Tuesday, June 12, 2012

logical colons.

I don't do logic. Ever heard the saying "you can have too much of a good thing?" Of course you have, because you wanted to purchase a more-than-acceptable amount of candy in the presence of an adult. In the grown-up world, logic is everywhere, and there's too much of it around all the time, regardless of how good it is.
It's at work: "no, we don't need a pool installed out back"; in church: "you're not a child, don't go up to the front when he says it's time for the children's sermon"; and in writing: "that's not how you use semi-colons and colons."
Well world that tells me how to use punctuation, may your colon explode for some reason unexpectedly one day.

None of this worked, my wife said I still needed to shave off the second half of my mustache and get out of kitchen because it wasn't a restroom. So I stepped out of the sleeping bag, untied my boots, took them off and put on a shirt, then stomped upstairs to the bathroom to sulk.

Logic is ruining our planet.
When I was a kid, if a bully came up to you and said brusquely "What up. I'm a bully and I'm gonna punch you in your face if you don't give me your lunch money" the correct response would be to grab the nearest light saber and fight him off the nearest cliff, because in real life bullies never spoke that way. It was a dream. Not logical.
Nowadays if a bully says that to you I'm told kids are supposed to reach in their pockets and hand him their money then go find the nearest adult and explain calmly to them exactly what happened. This is logical. Do you not see the problem though? LOGIC MAKES AWESOME FIGHTS EXTINCT.
I was in high school when I got in my first fight. What happened? I'll tell you. I lost. I lost completely. It was astonishing the sheer volume of losing that one skinny little white guy was handed, and yet I took every bit of it. Did I cry? Absolutely. Why? Because.
Ask me this though, did I lose the next fight? No. I chose it very carefully, at a time and place of my own choosing. I wasn't going to let another big Hawaiian kid get the best of me again. So I waited until the time was right, then I chose a kid much smaller and weaker than myself.
"Get off the slide."
"But it's my turn!"
"Not any more it isn't."
"Aw man! Okay." And he stepped off the ladder. That was it. I won with almost no bloodshed. Scraped my knee at the bottom of the slide because I came off it sideways, but no biggie. I was tough and didn't tell anyone, I just got water from the water fountain and drank it instead. Ever seen a pro boxing match? UFC fight? Wrestling championship? What's the first thing they do when it's over? Drink some water. Exactly like I did. Stand down.

To you, logical world, I ask this: which ended better – the fight I lost logically, or the second fight I won illogically? The second, of course.
Logic is also demanding. You have to use it all the time, like toilet paper. Who originally proposed that idea for a hipster startup?

"We need something people will keep coming back for over and over again for the rest of their lives."
"Haircuts?"
"Already been invented, Steve."
"Oh, sorry. Um… batteries?"
"No Steve. If it has a name then it's already been invented and we can't use it for an awesome startup."
"Oh, sorry. Um… knackeries?"
"What's knackeries, Steve?"
"Don't know. But it isn't a thing yet, we could use that, right?"
"No Steve. We can't. Let's just use our original idea and make using your hand to wipe a really gross thing and sell people paper instead."
"Sounds good. Like letters and journals and books and stuff?"
"No, like butt-kleenex."

Once someone finds out that you know how to use logic, you're expected to use it all the time, every time, and I find that high of maintenance exhausting. Folks should learn to drive to the store in reverse every once in a while, just to break free of the chains that bind society. Free yourself up from the butt-kleenex and get creative. Stick it to the status quo and disobey logic occasionally, I think you'll find it exhilarating. Like using colons however you please.

What am I listening to right now? A lecture on the environment given at a Korean summit. Do I speak Korean? No. Will I let that limit my mind expanding into unknown territories, just because it's "illogical"? Definitely not:

Friday, June 8, 2012

walls.


I’ve rarely met a wall I ended up hating. Walls are like people: most of them get along with me, and I with them. You can mostly depend on walls. I say mostly because one time I tipped my Dad’s wheely office chair backwards and the wall moved so I fell and hit my head on the floor. Got mad about that one. Did the wall move? Psh. Of course not, where do we live, Narnialand? No. The wall didn’t move which is good, because that would be stupid. What the wall also DIDN’T do was lean forward just enough to catch me. Which is why I got mad at that particular wall. Was it the wall’s fault? Let’s talk about that for a minute.

No. Good talk.

It wasn’t the wall’s fault because walls don’t move. They can’t. I learned that at a very early age.
"Wait, what did he learn?"
I learned that because something can’t do something to stop something else from happening doesn’t mean you don’t necessarily get mad at that thing that didn’t do what you wanted it to do.
Obviously.
Case in point. Gas prices. You mad at them? Probably. Is it the gas prices fault that they’re so high? No. They aren’t smoking anything illegal, otherwise it would be their fault they are as high as they are, but they’re not, so it isn’t. That doesn’t mean you’re not mad at them though. I hear you, standing in line at your grocery stores and after church. “Gas prices” you say. “They’re so high!” And you’re mad about it. Which is cool, cause I’m mad too.

When I fell that early October morning (yes, it was October) and hit my head against that particular wall, my sister was watching. She laughed at me. “Why are you mad at the wall?” she sneered, with her sneering face. “Because it wasn’t there and it was supposed to be” I explained, only driving her vicious mirth onward. To you, laughing sister, I present this: how happy were you when you last filled up your minivan? That’s what I thought. Gas prices are pretty high, aren't they?
And the wall wasn't where it was supposed to be.
Blam.
I only recently (two months ago) acquired all the words in my vocabulary necessary to complete the mammoth task of documenting this phenomenon. After extensive research I’ve determined that my ability to reason at this level of complexity at such an early age as this instance occurred (seventeen and a half) meant I had a very special gift of extreme intelligence.

For six months of my life I was a child prodigy. 

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Ears.

Lots of people have too much ears. My wife would kindly point out "Sweetie, that isn't correct grammar" but in this case, she hasn't read what I've written yet. So it is correct grammar. Because the issue isn't the way the words are arrange or in what tense I'm writing – in fact I'm very relaxed right now, not tense at all – the issue is, plainly put, each ear just has too much ear to it. Not anything startling mind you. Just enough that while you're speaking to/with them, you privately notice "wow. God blessed you with some ears there champ, didn't he?" It doesn't matter how proper and composed you are, it's a unique fact of life that if someone has a physical anomaly attached to either side of their head, the rest of the world is obligated to notice.
This is 2012. Why haven't we (and by "we" I obviously mean some mildly overweight dude in his 50's) invented a solution to this problem that plagues America? I'm not being sarcastic either. "But James, you must be sarcastic. You can't mean that seriously." Oh, I do mean it. In all sincerity. Because I'm 24 and somehow have "all" the planet's sincerity within my grasp. I say that this is a problem that plagues America because it is A.) a problem and B.) because this is America. Gone are the plagues of locust, rivers turning to blood and crickets who play the banjo. We have entered into a new era. One where we have normal, everyday conversations with folks who have extremely large ears and pretend they don't know we're holding back our comments. If society allowed it I'm sure many people would come out with public statements such as "Yeah, I saw you there while we were talking. I could tell you were listening to me but you were distracted by my huge ears. I knew you weren't just talking with me about sports, you were really just not talking about my massive, oversized ears." But this is the world of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The truth is held captive and the world is forced to stay silent on the topic of large ears.
Not me. I stand before you clean and reconciled like a freshly mopped floor (yes, I know how to mop). No longer am I bound by the chains of other's physical features. I am free. You, random sir, and you, random ma'am, have large ears. And I can't stop looking at them. The fart in the room is out in the air and you may sniff if you like, but I for one, feel much, much better.