An Update On My Progress With My Drawing Tablet

Tales Of Younger Me Suffering An Absurd Amount Of Pain: A Miniseries - Part 6.5

"You need to go," Death intoned. His voice boomed in my head, reverberating off the walls of my skull.

"Nyagh?" I responded eloquently. I'm sure I had a response mapped in my head, but my motor functions were somewhat dampened by the fact that my arm had basically been reduced to mashed potatoes. Except in this case, the bacon bits were pieces of gravel embedded in my flesh and the gravy was actually my own blood. This is in keeping with a food theme that I introduced in the beginning of my last blog post, which was like two years ago. What I'm trying to say is I'm an inconsistent piece of garbage when it comes to my writing efforts. Anyway.

Meh.

I turned to face the Grim Reaper. Well, I say "turned" like it was a simple thing for me to do, when in reality I mostly flopped around like a fish having a seizure until I was sort of facing the right direction. My vision was slowly starting to clear up, and Death gradually came into focus. He was tall, slim, dressed in black garb, and...uh. Balding?

"You know, MOST people were kind enough not to point it out."

In fact, the more my sight cleared, the more this fateful spirit began to look an awful lot like an old man in a suit. "Maybe the whole 'skull head black robe' thing was a bit of an exaggeration," I thought to myself sluggishly. It was fitting, I supposed, that Death would be an old man. A grim reminder, perhaps, that even if we were able to survive the many slings and arrows of life, old age would claim us anyway. I began to yelp in protest, but my tongue was being uncooperative, so most of it was lost in translation. "I wohn go ow wiffow uh fiiiiight!" I declared. "Come - guh. Come see wuh ha'ens!"

"Sir, you have to move NOW!" 

"MAKE ME!" 

Even in my discombobulated state, I could tell that things were getting weird. Since when does Death argue with people? It seems like he would just swoop into the scene and scythe you into the afterlife; there isn't a whole lot of room for bargaining in that situation. Yet here I was, screaming and shouting like a drunkard and surprisingly not-dead. More confusingly, why did he call me sir? 

It was around this time that I realized that I may have misinterpreted the situation. My sight had cleared up enough for me to discern that this ghostly specter was not, in fact, a ghostly specter; rather, he was an old man with large coke bottle glasses, impeccably dressed in a classic black suit, with a ring of finely groomed silver hair like a crown around his bald scalp. He looked less like a spirit and more like a funeral director. His expression and body language could be accurately described as that of a man preparing to completely and utterly lose his shit. As I tried puzzling out why he seemed so angry with me, I noticed that there was a long line of cars behind him, reaching all the way up and beyond the top of the hill that had just claimed so much of my arm flesh. Why would there be so much traffic in the middle of a cemetery? I scanned the cars, looking for anything to indicate what was happening. I saw a red SUV, a couple of blue sedans, a black hearse, a beige two-door, a - wait.

Wait. Hang on. 

Long line of cars. Hearse. Middle of the cemetery. Cemetery. Hearse.

Oh. Oh shit. Oh NO. OH SHIT. OH HOLY HELL DON'T TELL ME I DID WHAT I THINK I JUST DID. 

I just wrecked my bike in front of a funeral procession.

AGH.

This next part requires a quick lesson in my own self-perception. 

I've often made references to the fact that I was an overweight adolescent, and the effects that it had on my self-esteem. I make it seem like I was a bumbling, idiotic doormat of a kid growing up, and in many ways I was. But, like a lot of children, I was also selfish and self-serving to the point of being a narcissist. This worship of the self would express itself in moments of extreme duress, when the protocols of civility and good behavior gave way before a mighty tempest of pubescent hormone-fueled rage. This awful encounter in the cemetery was one such moment. So as I was laying in the street, still in shock from my violent encounter with gravity, my arm in pulpy shreds, the sheer embarrassment I felt in the moment gave way to a powerful and primal sense of self-worth. While the upper layers of my consciousness had shriveled up in shame at my predicament, the baser layers rose up in protest. "How dare he," I thought. "Whoever's in that hearse is already dead, whereas I am currently dying. I am the priority here." This line of thought seemed perfectly reasonable, so I expressed it the best way I knew how - vulgarity. This is what I want you to keep in mind as you read these next words. 

"Sir, for the last time, get out of the street!" The old man yelled. "You are blocking the procession!"

"Nnnnnnyahfuuuuuuuuuuuck yooooouuuuu," I gurgled triumphantly. 

Oh dear.

What happened next was a small miracle. The friends I'd been riding my bike with were fairly passive for the whole encounter, standing on the sideline as I lost my mind in the middle of the road. My sudden outburst seemed to spur them into motion, and it is my belief that their interference was the only factor keeping the procession-leader-guy from finishing what the bike accident had started and tossing my body into the hearse with whatever dead asshole was ruining MY moment. They dragged me and my deformed bike out of the road and apologized to the man, said that I'd just been in a bike accident and we're so sorry, this was all a big misunderstanding. Their attempt at an explanation was somewhat derailed by my incessant need to moan "fuuuuuck yoooouuuu duuuude" as much as possible before he left to go put his stupid carcass in the ground. 

After the procession rolled by, my friends mustered their strength and proceeded to help their good buddy in need. By that, I of course mean that they took just enough time to verify that I wouldn't die, then they fucking left me in the middle of the goddamn cemetery with a pulverized arm and the sad remains of my destroyed bicycle. Assholes. 

Eventually, another friend of mine happened upon the disaster that was me while walking home. He helped me limp the rest of the way back home, at which point I had to break into my house through the God damn dog door because I forgot my house key that day. Have you ever tried to crawl through a medium size dog door with a fractured collarbone and a skinned arm? It's an ordeal. 

This story doesn't really have a good conclusion. When I went back to school, my arm was bound in a sling, and my attempts at concocting a cool backstory were quickly thwarted by my awful friends going on about the kid who was so fat that even his bike was known for eating the clothes off his body. The accident left me with a neat scar on my elbow and slightly limited mobility in my left shoulder. Here's a picture of my arm to close it out. 

Tales Of Younger Me Suffering An Absurd Amount Of Pain: A Miniseries - Part 6

Age: Tail end of middle school.

The injury: Basically, imagine what would happen if someone mistook your arm for a block of cheese and tried scraping it with a grater made of asphalt. Also a cracked collar bone, which I suppose could be like a wish bone if we're sustaining my food analogy.

                               

 =

The logic is infallible. 

The story: As I've spelled out many times in this oft-forgotten blog of mine, I was overweight in my younger years. The funny thing is, growing up being made fun of for one's weight typically makes a person reach out to a sort of security blanket for comfort - in my case, I always wore jackets. Like many fat kids, I labored under the sad mistaken belief that having a jacket anywhere on my body would somehow take attention away from my massive, heaving ball of gut flesh. What I'm trying to say is that I was that girl from the 90s that always wrapped her jacket around her waist, except it was the late 2000s and I was not, in fact, a slim generation Y girl with questionable taste in fashion, but a formless glob of meat that purportedly contained a Y chromosome somewhere in its unfathomable depths and brought all of men-dom down as a result. 

People were...broken back then.

Despite my physical failings, I did have one shining athletic attribute: I had a bicycle, and I would describe my relationship with it as my first foray into the realm of sexuality because I quite literally rode that bitch so hard that I smashed it into pieces (foreshadowing!). Being that my middle school was just under a mile from my house, I would frequently ride my bike there and back, huffing and puffing my sweaty little ass off and somehow deriving enjoyment from it.

One bright April day, just after school had let out, I met up with the unlucky souls that I had designated as my friends and prepared myself for the ride home. Unfortunately for me, the sun had apparently decided that it was an excellent day to fry the state of Colorado off of the planet, and the comforting warmth of my security blanket-jacket had transformed into a monstrous greenhouse that stole the heat from the very air and stuffed it into my fleshy folds. Ashamed as I was of my girthiness, I was even more embarrassed of my tendency to sweat, because one of the things I inherited from my dad was a genetic disorder in which waterspouts grow where my sweat pores should be.

Okay, I finally got the jump rope out of its packaging. Snack break!

With great trepidation, I removed my jacket, basking in the refreshing breeze like a plump, majestic gazelle. With great ignorance as to how fucking dumb it made me look, I wrapped my jacket around my waist, making sure that I tied the arms up a bit higher than normal so as to cover up my stomach, thereby making it look...smaller, somehow. With great excitement, I hopped on my bike, hurried over to burden my friends with my presence, and set off for home.

Now, to get home, my friends and I had to ride through a rather large cemetery. The road through the cemetery is on an incline that would best be described as "suicidal." Needless to say, my friends and I took great pleasure in barreling down that hill like there was an endless supply of Xbox Live and Doritos at the bottom - without helmets of course, because when you're a dumb middle schooler, you really should go all out. These high velocity rides had the tendency to create a lot of drag. On this particular day, all the air was trapped by my jacket and caused it to go billowing in the wind behind me, which I thought was great fun...

...right up until my rear tire gobbled up my jacket, causing it to come to a dead halt, all while I was doing my best to set a new land speed record. I had just enough time to realize what was happening to my bike, and was about halfway through accepting my imminent death when gravity pulled me by the hair and smashed me into the street. 

JESUS, TAKE THE WH - BBJASKFDTBNLKJKLTH *dead*

I collided with the street at the same speed that most asteroids collide with the planet, and I was even less intact by the time I finally came to a stop. After skidding along the road like the world's most unfortunate drift racer, momentum mercifully let go of my body. My arm was reduced to little more than pulpy mulch, and the only thing that kept the back of my skull from being pounded into dust was the massive bulk of my backpack taking the brunt of the impact for me. When I was finished trying to paint the street with my own blood, I was in utter agony, howling into the sky and trying to disentangle my bruised legs from the battered remnants of my bicycle. My friends, being the stalwart companions that they were, quickly stopped and...well, laughed, mostly. The only bright side was that this all occurred in the middle of a cemetery, so if I had died they could have probably gotten away with just rolling me a few feet into the grass and calling it good. 

You know what, people can just walk around him. Halo doesn't play itself, you know.

After laying down for a minute to let the pain lessen a bit, I determined that the pain had no intention of lessening, and was in fact gaining strength with every passing second like the Hulk chewing on a rod of plutonium. In an effort to gauge what exactly had happened to my body, I started testing out my extremities to try and assess what was and wasn't broken. The first limb I tried moving was my left arm (the arm I had landed on). This turned out to be the exact wrong limb, as I managed to raise it all of an inch before the thumping pain in my left collar bone blossomed like a rose, albeit a rose made out of debilitating anguish. The pain was such that I immediately went into shock - my hearing dulled to almost nothing as my vision exploded in a brilliant display of neon greens and vibrant purples. 

Dazed, half blind, nearly deaf and bleeding all over the sidewalk, I started to panic. As the walls of my mind began to contract, I looked about my surroundings, desperately trying to clear my head and get a sense of what was happening. As my eyesight began to fail me, I saw an ominous black figure standing in the road some distance behind us - Death, it had to be. Death, in all its horrible splendor, burdened with glorious duty, had come to claim me. Overcome with the effort it took to keep myself in a sitting position, I collapsed onto the sidewalk. I tried to speak, to voice some protest against my imminent demise, but found that I could form no words. Fine, I thought. Take me as I am. Ferry me across the River Styx - I wasn't done, but I will go with dignity. 

"It's time to go," Death intoned. I closed my eyes, readying myself for the journey with this otherworldly claimant of souls. So be it, said I. 

To be continued. 

Author's note: The last time I wrote anything on this blog was almost a year ago. I just suck, don't I?

Photo credits, courtesy of Corbis: Elisa Lazo de Valdez, Tetra Images, 2/Ocean, Alejandro Almaraz, 2/Nisian Hughes/Ocean.

Something I'm Never Going To Follow Up On: A Follow Up

Clever title, isn't it?

Right, so this post might come off as a bit preachy, and I apologize in advance. No product placement is intended; in fact, Mr. Steve Kamb has absolutely no idea I'm doing this.

Like most other people, I've made various half-hearted attempts to be fit in the past.

Hmmm. Better go with half a cake - wouldn't want to seem too greedy or anything.

And, like most people, those half-hearted attempts withered away and died like a starving orphan the moment I drove past a Mcdonald's/Chik-fil-a/Wendy's/another Mcdonald's/Taco Bell/Quizno's/fucking anything. 

Pictured: My weaknesses.

A couple weeks ago, just for the heck of it, I stepped on a weight scale. I expected to see something around 200 lbs, as I've maintained that weight with no effort at all over the last 3 years. Instead the number I got was 220. 

At first I wasn't alarmed, as I use an electronic scale, and in consecutive weigh-ins it's varied within a window of 20-30 lbs and it's not to be trusted. Shrugging it off, I sauntered out of the room. 

10 seconds later, I ran back and jumped on the scale again.

This scale is an asshole anyway, I thought to myself. I'll weigh myself again and it'll probably say 180 or something and I'll be good. 

220 lbs. 

It's a fluke. Remember, this thing's an asshole. Try it again. 

220 lbs. 

Scale. Asshole. Try it one more time. 

223 lbs. 

Oh, you fucking dick. 

In hindsight, it wasn't difficult to divine how I had gained 20 lbs in a manner of months. I recently got a job working in the dining room of an upscale retirement home. This job has given me near-limitless access to delicious cookies, ice cream, cake, chocolate milk, and pretty much everything else in the world. 

However, as I've established multiple times before, I am nothing if not dreadfully stupid, so at the time I was completely dumbstruck. "The hell did all this weight come from?!" I asked myself.

After a bit of contemplation, I came to a rather sobering conclusion: I was eating, sleeping, and living like a fatass.

How could you betray me like this, quadruple decker chocolate-covered bacon artery murder burger?

Several days later, I was roaming the internet, lazily perusing various fitness websites while inhaling those little chocolate mini donuts that you can get at the grocery store.

Like this, except smaller and with 40 of them.

It was during this hypocritical bout of web surfing that I stumbled upon Nerd Fitness.

For those of you who aren't in the know, Nerd Fitness is a nifty website created by stud muffin and deadlifting enthusiast Steve Kamb. Steve not only advocates sensible health advice (small sustainable changes as opposed to a crash diet comparable to that of Christian Bale's during The Machinist), but he also presents his information in a way that socially incompetent internet dwellers such as myself can understand (awww, look at the little Lego guy doing push ups! This website is bitchin').

I spent several days on his website, working my way through his articles like a fat kid goes through chocolate mini donuts from the grocery store. After a while, it began to dawn on me.

You see, my fitness goals have always been incredibly vague and nebulous.

I mean, I guess not being a fat lard would be a nice change of pace. 

Eventually, it occurred to me that I didn't just want to be fit, I wanted to overhaul my entire life. Eating habits (cake, chocolate milk, maybe more cake), Sleeping habits (stay up until 7:00 AM, wake up whenever I have to pee), exercise habits (maybe I'll actually walk into the bathroom instead of rolling to it like usual); it all had to go. 

To that end, I've made some changes that would be considered small if I wasn't such a lazy dick. For example today I woke up at 6:00 AM, had a decent breakfast, went to the gym for an hour, showered and shaved, all before 9:30. I've also invested some money into the Nerd Fitness Guide, because if I like anything, it's not having to think about things when I do them. 

My commitment at the moment is to wake up at 6:00 AM every day for the next month, until it becomes habitual. As time goes on, I'm sure I'll tack on more goals and challenges for myself, but for now the concept of seeing the sun for more than 3 hours at a time is so mind-blowing that I really need some time to wrap my head around it. 

If you're interested, be sure to check out Steve's work on his website, or buy one of his many guidebooks if you have some cash laying around from your busy career as a combination super model/orphanage builder. I can't speak for Steve's other books, but I know that the Nerd Fitness Guide comes with well over 100 pages of material, as well as workouts that make you sweat so much that a 79 year old man feels compelled to point it out while you're in the corner of the weight room trying to avoid attention (oh my Lord that was such an awkward encounter). 

Again, this isn't intended as product endorsement of any kind, I just think that the little Lego people on Steve's website are adorable and I believe everybody could benefit from more Lego. 

Boring picture copyright stuff that no one cares about:

(C) SuperStock/SuperStock/Corbis, (C) NASA/Corbis, (C) Image Source/Corbis, (C) Pulse/Corbis, (C) Oliver Rossi/Corbis. 

Why I've Been Ignoring All Of You Lately

Right, so in the last few months, I've...

- Joined a boxing gym

- 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. 

Pseudonym

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.

(C) David Wrobel, /Visuals Unlimited/Corbis

Something I'm Never Going To Follow Up On

So self-image is kind of a dick.

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!

*Editor's note: No.**

**Author's note: You're a dick.