Part One of Something

5/18/99 (i think)

I need to stop picking my nose one of these days. I mean, it's really not the most attractive thing to witness, is it? I once had an aunt who told me that if I watched myself do something in the mirror, the bad habit would be kicked in a week. "...and just imagine being the poor guy has to discover your downright poetic collection of dried boogers on the underbelly of your desk at work." Yum yum yum. Didn't Primus write a song about that guy? Or was it Phish? Or Zappa? Or did I just imagine it, like everything else lately? That's all life is these days, one big self-sufficient delusion after another.

"Oh, I just read about that on the internet..."

Life wasn't always this cliche. It used to have some sort of purpose, save the Valuble Lesson we all learn on sitcoms when all of the characters' problems are mysteriously solved at once like some sort of godsend epiphany. Must be some kind of conspiracy.

"Man, LIFE is a conspiracy!"

The magazine or the breakfast cereal? See, there's another one...the word "breakfast" must always precede the word "cereal", as if we'd confuse it with lunch cereal or dinner cereal...holy jesus christ, did I just impersonate Jerry Seinfeld? Shoot me fucking now.

Is someone shaving my door with an electric razor?

I have the most erie feeling that my ceiling fan will at any moment extend downward, form a large claw with its blades, and try to haul me off to some exotic desert island full of naked men. Reminds me of the time my ceiling fan once turned into a large claw, grabbed me about the midsection, and hauled me off to some exotic desert island full of naked men.
The journey itself was like a Gene Roddenberry Wormhole Thing. You know, the types on the TV shows made by a handful of mediocre actors and British computers that haven't been manufactured since the early 1990s. It was blue...I remember that much. And there were all sorts of tiny voices coming out of nowhere assuring me that I wasn't hearing all sorts of tiny voices coming out of nowhere. I have a feeling that sliding through this Roddenberry Apparatus (which I think should be the new "official" term for wormholes) must be a bit like what a baby feels when travelling through the Birth Canal (which I think should be the new name of that bit of water between England and France), although I never could be too sure, being as I am the result of a Cessation-Section.
I can't really say how I ended up on the island. It's not as if the sky had a sudden attack of flatulence and farted me out. It's more like I materialized out of the sand....as if someone had built a me-castle and it just gradually came to life (this of course has me wondering why I didn't just try building something useful out of of sand when I fisrt arrived -- maybe because I'm not much of a sculptor...I can't be sure). The sand itself wasn't so much like lots of tiny little grains of sand so much as it was like a kind of paste. In retrospect, I suppose calling it "sand" in the first place was a very large mistake. Such is Life.
The first thing that really struck me about the naked men was a small rubber ball dead-center to my forehead. It stung quite a bit. I had apparently inerrupted a game they were playing, which made them understandibly upset. One of them shouted something in what sounded like Greek, but with lots of German-esque "cht" and "sht" sounds.
It was at this point that I realized that I really didn't care too much for this rather compromising situation, so I decided to leave. Still, I'm sure it was a Learning Experience of some kind.

Life is chock-full of these Learning Experiences lately. Like learning when to (never) and when not to (ever) use the term "chock-full".

Learning Experiences are God's way of hitting the Panic Button.

The great thing about Learning Experiences is that they're almost always a very unpleasant-to-do, usually leave you feeling like an utter idiot, always come completely unexpectedly, and you hardly ever realize that despite what a downright miserable time you had, it probably wasn't that beneficial to begin with.

One of the first things I learned from being on the Naked Guy Island is that it's best to always bring a toothbrush, even if you're just leaving the house for a few minutes. Life is quite weird enough without being killed by a bad case of plaque poisoning. Despite the achingly popular belief that plaque is a very slow and really not-so-dangerous substance, it's actually quite the opposite. The Naked Men are constantly plagued by it. It sneaks up behind them while they're in those uncomfortable, compromising situations that sitcoms are basically made of. It comes to the Island in swarms every August or thereabouts. August is a very troubling time for the Naked Men. They spend most of the month half-buried in the sand with their hind halves sticking out into the air like drunken ostriches. This gives one ample opportunity to hone the fine technique of Body Art, as I have. I can now paint anything from a pair of Venician Blinds to a blind Venician on a person's bootimus maximus. Providing, of course, that they are upside-down.

Goddammit..what's with this crap on the radio? You call that music? I call that math class with a Fender and some eyeshadow, you stain. Has the whole fucking world become one big shitfaced frat house? Man, now those Naked Guys...*they* had some good music. Ok, so it wasn't so much music as it was a bunch of running around and screaming and smashing heavy things against other heavy things that just happened to be somewhat rhythmic. But then, that's what good music really is...an accident. An accident that someone decided to put to tape and package in a way that would sell to the masses before it got too big and flat and boring and archaic beyond comprehension, to the point where it was again just an accident.