GI Joe Vs. The Pr0n

Sitting at Tully's in downtown Pleasanton on Thanksgiving at Noon. Family went on a hike, but I felt like more coffee and more iPod. Some playlists just fit the moment and you need to isolate yourself and look around at your surroundings with a soundtrack. I knocked out the Benzedrine playlist this morning that felt like open heart surgery the way it just pulled out all the stitches that hold it together, but it's healthy to open wounds every once in a while so that you can apply more scar tissue on top of it.

So, today's story is another chapter in the randomness that is my life. I was doing laundry the other night and my neighbor said, "Hey, I opened my DVD player and the DVD of G.I. Joe was in the player, but I returned the movie like three weeks ago. Blockbuster never called or anything and I couldn't figure out why, but I think I know what happened..."

Here's what happened. I loan my rapy neighbor tons of movies all the time as I'm the resident pirate and also just have a shit ton of movies laying around that are of his taste. So, he had his Vegas girlfriend in town and I loaned them a stack of DVDs. Apparently, there was a porn DVD in the stack. I figured this out when I heard them watching it while I was on my porch.

Now, here is the thing about porn. You don't ever loan porn to someone. You give porn to people under the guise of loaning it to them. There are a couple of reasons. If somebody truly appreciates porn and doesn't find it shameful, they just fucking buy it for themselves. If they like it, but are a little up tight, they borrow it...and never give it back.

As part of my accepting growing up phase last year, I threw a bunch of it away, but have since also been like Johnny Pornoseed and have been doling it out to those in need. It never comes back. One dude has had New Wave Hookers 5 for like 5 years. He's gotten married since he borrowed it. It's not coming back, which is fine because there is a weird porno clown scene in it that is just frightening. So, it's a win-win. Someone gets porn and I get rid of it.

Anyway, so rapy neighbor has a porn DVD for a while. He rents G.I. Joe and some other shit and then returns the movies. Unknowingly, he put the porn inside the G.I. Joe case and returned the movie. So, some dude checking in DVDs at Blockbuster just got some porn returned and no fucking duh you didn't get a call about it. Shit like that tends to fall through the cracks and go unmentioned.

Sadly, if you've seen G.I. Joe, I think the neighbor came out on the shit end of that stick because the porn that he had had more artistic merit than G.I. Joe by far and even a more fluid storyline. Now, that's just fuckin' sad.

Bite Me

Here's a typical Hugh moment. The end was me staring down at a dude's face bloodied up pretty good in a doorway. I reached down and checked his pulse and he twitched. The twitch is the difference between a cab and an ambulance. A couple of dudes then grabbed him and threw him in a cab. I grabbed a girl that was somehow involved in the scuffle and removed her from the situation while she called her mom for a ride home. During the call she looked down at my hand and said, "Oh my god. Your hand is bleeding all over the place."

The bartender looked at me and said "Stick your hand out." He then poured a couple of shots of 151 on it as I said, "That's really all right. I think I'll just put some Neosporin on it when I get home." That was my manbite.

Somehow in the process of being a misguided boy scout, I managed to get my hand bit by a human. Who the fuck bites people? That's got to be a last resort like twenty steps below kicking someone in the balls and the classic throat punch. They are dirty, but incredibly effective in some situations just like jeans that haven't been washed for a week.

I'm still not sure about what happened, but heard that someone may have thrown a drink in a girl's face. Cliched, but still unacceptable. Still, there is no excuse for my involvement in something like that. It was all very instinctual, in my defense, but I should've been home in bed and not being bitten.

Land of the Free. Home of the Grave.

Fuck, man. I went straight Obi-Wan Weekend last weekend. Performed a year's worth of introspection as I tried to distract myself from doing a state of a personal union speech as an internal monologue all weekend. Weakly, I fell into slight self-medicating Friday night. That equals ten beers while trying to beat Guitar Hero: Van Halen on bass. It wasn't so bad, but I Saturday morning quarterbacked myself pretty brutally for doing it. It's severe weakness of character and was a result of a recent dust up over an A-Team like crime that I didn't commit and light rejection. People are not going to like me and that's all right. I need to accept that. That is starting to become very apparent.

The main problem is that, at this point, I feel like a guy running through Bridgetown who is clearly on fire again. I'm getting lonely, yet introverted. I don't want to be around anyone. I just want to sit home and stew. I decided Saturday that I wouldn't drink for the rest of the weekend as it made my mind turn on me. Saturday was Halloween and as I caught up with my DVR and pounded ginger ale, I had this thought. I'm absolutely free. Lonely, but free.

Isn't freedom what we all want? Shouldn't I be happy that I can do anything at any moment in time? On a dime, I can jump on my bike and drink myself into the clouds with the only consequence being the occasional drunk text or off hand remark that ruins everything. Or, I can just sit in my sweats and watch the sun move slowly across the sky until it's dark and then realize that I've done nothing, but effectively melt away a day like a Bond villain with some piece of super science time bending machine.

My two points of human interaction were my buddy Warnervon dropping by to give me a new xbox game for us to play together and dropping off the Bakersfield Raccoons at a club for Halloween. That's right, bitches. HughVoltage as your sober driver pseudotaxi on Halloween. They invited me, but I was in no mood for social interaction, although, painfully lonely. I just didn't know of anyone eligible that I wanted to be around. Everyone that I wanted to be around was simply not an option. So, I sat there with Halloween candy for costumed kids that would never show. I did, however, grab my neighbor kid Sunday afternoon and give him all the candy I had in my Halloween Pumkinhead. The little dude was stoked.

Sunday was xboxing, football watching, grocery store and light chores. The apartment is clean. Very clean, but I'm starting to see areas for drastic change and reorganization. I need to just pick up and leave the apartment, but moving is such a bitch.

Sunday morning was filled with the cacophonic symphony of variations of "Fuck" heard from the Raccoons lair. Duh. Tons of boozing plus Halloween lead to these things. I had made the right move by staying in to stew no matter how lonely I was feeling. I've been what some people would deem phenomenally successful on Halloween in the past, but these are only successes to married men. They were pretty awesome, but not real healthy and I'm still convinced that two of them have been caught on closed circuit cameras somewhere. Wait, I just realized that there is a theme of waking up in hotels involved with them. That and strangers in costume. What a fuckin' mess. So, yeah, this Halloween, I didn't wake up in a hotel room with a relative stranger or strangers. I'm checking the success box on Halloween '09.

So, I'm cutting off the therapy tomorrow to save some money and hunkering down for the war in front of me. I'm at ground zero. I look at my phone to call someone when I'm like this and then just put it away because I have no one to say anything to. The upside to everything is that a) I'm totally free to do whatever I want and b) Something rad is bound to happen if I just sit tight, don't do anything stupid and ride it out.

To be completely honest, it's painful, but I think there was some necessary social cleansing that took place and once it takes I will have an opportunity to improve my immediate surroundings. I lay in bed last night with my first bout of insomnia in weeks and went down the list of companions for the last three years or so and I've made some horrible choices and have made a career of jamming square pegs into round holes expecting something miraculous to happen. It doesn't. Time to take everything at face value and quit making excuses for everyone. It's not that I don't play well with others. It's that they don't play well with me and fuck them. I'm taking my toys and getting out of the toxic sandbox even though it's my fault for being in there in the first place.

This wasn't meant to be a big fuck you. It's meant to be a big thank you. A thank you to Kismet for punching me in the face until I could see again. Time to man up and quit taking this so fuckin' seriously and also drop this sensitive bullshit in lieu of self-preservation. Fuck empathy for now until someone or something presents a reason. Time to take life for what it is and not what it is not. That's freedom. I'm a goddamn patriot.