How Abusing Outcasts Saved Christmas - A Cynic's Take on "Rudolph"

Long ago, in the early days of television, animation and cartoons, certain things we now consider "taboo" or "inappropriate" were much less critically analyzed. In the good old days of cartoons, we had shows about a cat and mouse actively attempting to brutally murder each other with shotguns, fire axes and 100 ton weights. We laughed at a bald hunter's obvious speech impediment as he hunted and shot at woodland creatures, and throughout it all, mysterious OSHA-devoid company "ACME" continually ripped off consumers with untested and potentially dangerous products presumably plucked from the rejected surplus bins on the factory floor.

In today's cartoons, we've replaced the weaponry and wanton violence with nonsensical, unfunny plots aimed more at hypnotizing or possibly brainwashing viewers, and persistently bad art styles that look like brain vomit from particularly bad acid trip. The homicidal cats and smart-ass rabbits of my childhood have been replaced with such characters as a potentially homosexual talking sponge and his obviously mentally retarded starfish life-partner. But that's a topic for another blog post. The cartoon I want to talk about today is the old Christmas classic stop-animation style "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer."

Watching this old movie has been a Christmas tradition in my parents' house since we were little, and that style of animation was still relevant. Every year that I watch it, however, it seems to be just a little bit... darker, I guess.

The movie technically begins with a rambling introduction from a talking snowman character who turns out to be largely unimportant to the rest of the film, but really begins in a little cave where Rudolph has just been born. Donner and his otherwise nameless baby mama, I guess, have just discovered that their child's nose is something akin to the siren light from a 1950's police car, complete with flashing red light action. They're so appalled by this bizarre deformity that they completely disregard the fact that while they're oggling it, Rudolph says "mama" and "papa" presumably for the first time. As they discuss the difficulty of overlooking something so horrendous, Santa Claus walks in to see the baby. His reaction essentially amounts to "You'd better hope he outgrows that, because I don't accept freaks on my reindeer team." Then he sings a little song and leaves, and Donner decides to take action. He slaps some mud over Rudolph's nose so he'll be a "normal little buck just like everyone else." Once the mud is covering Rudolph's nose and he can bear to look at his son again, he pulls him in for some affection. "Come here, son. Now that your god-awful facial deformity is covered, I can love you again."

Meanwhile, over in Santa's workshop, we're introduced to Herbie the elf. Herbie the elf doesn't like to make toys, and evidently, this is a crime in elf culture. In fact, when he reveals this fact to his slave driv- eh, overseer, the other elves around him sneer evilly at him and chant that he should be ashamed of himself for wanting to be different. Don't believe me? Look it up, the whole movie's on YouTube. Instead, he explains, he wants to be a dentist. For this, he's mocked by his peers and his overseer person and forced to work through his break (which, considering that the elves are pretty much slave laborers, I don't imagine they get many of) all for wanting to do something different.

So let's recap. So far, we've established that if you are different, you will be mocked by your peers, can be fired from your job, deserve no respect from your parents, and Santa Claus hates you. And we aren't even ten minutes into the film yet.

Fast forwarding again (approximately twenty seconds, because it doesn't take long to find more blatant discrimination and hate in this movie) and we find Donner forcing a nose cap thing on Rudolph. Rudolph doesn't like it and complains that it isn't comfortable (and presumably forces him to breathe through his mouth, which is really attractive), and Donner basically tells him to shut the hell up and wear it because unless his horrendous malformed nose is disguised, he won't be able to have self-respect, and Santa will continue to hate him. Meanwhile, the elf choir performs an original song and dance routine for an impatient Santa Claus who spends the entire duration of the recital facepalming and slouching impatiently in his chair. When it's finally over, he dismisses the whole affair with a mumbled "Well, it needs work," before rushing out the door, presumably to go piss on someone else's hopes and dreams. The elf overlord, however, takes this as an opportunity to inform the elves that they were all terrible, and then storms off to find Herbie so he can inform him of exactly how useless he is, and how he'll never fit in. Probably because elves in this world have something against fabulous hair.

Back at the Rudolph-focused side of the plot, Coach Comet shows up to teach the little reindeer how to fly. With some adorable encouragement from his new friend Clarice, Rudolph manages to out-fly all the other reindeer, and right in front of Santa. Seems like a pretty nice turn for this story, right? Well, we can't have that now, can we? In a celebratory bit of horseplay, Rudolph's new friend Fireball knocks his nose-cover off his face. Immediately, Rudolph becomes the reindeer equivalent of Quasimodo, and scares his only friend away. To make matters worse, the other reindeer start mocking him calling him names. But Santa's right there. Surely he'll intervene and save the poor underdog, right? Actually, he tells Rudolph's father that he should be ashamed for bringing such an abomination into this world, and not having the decency to smother it before it inflicted itself on the rest of reindeer kind. Santa storms off, and Comet blows his whistle to restore order and send the little deer back to practice. Except Rudolph, who he sends home. But not before announcing to the rest of the group, and I quote, "From now on, gang, we won't let Rudolph join in any reindeer games, right?" To put this in perspective, that's like if the weird kid in school pissed his pants in Gym class, and the coach decided to make an example of him by hanging him from his ankle with the climbing rope and instructing the rest of the class to beat him like a whiffle bat piñata. And then the principal comes in and calls him a fag before leaving him to his fate. Oh, and Santa Claus hates him.

I don't really feel the need to go through the entire movie because you've probably got the point by now, so I'll skip to the triumphant return of Rudolph to Christmas Town. The narrator gives a brief little bit about how maybe people shouldn't have been so hard on the misfits. Herbie gets to open a dentist office, and Santa promises to help out the Isle of Misfit Toys (another lengthy adventure in life lessons about how you'll be rejected and abandoned for being different). It isn't because they feel bad about it, though. It's because the "misfits" have proven themselves to be useful in some kind of way, so they're tolerated now. This includes Rudolph, who's only allowed to join the reindeer team because his glimmering nose cancer will allow Santa to navigate a storm.

Hooray! The freaks found a way to be useful, Santa learned to abuse Rudolph's deformity instead of mocking him for it, and everybody lived happily ever after. Except that until this point, the movie has clearly been setting itself up for the part where everyone learns a lesson. Except nobody ever does. While Rudolph and his melancholy band of misfits find their proverbial bells to ring (that's another hunchback of Notre Dame reference, folks) the movie COMPLETELY FORGETS TO CONDEMN the fact that everyone's been abusing these people the ENTIRE MOVIE. Sure, they find a place to fit in and some half-assed apologies are given, but nowhere does it punish or condemn the behavior from earlier in the film.

So there you have it, folks. The lessons taught by the old Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer film are that if you're born a freak, or possibly a homosexual elf with fabulous hair, your miserable existence will be spent getting kicked in the teeth by life, people will mock you, your parents should be ashamed and Santa Claus will hate you, but it's okay in the end. Because somebody will find a way to abuse your deformities for their own personal gain.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Technology is Not My Strong Point - Space Edition

With the end of the semester, I've finally begun to have time to pull the blog back into my spectrum. I pulled up my post list today to start writing a new entry, and I happened across this half-finished one from about mid-semester when my life was starting to get really stressful. After reading through it, I decided it was too good to waste, so I'm just going to finish it. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you something that should have been posted months ago.

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A few weeks ago, I had to take both of my computers and my external hard drive to the PC repair shop to have them wiped. Everything. Every last nanobyte of data had to be destroyed. Why? A virus that's been plaguing me for over a year now. It all started around the time I accepted a folder of infected PDF files from a friend of mine who shall remain nameless. His antivirus wasn't totally worthless, and actually managed to quietly locate and quarantine the little nightmare. My computer, on the other hand, was equipped with Norton. Let me take a moment now to illustrate exactly how well-protected your computer is with Norton Antivirus.

Picture a shield. Not a kite or heater shield, but a big square Roman-style tower shield. You can stand behind this thing and not be seen from the other side. Seems like great protection, right? Okay. Now, replace the steel and hardened wood with a square frame made of pine, and a sheet of paper. Now soak that paper in water. Now put termites in the wood frame. Now burn it a little bit. Now punch out about five big gaping holes in the wet paper. Now slap on a big sign in all capital letters that says "PLEASE SHOOT ME." Now write that message in Comic Sans font. Now march this creation of yours, alone, against a standing battalion of over 500 angry men armed with illegally modified machine guns. And maybe an artillery battery.

Congratulations, you've experienced Norton Antivirus. As you may have imagined, it was fairly ineffective. So my computer caught the virus. And it infected everything. And then I transferred some files to my other computer. And it caught the virus. Then I paid a large amount of money to have my computer upgraded with a brand new hard drive. And then I restored some files from my external hard drive. Which were also infected. So my new hard drive became infected. And the nasty thing about the virus was that it installed itself onto the hard drive, so you could have the computer swept and cleaned of all the bugs as many times as you wanted to, because that sucker was still coming back.

So now I have an empty external drive and two very empty computers. And absolutely none of the data I had before. I lost countless amounts of short fiction, class assignments, papers, projects, images, music and other important stuff. And I needed to distract myself from that. So I bought a new game to play. Now, it's been a really long time since I've done a blog post almost exclusively over a video game. Last time that happened, my blog was still a Tumblr page and it was over Star Wars: The Old Republic. But you know what? I'm doing it again. Because this game is hilariously torturous enough that it deserves its own blog post.

The game I bought is a new independent game called "Faster Than Light." It's a game with simple graphics reminiscent of the Gameboy Advance style. You take control of a spaceship and crew, all of which you get to name yourself, and take off across the galaxy as you fly from space beacon to beacon in an attempt to escape the evil rebel fleet pursuing you. It's essentially the opposite of the plot in the opening scenes of Star Wars Episode 4. The entire goal of the game is to pilot your ship successfully through seven dangerous sectors of space to reach the 8th sector, and defeat the Rebel flagship in epic space combat. So, excited to get started, I set the game to Normal mode and started up.

Thus began the adventures of The Space Dingo and her faithful crew: Tech Specialist Luke, in charge of shields and repairing damaged ship systems; Weapon Specialist Ben, in charge of exploding things and beating the piss out of boarding parties; And last but not least, Captain Hayden, in charge of piloting and navigation. Never before had the fate of a galactic Federation rested in the hands of such a rag-tag band of incompetent laser fodder. But they had high hopes anyway.

So I started the game off with a shiny new ship and a full-health crew. Then I moved two spaces forward. There, I encountered a ship who hailed me and informed me that he was selling slaves. I had the option to either buy one for an obscenely large amount of money (which I didn't have), ignore him and move on, or fight him. The noble crew of The Space Dingo doesn't deal with slavers, so we attacked. Two minutes later, my shield system had been destroyed, my oxygen had been knocked out and my medical bay was on fire. We did manage to beat the slave ship into submission, and they gave me a slave for free and ran away. That was the positive side. The negative side was that my Tech Specialist was nearly dead, and infernos make terrible medical bays. "That's alright," I thought, "I'll just open an airlock and suffocate the fire." That would have worked better had I not forgotten that my Oxygen systems were still offline and poor Luke was doing his best to repair them as he bled out. As you may have guessed, venting the remaining oxygen in the ship was a poor choice.

Oddly enough, it wasn't the suffocation that killed Luke, he survived that well enough. He died when the oxygen system room burst into flames because the fire had traveled there from the med bay. We held a little vigil for him (when the flames finally went out), and he was then replaced with the free slave we were handed. It wasn't quite the same, but at least we had our shields back. And from there, we carried on. For about three spaces. And then we encountered an automated combat drone with a cloaking device that promptly destroyed the rest of the ship. Back in the hangar menu, I decided it was probably best to switch the difficulty to easy mode. Actually, that's a bit of a misnomer, in this game's case. I've found that there's nothing remotely easy about easy mode. In easy mode, you're going to die horribly. On normal mode, you're  going to die horribly, only sooner. Still, undaunted by my initial failure, The Space Dingo 2 began its doomed voyage into the stars.

About the time I launched The Space Dingo 10, I began to accept the fact that I might not be very good at this game. I had also begun to notice a particular parallel with my crew and their D&D player counterparts. And what that means is that Luke always died first. Naming an NPC Luke is like handing him a red shirt with a particularly offensive phrase written on the back in every alien language. It was never a glorious death, either. At one point, my ship had recovered a drifting escape pod, which I opened hoping to get a new crew member. Instead, an enraged space mantis creature popped out and sliced Luke in half before proceeding to attack the rest of my crew. In another playthrough, Luke was part of a boarding party who I'd beamed over to attack the enemy crew. What I didn't realize was that all members of the party had to be in the same room before I could beam them back over, and I didn't pick his room. The enemy ship took advantage of this miscalculation by destroying my crew transporter with a missile, leaving Luke to run circles around the enemy ship trying to avoid getting shot. He was successful enough at evading the enemy crew, however he wasn't so successful at not being on the ship when the fires breaking out in all the rooms destroyed enough systems to cause fatal damage to the ship. It exploded with Luke still on board.

The other trend I began to notice was that not naming my crew members after my friends made me far less attached to them, and therefore easier to lose without wanting to restart the game. This, however, did not improve my gameplay. I still died every single time. Captain Picard would be ashamed of me, but he died in a previous playthrough. As did Captains Kirk, Morgan, Solo, Planet, Crunch, Falcon, Hook and Obvious. Virtual space pirates are ruthless.

It took me literally three weeks to beat this game. Three weeks of near-daily attempts. It doesn't seem like a long time to beat a game, but then you have to remember that this game consists of just 8 sectors, and a typical play-through from start to finish lasts only an hour or so (assuming you make it to the 8th sector without dying.)

Of all the lessons I've learned from playing FTL, the clearest one is this: If ever there comes a time when space is populated by cruisers and ships manned by small Enterprise-esque crews... I definitely shouldn't be captaining one.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Close Encounters of the Nerd Kind - An Episode From My Childhood

So as you may have guessed by my one or two missed updates lately, I am back in classes. It's a fairly light load, all things considered, but I'm still a full-time student, and I will be until May, when I'll be unceremoniously booted from the safe confines of College and tumble into the confusing Limbo that is the real world. It sounds a lot worse than it actually is, but I favor hyperbole.

The real reason I bring this up, however, is because of an interesting question posed by my American Sign Language professor this morning in class. We were reviewing past material to make sure we were prepared for the exam next week, and I'm still not quite sure how we progressed from signing numbers over one thousand to criminal history, but we were asked if we'd ever been in trouble with the cops. The question was a joke, but it still reminded me of a particular instance that I knew immediately was destined to be recounted here as another embarrassing tale from my youth. However, unlike my usual "Episode From My Childhood" posts, this one doesn't take place in elementary school.

I have had a lot of very strange friends over the years, being a rather strange person myself, but arguably none of them were stranger than one particular friend I made in intermediate school. I've gotten into some trouble in the past for mentioning names in these things, so instead of calling him by his actual name I'll just refer to him as "Nugget." Nugget was his nickname, given to him by me. He actually earned the nickname on a river trip, and the nugget part was originally preceded by another word, but because certain members of my family read this blog and gripe at me when I curse in my updates, we'll just leave it at Nugget. It's fitting enough on its own, though. The dictionary definition for the word nugget is "A lump of something," and Nugget was definitely a lump of something.

Nugget and I originally met in the seventh grade, and we only had one class together: Home Economics. Yep. I took Home Ec. I'm sure it's the same with most intermediate schools, but we had the option of taking Shop or Home Ec as one of our electives. Typically, all the boys took Shop, and all the girls took Home Ec. However, that semester was my first semester of public school since my sheltered elementary school days as I had been homeschooled for all of fifth and sixth grade, so I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Furthermore, when faced with the choice of spending an entire period every day surrounded by attractive girls and eating glorified EasyBake Oven cakes, or spending that time surrounded by sharp things, idiots with access to bandsaws and wood lathes, and guys who hated me, I'd say that in retrospect the decision made sense. The one fatal flaw in that logic, however, was that the girls I was surrounded by were, for the most part, the most unfortunately unattractive girls I'd ever met. Furthermore, the only one who ever spoke to me had an underbite, dull, wide eyes and a muddy, sunburned complexion that literally made her look like a sock-eye salmon. There were times I wondered if she'd actually registered for the class, or just gotten lost on her way up-river to spawn.

Now in the beginning, Nugget and I were not exactly what you'd call "friends." We spent literally every day in that class period ridiculing each other in a battle of wits to see whose venomous insults could wound the other the deepest. It remained a strange kind of cruel game until one particular afternoon as we worked on our cross-stitch projects (which absolutely pains me to say and would shame the fathers of most guys I know), I won. I took a particularly scathing jab at his mother, and I won. My prize was getting the top end of my pinky (from the base of the nail up) nearly cut completely off. Now, to be fair, he didn't attack me directly with the scissors, he was attempting to cut up the pile of thread I was using to work on my project and I was trying to save it. My finger was just an unfortunate casualty. It was, however, an unfortunate casualty that bled profusely, and unsurprisingly I didn't exactly react well to my newfound ability to rotate the top half of my finger enough that it faced the wrong way. In the chaos that ensued, I called him a few things loudly enough that I'm fairly sure it disturbed the classes three rooms over, and then I was sent to the nurse's office. The following day, we were both sent to the principal's office and threatened with a paddle unless we were willing to act like friends.

And for many years after that, we were. That's how the strangest friendship of my life began.

But that little anecdote isn't the story this blog post is about. The real story begins a few years after that, during a gaming session with Nugget and another friend. Again, with the names, so I'll call that other friend "Billy." Now, Billy and Nugget and I had all gathered over at Billy's house for a long night of Dungeons and Dragons, Halo 2 and GunBound. It was about two o'clock in the morning, and we'd played the hell out of everything we had, and we were bored. So we did what any average teenage nerd boys would do in that given situation. We went out into the back yard, armed ourselves with various wooden and bamboo weaponry, and beat the ever-living piss out of each other.

It was a game we called "Dueling," and it was essentially as close to sword-fighting as we could get. Actually, on several occasions we actually did duel with live weapons, and in one particularly impulsive instance we coated those live weapons in homemade napalm and fought with flaming weapons. That evening, however, it was just our standard arsenal of sticks, bamboo rods, a bull whip from a carnival game, and a monkey's fist. After about the third round of this, we decided that Billy's back yard was a bit too small for our game and we started to look for a better place to play. That's when we realized that Billy's house was a matter of blocks away from the city's baseball fields. And a plan was hatched. We gathered up every single stick, bokken, plank and staff in the back yard, along with a wooden dagger, the monkey's fist and bull whip, and a handful of javelin-shaped iron curtain rods. Nugget, for whatever reason, had recently bought a used diving wetsuit, which he was now wearing, and Billy had donned his black shade cloak from his Renaissance Festival costume. I had found myself a trench coat, and I still have no idea where it came from. And just like that, we descended on the baseball fields. And we commenced battle.

It was awesome, and we were enjoying ourselves thoroughly until I happened to notice a peculiar white vehicle pulling into the parking lot. I immediately recognized it as a Lake Jackson patrol car and notified the other two, and we did what any sensible person would do in that situation: we jumped a fence and hid behind the wall of the concession stand. Fortunately, I came to my senses before the officer arrived and realized that the only thing worse than being caught trespassing is being caught trespassing and actively attempting to hide from the police.

Now, I can only imagine what kinds of strange things you see and encounter as a police officer. But I can only imagine what must have been going through that officer's head when he arrived at the baseball fields in the dead of night to find three teenage idiots wearing a wetsuit, a black cloak and a trench coat, armed with a bullwhips and curtain rods.

There was a long moment of silence.

And then needless to say, we were asked to leave because we were disturbing the peace.

And that is the only encounter I have ever had with the police. Those were strange times.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

((Just as a side-note, I'll probably be revising or just removing this entry at a later date because quite frankly, it sucks. My writing here is just absolutely dry and not funny at all, and I was struggling to get it written, so I apologize. It happens.))

Being Grown Up Sucks Sometimes.

I think I'm going to skip my usual self-deprecating introduction and just get right to the point of this blog entry.

There's a leak in the ceiling of my bathroom. How long has it been there? I have no idea, I've been out of town for two weeks. It's evidently been there long enough to saturate an entire roll of toilet paper, then knock that roll of toilet paper off onto the floor, then continue to soak it until it sat in a little puddle of leaky AC unit fluid, and then gradually work its way on from there. Fortunately, it was considerate enough to finally position itself directly over my bathroom sink, so at least it's dripping into a drain. The unfortunate part of that is that my sink is not very deep and has a very flat basin. So every time it drips, it splashes nasty rust-colored mystery fluid all over my toothbrush, my overnight bag, my razor, and my hair brush. I've stuffed a rag down into the spot where it drips, and that's at least stopping most of the spatter, but now that particular wash cloth looks like someone has mistaken it for toilet paper. More than once. And then thrown it into my sink.

This particular inconvenience is just one of a list of things currently on my to-fix/ignore-indefinitely-until-I-flip-out-and-break-it list.

Topping that list (aside from the leak) is my car. I've blogged about my car many, many times in the past, so if you've read more than just a handful of these posts, it should be a familiar character. Kind of like that character on sitcoms who only shows up every once and a while, but you really wish he would kind of just not show up anymore because he's annoying and not very funny. So essentially, every character on Seinfeld. (Take that, highly successful beloved 90's sitcom.) However, this time it's not actually the car's fault. My inspection sticker has been out of date long enough that I'm fairly sure the police can smell it like a shark smells blood in the water every time I pull out of a parking lot. I've been meaning to get it inspected for a long time, but let's face it, meaning to do something is basically what you say to cover your ass when someone finally calls you on it. On Monday, however, it really was my intention to get it inspected along with a list of other errands I intended to run. So I fired up the Duralast Kevorkian and headed to campus.

The first thing on my list of errands was to pay the first installment of my tuition at the Bursar's office. What I had forgotten, however, was that this was the Monday of the first week of classes. And the school happened to accept a significantly higher number of freshmen this semester than it usually does. So every freshman and his mother (literally) were all trying to do the exact same thing I was. After cursing my terrible timing, I stood for two hours in a slow-moving line that smelled like sweat and fear, just praying that none of these biddy freshmen moms were here to raise hell over the price of tuition or anything. That way, we could all just behave like civil human beings and get on with our day. Fortunately, nobody started anything or caused any major delays, but that didn't help the fact that the line was moving slower than a dying snail in a puddle of molasses and the mouth breather behind me literally sounded like he was on a ventilator and choking on his own spittle. It was like if they'd gotten that weird stalker kid from Hey Arnold to do the breathing part of Darth Vader's voice acting. I held my tongue (and more discreetly, my nose) and made it through, paid my dues and headed upstairs to see about talking to a Financial Aid person about a student loan. I quickly learned that the massive crowd of people milling about on that floor weren't actually there to just hang out and chat. They were the waiting list. Unwilling to spend another two hours of my day listening to freshmen prattle on about who got what dorm and where they were planning to hide their toaster ovens so the RA wouldn't find them, I decided I'd take care of it later. I got the hell out of there and moved on to getting my car inspected.

Now, getting a vehicle inspected is never an exciting task. You pull into the parking lot, awkwardly talk to some guy in a jumpsuit about what he can "do ya fer," and then spend the next hour in a tiny un-air conditioned room with a group of people you could swear you saw on last week's episode of Maury. Then, in order to avoid eye contact at all costs, you get to choose between a selection of magazines full of trucks and guns, or watching Judge Judy reruns on the microwave suspended from the ceiling in the corner. After what seems like an eternity, your friend in the jumpsuit comes back in to begin a conversation that consists entirely of him pointing out things they could fix, or change, or refill, and you doing your damnedest to convince him that "No, it's fine, I really just came in to get it inspected." Then they charge you fifty bucks for the time they spent playing with your blinkers and your AC and send you on your way.

However, this time it did not go like that at all. I pulled into the parking lot, and then I sat behind a truck that was probably large enough to tow a small house and punch a new hole in the o-zone layer every time it accelerated, but was probably owned by some guy whose idea of manual labor was helping his buddy move a couch out of his double-wide. Because the entrance to the parking area was on a steep incline, half of which was currently being occupied by the diesel-powered douchemobile and the other half had me stuck halfway into the very busy road behind me, I quickly decided I was tired of playing that game and pulled into a space which was clearly not intended for parking. Then I went inside. When my jumpsuit friend arrived to ask about my car, and I told him I needed to get it inspected, he asked me if it was registered to Walker County. I told him no, it's registered to Brazoria County, and he told me that was going to be a problem. As it turns out, they need some kind of special piece of paper I need to sign before they'll inspect my car, and they happened to be out of that piece of paper. He told me they'd be getting more at the end of the month (though, until that point I was fairly sure that the 27th counted as the end of the month). Rather than ask why they didn't just print off a new stack, I just decided to cut my losses and leave.

My next stop was a bank I had never seen or been to in order to deposit a tax return check. When I had called my bank in my hometown about the situation, they directed me to a Community Somethingorother Bank on Sam Houston Avenue. So I pulled onto Sam Houston Avenue, and sure enough, there was a Community Bank right there. Unfortunately, they must have had a fairly pessimistic view on how many clients they'd actually have because all four of their parking spaces were hidden behind some decorative hedges on the opposite side of the building. Just happy to have found a place to park that wasn't in the street, I went in and asked about the check. I repeated what the bank employee from my usual bank had told me, and they stared at me as if I had just attempted to order chinese takeout at their teller booth. In the confusion that followed, I was informed by the bank manager that I was actually looking for the -other- Community Somethingorother Bank on Sam Houston Avenue. Because there are two. And he used to manage the other one. Oh, and also, the place was right next door to the University Police Department.

And I had to drive over there. In my car with the expired inspection sticker. I felt like I might as well just drive on up there, walk inside and tell the lady at the front desk that by the way, I'd been driving a vehicle with an expired sticker for about a month and now, and if she wouldn't mind just giving me my ticket then and there that'd be just dandy.

So I pulled out of the parking lot, determined to complete this leg of my journey without incident. I turned to get back on Sam Houston Avenue, and promptly encountered a red light. Now, Sam Houston Avenue is a very, very busy road. And it is very, very heavily populated with police. And here I was, stuck at a red light, just advertising my expired ticket magnet to everyone who happened to be driving by. At last, the light changed, and I quickly pulled onto the road and headed toward the other bank. And then hit another red light. And another one. And another.

I hit every single damn light on that road until I pulled into the parking lot of that bank. And then every one on the way back. Where before I had felt like blood in the water, I now felt like a giant red herring wrapped in neon lights and hemorrhaging blood, barbecue sauce and shark pheromones everywhere. It is an absolute miracle I made it back to my apartment without being pulled over.

So now I'm back in my apartment with my leaky bathroom ceiling, still neglecting to call the office for a repair. Being grown up sucks. I'm building a blanket fort in my den this weekend so I can sit in it and pretend I'm not.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

I still say it was dehydration.

Ladies and gentlemen of my widely imaginary reader base... It's been a long time.

My computer, in case you were wondering, has not actually been repaired. It just recently decided I was allowed to use this site again, so I suppose I should take advantage of the fact. Admittedly, in my weeks without updating I've fallen out of the habit of doing so, and it's been a challenge to pick it back up again. It's much easier to just let the blog die, knowing how very few people care, but instead I'm going to press on. Because I'm sure the posts on my Facebook wall about my lack of updates will never stop.

Another reason I haven't been updating is that ever since my break started, I just haven't had anything to write about. I felt that moment creeping up on me long before my computer went on strike, of course. The number of consecutive "Episode From my Childhood" updates was a clue about that. I have to relate back to the past and tell stories from my childhood when I run out of current events to talk about and quite frankly, the events of the current variety have been absolutely boring as dirt for months. No one single event (or chain of related events) has been interesting enough or had substance enough for me to write an entry on. I suppose I could have just talked about it anyway, but this is a humor blog, not an "update everyone on the boring mundane happenings in my life" blog. If I wanted to do that, I'd use my twitter account more often. It's far more suited to notifying the world of everything in my life that nobody cares about.

There lies my problem. My life is boring. I have literally spent the last several weeks watching Let's Plays on YouTube, listening to music and playing Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning on my Xbox between sessions of ragequitting out of League of Legends.

So you know what? I'm going to do this update. And I'm going to update about the most interesting thing that's happened to me since my computer decided to boycott my blog. And I'm going to make it the funniest damn retelling of stupid pointless mundane life events there ever was, or so help me I will... probably... fail miserably to do that.

Starting from the most significant thing I can remember, let's go back a few weeks to the last two weeks of my summer semester. It was a Wednesday. I was sitting in my ASL 2 class, doing my best to pay attention in my sleep-deprived state. I was finding it a little more difficult than usual, and I suddenly noticed that I was extremely cold. Now, this isn't necessarily an extraordinary event. The SHSU classrooms are always cold. I'm fairly sure that some of the classrooms in the older buildings serve as meat lockers between semesters. My theory is that some of these buildings are so old that they're actually in a state of cryogenic freezing, and if the temperature were raised at all they would crumble to dust. This normally doesn't bother me, however, because I generate enough heat that I'm like a human space heater, so it was unusual that it would be getting to me. The follow-up to that warning sign was the loss of the feeling in my fingertips. All of them. At the same time. Now, I'm not a medical doctor. The extent of my medical knowledge comes from First Aid Merit Badge and a marathon viewing of all 9 seasons of Scrubs, but I'm still fairly sure that losing the feeling in all my fingertips is a red flag. Then when you added in the dizziness, lack of ability to focus, sluggish mental alacrity, nausea and pale complexion, I was pretty sure something was really wrong.

I made it through class and back to my apartment where I proceeded to lie on the couch because standing up made me light headed. I considered putting the symptoms into Web M.D., but given that site's accuracy, it would probably just tell me I was dying from Ebola or some rare genetic disease from the Congo. Until further notice, I was just sticking to the theory that I was either dehydrated or I was about to be the start of the zombie apocalypse, though I suppose the two aren't mutually exclusive. My friends and family were unimpressed with my decision to ride it out on the couch, however, and I was sent to the doctor. And by doctor, I mean the free clinic on campus.

Normally when you go to the campus clinic without an appointment, they have you make an appointment and come back later unless it's an emergency. Now, I was still fairly convinced this was the furthest thing from an emergency and I just needed a few cups of Powerade to cure a moderate case of dehydration. But they had me see a nurse anyway. She asked a lot of nursey questions, checked her chart a lot, and went back and forth between me and the doctor several times.

Then the doctor came in and asked me a bunch of questions with a very concerned face, took my temperature, etc.

I was still convinced that I was just dehydrated, but I did have to admit that it was very peculiar for dehydration to cause a 102.6 fever. I had also never known it to cause my blood pressure to drop significantly anytime I stood up. Ultimately, I remained unconcerned until they started talking about sending me to the ER.

Now, here's a little fun fact about me: I hate hospitals. And when I say "hate," I mean "completely and utterly despise with the burning intensity of a thousand suns." They make me nervous and anxious and I feel trapped when I'm there. Probably because when I was eighteen, I had a cyst removed from my throat and an appendectomy within a few months of each other and neither time was a pleasant experience. Over those visits, I've learned that I'm allergic to just about every kind of anesthetic they have, including morphine which gives me hives, and I also react to painkillers by vomiting every ten minutes or so. Also, when I had appendicitis, I was catheterized. Which I didn't know until I was recovering and suddenly found that trying to use the restroom was excruciatingly painful in ways that pain should never be experienced.

So in my mind, when someone says "Emergency Room," my brain associates those words with getting stuck with needles full of liquid fire, waking up with scars in strange places, and finding that things aren't working quite the way they're supposed to and it hurts to pee. It's an experience similar to being abducted by aliens, or a typical night on the town in Los Angeles. (Zing!)

They must have taken my blood pressure at least ten times in those couple of hours. I suppose it wasn't a mystery when they discovered that my heart rate was extremely fast, and I suspect it had less to do with the illness and more to do with the sheer panic I was trying to suppress at the mention of a hospital visit. Fortunately, when I decided to share my strong disinterest in an ER visit with the doctor, she agreed to do what she could to keep that from happening.

In the end, I was sent home with my cousin with a bottle of pedialyte and a ban from eating certain foods (see: anything tasty) because I wasn't allowed to be alone in case my condition worsened. I got a four-day antibiotic aimed at covering a wide range of possible causes, and that was the end of it. The fever lasted for three days, and the cause was never really determined.

And that's the story of how I ended up getting two blood tests, a bottle of pedialyte, a five-day ban from eating anything good, and a $70 bill for what I'm still convinced was a case of moderate dehydration.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Forced Hiatus

Some of you may have noticed that I failed to update my blog on Wednesday, and Thursday, and Friday. The reason for this is frustratingly simple: My computer has a virus. It has been slowly eating away at the damn thing's functionality for a long time, and it has recently reached a point where it's very rare that I can access any website that isn't Facebook or Wikipedia. I've somehow managed to force it to access this page, but I still don't know if it will actually allow me to post what I'm writing here.

I am still unemployed, and this means I have no money that isn't already spoken for by groceries and other vital living expenses. While I try to remedy this situation, it means that my computer will go unrepaired because I am a technological idiot and don't know how to format my own hard drive, so I have to give it to the repair shop. That'll cost me about $60 which I just don't have lying around to spare at the moment.

I will try to update it when I can from either campus computers or by other means, but for the time being you can consider the blog on hiatus while I deal with this situation.

Now would normally be the point where I go on a page-long rant about how much I hate the little bastards who program viruses because daddy didn't hug them enough and mommy liked older brother better so they take it out on society by wrecking thousands of dollars in computers with their little rageprograms. However, I'm not going to do that, because that kind of tirade can easily be misinterpreted by law enforcement as an actual plot or expressed intent to capture the little sniggering nerdlinger who wrote the virus that's wrecking my computer and do horrible things to him. So to prevent any sort of misunderstanding of that nature, I'm just going to leave you with the following:

The internet is where decency goes to die.

Animals Are Not My Strong Point - Round 2

I have a new friend. And by friend, I mean literally nothing which is usually associated with the word "friend," and exactly the opposite in most cases. His name is Axl. And he's a cat. I know in my previous post of the same title, I said a few things which may or may not have been highly biased in favor of cats being my favorite of the typical domestic pets. Dog lovers can sit back and enjoy though, because none of that applies to this particular cat.

In case you haven't figured it out or are curious or whatever, I didn't just name the cat Axl because it seemed like a good cat name. You see, Axl has decided he lives on my back porch and in the bushes or by the air conditioning unit by my bedroom window. He has also decided that he is a dog. What makes me say this? Because Axl howls.

When I first heard him howl, I was in the middle of a pitched League of Legends match with my headphones on. The volume was cranked up high, and I had the sounds of teamfights and friends on Skype blasting through them. I suddenly had to return to the summoner platform and take my headphones off because I heard what I could only describe as a rape attempt happening outside my window. Turns out it was just one very obnoxious cat, making a sound that I had never heard a cat make before. Now, way back when they were still a thing, Guns and Roses did a cover of "Live and Let Die," which is a song that was never intended to be sung by the voice of Axl Rose. And that's what the cat sounded like. Only a few octaves higher. And it was bad. I could only imagine what was causing the little nuisance to produce sounds like that, but enough of the answers I came up with were accompanied by horrifying mental images that I decided not to check. Instead I went back to my game, figuring he would eventually stop.

But he never did. And this went on for hours. And it became a recurring event.

Every morning at between 2 and 5 AM, this damned cat has carved time out of his busy schedule of raiding trash cans, collecting intestinal worms and earmites, licking his butt or belonging to some extremely unfortunate owner to come sit outside my window and wail.

Another unfortunate fact about it is that the local human population evidently isn't the only group who's got a beef with him. He's been in a number of fights with God knows what kinds of other animals out there, and I'm fairly sure he's decided that my back patio is his own personal MMA ring. And he loses every fight. He's like that annoying kid from middle school who thought he had to prove how tough he was by getting into fights, but always got his ass kicked. Except Axl just wants to make irritating noises.

Now, I do love cats. I am a cat person in every way, but my affection for them only goes so far. And when I'm repeatedly awakened by what sounds like the tortured shrieks of the eternally damned, there is only a thin layer of sleep deprivation and common sense between that cat and a date with the longsword hanging from my wall. As irritating as it is, I have no real intention of dealing with him on my own just yet. It depends on how long it takes for him to catch me on a bad night. I just hope for his sake that he finds a new gig to play or management removes him. Preferably before he decides to ruin "Sweet Child O' Mine" or challenge a pissed off raccoon to death combat on my porch.

This just seems to be par for the course as far as the local animal population is concerned here in Huntsville. I don't think I've met a single local animal that was any kind of normal. I'm fairly sure the only reason we're allowed to use the Sam Houston campus is because the Squirrel Mafia allows it. The squirrels around campus are some of the most massive squirrels I have ever seen. Some of them look downright prehistoric. If you were to leave an acorn on an industrial strength rat trap, a campus squirrel would probably look you dead in the eyes and set it off with his foot, lick the wound once without breaking eye contact, and then walk away with his acorn while giving you the finger over his shoulder. The other day I was walking home from class and one was sitting on the sidewalk in front of me, so I tried to make it leave by starting at it like I was going to chase it. Instead of leaving, it just turned around and gave me this "Come at me, bro" look with his beady little eyes and I decided to walk the other way.

Oddly enough though, it seems that the level of intelligence, size and intimidating, creepily organized behavior dissipates rapidly the further away from campus you get. In fact, they go from escaped NIMH experiments to suicidal street jockeys in a matter of yards from the main campus. However, that's likely due to the Jurassic campus squirrels' reluctance to impede on the territory of the grackles.

Most of the birds in the area are pretty normal. The blue jays and mocking birds and the like are fairly average, but the grackles are an entirely different story. While no grackle is ever going to win any beauty contests, it seems to me that the grackles around here are a disturbing new level of grotesque. Every single one of them looks like it's been hit by more than one car and then got up and promptly lost a knife fight with a band of greaser alley cats and a weed whacker. Every single one of them is missing large chunks of feathers from their wings and tails. I'm fairly sure that only half of them fly the way nature intended, while the rest get airborne using the dark powers of the Necronomicon and gravity's own fear of telling them otherwise.

Additionally, when I look at the eyes of any other bird, I just see nothing but simple, single-minded creature intelligence. When I look into the eyes of the grackles, however, I see nothing but a dark, loathing hatred that pierces my soul. I once had one of these Hitchcock nightmares glare at me through those dead, zombie bird eyes for a full three minutes while I tried to get around him because he was absolutely convinced that I was going to steal his waffle fry. I'm not even sure where he got it from, considering how far we were from the campus Chic-fil-a, so I can only assume that he stole it from his latest victim. I probably would have stumbled on some bits of bone and clothing had I poked around in the bushes he was perched in front of.

So all in all, there are worse animal threats to be concerned over than Axl. Actually, come to think of it, I didn't hear Axl last night. I can only assume that he either left on his own, or he was captured and sacrificed by the parking lot grackles in a cemetery somewhere. No way to know for sure.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

The Tale of the Catcoondillo

A short time ago I went back home to my parents' house to watch over it and make sure the pets didn't die while the rest of the family was out of town. During that time, my friend Luke and I spent several of those nights playing Lord of the Rings: Conquest and Magic the Gathering, draining cans of Dr. Pepper and gallivanting around town in his car. On one of those evenings we were on our way back to the house from messing around in Walmart when in his rear-view mirror I caught sight of a strange looking creature hobbling across the road under a street lamp. We were unable to decide what it had been, so I jokingly dubbed the creature a "Catcoondillo." As the name might suggest to some of the more clever readers, we couldn't decide if it was a cat, a raccoon or an armadillo. Luke thought this was quite funny, especially when I created a strange noise for the creature to make, but what he didn't know was that I have encountered such a creature before. And it wasn't nearly as whimsical.

Several years back when I was still in the Boy Scouts program, our troop took a camping trip to Brazos Bend State Park. In case you didn't know, Boy Scout troops are organized into individual groups known as patrols, and each patrol has its own leader, unique patrol name, and patch. My patrol was called the Flaming Arrows at the time, complete with awesome flaming arrow patch. I don't think I was actually the elected patrol leader at the time of this trip, but the actual patrol leader wasn't able to go. So I ended up being named temporary patrol leader for the Brazos Bend trip. This was kind of a big deal for me because until that trip, I had never been patrol leader before. I never had the guts to run for it, even though some part of me knew I could win it easily. Another thing the patrol leader gets to do is select an assistant patrol leader, and since this trip happened during the brief time that my best friend Ben was still with the troop, he was my first choice.

Now, I'd been camping many, many times with this troop before in various state parks, but one thing still bothered me about camping at Brazos Bend. It's a wildlife reserve that's famous for one particular type of inhabitant: the ludicrous amount of alligators who call the swamps there home. I still wasn't entirely clear on how camping in an alligator-infested swampland was a good idea, but we were also being promised a trip out to the George Observatory to look at Mars, which was the closest to Earth as it was going to be for a very long time.

The trip was fairly uneventful up until the night we were supposed to go out to the observatory. It was the standard camping experience around the site, my patrol was busy doing what the oldest present patrol always did, which was to sit around and do nothing. The younger scouts were marveling at everything and obsessing over building their own little fires and cooking on their own, and our neighbor patrol had realized that their chuckbox didn't actually have any cookware in it because the last person to clean it never put any back in, so they were attempting to cook their meals on metal plates. After watching them warp about six of them, we decided to let them use our stuff because we were good, responsible scouts like that. Meanwhile the camp nuisances, a couple of kids who we'll just call Thing 1 and Thing 2, were busy fighting with each other and irritating everyone else around them. It seemed like it was always Thing 1's goal to piss off as many people as possible before running to his father for help when we finally turned on him, even though that never did much to save him. Thing 2 on the other hand truly believed that we were all his bestest buddies even though we pretty much universally hated him.

I'd actually been nice to the guy once and he'd decided that we were besties for life or whatever. He became my obnoxious, awkward little shadow from then on. Every year the troop went on two week-long trips, one in the summer and one in the fall or winter, and the fall/winter camp was at a little patch of hell on earth known as Camp Karankawa. This desolate patch of mosquito-infested bog was parked next to the San Bernard river. While the rest of south Texas could be a comfortable, sunny, dry climate, Camp Karankawa couldn't give less of a damn. It had its own weather system and was capable of being miserably cold and stormy while surrounding areas were pleasant. The year after, when the troop had gone out there for Fall camp, it had already reached that point in the week where it was sinking in that this year was not, in fact, going to be any better than it was last year, and we were all cold and angry. We ate our lukewarm breakfasts of box-eggs, meat substitute sausage and box-everything-else and then trudged off begrudgingly to our merit badge classes, so it was about that time that I decided I was tired of being Thing 2's friend. Instead of just telling him that, however, I decided to just give him something to do that didn't involve pestering me. So I decided to tell him a little story.

Off in the back woods down a mostly forgotten little trail at Camp Karankawa is an old car. It's anyone's guess as to how it got there, but the patch of woods where it rests is eerily quiet. It's a perfect setup for a good ghost story. So Thing 2 and I took a little trip back there, and I told him the story of how a man was driving home about this time of year on an elevated strip of highway nearby when he fell asleep at the wheel. His car jumped the guard rail and rolled down the hill, crashed through into this little clearing and ejected him from the car. Then I told him about how the guy was still alive, but the camp hadn't been established yet so nobody could hear him yelling for help, and because his legs were broken from the crash, he died slowly and painfully there in the clearing until animals came and dragged his corpse away. The little weirdo bought the story hook line and sinker, and I helpfully encouraged it every time he thought he felt cold or saw a ghost walk past in the forest. Then, as we were walking back to camp, the heavens opened up and fate smiled down on me and we stumbled across some scout's missing merit badge class schedule. The badges were unimportant, but what I did notice was that the correlating course numbers were A1, 2B, 3, 4A and 5. Anyone with half a brain could see that those numbers simply told what areas of the camp's map the scout needed to be in for those classes, and while I could see that I also saw something else. If you were to speak those letters and numbers out loud in a certain way, it sounded something like "I want to be free for a while." Which is precisely what I told Thing 2. And then I convinced him that it was obviously a secret message from a certain ghost, and that there were probably other things like this around. He stared at me with big wide all-believing bunny eyes and I sent him off to find them. For the rest of the week he was scampering around collecting trash, bits of paper and rock, and other people's schedules in an attempt to solve the mystery of a ghost which I almost completely made up.

Back at Brazos Bend, however, there were no such conveniently creepy car wrecks to pin ghost stories to, so we were pretty much stuck with him. He wasn't even in our patrol, but his own patrol had made it clear how much they hated him and it also didn't contain me, his bestest ghost-busting buddy, so we got landed with him most of the time.

Finally, it was the part we'd all been waiting for. We were going to go to the observatory to look at Mars. We all packed up into the van and headed down to the George Observatory where we took our places at the back of the line and proceeded to sit on benches and railings and be bored out of our minds for an hour or two while the adults talked with the people at the desk. Finally the adults showed back up, gathered us all around and told us that we weren't going to be looking through the telescope because evidently we needed reservations beforehand to actually use the good telescope. Our alternative option was to wait in a really long line to look through the much less impressive little telescope, but nobody cared to do that. We'd already been out there long enough and another scout had gotten sick, probably because his dinner was cooked on a metal plate, and puked all over the place. So we packed up into the van and headed back to camp.

When we arrived there, it was immediately clear that something was not right in the camp. A strange haze and odd smell hung over the entire place, and something just seemed amiss. That was when somebody pointed out the smoldering remains of what had previously been Thing 2's fanny pack (he was the only scout in the troop who wore a fanny pack). We all thought it was hilarious until we realized that the smoldering chunk of burned crap it was sitting on top of was actually the remains of my patrol's ice chest containing all of our food for the next day. Evidently, someone had left a kerosene lantern burning on top of our ice chest when we left, and the local raccoon population decided they were in the mood for a midnight snack. When they couldn't get the ice chest open, they burned it to the ground because they're evil little creatures. I'm sure that's not exactly what happened, but at the time we were all pissed off because we had no food, and for all we cared the raccoons were some sort of animal mafia who had organized this from the beginning. We didn't even take solace in the fact that some raccoon out there had probably burned the piss out of himself when he knocked the lantern over. The fire was still burning in some places, however, and needed to be extinguished. So because my patrol was the primary victim of the raccoon arson, we had to be the ones to go fill the water tub and bring it back to camp.

Troop 325's water tub was a large metal basin that, when full of water, took at least two scouts to carry. Therefore, it was necessary for three of us to venture out into the night to fill it. Two to hold the bucket, and one to hold the flashlight. Naturally, Ben and I were voluntold to go out along with a third scout. Ben held the flashlight, I held the empty basin, and the third scout just kind of came along with us.

I remember what happened next like it was a scene from the Blair Witch Project. There was no moon that night, and the trail was extremely dark. We had gone out far enough that the light from the campsite couldn't be seen anymore behind us. We had just reached a large clearing around the area where the water faucet should have been when suddenly I hear Ben yell. I looked up to see where his flashlight was pointing, and there it was.

We were face to face with a creature unlike any we had seen before. It was long and thin with a long tail like a cat, but it had a narrow face like a dog. It had strange scale-like coloration, a dark eye mask like a raccoon, a mouth full of needle-like teeth and two large, glowing green eyes. Either someone's incredibly ugly dog thing had gotten off its leash, or we had just encountered the Chupacabra, but whatever it was we didn't care. What we cared about is that it made a strange noise and started moving towards us. Now, Ben was holding a maglite with steel casing. I was holding a heavy metal washtub, and the other scout had a walking stick, and as Flaming Arrows, we did what we had to do.

We dropped everything, screamed like sissy girls and went tearing blindly through the woods back toward the campsite, because none of us felt like being devoured by some nightmare creature of the bog. We burst back into camp vehemently refused to go back out into the dark anymore that night. Finally, after the adults were sure that none of us were bleeding and we weren't hysterical anymore, one of them went down the trail to retrieve the wash bucket and flashlight. He came back and reported no strange creature, so it probably only preyed on scouts. We spent the remainder of the evening shining the flashlight around the camp and into the trees to count the pairs of raccoon eyes watching us and trying desperately to sleep knowing that some Yeth Hound creature still prowled the night nearby. There were no further attacks that night, and the only other disturbance was when Thing 1 decided it'd be funny to piss on our tent in the middle of the night. We were only able to sleep again after the adults had informed Ben that he wasn't actually allowed to force Thing 1 to do a thousand push-ups in the mud as punishment.

Looking back on the incident now, it's fairly obvious to me what happened that night. When I think back on some oddly colored creature with catlike features, a doglike face and an odd prowling nature, it's almost tempting to assume that it was actually just a fox and not some demonic entity bent on devouring our souls. I'm fairly convinced however that it was, in fact, the dreaded Catcoondillo.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Technology Is Not My Strong Point

Ladies and gentlemen of my (mostly) imaginary audience, technology hates me. At one time, I was like many of you and believed that technology was nothing more than a classifying term for fields of study, or a broad term used to describe certain advancements. Or maybe even just a collection of gadgetry that permeates our lives every day. But now, I have seen the light. Now, like many schizophrenics and eccentric conspiracy theorists before me, I believe that technology is in fact, an entity. And this entity hates me with the fiery, white-hot intensity of a thousand burning suns. Its hatred of me is so deep-seated and loathing that I'm fairly sure that on Cybertron, there are sects of Transformers who are dedicated to the hatred of my very existence. And one day, I will be suddenly abducted by a band of them and dragged back to Cybertron where I will be crucified on a cross of Energon, and the Autobots and Decepticons will be united by their mutual loathing for me. Yes. Technology hates me so much that Optimus Prime wishes I was dead.

What I'm trying to say here folks is simply that if it's a gizmo, gadget, or widget, it will not work for me the way it's intended to work, and works for everyone else on the planet.

Before I go on, I'm gonna stop and just reiterate that you can direct all of your hate mail care of "ssoul.dmsdiscretion@gmail.com" where I will gladly take note that you took the time to email me, and then delete your message. I say this because I know at this point, at least one person in the world is scoffing to himself and composing an angry letter that's something to the effect of "Dear Sarcastic Soul, I am writing to notify you of several grievous errors you made in your depiction of Cybertron. First of all, you cannot construct a cross out of Energon, as it is incredibly rare and valuable. Second of all, Optimus Prime cannot possibly hate you, because he is the greatest hero of the Autobots who, by the way, would NEVER accept peace with the Decepticons over the death of-" and then I would cut you off. Because if this is in fact anything similar to what you're currently pondering, I'm just gonna take a shot in the dark here and guess that natural light and relationships with women aren't your strong points. By the way, spoiler alert for every Transformers plot ever: Optimus dies at least once. Every time. Look it up.

The reason I bring all this up, believe it or not, isn't just to enrage Transformers lore nerdlings. It's because lately, I have been reminded of this fact in more ways than I care to count and it's making me sad.

Take my car, for instance. Please. Take it. I mean, pay me for it first, but just take it. When I got it, I called it the Strawberry Fields Forever Mobile because the previous owner smoked like a chimney. In order to fix this issue, the dealer equipped it with a very, very strong black cherry air freshener. Problem was, it didn't smell like black cherry, it smelled like strawberries. For a very long time, even after I removed the air freshener. The scent eventually faded, of course, and over time it's earned a new nickname. The Duralast Kevorkian. Why? Because it helps ailing batteries to their deaths. Slowly. Through the equivalent of electrical strangulation. Except that the batteries aren't ailing until it's had a few days alone with them, so it's really more like regular murder instead of assisted suicide. It destroys a battery at least once every two weeks, and sometimes as much as twice in one week in the winter. Fortunately, the warranty on the batteries lasts a whole lot longer, so I get a free one every single time it happens! Autozone hates me too.

Then you have my computer. Oh sweet baby Jesus do you have my computer. I have never had any luck with computers. The first computer I ever bought was a Dell Dimension E310 desktop computer which was basically Dell code for "some crap we found in the warehouse and threw together one drunken evening." That thing caused me more grief than a funeral, and I hated it. In fact, I hated it so much that when I finally put it out of its misery and decided it was time for a new computer, I decided I was going to get the best computer money could buy. I wanted THE best, because I had been dealing so long with the WORST. So I saved for a little over a full year (in my unemployed pre-college years) and bought myself an Alienware Area 51 m9750 performance gaming laptop. $2000 for one laptop, but it was so worth it. Or so I thought. It ran wonderfully for about the first year that I had it, but then a dark truth began to emerge; about a year or so before I bought the laptop, the Alienware company had been bought out. By Dell. For those of you who have never owned a Dell computer, where the hell have you been since the early 2000's? But seriously, there's a little rule that exists with Dell computers. They will die. Within two years. And it will be catastrophic. Because Dell builds computers to die within two years. And my Alienware was no exception. This thing has had more hard drive failures, bluescreen crashes and catastrophic failures in the past four years I've owned it than any other computer I've seen.

Why do I bring all this up, you ask? Well, according to the angry Facebook messages on my timeline yesterday I'd say it's safe to wager that some of my more observant readers noticed a distinct lack of update. The reason for this is because I had an update written out earlier in the week, and decided to set the Blogger schedule option to auto-post it on Wednesday. Thinking I was being all clever with my making use of the technology available to me, I didn't bother to check the damn thing until I figured I would have a good number of views. By the time I realized it hadn't updated, it was late in the afternoon and I had absolutely no inspiration or motivation to write anything, and I couldn't remember enough of what I'd written the day before to re-write it. So it went unwritten. And for that, I apologize.

To tell the truth, I have no idea why I thought even for an instant that the auto-updater was going to work for me. That kind of thing never works for me. It's not any fault of Blogger's, it's just that technology is forever conspiring against me to make everything I touch turn on me in some kind of horrible fashion. This is the reason I don't ever plan to own a smartphone. I'm fairly sure that it would eventually transform into a little monster machine and murder me in my sleep.

I think one of the best examples of technology doing its damnedest to destroy my life comes from last semester at the end of finals week. I had been taking a creative writing course and I had two revised short stories I needed to turn in by a five o'clock deadline. I went to print them out, but my printer decided it was going to pick that day to run out of ink, so I did the next logical thing and tried to upload them to Google Documents. I had been using this service for the entire semester with no issues, so I expected things to go smoothly when I tried to use it again. Except this time, the damn thing was ready for me. Instead of uploading my document files, it actually destroyed the save backups for both of my short stories. I was able to recover one of them, but the other was completely gone. The only version of it I had left was the completely unedited one, and I had no time left to try and edit it again. I was starting to panic at that point, so I threw the unedited version onto a flash drive with my other story and booked it to the campus. I figured I'd just use the computer lab in the English complex to print them off, and then hand them in to the office. Except that the computer lab was locked. Along with every other computer lab. I had to frantically search the entire campus from the English complex to Narnia, sprinting from building to building until I finally found a functioning computer in the library computer lab. Which then took its sweet time booting up and logging me in, so that I'd already lost another twenty minutes on my clock by the time they were printed. And the printer smeared every page with gigantic black ink burns. Every single page looked as if the Satan of technology himself had scarred each page with some kind of dark omen in the form of a malfunctioning printer. As I looked around, nobody else's papers looked like this. Just mine. And because it was the only printer left that was still printing, I just ran with what I had. I went to grab the only stapler in the entire building and opened it. One single staple remained inside. Breathing a sigh of relief, I clamped it down on the corner of my partially destroyed packet. And the staple promptly bent, folded, and slid off the page. There were no other staples to be found. So I sprinted back across campus, up the stairs to the top floor and made it to the English office... Seventeen minutes late. Every employee in that office had packed up and left at exactly five o'clock, and I was standing outside of a dark, locked office at 5:17. So I slid my unstapled, ink-smeared, wind-creased, unedited story under my professor's desk and walked home.

Fortunately, I still made a B in the class because I've had that professor before, and she understands that technology hates me and took pity on me.

This is the reason I don't ever take online courses. I would fail every single one of them. My lecture videos and project files wouldn't download correctly. My finished assignments wouldn't save or upload. Exam time would come around and I would open the page only to get a window that said something like "Error 404 - Exam Not Found. P.S. We're watching you, asshole. Sincerely, Definitely Not Optimus Prime." And it might be just me, but I'm fairly sure that "my computer hates me and I'm receiving death threats from Cybertron" won't hold up very well when I'm trying to explain to the Dean why I have an F in an online art appreciation class.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Ice Skating - An Episode From My Childhood

I know it probably seems like I've been doing a lot of these childhood bits lately, and that's because I have. And there's a good reason for it. My life has been fairly uneventful lately. I really do try to keep my blog posts current and cover topics that are more to do with my daily life and observations, but sometimes there's just no material to work with. And since I seriously doubt anyone who reads this wants to read a tirade over internet trolls and stupid n00b Brazilian League of Legends players, here's another one.

I have a cool party trick. When you hear most people say that, the images that come to mind are probably some involving contortionists, beer guzzling or bad impersonations of famous people, but mine is far more mundane than all that. My party trick is that my left front tooth glows under a black light. And while it doesn't really involve any effort on my part, for whatever reason it's really entertaining to other people.

Believe it or not, the glowing tooth isn't actually a result of spectacular oral hygiene. Not that I don't have spectacular oral hygiene, but that's not the point. The point is, the tooth glows because it's not real. It's an implant.

So now you're probably thinking, "Wow. You're twenty-two years old and you've already had a tooth replaced with an implant? Your oral hygiene must suck, dude" but that's not the case at all, and how dare you insult my oral hygiene. It's actually because when I was younger, I broke the real one. In half. And here's how that happened.

I don't really remember how old I was when this happened. It's probably because the excruciating pain, mortifying embarrassment and overall traumatizing nature of the event have probably reduced certain details into a partially repressed mush, which I'd imagine is a consistency akin to scrambled eggs. What I do remember though, is that I was young and it was my church's youth group trip to the Galleria to go ice skating. Most places in the United States and definitely Canada will probably be thinking, "Big deal. Ice skating. Where's the excitement in that?" But you have to remember, I lived in South Texas on the Gulf of Mexico, or as I liked to call it, the giant humidity bubble of don't snow here. Actually, the weather hardly changed at all down there. It basically operated on three different degrees of hot. There was mostly tolerable hot for most of the year, not quite so hot for the colder months, and dear sweet baby Jesus why the hell is it so hot out here for the Summer months. In South Texas summers, you really could fry an egg on a manhole cover. We tested it. You wouldn't want to then eat that egg, of course, because it'd probably taste like seven kinds of dog piss, cigarette butts and sewage fumes, but it would definitely fry all the same. So given that the only ice we'd ever seen was either floating in a glass of water or the extremely rare occasion that a shallow puddle froze over some night in December, the concept of getting to go ice skating was extremely exciting for us.

I was confident that I could do it. My dad, who'd lived in Michigan for a time, had tried to explain to me that ice skating was difficult and I shouldn't just assume that I was gonna be perfect at it the first time I tried it, but what did he know? I bet Link could ice skate the first time he tried. And besides, I knew how to in-line skate, and roller skate. Not very well, of course, but when your only means of practice were to try and keep up with your much more athletically inclined younger brother and cousin in the aforementioned sweet baby Jesus why heat, it's enough that I knew how. We did have a skating rink, of course, but it was expensive and smelled like cigarette smoke and sweat. Also, the only times I really got to go there were the occasional school skate parties. They'd open the place up to the elementary school on some given Friday and we'd all play silly, stupid games between periods of free skate time. One of those games was a lovely relic of a time when safety and the fragility of children were viewed more as "loose guidelines." It was called "Bat Tag," and it was exactly what it sounded like. One child was given a florescent orange plastic whiffle bat and set loose on the skating floor to chase down and bludgeon their fleeing classmates while the Chicken Dance was played loudly over the building's speakers. I can see how this might have been a good idea in a more controlled environment, but when you put an entire grade or two of elementary school kids on wheels and arm one of them, it becomes Lord of the Flies rather quickly. Plus they always fed us Zebra Cakes and coke, and while that's fine for most children, I had an allergy to corn syrup that caused me to become something that required an exorcism anytime I ingested it. So given the nature of the thing, it was only natural that after a while, my parents were mysteriously too busy on every given evening that was supposed to be a skate party.

There would be no bat tag at the ice skating rink, though. Just me, some friends from church, and an experience that the bipolar south Texas weather had denied us for our entire childhoods up until that point.

When we arrived, after everyone had their wristbands and ice skates and waivers signed (should have been a big red flag right there, but whatever) we were released onto the ice. The spectacle that followed was a sight that would have probably been familiar to anyone who's ever introduced a number of new kittens to an unfamiliar house. Some of them go right on about their business, playing and exploring and zooming around at top speed, while others immediately gravitate to the nearest wall which they cling to for dear life while they look for something to hide under. It was exactly the same on the ice. Half of us took to it like nothing, and the others did their parts to hold up the walls. I was one of the adventurous ones who actually set about learning to skate, but I did end up using the walls. To stop. Because how else are you going to do that? I had always used the walls to stop before at the roller skating rink, after all. I suppose it would have behooved me to learn to stop without them, but you try learning to stop moving while somebody behind you has a bat and is trying to reach you as fast as they can. I found it was just easier to use the wall, or in the case of ice skating, do a baseball slide to see how far you could get before you lost momentum.

I skated until my heels were blistered from my ill-fitted ice skates and I was clumsily tottering around, and it wasn't really a big surprise when I slipped, fell backwards and smashed the back of my head against the ice so hard that I saw nothing but blackness and flittering stars for a while. So I decided that I needed to take a break and escorted myself off the ice. It was well enough that I did anyway, because the Zamboni was released right afterwards to clean the ice and everyone had to leave anyway. After a while, it retreated back into its little box and the ice was left with a slick wet sheen that told me it was at least twice as slippery as it had been before.

Now, I've made note before of the grasp I had on common sense as a child. And that very common sense was telling me loud and clear that I should probably not go back out on the ice anymore for a while because I already smacked the back of my head, and now it's twice as slick. But for reasons I can't explain, I did anyway. And it was fine for a while. Just business as usual, tearing larger holes into the flesh of my heels and trying to pretend it didn't hurt like hell and that I really was still having fun zipping around in circles until I smashed into a wall to stop.

And it was one of those times that I smashed into a wall that some passing skater decided to teach me how to stop. I already knew how to stop, I tried to explain. I just crashed into walls. It worked well enough. But he wanted to show me how to stop the right way, which was evidently to drag one skate behind the other to slow your momentum. So I tried it. I'm still not sure if it was a bad patch of ice I hit, or if I did it wrong, or if the possible concussion I'd given myself was throwing off my sense of balance, but for whatever the reason, I failed his stopping technique spectacularly. And landed flat on my face.

I don't actually remember hitting the ice. I just remember popping back up from the impact and doing the initial systems check to make sure that everything was still functioning the way it should be. Which went fine, until I ran my tongue along my top row of teeth, and where my front one used to be I found only a small squishy thing which tasted like excruciating pain and blood. And then I started freaking out. I screamed bloody murder and then promptly closed my mouth because it hurt like hell when the air hit the exposed nerve, and I quickly skated back over to the seating area to get off the ice. The adults who were present kept asking what had happened, and in response I spit out a mouthful of blood and dignity and proceeded to bawl my eyes out from the pain. And it was at this point that all hell broke loose among the adult leaders. One of them attempted to pacify my hysterical state by giving me a cell phone to play games on, which actually worked for a short time because I wasn't allowed to have a cell phone and never got to play games on them. But after losing at Snake for the third time, my attention for the game was replaced by the sensation of screaming exposed nerve in my mouth, and I was hysterical again.

Ultimately, I was escorted out of the area (probably both because I needed medical attention and because I was causing a massive scene which I'm sure was costing the skating rink money in customers who didn't want to destroy their own teeth) and into the church van to go home. My best friend Ben gave up the rest of his own skate time to come with me, which I was highly appreciative of not only for the company, but because he had a copy of Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons on his gameboy color which I hadn't gotten to play yet, and he let me play it on the way home. I've compared his loyalty and behavior to a golden retriever before, but however accurate it may be I was glad for it at that point. By the time we were halfway back to home, the nerve had stopped hurting quite so badly. I still don't really know if that was just something exposed nerves do, or if the pain had caused my brain to fall into sort of a state of shock in order to cope with it.

We did actually find the other half of the tooth on the ice, which is kind of amusing in and of itself, but the break was so high and so much of the nerve was exposed that there was really no way to save the tooth. As a result, the rest of the tooth was pulled and a root canal was performed (which was a traumatic story all its own) and I was landed with a nice replacement tooth, and a neat stupid party trick.

I have gone ice skating several times since then, and I haven't broken anything since. In fact, the last time I skated at the galleria I was with my (now ex) girlfriend, and the only challenge I had to face then was resisting the urge to clothesline the irritating children who insisted on skating between us while we were holding hands. Had it not been for the fact that she thought they were cute and that it probably would have been not quite socially acceptable, I might have introduced them to a game called Bat Tag...

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Animals are not my strong point.

After devoting seven years of my life to the Boy Scouts of America program, spending countless nights camping and hiking, and earning my Eagle Scout award, pop-culture and disney-production logic dictate that I should have developed some kind of magical empathy with woodland creatures. However, I can assure you that this is not the case. I have actually recently come to the conclusion that I hate animals. Almost all of them. With a passion.

I came to this realization this week when it was Monday of my dog and house sitting week, and I was already wishing it were Saturday. Not because of the house-sitting part; I actually don't mind the cleaning and maintenance and the broken shower in the bathroom or anything else like that. What I don't like is the dogs. We have two of them, and they're approximately two halves of one idiot. And that's putting it nicely. Our female dog actually functions at a mental capacity that's somewhere between a lemming and an aluminum bucket. Which really isn't fair to the lemming. Their names are Scottie and Tillie, and they're Tibetan Spaniels. We got them from a breeder, and they have pedigrees and paperwork and thick contracts we had to sign agreeing that we would/would not do certain things to them. A common misconception with dogs, I gather, is that pure-bred breeder dogs are typically better, smarter dogs than your common ASPCA mutt. Well, after living with Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Bitch for these past few years, I can safely put that myth in the busted pile because it's a load of crap.

Scottie is a small black and white dog with an attitude problem that could rival most rebellious teenagers. We've never gotten along because he's been convinced that he's alpha over me since day one, and our relationship has never improved. We're not friends, and neither of us is willing to remedy that. It's not for lack of trying, mind you. I taught the little ass over half the tricks he knows, and we still hate each other. He's also got an irritating habit of claiming ownership of the house anytime my dad leaves for a while by crapping all over the place. Though, as long as we've been at war, he isn't the major problem.

Tillie is a blonde creature that was once a small dog. She's about 35 pounds of brainless dog fat (or more), and that's saying something for a dog that stands not even a foot off the ground. I'm fairly sure I've seen seagulls with more brain power than this dog. Unlike Scottie, she's impossible to train because she's just too stupid to understand basic commands. I'm fairly convinced she doesn't even know her own name. If you call Tillie she'll come, but she'll also come to "Scottie," "Dumb," any of the cats' names, and "Turkey Sandwich." I know this because I've tested all of them. Her special quirks include barking loudly and incessantly at everyone who walks in through the door (including people she already knows well) and somehow managing to give herself dreadlocks in her tail and her stomach fur.

Now, to be clear, I've never understood the logical reasoning behind owning a dog for a pet. Any dog lover will be quick to tell you that dogs are as intelligent as human children. They understand a small vocabulary of commands and function at a mental level which is similar to a three-year-old. From one standpoint, I suppose, this is kind of impressive to them. I mean, humans are technically the most intelligent beings on the planet. But then you have to look at it from the "did you listen to what you just said?" standpoint. Dogs are like three-year-olds. Perpetual three-year-olds. That live for about twelve to fourteen years or more. As three-year-olds. Have you ever lived with a three-year-old? Most people have, but in case you haven't, let me break down exactly what that entails. You have a small, noisy, messy creature who understands roughly a fourth of what you say, tends to ignore the commands it does understand, gets into everything, eats everything, and generally makes your life revolve around making sure it doesn't find some new and creative way to kill itself. It's almost like dogs and human children are programmed to be self-destructive and suicidal. The primary differences between the two is that a dog probably won't cause a screaming tantrum scene in the middle of Walmart or make the other passengers want to hijack the plane you're sharing and toss them out of the emergency exit just so they can stop the crying. Also, it tends not to be such a big deal if dogs eat Christmas tinsel as opposed to the child eating it.

As I write all this, I can already hear the dog lovers charging in to defend their beloved brainless beasts. "But you're just biased!" They'll say. "Dogs are so much smarter than that! You can teach them to do so many things, and they'll protect the family, and they're just so ADOWABLE!"

Yep. I'm biased because I hate dogs. You know who else is biased? People who love dogs. Why? Because they will willingly invite a halfwit creature who does nothing but make unnecessary noise, cause property damage, generate unbelievable amounts of crap and piss, add hundreds of dollars in food and vet bills to the family financial burden, and shed mountains of fur, into their homes. And why? Because dogs love their owners and they're adorable and fun to play with.

So let's weigh the pros and cons of this arrangement, shall we?

Cons: Stupid creature, noisy, breaks things, craps and pees everywhere (yard or house, doesn't matter, you still have to deal with it), expensive to maintain, makes your house look and smell like a wreck.

Pros: They're fun and cute.

You know what else is loyal, adorable and fun to play with and teach tricks to? A Tamagotchi. A plastic handheld egg with a screen and a little digital pet inside. And when the Tamagotchi craps on the floor, you can clean it with the press of a button and then beat it mercilessly to punish it and nobody calls the police. When it makes too much noise, you can mute it. And when it gets old and it isn't fun anymore and you want a new one, you don't have to wait around and watch the old one degrade slowly until it's a crippled sack of fur and bones that's just miserably waiting to die. You just take a needle and poke the reset button. Voila, new Tamagotchi.

Now, I'm sure the question on everyone's mind is, "So you're a cat person, then?" And the answer is yes. My cat is the only animal I have ever felt any kind of attachment to, and I love her to death. And I know. Dog lovers will argue with me until the cows come home about whether cats or dogs are smarter. And you know what? I don't care. Scientifically, dogs and cats are of a fairly similar intelligence. So similar in fact that it's not worth distinguishing between the two. However, I will say this: I have never seen my cat take off running at full speed, snarling and growling, to slam head-first into the door so hard the walls shake, just because the mailman put something in the slot. But I have seen the dog do that. And I have never seen my cat sit and rip chunks of its own fur out until it had a massive mangy bald spot on its butt. But I have seen the dog do that. Just sayin'.

I honestly think that, in preparation for owning a dog, somebody should modify a Roomba-type robot to wander aimlessly, replay the same three barking sounds over and over again incessantly, pause every now and then to leave puddles of some foul liquid or goo on the ground, leave a trail of fur as it motors around, and generate the oh-so-lovely odor of stinky dog so that it clings to every surface and piece of furniture in the house. And if the would-be owners can endure that for a few weeks without shutting the robot off or getting rid of it, they'll have a better understanding of what it's really like to own a dog.

And as for the people shouting "You can't just base all dogs on your experience because it depends on the breed of dog!" Okay. Fine. Show me a breed of dog that doesn't smell, bark, shed, drool, lick, slobber, eat, crap, urinate, dig, or require shots or vet bills, and I'll show you a potted plant.

Ultimately, if you're planning to get a pet, here's some advice. It's the 21st century. We have advanced technology now. There is literally no reason you should feel compelled to purchase and own an animal. So get an iPod app. Seriously. It's all the joy of owning a pet with none of the cleanup, house destruction, feces or foul odors. And when you leave to go someplace, you don't need to hire a dogsitter. Just close the app. If you're really deadset on getting a real physical pet though, I would suggest a pet rock. It's been a thing for years. Nobody's going to judge you. I promise.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

The Gang - An Episode From My Childhood

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, my childhood, particularly my elementary school years, was a gigantic collection of poor choices, stupid mistakes and memories I'd really just like to repress. However, as I have been as of yet unable to do so, I figured I'd share another lovely memory from my elementary school days with you.

As a child, I attended school at A.P. Beutel (pronounced boy-tel) elementary. The way the classes are arranged at Beutel, kindergarten, first grade and second grade classes are taught in the main building, while third and fourth grades are taught in a separate wing known as the Tally building. Naturally, in the mind of a new third grader, it was something of a major life achievement to move from the little kids building to the Tally building. You get new classrooms, new playgrounds, and a new hall. Actually, the Tally building was exactly that. One long hallway with several classrooms, one boys bathroom, and one girls bathroom. Both bathrooms were at the very front end of the hall, with a fairly large gap between them and the first set of classrooms. So it was only natural that a bunch of stupid stuff would go on in those bathrooms. Like using the brown paper towels and half the soap in the dispenser to make the ceiling look like a bat cave, or skipping class to mess around with friends. Or that one time a particularly stupid classmate ran screaming hysterically from the bathroom and all the way down the hall after scaring the piss out of himself playing "I believe in Bloody Mary." One particular oddity in the bathrooms, however, was that in the larger handicap stall at the back of the row was a door. The door was a thin piece of plywood painted to match the colors of the walls, and was kept locked by a simple lock. There were often stories and rumors and the like about what was behind the door, but to my knowledge, nobody ever bothered to open it and see.

...Until my third grade year.

One thing you have to understand before I go on with this story is that I was never a popular child in school. I was something of a strange child, due to my astonishing naivete, sheltered home life and complete and utter lack of social skills. As such, I had only a very small group of friends, most of whom were also outcasts. There was a boy named Cameron, a girl named Sarah, and another boy in a wheelchair named Neil who was only part of our misadventures some of the time. I was undoubtedly the leader, though, in my own mind at least. We would spend our lunchtimes sitting at the far end of the table with a sizable gap between us and the rest of our classmates so that we could talk about nerdy outcast things and not be bothered. At recess, we'd go to the same spot every day that was far away from the regular play equipment and we'd play Pokemon. Not the video game, mind you, we weren't allowed to bring gameboys or trading cards to school. Instead, we'd play real Pokemon. I was always Ash, Sarah was always Misty, and Cameron was Brock on the days he cooperated. Cameron really always wanted to be Agumon, but we weren't playing Digimon, God damn it, we were playing Pokemon. We tried to let him play Agumon once or twice, but it never really worked out because digimon and pokemon don't fight the same way. Especially when it was Cameron Agumon versus our invisible make-believe pokemon.

With the way our little merry band of outcasts functioned, it was no wonder that when we caught word of a gang hanging around the school, our little brains took it too far. Lord only knows how or why we ended up with this knowledge, and to tell you the truth I don't remember the particulars of the story. I simply remember overhearing a teacher saying something about a gang on the school grounds. I think she was talking to another teacher, but it didn't matter. All I heard was "gang hanging around on school grounds" and it was too late. Aside from being an outcast, another important fact you need to know about third grade me is that because I had so few friends and such a naive idea of how the world really worked, my brain was programmed to function in terms of video games. I spent the vast majority of my time playing them as a child. I probably spent all the time I should have been spending making friends, playing outside and learning how to function playing video games instead. My favorite game by far, however, was Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was fun, and I thought Link was the coolest guy ever. Ten year old kid suddenly learns he has this epic destiny, takes up a sword and charges off to battle the forces of evil? Hell yeah. I wanted to be that guy. In my mind, I was that guy. So upon catching wind of this alleged gang activity at the elementary school, naturally I couldn't just let it go and ignore what I'd heard. Would Link let these evildoers go unpunished? Of course not. He'd grab his Kokiri sword, hunt them down and smite their asses. Which is exactly what I suddenly felt inclined to do. I was the only one entrusted with this knowledge I was granted by eavesdropping in a hallway. It was my destiny. I didn't have a sword but a stick would work, and I didn't have a slingshot because Mom wouldn't let me have one, but I'd have to do without.

So off I went to tell my secret destiny to my outcast friends. Naturally they believed me. I mean, I heard a teacher say it. How could that possibly not be true? So that day at the lunch table, we became the A.P. Beutel equivalent of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. We spent our recess periods scouring the playgrounds for clues and signs of gang activity. Ultimately, we ended up with a collection of paper scraps, a pile of Bud Lite crown bottle caps, and a mountain of cigarette butts. (Because y'know, smoking and drinking beer were only things that gang members did. You can thank the Chicken Club and other anti-drug, anti-gang organizations for drilling that particular message into my naive little third grader head.) Once we'd gathered our little collection of trash, we were convinced. The gang was not only using the playground for their illicit activities and villainy, but they were in the school. They had obviously infiltrated the school and were using it as a base of operations, and we were the only ones who could stop it.

So we told our teacher. And we got laughed at. Not directly, of course, but still. And then she told us to go sit down, and that we shouldn't worry about things like that, and no gangs were at the school. Which was of course entirely accurate, but I wasn't going to be stopped by the ignorance of grown-ups. Obviously she hadn't paid enough attention to the clues. It was enough, of course, to stop Sarah and Cameron who gave up the chase then and there, but they didn't have a destiny. So as I sat at my desk, brooding and wondering how next to pursue this evil gang now that the teacher had ignored my warnings, I decided I needed a place to mull this over without the distractions of the classroom. Off to the bathroom I went.

And that's when I discovered the secret door in the fourth stall.

It had been there, all along. Staring me blind in the face, and I just hadn't made the connection. If a gang were in the school, where else could they possibly be? It was so obvious! Nobody ever went into this door. Nobody even knew what was behind it, or why it was there. So I decided to find out. For the sake of my classmates, my disbelieving teachers, and my destiny. So the next day, I brought a paperclip with me on my bathroom trip. And after a while, I tripped the latch and the mystery door opened.

The inside was not exactly what I was expecting. It kind of looked like my grandparents' attic, with plywood on the floor and walls. There was a bucket and a mop in there, and a folding card chair. There was a hanging light with a pull chain, and a bunch of other miscellaneous junk. I climbed inside tentatively, and to my surprise, the door actually led straight to an identical secret door directly in front of me. I crept over and opened that one, and promptly found myself in the girls bathroom. Fortunately, I was still weirded out by most girls at the time and their bathroom was a forbidden zone, so I quickly retreated. More fortunate than that, the stall I emerged into was unoccupied at the time, though I can only imagine what might have happened had that not been the case. It was dark in the little room behind the secret door, and I was afraid of the dark, so I quickly retreated back into the boys bathroom. However, as I closed the door to latch it back, I thought I caught a glimpse of a brown bottle... It had to have been a beer bottle. That was it. That was all the proof I needed. I immediately ran to the one person I knew I could trust with this information: the principal. Mrs. Vickers and I were very well acquainted. I spent part of almost every single day in her office when my teachers needed a break from my emotional outbursts and other disruptive antics. I even had my own special chair where I could sit and do my work and play with her Magic 8-Ball. That chair would have to wait today, though, because I had a special mission. I burst in and told her everything I'd gathered like a good little sleuth. I told her about the beer bottle caps and cigarette butts on the playground, and about hearing about the gang, and most importantly, I told her how I picked the lock on the secret door in the bathroom and found a beer bottle in there. The look on her face was one of concern and confusion, so she told me very reassuringly that she would look into it and sent me back to class. Satisfied with my job, I marched back down the hall and back to class, which I'd been gone from for a very long time by that point.

Now, looking back on this incident with my adult mind, I can only imagine what must have been going through my principal's head at the time. Here is this kid who's notorious for telling exaggerated, mostly untrue tales which could probably be called delusions of grandeur. He spends every day in this office for distracting behavior, refusal to do work, breaking pencils, crying, etc. And yet, despite the story and the delusions and all the nonsense, he claims to have found an empty beer bottle in the school. The only thing she could have done was to actually look into it.

I made a couple more excursions into the secret room after that, but the following week I found the door fitted with a shiny new deadbolt lock which required a key- an obstacle that exceeded my lock picking skill at the time. There was no more mention of the gang, and for all I knew, I had been victorious. In reality, I had seen a bottle. Of chemical cleanser. It was brown, but it was also plastic. There actually had been a conversation about a gang at the playgrounds, but there was never really a gang. Just a bunch of hooligan middle-schoolers hanging around on the playgrounds when school was out.

So that's the story of how I eavesdropped on a teacher, blew things out of proportion, hunted down a non-existent gang, made the faculty unnecessarily nervous, and had the janitor placed under investigation for alcohol use on an elementary school property.

I am so sorry.

-The Sarcastic Soul-