In Memoriam...

Thank you all for coming. Recently my hair has been threatening to cut itself, like an unruly teenager. So, I (my hair's loving family) have staged this mock funeral to show how much we (the editorial "we") care about it.

(After taking this introductory photo, I realized that I should maybe give my hair a little more credit, and that it was all right to admit that it could be sexy. So I channeled Desperado-era long-haired Antonio Banderas and came up with this)

See, hair? You can totally pull it off.

I think my hair feels better already. Its hairy heart is being moved by all the pretty words we are saying about it. Let's have a look back at some of my hair's travels.

Here's a picture of my hair at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. There were many cowboy hats to try on, but my hair wasn't feeling very thin that day and trying things on probably would have just made it feel worse.



Ah and here's my hair posing with a burrito in Mexico. My hair is a bit of a racist, and its social commentary on the "dirty" Mexicans was to not be washed for most of the time. What an asshole. What? Oh AHEM HEM HEM... but we're here to remember the good times. Moving right along...



Here's my hair in a rare artistic piece. The photographer wanted to shock you with the contrast between a long, flowing head of hair and a bald, green head. Or perhaps one could interpret the receding hairline of the human subject to challenge the viewer to imagine him becoming the bald anthropomorphic reptile skilled in the arts of stealth and assassination.



And here is my hair taunting what it believes to be an Ewok. My hair is a Star Wars fanatic of almost religious devotion, and it was not pleased with the Ewok spin-off movies cashing in on what it considered to be non-essential and "stupid" characters. Don't even get it started on Jar Jar Binks.



Here is my hair when it was younger, embarrassing itself at a party. This was one of the many times my hair forced me to base a transition into a closing paragraph on a pun. After three beers, I told my hair I'd have to CUT IT OFF.

I can see that in your grief-stricken state, you're not in the mood for puns. Well of course it's the grief. At any rate, my hair is feeling a little better about itself, and has come out of its suicidal depression long enough to remind me that I'm in a rock band, and that if I cut it off, how am I going to get to be as sweaty on stage? My hair has greatly overestimated its understanding of things I like.

THE PBJ

Being a proud bachelor/poor/awesome, I have logged many hundreds of hours making and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Not many other cheap foods can consistently deliver the way a solid PBJ can. They've evolved about as much as sharks or AC/DC and are just as much a piece of the very fabric of American life. Thus, I would like to share what I have learned so that you may enjoy your sandwiches as much as I do.

THE INGREDIENTS
Now I could rattle off brand names of specific breads and where you can purchase a certain kind of jelly, and we could argue smooth versus crunchy peanut butter until I punch you in the chest because you say crunchy. Crunchy peanut butter is gross. I win.
But the three ingredients of an enjoyable PBJ all adhere to three guidelines:
First, ingredients to make PBJs for a week should not cost any more than $10. Making an expensive PBJ is like putting peanuts in peanut butter. WHY DO IT. Second, they should be easy to utilize. Now this is where I half break one of my own rules. Obviously jelly in a squeezable container was an international revelation and should have its own commemorative day complete with parades and awkward family gatherings. But peanut butter needs to come in an old-fashioned screw-top jar, and I'll tell you why. Did you ever wake up one picturesque winter morning to a fresh snow so completely brand new and untouched by anything that you had to suit up and get out in it to be the first to upset the pristine white surface with your giddy, excited-for-Christmas-presents energy? Yeah me neither. But that's pretty much what the first stab into a new peanut butter jar is like for me. Perfectly flat smooth brown surface BUTTER KNIFE DESTROY!! It's an important piece of your formative childhood memories that I get to live whenever I feel like it. By stabbing something.

INAPPROPRIATE PARAGRAPH BREAK 
And then third and finally, ingredients should be plentiful and easy to find. Half the appeal of the PBJ is that headaches are allergic to it. Nothing about it says "I'm stressful" or "give up." You should never have to drive to a second store to round up ingredients. If you do, you might as well go ahead and buy yourself a turkey to cook in the oven for seven hours or whatever.

A CAUTIONARY TALE 
You may make it to the end of a loaf of bread and find that you're left with an odd number of slices. You may be tempted to employ the well-worn sandwich adage "bigger is better" and attempt a double-decker PBJ, peanut butter on one side, jelly on the other side. I'm here to tell you the result will leave you angry, confused, and likely to throw your sandwich off your sixth-floor balcony. The bread buffer between your PB and your J violates the most important PBJ rule: the peanut butter and the jelly MUST be touching. The bond between the two is half science, half magic, and all amazing. Don't disrespect it.

THE FUTURE? 
Recently, I've been flirting with the idea of adding another ingredient into the mix. But every time I go to make myself a sandwich, I can't seem to muster up the enthusiasm to desecrate something so holy. And now I'm sad because I'm afraid I've offended mayonnaise by calling it a desecration. But I think the mark of an advanced civilization is that sometimes it's not already extremely hungry when it prepares its food, so it might get adventurous and tamper with the sanctity of jelly and bread and peanut butter. I, however, am not an advanced civilization and I am starving. I think I'd better go make myself a turkey club and apologize to mayo.

I probably don't have ADD.

Prologue:
It took a little longer for me to find a job after moving than I thought it would. About two months longer. So I was broke. Well, college student-broke. I still have things like an apartment and an internet-connected computer and guitars and an obnoxiously over-powered cell phone, and $6. But I was broke. So I wasn't able to pay my car payment. I'm also horrible with calling companies and wading through phone menus and talking to representatives, especially companies to whom I owe large quantities of money.

Chapter 1:
At the behest of my mom, whose credit rating will also suffer by my inaction, I finally call the company that owns my car until I give them enough money. My goal is to defer a payment or two until I'm back on my feet a little. They tell me that the payments need to be current before I can do that, so

This is boring I'm gonna go play Halo.

Gather 'round, Nation.

I'm an American. So I get to demand stuff.

1. No more super-loud motorcycles.
I believe the days of the iconic American biker are behind us. The part of our society that idolized the solitary rebel or the Hell's Angel as rugged, idealized individuals no longer includes the smarter or classier part. The only people who like bikers now are either trailer trash or other bikers. I know it's small potatoes for any governing legal body, but I think it should be put to a people's vote whether or not we put a cap on how loud motorcycles can be. They don't have to be any less powerful or dangerous to ride. Limiting the ways I can hurt myself of my own free will is absolutely un-American. But let's limit the power of one asshole to wake up an entire neighborhood at 2am because HE thinks it's cool.

2. Smaller portions. Everywhere. 
There was a period of 6 months before I moved where just about every meal I ate was at a restaurant. While I believe this is absolutely the life for which I was intended, I did learn a lot about what the restaurant industry thinks of Americans. It's been in the headlines for probably the last ten years that Americans are disgustingly super-fat. And while I believe it's somewhat American of us to flaunt our nation's wealth by eating however much we want of whatever we want, I think a popular vote would favor smaller portions for a smaller price. Only teenagers need a 1/2 pound burger with a mountain of french fries. For the rest of us, a modestly sized burger and a small order of fries will usually get the job done, if you can eat slowly enough to let your body understand that there's food going into it. Then maybe I'd be able to afford to go out and eat all the time and stimulate the economy, instead of buying one loaf of bread every two weeks.

3. A stricter Truck License.
I'm aware that there is a special license needed to own or operate semi trucks and high powered industrial trucks. But how often do you see these F250 Super Duper Duty monstrosities without a speck of dirt on them. Why do you need a truck that big? Does your entire diet consist of free pizza and beer from helping friends of friends move? Does it make your truck easier to find in parking garages because it sticks halfway out into the lane? This is a tricky one, because I believe a majority of this country still believes that a god put us here to use up this planet's resources because the end-times are near. I don't want to go too far into why that majority of this country is dumber than a brick, but in extreme summary, people have been saying we were on armageddon's doorstep for thousands of years. So in all probability, the world isn't ending. So we might need to think a little bigger than "I wanna big truck, uh huh huh huh" in terms of what we do with this planet. Let's make the idiots drive cars like everyone else and take a step towards the freakin' future.


4. Admit we have no clue what we're doing with the Middle East.
There just is no right answer. Nothing is going to fix it. Life has always sucked over there and it will always suck. Anything we do over there is only always going to make things worse. So I say we just get the hell out and stop poking the entire region with a stick. Just because they're not going to stop being pissed off doesn't mean we can't be the bigger people and let them sort it out themselves (or at least continue doing whatever they're doing instead of sorting it out). I realize it's a smaller and smaller world these days, but they're all the way on the other side of it. So who cares.

5. Legalize pot. 
Come on. I don't even smoke pot and I think we should just settle this one already. If there was any shred of scientific integrity to our society and our government, we would have decriminalized marijuana and just started taxing the shit out of it. Money makes the world go 'round, and America is the entire world. So I would have assumed that even maintaining absolute power over a people (even using arbitrary laws, like marijuana laws) would come in a distant second for our money-worshipping government. That and I'm just sick of hearing about it too. I think parents worried about how the legalization of pot would affect their children haven't considered the effect legalization would have on the whole counter-culture anti-establishment image of pot. Once it's legal, it's common and dorky. You can go down to the store and buy it with toilet paper and deodorant. After a few years it'd be less threatening than alcohol, and we'd have paid off the national debt. You're welcome, America.

Dear Fire Trucks,

I realize that the reason you need to be so loud is because you are so big. I do not, however, know the reason you need to be so big.

If cities didn't have fire hydrants, I could understand that you would need your ear-splitting, gut-rumbling 56-cylinder engine (or whatever) to quickly carry hundreds of gallons of water to the site of a fire.

In a world where modern technology hadn't rendered ladders extremely collapsible and compact, and firehoses capable of being folded and coiled to the point of being almost nonexistent when not in use, I might see a reason for you to be sixty feet long and weigh 9 million pounds.

If the majority of emergency calls came from halfway up Mt. Rainier and not down nicely-paved city streets, I could even let the logic behind your behemoth off-roading wheels slide.

If this weren't the richest country in the universe, maybe we couldn't afford to develop the technology to suitably dampen the racket produced by our state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line response vehicles.

But since all of these scenarios were just made up by me, Fire Trucks, perhaps you could stay in tonight so I can enjoy having the windows open. It's nice out and you're ruining it for me. We have plenty of buildings. Let a few of 'em go. I can't hear the movie I'm watching.

Love,
Sam

Humans.

I don't necessarily stalk people on Facebook. I generally lose interest in people who know me and don't continually talk to me. What I have noticed myself to do though is click on friends of friends of friends who I have never met and will never meet and then look through their pictures. This brings me to my main point: I HATE BABIES. Man I hate babies. I realize our baby-worship is only an outward symptom of our deeply religiocentric history, but I feel like our generation might be at least vocal enough about their distaste for babies to get people to stop plastering pictures of their wrinkly newborns all over their pages that I am for some reason looking at. Why are you proud of that? There's a reason abortion clinics exist: ANYONE CAN HAVE A BABY. People have babies on accident. In fact I'm pretty proud that I haven't had a baby. And what's all this "Oh that's a cute baby" nonsense? All babies look the same. I just googled "ugly baby" and apart from the silly photoshopped freak-baby pictures, the regular ol' ugly human babies looked exactly like standard "cute" babies to me. Whatever, humanity.

While we're being superficial...
In the wake of the 2010 ICP Gathering and the Tila Tequila debacle (yes, I pay attention to F-list celebrity news sometimes) I am revisiting my light obsession with Juggalos. Being a reasonable and fair-minded person, I made myself sit through an entire half of an Insane Clown Posse song before turning it off, so I can at least safely distance myself from the "ick" of actually liking the stuff, and chock this one up to pure America The Trainwreck people-watching. Juggalos, in my opinion, have usurped the retards on COPS as the #1 reason the death penalty should be embraced nationwide. When are we, as a race, going to look at ourselves and realize that the continued reproduction of Juggalos is not enhancing the gene pool? Our compassion, our humanity, is going to be the very thing that destroys us. On a side note, I do have to respect the Faygo company for having the decency not to officially associate itself with the ICP in spite of the fact that they probably owe most of their last decade's worth of revenue to Juggalos.

The point, though, is this: someone show me a picture of a hot Juggalo. Seriously. Try and find one.