The Zombieslayer

It’s Friday night and I got a nice martini buzz going.  Junior’s spending the night at his friend’s house.  Mrs. Z is making dinner.

Besides getting a flea bite in the ankle (I swear I must have been a dog in a previous life because fleas like me almost as much as my dogs), it doesn’t get much better than this.  I don’t have any work this weekend and have nothing to do besides return library books.

I’m going to play guitar all weekend long.  I’ll be cutting some solos for a friend and need to brush up on my leads.  I’m currently saving up for some musical equipment because I want to get back into music again.

This weekend, I’m just going to walk.  I don’t care where.  I’m just walking.  I love that feeling of walking and having nowhere really to go.  Walking gives me time to just think.

Running sucks.  When you run, you’re thinking of running.  When you walk, you’re thinking about anything you want to think about.  I get some of my best ideas when walking.  I really should bring a camera though when I walk because there’s always a blog post staring at me whenever I don’t have my camera.

Dinner’s ready, folks.  Mrs. Z is calling me downstairs.  Have a wonderful weekend!

Living in America, Act IV

Character list:
Rusty Lederhosen
Col. ‘Bat’ Guano
Spotti Lederhosen

(knock on the door)

Rusty - Who is it?

Col. Guano - Colonel Bat Guano, 23rd Division and his troops.

Rusty - (opens the door) What do you want at his late hour?

Col. Guano - We hear you have an extra room and I’m going to have to use it to quarter my soldiers.

Rusty - We have some personal stuff in that room and I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline.

Col. Guano - This is not a request, but an order.

Rusty - Read this. (whips out his copy of the U.S. Constitution and points to Amendment III).

Col. Guano - (reads out loud) No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Rusty - Well?

Col. Guano - (red in the face). I’ll be damned. Well, Sir, you have my deepest apologies.

Rusty - (smiles and shakes his hand) No problem. Hey Colonel, you see that pink house?

Col. Guano - Yeah?

Rusty - Well, that’s Larry Schmuckmeister’s house. He has two extra rooms and a big screen TV and no knowledge of the Constitution.

Col. Guano - Sir, a sincere thanks from me and my troops. (Turns to his soldiers). Let’s go to the pink house!

(exit Col. Guano and his troops)

Spotti - (enters in a nightgown and night cap). Rusty? Who was that?

Rusty - (gives his wife a peck on the cheek). Oh, just some soldiers who wanted to use our spare room.

Spotti - You mentioned the Third Amendment, right?

Rusty - Of course, babe!

That’s my prediction. No, I won’t be voting for him. I’m just saying he’s going to be the next President.

I’ll also predict Nader will throw in his hat but get less than 1% of the vote. What I’d like to see is Ron Paul running as a Libertarian or an Independent. I’d love to vote for the guy. Exmi made a good point about if I do a write-in vote, I’d be throwing it away pretty much so I might as well vote for whomever the Libertarian candidate is. That way, at least my vote will be counted.

So my prediction is Obama beats McCain in a landslide. Who will be Vice President? John Edwards, not Hillary Clinton. Clinton is starting to alienate too many people and her attacking of Obama has already backfired.

You’re at a family reunion. You’re having a great time. Suddenly, you hear shouting in the other room. You go to check out what the fuss is all about and you see Uncle Jim on the floor being restrained by three of your relatives. You recognize another guy being helped by several people you don’t know. He’s bleeding. You immediately know what happened.

Quick quiz, folks. Was Uncle Jim drunk or stoned?

I’m not even going to answer that because I know you know the answer.

Marijuana is a drug. It’s not good for you. It goes into your lungs and anything you stick into your lungs can’t be good for you. Regardless, people on marijuana are not trouble makers.

Jim is not an asshole when he drinks. Jim’s an asshole and it takes drinking to see his real side. Now, when Jim gets stoned, he’s mellow. We’d all much rather see Jim get stoned than drunk.

Marijuana is a gateway drug

No it’s not. Do the research yourself. Survey after survey has shown that people try cocaine, heroin, or meth for the first time not when they’re stoned but when they’re drinking. If anything, alcohol is the gateway drug. Of course, I’m not against drinking either, but showing the absurdity of the statement.

Marijuana makes you lazy

Well, no shit, Einstein. I’d prefer that young people don’t smoke pot and I tell my son about drugs all the time, using people we know as examples. But then again, that’s a central part of my beliefs. You, not me, and especially not the government, make the decision about what is best for you. You, not me, and especially not the government should be raising your kids to do the right thing.

I know more than a few people who are lazy who smoke pot. Guess what? They never had an ambition to begin with. Sure, marijuana makes it worse, but these guys weren’t go-getters from the start. If you took away their history of pot, I guarantee you they’ll be wasting their time and money on some other stupid thing.

Marijuana has medicinal value

And this I agree with. It’s good for glaucoma, but where it really shines is for cancer patients. I’ve heard a lot about cancer patients and how they lose their appetites, and how marijuana helps them eat. That is a good thing. And why are we preventing people with cancer from smoking pot anyways? Come on, they got cancer for God’s sake. Give them a freaking break.

Summary

All in all, marijuana should be a State decision, not Federal. This is another clear violation of the Tenth Amendment. California, Hawaii, Florida, and if I’m not mistaken Arizona have voted to legalize marijuana for medicinal use, but they keep getting harassed by the Feds. Where are the States’ Rights folks when you need them?

Marijuana does not cause violence. In fact, people mellow out when they’re on it. For that reason alone, I’d rather people do marijuana than other things. You hear about marijuana making the roads more dangerous but the fact is people who are stoned know they’re stoned and know they have no business being on the road. Drunks on the other hand…

This post is dedicated to Miladysa.

WWI may have been the most pointless multi-national war in the past one hundred years. In WWII, there were clearly good guys and bad guys. WWI was a war between imperialistic nations where millions of young working class men died in the trenches for pretty much nothing, and it resolved very little because less than a generation later, it had to be fought again with even more nations caught in the middle of it.

WWI also was pointlessly brutal, with thousands of young men literally getting their faces blown apart. Plastic surgery was still in its infancy and plastic surgeons at the time performed miracles, taking men who had next to nothing left of their faces and giving them something that was good enough to go in public again, although not good enough to lead normal lives.

The Smithsonian has a display of before and after masks of men with their faces demolished and the masks made after the fact. The pictures are quite graphic and will leave you both shocked and astonished that plastic surgeons back then were talented enough to give these men something.

Live Through This

Now imagine this - you’re a WWI Vet. You’ve been in a stinky, filthy trench infested with rats for two years. Your feet are covered in fungus and you and your buddy took turns fending off the rats who enjoyed nibbling at you when you were trying to get some sleep. Your bread’s full of maggots, but you eat it anyways because it’s better than starving. You can’t stand all the way up or else you’ll get your head literally shot off with machine gun fire.

Then a crude hand grenade falls in your trench. You get your face partially blown off. You lose an eyeball, half your nose, and the flesh from one side of your face. You wake up in a hospital with plastic surgeons doing the best they can, but your face is so bad that you get to wear a mask for the rest of your shortened life.

The thing is, you’re better off than your comrades. Shortly after being taken out of the war, they all got hit with mustard gas. You visit them often and watch them die slowly as they’re coughing and wheezing all day and then within a year, they’re all dead as they literally drown in the watery buildup in their lungs as their bodies do everything they can to rid them of that mustard gas.

The Phantom of the Opera

The Phantom of the Opera was a French novel written by Gaston Leroux in 1909 that probably would have faded into obscurity had it not been made into a 1925 silent film starring Lon Chaney as the hideously deformed Phantom. His character plays a tragic role that lives under an opera house, has a beautiful voice, and longs for the love of the beautiful actress/singer Christine who instead loves a fellow actor Raoul.

The movie ends with the Phantom’s death, but throughout the movie, although the Phantom does bad things, the audience feels for the Phantom. It is intentionally sympathetic to the Phantom, a sort of anti-hero with a full range of emotions.

It was very popular with WWI vets who often returned from that stupid war disfigured and shunned by society as children would stare at their battle scarred faces in horror. Although the story was written before WWI, the silent film appealed strongly to these Vets who would watch the movie over and over again, seeing themselves in that tragic role.

So this movie is right up your alley. For two hours, you notice people in the audience actually feel some remorse for how they treat freaks (like you). Before you die, you watch the movie ten times. Living vicariously through the Phantom is the closet you get to actual intimacy with a beautiful woman.