get to that later.
******
So this is going to end up being a two parter because I did not realize how long it was going to take to write until I started writing it, ironic huh? But yes, I hope you enjoy this part because things are about to get a lot less rational and a whole bunch more crazy.
Hello friends!
The more observant of you may have noticed that the name has changed from, “lessons from the Black Sheep” to “Tales from the Black Sheep”. I thought this was more appropriate for many reasons.
While my post are technically lessons in that they are meant to explain a fact of life via an example, it is also my belief that they are a bit too long to be considered a real lesson. As I thought about it I realized that a real lesson would be like a Miyagi thing where he teaches someone a lesson about hard work paying off by making them stomp their own wine or something along those lines. So I consider my posts to be closer to the realm of stories, specifically outlandish nerd based stories which I think will be my specialty hence forth. This is mostly because, if you couldn’t tell, I love to tell stories especially if they are crazy. The nerdiness just works because it is something I am very familiar with. Anywho, I hope you enjoy the mind-bending stories that are to come especially this next one that I am in the process of writing.
Holy thighs of Mother Theresa! It is jufreakingly (joo-freaking-lie)! How did that happen? I personally have no answer because the other day my brother, after watching some show called Through the Wormhole narrated by God….i mean Morgan Freeman, told me that some guy had mathematically proven that time is an illusion. By first response was, “Well duh! Wait….what?” I’m confused about the mathematically proving it to be an illusion part not the it being an illusion. I don’t see how you could mathematically prove anything is an illusion. Would some mathematician go up to Criss Angel and be like, “Look broham I crunched the numbers and your shit is illusionary!” Dont ask me why the Mathematician speaks like that, it will forever be a mystery. I also have been reading a lot of books lately that involve steampunkness and time travel and they all seem to agree on that fact, that fact being that time is an illusion. So all things, past, present, and future are happening simultaneously is the basic gist i’ve gotten from these books. I also know that Charles Babbage and Nikola Tessla were badasses and we probably would be flying cars by now if they had their way. Anyway, the point is that since time is an illusion and all aspects of time are simultaneous, it was already July in May when I made my last post…chew on that for a bit.
Well I hope everyone has been having a good summer thus far I have been! I am also happy to report that I accomplished 4/6 of my summer wishlist! Summer Wars was AWESOME! I may go watch again right now to relive that two hour high! Okay well it wasn’t that intoxicating but still it was a great story, great animation, and a well maintained plot with no unanswered questions….I think. The video games that I got, Sengoku Basara Samurai Heroes and Resonance of Fate, are also super special awesome! Speaking of video games let us talk about the subject of this post shall we?
WE SHALL! I should start off by saying that;
My name is Robert Jones and I….am a splurger.
Splurger: A person whom is stingy with money until taken over by uncontrollable periods of intense shopping in which they blow a large amount of money within a short span of time.
I don’t think what I do is even intense shopping, in fact, it is dangerously unintense. I simply know what I want, grab it, and don’t look back. Its not like I have to go through a throng of demonic unmentionables intent on depriving me of my happiness. Nor do I have to brave the labyrinth (Target) and fight the minotaur to retrieve my swag. I do however, look at the receipts and then my bank account and mourn my losses. Anyway, the point is when I really want something I generally buy it, as most people do, and doing so makes me overjoyed (I may have exaggerrated about the crying and mourning part. In truth I simply shrug and go, “Well I was going to spend it eventually”). For example, today I was struck by the sudden need to have more video games as one can never truly have enough. So I went to my local Game Stop and stocked up on, God of War I and II, Burnout Paradise, and Soul Calibur 4. I must have been smiling like a madman when i put them on the checkout counter because Sean, the cashier, was like, “Gaming spree? Right on dude!”. And I kept that smile as I sauntered out the door, there may have even been skipping involved or at least a hint of buyers swaggah. And I said to myself as I was driving home, “Whoever said that money can’t buy happiness was a loser who had none!” Which may or may not be true but still I am still coasting on buyers high and probably will until school starts.
The point is that certainly money cannot actually by happiness, although in the near future we may be able to purchase the pheromones necessary to make us happy, but money can buy a lot of things that can make you happy like food, pleasurable company, or a Netflix subscription. For the most part, without money, in our present society, no one would be happy. There would be no infrastructure meaning no restaurants, movie theaters, public parks, public restrooms, coffee shops, drugs, prostitutes, amusement parks. Technology would be put on indefinite hold meaning no more iphones, imacs, or otherwise. And good luck finding a diamond ring to propose to your fiance with not to mention that 98% of woman (the remaining 2% are dead and never had a chance to begin with) would lose their chances of having an expensive over the top no hold barred wedding extravaganza the likes of which would make the Kings and Queens of old look like penniless orphans. Imagine that, millions of little girls and woman’s dreams crushed! There would be riots! And what the hell are we (the men) supposed to do without books, ESPN, or video games? Have sex and lots of it probably leading to an even worse state of overpopulation which we can’t feed because the farmers have no incentive to produce food other than for themselves. And think of all those Asian businessmen, what are they going to do with their lives? Get off their asses and start taking over the world probably. Because unlike us, they don’t need the motivation of becoming unfathomably rich to try and succeed they just do it! Next thing you know those giant robots in anime will cease to just be fantasy and we will be up to our nethers in gundams.
Bottom line: We need money or else the world goes to shit! This is of course a gross exaggeration fueled by my distaste of pointless old adages and proverbs that really just state the obvious or, in truth, state nothing at all. Such as this one: “A watched pot never boils” which is both incorrect and stupid. The actual meaning of the adage doesn’t escape me but even the meaning is untrue. I take it to mean that if you hang onto your expectations they will never come to fruition or that patience is important blah blah blah. Fact of the matter is that this is the year 2011 and we can boil water like an Armageddon boils the seas we don’t even need a pan to do it we can do it WITH LASERS! Better yet, we can melt rocks with sunlight! And yes somethings work out in their own time but since when has sitting around and waiting for things to happen helped anyone out? NEVER THAT’S WHEN! Could you imagine if Link just sat around and let Zelda save herself, like that would ever happen.
Or this little number, my personal favorite (MASSIVE sarcasm), “Shoot for the moon and if you miss, at least you’ll land in the stars”
Again, incorrect and scientifically flawed beyond reason. First of all, it really should be the other way around if the meaning is to say you should always aim high considering that the stars are impossibly further away than the moon. Either way, you have failed because shooting for the moon and landing in a star not only results in your complete and disgraceful incineration but would leave you at least a good five years to think about your failure before you fall into the sun (or a good millennia or so before you hit the second nearest star which I believe is Proxima something). On the other hand, if you shoot for the stars and land in the moon, you’ve only completed 240,000 miles out of 92,000,000 which is equivalent to getting a .3% on a test (truth be told, if you managed to get exactly a .3% on a test you might deserve a medal. But not a Nobel peace prize those belong to me). Also, the basic premise of the saying is that you should settle for less and be happy with it which is something that most winners would find to be an appalling concept. I don’t know about you, but my kids will not be taught to be okay with getting less than what they work or aim for because that is the breeding ground for losers and quitters! And yes I understand that you can’t always win and you can’t always get what you want but when you have a goal in mind and you don’t even come close to achieving it, generally that is bad. I mean, what if people always settled for less? Would only some woman have the right to vote? Would only some black people have their freedom? Would they have only aired one season of 30 Rock? These things are important people!
Well anyway, I think I have occupied enough page space for one day. If there is anything you can gain from my rambling, well anything serious for that matter, it is that sometimes you can make yourself happy and sometimes you can’t. But I know one thing, I have never not been happy buying ice cream and since ice cream=happiness, money can in fact buy happiness. BOOYAH! Another Nobel Prize for Robert Jones this time in theoretics and philosophy. Go buy yourself some ice cream you crazy kids ITS SUMMER!
Well…its more like a summer to do list but it involves watching and or buying certain things. Anyway, every summer I make a list of things that I want to do as far as movies I didn’t get a chance to watch or suddenly discovered now that I have an abundance of time. It also contains games that I want to play that I was either too poor to afford during the school year or didn’t have enough time.
Well that about wraps it up at least that is all I can think of at the moment. Does anyone else have a summer wishlist?
Honorable Mentions: Dungeon Siege 3, Star Ocean the Last Hope, Want to buy some Toms and more threadless tees
It is summer! Can you feel it!? I know I can and my combination sunglass flip flop tans are evidence of that fact. To be honest, it isn’t quite summer. It is in this pseudo paradise weather. The kind where you could sit in a lawn chair under a tree or an umbrella with a huge glass of ice tea or lemonade reading a book all day and you would barely sweat, unless you are one of those profuse sweaters in which case you probably are either inside or out buying different kinds of antiperspirants that are really just a good smelling lie. Speaking of which, I think i’ll do that this Sunday if weather permits, the laying under a tree with lemonade part, not the compulsively buying antiperspirant part. Anyone down for a picnic? Don’t all jump up at once now, seriously though don’t jump up at once, 23% of people are greatly startled by large masses of people moving in potentially aggressive unison. To you it may just look like a bunch of people standing in excitement but to that 23% it looks like a pack of Japanese wolf ninjas moving in killer attack formations with the precision of a bunch of robotic wolf ninjas moving in killer attack formations…when you pictured it in your head it was the same image twice, admit it.
Anyway, I bet you are wondering what the point of all that was. Well I’ll tell you. If you read in between the lines it will be obvious that my entire preamble was about how Stan Lee is trying to use Marvel Comics to turn America into a socialist institution. Now if you can actually relate everything that I said in the first paragraph to the ludicrous assertion that I just made you will have earned my allegiance and respect.
What I really want to talk about is my nigh uncontrollable urge to dance in my car to my self proclaimed, and proclaimed by three Hare Krishnas, kick ass music. In general, if there isn’t anything on the road that requires my immediate attention I am most likely undulating my body like Shakira while my music blasts all the molecules to my body to oblivion. However, when I have new music and it comes up on shuffle without me searching for it, this is a very joyous occasion mind you, I dance extra hard. Hold on to this story for a second as I am about to do some shameless advertisement.
If you are into eclectic electronica that borderlines alternative and reinvents some genres while throwing down some stuff you will initially go, “I say! Your syncopation is bloody disaster. Bass Lines have no business sounding like that! My word what was that instrument just now! It sounded like a peacock!” but after a while you’ll be like, “My word this ruckus is really quite good! If I were an indecent man I would be tapping my foot!”. At least you would if you were a Victorian englishman like myself. Anyway check out http://www.kitsune.fr/journal/. Kitsune Maison has a lot of remixes and under the radar artists and they have yet to fail me. If you have any fiber of joy in your body and have not had all your senses and emotions nullified like Keanu Reeves, then you will probably find at least one song you will dance uncontrollably to.
Anyway, back to my story. Still with me? Good. So as I was saying, when I have new music I dance extra hard such as today when I missed a green arrow because the ass bag in front of me wasn’t paying attention. I figured I had some time so I did what comes naturally when one of my new songs comes on. As I was putting the funk back in funkalicious I had that “Someone is giving you an awkward look” feeling. Turns out I was right. There was a middle aged frumpy woman waddling across the crosswalk and she was shaking her head disapprovingly at me as she trundled to the other side. My first impulsive was to stick my head out the window and say something to the effect of, “Maybe if you tried it once and a while you wouldn’t be classified as an suv in a dress you sow!”. But I held my tongue eventhough she considerably dampened my mood. And then a crazy though hit me.
Well two thoughts actually, wellllll more like two fantasies. Fantasy one: One day I will be driving with my windows down music blaring and dancing as per usual and someone will roll their windows down to listen and dance along too. Soon after, every car or person I pass is dancing along with me. Sounds like a corny car commercial I know but imagine if you were one of those people, it would be the best day of your miserable existence. The more likely fantasy: I will be dancing and driving and some driver will misinterpret my dancing as some sort of warning or a signal and in his distraction he will cause a multicar pileup. I guess that was more of a nightmare than a fantasy but anyway. For the sake of humanity I suppose I can control the urge a little bit. But if I see that heifer of a woman rolling about again I’m going to blast my bass so loud her generous rolls of lard will never stop vibrating. I’ll have invented the world’s first instance of an organism in perpetual motion. That’s another Noble Prize for me. I might have to rent out a Uhaul to store them.
Anyone else have car related fantasy/nightmares?
Dear People,
Hey there I’m back! And you’re probably like, “Well where did you go? And why were you there for so long?” I’ll tell you. First I had a lot of schoolwork to do and was a bit stressed and busy but that is not why I had such an extended leave of absence. The short version of the story is that my trip to Mordor ran a bit longer than expected. The much longer and more awesome version of the story starts……right now! It will also be available in detailed book format in September of 2011 when my publisher manages to crawl his way out of those silly dwarf caves.
So I decided to do my honors thesis on Mordorian soil and the impacts of the war on crop production in Mordor, for those of you who don’t know I am a soil science major (it is much cooler than it sounds). So after several failed attempts at summoning portals and many virgin sacrifices later, I finally got a portal to Mordor. By the way, portals to fictional dimensions have gotten so expensive lately! ugh this economy!
Also the accuracy of inter-dimensional portals has become extremely spotty so I ended up miles away from the black gate. I had to use several cross dressing bugs bunny style antics and everything I learned from watching horrible French spy movies to make my way to the Black Gate. When I got there I explained to the doorman, after they ran out of arrows to shoot at me, that I was a student here to do research and hopefully improve the yield of his crops. When that didn’t work I told them I was a DA coming to follow up a subpoena filed by Gondor for unjustified property damage and verbal assault. He laughed and said that they hadn’t done anything to Gondor….yet. This struck me as odd considering that I’ve watched the Lord of the Rings at least 12 times especially the parts with battles. Anyway I had plenty of time to ponder this after I was violently dragged to one the prison/orc camp/mess hall (The prison is pretty much a buffet for the orcs, average residence time: 2 hours, disturbingly enough, it smells like a Mcdonalds).
I had to admit that things were not looking pretty good for me especially after all my attempts to appeal to humanity of the troll dragging me failed. They don’t really speak english very well but they did know French. Apparently French people fall into Mordor all the time and taste like blueberries. We had a good laugh at the expense of the French and before I knew it I was in a prison cell closer to being torn apart and eaten than freedom or my thesis. But at least I left that troll with a smile on his face that has to count for something right?
Anyway, the Orc’s prison warden/ top chef, came by soon after my imprisonment to ask me how I would like to be prepared and this where my brilliance shines out. Luckily there are little to no black people in Middle Earth at least none that they had eaten so they believed me when I told them that I was cursed and if consumed would turn them into little girls before they turned inside out and exploded afterwards I would taste like the most succulent veal they could imagine. The only person who could remove the curse would be a supreme wizard/ warlock. I figured if I could talk to Saruman he might listen to reason and not eat me. The Warden informed me that he didn’t know of a Saruman. Baffled I wondered how this could be possible considering that he was kind of his boss and a step down from the big man. I thought hit me though, the portal I used cut through time and space which means that I could have arrived at any point in Middle Earth history including before many of the crucial events of the movie. I was in luck! I explained to the Warden/ top chef that by the brotherhood of Gentleman Chefs, to which we both belong (don’t ask its a long story), he was obligated to listen and believe any insane story I tell him and not eat me for a period of at least 72 standard Earth hours…which is about 26 Middle Earth hours give or take. So through careful calendar reading and lunar measurements I figured out that I had arrived a wee bit before Saruman had decided to mass power with the orcs and Mordor and such so pretty much right before shit started going down. I then consulted the scriptures, i.e. wikipedia (they have wifi in Mordor too!) and figured out exactly where Sam and Frodo would be at that point. I realized that I could completely rewrite Middle Earth history and you cannot pass up an opportunity like that, plus they were going to eat me otherwise. Man’s gotta do what a Man’s gotta do.
So I dialed up Saruman on my palantir, which I purchased on ebay, and explained to him the situation and my terms of release etc. Surprisingly enough he believed me and one army of orcs and a hobbit beatdown later he had the ring in his possession and he and the ring came to pay me a visit in my giant pot of soup, the orcs had gotten impatient and decided that if I was wrong there was no point in not prepping me to eat just in case. While I basted I told him all I knew that happened in the three movies including the extended parts and his untimely demise. And then things got a bit strange when I had a talk with the ring. As it turns out, during its time with Gollum and other parts of its life it had gone quite mad. The problem with being a sentient ring is that you never shut off and you see everything. A great sense of pity took me over when I considered how much time alone he spent with Gollum. As the ring slowly went insane he realized that the turn of events that left him with Gollum was not a coincidence but punishment for all his wrongdoing. His imprisonment left him a lot of time to reflect on all he had done and what it had amounted to. He could not deny the fact that he was being punished any longer when he was shacked up with “those sexually ambiguous hobbits”. He also confessed that the whole eye thing was really just for show and emitted an unspeakable amount of greenhouse gases and carcinogens into the atmosphere. His remorse drove him off the brink and he was no longer capable of covering the world in darkness and evil as he had planned and now he only wanted to die.
I confess that at this point I was beginning to panic. Nothing had changed! Although I pretty much cut out the three movies the outcome was still going to be the same. The ring would be destroyed and I would be roasted and served with a black bean hobbit sauce. Saruman however, disagreed. He thanked me for this intervention because if the movie had played out and they had actually reclaimed the ring it would have all been for nothing as he would still be insane and they would be out several thousand orcs and have suffered numerous embarrassing losses not to mention his pathetic death. For that I was to be released and not eaten much to the dismay of the Orcs. But despite my near horrific death experience I was determined to finish my research so I did.
Now this is where my story gets technically and soils sciencey so bear with me. I conducted my research on the soil in Mordor and discovered that by all rights it should be some of the most fertile soil if not the most fertile soil in the whole of Middle Earth. The fact that Mount Doom had been spewing out nutrient rich particulates forever, not to mention all the organic matter from the heaps and heaps of dead bodies, should have made acres upon acres of super fertile soil and it did yet nothing was growing. After some tests I realized what the problem was. The soil was supersaturated with evil. I know what your thinking, “Robert Jones you can’t actually have evil soil” To which I say, “I’m sorry did you take Soils 200 and get an A? I think not! Plus this is Middle Earth the rules are different” Anyway, normally plants love evil in soil its like miracle grow, steroids, and heroin to them while Good is way to complex for them to actually utilize. But even plants can have too much evil just like you can be too attractive and the over abundance of evil in the soil has made it useless. Now this is where they started considering me for the Nobel Peace Prize. If we could figure out a way to even out the evil we could restore the fertility of the soil and become super productive in agriculture effectively supplying food to all of Middle Earth but at exorbitant rates such that we have all the races and cities in our pocket financially essentially conquering the entire dimension! But how?
We couldn’t use orcs because that would just make it worse. Elves are too good and they turn all the crops flamboyant colors. Humans are pretty much neutral so that wouldn’t do anything either. and Dwarfs are faaarrr too hairy So in a brilliant storm of ideas I decided that we should use ground up hobbits to leach some of the evil out of the soil. And lo and behold it was a rosing success. And after an extensive PR campaign with the Ents we have the best agriculturalists running the Mordorian fields which have yields that would make Monsanto blush. The people of Middle Earth have food and therefore they aren’t fighting anymore, they are going to have to invent a new noble peace prize to give me, and I single handedly caused the extinction of the Hobbits. All in all not a bad Month.