Vandalism

I know that I probably brought this on myself...

Wednesday I had a shitty day. Work was shitty, I was working alone; the weather was crappy; my back hurt. I could go on and on with a litany of reasons to curse Wednesday until I was blue in the face. Wednesday was so horrible that it refused to die. It laid in waiting, hiding until I had forgotten about it and came back to bite me in the ass this morning on Friday.

With the weather being crappy Wednesday, the pool here in our apartment complex was closed. If it's rainy, the management here just leave it locked. If the day starts out nice in the morning, rains at midday they lock it up and close it the rest of the day, even if the late afternoon's weather is flawless. But Wednesday, being a bad day, naturally had crappy weather to go with it. The pool was closed. Locked up.

As I am about to pull into my driveway, which is directly across from said pool, I see a teenage girl inside, in her bathing suit and a teenage boy climbing over the fence in his bathing suit. Having just finished an especially bad day at work and just being a miserable son of a bitch at that particular moment, I was overtaken in a wave of misanthropy. Normally, I would not care if some idiots were climbing a tall, wrought iron fence with sharp appendages atop, to get into 50 degree water. But I had just finished a day where it seemed that everyone around me did whatever they felt like with disregard to attendance policies, compliance issues or even just simple logic. Everyone around me at work was a mental case and I often feel like the only sane, responsible adult in the whole hospital. I was going to be damned if I was going to come home and be witness to the same idiocy at home as well.

Instead of turning into my driveway, I continued down the road and around the corner to the rental office. That's right; I ratted them out. I'm not proud of it, but I did it.

The property manager took off for the pool and surely lambasted those kids and drug them out of the pool and possibly even dragged them by their ear to their apartment and embarrassed them in front of their parents. ...she doesn't play around, believe me.

I had forgotten about the whole thing until this morning. I head out to the car, sit in the driver's seat and as I am looking at the building I see that someone had poorly drawn that stupid Bam Margera logo on the building in spray paint. Shaking my head, I turn over the car's engine, turn to my right to look over my shoulder and see that my back window had been spray painted. I get out to look and see that my tailgate has also received a touch of paint as well.

I look up and down the length of the parking lot. Mine was the only car vandalized.

Payback, evidently, for Wednesday. Next time I'll let the little shits freeze their asses off in the pool...

hmmm

So, I have an idea for a book, or at the very least a short story. I have the whole arc of the tale mapped out in my head. I could sit down and bang out the outline of it in probably about 10-15 minutes. Writing it would be, I think, fairly easy.

But I am afraid to start it.

What if it sucks? And I mean really, really sucks. Would I know enough to know that it was complete and utter garbage and therefore save myself the embarrassment of actually sharing it with someone. I generally take criticism fairly well, but I don't know if I could take someone that I really care about that the story I've spent hours pouring myself into was a big, steaming pile of shit.

What if it was slightly mediocre? An amusing little ditty with serious structural flaws and a meandering narrative... a highly descriptive narrative with a charming voice whose story kind of falls on its face? Would I maybe feel good enough about it or fool myself into believing that it's not half bad and subsequently submit it to a number of publishers and be utterly crushed by rejection?

Maybe I might write it and never show it to a living soul (but you and I both know my ego is way too big for that!) I don't know... I've never been this chicken about anything creative before. As an actor, I've gone on stage in my underwear, broken down the fourth wall and gone out into the audience and interacted with them. I produced and directed a play in college. I've put my drawings into various shows. Why is this so different? Why is this so paralyzingly terrifying?

YIKES.

Wingnuts Unite!

If you were wondering where all the the crazy-ass, right-wing, nut-bags are hanging out online these days, they are congregating here.

Yahoo! Buzz was probably envisioned as a site where people of similar interests can converge and have a conversation. ...Or even as a place where lively, healthy debate could be held in a public forum. I'm sure that's what it was until the crazies took over. But now there is never an article where somehow the discussion doesn't get distorted into a hateful denouncement of the Democratic Party and President Obama, no matter what the subject.

No, really...

Don't believe me? Here's an article about Jessica Alba. Here's one about the Octomom. Here's one about Donald Trump taking control of his casinos; you don't even have to scroll down the page for that one... And these aren't even political stories.

The political stories are the ones where the hate is served the same way I like my coffee: hot and bold. Don't get me wrong; I think that people should be allowed to say whatever they please and are entitled to their opinions. What troubles me is that the loonies that congregate to these pages are so off-base, uninformed and hateful that it's down right scary.

Think I'm exaggerating? Take a look at this discussion about President Obama setting up a new regulatory agency to protect consumers. If you don't want to click over to that page here is one of the insane rants, posted by a person who calls himself "AMERICAN" whose avatar picture is the iconic Shephard Farey Obama image with a sniper sight superimposed over it:

"ARE YOU PEOPLE STARTING TO WAKE UP NOW !??!?!?!

YOU ELECTED AN ISLAMO FASCIST D!CKTATOR NAMED OBAMA.

A DEVIL IN WOLF'S CLOTHING, IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING.

OBAMA'S ONE GOAL IS TO ULTIMATELY RUN THE WORLD AS AN ISLAMIC STATE.

HE IS USING OTHER FOREIGN DICTATORS TO OFF THE RESISTANCE OF JEWS, CHRISTIANS, AND EVEN SOME ATHEISTS.
THIS IS WHY HE NEEDS IRAN'S REVOLUTION TO FAIL.

ONCE OBAMA HAS ELIMINATED REVOLUTIONS, HE WILL BGIN TO TAKE OUT CUBANS, KOREANS, VENEZUELANS, ETC WHO HELPED HIM BECOME THE NEW ONE WORLD LORD.

THE WORLD IS HEADING INTO A NEW DARK AGES THANKS TO OBAMA...


IF WE DO NOT FIGHT BACK NOW"

It's just insane... what's even crazier than that rant is the fact that as I am writing this there are five people who are agreeing with this hateful windbag. There are over 300 comments in that thread and the overwhelming majority of them are along the same lines.

Esquire, my favorite magazine, had a great article that touched on this. In that article it talks about the board of county commissioner from Warren County in Ohio who turned down $373,000 of stimulus money that was supposed to go towards addressing trasportation needs in the county's rural communities. One of the commissioners was quoted in the story saying, "I'll let Warren County go broke before taking any of Obama's filthy money."

Wow!

Dr. Tiller

Let me declare a few things if they are not immediately obvious:

1. I am a left-wing, liberal nut of a Democrat.
2. I am a Christian.

No, the two are not incompatible.

What the really fervent Christian pro-life (anti-choice really) people simply do not get is that no one actually wants to have an abortion. No one can come to the conclusion to have an abortion easily unless they are completely dead inside, emotionless. It is a decision that will haunt you for the rest of your life; it is as emotionally and morally painful as it is physically. It is an act of desperation. Anyone in their right mind would not want to see the number of abortions performed in this country to rise, no matter what their political or religious views might be.

Do I agree with the decision to have an abortion? No.

Do I think that a woman should have the right to choose to abort her unborn child? Yes.

Again, the two are not incompatible.

Abortion is ethically and morally horrific. But so are a lot of other things that are also legal in this country: alcohol, tobacco, gambling, the raping of our environment, slaughter of innocent animals (shooting wolves in Alaska...), and in some places prostitution and bygamy. All of them are equally abhorrent in the eyes of God yet not only are some of these act legal but sometimes condoned by the government on some level. But just because I or anyone else finds these things distasteful doesn't mean the government should be trying to outlaw them. People will drink themselves into oblivian, destroy their lives. Tobacco kills. Gambling destroys families and brings out disgusting behavior in people. And on and on...

And while I do not agree with abortion, I would never presume to take away someone's choice to have one. It's not my decision to make; it's theirs. And the decision will continue to be made even if abortion is made illegal. The criminialization of abortion will only force scared young girls into dirty alleys to be mangled with coat hangers which can result in serious infection, death, unintended sterilization. As well as the same feeling of despair and guilt that would hang over them if they were to have the procedure performed safely in a sterile environment in a clinic.

I would never presume to take conrtol over someone else's life, even if I think that they are making a bad decision. I do not possess the arrogance to dictate to someone else how to live their life.

Dr. Tiller's murder is domestic terrorism, pure and simple. He was killed in the name of the "sanctity of life." If that is not the stupidest, most hypocritical load of shit I have ever heard in my life I don't know what is.

George Carlin said it best:

"Pro-life, these people aren't pro-life, they're killing doctors, what kind of pro-life is that? What, they'll do everything they can do save a fetus, but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it?"