McNo-Can-Do #2

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Man, This Sandwich is Awful.

There’s something about that sandwich that I just don’t get. When I eat a sandwich, I have pretty low expectations. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly expect it to display standard sandwich attributes like: two slices of bread should be involved. Some kind of meat product in there somewhere. Perhaps a slice of cheese, tomato, or if I’m feeling pretty chancy? A pickle.

Nothing too complicated though. And I don’t remember going out of the norm for this specific piece of lunchtime construction. No capers, nothing with “Dijon” in the title, and none of those pickled carrot things I have to pick out of those Vietnamese sandwiches I get downtown. One time, I had to take a crap behind a dumpster during my lunch break at some shit-purposed bead/incense shop retail job because some lady got shot in our only bathroom during a failed robbery that day. If it weren’t for those pickled carrot thingies, I bet I could have waited until I got home. Plus, I could have wiped myself properly before getting on the bus to meet up with my folks for dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. The cops refused to let me back in the place before I left, and my parents repeatedly noted how much I smelled like human shit. I kept telling them “I must have stepped in dog shit on my way over, and that dog must have eaten Taco Bell,” or something like that.

Whatever.

There were no fringe items used in the making of today’s sandwich. Elementary cafeteria, prison lunchroom style.

So what happened here? Let’s look at this situation, play by play, effort by effort, layer by goddamned layer. First, I got out the bread, then…oh yeah.

I think it’s the bread I used.

My girlfriend bought it, and the packaging was really complicated. As if the manufacturer was trying to protect the consumer from bread-related radiation. There were two or three bags between which to navigate before hitting breadrock, and the loaf was approximately half the size of the standard. Little stones and twigs were falling all over the place when I pulled two slices from the hermetically-sealed trio-bag. And I bet that baked disaster cost a fortune.

You’d think that the extra cost involved would demand that the rocks be ground down a little more. Or that they would remove the twigs from the mixture, like a better quality ounce-bag. It’s funny how bread + “organic” + extra $$$ = me with an explosive rectal disorder. But then again, maybe it was that weird tasting cheese.

Where the hell is “humus” cheese from, anyway? Is that country near Yugoslavia? How exactly does one buy products from Humustan, huh?

Oh, here we go again. Pardon. Excuse me and my shitnami. I really need to stop dating these patchouli-wookie girls.

Fucking Eskimo Shit.

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I don’t know where you think you’re coming from with that shit, man. Those are definitely not going to fly as monkeys. Anyone can tell that they’re raccoons or something. Wolverines? What the hell are those anyway, Jack?

They’re not wolverines Billy. They’re nutria monkeys. And of course no one would fall for them being monkeys. Unless they were shown from really far away, to people who had no idea what a nutria monkey looked like. Eskimos maybe.

But we don’t know any Eskimos, Jack.

No one does, Billy. They’re made up. Made up by the Inuit to hide their true identity as the real Eskimos.

To hide their what?

Identity.

Oh.

Yeh, to hide it so that no one would ever realize that they themselves were the real deal. So that the white settlers would go off searching for some weird-ass igloo-living seal-beaters that arm wrestled polar bears or some shit, way out there in the desolate Yukon, to steal land from and give diseases to rather than the real Inuit. Like a snipe hunt.

Ah. That’s smart.

Damn right it is.

So, how does that relate to this nutria monkey situation?

I think it might have been some monkeys that told me I could find monkeys in Louisiana. I went, and these are all I could fucking find. So, nutria monkeys they are.

Oh. Good one. You were on, like, an Eskimo hunt then.

Well, whatever. They’re a bunch of fucking monkeys now.

Right.

Hey, don’t monkeys fling shit? These things aren’t flinging any shit.

I don’t know, Jack.

They really need to be flinging shit.

I don’t know about all that, Jack. Is it really necessary?

Yes. Yes, it is. Here, fling this when the crowd gets here.

Fucking Eskimo shit.

MTV CHINA? Holy shit... - GO VOTE!

Just got this message from a friend of mine (go ALIEF!) whose band, Johnny Hi-Fi, has a video that is in the running to be MTV China's world debut/PREMIERE VIDEO. Goddamn. That is... beyond badass to me. But it is no surprise, given their talent and the staggering ambition of Eric, their frontman. Dude does not fuck around when it comes down to business. Much respect.

So please go vote for their video (even though we're in the US, and this is a China thing, which seems a bit strange, I know, but whatever). Johnny Hi-Fi: "Man Overboard". Here's what he sent me (via big-ass email blast):

MTV is launching its newest channel MTV Chi on December 6th. You may remember from our past emails, Johnny Hi-Fi is hosting 2 premiere episodes of "Top 10 Chi Countdown" and "Live From". But two days ago came a bigger surprise.

MTV Chi's huge PR efforts around the world, already seen by millions of visitors on MTV China and MTV Chinese, named Johnny Hi-Fi as the upcoming artist from America. MTV Chi has also put Johnny Hi-Fi's music video, in a mix with 21 other videos from multi-platinum artists from Asia and US, to compete for the first music video spot on MTV Chi (think Video Killed the Radio Star). Johnny Hi-Fi is the ONLY unsigned artist to compete for this honor.

Now we need your help. Log on to www.mtvchi.com, admire the screenshot of Johnny Hi-Fi's music video on MTV Chi's homepage, and VOTE for "Man Overboard"!!! Vote as many times as you want and make us famous!

And if you are in the New York area, Johnny Hi-Fi will headline this year's Asian Rock Fest in NYC, and of course, MTV Chi will be there to film it!

The Time I Just Kept Writing Without Structure.

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This is a rambling, quasi-rant. I have no time for good editing, so I am posting it “as-is”. To all my Houstonian peeps reading this: I love you. Know that.

But your city is a hundred layers of frustration. Not that you need me to say it.

Yes, everyone here in Austin does their damnedest to point out the vast chasm of difference between our little city and the rest of Texas. The politics, the real estate, the attention paid to water-borne geckos, and our tendency to celebrate any bikini-clad homeless man with a social agenda. We’re all silly like that, and most Austinites are quick to point out how “weird” or “weirder” everyone/thing is here.

I’m all up in that bandwagon today.

But normally, I see these differences as more background noise than something that needs to be pointed out. Shit’s a bit strange here, but so what? Sure, we have a Yellow Bike Program, movie theatres you can get blasted in, and nekkid watering holes (close enough to Austin, damnit). But is that what really defines a city? What sets it apart? Honestly? Most of Austin’s big issues are right in line with any other Texas city: economic divisions, a dubious police force, and the obnoxious congestive effects experienced when half-assed city planning meets explosive population growth. So, aside from some glaring differences (like, say, knowing that voting to prohibit other individual’s rights guarantees that yours will be on the block next) we tick down the line of comparison against cities like Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston: text book, pretty much down the entire line.

But there are some more subtle differences between our greenbelted city and those in our vicinity. Much more nuanced differences. Things which we definitely take for granted until it all blows up in our face, like it has over the past couple of weekends during my trips down to Houston.

Traffic. Sweeeeeeeeet Jesus. Approximately six hours of every day I visit Houston is spent ON THE WAY somewhere. Usually, I feel like I’m stuck on some stretch of Karachi-bombed freeway, creeping along with a broken cement barrier scraping past, a mere four inches from my left side view mirror and a leaky “Fish” truck that is far too wide for its lane on my right. A smoldering cigarette butt is thrown from the Fish truck, and it bounces off my hood and over the cement barrier into oncreeping traffic. I look at the driver, he flashes us a gold-toof grin and begins to dig around in his nose for something. Word, son. Nice. Suddenly, the Fish truck’s lane is putt-putting along at a speed roughly twice that of mine, somewhere in the neighborhood of ten miles-an-hour. Ten minutes and ten car lengths later, I am no longer moving.

Things go from mildly frustrated to “fuck this bullshit” awesome.

And when you finally reach the source of your lane’s wrist-slittingly-slow speed, you grind your teeth down to dime-thickness upon the discovery that it is some douche-balloon in the LEFT HAND lane who has “magically” run out of fuel (check the gauge, bitch!), and is standing next to her vehicle, asking people to help her out with some cash for gas. Woman, you have absolutely lost your goddamn mind to do that to all of us and then request some sort of payment. You better call Tyrone before someone runs your stupid ass down.

Impressive. Impressive in that “you know, I used to believe otherwise, but there should be some exceptions that allowed for legal, impromptu public stonings” kind of way. Seventy lemur lifetimes later, when you finally exit the freeway and reach a goddamn gas station, you realize that you too were running low in the petrol department, and would have been in the same boat as that chick you just wished smallpox on.

Man, fuck that shit.

All the complaints here in Austin about traffic, based on having to sit in thirty minutes of Mopark traffic, pale in sad comparison to the hours required to navigate through Houston’s myriad of intersecting freeways with third-world no-lane interchanges. Just to get some goddamn gasoline. We have it good here, even if it could be better.

But you know what’s even WORSE than the traffic in Houston? The worthless “club scene”. Before I really dig into this, I want to state for the record that I have been going out in Houston for many, many years. I have many friends who live there, friends who I absolutely adore, who are regulars amongst Houston nightlife. When I visit Houston, it is not unheard of to see me out about the town, partaking in all that it has to offer, and enjoying myself in and amongst the “club scene” I am just about to start shitting all over. If there were a more convenient way for me to hang out with my friends in Houston, I would do it. If one of them was willing to allow us all to meet up at their place, get flammable drunk, argue with inanimate objects, and break things made of glass, then I would obviously prefer to do that rather than deal with the “club scene”. Well, you might be wondering then, “if you participate in that scene so often, how bad could it possibly be?” Oh, well then. Let me break it down for you:

Several thousand Striped Shirt dudes get together, primp, and prepare to profile by slinging credit cards and Red Bull with vodka all over the place in the hopes that some ladies, preferably total strangers, will be impressed enough to toss out handjobs beneath brass-decorated club bars like they were Halloween candy. This is the reason for the scene. This is the pack of wildebeest that supply the endless hunger of the Serengeti-like population of cash-hungry elements feeding off of them like vampires of the club-night. These dudes are out to get their rocks off, and plan on dropping lots of cash, booze, china, attitude, and pride to that goal.

Given that this is the endgame and method for the credit spending majority of “clubberz” in Houston, they get preyed upon by “club ownerz” and the “chickenheadz” that populate the interiors of Houston’s ever-changing club landscape. Bars/clubs breeze through that city by the hundreds, with very few making any real effort to change the scene, or do anything of real note. They’re out for the cash, just like the ladies are. And the system that is in place reflects that.

To begin, just about every place offers “valet”. This is a luxury service, which many people, whether wealthy or just spoiled, honestly prefer. They hate to park their own ride, and happily pay some random ex-con to wipe some spunk on their steering wheel and park their spare-tired Jetta on the no-light street next to the nearest plywood Hooverville. The same spot that homeskillet drove past to get to the valet awning, where he yelled out to his bros over the thumping house beats streaming from his iPod, “dudes, that shitty space right there is why I get valet to find me the choice spots!” And it only costs like, $5 plus tip. Plus all the change in your ashtray and a pair of Oakley sunglasses (damnit, bro! That’s my sixth fuckin’ pair, man! Lame!). Smooth.

Car has been taken away for a good keying. Now get behind the velvet rope and note that bouncer is wearing a three piece suit from Oak Tree, circa 1988. That was the year he tried out as a walk-on for the Bengals but was cut from the program for excessive steroid abuse. His teeth are chipped, probably from being on the wrong end of a few mag-lites in his day, wielded by rage-fueled doorguards of night establishments, much like himself today. He is not happy to see you. He is not happy to see anyone who is not two-dimensional, green, and a deceased prior-ruler of American politics. If you try to introduce him to Washington, he just might urinate in your bloodied mouth.

He honestly believes that he deserves such power and authority. This is the way of the “club scene”. And so it begins.

There is a cover charge for almost every fly-by-night bullshit-dancefloor-focused asshole circus in the downtown area. $5 would be a cheap cover. $10 would be considered a “typical” charge, if you are an out-of-town dude. If you are a dude wearing tennis shoes, expect to be charged a bribe for your entrance. Probably north of $20 (I got you next time Nick, sorry for pinning all that shit on you but I had no duckets! Ahhhhh!). He’ll say that your shoes are “disrespecting the establishment”, and that he is doing you a favor. This is hilarious for obvious reasons, but you will keep that to yourself. If you are wearing a hat, comfortable jeans, a smile, or hair that is not cemented into place you may be denied entrance for life. You might even get the mag-lite treatment. Again, this is the way of the scene. For the ladies, entrance is free. Unless the ladies are of the slower, or less attractive variety, which get charged as if they were dudes because they either a) are too slow to understand that they ARE the whole REASON for the club, or b) they look more like dudes, so they get charged appropriately. Thems the breaks in Houston.

So, as a dude in Houston, before you even ENTER a club, be prepared to drop at least $15 in cash. That’s an average though. Some will be slightly less, others will be obscenely more. Feel free to cry about it, as I am sure it would help your cause.

Once inside, prepare to drink heavily. You will want to do this because the interior will look exactly like every other interior of every other club you have ever been to over the rather expansive tract of time you have been indulging in such things. This realization will depress you. Immensely. And you will dive immediately into whatever will help you “adjust” your surroundings so that you can ignore everyone/everything there except for your friends (who are the only reason you’re there to begin with).

Besides, alcohol is fun. LOTS of alcohol is LOTS of fun. Especially when dispensed with complete abandon in the form of coordinated shots amongst a dozen like-minded friends. Suddenly, you’ll forget about that ass-hat manning the door who taunted your choice in footwear. You’ll forget the warm lighting. The square-foot tiled dancefloor, covered in sticky-spilled Red Snappers. That really nice dude in the bathroom that hands everyone paper towels and tells tales of living in New Orleans “before it got all wrecked-out”. You’ll forget all the Striped Shirt dudes that line the dance floor, who envision themselves as lions, stalking the crowd for the weak and sick, ignorant to the fact that they themselves are the wildebeests of the scene. It is their cash that fuels it. Well, their credit, more specifically. Their hard work and efforts that cause the owners and ladies to get together in a symbiotic effort to fleece them of what little money they can borrow at usurious rates…

Whoa. I’m going way overboard here. It isn’t that one-sided. It’s a game, really. Some dudes play it well, some dudes don’t. I, personally, never bothered playing it because I know I wouldn’t be particularly good at it. Besides, it’s more fun to show up, drink like a fish, laugh at the world for a bit, dance with the abandon of a half-wit, and scream the lyrics to songs you usually only sing in your car (alone). I’m in it for the fun. For the experience of the situation, not the game. But that’s just me. Call it lame if that makes you happy.

Where was I… ah yes. Inside. The drinks are mad-expensive, and the drunker you get, the higher the probability that your tab is going to get padded. It might occur as the result of an error in communication between bartenders over your 15 shot order. Perhaps you asked for Crown, but got gut-rot instead. It may be an honest mistake. But more than likely, the bartenders ran out of comps for their crew of broke-ass hoodrats, and your bill was already tipping out over $100 BEFORE they saw you stumbling around like WC Fields and making out with a wall-mounted light fixture, so they just started dropping some beers/McCalls on your bloated tab. You are too far gone to get that shit straight anyway. You can argue, but it won’t take much in the way of drunken-Jedi mind tricks to throw you off.

YOU: “Hey, maaaaaaan. Is this.. [holding bill three inches from face] ah hun-red an fitty two bucks?”

BARTENDER: “Yep. The tip line is at the bottom.”

YOU: “Whoooooooaaaaa, waidah minute, fursht. I de’yint drank all that man.”

BARTENDER: “I don’t know who drank it. But you ordered it. The tip line is at the bottom.”

YOU: “But whaaaaaaaaat is on here? I mean, whaddis’ on this tab?”

BARTENDER: “Right now, everything is on there but the tip. Bottom line.”

YOU: “…” [looking suspiciously at the multiple, moving images of the bartender]

BARTENDER: “The line at the bottom. I gave you twenty percent off, because you guys were so nice. It’s the line at the bottom. Thanks for coming in.” [walks away with urgency]

YOU: [curious expression melts over face] oh no shit? Twenty? Well, alright then. Shweeeet! [signing furiously, forgetting to bother doing math and totaling tip, leaving that to the limitless discretion of the bartending/management staff, which should make Christmas extra sweet this year for their kids]

And that’s just one establishment. In Houston, try going to more than one place. Better yet, try to go to more than one place with more than two other people. It becomes a logistical shitstorm of confusion and bad directions. Everyone knows how to get where they want to go, but no one can explain to anyone else. Plus, the fucking freeways inside the loop swap all around like a Harry Potter staircase. Nothing is near anything else, so it’s not like it is convenient to say “man, fuck this place! The door guy is a goddamn rabid orangutan and the bartender charged me fifteen bucks for tap water with a splash of immigrant urine! Let’s stand outside and coordinate (argue, cry) with each other for thirty minutes, compromise in frustration, drive another thirty minutes, and do this all over again somewhere else on the other side of downtown! Who the fuck keyed the entire right side of my car? That’s so awesome!”

Yes Houston, you are awesome. Awesome indeed. And by "awesome", I mean: "excrutiatingly difficult". I look forward to Thanksgiving this year, where I will repeat all of the things listed above (except for the valet, which is the most obvious fleece, as I prefer to be a mark at the bar rather than the parking lot – or both).

My friends are the best to get stumbling drunk with, they really are! I just wish we had a better venue...

Flippin' Yo Lids n' Sheeeeeit.

Brother Nick sent me this link, so I thought I'd dick around with it. It WASTES IMMEASURABLE AMOUNTS OF TIME. So be careful. But I want to see what other people come up with (since you're all creative types with funniness and things of that sort). And I like to be entertained.

I really do.

Here's the one I did. I did another one, which liked MUCH better, but Flipbook flipped the script on me and the load-up barfed all over the place. So an hour's worth of painstaking work was burned to digital cinders, and replaced by something much simpler. Thems the breaks. Word to that.

A-lot of the other ones are just some fourteen year-old drawing pirates with big dicks, skull-fucking poorly drawn naked women, ending with the word "FART" written like chicken scratch across the screen (so fast you have to watch it like, fifteen times to figure out the plot and read the ending word) Here's a good one I found. Violence is the answer.

I want to see YOURS. (your flipbook, you dirty, dirty such-and-such)

Metabullshit Post. Yes, I suck. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Okay. So I haven’t posted much around these parts lately. That’s because I’m lazy and have a “work” problem (as in: I need to do work to pay bills and shit) + a “drinking” problem (as in: if I go out I drink. I go out a-lot. I drink a-lot. And the hangovers just bleed into one another).

But I write elsewhere. Namely: here. But they don’t archive things too well, and some friends have complained that they never catch any of my shitty writing up there. So, I dug all up in that bitch and found some links. If you’re tired of reading my crap, then stop torturing yourself.

Unless you’re into that kind of thing.

A-lot of what I do is just for information purposes. I originally intended to write with more of a satirical stance, but that style met some pretty strong resistance and has since given way to pretty text-book hack-journalism. If I continue writing for them, I will have to find some way to periodically return to my pointier roots. Otherwise, I will bore myself to death whilst simply pimping shit I like through their site. Which is not the point of the thing.

Regardless, for those who missed my Austinist post-things:

I did a book review for Ben Reed’s The Bow Tie Gang. Good fucking book, if you’re literate.

I relayed my experience at EXTRAVAGASM 2005. No one read the thing, because people honestly HATE sex. I don’t get it.

I got all controversial with this half-baked opinion piece on the Austin Smoking Ban. People get so touchy over this shit.

I got to interview local DJ legend, DJ Mel. I don’t really like interviews, so I asked him ridiculous shit. I feel that it exposes more of their true character, and Mel is as crazy as me. So it worked out.

I wrote an open letter to the shittiest freeway intersection. The shittiest ever.

I told the bats underneath the Congress Ave bridge to get a real goddamn job. Freeloading, flying rats.

And we wrote a little ditty about this fucked-up 5k we have here in weird-town. Keep Austin Weird! And really fucking hot! With some bacon and ice cream, but no beer! Alright! Super-sweet alright!

I say goddamn!

Fucking Mutated Expectations and Shit.

Every now and again, we as actors on a larger stage, the stage of happenings and going ons during the course of our lives, we breach the lines that separate our individual parts. That is to say, we start reading someone else’s lines, in a way. We don’t always know whose lines they are, or if that part is even meant to be played. But what can definitely be said is that we abandon our normal role, and take on some lines that just don’t fit our current selves. Perhaps the new part will stick, perhaps it will be wholly rejected. But that is not the point. I believe everyone does this sort of experimentation in personality, as a function of personal growth and progress. It is how one picks up new hobbies, changes careers, goes from being a soldier to a staunch anti-war activist, or survives prison by shanking fools in the showers from behind.

Alright, perhaps that last one is a bit specific and rare, but you should have seen the dream I had the other night. I was in this weird truckstop shower, trying to get some sand off of me, and had no idea what I was doing there. The shower was rather large, about the size of an average apartment bedroom, with hollow metal walls like those one would find for a toilet stall in a public restroom. A gap above and below the wall led out into the truckstop’s main room. Cement floor with a drain in the middle. Outside my shower stall, there were café tables set up in a larger room, with plasma TVs all over the place, like a sports bar of some sort. But it was truck stop, not a bar, and I was covered in sand, not overcharged tabs. The dream started with me vigorously scrubbing myself beneath a blast of hot water, nude as a bee.

So I was in there, scrubbing myself down, with my eyes closed. I was thinking about how weird it was to just have a shower stall out in the room like it was, wondering where my clothes might be, or how I got all sandy to begin with, and then I opened my eyes to see some dude walking through my shower stall/room, fully clothed. He passed through an arm of the shooting water, getting his pant legs wet, and was paying absolutely no attention to the fact that I was already in there. Under normal conditions, I would have totally lost my shit and probably busted out the most awkward wet-and-sandy-windmill fighting technique ever witnessed in any truck stop bath house, ever. But this was a dream. My word, it was definitely a dream. DUUURRREEEEEAM.

For starters, my penis was easily a good foot long, flaccid. Crazy thick too, like a pork loin. Not that I’m hung like a wine cork in real life, but I’m certainly not packing anything of equestrian proportions. So when I looked down and saw the thing, the stranger who was passing through also took notice, and he stopped next to the stall door, staring back at me in awe.

What the fuck?

I have no idea what it was that my mind was parsing through, or what it was trying to reconcile, but he and I just stood there, staring at my Johnson for a few seconds. When I looked up, he was smiling, and there were two other dudes looking over the top of the stall, trying to pretend that they were watching the plasma TV mounted on the wall above my shower. One of them stepped down out of view, walked over to the door, opened it, and peeped his head in, smiling like the other intruder. Real creepy-like.

Uh, WHAT. THE. FUCK? Seriously, this time.

There was a definite air of homoeroticism involved, which in all honesty, I’m cool with even in real life. I feel comfortable enough in my own understanding of the difference between my own feelings of attraction and the mere reflection of those imposed upon me. Not that I am the subject of such things on a regular basis, but whenever it has come up in my real life, I believe I have handled it with respect and decorum. Even though these dudes were much more aggressive in their stance than any I have experienced, it played out the same, for the most part. But it all felt as if it could degenerate into a jailhouse-communal-bathroom situation at any moment (don’t drop the soap, son!). Of course, in dreamland, we are all super-something-or-other, if we aren’t victims. Apparently, I was not playing the victim role in this dream, because I just folded my arms and said something along the lines of “hey, guys, I’m trying to get this sand off me, would you mind staring at some other dick, somewhere else?” Just as I imagined they would, they all scurried off with real embarrassment. Again, I’m not going to pretend I know what this dream was trying to make me privy to. But it might have something to do with unabashed confidence, even in the face of obvious reasons to be embarrassed or intimidated.

Because soon after that, the guys that scurried away must have gone around telling everyone of my bathing escapades, because a growing crowd had formed to watch me shower. Looming over the stall walls, peeking through the door, and some were just hanging out in there with me. They all started out with a menacing sort of tone, a kind of “come on now, squeeeeeel! Squeeeeeeeel!” sort of presence to them. But I checked each one individually, with a cold stare, or some snarky words about whatever jacked up gear they were wearing (typical truck stop garb: filthy work boots, padded vests, old jeans, whatever) or their potential pathetic penchants for banging one-legged, genetically limited boys. And they quickly backed down after being confronted. Then, women started to join the mob. Teenage girls and hormonal fifty year old ladies. Just as lecherous as the trucker dudes. For whatever reason, I remained calm and just continued to concentrate on the project at hand: get that fucking sand out of my various cracks and crevices, all the while wondering: where the hell are my clothes?

For those who don’t know me, I’m not an exhibitionist by normal definition, and I am certainly not the type of person who would stand for this type of deification. I mean, these trucker dudes and random ladies were slowly morphing into a benign crowd like one would find at a PTA meeting. And I was their sole focus of curiosity. Me and this inhuman slab of shlong swinging between my legs. Somehow, I had earned their respect, and they were staring at me like I was supposed to answer some existential question for them. They were highly expectant, and I realized it, but didn’t care. I was intent on solving my own sand problem. Fuck them and their ridiculous expectations. I owed them nothing, and acted accordingly.

Eventually, I got all the sand off of my skin, and was done with the shower. I still did not know where my clothes were, where the sand came from, where I was, or where I was supposed to be. But as soon as I turned the water off, the crowd dispersed, and only a few remained. It was almost as if I had just finished some sort of stage show, and there were some people milling about, hoping to meet me, the performer. All I wanted to do was get out of there. But they sort of crowded me in, keeping me in the stall, chit-chatting with me about inane bullshit. I even knew some of their faces. People I had worked with in the past, or friend-of-friends from current day. But I had no feelings of shame or embarrassment. I didn’t even think to ask to borrow an undershirt or anything. I willingly complied with the rules of pointless banter and fielded comments and questions about the weather or politics. Newborn nude and dripping wet. Whatever.

The dream ended with me requesting that everyone leave my stall so that I could figure out where my clothes were, and whether or not the absurd swelling of my procreative member was the result of something medically scary. Everyone smiled and shuffled out or lowered themselves from the top of the stall walls, wishing me luck in my quest. Fucked up sand-washing-big-dick-exhibitionist dream: fin.

Now how this relates to my little theme here, is the question of role, and expectation in an individual’s life. The occurrence and results of mutation in personality.

In the dream, I acted completely different from what I would have done in real life. Probably different from how anyone else would act as well. The situation was absurd, and there was a thick expectation from the crowd around me. Expecting what? I didn’t know. And I didn’t care. Whatever they were waiting for me to say, or do, was not going to come from me willingly. And that was a conscious decision that I was actively making throughout the events that played out. It was like a dry-run, staged by my mind, for situations (albeit much less ridiculous) that I would (and have) inevitably encounter in my real life. Situations where I would be challenged, however subtly, to comply with expectations imposed on me beyond my own abilities or willingness. This happens to everyone in life, and how we respond to these situations is a powerful molding agent for the mutations and expectations of our own personalities. It is one of the many ways in which we grow and change throughout our limited time here, together. Perhaps my brain is trying to shore itself up, or bracing itself for something it perceives as immediately threatening.

I would have had to buy new pants if that dream was my reality. I like my pants as they are. But thanks, my little mind, for the opportunity to see the other side, if only in a dreamland truck stop. Somehow, there’s no irony in any of that.