Wednesday, January 14, 2004 :::
Learning The Things You Already Knew And Then Hating The Lesson
It’s possible that we know so much more than we give ourselves credit. We read a set of inputs from our environment, we draw a conclusion, and we operate based on that conclusion or inference. And, no matter how hard to we fight ourselves, how stubborn we are to fall in-step with our original impressions, eventually we surrender the things we wished for, or even prayed for, to what we knew all along.
But we don’t always trust ourselves, do we. We aren’t always the first and best believer of our own powers of perception. We tell ourselves little lies or willfully omit the details that will alter our end results. The reason we do it? We do it because sometimes we want to believe in something (or someone) that defies logic, experience, common sense; intelligence, instinct, and universal truths just so we can lay claim to some discovery left neglected by the chance or analytics of the rest of the world.
It’s a nice thought, but by the time we reach the end we find what we learned is what we already knew… what a fucking bummer!
::: posted by Mike at 2:56 PM
The Antidote to Erection
Man, how I hate to start off the year on Nosebleed with a subject like this… but it has proven too powerful a mental image to escape and, being driven to intrude and trample on the delicate scenery of your private mental space, I feel compelled to infect you with this image so that I can somehow purge the pain in the name of catharsis… got me, you know where this is going don’t you, I am going to talk about fat chicks that spank each other.
The new semester has begun at UNT. I like it when classes are in session because I never fail to see something on campus that teaches me something. Sometimes it will be a lesson in identity as I watch the freshman struggle to find a place in this new big world that is not really a big world at all. Sometimes I see budding intellectuals try to react the moments they heard when their parents talk about college in the late 60s, so they have their chalked slogans on the sidewalks, banners calling attention to some cause of insignificant social gravity. There are so many things to see on campus, especially when you have traveled the world to the point that most of what you see is simple.
Every once in a while, however, you sometimes see that thing that will haunt you. It happened to me yesterday on the way to class. I was walking the sidewalk when I saw approaching what I can only describe, and superficially so, as a herd of girls. They were not chubby, they were not ample, they were not big-boned… they were fat girls where the needle on the gauge hung trembling above the words “morbidly obese”. This was a fact that did little to interfere with their- well let’s call it what it is, as disgusting as it may sound- frolicking.
For 20 or 30 feet these girls somehow got infected with the “spank bug”. It started when one girl made apparently made a comment to another of the herd and the recipient of the comment responded with a spank on the ass and a giggle. That was the first bite of the spank bug. From there, the one who issued the comment and was spanked in retort, giggled and spanked back. That is when the flood gates of spank open… me downstream. They whole crew then began this grotesque ballet of spank-n-giggle down that 30 feet stretch of sidewalk. It was truly unsettling, something I have been trained by the media, with its army of beautiful, to think as more macabre and disturbing than anything ever penned by Edgar Allen Poe or Stephen King.
I knew at that moment, watching this bobbing and giggling ocean of spanking girls, that my ability to gain and maintain an erection might perhaps have suffered permanent, and if not permanent than at the very least long-term, damage. Every time my brain would send that impulse to rush blood to the proper places it would follow that message with the regrettable remembrance of four very fat girls lost from the world in their game of spank-n-giggle. The blood will not flow, the mail sail will not be hoisted, and I will be as useful to the productive cycle of the human race as gun control legislation in a republican controlled senate.
Higher education… it too has its costs.
::: posted by Mike at 12:04 PM
