I'll Skip on Fermented Things

I was just served a nice big glass of Boddington's Pub Ale. This, I have been learned, is a considerable upgrade from both the watery mediocrity of Bud Lite and the kiddie soda-pop vibe of Smirnoff Ice.

I've tried the last two, so I decided I'd go ahead and try the ale, supposedly a real man's drink. Let's clarify here, though, that I am by no means a connoisseur (I had to spell check that word) of alcoholic beverages. As previously mentioned, I'm new to drinking. I've picked up the opinions of others but I have no idea what makes a light ale light and a dark one dark. I assume it has to do with the number of light bulbs in the ingredients. Additionally, I have no clue what many drinks taste like except for a sip or two, and for the most part they taste all the same to me. So between you and me, we know this is not my strong suit.

So I have some Boddington's. Maybe half the glass. And you know what?

I didn't like it. Nope. No thanks. Even if I did like the taste, and I really don't, with every sip I took I felt like I was trying to be someone I wasn't. Like I was drinking just to do it and not because I wanted to. Like I was faking an enjoyment for the crowd--being a poseur (it's spelled that way, I'm not trying to be fancy with all these Frenchy words) really.

And I hate poseurs. I really do. I'll rant about them all day. In fact, I do in my Minecraft playthrough here. I can't stand the thought of pretending to be someone I'm not just to get other people to like me or find me interesting. It's so irritatingly vain and shallow. Take, for instance, two people I met recently, one of whom has a Jeep.

He loves his Jeep a lot. That's great, he could shut the fuck up about it every once in a while, but he's happy with his Jeep. While he was fawning over it one day I joked that we should put his Jeep next to my Kawasaki Vulcan LTD and see which girls will like better. He then proceeded to challenge my Vulcan with his Harley-Davidson. I inquired as to whether or not he actually owned a Harley-Davidson and responded affirmatively, but after asking him if he bought it, he revealed that it was his father's bike and he didn't actually have a motorcycle license.

You lying motherfucker. And he said "my Harley." See, I can say my Vulcan is my bike because I am a co-owner, my father being the other co-owner. The motorcycle is in both our names and I shelled out the same amount of cash as he did for that bike, AND I have my license. For reference, here's our bike:

For further reference, here's Jeep Guy's bike:

I hope you get the joke.

What's worse is that he proceeded to try to tell other people he had a Harley. In front of me. You had better believe I shot that self-centered ego boosting down real quick.

Another example the same day, again with motorcycles! Some fifteen year old nimrod tried to impress me by saying he street raced sport bikes and one time he got in a street race with some fella on, again, a Harley-Davidson. I'll repeat that he's about fifteen and let you do the rest. Fuses were exploding in my head.

What I'm trying to get at? Don't ever, ever be a poseur, and especially don't pretend to be something you're not to impress people or best someone in a dick measuring contest. It's okay to be not as good as someone in something else. Don't take it as a challenge, take it as an opportunity to learn from someone who is different from you. I have a motorcycle and I know some balisong tricks, but I don't know how to fix a car and I don't know much of anything about alcoholic beverages, something I think we've all understood by now. So if I meet a guy who is real handy or he's got a good taste in liquor, I don't pretend like I can fix my motorcycle (I can calibrate the side mirrors) or that I know anything about alcohol.

Just advice, I'm not trying to tell anyone how to live their life.

Kevin Costner is Scary

The face of terror.

I just watched "Mr. Brooks", a 2007 movie of crazy dark psychological thriller-ness. It's kind of a spin off of Jekyll & Hyde . Kevin Costner plays Earl Brooks, a CEO of a box-making company who has an alter ego named Marshall. Marshall is the embodiment of Earl's addiction to killing people, then rearranging their bodies and taking artsy pictures. There's the obligatory plot of a spunky law enforcement agent trying to find him out, but they throw in a sicko photographer who wants to accompany Earl in his deeds, among a few other things.

It was dark. It was twisted. It was screwed up. It was tense. And I did NOT see the ending coming. Holy balls, that was a good movie. See, I don't know about you folks, but I love a good psychological thriller. Anything that bends the mind is fantastic to me because it requires a person to bend their own mind to come up with everything in the first place.

That's why I like horror. True horror. Not the crap put out these days with the formulaic plots regarding hot teens having sex and then getting gruesomely murdered by one stupid stabby thing or another because they don't have any brains. I mean stuff that really gets into people's heads, stuff that doesn't even have to be gory. I mean stuff like that of the late Polish painter Zdislaw Beksinski. Stuff like this:

Look at that and tell me it's not scary. That painting is just one of many of his that give me chills. That's some real horror there.

Think, as well, of the video game Dead Space 2. The horror in that game is fantastically done I think. Honestly, it's not hard to think up a mean scary bad guy. But are they truly terrifying? I think Dead Space nailed it by making the enemies in the game a mutilated and mutated onslaught of humans. Ho, but not just adults, because everyone in video games is an adult. No, they went after kids and babies too. 

Visceral Games probably had a board meeting and decided something along these lines:

Let's do 'em, man! Let's do this whole fucking village! 

If you get the reference, then you're a fantastic individual. If you didn't, then you are wrong and you need to see "Platoon." It's got Charlie Sheen in it. Anyway, these boys did NOT hold back when it came to making as many things as fucked up as possible look as fucked up as they possibly could in their game. Seriously, if I was ambling along some mining facility and I saw something twice as tall as me with this face:

That is the point where I'd just throw my hands up and walk out, muttering, "I fuckin' quit bro. I fuckin' quit." That's SCARY. And I love it.

The ability to truly psychologically affect someone, especially in a negative way such as scaring or confusing them, is applause-worthy in my book. The skill to reach outside one's own comfort zone to find something truly affective (and I specify "affective" and not "effective," I'm not always stupid) and then bring it to others is very impressive. Often I have trouble thinking of scary or tragic scenarios because I don't like to think of them, so to me the ability to not just think of these things, but to be able to draw them and give them life goes far beyond making a good romantic comedy or painting a pretty picture of some fruit in a bowl (I admit I'm absolutely terrible at drawing anything in general).

And just FYI, at the end of Mr. Brooks, Snape kills Dumbledore.

It's Goddamn Grass

I just saw a commercial for a lawn tractor that supposedly has a turn radius smaller than its competitors. Holy hell, this is the kind of stuff that infuriates me. Is this seriously important?

I'm not pumping my fist to any new cause when I complain about stuff like this. Just the mention of the  frivolity of lawn care is enough to attract every hipster and bohemian within earshot. But like I said, it's goddamn grass. It's really not that important.

I wonder how much the guy with the greenest lawn in the neighborhood contributes to charity. Let's hit on that for a second.

Around the time Haiti got wasted by that big earthquake, Facebook groups like these started popping up and pissing me off severely. The idea is that by joining a group which promises to donate one amount of a certain kind of currency (in this case, $1 USD) for each person who joins, people then feel that they are donating by proxy. That's absolutely ludicrous and it's simply a case of lazy people giving themselves peace of mind that they helped when they didn't.

You know what I did to help out Haiti? I gave $10 to Red Cross and bought this awesome shirt, 100% of the proceeds of which went to Red Cross as well. See, I actually took some money out of my own goddamn pocket. I didn't click "join" to a group on Facebook and wipe my hands, dutifully declaring, "My work here is done" before joining a group full of people who think that the situation in Darfur "totally sucks" and that it should stop.

The world don't work that way, but more on that later.

Leave My Cowboys Alone

"Cowboys are awesome" is the revelation granted to me by listening to the song "You Look Great When I'm Fucked Up" by The Brian Jonestown Massacre. They never actually say that but you...just, you know, you can hear it in the song. When I hear that song, I think of cowboys dueling, and dueling is awesome.

Then some physicist named Niels Bohr decided he was going to figure out why bad cowboys always lose in duels. According to the article, he enlisted a fellow physicist to do a few pretend duels and Dr. Bohr always came out on top even though he pulled his guns last, probably because the guy he was dueling with was on his payroll. SCIENCE!

Going off that, British experimental psychologist Andrew Welchmann did his own experiment (this makes sense because he is an experimental psychologist as we learned previously):

His experiment didn't have any subjects aiming pistols at each other, sadly, but instead had them competing to push three buttons on a console in a specific order. Those who reacted to the first movements of their competitors moved around 9% faster then those who initiated the exchange, though the reacting subjects' movements tended to be less accurate.

Welchman believes: "It would be sensible for the brain to have a reactive system that went a bit faster than a system based on decisions or intentions." An inaccurate, but quick response system may have evolved in the human brain for when survival is at risk, where making an error is less important than having some kind of reaction at all.

I think both Welchmann and Bohr are incredibly silly if they didn't realize the bad guy pulls first and dies first because it's in the script, but they need their government grants and everyone loves cowboys.

Another Bad Cheese-Related Decision

My sister made some macaroni and cheese and I ate a lot of it. Now I feel sick. Cheese always gets me that way.

I made this blog at the suggestion/prodding/gunpoint coercion of two friends of mine after telling them that I started keeping a journal (the man word for "diary") recently. Apparently they think I'm more important than I do, but that's what I pay them for. Alright, enough of that.

I don't want to say I was raised to be humble, but I learned to despise pride that crosses into arrogance and elitism. As a result, making my own blog is one small step for Man but one giant leap for me. I have no inclination to believe that anything I say is important or special enough that I should publicize it and expect anything at all from it but ridicule for thinking I do think what I say is important or special enough to be publicized.

But my friends said I should, so what the hell, I'll try. I couldn't say where I want to start though. I would love to run a blog like Hookers or Cake. Perhaps I should discuss topics in religion and politics that interest me. Maybe I'll just share stories like the mac & cheese bit above, or things from my journal. I suppose I'll figure it out.

In the mean time, whoever reads this, your patience is appreciated.

NOTE: The writer of this blog wishes to convey that he was not actually in any way, shape, or form coerced or pressured to create this blog. The above claim is fictitious and completely in jest.