Making Fun Of Handicapped People (Is Still A Really Bad Idea)

Despite the impression that you, my highly valued reader, may have of me from this purple little blog of mine, I am no superhuman. To the disappointment of all involved parties, I am not a towering monolith of everything that humanity could be if it simply fulfilled its potential for greatness. In fact, as difficult as it may be for you to swallow, I am only human, and just as fallible and stupid as the rest of my ilk. Yet, even for a species as destructive and short-sighted as mine, one would have to be exceptionally lacking in areas both intellectual and moral to do something that could be considered a sequel to something like this.

Alas, that person is me. I'm so sorry for all of this. 

Take this bottle of shampoo as a gift to show you how remorseful I am.

So I'm white. I happen to live in an area where just about everyone else is white too. Virtually every friend that I have is perfectly acceptable WASP material. Because of this homogeneous atmosphere, my friends and I have all picked up a bad habit of using terrible words to describe unfortunate things. We feel pretty secure using these terrible words, because none of us really know anyone who's retarded or gay or any of our other horrible adjectives; consequently, we don't know anyone who has a real basis for being offended. 

This is my friend, Bucket Of Dicks. He gets really offended when we call something a bucket of dicks.

So the other day, I was hanging out with a friend of mine at school. Neither of us had class for a while, so my friend suggested going across the street and getting some food. I was happy as a clam at the prospect of perpetuating my fat existence, so we went on our merry way. All was well until we got near the crosswalk. 

I have a special reservoir of hate in my heart, reserved specifically for people who incessantly mash on crosswalk buttons. It's more than just a pet peeve; every time I see a person press a crosswalk button more than once, I want to slap them across the face and explain why I believe every major tragedy in the last millennium has been directly caused by them. I firmly believe that rapists, racists, murderers and crosswalk-button-smashers are all going to the same part of Hell. I hate crosswalk buttons because they serve no purpose and the ones in my area make a God-awful clangy metal noise that can be heard from space. 

Hate Puppy knows how I feel about this. 

So we came within view of the crosswalk, and I immediately felt my soul turn cold and black, because some girl was beating on the button like a particularly bad case of domestic abuse. As we approached, the girl pulled out her cell phone and started perusing through it, pushing that Goddamn button all the while. At some point, the little white crosswalk guy came on, and every single person crossed the street except her, because she was still checking her phone and pressing that awful button. 

This blatant stupidity stoked the proverbial fires of my unreasonable hatred into a blazing inferno. Turning to my friend, I vehemently whispered to her. "Is this girl retarded or something? Why is she still pressing that button?"

My friend was horrified and urgently whispered "Johann, that girl is retarded!"

"....what."

I usually turn to the internet to express my feelings. I'd like to think it does a pretty good job.

When we got to the crosswalk, I timidly looked at my former hate-target, and sure enough, the girl was actually retarded. 

This post doesn't get a satisfying ending, as I feel the urge to repent. Goodbye.

Tales Of Younger Me Suffering Absurd Amounts Of Pain - A Miniseries: Part 2

Age: A tender 8 years old.

The injury: A finger that snapped in half like a dry twig.

The story: As I mentioned in the first installment of this ill-conceived miniseries, my parents sent me to a daycare almost everyday for a period of almost 9 years. If memory serves me correct, this daycare was filled with some of the most dumbshit ignorant old people I've ever had the misfortune of knowing - our bus driver was a 70-something year old man who had a habit of sitting down in the middle of our playroom and clipping his yellowed old man toenails, and one of the staff members was an elderly lady who went on frequent diatribes against the music industry and how she thought it was a cardinal sin that they didn't rate CDs the same way they rate movies.

  

Apparently this isn't a thing?

The children were just as weird - there was a prolific kleptomaniac tomboy from Russia, the boy with debilitating asthma and about 6 different speech disorders, some kid named Juan who once bit my arm so hard that I squirted blood into his mouth, and a small child who had a frightening habit of eating every single thing he could get his disgusting little hands on. Wood chips, dead wasps, markers, rocks, worms, crayons, everything went down this kid's throat like it was a garbage disposal. This kid is important to the story. We'll call him Rainbow Tongue. 

Imagine this, but with more insect innards.

Apart from strange people, our playground was also home to a big ass tire swing. Said tire swing was suspended by three uncovered chains. The problem is that uncovered chains on a playground are a really bad idea. For those of you unfamiliar with kids, children can, and will, find a way to wedge one or more of their appendages into just about every nook and cranny that they can find (that's what she said? Wait, no, we're talking about kids here. Oh God. Forget I said that).

So I was somewhere on the playground, waddling about as I was wont to do, when Rainbow Tongue came to me with a request. "Johann," he mumbled between mouthfuls of orange marker, "You're a big kid and the tire swing is spinning really fast and I wanna get on it. Can you stop it for me?" 

I looked at his diminutive little form, then directly behind me, to where the tire swing was indeed spinning around quite fast. To this day I have no idea how it attained such a phenomenal velocity. Mumbling in acquiescence, I approached the whirling death tire and tentatively reached my palms into its general flight path, hoping to lightly tap the side of the tire and slow it down a little each time it passed my hands. 

This is when the tire swing made a valiant effort to murder me.

The life expectancy of these children can be measured in seconds.

It happened instantaneously. The moment I raised my hands, some unknown force yanked me off of the ground, and suddenly I was very comparable to a pigeon caught in a tornado. My world became a blur as the tire swing picked me up and swung me through the air, and the only thing more surprising than my sudden flight was the blinding amount of pain shooting through my hand and legs. I've always been a big kid, and I was just tall enough that when I started flailing in circles like a rag doll, my legs smashed into the wooden supports that upheld the swing. After about 5 rotations in the air, I came to an abrupt halt, as my trajectory took a sudden downturn and I smashed into the sand with my shins. My vision blurred with tears, I cast my gaze about and discovered what had caused me to go airborne. My finger had apparently gotten caught in one of the chain links upholding the tire swing, and in the process of attempting to rip off my finger, the link accidentally picked up the rest of my body. Despite the fact that I was going fast enough to escape Earth's gravity well, my finger was simply too stubborn to disconnect with the rest of my hand, opting instead to hang on for dear life and simply see what happened. Dizzy with pain, I slowly extricated my finger from the chain link. I successfully removed my digit, and was rather surprised when the end half of my finger immediately flopped out like an uncoordinated fish.

As I've mentioned again and again, I was an impressively stupid child, and at no point in my 8 years of existence had I conceived of the idea that bones could actually break. Indeed, I was convinced that bones were the end-all be-all of material strength, and was somewhat flabbergasted to discover that my ring finger had snapped like a popsicle stick. At least, I would have been, had I not immediately passed out and face planted into the sand.

In my defense, I probably drink enough milk for my skeleton to register as a 7 on the hardness scale.

I woke up approximately 2 seconds later and began howling like a banshee, because despite what some people would have you believe, breaking a finger really really hurts. Thankfully, it only took about 2 and a half minutes of incessant screaming for some of the daycare staff to come to my aid, where they began giving me proper medical attention. Which in this scenario means I got a firm scolding for being in the big kid's playground and a bag of ice to hold on my finger. After a bit of deliberation, the staff decided that it might be a good idea to give my parents a ring. Unfortunately for them, they decided to call my dad. I'll get to that in a second, but for now, just know that my dad looks a lot like this.

Being the little dipshit I was (am), I decided that a good way to pass the time while I waited for my dad to arrive would be to play with my now extraordinarily flexible finger. I did this for about 30 seconds, showing off my cool new trick to all of my friends, until I twitched and accidentally mashed my two broken bone ends together. That was a bit unpleasant.

My dad arrived and, following his typical modus operandi, immediately tracked down the daycare's elderly manager and threatened to beat her into a little granny pancake (I'm probably paraphrasing that a bit more than I should). Unbeknownst to me at the time, it turns out that leaving the playground unsupervised at a daycare center is the exact wrong thing to do. It's also exactly what they did. After reminding them of all the reasons why uncovered chains and unsupervised children are a really bad combination, my dad grabbed me by the shoulder and started leading me towards the car.

It was at this point, right before I passed through the fence gate and into the parking lot, that I began looking around for Rainbow Tongue. Having dipped into shock, I was barely coherent enough to reach the conclusion that this was all his fault and that I should really start hating him more. I found him, staring at me with horror, his eyes filled with guilt and overflowing with tears as he felt the unbearable responsibility for my pain and suffering seep into his system like arsenic.

Haha, just kidding. He was in the corner scooping handfuls of sand into his mouth.

Tales Of Younger Me Suffering Absurd Amounts Of Pain - A Miniseries: Part 1

Age: I can't really remember, but it was when my friends and I considered nose-picking and marker-eating to be competitive sports.

The injury: Just a stupid amount of blood loss.

The story: When I was really little, my parents used to dump me off at a daycare everyday - the reason being that my parents had absurd work schedules and couldn't really let their pudgy little toddler waddle around the house on his own. One particular day, my mom had come surprisingly early to pick me up, and I, ever the rambunctious little boy, was more than eager to get going. I bade a hurried farewell to my friends (which consisted of some weird Russian army brat and another kid with, like, 6 different speech impediments) and rushed out to my mom's car. As I was getting in, she said "I need to go inside the daycare and talk to one of the grown-ups for a little bit. You just stay here, ok?" I mumbled an agreement, not really paying attention to what she was saying, and it wasn't until after she was already inside that I realized I was stuck in her car alone.

Now, I've never claimed to be all that bright (considering the fact that every linked word in this sentence leads to another story about my functional-retardation). But even for someone as deprived of common sense as me, I was an exceptionally stupid child, and as such, I was possessed of an attention span that could be measured in microseconds and an unshakable fascination with the inner workings of my nose. After processing the possibility of having to sit still for an extended period of time, I promptly buried my finger into one of my nostrils and staged a small reenactment of the Gold Rush.

Ladies.

I was having the time of my life, when all of a suddenly, I felt a sharp pain somewhere deep within my nasal passage. I was about to write it off as some strange finger-induced phantom pain, except when I extricated my finger from my nose, blood started gushing out of my face. It was like a mix between a fire hose and that scene from The Shining, and the closest I've ever come to bleeding that much since then was...well, this.

Being the little dumbass that I was, it never occurred to me that I should unbuckle my seat belt and take my bleeding outside. Instead, upon seeing the sheer quantity of blood that I was spilling, I had a bit of a panic attack and started crying. I was rocking back and forth, trapped by my seat belt like a rabbit caught in a snare, and the front of my shirt had turned a surprisingly vibrant shade of red. I sat in my mom's car bleeding all over myself for a good 5 minutes before she finally came back. At first she started panicking, as any competent mother would when their only begotten son is drenched in blood. However, once she saw that my nose was the source of it all, she looked at me with what I can only describe as a weird mix of disappointment and complete befuddlement at my total incompetence as a human being. 

I've gotten that look a lot since then. 

Probably My Grossest Post Yet

At the time of this writing, my 18th birthday is tomorrow, which happens to be a Saturday. Fate, being the fickle mistress that she is, has apparently decided that the best way to celebrate my coming-of-age is to beat the ever-loving hell out of me via a bout of the stomach flu. Rather than make a post elaborating on my total incompetence at being an adult, as I originally intended, I'm going to talk about poop. Which, in a way, does more to elaborate on my incompetence than an actual dedicated post could ever hope to achieve.

In my defense, stomach flu-poop is really quite fascinating.

So for the last few days, my stomach has felt like it's been hosting a UFC cage match; one in which everybody is equipped with chainsaws that they're constantly jamming into the walls of my stomach because they hate me (my more devout readers will notice this is the second time in a row that I've used UFC cage matches to illustrate something. I have no excuse other than the fact that it's an effective comparison). I've been violently nauseous and I haven't been able to eat anything for fear of pissing off my metaphorical stomach fighters. But yesterday morning, something felt different.

Something jolted me out of my sleep. It was still dark inside, and all was silent in my house. I wasn't sure what exactly had woken me up; what I was aware of was the fact that my stomach didn't feel like it was on fire. After several seconds of continued non-pain, I sank into a deep cushion of happiness and tranquility. At last, I thought. The war has ended. I smiled, snuggling deep into my pillow. I let my guard down.

That was my fatal mistake.

"YOU GOIN' DOWN, MUHFUCKA."

I felt a subtle shifting somewhere within my lower intestines. Huh. That felt weird. It was unexpected, sure, but I quickly dismissed it as hunger-rumblings due to the fact that I hadn't eaten in a few days. Oh well, back to sleep, I thought lazily. Unfortunately for me, about 3 seconds later, that subtle shifting had evolved into an intestinal earthquake, and I was quickly aware that something was very, very wrong.

Oh God oh God oh God bathroom bathroom I need the bathroom WHY IS MY MOM IN THE BATHROOM OH NO. I was running out of time. I simply couldn't wait for my mom to finish whatever she was doing and, in a panic, I rushed to the downstairs bathroom, my stomach violently protesting the entire time.

Here's the thing. I think that, for almost everyone, there's a room in their house that they just don't like being in. Maybe it's creepy, or it smells funny, or it's where their grandma keeps her doll collection and they all seem to stare at you with their empty doll-eyes the moment you enter the room because you have a soul and they just want to RAPE IT SILLY. 

Ahem.

For me, that unwanted room has always been my downstairs bathroom. It's this dingy little yellowed room with broken tiles and bugs everywhere. I've lived in my house for nearly 9 years and I have yet to use that bathroom without watching a spider or an ant or a goddamn centipede crawl across the floor. 

YOU DON'T BELONG IN HOUSES CENTIPEDE. GO AWAY. 

Unfortunately, I was in a desperate situation, so without hesitation, I hurdled into the bathroom, slammed the door shut and sat myself down on the toilet. This is normally the part where I describe, with the use of colorful adjectives and brilliant imagery, exactly what it felt like when I finally unleashed that most stupendous of bowel movements upon that poor, unsuspecting toilet. In this case, however, I feel that less is more, so I'll try to say it as succinctly and concisely as possible:

I shotgun-shat christmas colors.

Seriously you guys, I could cut my arm off and it wouldn't be as bloody as my poop was. After 10 minutes of agonizing geyser-shitting, the inside of my toilet looked like one of Hannibal Lecter's more disturbing wet dreams. To take your mind off of that disgusting imagery, here are some unrelated pictures.

Haha! I'm just kidding. They're all related.

Why We Don't Do Thanksgiving At My House Anymore

My family has always reminded me of the family in the TV show Roseanne, in the sense that just about everyone I'm related to is fat and none of us like each other. Now my goal isn't to speak ill of my family, because obviously I love everyone I'm related to...kind of. That being said, it shouldn't surprise anyone in my family when I say that most of us are dysfunctional jackasses who have a really hard time doing anything effectively.

It's like looking in a mirror, except minus the part where my mom lost her friggin' mind and ruined the whole series.

Case in point: we used to do Thanksgiving at my house. My mom's siblings would all fly in from Chicago, my grandparents would drive down, and the holiday would usually be spent watching football and stuffing our faces with enough food to render us clinically comatose. It was a fine process that seemed to be going swimmingly, at least until a few years ago.

See, I only have two aunts and one grandma. Well, I did. Grandma's dead now.

"Alright Johann, thanks for making this awkward."

You're welcome!

So at the time, I had two aunts and a grandma, and I wish I could phrase this any other way but they all hated each other's guts. I mean, I love them and all, but good lord did they despise each other. Anytime these three were in the room, it was a given that whatever conversation ensued between them would be rife with snide insinuations and backhanded compliments. We - that is to say, the rest of my family and I - had all gotten very good at ignoring these awkward spiteful interjections, and it was an unspoken rule that, should any bickering ensue, we would simply let them have at it until they tuckered themselves out like little puppies. Hatred puppies. 

As is usually the case with most family feuds, this thinly-veiled antagonism could only gain so much pressure until it finally exploded. I was young and don't remember all the details, but I'll do my level best to give a factual account, being sure to take only as much artistic license with the story as I want because I'm the author and shut up. First, a bit of necessary back story.

My two aunts (we'll call them Red and Blue) wanted to murder each other. Red is the daughter of my grandma (we'll call her grandma) and Blue is related by marriage. Blue had taken quite the disliking to my grandma, which is one of the main reasons why Red hated her, as Red generally got along with my grandma fairly well. End back story.

By the time the Thanksgiving dinner was ready, the air was already thick with tension. Blue had been taking potshots at my grandma throughout the afternoon, and Red (who's never had much restraint to begin with) was ready to take a hatchet to her skull. Grandma, who I remember fondly as being quite the badass, was also fed up with Blue, and it was only a matter of time before the family dinner turned into a three-way UFC cage match. In addition to all this, my mom's brothers (who were perpetually annoyed by Red) were getting sick of what they perceived as Red's increasingly flighty and stupid behavior. My mom was doing her best to keep things calm, but there's only so much one woman can do to combat years of dysfunctional family issues. Everyone was ready to explode, and it was simply a matter of who would fire first.

Imagine enjoying a nice Thanksgiving dinner with five of these at the table. 

The straw that broke the proverbial camel's back came when Blue made some particularly nasty remark about grandma. Red, who had been stewing throughout the day, just lost her shit. I mean...goodness gracious. A mightier bitch has yet to be flipped as the one that she flipped that day. Grandma and Red engaged Blue in a verbal battle worthy of song, and my uncles seemed to decide that they might as well start screaming too because why not. 

After much cussing, accusing and slander, everyone sort of left. Grandma and grandpa drove home early, Red and Blue were about to slit each other's throats, my normally jovial uncles were fury incarnate, and my mom was in tears. Truly, Thanksgiving was in shambles. Everybody filed out of the house, leaving my dad and I sitting awkwardly at the table by ourselves. We watched everyone leave, we looked at each other, and then we looked at the table. What we saw looked a lot like this.

My dad, ever the fountain of wisdom and knowledge, grabbed his silverware and exclaimed "hell yeah, more of us! Dig in kid!"

Dinner was ruined, but my dad and I feasted like kings that day. It was a real bonding experience.

Naked Fat People on the Internet

So boobs, right?

That's a relevant introduction, I promise. This picture, however, is not.

Awhile back, maybe a couple years ago, I was at my local library. This library has a lot of Mac computers in it, and while nearly all of them require a library membership in order to access them, there's always been one lonely little computer in the corner that, for whatever reason, has never required any sort of login or membership. This computer has always been the favorite of people who just can't be bothered to join the library or (in my case) can't figure out where the hell their library card went.

So I was at the computer, probably checking my Facebook or something, when all of a suddenly, a little email notification popped up in the corner. Oh dear, my inner good Samaritan said. Someone must have accidentally left their email open. I'll just mosey on in and log them out. I clicked on it, feeling a modicum of satisfaction in the fact that, in this tiny little way, I was benefiting someone somewhere in the world.

Imagine my surprise when, after I clicked it, a giant pair of boobs appeared and dominated the whole screen.

Is it dinnertime already? 

I mean, don't get me wrong, surprise boobs are cool and all. Should any female types decide that I'm lacking in my annual mammary exposure, then far be it from me to stop them from rectifying that. However, these boobs were a little unwanted in this particular scenario for two reasons.

1: I was right in the middle of a public library, seated at a computer whose screen was visible to any and all casual passersby. 

2: The unfortunate-looking woman attached to said breasts was...well, kind of...bigger? In the stomach/everywhere area? I wish I could put it nicely, but...good lord you guys, this chick was chunky. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with hefty women, but geezus nobody wants to see you naked like that. Ugh. 

As is usually the case in my life, my sense of decency was quickly overridden by my morbid curiosity, and I began creeping through this mysterious email account. I was absolutely astonished at the sheer number of emails from this mysterious woman (we'll call her Chunky, because I'm a judgmental prick), virtually all of which contained either a picture or a brief attempt at erotic literature. While these hot and heavy little excerpts were apparently intended to excite and arouse whoever owned this account, they all fell a little short, mostly due to the fact that Chunky's level of literacy was only slightly higher than that of a giraffe and reading her work was comparable to ripping out my own teeth.

WHY DOES TV SCREEN TASTE LIKE TINGLES??

When I tired of Chunky's failed literary endeavors, I began looking through the Sent folder, wondering at the nature of Chunky's lover and whether he reciprocated her libido-fueled methods. After poking through some of the sent emails, I noticed that the anonymous email user had also sent their own little erotic snippets, which somehow managed to accomplish the miraculous feat of being more difficult to read than Chunky's. I saw that they had also sent pictures of their self, which allowed me to finally attach a face to the individual whose privacy I was shamelessly violating (to be fair, I was 14 at the time and he was the one who left his email up. This was inevitable, really). The man was in his early twenties, with a pockmarked leathery face and a straggly dirty-blond goatee. For some reason, he had sent her dozens and dozens of pictures of him just...sitting in the library. 

Staring at the computer. 

In the exact same chair that I was in. 

Suitably creeped out, I promptly logged out of his email and did my best to repress yet another memory. This effort was doomed to failure, because about a month or so later, I saw Chunky and her facial-haired beau crossing the street. I wish I could convey how unsettling it was seeing these people in person. Since I can't, I'll let the internet do it for me. 

If you're planning on logging into your fat-boob-filled email account in a public place, for the love of God sign out before you leave, otherwise you get dickheads like me who lurk through your stuff and then wish that they hadn't. And as a general rule of thumb, don't take naked pictures of yourself. Especially if you're chunky. 

Especially if you're Chunky.

Hey I'm Back

I don't feel compelled to apologize for my absurdly long hiatus. The fact is, I am (at the time of this writing) a 17 year old male who's ridiculously prone to ignoring things like his blog. Let's talk about nipple piercings instead.

And the winner of the "Weirdest Segue of the Year" award goes to...

A while back I was at the gym, working out with a friend of mine. While my core audience is comprised of incredibly photogenic sex symbols who simply can't be bothered with petty trifles like weight lifting, I myself exist at the opposite end of the spectrum, right next to the guy who has sweat stains on the back of his shirt. Actually, I'm lying. I am that guy. 

My shirts aren't the only things that get moist when I touch them. 

Anywho, I was at the gym, pumping about as much iron as a perpetually sedentary internet-dweller can be expected to pump. All of a suddenly, a guy and a girl whom I can only assume occupied the unfortunate station of his girlfriend came in. The man looked to be in his early twenties, muscular in some weird places and...just pretty oddly shaped in general, really. After entering the gym, the man proceeded to flit about from one machine to the next, spending about 5 minutes on each one and doing nothing in terms of productivity and not-being-a-dickheadedness. His girlfriend just kind of sat on a bench and played quiet music from a portable speaker she had procured from her Cars backpack. Kind of a weird couple. Upon reflection, the guy looked like a misshapen potato. 

Women. The other things were women.

The weird couple eventually established a pattern where they would hang around the gym for 15 minutes or so, leave for a bit, then come back and do the exact same thing as before. I was too preoccupied with lamenting the abysmal state of my muscles to really pay attention to them. Then something terrible happened.

The guy took off his shirt, which was problem number one. People get sweaty when they work out, and nobody takes off their shirt in the gym because they get sweat all over everything, and that's gross.

Problem number two arose when the guy turned around and provided me with a very clear view of his nipple piercings.

...

Ew.

I wish I had something witty to say to this, I really do. Unfortunately, I don't. I don't care if you saved a limbless orphan baby from a freak electrical fire while being chased by a cruise missile and a lion. I don't even care if you did it with a broken leg and a severe case of asthma. If you're a male and you have nipple piercings, I hope you died in the aforementioned electrical fire. Male nipple piercings are for the emotionally malformed and the intellectually challenged. 

I'm sorry, I just can't do this. This story doesn't get any resolution, I'm upset and I have to stop writing.

Ugh.

Uuuuuuuuugh.

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh.