Many Reasons to Love Lobsters.

One of my favorite things in all the world is lobsters. Lobsters are probably the coolest animal in the universe. They are the absolute antithesis to hornets. When I was a kid (and a teenager) I used to stare at the lobsters in the tank and think to myself, "If there is a God, he is probably a big lobster." So far my theory of a Lobster God has not been met with widespread acceptance, but give it time. I would assume that within 30 years, most churches will look like large aquariums. The reasons for lobster superiority are many.

1.) They taste delicious- Lobsters are very tasty. Plus, what other animal do you eat by cracking open its back and butt shell? A very great way to eat something, I must say.

2.) They defend themselves by pinching- Any animal that has managed to stay alive all these years whose only means of defense is pinching is pretty great, not to mention the fact that they are indiscriminate pinchers. That's why they have rubber bands on their claws even when they're in the tank with only a bunch of other lobsters. Because they will swim around and pinch anything in the way. Awesome!

3.) People are afraid of them- It's a known fact that 67% of people (94% in Maine) are deathly afraid of lobsters. People actually dream about a marauding horde of lobsters coming to get them. When you're scarier than Al-Qaeda to the general population and your only weapon is pinchers, you are awesome.

4.) They look like tiny monsters- This probably contributes to the reason that people are so cavalier about dropping them alive into a pot of boiling water. Nobody feels any remorse about the painful death of a monster. Remember when Jaws got blown up. Roy Scheider did not feel bad about that.

5.) They look just as scary as a baby lobster- Lobsters are one of the only things that don't look cute as a baby. They look scary and menacing, just on a smaller scale. This is awesome.

6.) They would make a great pet- This is sort of obvious, but imagine how great it would be to be having a party where everybody was constantly on the lookout for your pet lobster:

Me: Lift your feet, lobster coming through!
Everybody: AAAAHHHHHHHH!!!
Me: Awesome!!

Yes, a lobster roaming the house would certainly make you the talk of the town. Burglars would hear through the burglar grapevine and would most certainly not even contemplate burgling your house. Not with a free range lobster lurking about.

7.) When your pet lobster died, you could just eat him- Isn't it a pain when your pet dies? You either have to pay the hospital to dispose of the carcass, or you have to dig a hole in your backyard and bury him. Digging a hole sucks. A pet lobster is the cure all.

So as you can see, lobsters are perfect in most every way, so when you see one, make sure to say "Hi." It might just save you a pinching.

Somebody's watching ME

I'm not 100% certain about this, but I'm a little bit suspicious that a guy might be stalking me at the gym. I am not happy about this. It all started a few weeks ago. I was in the locker room, looking at either the ceiling or the floor in the hopes of avoiding all the gross naked men with their micropenises sauntering back and forth past me.

I had been especially successful at this that day and so I was feeling pretty accomplished when somebody said, "Hey, what happened to your back?" I turned to see this little guy smiling at me and pointing at my torso. This made me uncomfortable. I could tell immediately that he was the type of person who in high school would have tagged along on everything any group of people did until somebody said to him, "WHY ARE YOU HERE?" and then he'd feel all stupid but continue to tag along anyway. At least he had underpants on. But, being the extremely friendly person I am, I told him it was a heart surgery scar. (Side note: As a refresher, I had heart surgery in 1996 and I now have an 18 inch scar shaped like a sickle on my back.) He said this:

Dude: Wow, cool!
Me: Wasn't that great really. Kind of hurt a lot. Morphine was fun though.
Dude: Do you have any restrictions because of it?
Me: Well, I'm not supposed to eat rat poison or jump off of skyscrapers anymore. HAHA (My obvious attempt to scare him away with humor that only I find funny)
Dude: HAW HAW HAW. I was just asking because my mother's friend....blah blah blah.... herpes....blah blah blah.....sexually attracted to snakes... blah blah blah... surgery in a barn..... blah blah blah.. big scar.. blah blah..... can't go out in daylight... blah blah.... pancreas explodes, etc.

I realize that the whole time he's been talking I've been staring into my own gym bag pretending to look for nothing. Unfortunately, this guy is one of those people that doesn't understand things like body language so he is unfazed at my blatant attempt to get him the fuck out of my space, plus he kept trying to somehow stare around me to see the scar and he was smiling the whole time too which was creepy.

Dude: Hi, I'm Paul!
Me: (Think of a fake name, think of a fake name.) Hi, I'm....... Brian. (CRAP!!)
Paul: Nice to meet you. Well, gotta go (insert an overtly gay workout platitude here; rip my abs, shred my quads, max my glutes, etc).

I don't remember what exactly he said, but it was the linguistic equivalent of drying your pubic hair with a community hairdryer. It made me cringe. Then he was gone, much to my relief, and after a while I even began mocking myself for letting Paul bug me that much. All was well until 3 days later. I was standing on a treadmill about to run someplace when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned and nobody was there. Then I heard a "HAW HAW HAW" and he was on the other side of me.

Paul: Gotcha. How ya doin Brian?
Me: Oh, hey.
Paul: Went to Hooters this weekend!
Me: Good work.
Paul: Chicks there are PHENOMENAL!
Me: Yeah.
Paul: Cardio huh?
Me: Yep.
Paul: Have fun chief!

I realized I don't like being called "Chief."

So since then I've had about 6 encounters with this guy and he's always all friendly and in your face and I don't mean to sound mean but I don't ever want to talk to this guy again or look at him or think about him, but I don't really know how that's going to happen. He seems to have an innate sense for when I'm going to be at the gym. It's like when girls live together and begin getting their periods at the same time. He's just like a period. I'm afraid that the only way to get him to leave me alone is to murder him, and from what I'm told that's kind of risky and messy.

So if anybody has any ideas on how to make Paul go away forever that don't involve the spilling of blood, please let me know.

I Get Trapped Downstairs

Here's something that may have happened to you before. Or to put it another way, here's something that definitely hasn't happened to you before because you aren't doomed to forever be dropped into strange situations through no fault of your own like I am.

I had just gotten back from going for a run. It had been a fairly long run and I was now sweaty. I had also been doing laundry the whole afternoon. Are you with me so far? So I had done most of the laundry downstairs and put it in our bedroom, which is upstairs. I only had one load left to wash. Since I was in sweaty clothes, I took my clothes off and put them in the washing machine with the rest of the last load. I am now naked. I pause for a while and bask in my nakedness. I laugh at myself ("HAHA, you're naked!"). Then, after basking and laughing at myself naked for a while, I begin to go upstairs to get some clothes on. This is where things take a wrong turn.

I notice silhouettes at the door. They ring the doorbell. I shriek like a girl and sprint back downstairs to hide. I whack my knee against the doorway really hard. I do not notice this until much later. I sneak back to the doorway and peek up the stairs. The silhouettes catch me in this cowardly act. They see my face and my arm. With renewed vigor, they begin to pound on my door. I realize I have no clothes downstairs and the only way to get clothes is to go up the stairs and pass right by them. This is not an option! I am trapped naked in the lower level of my own house. Minutes pass. I am sitting on a tile floor in the downstairs entryway. I am cold. I have also noticed that my knee hurts horribly. I am not certain why. I stand up and peek around the corner again. The silhouettes are gone. I breathe a sigh of relief and begin to walk up the stairs. Then another silhouette comes to the door. AAAH!! I scream again and run back down the stairs. This person has definitely seen me, possibly my butt too. He knocks again. I contemplate putting on a big coat and going to the door. I decide I would look like a child molester if I did this. I do nothing. I am still cold. After a few minutes I peek up the stairs again. The person is gone. I realize there is a large basket of clothes sitting like 2 feet away from me full of my sweatpants and shirts. I kick the basket as hard as I can. I then yell a swear word that rhymes with "sacrifice bunt." Then, as calmly as possible, I walk upstairs and get dressed.

The only moral of this story that I can think of is this: Never be naked. Ever.

Inspirational E-Mails

Recently I've been getting a rash of these so-called "inspirational e-mails." They are ususually a load of stupid paradoxes that are designed to make you think about what a sorry, uncaring jerk you are and how you can be so much better if you just stop and try. Maybe that is true, but if you really need to get your inspiration from e-mails that have been mass forwarded by your Aunt Judy, you probably have a lot of other things you need to fix first.

Plus they all make the writer invariably sound like a gigantic pussy. Then they get attributed to some famous person, (i.e. George Carlin, Andy Rooney, Gallagher II, Charles Manson, ALF) and the famous person in question either angrily chokes on his vomit, or, if the person is dead, comes out of their grave and starts killing drunken gravediggers and horny teens getting their freak on in the cemetary. Then we finally learn that the actual author is some holier-than-thou pastor, who loves to write sanctimonious, self-righteous e-mails and has recently been busted for having gay sex in a public restroom while high off crystal meth.

We love too little
But argue too much
We're deep pocketed
But shallow-minded
We're high on drugs
But low on self worth
We kill our young
But don't save our whales
We pity our criminals
But condemn our creator
We eat to excess
But neglect the starving children
We pollute our oceans
But drink bottled water
We pay our prostitutes
And prostitute for pay
We obsess about the almighty dollar
But ignore the almighty scholar
We love Sin City
We hate Generosity

Then it usually ends with a head scratching platitude like "There is no greater good than what's within you." Then it says to send this to 800 people or my nutsack will spontaneously detach from my body and run away.

Well people, I still have my nutsack, and I still think these e-mails are awful. So please don't send them to me, even if it costs you a nutsack. Thanks.

Top of the Head Syndrome.

Today I woke up with a really bad earache, and also a bad top-of-the-head ache. I haven't had an earache since I was about 9 and to my knowledge I've never had a top-of-the-head ache. It wasn't like a true headache, it was more like some crazy little person had beat me with a mallet right on the place where my soft spot used to be when I was a baby. It was a little weird, but also funny.

I thought about this guy I know who woke up one morning with a bloody top-of-the-head. Kind of like a bloody nose, except he never had a bloody nose, only a bloody top head. It makes me wonder if our two conditions were somehow similar, like maybe the crazy little person had been poking him in the head with the sharp end of a beam compass all night

So this was a pretty pointless post, but one more thing I'd like to point is that if you write about your top-of-the-head ache, it hurts again. Thank goodness I only mentioned my earache in passing....Oh crap...

Creepy Children's Books

What is the deal with kids books these days? I take my kids to the library and there are tons of books about horrible things that can happen to them. I guess the idea behind books like this is to make a profit off of how dysfunctional families have become, or, as the writers would tell you, "to help a child understand that he/she is not alone in this scary situation." Yeah right. It's really creepy to peruse the sections and see:

Where did Daddy go?
Mommy went to Heaven
What's that lump?
What's a Divorce?
Daddy smokes Mary Jane.
Grampie lives at the Nursing Home.
What's a psychiatrist?
My new wheelchair.
Spot lives underground now.
Uncle Dave touched me.
Daddy's in prison
Jeffy drinks poison.
Rabies hurts!

And on and on. Any bizarre occurance probably has a children book written about it.

Dragons live in my underpants.
Policemen killed my dad.
My toys tell me to burn things
Uncle Frank has two heads
My friend has no legs
I met Satan at Daycare.
I forgot how to breathe.
My wee-wee smells terrible
Gramma's in a coma
Why don't I have lungs?
I go potty in a bag.
My family are nudists.
Spider bites make me die.
What's wrong with his face?
I have no torso.
Cousin Jim has antlers.
I see dead people.
I see red people.
Why is daddy kissing that man?
Mommy is naked on TV.
Great Aunt Velma got stuck in a chimney.
Why does gramma smell bad?

And the list goes on. By the way, all you aspiring children's book writers, don't steal any of these ideas.