a train with all cabooses (part 1)

(originally posted 12/11/2013)

Don’t you hate when, for whatever reason, you wake up in the middle of the night and you’re laying there and you hear tiny scratching noises above your head? You strain to listen and you can make out little scampering noises in the attic. After a few seconds of complete silence you then hear what sounds like a large metal shelf filled with cymbals, snares and free weights tipping over followed by a deep, hearty laugh. Hard to get back to sleep after that.

Yes snippy salesperson, I do realize that nobody wears tube socks up to their knees anymore but the thing is all I have are tube socks that come up to my knees, I’ve always worn tube socks that come up to my knees and I came into your department store to buy more tube socks that come up to my knees. In 10 years socks will have crept back up to people’s knees and anyone wearing anklets will be looked upon with the same disdain that I am now looked upon and I will be considered cool but right now all I need is for you to point me in the direction of the fucking tube socks that come up to my knees.

Somewhere in Hollywood right now there is a waiter or waitress who in one year will be a celebrity. Right now we consider them sad and perhaps ignorant but in the next year they are going to magically become fascinating and extremely intelligent. Right now we wish they’d just hurry up with our lunch but soon we will be interested in their every thought.

Why is it that sometimes when you’re watching a TV show you’ll see an ad for that same show? They run the ad during their own show. An ad for the show you’re watching. What else do they want me to do? I’m already watching the fucking thing. It’s all I can do. Is it somehow not enough for them? I’m sitting there, I’m tuned in. I’m watching the fucking show. What else do they want from me?

I bet aquatic organisms were probably pretty pumped to see humans building so many pools. Probably thought to themselves “These guys aren’t half bad.” Then came the chlorine. “What the hell is this? Aw man…”

It has been my experience that the size of a woman’s breasts is relative to how much padding her heart needs. Emotional air bags.

If you’re trying to enjoy a movie set in the Old West, medieval times or modern-day England, nothing fucks it up quicker than all the actors having perfect too-white teeth. Matt Damon’s enormous/terrifying/dazzling maw is a plot killer. His smile is two feet across. I think he had additional teeth put in. I understand that when he was filming We Bought a Zoo every time he so much as smirked, the tigers would run back into their enclosures.

Enough with lacrosse. It was invented to give kids who couldn’t make the football, baseball, basketball or soccer teams a “sport” to play. Not everyone needs to play a sport to achieve self-actualization. Nowhere among Maslow’s hierarchy of needs does it mention running around with a stick like a wannabe-jock.  How long until we have to endure middle school Jai Alai?

If I was a respected writer and wrote “The sun finally down, he rested his head on the dirty pillow and began the journey to the other side of night,” you would be putting on a pot of tea and headed for a comfy chair to settle into a powerful reevaluation of the human condition. Knowing how I write you are left to assume that this is the beginning of a Mexican soap opera I’m hoping to pitch. El otro lado de la noche!

During the holiday season whenever I see a commercial showing an older tubby actor with a white beard playing Santa Claus I can’t help but think that somewhere there is a woman who is fucking him. After the shoot he goes home to someone. There has to be an interesting story behind a woman who ends up banging someone who looks like Santa. I’m sure there’s always an element of chance or fate involved and she might say that she’s sleeping with him despite the fact that he looks like Santa but in the end there’s no denying that there’s something terribly wrong in her past … How often does she end up on his knee telling him what she wants?

Do you ever pick your nose but realize just before you extract the offender that it’s too wet to remove cleanly so you have to store it at the edge of the nostril and breathe in and out a bit to dry it sufficiently to take out without fear of a long moist tail following it? Don’t you hate when you are interrupted in this drying process by someone walking into the room unexpectedly and trying to talk to you? Don’t you just want to scream “Are you blind? Can’t you see I have a boogie clinging to the rim of my nose that requires my full attention?” Then add “I’m glad you have rosacea!”

I hate when the amount of rainfall is out of sync with any setting on my intermittent windshield wipers. Faster, slower, faster, slower, I can’t get it right. First I can’t see … then the tortured scream of the wiper being dragged across the dry glass… The worst noise in the world. If the apocalypse ever comes you can be sure it will be to the sound of a hundred million wiper blades being dragged across a hundred million dry windshields.

I’m surprised you don’t read more personal ads like this: Middle-aged married man with children seeking a woman in her early 20’s. Must be very beautiful and wealthy enough to not only take care of the kids but pay the legal bills to extricate me from my current situation. I will ask you to perform terrible sex acts I’ve never tried before. I will then leave you.

There’s always that one spot where restaurants come and go with alarming frequency. One day it’s an IHOP, then the next it’s Mexican cuisine, then it’s Italian, then it’s a diner, then it’s Japanese, then it’s a steakhouse. Holy shit, figure it out all you would-be restaurant owners. The spot can’t sustain an eatery! I know it looks like it gets a lot of traffic, I know there’s a big development just a mile down the road, I know, I know, I know but for whatever reason a restaurant can’t survive at that particular location. Maybe it’s cursed land or something but do everyone a favor and burn it to the ground, end the suspense and put up a CVS pharmacy already!

What better way to show young people that only a few hours of hard work can change nothing than to have them spend half a day sewing bandanas for homeless dogs and cats at the pound? Photograph them doing it and put it in the Dipshitville Gazette so the whole community can share in what a completely pointless morning they spent thinking they were doing something nice when in fact those animals could care less about what they are wearing when the man arrives to put them down later that same week. “I look fabulous!” Thud. Make sure their parents cut out the picture and save it for them so when they grow up they can look at it all faded and yellowing in an album, shake their heads and think to themselves “No wonder.”

The crowd gathered for the keynote address at the American Anthropological Association sat in stunned silence as Dr. Carl Tyson of Harvard University presented African fossils indicating the existence of a previously undiscovered relative of man. Paradigm-shifting. Compared with earlier fossil remains, these indicated an expanded braincase and relatively longer legs compared to the size of the torso. Homo sayswhaticus. For a moment you could hear a pin drop. Finally, in shocked disbelief, Dr. John Clark, Professor of Evolutionary Theory and Director Emeritus of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, spluttered out a soft “What?” And everybody had a good laugh at his expense.

I knew it. Once they started to talk about tomatoes being fruits instead of vegetables it was going to open the flood gates. Now they want to say that cucumbers and green beans are fruits. Stop it. Just stop it already with the enclosed seeds crap. They are both fucking vegetables. How do I know? Because they taste like fucking vegetables. That’s how you tell. Put on a blindfold and eat one. You can’t give these pricks an inch; I’ve been saying it for years now. Don’t speak up about tomatoes and next they’ll be after your bell peppers.

They really should make a deodorant especially for online gamers. I’m no expert in chemistry but I know the sweat produced by tossing a football around in the backyard isn’t the same as the sweat produced by five straight hours of defending your elven encampment from orcs. One smells all manly and the other is like a combination of entropy, Mountain Dew, piss, Axe body spray and quiet desperation.

Recently I had the flu. To combat it I took a flu medication that claimed one of the side effects was flu-like symptoms. Later when I still felt crappy I didn’t know if I still had the flu or if the medicine had worked and I was just experiencing flu-like symptoms.

I’m always a lot more concerned with brushing my teeth before bed as opposed to when I wake up. As if plaque is nocturnal. “Is he asleep? Ok, let’s get to work.”

The clock read 5:62. The clock was broken. If I knew how much it was off by and when it broke I could figure out what time it is but the math would be daunting. Reminds me of a girl I use to know. That’s how inanimate objects get names.

In my bathroom I saw a spider. Up in the corner above the toilet. There are never any bugs in my bathroom so I thought at the time it was an odd place for him to have set up shop. Every time I went to pee I checked to see if he was still there or if he had decided to finally go somewhere with more prospects. Yesterday I noticed he was still there but he was dead. He starved rather than admit he’d built his web in the wrong spot. I’m glad. I enjoy the company of his corpse.

The only difference between the old red Hawaiian Punch and the new blue? The blue wants to be spilled. I know science won’t back me on this but don’t kid yourself, turn your back on it for just a second and you will end up with a Windex-colored stain on your carpet.

It’s about time someone came right out and said it. Fuck manatees. There are just certain animals that are just too fat and stupid to survive. It’s not even survival of the fittest. It’s about not being the least likely thing to survive that has ever existed on the planet. They’re not even trying to evolve. It’s like they are on The Biggest Loser but they’re still eating fast food and sitting on the couch and gaining weight. They’re just relying on us to try to keep them around. Not every species deserves to be saved from extinction. Fuck ’em!

A great way to improve the Super Bowl would be, right after they have dumped Gatorade on the winning coach, dump gasoline on the losing coach and set him alight. The network should make sure they have a camera on his family to capture the looks on their faces when he runs across the field engulfed in flames.

I know it’s spelled orangutan but I like pronouncing it orangutang and frankly I hate people who say it correctly.

MySpace attempting a comeback seems to me like dinosaurs wanting another shot. Of course, with Justin Timberlake money … hello Stegosaurus! If you’re trying to figure out why I chose the Stegosaurus to represent the MySpace business model don’t bother. It was the first dinosaur that popped into my head. If you’re trying to figure out why a Stegosaurus was the first thing to pop into my head when I think of dinosaurs when there are cooler ones like Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor might I suggest that you are greatly undervaluing the coolness of giant armored plates on ones back? Which then makes me realize that perhaps stegosaurus was a bad analogy because MySpace will never have anything as cool as giant armored plates. MySpace attempting a comeback seems to me like dinosaurs wanting another shot. Of course, with Justin Timberlake money … hello Pachycephalosaurus! If you’re familiar with the Pachycephalosaurus you’ll see that it’s actually a great analogy to MySpace.

To all those actors and musicians who somehow feel, despite surrounding themselves with lackeys and sycophants, that their success is a fluke and they are not worthy of the praise and attention and the respect and the money I just want to say I agree 100%. You’re right. You’re not.

I know about natural selection and how cruel nature can appear and all but I really believe that if a big dopey seagull is seen eating a puffin it should be mandatory to shoot it. Eating baby turtles is bad enough; we can’t let them just go around eating anything they want. Seagulls shouldn’t eat puffins, it’s wrong and if we’re the dominant species we should act like it and impose our will a bit.