First item of bidness- I have decided to start talking like a homey, but intermittently. I figure it will be more irritating and baffling to my contemporaries that way.

Also, I found the SHITTIEST techno song EVER. As far as I can tell, it is the first techno song to effectively combine all three of the holy trinity of asswipe techno staples-

1. German lyrics
2. That damned Carmina Burana song
3. Samples of a wolf howling.

It’s like seeing the Mona Lisa painted in excrement.

In other news, what a freaking two weeks this has been.

Driving to work today traffic had backed up due to go knows what. It was a near standstill, which means that someone probably dropped a jelly bean on the highway and every local law enforcement agency short of the National Guard was out there helping search for it. I fucking swear, what passes for ‘traffic emergencies’ around here is offensive. How many times will I be sitting there for a freaking hour, and I finally get up to the scene of the ‘accident’ and it is like some Acura with a flat tire on the side of the road, or some minor fender bender but they have two fire trucks, six cop cars, and for some reason, three damned ambulances when there are only two people involved in the accident? If your punk ass does something stupid in traffic and causes an accident that backs up traffic for an hour, there had damned well better be some carnage to justify that delay, and I am not talking about some whitebread cracker with a damned nosebleed either, I want to see some epic, civil war, type carnage, I am talking bowels strewn across the highway so deep that cars cannot physically plow through it. Anything less, in my opinion, does not constitute grounds for a commuter delay.

This meant that I had to employ what I modestly refer to as my “Madcap Ninja Driving Skilzz” to get to work on time. This sucks, because these driving techniques, much like the ancient art of Kung Fu, were passed on to me by my insane driving ancestors, and I am sworn to use them only to protect, and/or endanger all living beings, NOT to compensate for the stupidity of others motorists.

So, I park the Honda O’ Death and make a mad sprint towards the door. If you work in a call center, you know the concept that most of them have, wherein they try to reinforce the idea that if you are even 15 SECONDS late, it is going to cause huge delays in customer response, a backlog of calls, irreparable damage to the Ozone Layer, and a wave of stillborn children in Indonesia. As I have been late a couple of times already, due to what I term as a ‘Total and Complete Lack of Give a Shit” I figured this one better not happen, plus I wanted to be on time to prove I could do it.

So, I do the dash to the door, which was a mistake, as there were several co-workers outside. Although normally slow witted and slovenly by nature, my co-workers have been known to become startled into a state of alert dumbshittery by bright, shiny objects or sudden movement. This triggers their natural defense, which is to say something so excruciatingly dumb that anything with an IQ of 95 or higher will flee and retreat to the safe cover of something with intellectual superiority, like say a pack of mentally retarded geese.

As I am running in, one of the chair moisteners I am passing says something that I hate so damned much that I nearly stopped, just to slap her ass in an attempt to see if I could knock out the stupidity. She watches me run by and goes “RUN!”, as if that was not what I was already DOING. Christ, what is with these people? Do they think that their mouths are going to rust shut if they don’t open them to let every verbal bowel vacation they have out? Another one of my favorites is how, EVERY TIME, without fail, I come back to my desk with food, some random butt sweater HAS to say- “So what’d ya bring me!?” then they proceed to laugh themselves stupider. Christ. That is so lame, it is not even humorous the first time, let alone the 23,000th time, it’s like anti-humor. What did I bring ya? A nice big Hog Log Salad, wanna toss it for me, you daft tool?

I have also started reading a book on World War II that was written only like 3 years after we won the war, so you can pretty much guess what it is like. So far it is an exercise in surrealism. I started reading it because I wanted to become educated on the dynamics of the era and some of my unanswered questions about WWII but I am quickly finding that I should have picked up a book written from a more subjective time period, like say, the Dark Ages. Seriously. For one thing, I am reading and there is a paragraph that reads “U.S. soldiers prepare the front lines for an engagement with JAP forces”.

“What the hell?” I am thinking to myself. I mean, ‘Jap’ forces? Did I read that right? So yeah, pretty much 1/3 of the book refers to the Japanese forces as ‘Japs’. That to me is just, not only offensive, but outright weird because this is a history book, I mean, it’s like being educated about the war by someone’s alcoholic, KKK, veteran grandfather.

Other interesting facts I gleaned from this book about the war-

1. WWII effectively wasted exactly one metric assload of paper. I am only up to about page 35 and already I have read about no less than some 456 events that were hallmarked by the signing of shit tons of treaties, papers, documents, agreements, amendments, hall passes, field trip permission slips, rebate coupons, and about 50 other items that seemed to accompany every single action in the war, no matter how pedestrian. Seriously, go Google yourself some images of the war and I bet you that no less than half of them well come back with someone signing papers.

2. There were women marines and they kicked ass.

3. EVERYONE smoked. That is just odd to think about nowadays, where pretty much I think the law is now that you can only smoke if you are outside, under a bridge, not within 42 miles of a child, and in a completely self sealed proximity suit. That’s a stark contrast to the good old days when, seriously, the first thing you did when you had a newborn child was go into the room and not only light up, but smoke freaking cigars! In those days, men didn’t watch child birth, nooooo. We were called in later, after everything else was said and done, cleaned up, wiped down, etc, so we could waltz into the room and nod approvingly, and then proceed to inundate every living thing within 4 city blocks with cigar smoke.

Somewhere along the lines, and I am not sure where EXACLTLY, but I am guessing that it was in the 60’s because that seems to be the decade of stupid ideas (hippys, ‘Laugh In’, beatniks, bell bottoms, and let us not forget that this was the decade that was the one responsible for ending in the 70’s, another no fucking good decade which produced Ozzy Ozborne) people started thinking that men should be IN the room while birth is happening. Up until that point we had the benefit of being placed in isolated rooms, off to the side and being spared the whole ordeal. It just made sense, RIGHT? I mean, we are talking about WOMEN here, a gender that is so worried about men seeing them at their worst that they don’t want us to see them with zit medication on, or before they have brushed their teeth in the morning. It stands to reason that they don’t want us their while they are wailing in pain, sweating, and squeezing out a tiny person from an orifice that is normally not used to expelling things the size of a small sack of un-lubricated potatoes. I know if it was ME, I wouldn’t want my significant other present. I would want to be attended to by a group of medically trained gypsies who were programmed to self destruct immediately following the ordeal so they would never EVER be able to tell anyone they had seen my privates dilated large enough that the Harlem Globetrotters could have played a game in my lower innards.

So yeah, women were attended to by trained professionals, and men were spared the entire, harrowing Geiger/Alien-esque experience of child delivery. Everyone was happy.

Now, I know that someone out there is going to send me a message about how child birth is a ‘beautiful, natural, miracle’. Ok, that’s hippy granola crap if I ever heard it. I will grant you that it IS natural, but you know what? My body does about 5 or more things that spring immediately to mind, on a daily, basis that, while totally natural, are in NO WAY beautiful, and if I asked my friends to be in the same room and watch them happening, I would no longer have any friends, and would most likely be remanded to the custody of clinical doctors with access to high powered, mind altering substances and inhibitors. Natural does not translate directly to beautiful. In most cases, natural has to take a big long ass layover with about 20 paper towels before it qualifies.

It is also not a miracle. A miracle is something UNIQUE that is not at all common and nearly unobtainable by mortal standards without the help of divine intervention. Last time I checked, child birth did not require any involvement from a deity. It required a lapse in refill visits to Planned Parenthood, and/or depending on your social circles, a 40 ounce of liquid form inebriants. The point is, anyone, no matter how stupid, can get knocked up. It’s not turning wine into water folks, it’s turning semen into little bastards that are going to grow up and cause traffic jams that make ME late to work, which is no fucking miracle.