Brian Touches Pee, Learns Nothing.

A few days ago, I was peeing at work (in the toilet of course, not just behind the fax machine or something), when my keys fell into the toilet. Initially, when I told my wife this, she was fairly incredulous.

Me: I dropped my keys in the toilet honey.

Her: What?

Me: I dropped my keys in the toilet sugarplum.

Her: You dropped your keys in the toilet???

Me: I dropped my keys in the toilet Cuddle butt.

Her: Why?

And the conversation went on like that for a while, with her growing more and more suspicious that she'd married a man who was born with an extra chromosome, and me trying to reassure her by calling her pet names like babycakes, pooh bear, and hooker lips.

Let me explain how this happened. I originally had my keys in my pocket like a normal person, but the pants I was wearing were obviously made by retarded monkeys in the dark. Somehow my pants are too loose in the waist and too tight in the thighs, which makes no sense because I have normal sized thighs and my fat accumulates mostly as side fat. (I also enjoy clouds, tabby kittens, and long walks by the fireplace.)

Anyhow, since I was wearing oddly configured pants, my keys kept poking me in the groinal area every time I did anything at all. I have sharp keys too. Ouch! It felt like getting bit on the crotch by a parrot. (That's a whole other story.)

So since I was wearing a hoodie, I took my keys out of my pocket and put them in that little kangaroo pouch thing that many hoodies come equipped with. (Side note: I have a skate key on my key chain and I have no idea what it's for.)

Then when I went to pee, I lifted up the pouch so I wouldn't pee on my own clothes and in doing so my keys fell into the uriney toilet. And not just into the toilet either, into that hole at the bottom of the toilet where the wild things go after you flush them. The keys were barely visible, and I didn't have any spares. This was horrible! I walked back out to the office kitchen and I was looking for some salad tongs or something, all the while keeping my eye out for anybody nearby that I could shoo away if they tried to get in the bathroom.

I found a big long knife and figured maybe I could stab out the keys. Of course right as I'm doing this, the UPS guy walks in with some certified mail for me to sign. I'm sure he felt really comfortable engaging some guy who was about to walk into the bathroom with a big knife and I could tell he was not unhappy to get back to his truck.

The story ends like this. I didn't stick the knife into the toilet because... well it's a knife and people cut food with it, and that's a little too weird, even for me. We've somehow managed to retain the pot my wife threw up in as a kid, but she won't cook stuff in it. It's the same basic concept. I did however, stick my entire right arm into a toilet filled with my own pee and retrieve my keys. Then I did some swearing and washed my arm for about 2 hours, and went back to work. All in all, it was pretty gross.

(Post-Script to this story: You'd think I would have learned some sort of lesson from car key/toilet mishap, but today I dropped my keys in the toilet again. Maybe I do have that extra chromosome after all...)

Brian Starts Argument, Passes Time.

The short Thanksgiving week is notoriously slow for most businesses, except, like stores that sell turkeys and stuff. Neither my wife, nor myself, work for a turkey store, so finding things to keep busy with this week has not been easy.

Since we were bored, we started emailing things back and forth to each other that were very boring.

Me: Today is boring and dumb. I'm gonna clean my keyboard. Heh Heh.

Her: I'm bored too, and you are gross.

Me: Flicking a lintball right now, a little busy.

Her: Are you busy the week of March 15th, 2026?

Me: If I had to bet on it, I'd guess my nosehairs would be the first hairs on my body to go gray.

Her: My sister's kids are always sick.

Me: If I peed in an ice cube tray, could I make pee cubes?

Her: I hope Bella's not getting Strep.

Me: Did you throw away all my underpants?

And on and on it went, all the while very boring.

Then she suggested that maybe we should buy lottery tickets. I never buy lottery tickets, considering the simple fact that I have a better chance of having my penis bitten off by a lake monster than I do of winning the jackpot.

I suggested to her that instead of buying lottery tickets that maybe I should just take a few Washington's and fling them into the street, because the same thing would likely happen which was nothing.

She said that at least her idea gave us a chance, albeit a slight one, of winning money. Let me be the first to tell you, I disagreed with her assessment.

My contention is that it was just as likely that after I flung some dollar bills into the street that a burglar would run by, carrying a large sack with a dollar sign on it filled with money (I made the further assumption that the money was untraceable, and that the burglar had been wise enough to discard the exploding die pack). Anyhow, the burglar would run by, slip on the dollar bills and crack his head wide open, just like my mom always worried about me doing. The burglar would be laying there dead, with a cracked-wide-open head, and I would simply walk over and take the bag with the dollar sign on it, and, somehow owing to the spoils of war laws from the first two World Wars, I would be able to keep it and not pay taxes on it either.

This scenario struck me as just as likely to occur as Ed McMahon coming over and presenting me with a big check. Wait, that might be Publishers Clearinghouse and Ed McMahon might be dead, but my point is still well made.

She disagreed and so we argued about it. Women huh? Oh well, at least it passed some time.

My Keyboard

You ever notice how disgusting your keyboard gets after a while? This is really, really gross. I cleaned my keyboard today and I was shocked at how much crap was in there. I don't have a really scientific method for cleaning my keyboard. I just whack it against my desk really hard until somebody from another part of the office comes over to see what the hell all the racket is about.

Person: Brian, what are you doing?

Me: Whacking my keyboard against the desk.

Person: Why?

Me: I'm cleaning it.

Person: I thought you were loudly killing yourself.

Me: Nope, just cleaning my keyboard.

(Side note: My latest euphemism for masturbating is now "Cleaning my keyboard". My euphemisms haven't evolved much since I was a kid. When I was 12 it was referred to as "Strummin' on the Old Banjo". But I digress.)

Anyhow, I'm pretty much amazed at the amount of stuff that flies out when I clean the keyboard. A general list:

-Old food particles
-Dirt
-Fingernails
-Boogers
-Old skin
-Disgusting items of unknown origin
-Little bits of paper
-Insect Poop
-Lots of eyelashes

The last one really surprises me. How come I don't notice when my eyelashes fall out? You'd think you'd see that. It's right by your eyes! It's kind of unnerving to think how often I am unknowingly shedding eyelashes all o'er the land. And when people come over to my house, are they leaving a big pile of eyelashes behind? Yuck!

Keep your eyelashes to yourselves people. In the meantime, I'm gonna turn on some porno and "clean my keyboard."

Brian goes to Bahamas, Things Are Dirty There

I've been meaning to write about this for a while now but I've held off because I didn't want people to get the impression that I didn't have a good time on my Disney Vacation. The vacation itself was a wonderful time. We spent two days at Disney World, and 5 days on a Disney Cruise. The kids had a great time, we had a great time, and uh... it was great. There were two things that bothered me a little.

1.) Walking around for 13 straight hours is hard on your feet. On the second day I found myself sitting in Epcot Center, in the country of Norway, with my shoes off massaging my own feet, totally oblivious to the stares of disapproval from stupid tourists all around me. It was the best foot massage I've ever gotten. So I was sitting there, eating German Cheesecake (which is nothing more than a bunch of Kool-Whip in a pie tin) and rubbing my own feet, and loudly grunting with pleasure about it. I think that about says it all. Oh, and to the fake breasted woman that was gawking at me, worry about yourself and your expensive cha-cha's, or come rub my feet, or keep walking. Ho.

2.) Nassau, Bahamas is a dirty craphole. I started thinking about this because I have a certain Bahamian friend who is being such a pain in the ass that I want to slap him around with my penis and sew his butthole shut. When we got to Nassau, we were immediately inundated by small women carrying beads who wanted to braid my daughter's hair.

Woman: Hey Dada, you want braids for yo' bebe?

Me: No thanks.

Woman: C'mon Dada, yo' bebe want braids huh?

Me: No, you look like you have Syphilis of the hands. I can get somebody on the ship to do it for cheaper, plus I won't have to worry that my daughter will catch the 7 year creepin' Jesus. Eat your Jonny Cake and leave me be.

After being assaulted by about 50 women like this, I started completely ignoring their catcalls and instead staring at my feet or trying to catch small lizards hanging off trees. This tactic was moderately successful.

Finally, after I'd dissed like 3 generations of hair braiders, we got on this bus and headed for a zoo. The zoo turned out to be a ghetto ass zoo. More on that later.

While driving to the zoo, we noticed that all the dwellings seemed to have no windows or roofs or ceilings, and the entire insides were filled with garbage. I didn't see one inhabitable place on the whole drive. 80% of the population of the Bahamas lives in Nassau. I have no idea where.

When we got to the zoo, it became very obvious very quickly that it was a ghetto ass zoo. There were hardly any animals except birds, and it appeared as though it hadn't been painted since 1842. The only thing the zoo had was flamingos, who had been taught to run around in circles. A drill sergeant kept yelling at them and then they'd run around in circles. Then they stopped doing that and began trying to bite us. This terrified my daughter, and enthralled my son, especially when a flamingo ran over to me and tried to bite me in my crotch. You ever see somebody slap a flamingo? You should hang out with me more often.

After we left the ghetto ass zoo, we drove through more garbage until we got to a fort that was falling down. Some random townie with a bizarre voice gave a rambling history lesson and then stood really still like a statue and wouldn't answer any questions. Then he abruptly started moving again and kicked us out of the fort. We were led to an open area that was full of little kiosks that usually would have been filled with peddlers and hair braiders and drug dealers and such. But since we were the only ship that day, nobody had bothered to show up, except one guy who got sleepy, and was sleeping on a table, in a kiosk, with one of his shoes resting next to his head. I wanted to throw some stones at him but Amy wouldn't let me.

Then the tour was over. We drove back down through the garbage, stopping to admire a brightly colored billboard reminding us to "Protect Ya Tings" (apparently there is a high incidence of AIDS in the Bahamas. People must be humpin' in the streets or something). As we got back on the boat, the hair braiding ladies came back in full force and I had to beat them away with a conch.

Really though, where do these people live?

The Things I Hate.

A lot of people who read this frequently ask me why I have such a strong hatred for various things. Well, faithful readers, I figured I would explain to you.

1.) Hornets-Hornets suck for so many reasons. First they fly around in your face, which is pretty inconsiderate, all things considered. Maybe in France people think it's great to have little insects flying around your eyeballs all the time, but here in America we have personal boundaries and space. Human beings respect each others personal space, is it so much to ask that hornets could do the same. (Side note: My grandmother used to let hornets walk all over her glasses and eyes. It was horrible. I never understand why so many hornets would flock to her face like that. Maybe her eyes smelled like flowers, I don't know)

Secondly, and more importantly, hornets are JERKS!! Hornets will just fly over and sting you on the arm if they think you're looking at them funny, or hanging out too close to their nest or something. Sometimes I think they sting me just for practice.

Hornet (Looking at me): Look there's a big thing.

Other Hornet: Let's sting the shit out of it.

Hornet: Good thinking Ed.

I know people who have been stung like 2 times in their life. How is this possible? I've been stung like 400 times. And they can just keep stinging indiscriminately forever. I hate them. I watched this show one time where this guy named Billy sprayed a bunch of crud into the cracks of this dilapidated shack, and hornets were falling out everywhere dying. My eyes had an orgasm watching this.

2.) Roundabouts-When did this country turn into England? Everywhere I go nowadays, a stupid roundabout is popping up. The powers that be apparently believe that we are born with an inherent understanding of what to do when faced with a large circle in the middle of flowing traffic. Well people are dumb and treat roundabouts like a very small scale Indy 500, so I am constantly in fear of getting in an accident. I'm also in fear of being trapped inside the roundabout like Clark Griswold, driving in circles for hours. "Look kids, there's Big Ben, Parliament." My children think it's funny and cheer loudly when we approach roundabouts. This angers me. People who need someone else to wipe their butts for them shouldn't be making fun of me. If you want me to stop hating roundabouts, you should send me to roundabout camp for a week, at the taxpayers expense of course.

3.) Heelys-I've mentioned before why I hate these stupid shoes, but let me reiterate. The only kids you see with Heelys are fat, weird looking kids with even fatter parents. The kids skate around shopping centers, and crash into people and don't say "sorry" and then skate off to crash into different people, and their fat ass parents can't keep up with them because they're driving around in those motorized wheelchairs with baskets on them for groceries provided by the store, and they've stopped paying attention to the havoc their ugly children are wreaking because they're too busy yanking preprocessed, cholesterol laden items with their canes off of high shelves in an obvious subconscious attempt to bring around that next coronary sooner rather than later.

4.) Dog the Bounty Hunter- I hate him because he has a gay mullet. I hate him because he has a dumb voice. I hate him because he has a 5th grade vocabulary. I hate him because his wife looks like a cross between a super high class prostitute and Grimace from McDonalds. I hate him because he makes idiots believe it's really possible to aggressively chase after criminals without a gun for years and never get shot. Really though, just look at him. How could you not hate somebody like that? Even if he was really nice and all he did was save puppies and babies from buildings on fire all day long I'd still hate him.

I think everything else I have a real hatred for I've covered in earlier posts. For more information, refer back to those.

My Dog is Crazier Than Me

Let me preface this by saying that I love my dog Jasper. He is a sweet, friendly animal, very good with the children, and I'm happy he's mine. He's also, on occasion, a raving lunatic.

I suppose you can trace most of this behavior back to when he was a puppy. He was apparently abused at a very young age, and then set free in Duluth in the winter, ostensibly left to freeze to death. Instead, Homeward Bound got a hold of him, and while I was still in college my wife adopted him. He had really severe kennel cough, and dog pneumonia, and he sneezed big green boogers all over his feet every 30 seconds or so. My wife spent a good majority of her day cleaning snot out of his paws.

Jasper has never really been able to let go of his upsetting childhood, and since I'm not paying for a dog whisperer to come in and help him express his feelings, or his anal glands, or whatever a dog whisperer does, he has a tendency to act really strangely at times. Throughout his life he has done the following

-Ran upstairs and hid under the bed for 2 days after I fell down the stairs and landed on him early in the morning while still half asleep going to let him out.

-Escaped from us at a park where the snow was 4 feet deep but he didn't sink since he was too little, and proceeded to chase a flock of canada geese, that were flying 500 feet above him in a "V", for about a mile, including across a busy road where he almost got hit by like 8 cars, but was totally oblivious to this fact because he was staring at the sky and barking the whole time.

-Chewed off and ate his long plumage of tail fur along with a considerable amount of stuffing from his kennel mat (which he then chewed to pieces) and then loudly vomited it all up in the night on our new carpet because he was angst ridden since I had started a new job and screwed up his daily routine. This caused a fairly uncomfortable Q&A with my mom since when I returned home from work I couldn't figure out what happened to my doggie's tail.

Me: Uh mom?

Mom: Yes?

Me: Did you do something to Jasper?

Mom: What?

Me: Ummmm, did you uh, come over and cut off all his tail fur for some reason?

Mom: What? No. Why would I do that?

Me: I don't know, to make a bed for a small animal you found?

-Ferociously barked at invisible ninjas for an hour at 3 in the morning until I had to get up and threaten him with euthanasia. He's done this repeatedly.

-Got bitten on the snout by a fly which causes him to be either really scared of flies, or really aggressive towards them depending on the day. When he's really aggressive towards them he runs around barking and snarling at them and tries to leap up and bite them to death. I don't believe he has ever been successful in this. When he's really scared of them, he repeatedly slithers around the house squeaking like a big pussy and tries to wedge himself under furniture and furnace crawlspaces that he has no business trying to fit into. This usually causes chaos and broken furniture.... and threats of immediate euthanasia

-Stands and barks at a random wall for long periods of time, until I come snap him out of his trance by threatening complete and utter euthanasia. (Side note: We learned from our vet that this may be a sign of early onset dog dementia. I don't know how a being with no concept of time can have dementia, but whatever.)

-Pees on people at the dog park. I never apologize for this, instead I choose to say clever things like, "Gee your pants must smell bad" or "I guess that leg belongs to him now". People always appreciate humor when they are being urinated on.

-Lets our other much larger and bouncier dog chew on him until his head is soaking wet from slobber, and sneezes numerous times while playing. We call this phenomenon "Sneezefighting."

His latest, most confounding problem though, is that when he runs out of water he goes absolutely bonkers, but only when nobody is home to correct his behavior/threaten euthanasia. I forgot to give him water yesterday before I left for work. Let me correct myself. Never in the 10 years since I got a dog has it crossed my mind that the dog may need water at some point. I have some sort of mental block.

So my wife forgot to give him water. When I got home, the entire downstairs was in shambles. The rug was all askew, there were pretzels all over the floor, a glass candle holder had been broken, there were magazines and newspapers bitten into tiny pieces, the clothes hamper was laying on it's side, the cable box was in an odd position, there was a plate on the floor, a chair was leaning precariously against the entertainment center, and somebody had eaten a large piece of styrofoam. My first thought was really rowdy burglars. After I went and got a baseball bat and secured the house, I walked in the bathroom and noticed that there was no water in the water dishes. Uh oh. I checked the bathtub. It was full of dirty paw prints because when he gets desperate Jasper hops in the tub to try to drink residual bath water. So I got him some water and proceeded to tidy up the downstairs, sweep up the glass, and throw away the rest of the styrofoam, all the while loudly cursing the heavens for my bad fortune.

I'll say this. Having a crazy dog makes me a lot more empathetic towards the plight of my wife, who has to put up with a crazy human everyday. But still, she should remember to get the dog some water...

Weird People and the Batmobile

People are weird, I tell ya. Some people are ridiculously fat. Some people are anorexically skinny. Some people look like their spouses. Some look like their pets. Some look like other people's pets. Some people look like combinations of famous people (i.e. Colin Cowherd looks like a combination of Alice Cooper and a guy who stuck his penis in an electrical socket). Some people look like they're dead and don't know it.

Mostly though, people are weird because they say weird things. I count myself as one of these people in this not particularly prestigious group. But it seems as though everywhere I go, I have a certain knack for accidentally avoiding the normal people, and only dealing with the really weird ones. I'm sort of a magnet like that. Today was no different.

I decide to break down and go get an oil change, even though I enjoy getting an oil change in the same fashion that I enjoy french kissing hornets on their stingers after I inject them with meth and Red Bull.

So I go to the oil change place. There are 3 people working there. All 3 look at me. I look back. Then two of them walk back into the office and one begins motioning me in. The two that walked away were normal. The one left over was a full blown wackaloon. The law of averages never applies to me in situations like this.

I can tell that this fellow is most likely crazy because he looks like my brother-in-law Josh, if Josh's mom and dad were also brother and sister who smoked tainted crack during the pregnancy. To be quite honest, this guy looked like a combination of Josh, and one of those people that turns into a Super Villain/Monstrous Freak after he falls into a vat of toxic sewage. He is also chewing on his bandana, which is still attached to his head somehow.

So either he steers me poorly, or I drive poorly, because he begins to gesticulate wildly with his hands, trying to get my car back to the proper position within the little oil change area. Then he puts both hands out really hard, signaling stop, and also stomps his foot like a 7 year old having a tantrum.

I stop. He comes over.

Him: Dude, what are you trying to do? Drive into fuckin' the hole?

Me (Flustered): Dude, you were waving your arms around like a man on fire. Settle down a little.

Him: Trust me, fuckin' you don't want to drive into the hole. That would suck for everyone.

I notice that he is using the "F" word at odd times in his sentences. Further confirms my suspicions that I am dealing with a crazy person.

So I tell him I need an oil change, and the normal people go down into the little basement under my car and begin changing the oil. Then he comes over to my car.

Him: This will take a bit. You can go wait in the lobby.

I get out and begin walking over there. He gets right in my way and smiles at me.

Him: Or you can just stand over here.

I'm not sure what to do. There's only a tiny path in between the front of my car and the garage door, which is now shut. He is standing in the tiny path, smiling at me. I feel like I may get raped. I stand there.

Him: You fuckin' gotta house?

Me: Uh, yeah.

Him: Does it have a pole barn?

Me: No, it just has a garage.

(Really sure he's crazy by now. As I do whenever I get into situations like this, I begin plotting my escape route. He is talking. I am plotting.)

Him: Hey, pay fuckin' attention. Would you build a pole barn?

Me: What? Where?

Him: Behind your garage of course.

Me: I don't know. I guess so, if I had some wood or something.

(This conversation has devolved and gotten me nervous, and when I'm nervous I start saying stupid things, like that I would build a pole barn behind my garage if I had some wood.)

Him: Yeah, I need to get some land.

Me: You ain't no kind of man if you ain't got land.

(I'm quoting movies without realizing it now)

Him: When I get me some land, I'mma build a house, a garage, detached fuckin' of course, and a pole barn.

Me: That's ambitious.

Him: Huh?

Me: I said "Good Thinking"

Him: Yup. Then I'mma go out in my pole barn and build fuckin' the Batmobile.

(I want to run away)

Him: But not fuckin' that Batmobile from the 90's. That thing was shitty. I checked the specs on it, and it could only go 35. 40 tops.

(How did he check the specs on a car from a movie from 20 years ago?)

Him: Naw, I'mma build that one from Dark Knight, that shit can can go zero to 60 in 5 flat. And it can shoot rockets at shit. All that shit was fuckin' fully functional.

(He's getting really excited talking about this bizarre dream of his)

Me: That'd be awesome. I'd drive that.

Him: Shit yeah. And my girl would come looking for me and I'd be like, "Don't bother me, I'm in the pole barn working on the Batmobile, and she'd bring me beer and shit."

After another 10 minutes or so of listening to him ramble on about Batmobile specs, and pole barns, and land and such, the normal people finished changing the oil, and so I paid and left. As I'm driving out, totally bewildered the last half hour of my life, the dude runs up next to the car and shouts, "FUCKIN' BATMOBILLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEE!!!!" I drive away.

This is my life...

My Troubles with Earwax.

This morning I was on a call with a client, chatting away about annual maximums and other very important things, when all of a sudden I could feel something happening inside my ear. This obviously distracted me from my phone call, and I became even more distracted when a large chunk of earwax fell out of my ear and stuck to my shoulder.

Client: So anyway, how about we move the maximum to $1250, reduce the deductible, and then...

Me: You need to stop talking for a minute. A giant waxball just fell out of my ear!

Client: Um, well...

Me: Now it's on my shoulder. It's pretty gross, I wish you could see it.

Client: Ummm...

So I got the waxball off my shoulder and finished the conversation, but it also made me realize that this was not the first time some earwax fell out of my ear while I was in the midst of something fairly important

One time, when I was about 19, I was on a date with somebody, and we were sitting there at an Applebees or whatever, talking about football, or ballerinas, or the Kama Sutra. Actually, I have no idea what we were talking about...

So we're sitting there talking, and all of a sudden a huge, Andre the Giant sized blob of earwax dislodged itself from my ear canal, fell out our my earhole, bounced off my shoulder, and landed on the table between us. We both stared at the earwax for a while, no one daring to say a word. I was kind of mortified since I was trying to make a good impression, because I figured it was going to be harder to hook up later if she thought I was the type of guy who carelessly flung earwax around at the dinner table. I surmised that it wasn't as bad as having a turd roll out the bottom of my pantleg, but that it ranked somewhere in between having a turd roll out the bottom of my pantleg, and accidentally sneezing a bunch of snot and boogers into my hand on the grossness scale.

So, I did the only thing I could think of. I blamed the ceiling of the restaurant.

Me: Ugh, this restaurant has earwax falling from the ceiling.

Her: Um yeah, the ceiling.

Me: I mean, you'd think they'd clean the ceiling every once in a while, get the earwax off it and stuff.

Her: Mm hmm.

My ruse apparently did not work as the date ended quickly and uneventfully. That sucked. I began carrying Q-Tip's around with me for a while and cleaning my ears so vigorously that I think I went a little deaf, but I gave up on that. Screw it. To quote Popeye, "I yam what I yam," and sometimes what I yam is a dude that has earwax falling out of his head, and that's OK.

At least I'm not constantly bleeding from both eyes...

Brian Needs to Shut Up More

Sometimes I forget as a father, and authority figure, that my children pick up on anything and everything that I say, even stuff I say that I don't realize I'm saying. They're like sponges; loud, screaming, crying, crazy sponges who don't enjoy eating food.

This all came to a head last week when my 6 year old daughter decided it was a good time to question me on every partially offensive remark that came out of my mouth. I should have known something was different that day, as she started out by saying, "I have a hypothesis" about the TV or something, and then mentioning something about a constellation. I was perplexed.

Me: Holy crap! How do you know what a hypothesis is?

Her: I learned it. What does "Holy Crap" mean?

Me: Ummmm.... nothing, eat your granola bar. And how do you know what a constellation is?

Her: I learned it, Brrrrrrrian (That's what she calls me when she's feeling superior). Now answer the question. What does "Holy Crap" mean?

Me: Ummmm, it means gee whiz.

My son: Did you just say "Whiz"? HAHA, Whiz.

Me: Agghhh!! Go back to bed you two!

Her: No way Brrrrrrrrrian...

And so on. I should have taken this obvious sign from the heavens that my children were bound and determined to make me a bad father that day (or as I'm referred to by other kid's mom's, "That Man") and just went to the gym and stared at chick's butts all afternoon. Instead I went on with my day, doing things, and saying things that only my diseased brain could think of, at least according to my wife. My daughter was quick to catch any verbal misstep I had.

Me (After almost getting crushed by a speeding buttlicker on my street): Watch out, you stupid son-of-a-bitch!

Her: Dad, what's a son of a bitch?

Me: Uh, it's a bad person, honey.

(Side Note: One time when I was about 7 and riding the bus home, someone had written "DAM FAGOT" in magic marker on the bus seat in front of me. I was really interested in that term because I figured it must have been really important for someone to risk getting in trouble by the bus driver to write it on a seat. So I went home and politely asked my mom to define the term "DAM FAGOT" for me. Her response? "Uh, it's a bad person, honey." In that vein, I also grew up thinking "Dildo" and "Bimbo" were similar synonyms for a "bad person". Thanks Mom.)

Later that day, I was sitting on a hill at dusk (don't ask) when I saw my son being chased by a girl and really enjoying it. I was kind of grooving on this because up until now my son's only interaction with kids (outside of his sister) was knocking them over during sporting events if they were "the bad guys". So I'm happily sitting on a hill at dusk watching my son play with a girl, when a friend come comes over and gets in their way. Without thinking, I yell:

Me: Hey, quit cockblocking Miles!

Her: Cockblocking?? What does that mean Dad?

Instantly everybody else on the hill is staring daggers at me, and I think a mom threw up in her purse in horror. I tried to think of a harmless word that sounded like cockblocking, but the only thing I could think of was "knobslobbing" and I figured that might actually be worse, so I just stared at my shoes for a long time and hoped people would forget about me.

Then like 5 minutes later, I was rambling on about something with Amy, and she told me I was foolish, and so I remarked that pretty soon I was going to find me a new stripper wife. These things that come out of my mouth are not my fault, I swear to you. They just happen...

Me: Oh yeah, well I'm fixin' to go get me a new stripper wife, and she's gonna be all strippery and hookery and stuff...

Her: A stripper wife? Haha Dad, you're weird. You're already married to Mom.

Me: Bella, stop listening to me!! Go roll down the hill!!

Her: No way Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrian.

I think I should probably just shut up forever. I heard that Pythagoras imposed a vow of silence on all his disciples. I wish Pythagoras was still alive and formulating theorems, as I could have been a disciple and avoided all this nonsense. Damn you Pythagoras!! A^2 + B^2 +C^2 my ass!

Mister Smart Runs out of Gas

So the other day I ran out of gas on the highway. Luckily I was able to steer my now idling car through traffic and over to a little grassy knoll on the side of the road, where I proceeded to sit and swear loudly for a really long time. Then I got out of the car and kicked it a few times for good measures. Then I stared out at all the cars driving along happily that were full of gas and prayed really hard that the people driving them would get severe involuntary diarrhea right there. Then I called my mom like a 6 year old and asked her to come meet me on the grassy knoll and bring some gas with her. Then I had to wait an hour for her, because my sister was using her car and was out someplace getting her toenails polished or something. Then I stood around swearing and punching the air for a while until I found some golf balls in the grass. Then I threw the golf balls out into traffic to see what would happen. Then I angrily shook the fence separating the highway from the frontage road for a while. Then I peed on the grassy knoll and waved my ding dong at the traffic in disgust. Then my mom finally showed up.

Apparently my car does the bare minimum to remind you that you need gas. I learned this the hard way. My old car had lots of bells and whistles that told you you needed fuel, and the car would eventually start actively trying to steer you towards gas stations, and finally a little tweezers would emerge from the driver's seat and start pinching your scrotum every 30 seconds until you filled up. (Side Note: The tweezers was rusty. And filthy!)

My new car took a more laissez-faire approach to it's thirst. 20 seconds before you run out of gas a small light shaped like a gas can lights up, and if you happen to be loudly rapping along with an Eminem song and bouncing around in your seat, it's pretty easy to miss.

So as I was sitting alongside the highway, swearing and contemplating ways to murder random civilians with full gas tanks, I kept thinking to myself, "MMM Old Country Buffet!!!" This made no sense to me. Then I realized that Old Country Buffet played a large role in the last time I ran out of gas, some 16 years earlier.

Let me take you back to April 1994. I had just met some friends and crushed the buffet at the OCB in Minnetonka. I had a 1975 Pontiac Bonneville (The EvilMobile to those in the know), and one of it's fun little quirks was that the gas gauge had stopped working in 1976. The other fun quirks were that you couldn't lock all the doors at the same time so stupid high schoolers would break in and smoke weed in it, the spark plugs would randomly fall out, and it had a bad habit of breaking down when it had a keg in it's trunk and an entire party was waiting for it.

Anyhow, since the gas gauge didn't work, you just kind of had to guess how much gas you had. Apparently I guessed wrong, since it died at a Tom Thumb about 2 miles away from my house. So, being that I wasn't that far from home, and I had like 30 cents in my pocket, I decided I'd just leave the car there and walk back. This proved to be a really bad idea.

I got about 3 blocks away from the car when I realized I had to go to the bathroom. Bad. I started walking a little faster. Walking faster made me have to poop worse. So I slowed down. I came to a bus stop. A man harangued me for money so I gave him the 30 cents. In retrospect I should have just pooped on him. I walked on.

I got to about a mile away from home. This was now a serious crisis. I came to a golf course. I considered pooping behind a tree, but there were a lot of golfers out there and I didn't want them to see my butt. I walked on.

I got about a half a mile away. I was now getting desperate. I came to a bridge going over a creek. Since I was about 50/50 if I was going to poop in my pants by then I decided I'd just poop off the bridge into the creek. Right as I was getting ready an armada of police cars drove by me. I took this as a sign. I didn't want to get arrested for pooping in the creek. I thought that might be a felony. I walked on.

I got a block from my house. I was now sweating profusely from the effort, and I realized that for the last couple of blocks I had been muttering "OH NO" over and over in sync with my footsteps. I wasn't sure if I was going to make it. "OH NO OH NO OH NO". A mean looking dog was giving me the eye and looking like he might start growling. "OH NO OH NO OH NO." My shoelaces had both come untied and a hornet was crawling on my shoulder. "OH NO OH NO OH NO." Two people were out mowing their lawns and I was holding my butt cheeks together with my hand and they would notice. "OH NO OH NO OH NO."

The story ends happily though. I made it home without crapping my pants, and then I had to take a nap because I was so exhausted from the ordeal. Running out of gas really sucks!

People Suck at Conversations

Do you ever get to talking to some casual acquaintance and you begin to tell a fairly interesting story about something that happened to you, and the stupid person completely blows you off when you take a breath and starts talking about his own story which isn't even remotely as interesting as yours? I hate that. When people do that I really get the urge to clang their testicles together with heavy cymbals.

Me: So last week I went parachuting naked in Greenland.

Person: Oh, I went to International Falls.

Me: Um...

Person: Yeah, I went to the Bronko Nagurski museum, and then we hiked up a hill and ate marshmallows.

Me: Cool, well I was..

Person: Then we drove for a while and saw a farmhouse and there were chickens there.

Me: Yeah, so...

Person: Then I took a big poop at a gas station. It was greenish. The poop, not the gas station. Then we went to an embroidery store. Then I pooped again, but not at the embroidery store.

I figured out a really good trick to help get this person's concentration back to your story where it belongs. Just start slapping him repeatedly. It's a well known fact that a good slapping helps with this.

Brian Sucks at Fishing

So every year I go up to Cold Spring, MN, play in a baseball tournament, get butt raped by the home town umpires, and stop at the Space Alien Cafe on the way home where the children proceed to eat 3 cumulative bites of food, all the while begging for tokens so they can go play games of "skill" and then lose all their tokens rapidly (either because the game takes 15 seconds, or because they accidentally spill them into some token vortex located within the game area) and then come back demanding more tokens, and then throw a giant fit when we finally decide to leave, and then get the small consolation of a ball or a Chinese Finger Trap as a prize from their 30 dollars of game playing.

Anyhow, while I'm up there, lounging in between games, I usually get invited to go fishing with my friend Bob. Sometimes other players come too, and they bring their wives, and the wives lay around on the boat and get tan and take up space, and sometimes not.

Fishing is always a very enjoyable way for me to pass the time. It would be even more enjoyable if not for these few aggravating problems I have.

1.) I can't catch any fish- Oh sure, I get lots of nibbles, but every time I try to hook the nibbles, I wind up with nothing. The only thing I can catch is stupid Milfoil. (Side Note: I was told that what I was catching wasn't Milfoil, just regular old lake plants, but screw you people, it was voracious, deadly, boat-killin' Eurasian Water Milfoil. Prove me wrong!) Anyhow, all I catch is Milfoil, while everybody else catches real live fish. I felt like Charlie Brown when all he got was rocks for Halloween candy.

2.) Tiny fish nibble off the attractive parts of my lure- I don't know how many times Bob had to change my lure for me. It was probably upwards of two. These stupid little minnows or sunfish or something think it's really funny to chew off the flippers off my fake distressed animal, so it just looks like a garlicky smelling tube floating through the water. Even a mentally retarded bass isn't going to bite at a garlicky tube. You little fish are gay!

3.) I suck at casting-Everybody else on the boat is snapping off these 50 yard spirals right into the area they want it to go to. Meanwhile, 1 of 4 things happens when I cast:

a.) I completely forget to release the line causing the rod to snap violently forward, like I'm trying to beat a hooker with it or something. This causes giggles from the stupid peanut gallery who are all up to their testicles in trophy bass.

b.) I release the line way too late so my cast goes at a sideways 90 degree angle, crosses everybody else's line, and nearly lands in the boat on the opposite side. This causes scornful looks from everyone else in the boat including the wife, who has stopped reading Vogue long enough to say, "Jensen, what the fuck are you doing?"

c.) I cast too hard and my lure winds up laying on a dock, or one of those things that covers a dock. Sometimes it sticks to something, and we have to float over and unhook it. This causes angrier scornful looks, and a small part of me fears getting flung off the boat.

d.) I cast what would be a really awesome cast but somewhere along the way my line gets hopelessly tangled up so it abruptly stops mid-air and my lure (probably without flippers by now) plops into a part of the lake that doesn't have any fish in it. Then usually somebody has to help me get my line untangled, because I get angry with things that require patience. This elicits comments like, "Jesus, how did you get it this tangled?" and "Jensen, what the fuck are you doing?"

e.) Occasionally I cast a really brilliant, awesome, Babe Winkelman-type cast. This happens about 1 out of every 300 tries. This causes cheering and looks of disbelief from the others. This makes me cocky. I say things like, "What's up now bitches?" and "I'm gonna rape the fish I catch off this cast!!" Then usually I almost drop my rod into the lake or stumble from somebody else's wake and nearly pitch a header into the Milfoil. I am less cocky afterward.

4.) I won't admit that the plural of bass is "bass"- I'm sure this plays against me somehow, but screw you, it should be "basses." One bass, 2 basses. Makes sense right? Stupid English is for dorks.

So basically, what I'm trying to say is this. I shouldn't have made fun of all the guys on Bassmasters when I was 10 for proclaiming themselves athletes, because fishing for basses on Upper Spunk Lake with a garlicky tube for a lure is HARD!!

A Weird Morning for Brian

So this morning a bunch of weird things happened. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad omen for the day, but I think it means something. And to that stupid dream interpreter, it doesn't mean I should be questioning my sexuality. (Side Note: I saw a dream interpreter once. I described a dream, that was basically a combination of Harry Potter and Conspiracy Theory. It had to do with people who were secretly wizards riding around on those old time bicycles with gigantic front wheels, and I wondered how they got up there, and the government arrested me for asking, and it turned out they floated up there. The dream interpreter said "Hmm, very interesting... Have you ever questioned your sexuality? So I had sex with her, and then left in a huff. What a slut!)

Anyhow, first I went around to various parts of the neighborhood putting up garage sale signs because we're having a garage sale. While I was in the midst of shoving a sign into the dirt, a car full of hot Swedish bikini team members drove by and honked and squealed at me. (Maybe they were just regular girls, I guess I don't know.) Anyhow, this struck me as odd because it was like 7:30 AM, and I was dressed in the clothes I slept in, and I hadn't showered or shaved or brushed my teeth or taken my morning dookie, or anything. Basically I looked like a sleepy bum, and I was carrying a garage sale sign and a half-eaten Slim Jim. Really attractive.

So then after I got done shoving signs into the dirt (by the way, I'm sure the chaos that comes with a garage sale will inspire a later post) I walked over to a port-a-potty to pee and tripped on a tiny stick and fell down and got all dusty. I got really mad at the stick so I picked it up and whipped it at a tree really hard, but it hit a branch and ricocheted back at my face so I had to hop out of the way. I was starting to feel a little like Donald Duck.

Fianlly, I walked into the potty and peed, and all the while the potty was making a humming sound. I was confused. I walked out, and then curiosity got the best of me, so I opened the door back up to try to comprehend the source of the humming. When I opened the door I saw like 40 hornets flying out of the toilet hole. I freaked out and ran away and almost tripped on the little stick again. There were hornets in the toilet hole! I hate hornets! One could have flown right up my urethra, and then where would I have been? Probably dead. I'm guessing if a hornet stings you on your inside-weiner, you die.

It might just be one of those days. I'll probably get struck by lightning or eaten by a bear this afternoon. Oh well, so be it.

Dude, Where's My Car

Recently I bought a new car. I had a big SUV, and the lease was up, and quite frankly I was spending a buttload on car payments and gas, and it had started to not work all that well, and high class prostitutes weren't nakedly flocking to it like I had imagined, and it never fit in the garage so I had to leave it in the driveway and sometimes the stupid hooligan kids in the neighborhood would shoot paintballs at it or smash the back window and not even have the common decency to steal my drug cache or my autographed Phil Hellmuth playing card hidden in the trunk.

With those things in mind, I bought an affordable, slightly used car that gets great gas mileage, will fit in the garage (as soon as we fix the garage door), and gets me from Point A to Point B in an economical and expeditious fashion. This makes me happy because in the long run I'm going to save a bundle of money, and as many people know, one of my favorite things in the world to do is check my account balance, and then imagine myself having a giant vault of money and diving in it and swimming around like Scrooge McDuck. I guess I'm weird.

The problem I had though, is that now I no longer have a giant, officious looking truck. I just have a regular old gray car that looks like 50% of the rest of the cars out there. So I go into the gym the other day and do my workout (25% working out, 70% staring at girls' butts', and 5% trying not to fart loudly and scare the other patrons) and then I finish.

One of my many weaknesses is that once I go into a large building and walk around in it for a while, I get completely discombobulated regarding where things are. I would have scored a lot better on my ACT had I not completely bombed the "Spacial Relationships" portion. Sometimes, when I'm in a large grocery store that I'm not familiar with, I attempt to leave and wind up in the way back of the store, by the employee toilets, which always disturbs the pooping cashiers.

This weakness affects me outside as well. Unless I'm paying complete attention to where I am when I get out of my car, I will have no idea where I've parked when I come back. I've walked many a weary mile at airports and parking garages, quietly seething while trying to figure out where I was at.

Anyhow, I come out of the gym and I instantly realize I have no idea where my car is. Shit. Usually my saving grace in this situation is that I have an automatic door locker that honks the car and flashes the brake lights when I push the "lock" button, so I wander around aimlessly pushing the "lock" button until I see the car honking and flashing at me.

Car: I'm here dummy (Honk Flash). Over here dummy (Honk Flash). You can't drive me if you can't find me dummy (Honk Flash).

Me: Gee, I don't remember parking you here.

Car: Yes, I'm Kit from Knight Rider. I was off fighting bad guys while you were eating bone-in filets. Either that or you are retarded. I'll let you figure it out.

I look down at my key chain, and find that I have no "honkflash saving grace" button. Shit! I say to myself, "OK self, you aren't a huge moron, just think where you parked the car."

I think about it. Absolutely nothing comes to mind. I think some more. I start thinking about burritos. This doesn't help me find the car. I give up.

I say to myself, "OK, so you can't remember where you parked. No biggie, just look for your car. There aren't that many rows."

I start to look for my car, but then I realize I have no idea what it looks like. I'm pretty sure it's a car, and I think it may be gray. It's a Chevrolet, but I can't remember the model name. Something like Oreo, but somehow, I don't believe there's a car called a Chevy Oreo. SHIT!!

I decide that I'm looking for a gray Chevy. There are about 15 in the parking lot. This is embarrassing. I swear at no one in particular, and begin arduously checking each gray car to see if it's mine. I'm sure I look like a really tentative burglar. This sucks.

Car 1: Definitely not. It has one of those things brides wear on their thighs and then throw over their heads and whoever catches it gets married next hanging from the rear view mirror. (Side note: What the hell is that stupid thing called?)

Car 2: Nope. There's a cat carrier in the back seat.

Car 3: Maybe. It looks pretty clean. It's a Chevy. I eyeball it for a while. Then someone gets in it and drives off, while shooting me a peculiar look. I assume it was not mine.

Car 4: Too dirty and pockmarked with hail dents.

Car 5: Too messy on the inside. Looks like a homeless person might live in the back seat, and maybe even urinate back there.

Car 6: Nope. Small dog is in it. I contemplate for a moment that maybe I left my window open a little and a small stray dog hopped in looking for food or warmth or something. I decide this is unlikely.

Car 7: Eureka!! This is definitely it. I confidently stride up to the driver door, and stick my key in. I am perplexed when the door won't open. Why can't I get into my own car? I step back to reassess. I notice that the license plate says "ALL4U2." This is not my car. I kick the air, and then quickly pretend to be stretching my leg as some people walk by.

Car 8: Hell no! There's a plastic bucket filled with buttons on the passenger seat, and a Yanni CD case on the driver's seat. I decide that whoever owns this car sucks a lot.

On the 11th try I found my car. It's called a Chevy Aveo, not an Oreo, and it was parked right by the entrance to the gym and I had just missed it. I had spent about 15 minutes stumbling around the parking lot because I have no brain. This is why I get frustrated with myself sometimes. I've decided that I'll have to put a big red flag on my car, or a nutsack on the tailgate or something so this doesn't happen again. Sometimes it's rough being me...

My Mom's Lawnmower has a Drug Problem

So the other day my mother's lawn mower stopped working. A couple of friends of hers offered to fix it. This is a very nice story so far don't you think?

The people that were going to fix it were two very nice young men, and their offer to fix it was based out of the genuine goodness of their hearts, and the fact that they like my mom. This is still a really nice story!

The two nice young men were unfortunately in the process of smoking or shooting, (I wasn't privy to this much detail), copious quantities of methamphetamine. The story has taken a turn for the worse, although meth use does make any story more interesting, so that's good.

To this point we have a broken lawnmower, a mom who's grass is too long, and some well-intentioned but methed out young men with a keen eye for lawn maintenance. Just thought I'd recap that.

The two well-intentioned but methed out young men with a keen eye for lawn maintenance fixed up the lawnmower so that it worked again. The story has become heartwarming. My heart is atwitter.

Unfortunately, the lawnmower now has an outboard motor or something attached to it which causes it to fly forward at an alarming speed. According to my sources, when my mom tried to mow the yard, the lawnmower took off, dragged her around the lawn for a while, and then zoomed away down the road looking for other lawns to mow without the impediment of a person hanging behind it.

Yes, it's true, apparently my mom's lawnmower is on meth. She sent it to Lawnmower Hazelden, so hopefully when it comes back it'll be straight, and able to settle down long enough to just mow lawns, and it won't be so fidgety when she puts it in the garage. We can only hope and pray right now. Parents of appliances, please have "the talk" with your kids about the dangers of drugs. If it can help even one appliance, it will not have been in vain.

Brian Yells at Horses

One time I was driving the family around aimlessly probably to kill time until a sporting event, or in the unlikely hopes that the children would fall asleep and quit screaming at each other and trying to maim each other with whatever was in their reach from their car seats.

I stopped at a red light. To my left was a pasture filled with horses. They were standing there, munching the ground and looking stupid, and walking around pooping indiscriminately, as horses are prone to do. For no particular reason, I rolled down my window and yelled, "GIDDYUP!!" really loudly. The horses went bonkers and started running around and doing horse wheelies and whatnot.

This was unexpected and caused a lot of excitement, especially from the youngsters in the back. After that, whenever we'd drive by some horses, my son would shout at them, regardless of whether the windows were down or not.

Since he was pretty young, his pronunciation of "Horsies" came out sounding like "Foofies" so we got used to random exclamations from the back of "GIDDYUP FOOFIES!!" Sometimes there were foofies nearby, and sometimes not. Foofies became sort of incidental to the whole business of yelling really loud after a while.

So now, whenever I see a collection of horses, I always make sure to roll down my windows and shout "GIDDYUP FOOFIES!!" at them. This happens regardless of whether my kids are with me or not. Sometimes, when I'm in a particular mood, I add an "F" bomb as an adjective in there, just to spice things up.

This leads me to this morning. I was leaving the gym, feeling particularly strong and happy. Nearby the Lifetime Fitness in Savage, there is a random, fenced in field filled with a bunch of horses. I'm not sure why they're there, but there's a lot of them. So I came to the stop light, rolled down my window, and shouted, very loudly, "GIDDYUP YA FUCKIN' FOOFIES!!"

Right as I did that, a middle aged woman pulled up next to me. Her window was open because she was getting ready to flick a heater out the window. She looked at me with utter shock and disdain. Not wanting to feel embarrassed, I did the only thing I could think of. I said, "What are you looking at? Fuckin' foofie." Then I drove off laughing. I'm not sure what she thought of that whole confrontation, but I'm sure when she re-tells the story I will not be held in a positive light.

That's OK, I don't think screaming at a horse is against the law...

Fear and Loathing of Comp 101

Here's something I bet nobody knows about me. I suck the old hind tit at College Composition classes. It's not that this revelation is of any particular relevance or anything since my college days are 10 years behind me and I have no desire to go back, it's just a little odd considering I have this wildly succesful weblog that is, according to some "the second coming of the bible, but not in a sacreligious way" or "the dopest shit since Sarah, Plain and Tall'' or even "the culmination of what would happen if a Fire Monster had sex with Godzilla's bigger, less stable cousin and the baby came out and then choked them both to death with his penis and then started writing a blog." Uh.... I got all excited there reading those accolades and forgot what I was saying...





Oh yeah, so I sucked at Comp 101. I don't know why I was thinking about this, probably because I spend 2 hours or so a day reflecting on things that went askew of my plans in the past, and how I would approach them differently if the situation were to ever arise again. My solution usually involves cartoonish violence and/or death, pre-pubescent name calling, and sometimes, a complicated system of levers, pulleys, guy wires and buttresses. In lay terms, my solutions are friggin' sweet.





Anyhow, I even got two separate chances at Comp 101. You would have figured at least one would have gone well. Wrong as usual, you idiot. Didn't you figure that it couldn't have gone smoothly if I was writing about it? What are you, dumb or something? Wait, who am I talking to?





Chance #1 was in Junior College where I went for a year to play baseball. I quickly realized that I would rather be peed on repeatedly by an 80 year old man than matriculate there any longer than I had to. The college in question was filled with 5 types of students as far as I could tell.





1.) Really scary 25 year old knuckleheads and gangbangers whose conditions of parole required they attend secondary institutions, and scare the shit out of everybody there as frequently as possible.





2.) Women of unknown origin wearing full length burqas that showed only their eyes and foreheads. They made loud popping noises occasionally but otherwise were completely mute. I thought they were wizards or something.





3.) Trashy looking white girls that were 50 pounds overweight and brought their babies to class with them. I guarantee you that all those babies are now 15 year olds that know every single ingredient you need to make meth.



4.) Non-traditional jerk off old people who would show up to class dressed like they were going to a job interview (complete with an attache case filled with crumpled up newspapers or something) and then proceed to fuck up the curve by getting really high grades on everything. Hey Dingus, getting 100% vs 90% in Intermediate Algebra at the local JC is not going to land you any better of a job in the real world, but you are very likely to get a serious beatdown by group #1 if you don't quit fuckin' up the curve.



5.) ME.



So as I sat down to my class, it was kind of like prison. Don't make eye contact with the scary gang members, don't sit near the non-trads, so the gang members won't mistake you for one, avoid the wizards so you don't get turned into some ingredient that goes in a cauldron, and stay away from the trashy white women because both them and their babies are squawking incessantly for no good reason.



Anyhow, our first assignment was to write a paper about a book or a pamphlet or something. So I wrote what I thought was something fairly incisive and clever and turned it in. I got my grade back about a week later. 43%. Apparently I had forgotten to follow some rules regarding spacing and margins, and font, and bibliographies, and other shit that we all use A LOT in real life right? It's terrific that most everything I learned ceased being relevant the exact instant I learned it. But whatever, I did it wrong, I could accept that. So the next paper I wrote was done absolutely according to form, correct margins, a works cited page, etc. It was flawless, like a naked lady holding a burrito. I got my grade back. 44%. What?? Even the freakin' white trash babies had done better than me. I was going to fail this class!



Here's where I made one of my uncharacteristic brilliant decisions. Since I already had a good idea of where I was going to school the following year, and since my GPA was hovering right around the 2.0, baseball eligibility Mendoza line, and since the current season had just ended, I quit. I dropped all my classes thereby ensuring my GPA would drop no lower than it already was and guaranteeing admittance to the next school, along with baseball eligibility. I do a lot of really stupid things, but this choice was right on the money. On the flip side, I was embarrased to tell my Mom and Dad that I quit school, so for about 5 weeks I would get dressed and pretend to go to school, but instead I'd just go to Aquila, SLP's version of Rucker Park, and play basketball for a few hours and then come home. I always wondered why my Mom never asked me why I was drenched with sweat when I arrived home from school.



So then I went out to South Dakota for school, and did pretty well, so my cumulative GPA got up a little over 3.0, but the whole Comp 101 debacle still sat in the back of my head like a dirty secret, so I totally avoided taking it. Finally my 5th year of school, I decided I'd have to buckle down and take the class. I was being openly mocked by my friends because of my class schedule. I had 4 upper level business school electives.... and Comp 101. I even had to mock myself a little.



The first thing I noticed when I got to this class was that for basically everybody but me, this was their first college class. There were girls shrieking and giggling and pushing their desks together and writing their first name and then their boyfriends' last name and stuff like that.



The second thing I noticed was that the TA (listed as TBA on my schedule) was actually a year younger than me, was somebody I knew, and was a friend of mine's girlfriend. Or to put that another way she was a girl that he had dated once. Or to put it another way she was a girl that he had gone on one date with. Or to put it another way she was a girl he had had a sexual relationship with frequently and had taken her to Burger King to feed her once because all we had in the fridge was beer and empty ice cube trays. Or to put it another way, she was a girl he would call at 2:30 in the morning after he had drank 20 beers and eaten a giant vat of fettucini alfredo and was too bloated with food and booze to pass out yet and then would hide in the morning in the hopes that I would break down and drive her back to her sorority house and he wouldn't have to see her.



So with all this newly learned information I was practically ejaculating with anticipation for this class. So the TA/redundant one night stand comes in, and not only does she appear to have been shopping at the Lilith Sternin-Crane House of Style for her TA uniform, but she's also become an incredible hard ass.



Her: There will be no speaking out of turn, no talking without raising your hand. If you're late by 1 second it counts as a tardy, if you get 5 tardies your grade drops by a letter. Unexcused absences drop you a letter grade, etc etc.



Me: Um.... you left your underpants at my house last May. But you can't have them back. Thanks to you I now have a canopy bed. Oh, and come get your bike. It got all rusty cuz it laid outside all summer and I can't ride it to parties anymore and the landlord tripped on it.



It was weird. I had 4 senior level business school classes, and 1 high school class. And of course, while I did just fine with the 4 business school classes, my grades in Comp 101 were consistently D's and F's. I was barely hanging on to a passing grade that was inflated because of my spotless attendance that we got points for.



In my business school classes, if I had gotten a poor mark on something, I would generally go in and speak with the teacher about it, and we'd have a very congenial argument on the merits of my work which would generally result in an upwards revision of my grades, but in the Comp class, it seemed weirdly unconfortable to go talk to someone who was younger than me and whom I knew. I just figured she was going to get some sort of passive aggressive revenge on my buddy with me as the conduit by giving me poor grades. I had accepted this as fact when she asked to meet with me after class one day. I figured I was going to get harangued because Lisa Jo Johnson, the 18 year old from Sioux Falls with the sparkly purse and braces was doing two letter grades better than me. What I got was this:



Her: How do I get him to like me again?



Me: I don't think he really ever liked you in the first place.



Her: OK Mr. D Minus, thanks for the advice.



The lightbulb flickered on in my head. Then I got an idea. An awful idea. The Brian got a wonderful, awful idea. I'm not going to divulge what my idea was, but sufficed to say it involved my friend and her "making up" thanks to some really serious treasonous lying on my part, and I wound up with a solid B in that class.



So I got through the holy hell that is Beginning English Composition, but I still don't understand why I sucked at it so bad. Maybe I'll never know, or maybe it's as simple as a quote from a very wise friend of mine. "Sometimes you suck at stuff because you do." I like simplicity. I hope that's it.

Brian Dislikes Baseball Practice

Baseball practice started yesterday for me. That's a sure sign of spring, so it always makes me happy. A few of us get together and we throw the ball around, and we hit. Then we leave. It doesn't take too long, and it always reminds me of one thing, the fact that I am extremely thankful that I don't have to endure daily baseball practices anymore.

Although I love baseball itself, baseball practice is right up there with wading penis-deep into a pool of electric eels. There may not be a more boring sport to practice, especially in the winter, in the North.

Baseball practice in the winter in the North means that you have to find a dome or a fieldhouse or something to practice in which is dumb thing #1. You can't throw as far, you have to hit in a cage so you can't watch the balls fly, and there are invariably other sports teams practicing near you, so you're constantly squeezed for space.

Have you ever run to catch a fly ball and smashed into a track girl running hurdles? I have.

Have you ever hit a softball player in her ample buttocks with an errant throw? I have.

Have you ever tripped over the Associate Athletic Director while running sprints and then yelled at him to "get his fat ass out of the way" and then been punished by having to run more sprints until your legs felt like they were going to fall off and you felt like you were going to take a big involuntary diarrhea in Lane 6? I have done this as well.

All this makes me very glad that I don't have daily baseball practices anymore. You know what else I won't miss?

-Practicing at 6:00 AM and having a fly ball hit me directly in the head because I was still a little loopy from the bar the night before.

-Practicing at 10:00 PM and not being able to get to sleep until 2 in the morning and then stumbling into class at 9 AM looking like I'd stayed up all night shooting meth rectally with Courtney Love.

-Running stairs at the DakotaDome. This was a form of conditioning, and also a way to keep us from smashing into other sports athletes because nobody else practiced on the stairs. Usually about once a year somebody would trip and fall into the row of seats below and get a really big bruise. That was the highlight.

-Other forms of conditioning. I never understood why we had to run so much for baseball. Isn't 360 feet the farthest we'd ever have to run without stopping? Apparently, we were training for the time when we had to play in a desert with no fences that sloped downwards for 4 straight miles. Some of our players couldn't hit a ball more than 25% of the time, but they could sure post a great 10K.

-Constantly deferring to the women's basketball team. I know they were the revenue sport and we weren't but still, I could have assembled a team that would have beat them 100-4. I shouldn't have to wait for anything for anybody I could whoop that bad at anything.

So thank you to the Gods of things that are fair and just for not making go through baseball practice very often anymore, because it's very likely that I would have sawed off the head of some unsuspecting athlete by now, and that just ain't how I like to roll.

The Cat Poop Dilemma

I'm sad to report that both of our dogs favorite food is cat poop. I'm pretty sure that they would rather eat cat poop than steak or burglars or whatever. This presents an obvious problem considering we have a cat. If we didn't have a cat they'd never know how tasty cat poop is, because it's not like I could go buy cat poop at the grocery store. I don't even think they sell that at Aldi.

Anyhow, we have a cat, she poops frequently, and then the dogs, especially stupid Polo, sprint down to the catbox and hungrily gobble up poop. Then he runs back upstairs, giddy with delight, with fecal remnants stuck in his gums and tries to lick us. Fortunately it's easy to tell when he's done this because the entire room he's in begins to quickly smell like a train station men's lavatory if a homeless person died in it. So usually I spend the next hour actively avoiding Polo and attempting to shame him into never eating cat poop again

Me: Polo, you're such a moron! What kind of animal eats something that comes out of someone's butt? You should be ashamed.

Polo: Arf

Me: I mean seriously, we paid good money for you, is this any way to repay us?

Polo: Woof

Me: You're a gross idiot!

Polo: Bark.

Then I say this poem to him that I made up to really illustrate the gravity of constantly eating turds:

If you eat cat poop from downstairs
I will not get annoyed
I'll simply take you to the pound
And I'll have you destroyed

You'd think all these threats would really make him think twice about indiscriminately munching crap. After all, it works with the kids. But you'd be sorely mistaken, because it keeps happening. Seriously, why are we so lenient with our dogs? If my wife ate my poop we'd be divorced. After the first time she did it. No marriage counselor in the world is going to help reconcile that.

So I came up with this great idea to buy the cat a fancy new catbox with a cover on it. The cover had a little hole in it so that cat could sneak in and poop and Polo wouldn't be able to get his big stupid head in it. The problem was solved and I was a genius for figuring it out. I felt a little like Sir Isaac Newton when he invented gravity and people no longer just up and floated away.

But of course, since I'm an idiot and not a genius, my foolproof solution became anything but that. Yes, the cat figured out how to crawl in the hole and poop, but, unbeknownst to me, she doesn't like to pee where she poops. With no other bathroom than the poop hole box, she had no where else to pee but in the deep crevices of the furnace room, where I'm certain a hobo once squatted, and also on top of the poop hole box. It's pretty frustrating, especially when you're feeling all smart, to come down to clean the catbox and find a big stinky yellow river floating on top of it and dripping into the poop hole.

So, my solution was to go get the old catbox out of the garbage, and fill it with litter, and then she'd have a separate place to pee. I felt really super smart again, like Ken Jennings smart.

Me: I'll take "Really Smart, Awesome People with Gigantic Heads" for 2000 Alex.

Alex Trebek: "This guy is the smartest, most innovative man in the world in terms of cat bathroom issues"

Me: Who is Brian?

Alex Trebek: Right.

The cat messed up my delusions of grandeur. Since the old catbox had been the catbox she pooped in, she now just continued peeing on top of the new catbox and pooping in the old catbox which was easily accessible to Polo's mouth. So I'm right back where I started plus I'm out 40 bucks for this deluxe catbox with crystal clean litter inside of it and cat pee flowing on top of it that gets rave reviews on the internet. Suck my butt, internet reviewers, you have no brains.

Basically, I'm going to have to either kill the cat, or the two dogs, or just start a urine emporium in my basement. This is retarded.

Olympic Memories

I spent parts of the last 2 weeks watching the Winter Olympics, because my wife likes them and I broke the remote because I got angry at a basketball game so we're pretty much stuck with whatever is on since I'm too lazy to get up, walk over to the TV, and change the channel. If we were watching a show about old ladies knitting booties for charity, and a naked lady gymnastics competition was on another channel, and I didn't have a remote, we would continue to watch the old ladies forever.

Anyhow, I watched a lot of the Olympics by default, and here are just a few random things I noticed.

-Figure skating is really boring. I understand very well that I can't flip around 3 times in the air, or even stay on my skates for more than 30 seconds, and I also can't pour myself into a tight, faux-fur laden, sequiny ensemble without looking like Elton John on a really bloated and extra gay day. That said, it's still boring, and the programs are way too long. The skaters spend an inordinate amount of time skating around vogueing and flapping their arms, and not enough time flipping and spinning in 4000 circles without getting dizzy somehow. And the top American competitor, Rachel Flatt, looked like Jim Valvano. Couldn't we have gotten somebody less atrocious looking?

-Dick Button has to be 80, but he looks very young, and speaks very eloquently, not the slow, slurred version of English that many 80 year old's talk. But why was this young acting, fast talking, intelligent old man wearing gigantic black shoes? The soles had to be a foot thick. It looked like the shoes they give to those people who have elephantitis of the legs. What's up Dick? Why are your shoes so frigging huge? And do people make fun of you because the first two syllables in your name are Dickbutt? Dick Butkus never got over that.

-Biathalon is a make-believe sport. I think a crazy person came up with this idea. Let's ski down a hill and then shoot stuff with a rifle, and then, do it again. One time, when I was 10 I came up with this game where I would pick up my cat, throw him over the shower curtain, and then sprint outside as fast as I could and make three baskets. My record was a little under 25 seconds. I think that if Biathalon can be an Olympic event, then Cat-Fling Basketball should at least be sanctioned by some governing body somewhere.

-The USA women's skiers are a bunch of teary-eyed, soap opera sluts. Geez, what drama, and I'm not talking about skiing. Lindsey Vonn is a prima donna according to her teammates. Julia Mancuso is always crying. Vonn's husband is accusing the track makers of designing the track so it would favor their home country skiers. Either have a big fight at the bottom of the hill, or make out with each other at the bottom of the hill, or just ski, or do all three, I don't care.

-Skeleton is for crazy people. The death of the Georgian kid notwithstanding, going down the hill on a tiny sled that looks like it was built by elves on heroin at 90 miles per hour does not sound like a good idea to me, even for a gold medal. I think I would rather run naked through a village of Penis Cannibals. (Side note: I'm not sure that Penis Cannibals exist, but I still worry about them)

-The closing ceremonies were remarkably dumb with the exception of the giant inflatable beavers, which I thought were aptly pointed out and appreciated by Bob Costas. Everything else was pointless. William Shatner was not funny. The mom from Home Alone?? That's the most famous Canadian you could get to speak? And Michael J Fox must have been on some serious Anti-shaking drugs, because you could barely see him twitch, which is one of his coolest attributes, if you ask me.

So now the Olympics is over but Channel 11 is still on because I haven't worked up the energy to turn the channel yet. Maybe I will someday, or maybe I'll just hire a giant inflatable beaver to do it.

Brian at the Zoo.

It's become apparent to me over the past year or so that I go to the zoo way too much. We all have things we do too much, but mine isn't even interesting. I don't masturbate in public too much, I don't poop 12 times a day, and I don't spend too much money on Austrian hookers, but I do go to the zoo too much. Pretty lame.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this. After all, I have 2 little kids, and for some reason, as a society we've decided that staring at sleeping wildlife is educational, not to mention the fact that we live 5 miles away from the zoo and have a membership there.

Pretty much without fail, the zoo experience goes like this: We get to the zoo, the kids run ahead, one of them falls and cries and wants a band-aid, we stare at the red-butted monkeys for a while, we go in the Tropics trail, the kids race through the exhibit, we go to the Minnesota Trail, the kids race even faster because it's cold in there and they stare at no animals because all they're interested in is getting to the next animal stamp as quickly as possible, we stare at the dolphins, one of the kids throws a tantrum because we have to leave, and then we leave. That's pretty much status quo for the zoo.

In fact, I bet I can tell you, in chronological order, what we do in the Tropics Trail. It goes like this.

-Enter
-See the large lizard in an exhibit with silhouettes of large, extinct animals.
-Bronze tortoise statue that the kids always feel the need to climb on until one of them falls off and cries
-Mynah bird that never says anything even though mynah birds are notoriously vocal
-Egg scultures that kids manhandle and sometimes lick, much to my chagrin
-2 different colored lemurs that occasionally screech loudly and make everyone think that the zoo animals are staging a riot.
-Black and white monkeys that aren't there anymore, because according to the sign left by the zookeeper, they've been at the "doctor" for 3 months. They're probably dead.
-In the same enclosure are flamingos and ducks. This is a common theme at this portion of the zoo. The kids try to stand on one leg like a flamingo. They fall over. They cry.
-A cave that the kids run in to. Then they pop out the wrong end and for a second they are lost. This frightens us as parents.
-A bird with a gigantic nose. This is a new gigantic nosed bird because I know, since I go to the zoo too much, that the old gigantic nosed bird died. From a stuffy gigantic nose.
-A tree kangaroo that never does anything. I remarked once that it was a statue, and a woman next to me reassured her children by stating, "That man is a liar honey." I felt bad.
-A big fat cow looking thing with a small elephant trunk called a Tapir. The Tapir smells great, if you think a dead old lady who's been laying in a shallow pool of fetid water in the desert for 4 days smells great. In the same exhibit is an animal that looks like a big black house cat (I forget it's name) and smells like popcorn. Another double animal exhibit?? I wonder if the zoo people were carrying the popcorn cat thing and then it started scratching and hissing at them and they dropped in into the Tapir exhibit and were just like "Whatever. It can stay there, it scratched my arm."
-Some tortoises that don't hold anyone's attention for long because the most exciting things they do are turn their heads and chew lettuce. That's pretty boring.
-The upper portion of the coral reef. There's a huge glare coming from the top of the zoo so you can't see anything
-The lower portion of the coral reef. This part is underwater and everyone hangs out there. Sometimes there's a scuba diver with a microphone in there and he feeds fish and answers the same three stupid questions from kids, in slightly different variations:
1.) Do the fishes eat food?
2.) What kind of fish is that big shark?
3.) Are you a swamp monster?
-Some really smelly warthogs. The warthogs never move but you can tell they are alive because they smell like inside buns left on the counter overnight.
-Another double animal exhibit. A red panda who is always sleeping on a tree branch. In the back portion are a few goats seemingly stuck high on tiny ledges on this make believe mountain. I think they act as sherpas if the red panda ever wants to go on an expedition. Or maybe they're just goats.
-Another dark portion. It's under construction, so there's nothing in it except another lemur, and a very large snake that is always curled up in a tiny ball. This is the portion of the zoo that we lost my grandmother in in 1985. We went in, she was with us, we popped out, she was gone. She was lost for like 3 hours too. We almost just gave up and left without her. Lord knows what she doing during that time. Probably sitting in a chair smoking cigarettes and doing crossword puzzles. Since then I've had a profound fear of getting lost in the dark part of zoos. It's not as profound as my fear of big, violent lesbians, but still...
-A section filled with birds that you can't really see because there are too many trees in the way.
-A door made of hanging pieces of bamboo that you have to smash through, so it feels like you're entering a fortune teller's lair. The kids make sure to smash through the bamboo repeatedly until I threaten to beat them about the buttocks if they don't stop.
-Some poison frogs. I know they are poison because they are brightly colored and because they are actually called "Poison Frogs"
-Quadruple animal exhibit alert. A sloth who really might be dead, some more tiny monkeys, a couple of birds, and the infamous red-rumped agouti all share an enclosure. Did the zoo run out of funding or something?
-Finally, another double animal enclosure. An anteater, and some more tiny monkeys share space.

By the end the kids are practically sprinting to get to God knows where, but they always want to stop at that stupid coin thing, where you put a coin in and then in rolls around in a circle for a while before falling into a hole. That stupid thing is like crack to kids. We never have change so they always wind up having a big fit as we're leaving Tropics Trail.

See, I go to the zoo too much. But just to prove to you what a moron I am, we're going on a Disney Cruise in April, and what is the shore excursion we signed up for in the Bahamas? That's right, the zoo. I'm dumb.

A Day in the Life...

Sometimes people categorize me as strange or odd. Some even think I might just be crazy. But, I'm not any different from the next guy. How, pray tell, do I know this? Well, I've decided to enlighten you with a glimpse of a typical day for me, which should erase any doubts you may have. This was what I did yesterday.

Wake up
Pee for 48 seconds, wonder how many glasses I could fill up with that much pee
Get dressed to go work out
Sit down and watch a show about white street gangs while I wait for the car to warm up
Fall asleep
Wake up and realize I have no time for the gym
Go to let the dog inside and realize he's standing next to me
Drag him into his kennel while he's shreiking in anguish and biting my hand
Curse him loudly and kick his kennel
Leave
Turn around, forgot cell phone
Leave
Turn around, forgot wallet
Scream in anger
Leave
Get gas
Get accosted at the gas station by a worker because I am kicking off my klinkers from the bottom of my car into his parking lot (Side note: Klinkers are those icy, snow chunks that hang off your car, by your wheels)
Yell back at him, buy beef jerky
Drive in miserable, snowy rush hour
Scream at slowness of commute
Play "Bitches Ain't Shit" by Dr. Dre seven consecutive times
Shout "Blizzards Ain't Shit" more than seven consecutive times
Honk at everyone in anger
Get to work
Work a little, and also watch Super Bowl commercials
Develop a crush on Danica Patrick
Work some more
Play online Scrabble
Cook soup in microwave, spraying chunks everywhere
Eat Chunky Soup, Extreme Chicken Alfredo flavor
Decide it's not "extreme" or even "tasty"
Work more
Play "Bitches Ain't Shit" on Youtube
Notice that my jeans have a large hole in them that I could theoretically let my penis dangle out of
Contemplate doing this for the rest of the day
Decide against it because I'm not sure if snow on the penis would be even a little OK
Turn down a walk-in salesperson who wants to sell me a reservation to play paint ball on his farm in Carver.
Buy a spooky, noisemaking flashlight from him instead (Side note: What kind of a weird combo sales package is this? The flashlight makes 8 spooky noises like a witch cackling and a door squeaking. Odd.)
Leave in a blizzard
Decide I need food
Stop at Subway, chatting with sandwich artist about the fact that she has a tattoo of a mermaid on her serving hand.
Frighten her
Leave with food
Eat it quickly spilling lots of lettuce in my car
Swear about this loudly
Think about Danica Patrick while throwing lettuce out the window
Play "Bitches Ain't Shit" several more times
Honk at someone angrily for having Packers decals on his car.
Have a long argument with myself about the merits of knowing how to play the fife
Lose the argument
Watch a guy nearly drive off an embankment because he needed to cut in front of a car to save 20 seconds
Condemn his foolishness and short sighted nature
Get very angry with a man shoveling his driveway because he's home am I'm not
Finally get home.
Yell at the air in frustration
Shovel snow like a crazy person, flinging it everywhere like a monkey flinging poo
Get nervous because the dog is out in the yard unleashed, and looks as though he wants to run and bite every car that comes by
Calmly tell him, "Polo, you idiot, cars are not food."
Notice that the neighbor, (the professor's wife), is stuck in her own driveway
Laugh at her, then mosey over to help
Get there just as she gets unstuck
Tell her, "Oh, you're unstuck, I was just revving up my loins to help push."
Watch her back away in fear and confusion
Advise my daughter NOT to build a snow fort by the place that Polo just took a big dookie while gearing up for the next approaching vehicle.
Become dismayed when she picks the poop up with a little red shovel and prances around with it.
Walk inside and get ordered by my son to play MarioKart
Whoop him severely and talk trash about it
Get whooped by him and pout and kick the couch
Decide that I am probably not teaching him great sportsmanship
Pout and kick the couch over this realization
Get presented a gift of Exotic Sea Salt by my wife as an 1st date anniversary/fake 1st date anniversary/Valentines Day present
Panic because I have nothing thoughtful to give back to her
Pout and kick the couch because of this
Eat dinner and sprinkle exotic sea salt on all my food
Text my sister as to the condition of her sprained ankle that has a walking boot on it
Make up a new word, "Booterus-A uterus with a boot on it"
Play more MarioKart with my son to satisfy his addiction
Sit on the couch fiddling around on the internet while my son, daughter, and wife fall into a coma watching Food Network next to me
Hum "Bitches Ain't Shit" while pooping
Get mad at online Scrabble because words like "Whiteboy" "Buttfish" and "Ballhair" are not recognized Scrabble words.
Kick the couch a little more
Drink a Purple Mountain Dew. Realize that I have no idea what "Voltage" is supposed to taste like.
Watch out the window and root for people to slip down the hill and get stuck in their cars
Cheer loudly and wake up the family when one does
Boo loudly when he escapes
Carry the entire family up to their respective beds
Poke myself in the eye taking out my contacts
Lay down in bed and realize I am laying on a tiny stuffed dog
Cast dog into closet
Toss and turn for a while thinking about Danica Patrick
Fall asleep and dream of Dragons

See, that's entirely normal.

My Brushes with Mortality

You ever almost die? I almost died the other day. It was last friday and I was driving to a friend's house to play poker. Before I went I stopped at a gas station and bought a Cherry Crush. I was really excited because I'd never seen a Cherry Crush before and, as everybody knows, any kind of Cherry flavored soda is really awesome and sweet.

So I was driving on a county road, happily swilling my cherry flavored beverage, and loving life when all of a sudden I got a really bad ear itch. It was something that needed scratching immediately. So I started itching my ear. To do this I had to transfer the cherry pop to my left hand. I was now steering the car and clinging to my pop with one hand. Then the pop started to slip out of my hand. Being that it was a terrific, new, potentially rare kind of pop that I may never have the opportunity to drink again, I instinctively clasped my legs together so that I could catch my soda between my knees before it fell on the dirty interior of the car and spilled all over the place.

Unbeknownst to me however, my left leg was resting directly against the underside of the steering wheel, so slamming my legs together caused my knee to turn the wheel left very violently, aiming the car right towards the concrete divider in the center of the road. Now, because I was lucky I managed to catch my pop, grab it with my ear-itching hand, and then grab the steering wheel with my other hand and correct my direction back towards the middle of the road all in the same motion. I came about a millimeter from the divider and I spilled a little pop on my crotch, but other than that I was fine. But it could have been way worse. I could have whacked the divider going 55 and then overcorrected trying to get back on the road and flipped my SUV and crushed my neck and died face down in the snow, and nobody would have ever known what the hell I was doing.

It got me to thinking about how many times I've almost died based on pure stupidity or weird luck. I thought of about three different examples.

1.) Age: 9
Nearly died from: Hanging/ or serious head trauma

I had just finished playing a rec league basketball game at my elementary school and, along with some friends, was getting ready to watch the game after us. It featured 3rd graders from my own school, so it held a certain level of interest to me. We would sit on the stage facing the game and cheer or boo, or whatever. While the teams were warming up we spent most of our time screwing around on the stage. There was a big port-a-pit back there for reasons unknown, and it was always fun to launch yourself onto the port-a-pit because it felt really comfy to land on. So during one of my forays onto the pit, I got a really big running start and dove, but because I had such a head of steam, I dove a little far and hit the corner. Landing on the corner made the port-a-pit shoot me off at a weird angle, backwards, and towards the edge of the stage. Realizing that I was in trouble, I tried to flip my body around in mid-flight to see where I was going. Just as I did that, I got caught by my neck in the rope that was used to pull open the stage curtains. I was officially hanging myself. Just as I started to die my neck dislodged itself from the rope and I landed on my butt, about two inches from the edge of the stage. Now the weird thing is, if I hadn't almost hung myself, I would have flown off the stage backwards and probably cracked my head open. (Side note: My mom was always warning me about cracking my head open, usually wide open. Until I was 24 I believed that you could actually hit your head and it would crack wide open like an egg, and your brain would just fall out with a loud "PLOP" . I'm glad I never saw that. Ick!) Anyway, I only hung myself a little bit, and I didn't fall off the stage and crack my head wide open so my brain plopped out. Instead I ran back and jumped on the port-a-pit a little bit more.

2.) Age: 16
Nearly Died From: Crushed by a Semi

I was driving to school one spring day. I had just gotten my license about two weeks earlier and I was feeling pretty geeked about my new found autonomy. To drive to school, I had to drive through Highway 7. There was no overpass or anything, so you had to wait for a stop light. I got about 3 blocks from the stop light, when I heard a buzzing coming from behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and I saw, to my horror, that there was a hornet flying around in my back seat. Now, people that know me know that I hate hornets more than just about anything, because they've always loved to sting me. For some reason mosquitos love to bite me because I taste good, and hornets love to sting me because I must feel really good on their stupid hornet butts to sting. I immediately started to freak out, roll down all my windows that I could reach, and pay complete and absolute attention to what the hornet was doing. This meant I was paying no attention to where I was going. Then I heard a bunch of honking, including one big giant horn honking. Screw you people, there's a hornet in my car. I finally looked up to see where I was after the hornet stopped flying around for a minute and was instead crawling around on my back window. I was all the way across Highway 7, I had gone right through the red light, and I had come within about 2 seconds of being smashed by a semi-truck. The cars in the left lane had stopped and honked at me but the semi probably couldn't stop that fast so instead he just honked really loudly. I stopped my car and got out to ponder all this, and also to give the hornet a chance to leave, and then when he finally flew out I stood there a minute, and then shrugged my shoulders and got back in my car and drove to school. Let me just say this for posterity: Hornets are punk ass bitches!

Age: 21
Nearly Died From: Broken Throat.

I was at baseball practice and we were all in lines playing catch before the actual practice started. Next to me was a teammate of mine named Pat. Pat was a young kid, and we loved making fun of him because his name was Pat, so we'd yell stuff at him that the androgynous "Pat" character from Saturday Night Live, played by Julia Sweeney, used to say, such as "I forgot my travel baaaaggg" and "My partner's name is Chris". Hey, baseball practice is pretty boring, it was something to do. In this instance, I threw the baseball to my partner Mitch, and then turned to Pat and said, "PAAAAAATTTTTTT!!!!" He did not appreciate this which made it even more fun. So I was staring and laughing at him, and I forgot that Mitch was throwing the ball back until he hit me directly in the larynx with it. Instantly I forgot about how much fun I was having teasing Pat because I was very concerned with the new reality that I could not breathe. You ever try to breathe and you can't? It's gay! So I bent over, holding my throat, and started to die. After about 10 seconds my throat opened up a little so I could sort of breathe, but still not well enough to not die. In the midst of slowly dying of asphyxiation, I thought to myself, "Hmm, the throat is sort of flexible, I wonder if I could choke it open?" That's what I did. I began choking myself and in doing so I opened up my esophagus more so that I could breathe well enough to not die. After about 5 minutes of sitting on a training table choking myself, my throat opened up enough by itself so that I didn't need to choke myself anymore. I never forgave Pat for that. He almost killed me!

It's kind of weird when you think about it. I bet the graveyards are full of people lying there dead just because they were acting dumb at the wrong time. And here I am. I guess that means there must be a greater plan for me. Either that or it's just a big coincedence. Whatever, I don't care, I'm going to go eat a bagel.