do you ever sit yourself down and say “dude, you are a huge asshole!”? i do this three to four times a day, depending on how many meals i eat - i always do it right after a meal. i say, “oswald, why are you eating wendy’s? you are already fat. furthermore, there are some other significant character issues that need to be addressed. for instance, you seem like kind of a rockist.” correction, SELF: i was once a rockist, and no more. and i wasn’t always a rockist; the first cd i bought was mc hammer’s “please hammer don’t hurt em,” the second was paula abdul’s “spellbound.” so i get it. i enjoy pop music. there was just a period of about fifteen years during which i was totally rockist, and more than a little obnoxious, and usually drunk. smoking weed freed my mind of the rockist constraints. i’m listening to the “superfly” soundtrack right now; it’s so fucking great. IT’S SO FUCKING GREAT. this cd has been sitting on my shelf since sophomore year of high school, discarded in the wake of my new rockist adventures. so i say, unto myself: “what’s your problem, dude? superfly is great. all music is great. why do you feel the need to obsessively categorize everything into oblivion? can’t you just LIVE? are  you seriously going to wendy’s again? it’s 3am.”

i always forget that i’m not the only human being on this planet. and that’s probably the most important thing to remember. i don’t know if this perspective is unique to me, but i tend to view other people as robots who were sent here to be better than me at everything. but they’re actually living, breathing organisms just like me, with their own hopes and fears and insecurities and plans.

have you ever been driving down the road and the car in front of you was going too slow and you were in a hurry and you started beeping and doing obscene hand gestures? and then you finally are able to pass this person and you look over and it’s an old lady who can barely see above the steering wheel? you just terrified that old lady. i used to have this experience fairly frequently - it’s not always an old lady, but it is always another person. i realized i had extreme road rage while i was driving home one day not too long ago. it takes me over an hour to get to and from work; this is not something that i planned or enjoy, but it’s the way things are until i can get a different job. but anyway, i was driving home and i was exhausted and it was one of those days where even music didn’t sound good to my ears. i hated existence itself, and i just wanted to get home and have a couple drinks and maybe eat a steak while watching columbo.

but i’m driving home, and there’s this one road w/ a 35mph speed limit and it’s one lane almost the entire way. except for this one section, not even 500 feet long, where it expands into two lanes at a traffic light. usually people ignore the right lane - everybody stays bunched up in the left lane so as not to look like the asshole who’s cutting line. but i’m more than happy to be that asshole. so i zoom ahead of all these cars and then i’m waiting at the red light and it changes and i accelerate with great haste and get into a pissing match with some yahoo in a huge pickup truck. he tried to run me off the road, and that upset me a little.

so i snaked in front of him at the last second and applied some pressure to the brakes, just to be obnoxious, and then i cruised along at five under until such time as the road widened again and i accelerated. but this crazy sonofabitch pulls around me and pulls halfway into my lane, leaving me mere seconds to stop my car completely. so i stop and then i’m driving behind him and then we come to another intersection, and i need to turn left. there are two left turn lanes. i get into the right one and he gets into the left one and there are some other cars around, so we’re sitting at the light. when it turns green, i flip the a/c off to improve my acceleration and i jet forward. i really cream this guy, he’s two cars behind me, i’m laughing maniacally and now music sounds AMAZING. i turn it up.

so now i’m driving peacefully, smoking a cigarette and sipping from my jumbo iced coffee. i’m about half an hour from home. and then i realize this fucker is still fucking with me. he’s following me. he’s driving alongside me, going just a few mph slower, and causing a tremendous traffic jam. now the one thing that always keeps me in line is large groups of people; i would never attract the attention that many other robots if it was at all possible to avoid it. but this guy doesn’t care. and that’s when i realized something important: i don’t have the stomach for road rage. i can fake it if i’m pressured, but when it really comes down to it, i don’t care that much. i was already over the entire incident and now i was getting closer to home and this guy would not stop tailing me. i had gotten my aggression out, the bad parts of the day were behind me, and i was cruising. but this guy was just starting to boil.

if you get into a little skirmish with someone on the road, fine - that happens to all of us. maybe you’re having a bad day or you’re running late or the car in front of you is sporting a sarah palin bumper sticker. we all see red sometimes. but if you’re willing to let road rage actually interfere with your schedule, if you’re willing to drive out of your way to follow somebody and menace them because you don’t think they’re being a totally polite driver - you got a problem. and beyond that, the fact is this: i am more than my occasional inconsiderate boners. i try to be decent. i don’t hold grudges. i have feelings. if i could help you, and it didn’t fuck up my shit excessively, i would. or at least i would try. but none of this mattered at that moment; i thought this bozo was actually going to follow me all the way home and then destroy my face with his fists.

it was scary. and then he decided to give up, maybe because he realized what we all need to realize whenever we’re really pissed off at a total stranger: that’s another person right there. they have their own shit they’re going through. i use this example because it’s the first one that came to mind (and also, i think it’s kind of amusing) but really it could be anything. i get so pissed off at people sometimes for the dumbest shit, and it seems really important, but then i realize that it doesn’t matter, that the inconvenience to me is negligible, that the slight was unintentional - we’re all just people.

except for those of us who are cybernetic organisms sent from the future.

i’ve been house-sitting (and dog-watching) for my parents this past week, and it’s weird as hell. i lived at home way longer than any human is supposed to (i was 23 when i finally moved out, although i should note, as a self-respecting scholar, that i didn’t graduate from community college until 2007 [i graduated from high school in 2002]), so i have some pretty mixed emotions about this house.

pluses: there’s a pool. and my dogs live here. and my cat. and my brothers. also: there’s an xbox and a wii, two gaming systems which i do not own. minuses: it is fucking weird hanging out in the place where you grew up, especially if your growing up was all haphazard and shitty. but, whatever.

i feel a certain amount of pride: i have not done anything truly transgressive in the past week. i am normally the last person who want watching  your house - i will order the same will ferrell movie six times on the pay per view, and i will drink all of your beer. but i’ve played it pretty chill this go-round, w/ the exception of leaving my cat outside for an entire night. (i realized the cat was outside when i heard him cat-screaming at 7am while i was urinating; when i went outside to rescue him, i found half of a mouse, which prompted to 1) scream like a woman and then 2) text my brother: “TWINKIE IS FUCKING BEAST.”) 

one thing i didn’t do this weekend was go see “The other guys,” i’m kind of upset about that, because “scott pilgrim” comes out next week, and also “the expendables,” and well - another summer movie season has passed, and i have once again failed to absorb the greater truths of cinema. i came close last year, although i only saw one movie. the movie was “transformers 2” and the reason i say i came close is that i was in possession of psychedelic mushrooms and i didn’t eat them until AFTER the movie. (as a self-respecting drug person, though, i should note that after eating the mushrooms i freaked out while watching “beetlejuice,” spent half an hour wandering in the parking lot of the apartment complex we were living in, and then had a total meltdown while my ex-partner tito donned my girlfriend’s robe and had some kind of michael jackson experience.)

anyway, i want to share 2 memories: 1) right before moving out of this house, i had a very bad night where i drank beer and watched venture brothers and tried to get various girls to come over. none of them did, i watched venture brothers with my dog, and i cooked this really excellent meijer-brand pizza that i was too drunk to eat. i was gone the next day, and i spent a couple months living in my car. 2) after moving, i came back with my girlfriend one morning and they were taking my old dog (tia) to the vet to kill her. it was a very weird morning, since everybody was acting totally normal, except for they were going to kill my dog. this was a dog that used to nip my heels as a puppy whilst i scurried around the house wearing an XL white zombie t-shirt. by this point she was old and fat and had weird growths sprouting from her belly, and no one in my family really wanted to hang out with her, but SERIOUSLY. 

how do you load an animal into your car and drive it to the vet and walk it inside and then watch while they kill said animal? i love dogs but i don’t know if i’ll ever get a dog of my own, as a free-floating adult, because i just don’t think i could do that load/walk/watch thing. FUUUUUUUCK. that shit is deep.

right now i feel like everybody is funnier than me, and a better writer, and more attractive.

you know who’s awesome? rob zombie. i was watching devil’s rejects the other night, for the millionth time, and that movie is just badass. right from the beginning - these crazy fuckers mow down a dozen cops and then they’re escaping and you’re like, “alright, these are the heroes of the movie. fuck.” the devil’s rejects is a classic, even though the acting is amateurish and a lot of the badassery is forced and shoehorned, like rob zombie watched pulp fiction too many times and emailed some ideas to tarantino and tarantino turned them down and so rob zombie felt he had to make a movie. but seriously, what a great movie.

(and seriously, i know the movie is set in the pre-google dark ages, but would any sheriff EVER, under any circumstances, say “GET ME THAT MOVIE CRITIC”? zombie wanted to get some knocks in on critics, and he did it in the most blatant way possible. i dig that, especially since critics were so receptive to that movie. you just gotta give him his props.)

(also seriously: halloween 2 was super-underrated. i don’t know what anybody’s problem is, but get off rob zombie’s dick.)

(very seriously: i feel like the internet is destroying my brain, and constantly reading articles about how the internet is destroying my brain does not help. so give it up, slate; i already know the internet makes me stupid and useless, and i don’t need your fucking INTERNET WEBSITE to remind me all the time.)

(on a less serious note: who watches jersey shore? that shit is incredible.)

let me tell you, in no particular order, 3 things i hate about sonic the hedgehog:

1. learning & memorization. 

sonic is all about learning. (i’m speaking only about the first game here; i have no reason to believe the other installments in the series are different [with the exception, probably, of sonic spinabll], but i can’t speak from any PERSONAL experience, because i refuse to play the other games until i beat this one.) when you say “sonic the hedgehog,” people think: “speed.” like you just cruise through these levels, holding a cigarette in one hand and preparing a seven-course meal with the other. no, bitch: you have to play each level slowly, memorizing every nook and cranny. in the early levels, this is easy; little kids (and me) can do it. on the later levels, not so much. especially the goddamn labyrinth zone, in which you are submerged underwater for large portions. you must move especially slowly in these sections, because every thirty seconds or so, you need to suck the precious oxygen out of an air bubble. the air bubbles can be far and few between, especially when you need them most, so in some situations, you have to stand there sucking up air bubbles and jumping up and down while you figure out exactly how you’re going to navigate across these platforms or dodge those spiky balls. the labyrinth zone takes for-fucking-ever to complete, and i would give both testicles - BOTH - to never play it again. but, yeah: this game is not as fast as you think. it’s kind of like going on a date with lindsay lohan. (i imagine.)

2. enemies you can’t jump on.

the mario games used to pull this shit too (see: any haunted house level), but to a much lesser extent. by the time you hit the fifth level, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single enemy you can defeat with a simple jump. no, you just have to avoid these bastards, while you’re simultaneously trying to memorize levels that (let’s be honest) are basically japanese opium dreams. i understand that video games would be boring if they were easy, but this is taking it to the proverbial limit in ways that even the eagles never imagined. i mean, either make the layout of the level ridiculously complicated -OR- make my enemies virtually undefeatable. hit me with both, and that’s a recipe for fury.

3. the music.

it’s like they found the most annoying possible combination of notes and then looped them. video game music doesn’t need to be this cloyingly melodic; just give me some ambiance. give me some thumping bass, a few hits on the hi-hat, and the occasional midi guitar squeal. it doesn’t need to sound like the carnival of the damned.

video games are supposed to be fun; playing this game for an hour just makes me want to go read a book. great job, sega.

i struggle constantly with what i want to do, what i need to do, and what i can do. it’s the main problem in my life. 

is it better to set lofty goals and accomplish what you can, or try to do less and make sure everything gets done?

that’s the eternal question.