Drunk Drivin' is What I Like to Do - Sublime

I haven’t gone on a rant in a while so here it goes. Why the fuck can’t people fuckin’ drive? It’s a simple question. There must be an answer. But here I am, stuck on the highway with idiots who have not a clue as to what they’re doing. Something has to be done.

Proposition 1:

If you’re a woman you should have to take a driving test once a year. Honestly, and I’m generalizing here, women have no concept of spatial placement. No ability to judge distance, speed or the lay of the land at all. A test once a year would at least weed out the really bad ones because there’s no way they get lucky every year. I’ll give a little leeway to young girls who just got their drives license because all young people suck at driving anyway. I’ve made some stupid mistakes behind the wheel when I was younger, its part of maturing as a driver. But when you never mature, it’s time to pull the plug. I’ve seen so many minivan driving soccer moms driving like assholes lately, it’s amazing. You’ve got a kid in the car for the love of god! Don’t pull out into oncoming traffic without looking, damn it! If not for me, then do it for the kids, and stop driving. I apologize to the ladies for this prop ahead of time. You rev my engine but damn it if you can't drive a car.

Proposition 2:

If you can’t maintain a consistent speed on the highway, you should have your license revoked. Look, if you’re on the highway, go whatever speed you like, but if someone wants to pass you, don’t take it as an insult and speed up to try to block them out, just let it go, for the love of Christ. I just don’t understand why someone passing you in the slow lane of two lane highway, when you’re in the fast lane, is a serious offense. The only offense committed is that you shouldn’t have been in the fast lane to begin with, you ignorant prick. Trying to block me from getting back in the fast lane after I’ve passed you will do nothing but raise my ire and probably get you the finger. In my experience, this isn’t as big of a problem in Baltimore as it is in Southwest Virginia and if my al mamater wasn’t there, I would nuke the whole place.

Proposition 3:

If you don’t understand proper road signals or common traffic safety rules, maybe you should just walk. It’s 8:30 pm and I’m headed home from class. There’s a one lane bridge by my house on the way home, so I pull up to it at the same time that a car traveling the other direction reaches the bridge. In a jester of good driving and common courtesy I flash my headlights to tell him/her to go ahead and cross the bridge. Instead of moving, the bastard flashes me back. I made the first move…just do what I say. You’re wasting both our time. There’s a four way stop by my house that’s the same way, except that it has the opposite problem. Someone always goes when it’s not their turn. For the love of god just pay attention to who got there first and who’s to you right and everything while be fine. Oh, but your right, beeping and stopping in middle of the intersection or cutting someone off is a much better use of everyone’s time. Maybe there should be no four-way stops for the simple fact that people can't handle them. Maybe, just to make it so that everyone can handle the road, all four-way intersection should be lights or traffic circles. I know it sucks for those of us who can drive but sometimes you have to play to the idiotic masses.

Sidenote:

The game that Tom Hank’s character in Big plays at the beginning and then near the end is King’s Quest. It took me all day yesterday to figure that out.

Cheese Blogger in Paradise

So day number two at work with nothing to do. I surfed the internet for at least 7 hours yesterday. I have the bruise on the palm of my hand as proof. Unfortunately, I don’t think that bruise is going to heal any time soon as I’ll be doing the same thing today.

What did people do when they were bored at work before the internet? I’ve got to think that office sex and various other infidelities ran rampant. I mean, really, what else was there. Maybe that’s how stick finger drawings were invented. No, the history channel told me they were around in caveman times. Although, cavemen didn’t have the internet either but I was thinking more in modern terms and less in terms of killing a t-rex to save the tribe from mutilation and starvation. They had computers before the internet, i.e. the greatest computer of all time, the Apple IIe. So did people take their copy of “Wizardry” into work with them for the down times? Did windows always come with solitaire? The Apple didn’t even have a hard drive. We always had to put our saved games on a disk. Wait, I’ve got it; these were the times when people actually read books. I always forget that the internet replaced books so that has to be the logical explanation. And yes, I know what your thinking, reading actual books, paper or hard-back in this day and age does make you a dork. The internet definitely has replaced books and, for that matter, all other reading materials in my life. The Sun gets delivered to my house every morning, I walk outside, pick it up, and promptly through it in the trash. I pay for that stupid paper and I don’t even read it. I will go to The Sun’s website and read articles though. Why I pay for a paper I don’t read is a story for another time. I can’t remember the last time I went to the library when I wasn’t working on a research paper.

In order to make yesterday not a complete waste of time, I decide delve into the world of blog to better understand the community with whom I had thrown my hat. Unfortunately, what I didn’t know was that the world of blog is far vaster than I had previously imagined. Honestly, there is a blog for everything. Anything that you can think up, someone probably has a blog on it already. There are writers out there who write about interesting things well, there are people who write about absolutely nothing and then there's the plain really weird stuff. For example, there’s a blog that posts homemade postcard expressing people's secrets anonymously . Half of the postcards people made were about suicide, wft? There are at least 10,000 entertainment and news blogs, 1,000 digests of various sorts, and a million where people just post pictures of themselve or their friends (*cough*...myspace...*cough).

I just really didn’t think this was such a big thing. Apparently, I was wrong, way wrong. What is a comment orgy, anyway? Just seemed like a way to get a lot of comments on your site to me, but what do I know. I am the new guy with a total of 2 comments. I could hold a comment orgy on this site but I don’t think me writing back and forth to myself would be that much fun. Thousands and thousands of people blogging and commenting and interconnecting. Like I said, some things about it remind me of myspace.com and that scares the fuck out of me. Really, though, it’s all pretty amazing. Which reminds me I still need to write about my fear of myspace, which I’ve learned, by way of a couple blogs, I’m not alone in, but I’ll put that off for another time as well. We all know the internet is huge, but sometimes you can really see how far reaching and society changing it really is. Millions of people have internet personas reflective who they are or who they want to be or who they think other people want them to be. Complete anonymity with a personality. It’s a truly ambiguous thing.

A Strange Feeling

Maybe this day will never feel right for me again. It’s September 11^th and I’m hovering at 41,000 ft somewhere over the Midwest.

As the humming plane engines began their steady ascent to a deafening roar, all I could think about was how I hoped that I could sleep the entire flight from Seattle to Nashville.

Sure, I had thought of the paradox of flying on September 11^th, and yes, I did feel strange about it, but it was the time that worked out best for the trip so I went ahead and put memories aside and booked the flight. Standing in the airport terminal watching ESPN talk about during halftime of the Redskins-Vikings game, the memories of that day came back in a flood. I think it was always in the back of my mind, not as fear or anxiety but as the memory of a feeling. A mix of loss, astonishment and anger I had never felt before and haven’t since.

The plane ride was smooth as we glided swiftly above the occasional passing cloud. Just a few passing bumps before the captain came over the loudspeaker saying we were making good time became of a strong tailwind and that we would probably get into Nashville a couple of minutes early. I found it hard to sleep. I couldn’t get comfortable, my throat kept drying up and my back or neck would cramp and I’d have to shift positions. Most of the four and a half hour flight I sat looking out the window at the ground trying to clear my mind so I could sleep. I can always sleep on planes.

I was traveling with a friend and seated next to him in the isle seat was a young tall guy dressed in a Canadian tuxedo. After hearing him talk in the thickest southern accent I’ve ever heard, I wondered if he even knew of a country called Canada. Seriously, he talked like George Clooney’s character in “O brother, Where art thou?” Luckily, I had my friend as a buffer and only had to offer the occasional smile and nod to their conversation but I was definitely listening in. After talks of his job, cleaning up hazardous waste and pranks that people pull at work for fun, he leans in close to my buddy and whispers, “Do you want to hear a racial joke?” Not that jokes about race are ever a good idea, but when there’s a large black man sitting right in front of you, you shouldn’t even have to think about it. My friend tries to shrug the question off as if he didn’t hear it, so tuxedo guy persists, “Do you have any friends that are a-rab?” You have to be kidding me.

Sometime it takes a little time to fully gain perspective. You don’t tell yourself to take a step back and reevaluate later. You don’t say, “I’ll understand this better with time”, while you’re still in the moment. Realizations can dawn unexpected when you didn’t even know you were reflecting. Sometimes it takes hours, days, months, years. I know I didn’t understand the meaning or significance of events in middle school that shaped who I am until after high school. I still don’t understand the motivation behind many of my actions but I’m confident that one day I will, no matter how illogical they were. Point is revelations come with time. “Everything will be revealed in good time”, from the movies is at least partially correct in that at least some things will be revealed and that’s good enough for me.

It’s Wednesday now and I see that September 11^th will always be surreal to me. What happens on that day will always seem like a dream no matter how normal or strange the events of the day actually are. I’ll always think about it on some level. I think it’s like that for a lot of people, whether you were in one of the cities or not. I wasn’t around for large wars like the World Wars, the Korean War or the Vietnam War. For Generation X, all those 20 and 30 somethings, our loss of innocence came on September 11^th and I know that we’ll never be the same again.

CD Now blows

Ok, so this was supposed to be the review that I posted on cdnow. com of the Panic! at the Disco CD but I couldn't figure out how to post without my name showing up. It's not that I'm ashamed to put my name to it, I just don't like putting my full name on the internet when I'm insulting people. Go here first,

http://www.amazon.com/Fever-You-Cant-Sweat-Out/dp/B000AMJDHY/sr=8-1/
qid=1157148628/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-6309151-7886354?ie=UTF8&s=music

(Sorry I don't know html that well) Read the reviews then come back because it will make more sense that way. Anyway, the following is my review which probably never would have gotten posted anyway because it's slightly insulting.

First of all, I don’t care what “cdnow” classifies these guys as, they’re not punk. That’s not a knock is just the truth and I don’t think they want to be anyway. Secondly, they’re not Fall Out Boy and sound nothing like them so if you compare them there’s no way you know what you’re talking about. Thirdly, who cares if the song titles are long? They wrote the songs, they can choose to name the songs whatever they want. I’m sorry if it takes more time to download the songs over the internet but deal with it. Fourthly, the lyrics aren’t immature and gimmicky at all. Yeah, it sucks that they write catchy songs that stick with you for awhile, but the content is mature and witty to say the least. Granted, they’re not Shakespeare but at least every song isn’t about their childhood (Everclear) or about their time spent in High School (Blink 182). There’s at least some reason and rhyme to their songs past, “I was a dork in high school and no one wanted to go to prom with me”. I offer to the jury “Nails…” and “I constantly…”, neither of which deal with juvenile subjects nor use juvenile writing. Someone wrote that there aren’t any solos. To that I’d say that they’re looking in the wrong place. Panic is much more about song structure and composition than individual praise, not to mention their type of music is not conducive to solos other than the horns and the keyboard. Honestly, I would compare them to any ska band before throwing them in the pop punk ranks. Basically, they are a beat driven band that definitely fits emo and maybe alternative but nothing else. To summarize, listen to them, if you don’t like it, move on. They are different and interesting and I’m trying to quantify them but there’s no one genre that they absolutely fit into. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean that it’s not good music. Maybe it just means that you’re an idiot.