Here is the real, real secret (not so secret anymore) reason that Ro is friends almost exclusively with boys. Girls, god love them, in this post Sex and the City sexual revolution world, despite the multiple opportunities available to us that were not available to our corset wearing, can't-learn-math-because-it-will-impair -our-fertility foremothers, haven't evolved much, personality wise. You put a bunch of girls together, be they cocktail waitresses or fucking brain surgeons, and they pretty much want to talk about the same goddamn thing. Boys. Boysboysboysboysboys. Like high school girls. Why doesn't he call? Do you think he wants to get married? He said "Do you mind doing the dishes?" but I think he really meant that he thinks we're ready for a deeper commitment. Fucking spare me. Seriously. And talking about boys usually means bitching about them. Constantly. He did this, he said that, I feel this, I feel that....goddamn Cosmo and bookstores full of Snag A Man Now Before Your Tits Fall Down and No Man Will Have You self-help books have so warped the female brain that it's all most women can think about.

And the scenario that plays out over and over is this. Girlfriend  is in a relationship. That relationship is imperfect. Therefore, every time Girlfriend and Ro go out (or stay in), Girlfriend whines constantly about her boyfriend and the shitty stuff he does and how it makes her feel bad and sometimes she even cries. And Ro, being a rather manly girl with certain rather un-girly emotional impairments and a tendency towards violence, views this situation thusly: I am your friend. I love you a whole, whole lot. I could give two shits about whatever asshole you've decided to let into your panties this month. I see that you are miserable and upset and I adore you and seeing you miserable and upset makes me miserable and upset. The way I deal with this is by telling you that this asshole is, in fact, an asshole. I will probably tell you that you deserve better. I will most likely offer to kill the asshole. I will probably council you to leave the situation that is making you miserable and upset. This is almost always, always the way I respond to my friends when they are in distress: I commiserate, I let them rant, I tell them that I think they deserve better and that anyone who makes them unhappy should die, horribly. Sometimes, in fact often, I get pissed. I have a highly developed sense of indignation. It's a personal problem that I don't see getting any better any time soon, especially as it relates to those I care about.

Right now, currently, two of my three closest friends are boys.(The third is a girl, but she's married to one of the boys, and they never bitch about each other, ever, because they are so in love that you could just gag.)  They don't complain to me about their relationships, my friends who are boys. They both have jobs that they hate and they are both miserable about them, and they both cry on my shoulder about their respective work situations. I listen to both of them almost every day. I tell them that I love them and that they deserve better. I encourage them to look for new jobs, jobs that will be more fulfilling and less miserable, where they will feel happy to go every day (or at least less likely to be killed in some sort of moron-related accident.). I offer the opinion that anyone who could possibly treat either one of them that badly should immediately contract cancer of the AIDS of the gonorrhea of the dick hole. I commiserate and I let them vent and feel bad that they feel bad and I tell them that all they have to do for me to ventilate their douche bag bosses with various pointy objects is to say the word. And then, once they've vented sufficiently, we go on to talk about poo, or the economy, or literature, or crime, or horror movies or comic books or physics or monsters or vast government conspiracies or gross bodily injuries or something else that is ACTUALLY MOTHERFUCKING INTERESTING!!!!!!

Do you know what the difference is between my two bestest boyfriends and my former once-upon-a-time bestest girlfriends? The real, fundamental difference? I'll tell you. Those boys don't go in to work the day after a "My boss is such a fucktard" bitch-fest only to have said boss offer them a lame apology, some flowers and a pinch on the ass, magically transforming himself into the good guy and Ro into the evil bitch from hell who dared talk shit about him. And this, my friends, leads to less emotional roller coaster for me. So. There you have it.  And here you thought that me hanging around with boys all the time just meant that I was kinda slutty.

From my local news feed, which bombards me with misery every time I get online to check my email...

Yeah, a blog. I know! I bet you're all like "That bitch said she wasn't blogging anymore and now she's doing it again." Bite me. I've had actual free time for the first time in like a year and a half this week, and it's surprising what a difference that has made in my slacker brain. I didn't realize how much stress/time/energy school was eating up until it was no longer eating them. It's like losing a hundred pounds. I feel almost like an actual functional human being. It's nifty.

Today before work me and my friend went and got pedicures. I know, how fucking girly. It was only the second one I'd ever had in my life that wasn't home administered by some drunk chick wearing a mud mask while "Sex and The City" played in the background. I wasn't having to rush between classes or stress about homework that I should be doing or spend hours in the computer lab trying to make up some bullshit power point presentation.

I'm being lazy this week. Maybe next week too. Not like worthlessly lazy but I'm taking it a little bit easy. Maybe I can catch up on my sleep and rest my brain enough so that I can function like a normal non-retard for the first time since like before Christmas. Hopefully, anyway.

I haven’t blogged anything in awhile. I’m not sure why.

Actually, that’s a lie...I know exactly the reasons why, and I will now share them with you, as if you cared. The whole idea of blogging has always been sort of strange to me, really, I never really understood why I felt compelled to do it back in the day when like 2 people might read it...it was like this weird internet equivalent of being that crazy bag lady with the tinfoil hat standing on the corner screaming about how radioactive hamsters were conspiring to overthrow Bob Hope. Nobody really pays attention to that lady, no one really listens to her and takes her seriously, and yet she keeps on screaming because it makes her feel better. It’s cathartic somehow. Putting shit out there, man, for EVERYONE to see. Sure, they’re not reading it...but they COULD. 20 people, 30 people, 100...they might read what I wrote and they might hate it or like it or be indifferent to it but either way they’re reading it. My private thoughts, which I have for some reason I can’t quite define, made public.

And then something strange happened. People read it. Most of them liked it. People started subscribing, showing up every time I posted something new, strangers all over the world tuning in to hear my bullshit vaguely amusing thoughts about everything. Like, wow. For the briefest shining moment, I felt like a popular girl. Not, you know, The Girl With The EYE...like I was all through the adolescent jungle of high school, or the invisible woman that I grew into living in the middle of a cultural shithole in the part of North Carolina where it’s really fuckin hot and most of the bugs are giant. A little less mediocre, I was, because of all this goddamn talent I’d been hearing about all my life.

Then the bullshit started, as bullshit always does. If I’ve learned anything it’s that the only constant of life if you are not living yours on a deserted tropical island far away from your fellow man is that nothing good can ever remain the same. Because people, when they interact together, are bound to fuck things up. There always has to be some asshole who shits on the party, some drama queen bitch who starts silly high school shit...adults, adults who’ve never even laid eyes on one another...hiding behind fake names and fake photographs, starting shit, stirring up drama, proving right all the rotten, rotten things that you don’t ever want to believe about other people. Those of you who were here for the drama, you know what I’m talking about. Those of you who are reading this now without the slightest clue what I’m talking about, I’m not going to tell the story, sorry, rest assured that it was laughable little kid drama perpetrated by grownups who should have behaved better. It was stupid, silly, pointless, and it was kinda a long time ago.

And yet, it wasn’t. Because I’m a Cancer, and we get our feelings hurt very easily, though we might not always let on. And when we get our feelings hurt, the very first, most natural thing we do is to simply withdraw into that stereotypical shell. Because it’s safe and dark in there and nothing can hurt us. My little toy, my safe little computer world where I write funnies (and rants) and other people enjoy them and feel happy was tainted. It didn’t feel good to me anymore. It felt like...waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the bomb to go off, waiting for the next angry email barrage or the next slew of psycho haters to show up and start leaving nasty comments and harass my friends. It felt like most aspects of my life as soon as I start having to deal with people...waiting to see what the terrible drama will be and how clobbered I’ll be by it.

And then there was the added aspect of...suddenly everyone knew that Ro the Dharma Janitor was ME. My mom, dad, co-workers, relatives...too much. Like, can I blog about sex on Sex Blog Thursday anymore knowing that my parents are reading it? No, thank you, so much for that. If I get frustrated at some situation or another, can I honestly blog about it knowing that whoever is going to read it and get mad...it wasn’t silly anonymous fun anymore, it was people I see every day, my husband, my co-workers, my relatives, having some sort of window into my brain. Like, it was no longer mine. Like, where is the line between blogging and diary, and why the hell am I letting everyone read mine?

Not to say that I don’t love everyone and enjoy all the positive comments from friends and loved ones here and everywhere. Not to say that it wasn’t fun, that I didn’t enjoy it. Not to say that I’m gonna get all emo and delete my profile and shit. Just explaining it to you, all you lovely people who do care about me and who message me every once in awhile to ask where I’m at and why I’m not blogging anymore. I’m tired, I’m busy. I’ve got a little over a month left till I graduate college. I work a lot, which is not necessarily a bad thing but is a time consuming thing. And, all excuses aside, it stopped being fun for me and started feeling like work. It wasn’t self expression anymore, it was something that I felt anxious about...like who is it going to offend, what problems is it gonna cause in real life, what will I say that someone will take wrong or personally or hold against me, will I open up my email to find yet another angry demand that I leave the country, will there be more gang rape jokes...too much.

So. All bullshit aside, this is my explanation, which I felt like I owed to you all. Because I’ve met some lovely people here, people that I love and don’t want to lose touch with. And I’m not saying that I won’t ever blog again, either, though right now I’m not feeling it and I don’t know if I ever will again. I’m just...I don’t know. As a wise friend advised me to say recently, "I have a lot of shit going on, and I don’t want to talk about it right now." So, yeah. Thanks for reading, and caring, and all that.

I absolutely cannot study or read anything more about sociology. I absolutely cannot stress anymore about work. I absolutely cannot eat another Jell-O pudding pop. However, I also cannot yet sleep due to the fact that on a daily basis I consume enough coffee to kill a racehorse. So. For those of you who haven't ever bothered to look it up, for those of you who don't give a shit, and those of you who need something else to be freaking paranoid about...here are some goddamn disturbing facts about everyone's favorite scary cult, the "Church" of Scientology.

I don't really have the space here to list all the sketchy shit out there about L. Ron Hubbard, the enlightened higher being who became a millionaire off of his creation of the "Church" of Scientology. He seems for all intents and purposes to have been a sketchy bigamous whoremonger who may or may not have been involved in various criminal activities of the unwholesome creepy variety, and all the information is out there if you feel like tracking it down.  My favorite part of his personal history was the way he and the other benevolent souls of Scientology ahem "allegedly"  tortured his gay son till the kid offed himself because the boy was more interested in flying airplanes than in becoming the second in command of the creepfest Scientology empire. Basically, he was a hack sci-fi writer who decided that the fastest way to become a millionaire was to found your own religion, which he did, based on pseudo-science and dime store psychology and some dreck about thetans and aliens and past lives and repressed engrams or some such ridiculous nonsense that makes the philosophies of the Church of the Subgenius and the Flying Spaghetti Monster look like the hard line serious theology of Matthew Motherfucking Henry. You can read all about that all over the Internets too if you want.

In 1974 the "Church" of Scientology launched "Operation Snow White", a campaign of burglary, wiretapping, theft, and infiltration of 136 government and private offices which were critical of the "Church" in order to find and destroy any negative and incriminating documents that said organizations might be in possession of.  (Some people in the, ahem, "Conspiracy Theory" circles claim that Operation Snow White was also launched to gather incriminating evidence against a variety of powerful people so as to blackmail them later, though that can't actually be, ahem, proven.) What was uncovered, once the shit hit the fan about Snow White, was some other highly evolved and enlightened enterprise called Operation Freakout, which was designed to either drive author Paulette Cooper, a journalist who'd written a book and some articles criticizing the "Church" insane to the point that she was committed to an asylum or to frame her for some crime for which she would be arrested. Yet again, you can get the full story on Wikipedia, and I do encourage you to look it up...the part where they try repeatedly (and almost successfully) to frame the woman for threatening to bomb an Arab embassy is simultaneously 70's spy show corny and really fucking scary. Operation Snow White was actually investigated by the real live FBI, and that investigation led to several "Church" folks including Hubbard's 3 Baby Mama doing federal time.

It seems like, during this time, they started to perfect their 1 weapon: the LAWSUIT. It's almost a running joke, now, how those motherfuckers will sue anyone and anything, including the makers of a certain adult cartoon and YouTube to have that creepy ass video of a glassy eyed Tom Cruise gushing about how Scientologists are the only ones in the world who can help car crash victims and crackheads yanked because they felt it was "misinterpreted." They also sued the medical examiner in the Lisa McPherson case for defamation after she ruled the death (of an 18 year old Scientologist girl who'd had a psychotic break after a car accident) was due to the fact that her "Church" buddies kept her locked in a hotel room for weeks sick and dehydrated and freaking out in an attempt to "cure" her using methods designed by that great medical and psychiatric expert Ronnie H. Instead of, you know, taking her to an actual hospital to treat, among other injuries, her infected cockroach bites. Because at the hospital, they might attempt to give her psychiatric treatment. And psychiatric treatment is nonsense, while bullshit about auditing and the planet Xenu is rational. They actually got away with McPherson's death, after launching one of their trademark aggressive campaigns against the medical examiner, including anonymous threats, having her constantly followed by a private investigator, and threatening to go public with unspecified damaging information about her and her family. If you look anything up for yourself, look that up, that poor poor Lisa deserves to have as many people as possible read her story.

So. Harassment, death threats, frivolous lawsuits...all part of Ronnie Hubbard's Fair Game...his policy on how to deal with anyone who says anything bad about the "Church." Let's have a quote from the enlightened master here just for dramatic effect shall we?

"A Suppressive Person or Group becomes fair game. By FAIR GAME is meant, may not be further protected by the codes and disciplines or the rights of a Scientologist. The homes, property, places and abodes of persons who have been active in attempting to: suppress Scientology or Scientologists are all beyond any protection of Scientology Ethics, unless absolved by later Ethics or an amnesty ... this Policy Letter extends to suppressive non-Scientology wives and husbands and parents, or other family members or hostile groups or even close friends.Fair game. May be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed."

Those who do not believe like we do are less than we are and not protected by the same code of ethics we are. Feel free to destroy them. Scary scary shit. Of course, apologists for the "Church" are quick to point out that Hubbard later issued a letter canceling Fair Game...because it caused bad PR. Not, you know, because it was morally reprehensible and Naziesque. In fact, some Scientologists continue to argue that aggressively attacking critics of the "Church" through lawsuits, legal and personal harassment, threats, surveillances and other sketchy Black Ops wannabe shit is a "core" and thus Constitutionally protected tenet of the "Church."

Look, I'm all for freedom of religion. I'm all for freedom of speech. You know what creeps me right the fuck on out, though? Secretive cults that practice mind control and attempt to completely destroy the life, finances and reputation of anyone who so much as looks at them crosseyed while hiding behind Constitutional rights that they would be perfectly happy denying to others. I haven't even really scratched the surface of the absolute creepy trainwreck that Tom Cruise thinks his poor little Suri is the reincarnated founder of. And I've written this blog pretty much a) because I was bored and b)because a certain fairly awesome young person clued me in to the fact that all the cool kids on the MySpace are excited about this Anonymous (Scientology) deal. I do not advocate criminal activity of any kind.  I do advocate learning about things yourself, making informed decisions, and not being afraid to stand up and say something seems fishy when it is. It makes me happy that kids are questioning, that they're willing to stand up for something. It makes me just a tiny bit hopeful.

If you think I'm wrong, fine. If you're a Scientologist, don't sue me, I don't have any money and nobody pays attention to anything I say anyway. If you read this and learned something new, yay. Most of this information came right off Wikipedia, which means that (for now) it's free and open to the public. By all means look it up if you want, information is nifty and the truth will set you free. Also, if my profile is gone tomorrow, we'll all know where it went....

I was going to write yet another blog about how much I hate it here in Fayettenam, how I'm so sick to death of goddamn ghetto scumbags and wanna be hustlers and the fucking pathetic no class wretched criminal scum bottom feeding turd factories that I encounter on a daily basis, like the one who just tonight ripped off the charity bucket that we put at the register at work to collect money for the animal shelter. I was going to write yet another angry angry blog because I live in an angry angry place and I'm fucking tired of feeling like I don't belong and feeling unsafe and wondering which one of any number of the lowlife miserable fucks that I casually encounter on a daily basis might be the one who chooses to end my life over the six dollars that I might have in my wallet.

I was going to write a blog about how I've been trying very hard for a very long time to make myself sort of a better person, the kind of person who is centered and Zen and who does not carry around this constant anger inside. How I've tried to study Buddhism and apply it's tenets to my life in order to make this transition to better personhood, how I've seriously considered finding some Fayetteville Wonder Shrink to write me a prescription for whatever miracle drug it is that they give to the Army wives to make them all so glassy eyed and smiley and goddamn complacent. It's not that I fear that I'm some ticking time bomb that is going to go off without reason and hurt anyone, it's just that I figure it's not good for a person to feel like this so much of the time. Also, I'm pretty sure it's probably unpleasant for my family and friends and coworkers to have to deal with cranky, mean, "This town needs an enema" Ro all the time.

I was going to blog about how I hate to sound like a broken record talking about how much I hate this town all the time and how people piss me off all the time because, well, a large portion of the population of the planet or at least the country is so miserably insensitive and worthless that just thinking about it right now is making me a little nauseous. I planned on getting around to the part about how I used to be one of those people that always saw the good in others, who always believed that people inherently wanted to do the right thing, who saw the magic in everyday things and how five years of living in this town has officially skullfucked the last of that right out of me.

I don't know what else to say that I haven't already said. I'm sure you all are plenty tired of hearing the same old same old. It's not as if whining about it and bitching about it is going to fix it. Yay for concrete and scumbags and thumping bass and baggy pants and American flags and trash everywhere and fucking crack rocks and strip clubs and strip malls and sprawl. Quit your bitching and bloom where you're planted, right?

This would be the part of the blog where I trot out that old cliche about how cynics are cynics because they desperately want to be proven wrong about how bad things are, only it keeps not happening which just makes them more cynical.

So, yeah. I was going to write a blog, but I've written it so many times before and I'm sick of writing it and thinking it and I'm sure everyone is sick of reading it so I'm just going to go take a bath instead.

You know, I hate to be one of those people that just blogs mean unhappy bile whenever they get the notion. I realize that doing so is not really pleasant for those of you who for whatever reason actually read this crap. But, that's the place I'm in right now and these are the words that have poured out of my brain. I promise that someday soon it will be warm and springy and I'll blog about honeybees and tomato plants and all that happy crap.

Until then....

I stopped by work this morning so that I could run out and buy colored paper for the copy machine and bags for our vacuum cleaner which was manufactured, I believe, sometime during the Eisenhower administration. Returning to work with said bags and colored paper, I attempted to turn right off of the Boulevard into the parking lot of the store, as I do at least once a day. Now, I should say that, much like Rain Man, I am an excellent driver. Or, at least, a careful one. My daddy drilled into my head at an early age to be watchful of all the fucking idiots out there who can't drive and who will kill your ass if you aren't careful. The turn from Bragg into the parking lot is a tricky one, since it isn't obviously a driveway, and it is made trickier by the fact that every fucking moron who lives in this shithole town feels the need to consistently drive 20 miles over the posted speed limit. So. I turned my signal on way early, as I do every day, so that anyone behind me can see me turning. I tapped my brakes, as I do every day, so that, yet again, whatever fucktard who happens to be behind me can see way early what I'm doing.

And I looked into my rear view mirror, right before I turned in, just to make sure that nobody was about to hit me, which is how I knew before I felt the impact that the idiot behind me was about to hit me. It was kinda slow-mo, me thinking "Wow, he's gonna hit me..." and then trying to gun the gas right quick hoping that I'd coast on out of the way...then CRUNCH. Hard enough to make my seatbelt catch, hard enough to knock my coffee and my iPod into the floorboard, not hard enough to make the airbag shoot out thank goodness because frankly I'm pretty scared of the airbag and I hear that they're expensive to replace. Not much damage to the car, a little fender dent and some black smudges. Not much damage to me, a little stiff and achy but I keep telling myself that it's just from the cold, not from the crash.

Because it wouldn't matter if I'd busted my head right through the windshield, since the fucking asshole who hit me sped away down the Boulevard, cutting off other cars and weaving in and out of traffic. A Buick, similar to mine but green, with the right front quarter panel white like it wasn't the first time they'd hit someone in just exactly that manner. Dark dark tinted windows, of course. Shiny non factory fancy silver rims, of course. North Carolina plates, though even with her glasses Granny wasn't able to see the tag number because the car was going so fast. And of course everyone else driving down both sides of the Boulevard saw it happen, but nobody stopped, and nobody inside the store saw anything because they were real busy anyway and it's hard to see that far out the window. 

I wasn't going to do anything at all, seeing as how it's Fayettenam, and I'm probably lucky that the douchebag who hit me didn't stop, shoot me in the face and take my wallet while he was at it. But one of my coworkers pointed out that it might be nice to have a police report, just in case I wake up tomorrow and can't move. So, I called 911 and made a report and waited half an hour at the store for the police. Well, not the police, the Civilian Crash Patrol that the police department created because nobody here can fucking drive and the real police were sick of spending all day going from one crash to another. He was real nice, a little old round man, who basically told me that there was nothing that he could do for me other than give me a little slip of paper stating that there was a hit and run. No tag number, after all.  And piece of shit car with tinted windows and expensive wheels doesn't exactly narrow anything down around here.

So. It could have been much worse. I wasn't hurt, the car is OK, nobody got killed. But still, the idea of it just chaps my ass. Who the fuck just crashes into someone and DRIVES AWAY? I mean, what if I'd had a kid in the car? What if I had been hurt? He (I'm assuming he. Could have been she.) sped away so fast that there was no way he knew how much damage was done. Probably had no license or no insurance or pending warrants or all three. Fucking asshole. Karma's a bitch, though.

And then, just before handing me my useless slip of paper, the little Civilian Crash patrol dude looks at me, my baggy "It's my day off and it's 20 degrees outside" giant hoodie, and asks me if I'm pregnant.

Because, you know, a hit and run on my damn day off wasn't shitty enough.

Fuck. I'm tired, and I don't just mean the go to sleep wake up feel better kind. Anyone want to run away to Mexico with me? Anyone? Ah, didn't think so. :)

I've been feeling homesick for my early twenties lately.

Some friends of mine and I were discussing, just the other night, a time not so long ago when we were all fun and exciting and interesting. Back in the day it was nothing for my friends and I to start drinking tequila at 12:30 in the afternoon, still be going strong watching the sun come up from the Craggy Gardens overlook, then head to Waffle House (otherwise known as the Awful Waffle) for scattered covered and smothered and coffee and a million cigarettes before heading in to work for a long day of washing other people's dishes. Back then, I could do that a couple days in a row before it started to catch up with me. And when it did, all I'd have to do was sleep for about 12 hours and I'd be good as new, ready to go again. Ready to wake up and decide to drive to Tennessee for the hell of it, or swimming at Graveyard Fields, or watching a meteor shower from the top of a mountain or running through the woods looking for Eric Rudolph, or dancing around the campfire or playing drums or telling ghost stories or playing hide and seek in graveyards or finding blue fairies at Cove Creek at midnight on Midsummer's Eve.

Life back then was chaos. And I'm sure that I'm romanticizing some of the details in my head, the way we all do in hindsight. But it seemed like the world was bigger then, brighter, fuller. I can remember waking up in the morning then and just being happy to be alive, so full of wonder, so ready to jump up and face whatever was waiting on me.

These days, it's all I can do to drag my sorry carcass out of bed in the morning. I have to hit the snooze like a million times, and I still almost always have to rush to keep from being late. I fucking HATE being late. I hurt all over, my creaky old bones crack and pop whenever I move, I'm tired all the time and it feels like my spine is lacking some sort of lubrication that it needs to function properly. Last week I finally gave in and decided to stop squinting at shit and go get my damn glasses. Today, for like five hours, I mostly lost my voice for no known reason. I'm getting old and falling apart and it seems like there is nothing at all I can do about it except watch it happen.

I can't help but wonder; is it all we get, that few years between eighteen and twenty something, that bright window of time before we stop having fun and start being grownups? Do we hit the wall and grow the fuck up already? Do we get mortgages and bills and responsiblities and blahblahblah, is that what we woke up in our shitty apartment in our early twenties feeling so goddamn hopeful about? We never realize how beautiful we are when we're young, either; it's only looking back at pictures of ourselves that we realize that whatever petty insecurities we nurtured back then, they were stupid and we were beautiful and strong and all those imaginary flaws back then were nothing, nothing compaired to the slow inexhorable march of time across our faces in the mirror now.

So. There you go. What the fuck?

Blame all this emo on the fact that this was Mama Ro's 11th straight day at work, and that tomorrow makes 12. Blame it on the fact that my throat hurts and my back hurts and my head hurts and there's some wierd shit going on with my tummy that I don't even want to get into. Blame it on Chris and Beefs and Al for reminding me that once upon a time I used to be interesting. Blame it on all work and no play makes Ro=Debbie Downer. Blame it on the douchebag "customer"( I use the term lightly, since the useless turd maker never actually buys anything) who gave me a goddamn 10 % off Waffle House coupon in an attempt to somehow win me over despite my obvious and visible hatred of him, which started the whole stupid discussion to begin with.

Actually, if you wanted to do something to cheer me up, you could find that creepy fucker and kick him for me, three or four times, right in the face...

Yeah. I'm really tired. I mean, really really really fucking tired. Too tired to paint, too tired to read, too tired to do anything constructive. Why, you may ask, am I not in bed? I'm too wired to sleep. I am filled with negative thoughts and mean emotional flotsam which are festering in my tummy and making me snarky and also a little gassy. So. I'm going to spew them out into the ether for strangers to ponder. Ain't technology grand?

In no particular order, my random bile:

1. You know how, every year, some celebrities die and it's in the news? Like, can I make a request to the universe that the first b-list pseudo celebrity to bite the final weenie in 2008 be James Randi? Because I fucking hate that douchebag. If he could die in some really embarrassing way, like that guy from INXS who hung himself in the closet while jerking off, that would be a bonus. Seriously, universe, one less asshole making turds.

2. Do you think it's possible that stupid people might stop breeding anytime soon? I mean, is that too much to hope for? If I see one more fat, useless, barely literate drooling unwashed shit-breathed fucking human waste of space walking around this town dragging snot-nosed wretched spawn with them I swear to god I'm going to go on some kind of fucking rampage. (Note to Homeland Security: Ro has no intention of going on any kind of actual rampage. This blog is purely facetious. Go get a dictionary and look it up you fucktard.)

3.  People, brush your teeth. Brush your teeth. Brush your goddamn teeth. Fuck. Don't they teach you that shit in like Kindergarten? Also, there are these magical things called deodorant and soap...not real expensive, you can pretty much get that shit anywhere, and it only takes a few seconds each morning to use these miracle products to ensure that you leave the house not smelling like the moist underside of a hobo's ballsack.

4.  Some people are evil. I'm not talking about bitches, like me, or stupid people who fucking act rude because their mommy was too busy turning tricks for meth money to teach them how to act in public. I'm talking about black soulless foul wretched twisted evil, little Michael Meyers with the dead cat in the ziploc bag in his backpack evil, evil in such a way that you wonder what happened to them when they were little to make them that way. Like, did their next door neighbor, the one in the short-shorts with the weird little mustache, make them do naughty things to his German Shepard before mommy and daddy got home from work everyday?  Was one of their parents a jackal and the other Beelzebub? When they were little, did they kill little furry animals? Evil people take things that are good and pure and twist and destroy them for their own sick pleasure. I think it should be legal to hunt evil people for sport and take them out Predator style. The world would then be a much better place for all of the good people who simply want to exist without the taint of evil. Hehe. Taint.

OK, I think that's it for now. I think I actually feel a little better. Whew. Feel free to add your own bile in the comments section...it's therapeutic shit man.

Dear Parents of the Demon Spawn of Fayettenam:

I hesitate to write this letter, because I realize that quite a few of you are very defensive about your lack of parenting skills. However, it is my belief that the situation here in the asscrack of the universe is getting severely out of hand, and I can no longer keep my thoughts on the matter to myself.

First of all, let me just say this: If you didn't want to parent your child, you shouldn't have had one. That's right. I said it. If you weren't ready for the responsiblity of a living, breathing, shitting, whining, dirty stinking tiny grasping little rugrat to be stuck to your ass for the next 15 years or so, you should have kept those legs shut. I realize that might be difficult in a town where there's a sex toy and skanky underwear shop on nearly every corner, but there have been incredible leaps and bounds in birth control in the last 30 years or so, and anyone willing to sit a couple of hours in the waiting room of the Health Department can partake of these contraceptive wonders virtually free of charge.

Nobody, including myself, put a gun to your head and forced you to breed. Therefore, it is not OUR responsiblity to look after your spawn. If I wanted to have to be constantly aware of the position of a small child in relation to my shopping cart, car bumper, feet, trash can or dog, I would have a small child of my very own. If you make the choice to take your child out in a public place, you by default make the choice to look after them while they are there. That does not mean dropping them off in the toy section of Target while you head off to housewares obliviously yakking away on your Bluetooth headset, leaving them to fend for themselves and to drag shit out all over the floor and to annoy all the other shoppers. Or to skate around on those goddamn stupid rollerskate shoes like they're outside. Or to stagger around the store on little fat legs with a reeky diaper vainly trying to keep up with your fat ass while you, chatting away to Aunt Cathy in Des Moines, speed away from them as if you were hoping that someone else might decide to snatch them up and be responsible for them.

I'm sorry, but it seems to me that the proper place for a child who cannot walk unassisted is sitting in the front of the shopping cart. That's why they put that little seatbelt there. If you don't have a shopping cart, perhaps you might try picking the child up in your arms, or, barring that, get one of those little slings that hangs across the front of you and leaves both hands free for shopping.  Few things piss me off quite so much as sitting behind the wheel in some parking lot watching some lazy ass bitch walk briskly away from her toddler, who is struggling his little heart out to follow her at a pace that his teensy bow legs just weren't designed for, lurching and squalling in the crosswalk while the useless waste that bore him repeatedly turns around hollering at the top of her lungs "I told you to COME ON, Octavarius J'miraquoi!"  This is the same bitch who will sue the shit out of you should you run over her unattended baby in said parking lot.

Also, I realize that children cry, scream and whine. Constantly. This is one of the reasons that I do not have them. That said, could you maybe, just maybe, pay attention when little Beaster starts screaming his head off in a public place like he just caught sight of Michael Jackson peeping around the corner holding the Jesus Juice? I know you've grown sensitized to the noise, but some of us find it disconcerting when we go out, wanting to shop, wanting to be left alone, only to be confronted by a different high-decebel wall of noise down each aisle we go down. It makes us unhappy. It is loud and not at all pleasant or amusing.

Not too long ago, a friend who is also a parent said to me "Well, what am I supposed to do if I'm eating my food and my husband is eating his food and she starts screaming and acting up?" The answer I gave her is the same one I give you now: Take that damn kid outside. I'm not going to pretend that I was a perfect little angel when I was little; I can remember a few times showing my ass in a public place, and when I did I can surely remember one or the other of my parents carrying my screaming ass outside to wait with me in the car. And woe unto me if Mom or Dad had to abandon a cart full of groceries or a half-eaten meal because my ass was acting bad, because the consequences would be dire. This kind of negative reinforcement, punishing bad behavior consistently and swiftly, is called "parenting", and it teaches children that their actions have consequences. I'm sorry if it steps on toes, but I don't think it's fair for me to make the choice, as a childless person, to go out in public and purchase an expensive dinner, a rare treat these days, only to have it ruined by some brat screaming in my ear, throwing food, running around and generally behaving like shit while the adoring, befuddled parents look on blankly as if they have no idea what to do. Most restaraunts these days don't allow you to smoke because your dirty habit ruins the dining fun of other patrons; I say that the same is true for screaming children, and if I were a restaraunt manager or owner watching all my other customers roll their eyes and rush through the meal with no drinks and no dessert because of one bad acting brat, I would feel just as justified in asking the parents of said beaster to take care of the situation as I would asking a patron smoking a cigar in the non-smoking section to put it out.

There is a restaraunt where your brats can scream and snot and cry and run and throw things all they want; It's called Chuck-E-Cheese, and grownups know not to eat there.

Apparently, there is a small amount of confusion around here about what constitutes appropriate behavior in children, anyway. It staggers the mind that, in a town where wearing a peace sign is "treason" and you can barely buy organic anything, people are suddenly so damn New Age-y in their parenting habits. Let me give you a few examples:

When your child is in a store destroying a display and throwing the product on the floor while you watch and laugh, he is not "Expressing himself and testing his boundaries", which is something that I honest to god recently heard a mother say to an angry store employee because little MacCauley was demolishing what looked like a day's worth of merchendising. He is being a pain in the ass. Everyone watching you laugh at his antics thinks that you are a douchebag and wishes that you'd had your tubes tied.

That high-pitched repetative scream that your kid makes when she figures out that she can make noise, the one she repeats over and over again like some kind of freakish giant bird from hell, that's not cute. Or, rather, it's cute only to you. It makes everyone else in the area want to blow his/her brains out. People are staring at you when you let your child do this, and they are thinking "God, I wish someone would shut that fucking kid up." If they happen to be smiling at you, it's because they think little Miley-Hannah is retarded.

And just because your kid is out of pull ups and into big boy drawers doesn't mean that you're off the hook, mom and dad. You child rushing up to me while I'm on the phone at my place of business helping a customer, yelling "Excuse me, can I get some help?" while snapping his fingers under my nose like I'm a taxi in a bad old movie is not cute, nor is it appropriate. If I had behaved that way towards an adult when I was a kid my mother would have tanned my ass. And I've said it time and time again, these fucking rollerskate shoes have got to go. Who the fuck invented those, anyway? The insurance companies? Osama? And how fast will you be speed dialing 1-800-SU4-BUCKS when little Orangalo smashes his tender temple into the corner of a glass display case because he's zooming around inside on skates like a rejected extra from Roll Bounce?

Fuck, people. Use common sense, goddamit. That's all I'm asking. Make all our lives more pleasant. I'm not hating on kids, really, just on parents who act as if they don't have to make their kids behave in public. A store is not a daycare. A restaraunt is not a playpin.

Seriously. Or, I swear to god, when I run this country I'll make every child who misbehaves in public wear a t-shirt that says "I'm proof my mommy likes to FUCK!" every single day until they hit 18.

Sincerely
Ro-Evil

I don't give a rat's hairy ass that the tiger killed that kid.

There, I said it.

Tiger eats kid, fucking waah. Seriously. I'm sad that the tiger had to be shot. That's one less tiger in a world where tigers may not be around much longer anyway. Otherwise, I say that being able to drive down to Hardee's every time we get the notion for a 10 pound Angus burger has filled our little monkey brains with an inflated sense that our position in the food chain is much higher than it is.

I've recently gone vegetarian, for a variety of reasons that I honestly don't want to get into because whenever you tell anyone why you became a vegetarian they get all offended and defensive, like you're trying to imply that you are somehow morally superior to them. When, in reality, all you are doing is answering the question that they probably just asked you, some variation of "Why the hell would you want to do that?" So. No meat for Mama Ro. Being a vegetarian is kinda like being a smoker used to be. Nobody is going to come up to you and tell you that you're ugly or that your haircut is unflattering or that your pants make your ass look like the backend of a barn, but even the most imperfect of perfect strangers feels completely comfortable making snide comments about the fact that you're sucking on a naughty naughty cancer stick. Or that you've given up hotdogs in favor of tempeh.

My favorite comment so far has been "I didn't make my way to the top of the food chain just to eat salad and tofu." This from a squirrely little man who looks like he might strain himself scratching his ass too hard.

Motherfucker, please.

It makes me want to kick ass when humans crow about being on top of the food chain. Like we're equipped with razor claws and lightning reflexes, like we chase down antelopes and giant wildebeasts, wrestle them to the ground in a mighty battle of speed and strength, tear out their throats with our teeth, drag them home with the hot blood still smeared on our faces, and then carve them into steaks and chops and burgers for our own grilling pleasure. Not, you know, that we pay some factory farmer to keep relatively docile animals in tiny boxes.  Not, you know, that we pay someone else to slaughter them for us, clean them up for us, throw away the worst parts, wrap them up nice in plastic and carry them safely to the store where we can purchase them with our magic money already portioned into convenient little pieces. And all this without so much as soiling our delicate hands, much less having to actually kill something in order to eat it.

Top of the food chain, baby. Fucking fierce.

Eat whatever you want, people. It's no hair off my twat what goes in your belly, be it steak or soy. It isn't at all an issue of morality, no matter how some people try to make it seem.  Just let's not kid ourselves about what mighty mighty predators we are just because we drove over to the Piggly Wiggly and purchased a filet mignon. When you track, kill, dress and carve your own dinner before you eat it, then you might, just might, be somewhere up in the upper reaches of the food chain as long as a tiger or a lion or a shark don't happen by. Otherwise, you my friend are just a guy eating a cheeseburger out of a paper wrapper that someone else made for you. And if someone else hadn't killed it and prepared it for you, chances are pretty good that you'd be going to bed hungry.

And if you're some moron who thinks that it's OK to train a tiger to read the newspaper while riding a giant unicycle or some stupid shit, or some dumbass kid who feels safe taunting one because it's behind a fence, then maybe it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise when the large carnivore attempts to kill and eat you. Why don't you put down the fucking PSP for 5 seconds and read a book, and then maybe you'd know that tigers are huge, have big claws and sharp pointy teeth, no sense of conventional humor, and that they eat smaller, weaker things that can't get away real fast. Which means you, Mr. Top of the Food Chain, unless you happen to be packing a really big gun.

Also, the fact that every article I read about the "tragedy" makes a point to mention that the families of the idiot dead kid and his idiot friends are already talking about the lawsuit makes me wish that some large carnivore would eat them too. Just an easy way to make a little money here in Gomoneygoville...have a relative die doing something fucking stupid in a public place.

Seriously. I got promoted last week. (Go, me, or something.) I'm trying really hard to do a good job. I love my job, and for me that is such a rarity...

Also, we're coming into our busiest time of the year, otherwise known as textbook hell.

So. I will not be going out, or hanging around the house in my jammies drinking jack daniels. I will be working. When you call my phone and leave whiny messages about how I never answer it and you never see me, I will be at work. I will get home usually around 10 at night. I will be tired. I will eat cookies and maybe fuck around on my laptop and then fall into bed. I will have a limited amount of free time and I will probably spend it cleaing the bathroom or cooking something. I will have something like one actual day off each week. I will spend it attempting to de-chaos my house.

This is the update. Do not be surprised if I fall off the face of the earth. Do not suddenly become worried and start calling/messaging  me every 10 minutes because you think I'm dead. I assure you, if I was dead, you would know. I will probably have more free time come February. I love every one of you. I hope everyone has a fantastic non-denominational winter holiday season.