- Purchased a plane ticket to France, in order to facilitate a years-long dream of going to France
- Made the horrifying discovery that I'm slowly going bald
- Gotten a job serving food to multi-millionaires in a retirement home that could easily be misconstrued for the Palace of Versailles
- Begun the process of leaving that job in order to do electrical work in construction sites via an apprenticeship through the Union
- Spent the night on the ground in a Chick-fil-a drive-thu for the sake of getting a year's worth of free food
- Found a female-type who doesn't mind dating me
- Graduated from high school
- Decided that I want to both build a computer and purchase a motorcycle
- Applied for a credit card
- And finally, I made a repair on my own car for the first time all by myself (assuming that the copious amounts of help from my automobile-savvy friend can be considered "by myself")
At the expense of my audience - which is comprised of literally tens of people - I've made no attempt at blogging, mostly because life is going absurdly fast and I feel a lot like this:
(C) Ned Frisk Photography/Corbis
That being said, it is awfully nice to see you again. How are you? You look great.
I suppose this is more of a news update than anything else, but I've decided to adopt a pseudonym. From this day forth, I shall be known to the literary world as Johann Mannloch!
(C) Underwood & Underwood/Corbis
How I imagine Johann Mannloch would look like in real life.
My blog posts have all been edited in order to reflect my new name. Here's a picture of a squid.
Case in point: in my mind, I look something like this.
In reality, I'm probably indistinguishable from these decidedly normal-looking fellows here.
That being said, I've decided that I want to look like this.
Which is unfortunate, because my diet looks a lot like this.
On a deeper level, I'm probably being motivated by the fact that I play video games, and in video games, people look like this.
And this.
And this.
Actually, just ignore this one.
In order to facilitate my potential transformation from Chubby McTruffle Shuffle into Studly Armstrong up there, I've decided to purge my diet of any and all fast food. Which is problematic, because I've reached a point where most of the happiness in my life is derived from the greasy innards of a cheeseburger.
This is better than porn.
So now, instead of striving to stuff my food sac with enough material to make Kirby seem like a fitness expert, I'm going to...
...um.
Wait.
Oh God.
Where do people get food from if it isn't fast food? Do I...do I have to cook things?
Do I have to go outside? Do they even have outlets out there?
WHERE THE HELL IS THE CEILING.
We'll see how this goes, I guess.
Our socially maladapted hero Johann is on a quest to rid his palate of gross food in order to sculpt himself into a more energetic and visually bearable person! Will our hero succeed*? Stay tuned!
The injury: I basically vomited the human equivalent of a bird pellet.
The story: When I was little, I almost went deaf. Apparently, there's some weird sort of brain fluid that will accumulate behind your ear drums after a while. Normally, it drains out via tiny openings in your ear drum. Unfortunately, I didn't have the aforementioned openings, and as such, I was subject to chronic ear infections (which usually resulted in me bawling my eyes out from the pain, being the manly little bastard that I was) and a steady decline in hearing. In order to avoid this, my parents scheduled me for a surgery in which they would take tiny little plastic tubes and ram them into my ear drums, in order to facilitate some much-needed cranial drainage. Because what my head really needed was more fluids coming out of it.
Come on ladies, you know you want me.
So my mom and I arrived at the building where my surgery would take place. Being as young and inattentive as I was, I forget the details of what happened, but the end result is that I ended up in an alarmingly revealing hospital gown while an anesthesiologist prepared a dose of knock-me-the-fuck-out.
(C) ER Productions/CORBIS
Not pictured: appropriate attire for an eight year old.
A little side note: I don't do any drugs, nor do I endorse the usage of them, but should you ever have the chance to introduce a suitable amount of anesthesia into your system, you introduce the shit out of it. Life itself is but a pale substitute when compared to the unbridled euphoria I experienced right before passing out in that operating room. Man, that was awesome.
I woke up in a groggy haze several hours later in my hospital bed. The surgery had evidently been a success, and when I regained consciousness, my mom was in the room conversing with a nurse. Upon noticing that I had finally come to, the nurse grabbed a small pink plastic tray and handed it to me. Confused, my mom asked "What's that for?"
I, too, was confused. Apart from the mental haziness and physical exhaustion that generally comes post-op, I felt pretty ok. It was nothing worse than waking up from a particularly deep sleep, and I didn't really see the need for a tray. The nurse calmly stated "Patients can sometimes have a bit of a violent reaction after surgeries like this."
My mom responded "Violent reaction? What does that mean?"
Right on cue, I vomited a hair ball into the tray. Except, instead of it being a hair ball, it was a congealed mass of blood and scab fragments. And instead of vomiting, it was more like 30 seconds of retching and dry-heaving, followed by an unexpected and painful explosion of lumpy red...something.
Reader, I don't know if you've ever vomited a fur ball composed entirely of what basically amounts to hardened blood pudding, but it is so horribly uncomfortable. I'm not entirely sure how to end this post, so here's a picture of a painting of the death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill.
So I have a doberman, and for the sake of anonymity (because a dog really needs that), we'll call her Ceiling Fan. Ceiling Fan, to put it gently, is a hopeless idiot. I've never met an animal so reminiscent of Simple Dog from Hyperbole and a Half in all of my life, with the unfortunate exception being that Ceiling Fan is much bigger and much more capable of destruction. She once got so frightened by the appearance of a water sprinkler that she ripped the entire thing out of the ground and tried to bite the water that sprayed out of it.
This is like her Vietnam.
Story time. On a rainy day a few years ago, I was getting a ride home from school with one of my friends. As I exited my friend's minivan, I noticed an odd little lady in a yellow rain slicker, standing in the middle of the street outside my house and staring into the sky, her face pelted by rain and her whole body completely rigid. I was slightly unnerved, as the whole scene was a bit reminiscent of the scene in It where the little boy gets his arm ripped off by the sewer-dwelling demon clown (what an incomprehensible book/incomprehensibly awesome movie).
I decided to ignore her, and was about to open my front door when I heard her yell.
"Hey! Do you live there?"
I paused for a moment, my hand hanging in the air, and slowly turned towards her, hoping she was addressing someone else. Alas, she was facing my way, and after ensuring no one else was in my immediate vicinity, I steeled myself for the inevitable social interaction.
"Well hey there, little guy! Don't you wanna balloon?"
"Nope."
"Um. Yeah?"
She got a bit giddy at this and started hopping in place. "Oh! Do you happen to own a doberman?"
Oh God damnit, I thought. "Yeah, why?"
"Because I saw her running away and I chased her into this bush!" The accomplishment and pride in her voice was palpable as she excitedly began gesturing to a massive bush in the front yard across the street. I told her to wait a moment, at which point I entered my house and verified that Ceiling Fan was, in fact, gone. The only living thing in the house was my fat basset hound, who seemed completely oblivious to Ceiling Fan's absence, and whose defining physical trait is that she always smells exactly like Fritos.
After grabbing a jacket and leash and bidding my other dog farewell, I rejoined Slicker Lady in the street, where she had gone from standing in the street to plowing her way through my neighbor's massive bush (hahaha. Oh man, that sounds nasty). I watched her thrash around for a bit, whereupon she informed me that my dog was not, in fact, in the bush.
It was at that point that I got a call from my mom. I asked Slicker Lady to give me a moment to answer my phone. She seemed a bit helpless, as without her bush thrashing, there really wasn't much she could do, so she reverted to her natural sky-staring state. I awkwardly looked at her for a bit, then turned my attention to my phone. "Hello?"
"Hey, is Ceiling Fan missing?"
"What the hell? How do you know?"
"Because I just got a call from a woman who says that Ceiling Fan is sitting in the backseat of her car."
"...What?"
"Look, I need to get back to work, I'll give the woman your number and you can talk to her. Let me know if you get our dog back."
"Um..well, alright, I'll -"
Click.
"- try. Ok then."
"I love you mom!"
"Nope."
While waiting for Ceiling Fan's unfortunate new supervisor to call, I engaged in a bit of strained small talk with Slicker Lady, where I learned that she really was quite an unfortunate creature. Our dialogue was mercifully cut short by my phone's ringing. I looked at her and said "Hey, thanks for letting me know that my dog ran away, but I think I can get it from here."
"...Oh."
Slicker Lady wheeled around and, without saying a word, bolted to what I'm assuming was her house further down the road. After taking a second to process her abrupt exit, I answered my phone. "Hello?"
"Hey, is this your dog sitting in my backseat?"
"I'm assuming, yeah."
"I'm at the elementary school down the street. I was picking up my daughter from school, and as soon as I opened the door for her your dog came sprinting out of nowhere and just leaped into my car."
"...Huh."
Dibs.
About ten minutes later, I had walked to the nearby school and managed to find the woman's car. Ceiling Fan was staring at me from the rear window, furiously wagging her tail and just happy as shit that she had finally done something to make me proud. I thanked the woman and apologized profusely for Ceiling Fan's behavior, which the woman surprisingly found really endearing. Ceiling Fan was mushing her face into the window and covering the whole thing in slobber. "She seems really excited to see you," she said. "I'll open the door."
"No, best let me do that."
I immediately braced myself, spreading my feet and holding her leash at the ready, dreading the result of opening this woman's car door. Confused, she asked me "Why are you doing that?"
"You'll see."
I pulled the door handle, slowly, carefully, my ears straining and waiting for the worst.
Click.
The moment the car door latch released, Ceiling Fan tackled it from the inside, flinging the door open and nearly decapitating the woman's poor little daughter. Absolutely mindless with joy, Ceiling Fan torpedoed into my crotch, giving me a warm greeting and doing her best to communicate to me her latest adventure.
"FRIEND!!!"
After a brief wrestling match on the sidewalk, I successfully restrained my dog and attached the leash to her collar. I hurriedly said goodbye to the woman and proceeded to walk my dog home, hoping that my dog's impromptu attempted murder of her daughter hadn't left too much bad will. When I got home, I took Ceiling Fan's leash off and took a seat on my staircase. She sat down in front of me, her chest heaving with her excited breathing, gazing at me expectantly and waiting for me to commend her on her latest display of idiocy.
I tried headbutting your testicles into paste because I love you.
The injury: a thorough embitchening at the hands of a grass field.
The story: For most elementary schoolers, Field Day is great. It's such an objectively awesome concept that nobody, myself included, can really find any fault with it. Rather than struggling to shove some learning into the sugar-addled minds of small children, teachers can just take them outside, make them play some games and maybe check up on them every now and then to ensure they're not killing one another. I myself was never talented enough to win any of the events that I partook in, but I sure had a lot of fun losing.
"Mommy look! I lost again!"
"We're all losers, honey."
So we were doing Field Day at my school, and my particular group of kids was at the 3-legged race station. The teacher there was pairing us up with our race partners, and much to my dismay, I was partnered with a kid that we'll refer to as Johnny Psychopath. To this day, Johnny Psychopath remains one of the most aggressively pissed off third graders I've ever met, and having him strapped to my leg for a competitive event was nothing short of terrifying.
After unwillingly having my leg attached to that bull of a child, we all lined up at the start line. While the teacher rattled off the rules of the game, Johnny Psychopath looked me dead in the eye and said "If we lose, I'm going to kill you."
Now, I shouldn't have to explain this, but a 3-legged race is kind of a group effort. One can't exactly expect to win without the help of the person attached to their leg, and it wouldn't do one any good to, say, punch their partner in the side of the head as soon as the race starts. Hopefully you understand that, my dear reader, because Johnny Psychopath sure as shit didn't. The instant the teacher said "Go," Johnny Psychopath decided that an excellent way to achieve victory would be to punch me in the side of the head and drag my ass across the field like a person tied to the back of a rampaging elephant. Surprisingly, his tactic worked, if only because everyone was so dumb-struck by the indecipherable workings of his mind that they couldn't help but stand there and wonder.
Man, do I love me some Spongebob.
After a moment or two of dead silence, punctured only by my panicked screams for help, the teacher grabbed Johnny Psychopath by the ear, and she beckoned to a nearby adult to take off our leg strap while the other kids commenced with the race. I laid there on the ground like an upturned turtle, covered in grass stains and unable to right myself, stuck on my shell while my exposed belly acted as a beacon for any hungry predator that might have passed my way. While they feasted on my turtle-y insides, I would crane my head and gaze at the sky one last time, cursing the cruel, unloving god that would let such a terrible fate befall as beautiful and majestic a creature as a turtle.
The injury: A stationary truck had its way with me.
The story: As I've mentioned before, my dad looks a lot like this.
And, as I'm so annoyingly fond of pointing out, I used to look something like this.
The thing is, man-gorillas like my father get a little confused when handling small children, so when it came time to teach me how to ride my bike, my failure was such that my dad rage-quit on the whole endeavor and drowned out his disappointment with TV. This suited me fine, as riding a bike was far too physical an activity for my pudgy frame, and we both reached an unspoken agreement to never speak of it again. This happy ignorance lasted until my family got sick of hearing gunshots every day, and decided to pack up and move from our home in the city of Aurora, Colorado to the nifty little suburb of Centennial. Not only did I have to deal with a substantial amount of culture shock (where were all the kids trying to make me cry?), but it was also my first time living in a suburban environment - a place where virtually every kid rides their bike and you're absolutely hopeless if you can't keep your balance on one. In an effort to adjust to my new home, I took it upon myself to teach myself how to ride a bike.
Suffice it to say, this story wouldn't end up in my childhood pain miniseries if it had gone without some colossal screw up on my part. The short version is that I got the everloving shit beat out of me by a parked truck.
There's a stone-cold killer behind those goofy Pixar eyes.
The slightly elongated version is this: on the day that I decided to learn how to ride a bike, I took my long-forgotten bicycle out of its dusty corner in the garage and wheeled it to a nearby cemetery, where I spent most of the day losing my balance, eating shit and presumably being laughed at by all the dead people. However, my perseverance began to pay off, and after several hours I had succeeded in keeping myself balanced long enough to be considered adequate at bike riding. Reveling in my victory, I got a bit cocky and decided that the only way to cement my status as a cool kid was to ride my bike all the way to my house.
Here's the thing: I live on a bit of a hill, and as successful as I had been at riding, I hadn't actually bothered to try my hand at braking. So when I got on my street and rapidly started gaining speed, I panicked. Rather than applying the hand brake, I started crying and screaming, my vision quickly blurring as my velocity approached terminal levels. I helplessly zoomed right past my house and continued down the hill, where, to my horror, my path intersected with a rusted out heap of a truck that was parked on the side of the road.
Pic unrelated.
Oh, I tried. I flailed like an idiot, doing everything in my limited power to prevent the inevitable collision. But like most things in this world, I was doomed to failure.
My face and the side of the truck rushed to meet each other like two long-lost lovers. Unfortunately for me, those lovers were engaged in a highly abusive relationship, so when my face met the truck it raised its proverbial hand and bitch slapped me to the curb with all the force of a fat kid crashing his bike into a truck. My poor bike, ill-prepared for the collision as it was, crumpled into a confused mess of pedals and whatever else a bike is made out of. My only saving grace was that I was wearing a helmet, a positive which was somewhat refuted by the fact that my helmet had left a massive dent in the driver-side door and knocked the rear view mirror off of the vehicle and into the street, where it lay shattered and useless (much like my pride).
After disentangling myself from the misshapen remains of my bike, I assessed the damage that I had done to the truck, whereupon I looked pretty much exactly like this.
Being the responsible young child that I was, I gathered the various pieces of my bike and ran away as fast as I possibly could, leaving the unfortunate truck owner to contend with the consequences of my own incompetence.
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