dreadcrumbs

Null Manbot

There is a problem, I've found, with being good at hiding from The Man (and The Beast). Your life is boring. Sure, the hidden cameras pointed at you are few, and no one bothers to tap your phone line, but nothing interesting really happens. I usually don't mind this, since I go to great lengths and expense simply not to have to deal with hassle, and nothing is more hassle-ridden than a global conspiracy on your back.

But I do have a blog to write. And one can only write about the bathroom behavior of co-workers so many times before it gets tiring. For me, I mean. I know you guys can't get enough of the poo stories.

I suppose I could always just make stuff up, but even that becomes difficult when the raw materials of my day consist only of Taco Bell, Tivo, and the vagaries of highway traffic.

So I'm going to try an experiment. I'm going to see just how much Truth I can reveal about the hidden nature of the world over the next few days before I am noticed by The Gnomes of Zurich or agents of The Discordian Apple. If I'm careful, I can be interesting, useful, and un-abducted. If I'm not, well, I'll see you in the re-education tanks.

Microstory Monday

Someone Else's Problem
Last night, there was a car parked next to mine in the lot of my apartment complex. I didn't know whose it was, but I think someone was in the trunk, screaming. It was pretty scary. I kept thinking about it all night.

This morning, though, the car is gone, and I have a coupon for a free Egg McMuffin. Good times.

If I'm Chaotic Good, you're Lawful Evil

Since my wife has thrown down the gauntlet regarding relative insanity, the subject is on my mind. I am reminded of a human classification system I developed in High School in an effort to understand the otherwise unintelligible hordes of humanity, and I believe it is still valid. Let me share it with you.

People are divided into four categories based on their sanity, or lack thereof, and their control, or lack thereof.

So people can be
A. Insane, and in control of their insanity
B. Sane, and in control of their sanity
C. Insane, and not in control of their insanity
D. Sane, and not in control of their sanity

Let me give you some examples.
Category A people are the most interesting, usually. At least in small doses. They might be artists or Star Trek fans.
B people are often pretty boring. They're good workers, but they often don't get your jokes.
People in category C are the ones that get the most news time because they made a suit out of the skins of their neighbors or something.
Category D is really the most dangerous. These people often control corporations that destroy small companies and mutate wildlife. They might be a little obsessive-compulsive and break into cleaning fits late at night. They take normal behaviors to extreme and quirky levels, and are convinced they are sane (and indeed they are), so justify all their behavior without realizing they are completely out of control.

I'll let you guess which category I think I am. And which my wife is...

A Congress of The Wee

There is a conference room here at work that I frequent when the temperature in my cubicle's vicinity approaches "infernal." The room is rarely used, and remains at a blissful sub 80 degrees Farenheit.

But someone else is also using this room. Someone tiny. I know this because every time I return to the room, the height of my favorite office chair is at its lowest setting. I dutifully raise it back up, so my knees don't knock my teeth out when I sit down, but when I come back later, it has reverted to squatty status.

Now, I don't have anything against short people. They want their seating experience to be a comfortable one, just like everyone else. But here's the thing. Even at it's highest setting, the chair in question would still allow anyone with a shin length of 11 inches or greater to sit without free-swinging feet. 11 inches. The length of a normal sheet of printer paper. My 2-year-old's shins are nearly that long. In contrast, the only possible way someone could be comfortable at the chair's lowest setting is if their shin length is under 8 inches. That is the length of my two year old's shins. Now, maybe I just don't hang around short people, but that seems pretty extreme. Wouldn't that require the entire person, properly proportioned, to be something like 3 feet tall?

Our resident Greek spy is taller than that, and he's the shortest person I've seen here. The only possible conclusion, then, is that we have night elves. Or gnomes, or dwarves. Wee folk of some kind that come out at night that are obviously evil, since we know all things nocturnal are malevolent.

I don't want to spook everyone in the building by sending out a company wide email with the subject line "TINY EVIL MEN ARE USING OUR FACILITIES" until I have proof, though. So I'll be sprinkling flour on the conference room floors before I leave for the night. The tiny footprints I find in the morning will be all the evidence I need.

And then those freaky little chair changers will pay.

It's not vampirism if it isn't red

In my neverending quest to expand my knowledge of all things abscess and pustule, I wanted to find out exactly what pus is made of. I mean, it looks sort of like clotted cream, but it doesn't taste like it, so I just had to know. Turns out it is made of dead cells and protein juice. That's right. Protein juice. I believe the phrase in the very respectable encyclopedia I used was "a liquid rich in protein." And here we are, scraping and squirting and washing it away. People pay good money for protein drinks, and here I am lancing my boils over the sink. Letting liquid gold go right down the drain.

I mean, sure, you would have to be pretty infected to produce enough juice for an 8-16 ounce beverage, but I'm sure it could be done. Especially after you added sugar and ginseng or something. I don't have the time or the inclination to be a pus farm myself (I just don't like the way cysts chafe against clothing), but I'm sure there are plenty of people who need extra cash who aren't doing anything else useful. I would have loved to have professionals come drain my carbuncles while I played 24 hours straight of Civilization on my PC in college. And then to get paid for it? What a treat!

I just need to come up with a friendly name to encourage investors. Pus has such a bad rep, so something like "Pus Dream" probably wouldn't work. Maybe Elysia™ ("Where white blood cells go to die!"), Neutrophil White™ ("It's people!"), or International Issue™ ("Flowing in from around the world!"). Then I'd target the youth market by adding carbonation and caffeine. Call it "X-Cess!" or "The Seep!" I could maybe add an "Extreme" or "Freestyle Edition," if the label's big enough.

Mute Points

I never know whether to correct people's language. I mean, who am I to say whether "anyways" is really a word or not? English is a forever mutating language. Until recently, I would have sent anyone using "text" as a verb to The Camps for re-education. But television has taught me that such use is now no longer social idiocy.

I bring this up because I was in a meeting today where an otherwise intelligent and reasonable human being repeatedly used the word "agreeance." As in, "If we're in agreeance, let's move on to the tortoise-meat discussion." It seemed a little petty to raise my hand and say, "Uh, Greg? Point of order. I'm afraid 'agreeance' isn't a word we use outside the short bus." So I didn't. I mean, maybe "agreeance" is hip new slang, and I would just be branding myself as a stodgy geezer to say anything. But then again, maybe I'm right, and allowing him to continue subtracting perceived IQ points from himself is just cruel.

Oh well. For all intensive purposes, the most practicle plan is undoubtably to just keep quiet.

Microstory Monday

Midnight Onomatopoeia

Clink.
Gasp!
Rustle.
Chuk.
Gurgle.
Chuk.
Thump.
Chuk. Chuk. Chuk.

A New Age for My Toothbrush

I heard once from an EMT that one of the questions they ask people to determine whether they are hypochondriacs or crazy (as opposed to just diseased or injured) is whether their teeth itch. If they say yes, then we all know they're nuts, since teeth aren't capable of itching.

But see, my teeth itch. Right now. As I'm writing this. I'm not going to call an ambulance or anything, since it's mostly just irritating, but it makes me wonder. Not whether I'm crazy, because I know I'm not (and don't think I don't know what "Schizophreniform" means, Dr. Gordon. You're still wrong.), but whether my teeth might be special. Of course most people's tooth enamel has no biological way to send impulses back to the brain, but who is to say mine don't? Rather than jumping to conclusions about someone's sanity, shouldn't we look into the possibility that they've been blessed with some kind of superhuman ability or extra-sensory perception? I can't say exactly how useful my dental nerve net is. I'm not going to be able to put on spandex and fight crime just yet, but I'm calling it a blessing. I won't be going public with my new abilities until I'm sure society will accept me, though. Getting "hospitalized" right now would throw a kink in my seven-year plan for world conquest self-actualization.

So until my teeth start sprouting little arms and legs, I'm not taking any pictures. Or medication.

Loneliness is No Excuse

I haven't done an entry about the public bathrooms in a while, so I suppose I might as well...
There is a guy here at work who talks in the stall. Not to himself, I'd probably be okay with that, but to whoever is in the neighboring stall. I've been aware of this guy (who, to the best of my knowledge, isn't retarded) for a while, but it didn't quite reach blog threshold, since he usually just says "Hi." Today, though...let me relate something I overheard as I was washing my hands.

So, like I said, I'm washing my hands in preparation to leave the facility, when I see this particular guy enter. He doesn't talk to me (thank Dagon), and proceeds directly to the one stall open of the two we have. The other is already occupied. About 10 seconds pass, and...

Poo Talker: Hey there.
Stall Two: ...
Poo Talker: How's it going?
Stall Two: Are you talking to me?
Poo Talker: Yeah. How's it going?
Stall Two: Okay.
Poo Talker: Cold, isn't it?
Stall Two: What?
Poo Talker: I say, it's cold, isn't it?
Stall Two: Sure.
*5 second pause*
Poo Talker: You got enough paper over there?
Stall Two: ...
Poo Talker: I say, you got enough paper over there?
Stall Two: Yes. I'm fine.
Poo Talker: 'Cause I've got like two extra rolls here, if you need 'em.

At this point, Stall Two flushed, and since I had really long since finished drying my hands, I left the scene of horror. As the door closed behind me, though, I heard what I think was a rapid flush and exit by the talker, and some more now unintelligible conversation. I think the talker actually cut his defecatory process short (read: no wiping), so he could keep talking to the poor soul in Stall Two. Wow. Just wow. I mean, I'm not a "talk to strangers" kind of guy, so I think any conversation with anyone who isn't your longtime friend or family member is uncalled for, but this. This is just shudderworthy.   

Things That Cannot Be Unseen

There are two specific kinds of terror that I experience on a day to day basis. First, there's the standard "being chased by a psychotic/zombie/hyperintelligent ape with a chainsaw/hacksaw/icepick" feeling. This is the kind of thing you get in horror movies and entertaining dreams. You mostly want to run, hide, maybe try to shoot the thing chasing you with a shotgun. Not something you really want to have to deal with, but ultimately no big deal.

The other kind of terror is the "crumple beneath the weight of your own cosmic ignorance" kind. The "please, no, this cannot possibly exist!" kind. To this point, there is a commerical for McDonalds that was on last month during children's programming  that consisted of Ronald dancing ridiculously on one of those Dance! Dance! Revolution! arcade things as more and more children congregated, interested in his performance. The spectacle ends with a poorly-rendered CGI clown shoe being flung at the "camera" from which the television audience is watching. That is it. If you have seen this commercial, then you know true madness. I cannot grasp the thing that that commercial is. My brain cannot accomodate it. It is horror.

Worse still, there was an interstitial on CBS, I think, during the Holidays that had a badly-dubbed preteen girl singing the hitherto unknown song "I Love Christmas" while bouncing about in nightmarish blue sets and fake snow, all while accompanied by a four foot person WITH A RUBBER HEAD.

When I see these things I begin to understand how people can react with insanity to things they don't understand. I swear, if I could fashion a noose for concepts, these pieces of media would be hanging from a tall tree down the road, twitching as I poke them with a pitchfork.