لدي زوجة

One year has passed, and yet the moment itself seems to occupy the entirety of that timeline. Sure, the rest of life keeps transpiring, with all the ups and downs one would expect, but fundamentally I still feel the same way about my wife as I did the day I said my vows, so in a weird sort of way I'm still in that moment as much as I am in this one. Sometimes kissing her strikes me as a continuation of that first married kiss in addition to being a discrete event unto itself. I suppose that must either be a sign of our enduring, storybook love, or possibly some indicator that I am trapped in an existential paradox and unable to segregate retrospective memories from prospective memories due to my persistent simultaneous existence in two time periods.

I've noticed (wioll haven notice) that settling into married life has just refined the relationship instead of altering it grossly. The same exact irritations occur (willan have occurren) but we have learned to deal with them a little differently (haven on-dealt witha learnfor willmay...you get the idea). So maybe the essential secret to marital bliss is a combination of framing your experience like a time traveller(1) and cultivating selective hearing.


(1) With thanks to Douglas Adams, who prepared me for the curious grammar and the general absurdity of life.

Amaranthine Arduousity

When I was a kid, video games were hard, but they were largely formulaic and short (all the better to entice another quarter out of the player). Over time, difficulty waxed and waned with length, story, graphic and sound qualities, and other factors, until the industry grew to expect games with budgets higher than Michael Bay films that took five years to develop. The end result is that once in a while I pick up a fantastic game that only has a single, terrible flaw: the fucker just never ends. I'm not talking about pure sandbox games...those get boring and I quit eventually, maybe to pick them back up again in a few months. I'm talking about 100+ hours of core gameplay, characters who appeal to my emotions, and sidequests upon sidequests upon sidequests of shit to collect, kill, or sleep with.

Fuck the grue; it is dark, and I am very likely to be eaten by the couch.

Code

Private Sub Form_Load()

For i = 1 to 4 Step 1

If happy = true and Knowit = true

While i = 3

With face.show

End With

Else

With hands.clap

End With

Wend

End If

Next i

End Sub

Edited; short code = win, dammit.

Transdermal

As Jackie Boy would say, you never really quit, do you?

I am no longer smoking. I am not presently, nor have I recently been, engaged in smoking. I do not wish to smoke; breathing, as foreign as it once became, is preferable, cheaper, and more enduring a pastime. I have quit before (for years, in fact), and I have resumed smoking before (idiocy /self-destructive nature?). I do not wish to resume smoking ever again. Not at parties. Not at the bar. Not once a year on my birthday. That is the Devil's talk: "Just one little puff...you can handle that", he claims (lying little horned fuck).

I have a new secret weapon this time. I am delivering my poison transdermally in the hopes that breaking the "habit" portion first will help me maintain my commitment to stave off the addiction that I am nursing along for a few weeks with my new pal The Patch.

Uncommon Quotations and other Contrivances

Someday I shall publish a counter proposal to Bartlett's and their ilk: a tome of Uncommon Quotations, filled with obscure, highly situational, or wildly inappropriate fare. The whole point of the more pedestrian versions of these collections has always seemed to me to be a mixture of self-propaganda / self-aggrandizement ("Look, everyone! I'm being poignant again...here it comes...") and the insincere attempt of public speakers to resonate with strangers. We tell anecdotes to familiarize ourselves, to break the ice, and to illustrate our own literacy to an audience that in all likelihood doesn't know the difference between a person who is well read as a whole, and a person who has a collection of quotation books and Cliff Notes. I would like to present the exact opposite; I'd like to author a book of quotations and anecdotes designed to baffle, alienate, or offend the audience...split the collection into non-sequitur Zen, discomfiting personal revelations from complete unknowns, and the vilest jokes available.

(a):

"Sometimes, when you're not looking, I'm someone else."

This is one of those things you say when people are inebriated or somehow have a tenuous grip on the moment (at a peak of stress, perhaps).

(b):

"My neighbor Carl once told me that he could only prepare for the banality of these conferences by masturbating furiously in the bathroom while choking himself with his tie."

Personally revealing, attributed to someone nobody else knows, and the kind of thing that visualizes easily.

(c):

"Do you know why the douche was invented? Ever try to teach a fotze to gargle and spit?"

As related to me by a 54 year old German immigrant who was quite possibly the funniest woman I have ever met; it even has a certain old-world charm when uttered by a bespectacled hausfrau from Stuttgart.

Cryptic Message from an Old Fool to a New Fool

The world was simpler then, or so the liars claim
Kids today, their elders say, don't understand the cause
Your predecessors all fell victim to the world
While you slept peacefully well, cradled in its claws
And all the sellouts, at the memory of their flaws
Wait for epiphany, absolution, or applause

And the whole world is as fucked up as a hippie with a gun
A mom who killed her kids for love, or a hooker who's a nun
The girl next door, the man upstairs, and rest are on the run
And someday you can pass all of this on again, my son

You'll want to change the world; there's nothing wrong with that
Except the arrogance invariably involved
You'll think you have the whole mess fixed in no time flat
Until you realize some problems just can't be be solved
So rest your laurels on to what you have evolved
It still wasn't you around which everything revolved

And the whole world is as fucked up as a hippie with a gun
A mom who killed her kids for love, or a hooker who's a nun
The girl next door, the man upstairs, and rest are on the run
And someday you can pass all of this on again, my son

Don't listen to or trust a soul, not even me
I'm only rational or lucid now and again
I've spent a lifetime and only lived a moment
Seconds of enlightenment punctuate years of pain
You'll find yourself one day unable to explain
Beyond echoing your father's desperate refrain

That the whole world is as fucked up as a hippie with a gun
A mom who killed her kids for love, or a hooker who's a nun
The girl next door, the man upstairs, and rest are on the run
And someday you can pass all of this on again, my son

Priorities

An appeal to the heavens for divine intervention is nothing to take lightly, but every one I've ever witnessed seemed to be (in the grand scheme of things) a fairly straightforward, self-centered request. "Please don't let this be a tumor" or "please bring my child back" as opposed to "please cure cancer" or "please raise all of the righteous the dead"...and that's being charitable; most of the appeals I've heard personally revolved around not getting caught.

It occurs to me that even tossing about words like omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, certainly a divine authority has priorities. Are we really doing the right thing by asking the being responsible for the movement of the spheres to help us hit lotto, or is that perhaps a distraction from more important matters? The Catholics have a system of intermediaries, but are very plain that your miracle is filtered up through to the Big Guy himself; he isn't delegating so much as he's hiring contractors to implement his designs. He still makes 100% of the decisions, which is perhaps why there are still pedophiles in the church and communists walking the Earth although a significant number of people have prayed for an end to both. It isn't that he's not listening, he just has a lot of shit on his plate. That, and he's ineffable / unfathomable, which makes the whole process damned infuriating because one never knows if something inconvenient is a part of the plan or just something that was de-scoped due to bandwidth problems.

What the world needs are second-stringers; someone who isn't saddled with quite so much. A specialist, if you will. You don't have the architect hauling concrete for the build site, and you don't ask the heart surgeon to put antisceptic and a bandage on a scrape, so why does humanity have the balls to ask the A-List of the divine world to get them out of parking tickets or help you pull a Jedi Mind Trick on the nice police officer and his dog?

For personal matters court then the intercession of unpopular gods, which being burdened with less may attend to you more.