Monthly Archives: July 2014

Day-to-Day, Meaning of Life

Backward Reading & Forward Looking

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Stanko & Tibor: Reading Diaries

 

These Thoughts Fuelled by C12H22O11 and C8H10N4O2 

After a very strong, brain stem-rattling, intestinal-clearing espresso, I decided to eat what medical practitioners and health & nutrition experts commonly refer to in technical jargon as “baked death”, a.k.a. a gooey chocolate danish. Then after ingesting this, I couldn’t help but begin think about things — largely as a result of the consumption of the aforementioned sugar-drenched confection spawned by Satan’s best bakers that kicked my brain into overdrive, giving synapse impulses free reign to fire wildly and circumvent the the IQ-suppressing and dullard-enhancing lead I absorbed as a child through toys, leaded gasoline in the early 70’s and no doubt Chinese food cooked in woks from the Ming dynasty.

I came to the conclusion rather quickly that you can divide the world broadly into two categories: Based on the premise if you could actually travel through time, there would be those who would travel to the future, and those who travel to the past. Two groups. That’s it. Let me explain before I digress into a nap in the fetal position in front of the TV.

Future People – Forward Thinking

I strongly believe that those people who would travel to the future are by nature explorers, people who like uncertainty, adventure, are curious, open-minded and who want to know about wild new cool technologies, what new buildings we will design, what will the world look like, see if we conquered space travel and inhabited another plant. Or if fashion followed all those Hollywood movies that predicted we would be wearing a lot of spandex jump suits, and if we would be having sex with aliens that so many pimply geeks — bunkered away in their basements, terminally on the Internet with sticky keyboards and tied to their computers — long dreamed about.

I also think the other sort of future traveler would be the type of person who is trying to flee something dark in their past (probably something sordid in a bathroom stall at a fast food restaurant). By launching forward, in time the general public will have likely forgotten what made them so heinous to begin with. This group probably has some mass murderers on a good behavior break.

Wouldn’t it be cool to see if science has found a cure for stupidity and maybe try new mixed drinks that 23rd century bartenders have come up with? Also you would be treated like royalty just for being an ancient artifact in the future world, and you would be studied (and possibly dissected) and fêted by others so that is a plus for future travel. You could actually tell people how it really was in the olden days when times were simpler and we only had 1400 TV channels.

A negative of future travel may be, however, that humans will have physically evolved to such a point that everyone will have seven fingers on each hand and giant, powerful brains performing telepathic feats and be seven feet tall, and you would be a shrimpy, bakward, unevolved little mental reprobate who would be laughed at and bullied by society at large and on the cover of a major magazine and what would pass for social media.

Past People – Reading Backwards

After numerous scientific experiments involving shaved monkeys, a bottle or three of cough syrup, a blow torch, some cleaning solvents, some strawberries, and a case of malt liquor, I woke a few days later having had time to think about this. I am scientifically convinced that people who would desire to travel back in time are sissies and control freaks. Why? Because you already know the outcome of world events. You could bet on sporting events or political assassinations and Hollywood couple divorces with absolute certainty as a get rich quick scheme. You know what’s coming.

Think how many bets with that annoying relative or that know-it-all jerk at the office you could win with stuff like “I’ll bet you a million bucks that the dumbest human alive is elected to the office of US President by the year 2000.” You’d clean up. Bring a history book with you and spend every evening reading, and you’d be the Jeopardy champ. What fun is knowing everything ahead of time? Control-freak sissy time traveler.

And don’t give me that garbage about traveling back in time and assassinating Hitler or Osama Bin Laden. You’d be too distracted by the cheap beer and hot dogs and glossy “adult” magazines that you now have to fork over a credit card for when you’re online. I am told by a doctor. Also don’t forget the fact that taking a gun back in time would violate travel safety rules at the time port. There is a pat down before you going the time machine, you know, so dischargeable weapons are a no-no.

Sex & Money – That’s All They Ever Think About

A potential positive of travelling back in time would be that you could sleep with people who looked good a long, long time ago in photos or old movies, but are now either dead or wrinkly and on oxygen. If you chose to return to the mid to late 1960s and early 1970s, however, when there was still a lot of free love, you could sleep around and do dope and be a rebel. The lazy time travelers among you could submit patents for things you know were invented by someone else so you could submit the patent and then sue them later when they actually invent it and make some easy money.

I am sure there are those who would happily travel back in time just so they could make all kinds of racist and politically incorrect jokes that were accepted back then that you can’t say now without being pillaged in the press and social media. My guess is the folks who want to travel back in time believe “in the good ole times” largely because they can’t handle modern day complexity. Like the television remote or getting your computer printer to work.

You could go back and marry that other person you dated to see how poorly your life would have turned out anyway. Or maybe go back and redo your 9th grade chemistry exam and just barely pass it again to prove either you or the teacher were deficient in doing their jobs. Or both.

Then And Then

Let’s face it, humans have always thought it was simpler “back then” whenever “then” was. What did cavemen and cavewomen really have to figure out apart from eating, not being eaten, and pleasing the angry gods who thundered every so often? Not much. What did our relatives of ancient Africa ever have to figure out? Pretty much eating, not being eaten, leaving Africa (it was a dump then too, I heard) and running the other way when a lion or tiger or bear came looking for an appetizer.

Same goes for our only slightly more advanced relatives in China, India, Europe and elsewhere as humans began working with metals and killing each other with spears, swords, knives, and other stuff. None of them has it as complicated as I do, what with a dozen loyalty coffee cards in my wallet, and Costco tempting me all the time with special offers on crap I am told I need to be socially accepted, and, of course, my father’s iPhone that needs constant updating because he patently refuses to update ANY of his software. If he had to start reading the instruction manual, I could see his aversion. Just press the damn button and agree to the terms of use and be done with it!

I can see why you’d want to travel back in time, just to avoid being the family help desk 24/7.

What About Me?

What does this insightful rant have to do with the latest episode of the comic that was recently branded by the Oprah book club and Lady’s Home Knitting Journal, May Edition, as “sub-mental” and “proof of society’s inability to stitch together a coherent thought, let alone a sweater “? Not much, to be honest, but it does tell us to live in the present because you can’t control the past or the future. Unless you have a lot of money.

Unsure of the time of day,

Randy “Winner-Winner Chicken Dinner” McSnowden

Day-to-Day, Frustration & Complaint, Meaning of Life

Truthfully Lying Inaccurately

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Bin LAden Diaries II

 

Fractious and Foolish, Not Factual

Upon cleaning the house and removing debris, junk, garbage, refuse, detritus, jetsam AND flotsam, not to mention papers from the kids’ school year that could serve as proof they are intelligent if we were ever to sell them on the black market, I decided to do something foolish, childish, immature even. I asked my wife why she’s keeping empty, massed produced canisters that once held tea. Painful, disdainful and solitary confinement-treatment silence reigned for intolerable minutes, with no discernible peep from the significant other, who, for reasons still inexplicable some 15 years later after agreeing to sign the contract that bound us in unholy matrimony, decided to fulfill her end of the bargain and marry me, I can only assume, on a dare from I’m guessing someone she once called a friend and now sticks needles into via a voodoo doll.

Why foolish, you ask? What stupid spouse of the male variety would ever do such a thing as to question his significant other on matters of emotional nature when he knows pursuing this to a logical (read: NOT an emotional) end would/could/should, nay, will with absolute death-and-taxes certainty lead to elevated blood pressures, voices and no doubt to a withholding tax on acts of a sexual nature for an indeterminate period of time? (Think in terms if business quarters — like “Q2 and Q3 were barren with transactions evaporating south of the Mason Dixon line, and principal shareholders sorely disappointed ready to revolt and appoint a new board” — and you’ll get the idea.)

This marked difference is not so much the Mariana Trench depth of division between the male and the female. I am sure gay couples are this stupidly, erratically emotional too. I’d say rather it’s the difference between being single and married, or at least single and shacked up with another inmate under the auspices of “for better, for worse, in sickness and in health.”

Rampant Single Stupidity

You see when I was single I would do stupid things galore from keeping pre-historic underwear and old beer bottles to ancient car magazines and punk rock albums I no longer listened to just because I couldn’t bare the thought of cleaning up, let alone tidying anything, as that would have detracted from my  cartoon-watching time. But now the wheel has turned and the shoe is on the other glove (I told you, logic has nothing to do with this rant). I am cleaning up after my kids and need help logically keeping things in order, including it would seem, empty tea canisters with no monetary value, but high clutter value. When I was single, logic and order played no role in anything I did. No one questioned me except my parents who were legally forced to admit they loved me and provide shelter, clothing and food once the court order became effective. In fact, the word logic wasn’t even in my vocabulary (I was a very poor student).

Yet somehow, the lessons of life stuck, and my university major in “space optimization so I don’t trip going down the bloody stairs” is paying dividends but is upsetting those who I require help from when asking why we should even keep a freaking tea canister when we have enough crap lying around the house. I could try and apply abductive reasoning to gain that moment of clarity, but that will piss off someone who just sighs in misery and thinks of melting down her wedding band to fund a trip back to the old country.

The World Goes Around, But How?

Speaking of scientific theory and fact-based decision-making, I may have discovered what makes the world spin around, and I don’t think Sir Issac Newton’s theory of gravity or the sun’s magnetic pull are correct. You see, applying logic to places where I am allowed (note: NOT to cleaning up the house to rid it of excess tea canisters) I realized that when half the world is awake, standing up and moving around, the other half is lying down, sometimes sleeping, sometimes doing bad things on their iPads, mostly horizontal, and without the help of Viagra or Cialis, not terribly erect. So the theory goes, those that are lying down, or at least having sex in boring positions, have lowered their center of gravity sufficiently to allow those on the other side of the globe to sway the earth with their higher centre of gravity, kind of like a ball filled with liquid, as it rolls around.

The sleepers and the “having boring sex lying downers” aren’t putting any momentum into the earth, while those moving about vigorously, particularly proctologists on call, truckers high on caffeine pills, lecherous politicians, sweaty plumbers and strippers dancing at clubs (not all mutually exclusive groups by the way) are making the earth swing about on its wobbly axis. Hence I have solved what makes the earth go around, in perfect imbalance, if you discount years of science and sex and money as other explanations.

Sure, I know what you’re thinking — he’s totally lost the plot this time, but let’s be honest. If I am prevented from throwing out legitimate crap from the house and left to think about these things because of the aforementioned withholding tax, I can’t be held accountable for these scientifically steadfast theories that will be borne out after I am dead or when I bribe the Nobel counsel with strippers and chocolate.

Lastly, what does any of this have to do with the latest and greatest posting of the Stanko & Tibor comic, frequently cited in criminal testimony as a decisive factor that led to mass fruit fondling incidents at supermarkets across the globe? Well, like the outlandish plot line and dialog you no doubt read in the comic and then forwarded it to publishers all over the globe in the hopes of helping me get discovered (or incarcerated), we humans are interested in the lives of others, no matter how ridiculously untrue or bizarre those stories may be, because our daily lives of tea canister shifting and arranging have robbed us the will to think for ourselves.

Wishing you many sleepless nights
Sir Issac Einstein von dem Hinterland Druker