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Dateline December 26th, perilously close the freezing toilet, 
despite temperatures upsettingly close to global warming theoretical models

Internet of Things = Holiday Laziness

So if you dared to read the previous previous episode of this epistemological equivalent of recycled toilet paper from a Third World Communist-era country with high dysentery, you know full well that my thoughts of winter and cold led me to explain to you the prevalence of technology, our addiction to it, the impending tsunami of the Internet of Things. And, if you read between the lines, you know I’m not a very good hair stylist or theoretical physicist. But you really had to be paying attention for that one.

So as you can see, the holiday spirit has made me lazy too and I crapped out and came up with this easy to make and even easier to read episode of the comic that should be banned by authorities. But that has given me time to spend with my kids, my family and most importantly, myself. Mostly unconscious and on a couch, warmly cuddling my iPad like the child I always wanted. (It has an off switch. Just saying.)

So with the holiday season in full swing, and ever more ways for the marketers who control the Internet of Things to tell us what to buy, and why we need it, and subsequent ads custom tailored to trigger our deepest, darkest, most perverted desires and convert them into purchases, we have not only become grand and gross consumers, but lazy ones as well. One click, and it’s purchased and delivered to you by a human, a drone, or a drone human. This my friends, my Romans, my fellow slack-jawed readers is progress! (By the way, I got new ski boots, thus satisfying a four year desire/need that ranks close to food and sex.)

Not Progress

However, in this age of ease, laziness and three-toed sloth, technology has brought some dangerously unintended consequences, and I’m not talking about North Korea and China hacking my Twitter feed so that I am accused of calling the President of the United States a “running dog lackey of the cesspool of narco-porno-terrorism” — again. I am, however, talking about the technological scourge of our visual world known as High Definition TV, and the even more perilous and insidious 4K TV. That’s right, I said it, ultra-high definition TV is a bad thing because it allows us viewers to see the world as it is, and not as how it could be with gauze sheathed glasses.

Why such a scourge you ask? (Actually, since no one reads this comic/rant, no one sane is really asking. I am really the one asking. Besides most of my unwilling readers are actually bound and restrained, like Hannibal Lecter.)   Well, there are certain combinations that shouldn’t occur in nature, and one of them is pornography and high-definition TV. I know the imprisoned among you think this would be a good thing, but why would you want to see all those appendages, scars, tattoos, entry and exit points in such graphic detail? Don’t you have a hard enough time looking at yourself in the mirror in the morning, up close, to know that humans look pretty damn hideous in detail?

Not The Face and Definitely Not the Logic

Let’s skip the sexual appendages and areas for a minute and concentrate on the human face. Unless layers of makeup are applied, hairs are plucked just so, sleep has been had in adequate time increments, the lighting is just right, and the alcoholic content of the wine you guzzled is just short of jet fuel, it turns out that human faces aren’t as nice as we think they are. In fact, the human brain adapts to survive by deceiving itself so we believe that perfect he or she across the room is beautiful. Our brains shield us from the reality of the crooked nose, the pitted skin, the greasy patina on the nose, the uneven eye placement, the gummy smile, even the thin lips so we don’t have to deal with the reality that 4K and HD TV grant us.

So, if we logically extrapolate this hideous face architecture coupled with our inherent brain deception, and drop a couple of quadrants to the human private parts, and now think of those “bits” in super-mega-quintuple high-definition, not counting the aforementioned tattoos and scars, why the hell would you want to see “the piston scene” in ultra-high definition? Porn stars really aren’t that good-looking, because if they were they’d be in Hollywood.

Technology has given us too much, I say. I really don’t want to see a monkey’s hairy butt in that much detail, so why would I want to see a woman’s woo-hoo being invaded like Poland by some guy’s obscenely large wing-wang (yes, I always feel inferior) with a mind-boggling, vomit-inducing detail revealing “things” the human mind makes a dedicated effort to conceal, smudge, gloss over and otherwise make palatable through neural deception? We need the gauzy filters and lighting effects. We need special effects and makeup artists and regular definition TV so as not to see the high definition horrors of low production values that could lead to procreation. The logic of visual hyper-reality has no place in the bedrooms of the nation or the porno sets of Hollywood, Prague and Tokyo.

It almost makes me want to give up gettin’ funky with my significant other. That would be incomprehensible.

Incomprehensible Logic

Which brings me to the next thing beyond comprehension. Child-rearing. You see, my thoughts of the cold snow and ice reminded me that my car needs to have its winter tires put on, and thus I realized I would be sliding, swerving and slipping sideways and forward to my destination hoping I don’t crash and/or incur more costs or penalties. Traction control be damned, it is dicey out there.

Just like parenting. If I may use an automotive analogy (translation: this author is not a deep thinker), your offspring are kind of like an adrenaline junkie lead-footed driver in a car with bald tires, while you, the stupid, impetuous parents, are like stability and traction control, airbags and anti-lock brakes, doing everything you can to prevent or at least reduce the likelihood of massive fish-tailing, skidding, crashing, hydroplaning, uncontrolled sliding, rollovers and unintended off-road misadventures with drug-addled, tattooed people of the opposite or same-sex.

Your job, quite simply, is to get your children — legitimate, illegitimate, adopted or kidnapped, natural birth or from a test tube or as otherwise defined by the law and social conventions — to their destinations in life, somewhat safe and sound with as few scratches, replacement parts as possible, no blown gaskets, and most of their critical fluids intact.

Leaky Fluids

Sure, there will be episodes where “fluids” will leak, the airbags will figuratively deploy and the dashboard warning lights will light up the instrument pinnacle like a baboons behind in heat (usually after the child has experimented with acid in said parents’ basement, or gotten a tattoo with the name “Midge” in an all too prominent place). But what would a journey be if it didn’t include inclement weather, roadside assistance, more than a few blind curves, pot holes and running up on the sidewalk of life?

The biggest problem isn’t even so much keeping your kid on the road to adulthood despite the likelihood of he or she winding up in jail for public nudity. Rather, it’s that you as the equivalent of the automotive safety net also need to be a mechanic. As we know many are crooked, few are competent and most are high on paint and gasoline fumes. Which isn’t such an awful thing, it just makes social engagements and job interviews more difficult to complete without graphic profanity and dropping your pants for sheer shock effect (dad).

Being poor mechanics on top of being a safety net means we often cheap out on maintenance and replacement parts to ensure we have some profit margin to be able to save for retirement. The result usually is parenting that involves quick fixes (e.g. “go ask your mother, I’m watching cartoons”) or psycho- and electro-convulsive therapy.

Last and Least

Penultimately, your offspring, as represented by the vehicle in this story, slows down, wears itself out, kills the battery every so often, gets into an accident or gets a flat tire, and sometimes admits maybe a paint job is a good way to hide the damage. (Unless of course, said vehicle and driver are turning 50, have a collective midlife crisis, get a paint job and fender extensions, and modified parts, and then leave home to have an affair with another “dealer” so to speak.) But I digress.

Ultimately for the parent, you want to steer the vehicle and its occupants so that at some foolish point they can err fatally, not use birth control and then wind up being the safety net/mechanic to their own (un)planned adrenaline junkie lead-footed driver in a car with bald tires.

So it is with these random words, these unstructured, tangentially and loosely linked thoughts, these bumper car-like mental occurrences translated into key strokes that I bid you, the mentally degenerate readers of this chronicle a happy holiday season. Spend some time with the ones you love, or if you can’t do that because of the restraining order, buy more crap as a means to short-term happiness and self-fulfillment. It does work, I know from experience.

Subtly stubbly and monkeyishly hairy,

Guido the Christmas Mechanic