I wish I could get that damned high.

I really do.

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/hmg-avatar-hidden-messages.html

Hidden? What the fuckin fuck?

Look. When you run at me screaming a message, and beat me over the head with a Louisville Slugger until I can repeat it by heart, it's not "hidden."

The so called "hidden" messages are no more hidden than the stink of lightly tuna flavored feces when you stuff cat turds up your nose.

It's right there. Right out in front of everything, including overdone special effects. Just because you painted the little tribal dudes blue doesn't mean your message is camoflaged.

It's all about as subtle (and stupid) as throwing a bucket of red paint on a little old lady wearing a fur coat and screaming at her that "meat is murder!"

And really... haven't we heard this same story before? About a million times? I have not, nor am I going to go see this. I'll just rent Dances with Wolves or The Last Samurai or some other version of this crap and fiddle with the color settings on my TV till the poor indiginous folk being oppressed by corporations and that evil technology shit turn blue. Some blue Hobbits riding to war on blue Ents would be funny as hell. Or it might be funny, if I were smoking some really good shit.

I don't know what's more depressing.
1> James Cameron thinking that he's got an original idea anywhere in his head.
2> The fact that someone somewhere thought that these same worn out, unoriginal, beat to death concepts were so subtley implemented by beating people over the head with it that they needed to write and article to point it out to the rest of the world.
3> The fact that there are people out there that probably don't and/or didn't get it until someone else pointed it out to them. Though, no one that reads my blog. Not that you're that much smarter, just... yeah no one reads this crap.
4> People paid money to see it.
5> You stingy bastards aren't sharing the crap you're smoking with me. It's got to be a god damned happy place where you're at, and I'd really like to see those rainbow sparkles.

Puff puff PASS already.

No... you don't.

Dear Teenage Girls,

Do not espouse to me, or anyone else, including him, how much you love and adore your boyfriend.

Because you don't.

You don't even understand what love means.

I'm not trying to be an ass, but the thing is you're just young.

Go log some hours at your local hospice. Spoon feed some poor dying slob something that has the consistency of mud and smells like death or spoiled milk, then change the bed pan and wipe his ass for him. Make sure you get all the urine and feces off of his unmentionables or he'll get a rash. EEEEEWWWW!!!! GROSS!!! Right?

Now.

Understand that your boyfriend, that you love so dearly, could get hit by a truck at any time and end up just like that. Now, imagine dropping out of school, and getting a shitty job that you hate. Work that job for 10 hours a day so that you can pay the bills, then go spend 6 hours spoon feeding and ass-wiping your boyfriend. Your boyfriend, incidentally, is way too fucked up to stick it in you any more, just in case you hadn't figured that out. You're lucky if you can have simple conversations. More than likely it's moans and grunts.

Fuck that shit right?

Well. That's what love is. It means being there no matter what.

Your boyfriend may not have said 'I love you too'. Give him credit for that. He probably doesn't know why, he doesn't really understand what love is either. But he does know that he's not going to wipe drool off of your face, and clean you up when you shit all over yourself. Don't nag him, and ask him why he never tells you he loves you. It's because he doesn't, and he knows it, and he doesn't want to lie to your face. He damned well may love you some day. He damned well may be willing to give up the entirety of his life to take care of you. But today is not that day. You should admire him for this, and give credit where credit is due.

Your boyfriend may well have told you that he loves you. He lied. Don't get too pissed off. He probably doesn't even know it. He didn't set out to lie to you. He just doesn't understand what he's saying, any more than you do. But I can tell you what he really meant when he said "I love you." What he really meant was "You make my dangly parts quit dangling!" or maybe he meant "I like it when you let me stick it in you!"

That's ok. Really it is. Boys, and men have this thing where we like to stick it in girls or women. Women and girls sometimes like it when we do that. It's part of life. It's part of growing up. Sometimes, we even go further than that, and enjoy each others company. We hang out and we do stuff together, and it's fun. We like it. All of us are pretty hard wired to want sex and companionship. That's in almost every case a very good thing. But that's not love.

So let's just try to be more honest.

Don't tell him you love him.
Don't tell me you love him.
Don't tell your friends how much you love him.
Don't tell his friends how much you love him.
Don't tell his parents, or your parents you love him.
Don't post on the internet how much you love him. The more you do this, the less the rest of us believe you. It's like you've stopped trying to tell us, and started trying to convince yourself. That can't be healthy.
And damned sure don't write "I love Darwood! <3" on the fucking bathroom wall.

Things you should know Part I

There are some things you should know about life on earth. There used to be this stuff called common sense. Those days are gone. Apparently it was a finite resource, and the old timers used it all up so that us young'uns could live blissfully ignorant of... well pretty much anything we might consider bad, or... inconvenient, or... maybe just stuff that doesn't instantly provide us with happiness and joy right this damned second because we want it. I mean, clearly I deserve this. I am after all here. Right? I exist, therefore give me shit.

I smoke. I work downtown. Downtown is full of people. The more people you see, the more your chances of seeing someone worthless.

Smoking is a fair indicator that somewhere on my person I have cigarettes.

Having cigarettes makes me very popular.

"Can I get a smoke?" "Hey, you wouldn't happen to have an extra smoke would you?" "Can I bum a smoke?"

Yes. As a matter of fact I have several 'smokes'. Whole pocket full of them.

No you stupid lazy fuck, you can not have one.

Here's how this works. Pay attention it's time for Things You Should Know:

If you want things, anything, any kind of thing, in this case a cigarette, you should know that things generally cost money. If you want a thing than you had better be prepared to give someone money.

I know. You don't have any money. You should know that money comes from things. You can sell things, or you can do things. Sometimes you can make things, and sell them yourself, or make them for someone else, and they will sell them. Or, you can do things. Usually things that aren't a lot of fun. Things that no one else wants to do. Sometimes people have money, and they have things that need done that they don't want to do, or can't do, or need help doing. These people will give you money for doing these things. You can then take that money and go buy whatever damned things you think you want or need, like cigarettes.

Those of us in the know call this a JOB. Terrible. I know. It's just awful that you might have to put something into your existence in order to maintain it.

So no. I do not have an extra cigarette. You may not have one.

Do you see tar stained wings hanging off of my back?
Do you see a smoking magic wand made out of braided tobacco plants in my hand?
Do you see me here standing in a brown tu-tu with holes burned in it from careless habits?

No. No, and no.

I am not the cigarette fairy, here to deliver lung cancer to all of the good boys and girls.

Go get a damned job. Go earn some fucking money. Go spend it on your own god forsaken bad habits.

Dissapointment with the advertised flamability of certain products.

Some days are more exciting than others. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail, but I know first hand that many solvents, particularly the industrial variety are extremely flammable. Acetone for example is the liquid form of acetylene gas, commonly used in welding and cutting operations. A standard plastic one gallon mop bucket full of acetone, that then catches fire, in a room filled with 5 gallon and 55 gallon drums of various flammable liquids for example, creates one hell of an exciting day. Especially when you're the guy holding the sole fire extinguisher that stands between a devastating fire (probably with big explosions) that will bankrupt a semi-famous American artist and cause the evacuation of a few city blocks due to the toxic fumes swilling forth. Good times.

So I have a garage. It's big. 3 car job. I think we may have parked a car in it once upon a time, but that hasn't happened in ages. No, preferring to keep myself busy, the garage is converted into a workshop. I shared it with my father before he passed. It was cool. It is cool. It is full of fun and excitement. I'd write about shooting sharpened wooden stakes across the garage with a router, but really, that's sort of mundane and unexciting for my garage. The dog didn't even bother to get up after the ricochet. She just looked at me like "What stupid shit are you doing now?" and went back to sleep.

But this isn't about excitement. Or about fire. I set myself on fire, or my clothes anyway, that I know exciting fire stuff when I see it. This is about disappointment.

In my garage I do lots of things. This weekend, one of those things I needed to do was paint something. A shelf. Not a big deal. I have lots of paint. I even have the paint that I want to use. So I brush a coat on to my shelf. It sucks. Bad brush strokes. Looks terrible. So I sand those down and decide that spraying it is the way to go. I have a spray gun. Not a fancy one, it's pretty cheap. It works though. Except when it is seriously clogged with paint, because I never cleaned it out after the last use, and that was 5 years ago.

Ok fine.

So I soak the spray gun in some paint stripper. Don't know the brand, don't know much about it. I know that the label claims it is the safest paint stripper on the market. It touts that it is much less likely to eat the flesh off of my bones than any other brand. That's kinda cool, because it does devour rubber gloves. The same rubber gloves I was wearing to protect myself from the 'safer' paint stripper.

The spray gun is really in reasonable shape. The paint inside wasn't even totally dry. Parts were moving freely. Valves were opening and closing just like they should. Things were looking good! But then I had to take it one step further just to be sure. I wanted to make sure that the feed tube was clean. It's an aluminum tube, about six inches long, about 1/4" inside diameter, and has a bend halfway up. I figure a wire with a small swab of old rag will be just the ticket. So I whip one up. It looks a lot like the rod that one would use to clean a firearm, only much more 2 minute manufacture with a good splash of redneck ingenuity thrown in.

I pull the swab through the tube. It cleans a good bit of old paint off of the inside. I pull it through again. It does the same. I make a new swab. I put the paint stripper away already but I have my mineral spirits out to thin the paint that I am going to put in the sprayer when I get that far. I douse my little swab in mineral spirits.

Mineral spirits. Keep away from flame. No smoking. Keep away from sparks. Very big fire white man. BIG BOOM! Keep away from your coffee mug because in addition to being pretty toxic, the ambient heat shed out of the little hole in your plastic mug might just be enough to bring about the end of the world because of the fire you're going to start like that with the mineral spirits.

It's very flammable stuff, see?

I pull my swab through the tube. It gets stuck. Crap. I try pulling. No, it's stuck good. I try pushing. No, it's still stuck. I pull and I push and I yank on it with pliers, and I clamp it in my vice and I drag the bench that the vice is mounted on around the garage and the yard and back again. The stupid swab will not come out.

Then my wire breaks. Ok fine. I try pushing with more wire. I bend the wire. I try some heavy stainless steel rod. I bent that too. Then the swab budged. I was hopeful, so I tried the heavy stainless rod again. It bent more and tried to bend my feed tube after trying to get stuck, and a few more laps with the bench and the vice.

I've spent about a half hour cleaning the spray gun now, and about an hour trying to get the swab cleared out of the feed tube.

It's a cotton rag that I made the swab out of. Cotton burns. It's soaked in flammable mineral spirits. Blamable mineral spirits also burn.

A plan emerges, and out comes the propane torch.

The little propane torches that fit on the little propane bottles are not enough for my needs. They're ok if you have a little can of pork and beans to heat up, or some sissy assed pipe to sweat. No. My propane torch is a man's torch. Screws into a 20lb. tank, and will spot heat (albeit slower than I prefer) 12 gage steel to a pretty good red glow.

I point the fire down my feed tube with the intent to incinerate the hell out of that stupid swab. Are you ready for what happens next?

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

It was a good plan. It should have worked. But it didn't. Probably something to do with a lack of oxygen in the tube.

I would have been ok with the whole deal if something stupid had happened. Like shooting a flaming paint soaked swab out of the feed tube and into my eye. I would have understood that, and chalked it up to Murphy's Law, and moved on to paint my shelf with one eye covered by bandages. But nothing happened. I spent another half hour trying desperately to set fire to something that by all claims on the label should have gone up like the Hindenburg.

I eventually went back to poking it with the rod and cleared it out. Then I painted my shelf.

Not a clue what I'm doing.

I like potatoes...

space potatoes...

the ones from the moon that come in aluminum cans.