Stories of America: The Death Slide

 Have you ever seen a ride at an amusement park and thought to yourself: "that ride is too hardcore, I shouldn't do that"? I have. That's because I'm a pussy. Pussyland is actually quite nice. It's safe and you don't need to worry about ever disappointing yourself because eventually you die on the inside. Thankfully, I have a reverse Jiminy Cricket in the form of Zooz. Zooz is the human version of lack of impulse control and although he can be a complete and utter tool as a result of it, it also means that he's often quite fun. This is especially applicable in amusement parks where he somehow managed to convince me to take a fifty meter waterslide which ends in three seconds flat as a direct result of Newton's gravitational dick being shoved so far up your ass you can taste it.

 This slide, for summation purposes, shall be named The Death Slide. When we first arrived onto the waiting area of The Death Slide it was closed. It was closed because of the design of the slide. The way you access the slide is by going into what appears to be a distended soda can with a hydraulic door and some sort of way you enter the actual slide which is not immediately apparent. This design apparently caused a morbidly obese Mexican woman some serious distress, and by distress I mean she started screaming for her mother and attacked the door of the slide like some kind of waterslide King Kong. Regardless, she somehow broke the slide and it was out of order for about an hour.

 After killing an hour we returned to find a line.As soon as I got to the front of the line, I realized that I was about to entrust my life to an aluminum can hooked to a hose and started rethinking my life choices. Zooz tried to convince me for a moment to not be a baby before he decided I was a lost cause. This was my point of no turning back. If I went on the slide I may have had a chance to possibly retain my place in this dimension, if I did not, I forfeited my right to breathe. At that moment, just as I had made the decision to dishonour my ancestors and chicken out, a little black girl, no older than 8 years old, pushed past me, got into one of the tubes and looked me straight in the eye in order to make it absolutely clear to me that although I had the testicles, she had the balls. At that moment, I realized that if I did not enter The Death Slide that very moment, this small child would virtually own me till the end of time. I got in the tube.

 I regretted it instantly. What I had not known was that as soon as I entered, the door would shut and audibly lock. Then a voice would come in through hidden speakers in the tube and start a countdown. As the voice counted down I found that there was a small window at the bottom of the floor which showed a dark, watery oblivion and just as I arrived at the conclusion that I'd made a terrible error, the floor, quite suddenly, ceased to be a floor.

 I screamed like a bitch.

Cheerios

 Cereals have been evolving since humankind first learned that everything tastes better with milk. From the time when the first bowl was filled with cow juice and had something crunchy and/or spongy dumped into it and shovelled into a mouth we have been evolving the science of cereal. From mammoth gonads to Chocos, we've come a long way. That being said, not all cereals have evolved equally.

 Let me start this off by saying: I once loved Cheerios. At one point in time Cheerios and I were buddies.I could inhale the savoury scent of Cheerios and not want to vomit, I could fucking snort Cheerios and be completely fine. All that changed with the Family Value Pack. If you aren't familiar with the Family Value Pack, allow me to shed you of your ignorance. If you ever dreamed of having a cereal box that was big enough to have a mascot of realistically fuckable size, I'm happy to inform you that it exists. If you want to feed all of Africa with a single goddamned box of refuse corn flakes, I'm glad to tell you it's right here and has an expiry date of one year.

 And in case you didn't catch the keyword there, it is refuse. And it isn't as though normal Cheerios aren't milked out of a giant bee then freeze dried into those little doughnuts of self-loathing. These are the Cheerios that didn't make it into the boxes sold to normal people. People who don't want to engage in intercourse with a cartoon bee. People who can look at the Family Value Pack and say: "that is too much Cheerios".

 The Family Value Pack is a box with the surface area of my torso and the nutritional value of my asshole. I would rather stick my dick into a pickle slicer while singing the song "Jingle Bells Rock" and have my ass hairs tweezed off than eat another single Cheerio. And it's all because of the Family Value Pack. See I was unaware of the Family Value Pack until very recently. By very recently I mean about two months before the expiry date. The thing is we all remember the day the box arrived because it didn't fit in the cereal cupboard and we had a laugh about how stupidly large it was. Well, nobody's laughing now. I found the box lying on its side, mysteriously hidden away in the cupboard where we keep the fancy dessert stuff nobody touches (like Vanilla extract n' shit). I was going to mourn the expired cereal when I discovered that it had two months to go. Instead of losing money (because I'm a cheap motherfucker) I made the conscious decision to devour the entire, full Family Value Pack of Cheerios on my own.

 I didn't eat them all in one go for two reasons: one, I don't want to fucking die, two, we didn't have enough milk. So almost every night for around 60 nights I had a bowl of Family Value Pack, bottom of the factory line, half-crushed, unreasonably shitty, refuse Cheerios. Cheerios that aren't actually viable for human consumption, Cheerios that have the texture, flavour and nutritional value of fucking cardboard. And I consumed them for 60 nights. 60 bowls of the flavour equivalent of Nickelback. Almost eight weeks straight of consuming nothing but Cheerios swimming in vaguely honeyish milk that tastes more like liquified sadness than anything else. Added up, around 20 hours of doing nothing except eating starchy circles of misery, that are so shitty I think they may have given me brain damage, floating in a bowl of off-white milk that looks, and tastes, like it was pissed in by a diabetic. But there was light at the bottom of the bowl; after 60 days of Cheerios induced depression.
I
was
free.

 I can now die happy in the knowledge that I didn't waste the equivalent of three dollars and 98 cents. 

Geese

Some people will subject themselves to misery-inducing synthetic cotton pillows that have the texture and hardness of a teenager’s “used” sock because they protest to the use of goose feathers and down in the pillows. Many will allow this to carry over to their choice of blanket/cover/quilt for themselves and, for some, even their children. Many are very, very against the eating of geese, goose eggs, pâté and foie-gras. Personally, I find these people to be without any sort of guidance for two reasons: 1) goose is fucking delicious (2) Geese, especially geese, deserve it because they are assholes.

To say that geese are jerks would be like saying that the Hitler didn’t like Jews. It is true, but only so far as an understatement of the highest degree can be considered true. Geese are not just jerks, geese have reached a new level, one that I cannot describe with words as well as I can with rapid angry hand gestures. Geese deal with people the same way that psychotic teenagers deal with small furry animals: very painfully. If you’ve ever seen a video of a goose attacking a person you should know that it’s not an isolated case. There are approximately 100 goose attacks on people annually from one genus of goose (the Canada Goose) alone. Y’know how many shark attacks there are WORLDWIDE every year? 75. 75 shark attacks worldwide from every kind of shark ever and 100 goose attacks from just the Canada Goose.

This actually wouldn’t be so bad if geese were completely harmless like chickens or infants, but no. Goose attacks often result in broken bones and head injuries which is bad in of itself, were it not for the fact that geese specifically target children and the elderly in groups of large people.

"Grandma, are we going to die?"
"Yes"

What makes this way worse is that geese have extreme resilience, are very territorial and possess some freaking Assassins Creed eagle-vision level of eyesight. They also have a knowledge of body language that rivals a master detective’s. When in contact with a hostile goose the best advice is to hold your arms up, pray, maintain goose eye contact and back away slowly, while never squinting your eyes or moving your torso or shoulders away from the goose, geese will see these as a sign of weakness and, seeing as they are total feathered cockbags, will accordingly attack. Sometimes even the proper precautions won’t help. Many geese will not only attack, but continue chasing people until seriously injured. Don’t believe me? The internet is littered with stories and videos of goose attacks ranging from a bite to “when I was still in diapers, my family took me on a picnic to a lake where a goose grabbed me by the head and slowly started pulling me into the water with the intention to drown me ”. If you don’t even trust the internet ask a parent, grandparent or someone who grew up near a farm. They’ll vouch for me: geese are fucking mean. But it’s when they don’t attack directly that you get issues because geese go kamikaze.

Fuck Humans

A far larger problem than direct goose attack is that of the “sneaky kamikaze strike”. This could just be sadistic pilots or geese that are stupid enough to fly over airports but the leading theory dictates that geese in fact do this on purpose in order to maximise human suffering. Geese will fly into the engines of a plane when it is at its most vulnerable, during takeoff and landing. Over a period of 18 years (1990-2008), kamikaze goose operations in North America have caused 1181 crash landings with 603 causing damage and 317 resulting in negative effects. Kamikaze geese in this period caused 59,000 hours of aircraft down time and an estimated $50 million in costs which is about equal to the average Hulk rampage through New York City, except that the geese were also directly responsible for a total of 18 deaths or serious injuries and 4 irreversibly damaged aircraft.

In these dark times when facing a savage bird attack or kamikaze goose mission you can always remember that these are birds and we do eat them. Please, remember the 18 fallen over a period of 18 years and the countless horribly maimed victims of bird abuse who have been scarred for life from goose onslaught and reconsider buying a goose down jacket. Geese are not endangered. Geese are not beautiful or protected in any way. Geese are not good pets or an important part of the lake atmosphere. Geese are just fuckers. Therefore I implore you to consider how foul geese are before reconsidering pâté because of a diet or, worse, animal rights. Geese have no rights. They traded them for intense reproductive skills and good eyesight. Two things that I lack.

Opera

As a family we collectively have the attention span of most rodents. My father and I are the worst offenders in this. When either of us hears a long sentence we take in keywords only. It makes sentences containing "Do not..." difficult. So when a receptionist at a hotel in Austria mentions "dinner" and "Mozart" we miss the part where she says "fancy dinner with entertainment like that of of the era of Mozart".

I cannot handle fancy. Fancy to me is like jizz to an octopus, completely out of place and somehow wrong in any situation. Whenever I can avoid wearing a something uncomfortable and "nice", I will. I've gone to weddings in sweatpants because deep inside I fear that if I wear pants with creases, my legs might dissolve.

EYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHH

The biggest travesty against sense is the concept of a fancy dinners. Why complicate dinners? Who needs al those extra forks? What the fuck are the extra forks for? And what's the deal with utensils made of valuable metals? To me, the only real dinner is something you can eat with your hands, preferably out of a bucket or cardboard box.

Now imagine my surprise when, expecting a modest musical dinner, I walk into a room literally fancier (and probably more expensive) than my entire house. My first reaction to the fanciness is to take the complimentary fan provided by the restaurant, hold it onto my forehead, and proclaim myself as King of the Mohicans. My father, who suffers from similar ailments in the face of class, took a photo, much to the horrified shock of the American family seated next to us.

Let me take a moment to talk about this family of Americans. It was a guy, his wife and their three teenage-young adult daughters. The man and the three daughters were all obese, with the man especially requiring a special new classification of obese which I would call "Over 9000". He was the kind of obese where you wonder if he has an IV drip of nacho cheese hooked up to him while he sleeps. His wife on the other hand was the kind of thin that makes you wonder if she eats her food, or merely stares at it as it shrivels while she gains nutrition. I swear I don't even know how she fucked the man. I mean biologically. How was she not crushed or assimilated into him? How did he and his daughters refrain from eating her? I'll never know. Soon after my eyes finally captured the entirety of the Americans the lights were dimmed and six musicians walked on stage and started playing their instruments. Instantly I thought: "hmmm, I don't recognize this one. Besides, isn't six dudes too little for Mozart?" Then I heard the screaming.

Initially I thought it was a waiter who'd dropped hot coffee on an old woman but I was sadly wrong. It was opera. There were two of them. A young man trying to catch his big break in opera (not realizing that he was about 80 years too late) and his mother who'd joined in for the fun of reliving her youth. My analysis of the events that followed is: an elderly woman is screeching into the ear of a very unlucky young man. This young man seems to have taken a single acting class in his life, within which the teacher told him "the eyes are the window into the soul" which he took to mean "I should use my eyebrows to their fullest extent". The end result appears to be a man's mother screaming into his ear and short-wiring his brain.

After about an hour of this, the first course came in. It was good but we'd had better and we'd had it without a man's mother dressed up in a silly costume pretending to be his girlfriend in Italian, communicated at a volume usually associated with fire alarms (and with the same pitch). Fortunately, as far as we knew, we were done with the howling. The food had come, we'd eat it then we'd get more food until the end of this very loud nightmare. We were wrong, very wrong. Right after we finished the singers had a second round. They took a chunk of a completely different opera where the dude's mother didn't want to fuck him (in stark contrast with the first) but instead wanted to fuck other, rather old, dudes (quite understandably). I zoned out and woke up an hour later to clapping. Not for the singers, for the food. Seeing as my father had apparently enjoyed this foray into culture I resigned myself to another hour of misery until I heard him say "Hey kid, let's bounce".

We asked for the bill and got looks from the waiters that are usually saved for murderers and people who torture puppies. When the bill arrived arrived we got even nastier looks from the Americans. The women anyway. The man was looking at us like "Please! Please take me with you! I'll do anything! I'll suck your dicks just please get me the fuck away from here". We paid and left, catching stares of either snobbish hatred or envy all the way through. It was the happiest I have ever been at the idea leaving food. We ended up walking around and listening to street music, it was way better in any case.

The Mysterious Shadow

 Like an elephant or the sex offenders list, I don't forget. I also have a deep set resentment for those who touch my hair. As a result, for a full year I harboured a great deal of resentment directed mainly at Joq and Zooz, but mostly Joq because he's more of a dick. As a result of this I inwardly concocted some sort of weird revanchist plan to shave Joq's eyebrows. As it happened, through some weird twist of fate I ended up going on a school trip with Joq and Zooz, and Joq's roommate was a good friend of mine. Somehow the offhand desire to leave Joq eyebrowless suddenly became attainable and I took the opportunity.

 Let me take a moment to explain why exactly this plan was directed at Joq specifically (other than the fact that he's more of an asshole than Zooz). It all has to do with Joq's personality. Joq is one of those people who maintain themselves within stringent criteria and see themselves as a temple to be worked on and worshipped. He also has an ego the size of most major landmasses. This ego contributes to him inherently seeing others as beneath him. Add to this the fact that he's the kind of militant atheist convinced that all religious people are misguided sheep (and loudly voices this opinion) and you'll probably get what kind of person Joq is. His level of arrogance and inherent condescending nature drove me to want to make it so that the stringent criteria which he so prides himself on should no longer contain eyebrows. I understood that I would probably be beat up beyond recognition and that getting close enough would be nigh impossible but the thought of Joq crying insanely while looking at his eyebrowless reflection in a mirror while the song "I Am Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera plays in the background was just too good to pass on, so presented with the chance to make this a reality, I put plan into action.

I AM BEAUTIFUUUL NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAAAY

 Joq's roommate, Darwaz, is a longtime friend of mine and a fellow enthusiast for seeing Joq without the ability to properly express surprise. Joq had brought an electrical razor with him to the trip and I'd agreed with Darwaz that I would shave Joq's eyebrows if he left the back door of the hotel room open at night and put the razor in the bathroom. The plan was for me to sneak in at a random late hour through the back door, get out the razor from the bathroom and shave off Joq's eyebrows while he was asleep.

There was a problem though.

 Darwaz fell asleep early the night of the de-eyebrowification and forgot to put the razor in the bathroom so I could find it. I snuck into the room in the dead of night, looking for a razor in a hotel bathroom in the dark (which isn't even there) and, I shit you not, the bathroom light just randomly turns on. I'm thinking, fuck, I'm totally finished.

I stand there for a second waiting to be found, but to my surprise it seems nobody's awake. I cut my losses and ditched the premises, but I left the light on (I didn't want to touch anything), Then, I ran back to my room, and drifted to sleep to the tune of my failure.

 Imagine my surprise the next morning when Darwaz comes up to me and says "Yo, Joq is really shaken up and afraid and he's telling this sorta horror story to everyone about his night and ... you've just gotta hear it".

At the end of each day of the trip, the 19 of us would gather around a bonfire and tell scary stories. Although the scary stories usually didn't affect anyone, they usually ended with our scepticism being slightly more malleable. This was especially true for Joq who returned that night to a roommate who was sleeping with his eyes wide open. Darwaz is a bit of a shitty sleeper. A lot of the time he sleepwalks or sleeptalks or does some weird shit and this time was no exception. Darwaz had fallen asleep with his eyes wide open and was staring at Joq. Darwaz continued to actively follow Joq with his pupils for a while before going over to his side and shutting his eyelids. 

A bit freaked out but mostly unfazed, Joq laid in bed and tried to sleep before the bathroom light randomly turned on and off again. This, combined with the incident of Darwaz’s red eyed staring and the scary stories started to get to Joq and, unable to get to sleep, he came to the conclusion that if the light turned on again, something was up. The light not only turned on again, but this time it also projected a shadow onto the wall, a shadow which strongly resembled Darwaz's with an average build and huge hair. Joq looked over to his roomate's bed but Darwaz was still sleeping. Joq watched in horror as what appeared to be Darwaz's shadow silently crawled across the wall, noiselessly walked in his direction, somehow gained tangibility, opened the door and left. This prompted Joq to soon jump out of his bed, run out through the back door and scream “WHO’S THERE” to the world at large in terror. Later he went back inside and began to seriously reflect on his beliefs.

This entire freaky situation was in no way aided by the fact that shortly after, while Joq was in a state of inner reflection, Darwaz got up, took off his clothes, screamed “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOUR MOTHER” at Joq in Arabic and went back to sleep.

After that incident, Joq took to telling the story to everyone who would listen, stating how it shook his beliefs to the core and how, as a militant atheist, he was taken to the brim of his scepticism, very nearly revaluated his core beliefs and thought of changing everything, and I mean everything, about his life and the way he thought about things. He then took to giving people his rationalizations, his "logical explanation" which basically said "the generator was dysfunctional and that caused the bathroom light to turn on and off. I assume that the shadow part was half dream. I dreamed the shadow but somehow when I woke up the bathroom light was on in real life". 

He told this story (along with his "logical explanation") to people not knowing that I had already told them the actual progression of events and that 18 of the 19 people on the trip already knew that the shadow spirit on the wall that almost turned a militant atheist into a believer in ghosts was actually me slinking off into my room, having failed to shave his eyebrows. The expected result of this is that everyone, when faced with Joq's version of events and his dreams-leaking-into reality explanation tended to giggle.

What happens when you giggle at a person who's telling you about an experience that nearly altered them at a fundamental level? To give you a comparison, imagine giggling at a person telling you how they survived cancer or witnessed a miracle and you'll get an estimate of how insulted Joq got. The poor fuck got really worked up and what's even worse is that people kept dropping him hints. Unsubtle hints. Hints so direct they no longer actually qualify as hints but the thing about people like Joq is that they're convinced that they're right and everyone else is wrong by default; this was no exception.

 The next creepy bonfire was entertained by a tale of, unsurprisingly, Joq's moving experience with the spirit world. Halfway through Joq’s testament, around the shadow-spirit bit, Zooz piped up with a "maybe it was a person" and Joq freaked the fuck out. He stood up and started screaming at Zooz, telling him shit like "it's impossible for me to be wrong" and "you're an idiot, how can that possibly be right" but the best was "You are a retard and I am correct. I am always correct and you are never correct, that's just how things are". 

This meltdown was in front of 18 people who all knew the real version of events. That's like walking into a room of scientists, screaming at the top of your lungs that the minotaur is the real cause of global warming and that they are all morons for suggesting otherwise. Unlike that example however, Joq's meltdown provoked not a round of giggling, but shocked silence. Zooz got pissed, really pissed so he gave me a look as though to check for my approval to reveal to Joq the true nature of his  one-on-one rub in with the supernatural and then said "I have a story for the bonfire"

"Once upon a time there was a boy called Joq and a boy called Sanad. Joq was often an asshole to Sanad and once shaved Sanad's head so Sanad decided to shave Joq's eyebrows in retaliation. In the dead of night Sanad crept into Joq's room, turned on the bathroom light to search for the razor, couldn't find it and left through the back door. Joq was awake but he thought Sanad leaving was a tangible shadow crawling across the wall because he's a complete fucking idiot. The moral of the story is that Joq can be wrong."  

I've never seen so many emotions run through one person in 12 seconds: confusion, disbelief, anger, disbelief again, complete shock and, at the end, wide-eyed amazement, all to the background of the hooting laughter of 18 people. By the end Joq had the hollow eyed look of someone destroyed from the inside, he then looked at me and asked “Is this true?” I nodded. At that point Joq surprised me. Instead of sulking or going nuts, as I would've expected him to do, he instantly regained his composure, stood up straight, laughed and said “good one”.

Damn straight it was a good one. Even if it was totally accidental, I still got your ass. 

Stories of America: The Enbaldening

Although most times I am a shining beacon of everything good on this earth I, like Stalin, have a fatal flaw. Unlike Stalin however, my flaw isn't killing shittons of Russians. My flaw is that I'm gullible. I'm so gullible that I get suspicious when I shouldn't be and gullible when I should be suspicious. It's truly a cruel cycle. The height of my gullibility and the reason that I live in fear of the buzz of an electric razor is because of my trip to America.

For those of you newer to Baked Beans, back in the summer of 2014 I went to the Land of Diabeetus to take a creative writing course in Columbia University. That part was awesome but it's not actually the relevant part, what happened afterwards is the important part. I travelled to America with a longtime friend of mine, Zooz...

 ...and directly after our courses we were to spend a week with his extended family in Washington D.C. During that time, in a way too moronic to mention, I had accidentally very nearly almost exposed his chain-smoking to his aunt. Although most of the trip was on good terms, from that point onwards Zooz was in a mood for vengeance.

For those of you who've seen the older posts, you may have noticed that when I've drawn myself, I've always drawn myself with long hair. At the time of this writing my hair actually looks like that because I like having long hair. It's my lion's mane and I love it. It makes me feel like the model of a shampoo commercial. Zooz knows this and like a villain in a Looney Tunes cartoon this thought grows into a scheme designed to deprive me of my source of joy.

After the week spent with his family, Zooz and I decided to tour a few American universities since we were rising Juniors at the time and the level of higher education in Amman is comparable in educational value to being pelted with styrofoam pellets for 14 hours every day. One of the universities in question that we decided to visit was Harvard University.

Lemme take a break for a moment here. I gotta say that Harvard University was the biggest letdown ever for me. I expected Hogwarts and got what looked like a Victorian-era factory complex turned into a university at the last second. I've seen architecture with more class in the meat packing industry than Harvard motherfucking University. Although the classes are awesome (or so I've heard) and the interior of these buildings is stunning, the actual look of the buildings makes the campus look like the less appealing one of my testicles

Anyway, Harvard was special because a friend from home, Joq le Coq, was taking a summer course there and staying  in the dorms so he offered to smuggle us in (technically illegally).

Problem is that there was a form he could've signed to get us in completely legitimately (and we'd get a mattress) but instead he decided "ah fuck them", faced expulsion from the university, smuggled us in through the window on the ground floor and made us sleep in a closet.

Anyway Zooz was really, really good friends with Joq. Like to the point where they almost share the same personality at times and at one point they decided that they were going to use the ruse of throwing a party in order to get me to cut my hair. At the time I was excessively focused on getting with a girl and the bastards knew that if they threw a party and convinced me that A) girls would be there, and, B) I'd have a chance with them if I got my hair cut, I would probably dtich the mane and get my hair cut, even if it meant sacrificing my grandmother to Satan. So they invited the people and started the process of subtle persuasion. It took them two hours two convince me to get my hair cut at a barbershop by which time it was 9 PM and all the barbershops had closed for the night. At this point, to this day I don't know how, they convinced me that they could cut hair.

They walked into a pharmacy and bought two pairs of scissors, illegally snuck Zooz and I back into the dorms of  Harvard University, sat me on a chair in the bathroom with my hair draped over a sink and started chopping. Zooz and Joq did the actual cutting while another guy filmed it. I probably should've gotten suspicious right then and there but they'd already started at that point and it was too late. The bastards' accounts vary as to who cut out a fucking massive clump of my hair and gave me a bald spot but before I knew what the fuck had happened Zooz went into the bedrooms and took Joq's roommate's electric razor. The roommate was this Turkish motherfucker who played League of Legends all day, practically bathed in his own sweat 24/7 and had a case of acne that made the plague look positively delightful by comparison. Also he probably used the fucking razor for his diseased pits. 20 seconds later I heard laughing.

Next thing I knew I was bald.

I feel a breeze

Dreams

Oh my god, I cannot even describe to you how amazingly weird my dreams are. I mean normally everyone's dreams are weird (I know of a guy who dreamed he was fucking a cheeseburger)

Modern Romace

but I swear to the Holy Lord Satan My dreams make LSD look like cornflakes. The thing is, I don't eat well and my main meal of the day is dinner, which is usually also yesterday's dinner. This weird gastronomical combo of old pizza, turkey bacon and the residual KFC that will invariably stay in your system from your very first spicy bucket until the day that formaldehyde purifies your corpse would result in the weirdest dreams on its own, but when combined with my latent insanity and the stresses of the IB system it ends up conceiving the weirdest motherfucking dreams ever created.

Let me tell you, whenever I hear "dreaming is your brain reliving the day you've just had" I think "bullshit" for one reason and one reason alone: "I'm pretty fucking sure I didn't encounter a Viking in my day to day life in Amman Jordan and no, not on T.V either. I'm pretty goddamn sure it just amounts to my brain going "fuck it, let's get some Vikings up in this joint". If you still doubt that dreaming is totally arbitrary here's a fun story: I once dreamed of a massive party wherein at one point a mermaid with the upper body of Snoop Dogg surfaced from a puddle in the ground and just smiled. My knowledge of Snoop Dogg up to that point amounted to: "he's a dude with weird hair who smokes a lot of pot and wears funny hats". Now it's that, plus "he would make a fucking hideous mermaid". Funny thing is, That's not even the epitome of freakiness. The Snoopmaid (as I have taken to calling it) is maybe a good 8/10 on the weirdness scale. It goes up to 10. Do you know how weird something has to be to get to level 10? Weirder than a mermaid-Snoop-Dogg.

From my dreams I have developed two theories. After dreaming of the Snoopmaid I took to trying out Snoop's music and I actually like it. Therefore I've taken to believing that dreams are your  brain's way of illuminating your life. Dreams alleviate my stress every  night and give me some sort of topic to talk about with people who don't actually care. My second theory is that dreams are your brain going "I'm bored and depressed, screw it let's imagine some cool shit" and then doing that, purely to fuck with your conscious mind. Like, literally purely to amuse itself your subconscious has decided to hallucinate some crazy junk.

I Fucking Hate "The Handmaid's Tale"

 I was forced to read The Handmaid's Tale for English class and I really gotta say: I hate The Handmaid's Tale. I hate it more than virtually every other piece of written work in the universe from a pamphlet for a spa resort to The Illiad. It's a big fat steaming pile of horseshit that sucks ass, and I'm going to tell you exactly why.

 Basically, it's fucking stupid. Having a shitty writing style and vaguely explained slightly nonsensical ideas is one thing, but trying to employ them through the whiniest and most depressing cunt of a narrator through a confusing "alternative" nonlinear story makes the book about as bearable as being continuously prodded in the buttocks with a dildo made of lava for all eternity.

 First off, let's talk about the ideas presented in this clusterfuck of a novel. The story revolves around a system of government called Gilead which was created through a military coup d'etat after a national tragedy. Gilead is a totalitarian system of government which seeks to control the populous in order to increase falling birthrates...by subjugating and depressing all fertile women to the point of insanity and then giving them to elderly men and going "well why the fuck aren't they getting pregnant?" This would be bearable if the aforementioned elderly men weren't the goddamned geniuses capable of successfully orchestrating a government takeover.

Now that I've successfully taken over the government, I'm going to quit using any brain cells not associated with my penis.

 Besides, don't you think attempting to subjugate an entire civilian population with very little effective propaganda seems a teeny weeny bit difficult? Because it is, in fact, it's extremely difficult. Historically, except in a few choice cases, this shitty attempt at an ideological revolution would not only be a failure, it would be a majorly absurd international fuckup of the highest degree. Like if a government made the decision to impose a uniform for every single civilian composed of a thong and crop-top made of toenail clippings. Nobody would fucking listen to the system and it would lose integrity and collapse, such as the Provincial Government of Russia in 1917 off the top of my head (about the loss of faith in government, not the toenails). How does the book deal with this? It doesn't, instead it makes the characters bitch and whine and say shit like "I yearn for the touch of another human". And what happens to the only fucking sensible character in this whole fuckfest? She turns into a prostitute and dies, as a lesson to say "if you're unhappy with the system and try to oppose it, you'll end up dying miserably"

 And the goddamn characters, oh my God. Somehow, although the characters are distinct, the writer manages to make each and every one thoroughly and exceedingly dislikeable. And just to clarify, although the characters are distinct from each other, pretty much every character falls into a predetermined stereotypical static piece-of-shit character role; like: surly old housemaid, forbidden love, rebellious friend...etc And please don't even get me started on the main character and narrator: Offred.

 Offred is the shittiest main character in the history of literature, including Mein Kampf. Everything that she narrates, from beginning to end fucking reeks of paranoia, cheap melodrama and the writer's repressed emotions of contempt towards the reader.

Boop boop boop. I hate everybody

The problem is, Offred's is such goddamned useless miserable cunt. She just randomly goes "I don't want to tell this story" and entertains us with a motherfucking passage about fucking oranges that is never fucking referenced ever a-fucking-gain. I hate oranges. While we're on the topic of things that I hate, let's talk about the writing style.

The book is filled with literary crap. The writer seems to actively make it a point to make the book as difficult to get through a possible; from including fucking eggs in every section, to using multisyllabic garbage like lugubrious. What the fuck is a lugubrious? Because it sounds like an excessively unappetizing vegetable. And worse, it's not  until page 160 (out of 270) that there's actually a storyline. Before that it's just Offred bitching about the system. One hundred and sixty motherfucking pages of miserable "inner thoughts and feelings" nonsensical bullshit. Literally the majority of the book can be removed without altering ANYTHING.

To put it in short, The Handmaid's Tale is the most awful book ever created and should only ever be picked up as a last resort by the terminally ill who cannot find other means of euthanasia.

Stories of America: The Fashion District

The fashion district of New York is a marvel of capitalism and if you plan on visiting Spider-Man's hometown it's definitely a sightseeing requirement. Or at least that's what I told  myself to justify being dragged to Macy's and having to browse clothes stores with another dude. The dude in this case being Stickman. The reason for this possibly offensive title is that he was really tall and really thin which made him very stickman like.

My dream is to own white jeans

I think he'd be very displeased with the name.


Macy's was just as droll as I'd suspected and in retrospect I should've learned the difference between Macy's and Wendy's before coming to the land of diabeetus.

But having already arrived and stuck in the area with a dude who was unwilling to leave, I chose to remain in the area and check out a few of the clothes stores.


We first checked out some "edgy" 1990's style, skateboarder themed clothes store that was on the very thin line between awesome and sickening. What definitively pushed it into the awesome sector, though, was a pair of gel sole flip-flops.

Real beauty

They seemed awesome, so I took them off the rack, compared the sole size to the shoes I was currently wearing and then told the lady that I'd like a pair of these flip flops. The looks I got could be compared to that of a man walking into a supermarket wearing nothing but a thong and a pair of bunny ears. Both Stickman and the attendant just looked at me blankly for a while before asking "don't you need a size?"
I replied, "No thank you, just these. The same ones on the rack"
The incredulous looks that I got from these two were amazing enough to plant within me the seed of evil. As a result I decided to buy my 6 foot, 100 kilogram father a t-shirt.


I'm not a big dude. I'm rather average actually, on the shorter, smaller side . I had this in mind when we walked into the next store and saw plain t-shirts on sale for $5. I walked over to the section of the sale and picked out an XXL t-shirt before realizing that Stickman was staring.

I turned to him and realized that he was looking at the unravelled XXL t-shirt that was practically touching the floor with a look that said "you are not XXL, that shirt would function as a dress for you". So I looked him straight in the eye and said "Of course I'm buying a bigger t-shirt, it's more fabric and therefore better value for money"

I've never seen a person look so genuinely befuddled. It looked as though I had destroyed his entire worldview and his understanding of economics. He looked like a child who had discovered that crayons were, in fact, the source of color in the universe. As soon as I was alone I laughed for maybe a good ten minutes.

The Clown

Amman has one clown. For the entire 4 million strong city there is a single, chronically depressed, "between jobs", unshaven and unloved clown.

Usually the self hatred acquired is spread over multiple unhappy people but the burden of entertaining Amman's entire infant population fell on a single poor motherfucker. It's also important to note that this, poor, manic depressive dude was one of those prostitute clowns who are hired out by clown pimps.

As a result of that; for every birthday party I experienced for a few years, he was there. Mine included.

I am, as previously discussed, the eldest in my family and as such I was pretty much my grandparent's familial crash test dummy. Believe it or not it took actual trial and error to convince my grandmother that not every child liked Barney the Purple Asshole. I was an Elmo person. TeleTubbies freaked me the fuck out (and continue to do so) and I found Barney monotone to a degree that sickened me even as a child but I felt a real connection with Cookie Monster and that powered me through childhood. When I turned three I, naturally, expected to see my childhood idol, Cookie Monster, at the party. I was disappointed. My grandmother was totally adamant that every child loved Barney. That liking Barney the Purple Cunt was a qualifier for being a child and the fact that I was a child meant that vice-versa applied. She was so completely certain that I loved Barney that she hijacked a fucking infant's birthday party plans and called the dude in the Barney suit.

I was not amused. Not at all. I tactfully avoided the pedophilic hugs and subtly loathed Barney from afar at various points in time, always moving so that he'd never get a fix on me. Eventually, due to the ridiculous amounts of strawberry milk I consumed, I had to use the bathroom and who do I find in the bathroom? Barney. Motherfucking Barney who's decided that halfway through an infant's party is the perfect time to bum out a cigarette and have a goddamn smoke break. However, to take a smoke break one is usually required to have access to one's mouth and as such Barney had taken off his mascot-style helmet and placed it in the sink. What was under the mask was not a bleeding spinal cord as I had expected, but the well known face of the much abused clown who hadn't even bothered to take off the makeup from his previous gig and looked so distraught at being alive that I decided not to alert him to my presence.

I'd made a monumental discovery. Barney wasn't real. For a 3 year old the ability to demolish his least favorite classmates dreams was a victory of the highest standards. Before I rushed out to destroy my enemies' dreams my mother spotted me exiting the smoking bathroom and stopped me. She had  realized from my demeanor (and from the smell of the bathroom) that I had discovered the ultimate  secret. She also understood that I was a loudmouthed evil little shit and would destroy her standing within the secret mom's circle. If I had understood bribery and blackmail then, I would have made a killing, but she just used subtly passive-aggressive remarks about the continued existence of my presents as leverage to make me keep it a secret and I had almost forgotten about it. Almost.

Weeklys

This announcement is a bit too important to stick in the Updates section that nobody reads so it's going here. 

From now on there will be extra 'The Far Side' style strips every Wednesday on the page titled "Weeklys" and they're as much to improve my skills as they are to entertain you. They won't impact the ordinary posts and there should be 3 every month (discounting the week of the actual big post). This whole dealeo will start February; however, to give you a taste of the Weeklys here's the first one:

The emperor llama was very vain. His narcissism saved him often

  That is all, click here to go to January's post

Jumping Castle

It's my cousin's 3rd birthday and as it was a child's birthday, my aunt decided to throw a little party. My aunt also decided that the absolute best best location for a child's Spider-Man themed party would be at the mall. I'd have understood if it was like a playground or something but it wasn't. It was the cold miserable dome at the top of the mall that is covered with glass and is supposed to look and feel all "new age"

Bitter cold and unhappiness

whereas it just felt cold and smelled like aging 40 year olds tying to relive their youth.

My life is misery so I must drink alcohol in exotically uncomfortable locations

I'd come to the mall with two intentions: to make my cousin believe that I loved him and to spend all of my funds on junk (which meant that I was uncharacteristically carrying cash).

 What was characteristic, though, was the way I responded to the existence of the Spider-Man themed jumping castle in the middle of the area. It was so beautiful, I swear it was practically shining. It just stood there among the children and tiny tables and I knew in that moment that I must have it.

So beautiful

Against my aunts wishes, I infiltrated the plastic castle and started to roll around. When I realized that children were beginning to stare I told them that there was food outside. The ones too stupid or too stubborn to leave were treated to a hungry stare until they started crying out of fear and had to be forcibly extracted from the castle. About 10 minutes after getting into the jumping castle every other child had been scared, tricked, sufficiently creeped or thrown out of the jumping castle and it was MINE.

I had the jumping castle for my own. For the first time in years I was in a jumping castle and, possibly for the first time in my life, I was alone in the castle. It was mine and mine alone. So I pretty much spasmed, rabidly attacked the interior of the castle and did stuff that would normally be painful or suicidal and generally went nuts until I accidentally jumped into one of the castle's corners and heard a sound kinda like "TCHHH". I should probably mention at this  point that I was a high school sophomore at the time and, more importantly, being 15, I was probably rather over the average weight that Spider-Man jumping castles usually accommodate for.

Initially I was totally oblivious, still in the throes of jumping castle induced insanity but I noticed that the castle was getting a bit weaker than usual. Then I began to notice that the ceiling was a bit lower than I remembered. This was quite worrying because before long I realized that the castle was quite definitely sinking and the tear I had heard when jumping into a corner was not just me hearing stuff and I probably destroyed the jumping castle at a 3 year old's birthday party. Needless to say my aunt was not pleased. I slowly took the walk of shame out of the slowly deflating jumping castle and for some reason, patted my pockets (quite by accident really). For the second time in about 20 seconds the sunken plastic heap of what remained of a Spider-Man jumping castle accurately represented my emotions.

My wallet that had contained my savings which I was going to blow in Virgin Megastore on random crap had disappeared and it had last been in my pocket when I'd entered the jumping castle. I gotta tell you, swimming in the silicon remains of a, once great, Spider-Man  jumping castle searching for your 3 years worth of savings is not fun. It took half an hour and numerous near death  experiences by suffocation to find it and to this day my aunt subtly blames me for ruining her child's birthday party.