crackhead.

Peanut buttah and crack sandwich!

I was out at this nowhere bar a couple nights ago.  House Bar, so says the sign.  It’s a bar.  In a house!  Novel idea.  The bathroom has a shower in it.  You sit in rooms that resemble living rooms.  There are couches.  All the hipsters flock.  The bartender likely has a neckbeard and a beanie and alternates his playlist between early 90’s hip-hop and Regina Spektor.  That kinda place.

(That kinda place where PBR will run ya one measly buck and I can get smart off rum-and-cokes for two a pop!)

And then, in the middle of all this hipster scene, there’s Scarface.

Scarface is an African-American man, about 5′7, wearing some dingy black t-shirt and a new era Scarface cap pointed backwards.  He smells of poo.  And he is only capable of articulating roughly every third word.  The rest is some cacophonic conduction of slurs and screeches.

I first meet Scarface on my way to purchase my second rum-and-coke of the night.  Ay man Ilikeyer jersey, he says, in reference to my sleeveless IU basketball shirt.  I nod and say thanks – polite boy I am – and continue to order my drink.  By the time I’m holding the glass and heading back to our little VIP section (that’s what I’m calling it anyway), Scarface has taken a seat next to my buddies.  Specifically, he has taken the seat of one individual who has gotten up to use the restroom.  Scarface is now a member of our entourage, like it or not.

Scarface at first talks about his shoes.  Specifically, how he hates his shoes.  How he is 31 years old and his mom still buys his shoes for him.  As he talks, I’m texting my buddies across the table from me – I’m in an overstuffed chair, they’re on a sofa – regarding the wafting clouds of poopstink that keep hitting my sinuses in bitter waves.  It occurs to me, at this point, that we have a crackhead on our hands.

But he’s not a gangster, he assures us.  No.  His mother is a gangster.  His mother “whoop [his] ayass”, but he is no gangster.  He is merely a dude.  Who wants to stop talking about depressing things.  Which serves as a perfectly segue into his rant about the tragedy at Fort Hood and how his cousin was there eight years ago so he could have been shot, so naturally we have to bag us some A-rabs.  Ramble ramble ramble, clouds of crap.

Thankfully, someone switches the subject to music.  Scarface likes music.  Specifically, he likes the eighties and nineties.  And the “Bee-Gheez.”  When my roommate tries to correct him (Bee-Jeez!), Scarface replies: “dat’s whaddie said man, da BEE GHEEZ!”  I find out, through interrogation, that he’s not a huge fan of Miley Cyrus or Taylor Swift.  I declare myself to be Taylor Swift’s biggest fan.  This invites an assault of words I cannot understand, I think about doing sex, so I just laugh and shake my head and hope I’m not going to get stabbed for being a facetious son-of-a-bitch.

Well, this is all funny for maybe 15 minutes, but it turns out that crackheads have a statute of limitations on their comedic value.  After 15 minutes, crackheads are no longer funny.  They are just ranting crazies.  So we spend the next 20 minutes trying to hatch a plan to ditch Scarface, which ends up being as simple as going back to the bar and striking up a conversation with the local hipsters just trying to enjoy their Gouda cheese.  Scarface takes this opportunity to join another group at the other end of the bar, sitting down to a few bottles of wine and more cheese.  Scarface doesn’t exactly strike me as a member of the cheese-and-wine crowd, so the imagery is pretty funny there.

Short story short: don’t wind crackheads up.  It’s exactly what they want.  Will they believe anything you tell them?  Probably.  Do their mothers buy them lame shoes?  Most definitely.  But if you get them talking about any of these things, they’ll just ruin your night at the bar to the point where two dollar rum-and-cokes can’t even save you.

And that, friends, is no good.

telepathy.

(Don’t worry, little dude.  It’s the present and still nobody reads my blog!)

But topic for tonight: telepathy.

Specifically, I’m thinking of this recurring phenomenon with a friend.  We’re always, as they say, “on the same page.”  For something like six or seven years, we’ve on several occasions said the same word at the same time.  Sometimes the same sentence at the same time.  And I mean, not delayed, not before or after, not getting the assist and finishing the sandwich.  At the SAME TIME!

Is that telepathy?

Five minutes of Googling tells me, no, it’s not, because telepathy does not exist.  But since scientists don’t have friends and I do, I’m going to choose to believe otherwise.  Thus, now, it is a proven fact that I have psychic abilities.  They may only work with one other individual, but you have to consider me a threat as part of this tandem now.  Because you never know what we could be plotting that no one else could intercept.

It is a strange phenomenon, though.  Kinda like that “twin” feel, but between two unrelated people.  Odd, and there’s something strange going on psychically, but I’m really not smart enough to know.

I mean, geez, I just draw dinosaurs.  RAWR!

neighbor.

This is an old one.  Like, one of the first.

I wish Jesus was my neighbor.  Pretty sure he wouldn’t complain about slip-and-slides at three o’clock in the morning.  Plus, the dude knows how to keep the alcohol flowing.  Garden hose, meet miracle maker!

Speaking of neighbors, though, those sirens from the previous entry came to claim one of them.  I don’t know if he died or not, he was a really old man.  I kinda wonder if I should stop by and check on things, or the good Samaritan in me wonders.  But isn’t that awkward, if you don’t really know a person?  To knock on their door basically to ensure that they still exist?

I think that’s awkward.

So I probably won’t.

consciousness.

Quite the busy week.  Need to upload more doodles, but until then…

Consciousness.

Just kinda a strange observation, not necessarily a funny one.  I slept badly the other night.  Or is it bad?  But I couldn’t really remember why, just woke up more groggy for the fact.

Later that evening, my roommate informs me that there was a lot of commotion across the street.  Apparently, some ambulances and firetrucks had showed up around 3:30 and were tearing down the street, blaring their horns as they traveled.  Which, of course, is totally unnecessary on a one-way neighborhood street at 3:30am.  But I digress.

Point is, as soon as he told me this, I remembered briefly hearing this blaring and then passing back out.  I’m a heavy sleeper.  It’s not uncommon for loud noises to wake me up (which sounds totally contradictory to what I just said) but they wake me up quite literally for a matter of seconds.  As long as I’ve determined the room is not on fire, I easily fall back asleep.  Same thing with loud thunderstorms.  No fire, no need to stay awake.

But I thought it was interesting how I had erased this from my conscious memory altogether.  It wasn’t until I was told about the night’s events that I remembered hearing those sirens.  Which leads me to wonder – is that memory real?  Or did I just construct that given this information?  It feels authentic, but on the same hand, I can imagine a lot of memories could be easily constructed.  I’d wager that a lot of my childhood memories did not ever actually occur as they remain committed to my memory, and some events, I’ve discovered through endless arguing with those involved, I’ve made up entirely.

Memory is an interesting thing.  Not only is it subject to perspective – two people can remember the same event in completely different ways – but it’s subject to conscious recording too.  Take the sirens, for example.  The ambulances came, I heard them arrive, I was conscious when they arrived, but as my window of consciousness was so short, it soon shut and relegated that memory to my subconscious thought.  So when I woke up a few hours later wondering why I was tired, I could not remember exactly why I had woken up for a few seconds at 3:30am, but just that I had and something had prompted it.

It’s somewhat akin to sleepwalking.  I’ve only been prone to an act of sleepwalking one time in my life – that I know of anyway.  I’m pretty sure I’m not a sleepwalker.  But how would you really know, right?  If the act was not witnessed by another party?  Anyway, I must have been eight or nine years old, and I managed to sleepwalk from my room upstairs, down to the main level and into the family room, where legend has it I tried to drink from a silver candleholder before my parents figured out I wasn’t fully awake and beat me mercilessly.  Just kidding, they just shook me awake.  Legend has it.

So I mean, while obviously there was some level of conscious processing for me to be able to navigate the staircase and hallways, to identify and grab the candleholder, obviously these memories were never retained once I regained full conscious processing.  They were relegated.  Yet little memories – a re-telling or re-witnessing – from others filled in the gaps and brought these occurrences back to the surface.

I suppose what fascinates me the most about this idea is that, if no one else witnesses these events or tells you something that prompts that miniature epiphany, did you really see or hear it?  Is it really stored in your memory?  Will you ever randomly access it or will your subconscious dispose of it entirely?  Could you, theoretically, retain the description of a criminal’s license plate in between spans of consciousness if you were assaulted?  I don’t know.  I don’t think a lot of people know how we gain access to these things.  But it’s crazy, it really is, how powerful the brain is, how much it can store than we can’t even process or access or comprehend.

dog.

Everyone in Bloomington, Indiana owns a dog.

It’s really odd.  And maybe it’s just my neighborhood.  No, actually, my neighborhood is much further off average than the rest of the city, I’m sure.  Because in my neighborhood, everyone owns two dogs.  And not two Yorkies.  Not two poodles.  But two big ass dogs.  What is an ass dog?  It’s whatever is still barking every night at 3am.

Miraculously, even though everyone owns two dogs, there is no dog shit to be found.  Anywhere.  On the street.  In the bike lanes.  On the park sidewalk.  At first, I thought this was because Bloomington is extremely environmentally-conscious.  But then I realized it’s just because nobody’s dogs poop in Bloomington.  Instead of pooping, they bark all night.  And form secret underground societies whose primary goal is to keep streetlights out of Bloomington, Ind.

Another fun fact about my neighborhood is that nobody actually has a job.  How do I know this?  Because whenever I leave for class – be that 8am, 11pm, 3pm or 6pm, everyone is always out walking their two dogs.  Sometimes they’re also jogging.  Sometimes they’re going with the trifecta – dog, jog, baby stroller.  But one thing they’re for sure not doing is working.  It doesn’t matter if they’re young or old.  They’re always outside not working.  Ever.  Unless you consider playing tennis to be working.  In fact, the only evidence of employment in my neighborhood is the daycare across the street.  Because really, it wasn’t enough for the dogs to be barking all night.  The toddlers have to be screaming all day to complete the 24-hour cycle of noise pollution.

Also, everyone rides a bicycle.  I’m not sure why, though.  As I’ve proven time and time again, my car trumps your bicycle every time.  Conveniently, my neighborhood has a nice, reed-lined ditch in the middle of two one-way streets where I can hide any and all evidence of this experiment.

 

drugs.

Don’t do them, children!

We had another crazy preacher stop by campus this week.  I don’t think the list of people going to Hell has changed, though.  By my count, we’ve still got: fornicators, drunkards, sodomites, lesbians, pagans, dope fiends, partiers, seducers, porn freaks, feminists, liars, hypocrites, music idolaters, socialists and all non-Christians!

According to Brother Jed Smock, anyway.

(Bro Jed actually has his own website, Bro Jed dot org.  Thumbs up for the concept, but dude went and hired the world’s shittiest web designer I think.)

The good news is, according to Bro Jed’s criteria, I think I’m going to heaven!

The bad news is there’s going to be nothing fun to do up there.  Pretty sure we can’t even play rugby.  You know, ‘cuz there aren’t any lesbians.

tolerance.

Like pterodactyls, I do not know how to draw crabs.  Again, vital curriculum that is completely lacking from our socialist education system.  I blame Obama.

The moral of this story, though, is that you can’t read any of the speech bubbles coming from the fish, seahorses and reef.  Whereas I can.  Because I created it.  I just chose to take a really crappy picture of it so you wouldn’t know.

Okay, fine, I give in.  From left to right:

Fish 1: Fag.
Fish 2 (to Fish 1): Homophobe!
Seahorse (to Fish 2): Gay fish lover!
Minnow (to Seahorse): Close-minded seahorse!
Reef (to Minnow): Queer minnow!
Rock (to Reef): Ignorant coral!

So basically this is like the aquatic Crash, but with a few notable differences.  For one, there is no fingerbanging.  Secondly, there are no Mexicans or Asians or crazy black people or pompous crackers.  There is only an emo octopus and a gay crab.  Odd that our emoctopus friend is somehow smoking a cigarette underwater.  No doubt a subconscious reference to one of my favorite films of all time (except Bill Murray didn’t quite pull it off.)

Oh, and yes, I still want emo hair.  Please don’t tell anyone.

dinosaurs.

Been a while, I suppose.  But like Abraham Lincoln said: you musn’t rush a good doodle.  Or a bad one.  Or any of the ones in the basement of bad that belong to my assortment of notebooks.

This probably would have been more amusing if I knew how to draw a pterodactyl.  I’ve learned several things in my 16 years of formal education.  How to draw pterodactyls, unfortunately, was not one of them.

(No, they had to teach me about derivatives!  Like I’ll ever need to retain that chunk of knowledge!  Oh, help me sir, my car broke down just outside Stabbington City!  You fix the fuel pump, I’ll fend off the converging army of denim-clad serial rapists with my knowledge of derivatives!)

You know what’s kind of cool about dinosaurs, though, is that they didn’t have to take no guff from no one!  Like, if someone told them that the previous sentence was grammatically incorrect, they would just stomp that know-it-all’s colon until it exploded partially-digested Blackjack Taco.  The only natural predator that dinosaurs seemed to have, besides each other, was the asteroid.  And to be fair, there are very few things in the natural world that stand strong through the nuclear winter following a ten-ton atomic blast.

Al Davis is one of them.

splash.

Have you ever had something so unbelievably shitty happen to you, the extent of its cruelty was actually funny?  At least in retrospect?

So yesterday, I’m walking to class.  I’d decided to ditch both morning classes to study for a midterm, so I’d been in bed all day with my laptop.  No Bruno.  Hadn’t been outside, hadn’t really even looked out a window (my shades are always drawn like my room is some sort of opium den…it’s only a coke den, thank you.)  Point being, it was my first encounter with the day’s elements.

And they were sufficiently shitty.  Indiana style.

It’s raining moderately hard.  Not pouring, not sprinkling.  Definitely occasion for an umbrella.  So I have an umbrella, and I’m doing my best to avoid puddles and decomposing leaf fragments.  As I’m walking, I’m fairly lost in thought.  I’ve got a midterm review session to attend, and I have some very specific questions I need answered.  Consequentially, I’m doing my best to think of how best to ask them, when suddenly…

A blue blob floats out in front of me.  I stop, jump back.  It connects with my knee and explodes.  I look up in time to see a dark minivan drive past and make a left at the four-way stop.  It doesn’t occur to me until it’s leaving what has happened.

Somebody threw a water balloon at me.  On a rainy October afternoon.

At first, I’m understandably pissed.  I’m cold, it’s see-your-breath weather.  And it’s already raining.  Yet some douche is going around tagging people with water balloons?  I immediately search out a decent sized rock and grab it, cradling it to my side.  If the bastard makes another round down the block, I fully intend on shattering his windshield.  Hopefully his jaw as well.

A water balloon.  Seriously.  Who throws a water balloon on a rainy day?

The van never shows again, and I get to class eventually.  Cold and wet.  Shivering.  But as the class goes on, I can’t help but find the whole thing funny.  I mean, yeah, I’m pissed.  But it’s so…redundant.  So unnecessarily mean.  So overly shitty that it’s actually funny.  Douchiness for the sake of it.  I don’t know why, but in retrospect, it’s funny.

That said, if I see a Florida-plated minivan coming towards me at any point in the near future, I’m still going to destroy its windshield.

inappropriate.

Wow, I’ve been negligent.  My bad.

This one always reminds me of that one guy who makes the uncomfortably inappropriate joke for every occasion, though.  Like, it’s socially acceptable to make some jokes in some settings, but then that one guy comes along and he doesn’t even care!  To hell with the conventions!  It could be a total group of strangers, he’s still giving you everything he’s got on the subject of racial slurs.  Not holding back one bit.  No sir.

I’m thinking specifically of this one kid in high school who used to make rape jokes.  Like, a lot of rape jokes.  So many rape jokes, I began to wonder if in fact he was a rapist and that was his way of telling us.  At a certain point (mainly after the first one) they just became uncomfortable.  And there is something tremendously creepy about someone giggling and promising to crawl under a table with one of their peers.  Then rape them.

So inappropriate!