The Break-Up Season

Seems like this is the time of year a lot of people go through break-ups.  Friends, bands, family.

Maybe it's the weather.  Or maybe the general reality of dealing with a person's shit just gets old.  It's cold, everybody's broke, so we all stay at home and get on each other's nerves.  Winter is shitty like that.

A break-up always spawns a series of questions.  When do I begin stalking?  What kind of stalking should I do?  Can I threaten anybody they date?  Do I spitefully sleep with somebody else just to fuck with them?  How about their best friend?

So many questions!

Frankly, I have no idea.  I never get far enough with a woman to actually be dumped.  And if a woman I don't like starts to get too close, I show her this blog, and that usually scares her off and out of my hair.  If that doesn't work, I show her my web browsing history.  By then she's running out the door and never looking back.

Asking me for advice about love is like asking Kanye West about humility.  Neither of us have a clue what you're talking about.

Love?  Isn't that when you would do anything for her but she goes out with other guys and calls you a friend?  Yeah!  I've been in love before.  Totally sucked ass!

So, yeah--alien concept.

Relationships are a completely different matter.  Relationships aren't about love, they're about living with a person, and dealing with their shit.  I'm good at that.  I know people better than most.

I've always seen relationships like a chess game with hidden landmines and random Gorgon attacks.  And then sometimes, reality just shifts for no reason like a David Lynch film, and we're on different sides in a different place.  Today is The Black Lodge, tomorrow is in the cafe.

Really, I don't have any sage advice for all of you folks going through break-ups right now.  It sucks, I know, but nobody ever has any wisdom in those times.  It's like Chicken Pox or the Mumps.  We all get that, then our bodies get stronger, and we don't get them again.

At least, that's how it's supposed to work.

Instead, break-ups, shoot-downs and unrequited loves are more like hangovers.  We know drinking that cheap beer all night comes with a price.  And at some point in our night of drinking, we said to ourselves, "Meh, fuck it!  I'll pay for this tomorrow.  Let's get tacos!"  So we did.

The next morning we made a whole bunch of promises to ourselves.  None of those we kept.  Well, for me I once refused to drink endless pitchers of Natural Light, and kept that promise.  My liver still thanks me.  

We know that wonderful person is toxic on some level but we gravitate towards them anyways.  They're gonna hurt us.  It's so obvious there is a large, neon sign blinking "Wrong Way, Dumbass!"  And yet somehow we ignore that sign and look for some small detail in the other person to latch onto like a lamprey eel.  "Oh!  They smiled at me!  I'm certain they're not going to rip me apart this time."

I've often caught myself being an emotional moth that blindly goes towards a bright light only to die a horrible death alone and battered from bashing my brains against the bulb over and over again.  I don't have any evil ex's to deal with.  Instead, I've always been the one less than what they needed and too much of the wrong things.

It's hard not to be bitter when these things happen.  After a while of being the cute but misunderstood puppy in the pound that nobody wants to adopt, it's easy to become jaded and cynical.  The alienation gets rubbed in by the happiness of others.  This is why I loved Sam Kinison's comedy so much.

Sam was the voice of the Rejected.  He was the guy that men would listen to when their break-ups went horribly wrong.  I was lucky enough to see Sam perform live just a few weeks before he was killed in one of the most ironic deaths comedy can offer.

Sam even wrote a great break-up song.  Far better than anything Taylor Swift would ever come up with, I promise.

In the end, I don't really have any advice.  I'd like to say we get strong by all of these emotional Cleveland Steamers but I don't think we do.  I think each one is different, like a cold, and while we might be immune to that one bug after a while there is still another bug waiting to kick our asses.   You would think with over six billion miserable assholes on this fucking planet this shit would somehow be easier, but it's not.  And when you're a Creepy Van Guy, it's really hard.

So that's it.  If you just broke up with somebody, happy stalking!

Valentine's Day Craptastic Blahness

Does anybody even like Valentine's Day?  Anybody?

I know stunningly beautiful and awesome women I'd gladly crawl through the thunderbucket honeypot of a Haitian Refugee camp in August just for a date who cannot stand Valentine's Day.  They roll their eyes and cringe.

I think it's because guys like me get the wrong idea.  The world is full of those of us who are less-than and too much who think a $3.00 card with some shitty chocolate will somehow announce our intentions.  Believe me, when women notice me mentally undressing them slowly and pretty much eye-raping them, they know my intentions.  I don't play poker.  You know what's on my mind right from the beginning.

And since I don't like dumb women, the smart ones tend to figure it out quickly, and stay in public places when I'm around.  It's like herbivores when a predator is in the area.  Safety in numbers, be ready to run, and if you hear or see a van go like hell and don't stop for anything.

It must be tough being a beautiful woman.  Every loser you meet thinks they have something you want.  There's a target on your back because the ugly women are vindictive bitches and the pretty ones are always comparing what you've done to their scorecard.

I have always known I'd make a shitty woman.  I'm terrible at daily maintenance, I forget trivial daily chores, and I don't mind showing up looking like shit.  Besides, the first guy to touch me gets ganked in a soft spot while I laugh at their painful misery as they beg for an ambulance.  But they won't get one.

Another reason I'd make a shitty woman is how poorly I dress.  I'm the guy that owns a dozen red shirts because I can't match clothes to save my life.  I don't buy anything but solid colors and even then I fuck up the matching.  People have asked me if I'm color blind.

We just expect women to make the effort to look good.  Even the ugly women are supposed to at least give it the old college try.  I'd show up everywhere looking like the evil witch that lives on the edge of town.

Another reason I'd make a shitty woman is how much I really do love women.  And just because you don't love women doesn't mean I'd back off.

In a few days, it'll be one of the shittier days on the calendar.  The lonely will be upset because they're alone.  The beautiful will be annoyed because they're popular with all the wrong people.  You would think with 6 billion miserable and lonely assholes on this planet a day about love would be popular.  Instead, it's about alienation, loneliness and unrequited love.

Really, Valentine's Day is about alienation.  It's about people spending money they don't have for crap another person doesn't want to elicit an emotional reaction they don't feel towards a person they don't like.

I've given crap to women on Valentine's Day who didn't give two shits about me just so I could see their reactions.  Cruel, I know, but...Hi, I'm Ted.  I drive a creepy van.

Anyways, I love doing that.  I love finding a herd of women, looking for the most awkward one of the bunch, and giving them something.  Candy, a card, flowers.  And then I stand there, smiling.  I stand there until they muster some kind of response that doesn't break my heart.  The look on their face is fun.  It's a mixture of a cornered animal and a lawyer looking for a legal clause to get them out of trouble.

At first they act like what I gave them was a sweet gesture.  Some do.  Some back away from their present like I've given them a severed limb.  That can be fun, too.  But no, most often they act like I've done something sweet, but their subtle body language says otherwise.

Sometimes I give married women Valentine's Day gifts just to watch them squirm.  Usually I know their husbands won't do shit on that day.  So the woman has to make a choice.  Does she tell hubby about the creepy guy at work or does she keep it to herself?  If she tells him, then hubby gets annoyed and wonders if he has to get off his ass to do something.  If she doesn't, then she and I have a Secret, and that can be exploited.

I once worked with an angry woman and her jealous husband.  I used to anonymously send her flowers with love-notes attached just to watch her get grilled by her husband.  And then it became a running joke.  "Keep it up and I'll send you flowers!"

One day, she shrugged and said, "go ahead!"  She didn't think I'd do it.  Oh, how little she knew about me.  I sent her flowers with a sappy love note.

She intercepted the flowers, took the card, then turned it around on her husband.  She grilled him about who was sending him flowers and if he had a girlfriend on the side.  Good times!

So...I have no idea how to end this blog post.  Valentine's Day sucks.  I guess that's the message.  Love is a weapon, women are awesome, and I'd never want to be one.  Oh, and I'm an asshole.  Or a troll.  Maybe I'm an asshole troll.

Fuck Valentine's Day.

Just Another Superbowl

This Superbowl was a good game but the commercials were horseshit.  Depressing, sentimental crap that really brought the mood down.  I don't need advertising execs trying to jerk a tear out of me in their $10 million 60-seconds of glory.

I think what really pissed me off the most were the attempts at legitimizing the NFL's non-profit status by making these players out to be humanitarians.  Sure, some of these guys do great work in their communities.  But most of us know the average player is a large man-child partying their asses off when they're not at practice.

This is why those commercials about social responsibility pissed me off so much.  Fuck your social responsibility!  I'm not watching this shitshow of gladiatorial combat so I can be reminded of how bad life is around me.  I'm fully aware life sucks.  And your attempts at getting me to be responsible only piss me off more.  You fuckers are lucky I don't leave bodies around rotting in the sun because I had a bad day.  Don't push your luck trying to draw a line connecting my life and the fate of little Deshawn in some city that doesn't need snowplows.

No, I'm watching this gaudy display of forced patriotism in hopes of seeing the spectacle everybody is going to be talking about for days.  I used to love football and now I see it as a distraction from the world around me.

Sometimes I need a distraction.  My mind goes to bad places and picks at scabs that need to heal.  Sometimes, She is harder to forget in the silence, and Her absence hurts just as much as her presence.

But that's okay because we had a ton of friggin' snow and we've got a bad Superbowl game to watch.  My team wasn't in it, so I was just watching for the spectacle of a it, and hoping to see something unscripted.  When watching an event like that, only the unscripted is worth watching, be it a brawl at the end of a game or a dancer falling off stage.  It's the only thing that interests me.

We had a ton of snow this weekend here in the Stateline area.  And it's really fucking cold.  Winter is going to drag on like a monotonous economics lecture.

Years ago, I was working at a gas station and winter just wouldn't quite.  A regular customer came in with a tan and said she'd missed the past 2 blizzards because she was in Florida.  Then she went on to say the temps were in the 80's and humid.

Something inside of me broke.  I felt it.  It was like a piece of my brain checked out and wasn't coming back for a very long time.

I looked down at the register and the money.  For a few minutes, I had a note in my head already worked out.

Dear People Involved,
Normally I would never do this, but fuck y'all!  I'm cold!  I'll come back when I warm up.  

XOXO
Ted
P.S.  IOU $3,340.00 and I'll pay it back when I return.

Then, in my head, I calculated I could drive my beat-up old Ford pick up down to the southernmost point of Texas.  Corpus Christi, I believe.  I had asked a guy with a tractor to dump a load of snow in the back for weight.  My goal was to drive all the way there fast enough so when I arrived at the Gulf of Mexico, I could dump at least some of that snow in and watch it melt.

Something happened to me, though.  Sanity took over and I realized I was trapped in this frozen misery with everybody else.  I remember going home feeling very sad and depressed.

But as for the snow in the back of my truck, I have to tell you folks about the crap I dealt with, because there are some dumb motherfuckers in this world.

It's common in the Midwest to dump snow in your truck's bed for weight in the winter.  The weight helps traction.  People kept asking me why I had snow in the back of my truck.  They were serious about it, too.

I got tired of those questions until I realized how much fun my answers could be.

"Well, the goal is to save it until July, then sell it to folks who need ice for their beer."  

"That's special snow that came in from Canada.  It's purer than our snow and better for lots of stuff."  

"I'm selling it.  How much do you want to buy?"  

"I didn't put that snow there.  I parked it outside one night and it all just drifted into the back of my truck."  

"I put it back there so people don't ask me to help them move."  

"It keeps the bodies underneath frozen."  


People are dumb and the shits are killing us.  Have fun when you can.