…a fair bit.

Sometimes, just sometimes I shoot my mouth off without pausing to think. My brain’s going, “Fuck you Mouth. Wait for me dammit. I can help” And my mouth replies, “Screw that. I can do this.”

And sometimes I shoot my mouth off after pausing to think. My mouth says to my brain, “You think this is a good idea”, and my brain replies, “Hell yeah, go for it. I’d do it if I were you. Be a man Mouth.”

I think that what I did a few months ago, during a job interview was the latter.

I was in the car with two of the people who would be interviewing me over lunch. They were talking were talking about life insurance policies. Not something I am normally interested in, because death isn’t something I usually think about. (I DO THINK ABOUT DEATH). Mouth said to Brain, “Fuck this all, I’m bored. Let’s do something fun.” And Brain replied, “Go for it dude.” …and Mouth went “Watch me.”

So as they continued to talk, animatedly, about insurance and premiums, I looked out of the car window and said, with all the weariness I could put into my voice, “Boy, old people sure know how to have fun.”

Brain broke into stunned applause, and the Mouth basked in his finest moment.

And presenting the continuing adventures of Mouth and Brain, here are lines that Mouth has uttered, tongue planted firmly in cheek (Well…mostly), in a place where circumspection might have been warranted..

“I am a prince among men.”

“It is all a part of my boyish charm.”

“I am a delicate flower.”

“A life without Rajneesh isn’t worth living.”

“I assumed you possessed the intellect of a mildly retarded three year old. Clearly I was mistaken.”

“Wouldn’t you rather be a legal corpse than a felonious one?”

“I am a pathological liar. And a horrible, horrible person. That is true.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just that I don’t trust you.”

“You are a moderately trustworthy person.”

“You are a strange, strange woman.”

“You are an obscenely tall person.”

“Everything belongs to me unless otherwise stated.”

“Have friendly dolphins refuel the plane.” (I’m particularly proud of this one”)

“We thought about doing the presentation in interpretive dance, but it just did not work.”

Yeah, so apparently Mouth and Brain are both drunk and high.

I’m confused.

And busy as hell.

How busy would hell be, if hell did exist?

Would the Devil say he was a busy as hell, if the Devil did exist? (And I’m not referring to that devil who occasionally reads this blog.)

He’d say, “Stop bothering me, I’m busy as hell!” And then he would snicker and stroke his goatee. And smirk. And smirk some more and stroke his goatee some more.

I always picture the Devil as smirking. Like someone who knows something funny but refuses to share it. I can imagine him thinking, “It is “Paint “your own Pottery Studio””, and not “Paint “your own Pottery” Studio”” and gloating in the smug superiority of his knowledge.

Goatees are good for that. For stroking and for framing a smirk. Anyone with a goatee looks sinister. I have repeatedly mentioned this fact to a colleague who has a goatee. He retorted that my penchant for dressing in black is far more sinister.

I smirked at him.

I may have mentioned this before. But I have a very, very annoying smirk. Actually a smirk that women find very, very annoying.

I practice it in the mirror.

I think it is rather devilish.

I briefly practiced an innocent expression. I made me look like a mildly retarded sack of flour, and so I do not use it in public anymore. (Most sacks of flour are actually quite intelligent, but sadly mistaken in believing that it is “Paint “your own Pottery” Studio””)

I hate decorating. I really, really do.

(The segue here? Painting to decorating.)

(Or maybe Deus ex machina. A rampaging horde of mildly inebriated toasters took over the blog and forced me at crumb point to start talking (complaining?) about decorating.)

But getting it half right is some kind of a genetic imperative. And so I stress over it and obsess about it. I try to build a unified theme, with colors that flow together and build a sense of harmony.

And halfway through I say, “Fuck it all” and take a nap.

So this leaves me with an apartment that looks half decorated, just as it would if the person in charge of decorating it had said “Fuck it all” halfway through and had taken a nap. The wall above my couch has the hooks for a painting, but I’m too lazy to hang it up. (Only a poor reproduction I’m afraid. My wallet went into terminal withdrawal when it heard the price for an original, or even for a lithograph.)

Yes, I’m talking about decorating the apartment. That admission makes me feel vaguely emasculated. Now I have to grunt and scratch myself in an inappropriate place to reassert my masculinity.

Grunt.

Scratch.

No! That is not a catalog from Pottery Barn in the back seat of my car.

And please for fucks sake, it is “you” and not “u”. “Z” is not a fucking acceptable alternative for the letter “S” in plurals (It saddens me when people I am fond of commit these transgressions). And fucking capitalize. The shift key is but a finger away.

And for the fucking love of all that is good and pure do not fucking ask me what I am into. I am into nothing. Nothing is fucking into me. Ask me the field I fucking work in and I will give you a fucking detailed answer. Ask me what I am into and I will try to do unnatural things to you with my umbrella. And I assure you that you will not enjoy it.

Yeah, so, decorating and shit. Fuck it all.

(I am the King of Coherence and Structure. Crown me now and take me to my harem.)

EDIT: “r” does not fucking equate to “our” or “are”. You can use “r” if you are pretending to be a pirate, but never ever in any other context.

I’m old (ancient?) enough to remember a time when I had no passwords. Not a single one.

The first one I acquired if for my now long defunct hotmail account (Props to anyone who remembers what it was. I still use the non @hotmail part of that address on far too many forums and websites. Perhaps not a wise move. I was eighteen when I came up with that name. A particularly idiotic and sartorially challenged eighteen.), and then another for my next email account, and then a third and a fourth. It’s gotten to the point that I do not even bother to remember my passwords anymore. It’s easier to pretend that I have forgotten the password and have it emailed to the one account whose password I do remember.(That is a cunning lie, I never bothered to commit the passoword to memory, so I cannot claim to have forgotten it. It makes me feel like a criminal mastermind.)

And I am also paying the price for other peoples stupidity. Using your name as a password isn’t a good idea. Yes, I know that. Unfortunately some people do not. And every password now brings with it a whole set of rules. One of the first eight letters must be uppercase; they should contain a number and a symbol. The symbol can be one that you can type with your middle finger of your right hand when the index finger of the same hand is on “x” and the ring finger is on “z”. The password should not contain more than three letters in sequence. Other disallowed sequences are the natural alphabetical sequence, the first letter of the days of the week, and any letters which sound the same if you are standing in a wind tunnel with a jet engine roaring behind you.

I can hardly wait for the day when I can have a chip implanted in me, something that will allow me to access my email if I twitch the appropriate appendage. By appropriate appendage I mean my finger. Get your filthy minds out of the gutter!

And while I am dwelling on prehistory, the first game I ever played on a computer was PC Pool. This was back in ’90 or ’91. On a friends computer, with a black and white monitor. Without a mouse. The instructions for the game possessed a charming simplicity and directness: Hit the Space Bar to shoot the ball.

And, I’m not kidding, but for the first few weeks that I played the game, I waited with eager anticipation for a drinking establishment with aliens in it. Aliens who would be gathered around a pool table… perhaps playing pool or a variant, billiards maybe. Or maybe not even that, maybe just aliens hanging about a bar, getting drunk and setting their passwords.

Eventually I did realize that they meant I needed to hit that long bar shaped key, the one that was used to type out blank spaces. This realization made me sad.

I never have quite gotten over that traumatic disappointment.

I’m a complete blank. Therefore I shall ramble on and on and on.

My calluses are itching.

I pulled a muscle working out. I won’t say which muscle, but think Home Improvement when it was funny.

I’ve discovered this passable imitation of an Indian Bakery a few miles from where I live. Plum Cake!

However to make up for the guilt that accompanies my eating the cake, I need to work out. And the muscle pull does not help matters.

So I am vacillating between overwhelming guilt and excruciating pain. Yes. Pleasant.

And keeping with my recent home-sickness, I’ve developed an all consuming longing for sweet buns, the kind you get at Wariar’s or Thom’s bakery. It’s gotten to the point where the people at work hare off in the opposite direction when they hear me mention the word “bun”. It was in the course of the hunt that I uncovered the Indian bakery facsimile.

They do not make sweet buns, but the puffs are excellent. And coincidentally the second time I was there I ran into their Vice President of Marketing. I spent the better part of a half hour trying to convince him that his sole hope of redemption lay in convincing his higher ups that sweet buns were the way to go. At around the twentieth minute his eyes glazed over. But I persevered. I’ll picket the place if I have to.

A few weeks ago, an old friend (By old I mean a friend I have known since kindergarten, and not someone old, for instance someone in their thirties.) asked me why I wrote nothing about what was happening in my life on this blog.

The reason for that is simple. It’s called a private life for a reason. It’s private. Private: From the Latin word Privaticus, which roughly translates to none of anyone’s fucking business but my own. And I’m a private person. Not traded on the open market. Ergo I do not air my clean linen (I’m a bit of a clean freak, I clean the dirty linen) in public.

But dipwad, if you still read this, you now know about my obesession with baked products.

In a moment of narcissism, megalomania and inspiring courage in the face of insurmountable odds, I got www.steadilygoinginane.com to point here.

Most religions have the occasional valid moral and philosophical viewpoint. The only problem is well…that they are religions.

And so they do not believe that their beliefs can stand the test of logic and argument, that they could be wrong and so they wrap it up in a God/Pantheon mythos. The “Insert Divine Being(s) here” told us this and so it has to be true. And if you do not agree, we will kill you to show you the error of your ways.”

Hell…Even I can come up with fairly valid edicts.

Here’s one right now. “You really should not hump the furniture.”

A perfectly reasonable and sensible edict. Humping the furniture can give you nasty splinters, or if it isn’t wood and is plastic or metal a nasty rash. (Because of the friction). And that worn spot on the couch may be hard to explain.

But do you think people will take this edict to heart? Will they look at it logically and rationally and evaluate the pros and cons.

No they fucking won’t. They will choose to believe that since they have been asked to refrain from humping the furniture, there must be something in the furniture humping sub-culture. Overnight this will explode into the mainstream. Furniture humpers will be everywhere. Peer pressure. Respectable professionals will visit the seedier parts of town for clandestine assignations with footstools of ill repute and questionable hygiene.

Society will break down.

I can try gently persuading people to see the error of their ways. I can draw fancy diagrams with arrows and bold text showing them why the edict is good. But they wont give a crap about my logic.

However, if I made up a story about a giant blancmange that came down from the skies, larger than your average blancmange, and said to me in a voice sweeter than Tiramisu:

“Hump not the furniture, for that is evil. And an abomination in my eyes. And it’s poopy. So stop. And if you continue to hump the furniture, you shall go to the lowest part of Insert Appropriate Stick Here, but if you refrain, you shall receive Insert Carrot Here.”

And people would then listen. They’d give me donations to fuel the War Against Furniture Humpers. Young idiots…devotees would hang on my every last word. They’d take down notes and sell books authored by me. And photographs of me grinning obnoxiously at the camera as I decapitate an Ottoman with loose morals.

And while I’m at it I’ll slip in a few edicts, one about people whose middle name ends with X being spawns of the Evil Sofa and another that all good devotees will sign their worldly possessions over to me.

So…Yeah. Don’t hump the furniture.

…mistake my misanthropy for a sense of humor.

I suppose that that is a good thing.

The Da Vinci Code and its author are in the news. A lawsuit.

Frankly, I do not give damn about the lawsuit.

But I do dislike the book. Intensely.

And the book is bad. Atrociously bad. Bad. Bad. Bad.

Two dimensional clichés impersonating characters. A Distinguished American professor. An Exotic French babe. An eccentric English nobleman. All we need now is a Ninja and a cute puppy. And a spaceship. And aliens. And pirates. They would only improve the book.

(That would be a good plot…If the pirates made the professor, the babe and the nobleman walk the plank. And the aliens laid eggs in them which hatched and then the Ninja fought them! On the spaceship. While a tidal wave on Mars wiped out the alien colony.)

A wafer thin plot. The Da Vinci Stupidity. Not my off the cuff masterpiece.

And a supposedly “fast moving” story.

That’s what the author called it: “A fast moving thriller.”

It is not.

It is fast moving crap.

The Da Vinci Code is literary diarrhea.

Gah!

At a Wal-Mart standing around doing nothing. Hanging around waiting for a friend to finish shopping and plotting against correct sentence construction.

Over the public address system, an improbably cheerful female voice asked, “What’s new at Wal-Mart?” I assumed that that was a rhetorical question, and I was proven correct as she continued, with that disquieting zombie-like cheerfulness, to list out what, in fact, was new at Wal-Mart. And that annoyed me. Because I believed that the correct answer to that question is, “Who gives a flying fuck.” I’d like to hear that over the PA system. Really, I would. (If I had gotten around to reading my copy of 1984, I would have called it Orwellian, but I haven’t so I won’t. )

Now, a Wal-Mart Super center Sells everything. Guns, bicycles, televisions and fertilizer. And books. I’m um… mildly strange I dislike it if book shops even sell CD’s, so finding the book aisle next to the candy aisle grated upon my soul, (not that I have one, but apt imagery) to a degree nearly inexpressible. And well their selection was um…wanting would be a polite way of putting it.

Wanting? Now I’m being all snobbish. But in my defense, the shelf I was looking at had a nasty sign saying, “Hot new releases”, with a flame decal below it. To stress the hotness and the newness of the release. (Sidebar: Doesn’t hot new release sound like a description of an ejaculation?).

Where was I? Ah yes. Hot, new releases. Well the moron, (you know who you are) who had dragged me to here was still “consumering” away, and so with nothing else to do, I started to read the titles.

Barefoot Tigress.
The Wandering Princess.
The Last Mistress.
The Lonely Seductress.

I noticed a pattern here. Clearly these books were meant for a particular audience.

Snakes.

Notice the strong hissing sound with which all the titles end?

SSSSSSSSSS.

SSSS.

SSSSS.

SSss…

Who hisses? Snakes. They’re famous for that. And for their love of trashy paperbacks. They cannot wear shoes and so are naturally barefoot. The wander from place to place hissing and so engrossed are they in the hissing, that they miss stuff and so are perpetually last when the numbers are called out while playing Bingo. And um…the last title, well I hope they get it on and aren’t lonely anymore.

Well, that’s my interpretation of what the target audience for those books could be. Snakes. And other things that hiss. Like valves, and um… balloons with holes in them.

I love the letter “e”. Suffixing a word with an “e”, adds a dash of class to the word. So instead of a “Shop” you have a “Shoppe”. You can buy a gift at a shop, but at Shoppe you can buy a Gifte.

See, all fancy and shit.

However, using Shoppe instead of Shop, when Shoppe is preceded by the words Adult and Gift, does not help one little bit.

And neither does the Giant Neon Arrow (A phallic fertility symbol? Something Pagan or Druidic? ) beneath those aforementioned words.

And now I’m going to try to squeeze in a couple of chapters of The Last Wandering Lonely Barefoot Seamstresssssss.