Subway employees that mash the bread.

Why would you mash….

Let me start over:

I don’t give to flying fucks what conceivable justification your Devry-addled mind could possibly come up with for savagely mangling my bread.  Your mindset is so alien to mine that placing myself in ‘your shoes’ lies well beyond whatever empathic powers I may have. You would not ask me to try and “understand” the murderous woodsman that brutally tore apart my wise-cracking camping buddy. I propose that this scenario is identical in concept, if not in severity.

Just cut the Italian herbs and cheese in half! Why waste all the calories it takes to place it on the counter, place your palm on it, center your body over the counter and bread and then grunt with beaded brow as you attempt to push the bread through the counter?  What do you get out of it?

It can’t be ‘easier’ for you.  Sliding the knife beneath your meaty paw to get at the unleavened sheet of crust that remains can only make it more likely you slice yourself.

Why not get a job closing suitcases that are too full?

I hate you.

For a very long time I described myself as a man who did not enjoy driving.  For me - I consistently prefaced my descriptions as such - for me the driving experience is too stressful. For me precisely every single car on the roads couldn’t possibly be more inane.  At once the cars traveling more slowly than me are idiots and the cars traveling faster than me are maniacs and the cars traveling at the exact same speed are assholes who are ‘in my blind spot’ or ‘pacing me when I want to change lanes’.  Should they care enough to make an attempt at my good graces these cars would be fighting a provably hopeless battle. This is for me, of course.

As a result I leveraged my 1-point plan for handling things I do not like. I’ve included the plan here:

Alfonso’s 1-point plan For Dealing With Things I Don’t Like

Point 1: Fuck it, I’m out.

And so I am a cycling enthusiast.

I’ve noticed, however, that the sort of complaints listed above are universal.  In the small pool of samples I have, no one is happy when driving.  Everyone thinks everyone else on the road is a moron. All who are cast into this world are lost to a feedback loop of ill-wishes and mutual hatred. And I know you think you are the exception, but you are not. If you are reading this you have been observed and recorded.

Think about this: Close to 100%, when I pass another cyclist coming the opposite direction, we nod at each other. A friendly ‘hello’ to a stranger.

That simply would not happen with 2 cars.

If you acknowledge drivers in anyway while driving, it will be perceived as threatening*.

Here is my theory: When you put yourself in a car your perception changes to include only 2 categories of existence:

1. Everything inside my car

2. Threats

Add to that the simple fact that there is a complete abstraction of humanity in traffic. You aren’t pissed off at people, because you never see people.  You only see vehicles, and there is no impetus to ’see things from that vehicles perspective’.  It is simply not human enough.  So you don’t have the social mechanisms of humanity informing your perception of that car. It is nothing but an alien potential source of threat.  In that same perception, you have no sources of friendship or psychological ’safety’.

It all seems natural to me, I don’t think this is something people can fix.  But if you take this thought, and boil it down to a sentence it might go something like:

To enter a vehicle is to enter a psychological world with nothing but potential threats.

Said like that, the concept seems self-destructive. And that, I believe, is the crux of why I do not like driving.

*Texas 1-lane passing being a bright exception

My thoughts coming off my first ever hot-yoga

1. It’s hard. No pansy-ass meditation up in that bitch.  I’m astonished how high you can get your heart-rate by staying perfectly still.  I, of course, mean “quivering in a mass of sweat and suffering” when say “staying perfectly still”

2. Get Naked. Or as close as you can without getting arrested.  I started with my tri-shorts, some gym shorts and a wife-beater. It wasn’t 4 minutes before I was down to just the tri-shorts.  You sweat a bunch.

3. It’s not /that/ hot.  If you’ve cleared brush in South Texas, you’ve sweated more than hot yoga.

4. It’s a free high.  I got light-headed a few times and it was pretty pleasurable.

5. Your balls hang low and you stretch a lot.  Wear something tight.

6. Body-image issues disappear super-quick. You’re too focused on breathing while being in positions that are immensely counter-productive to breathing.

7. There are hot chicks, but you don’t notice them. Again, too focused on placing your foot on the small of your back and breathing.

8. Super fun.  I liked it and will keep doing it.

You might already know this, but I count myself amongst the precise subculture known as ‘endurance athletes’. Don’t question it.

You might not know, however, that a good percentage of my motivation consists of the free stuff they give out at the endurance events.  Socks, shirts, Gu, magazines, water bottles and coupons comprise a mere fraction of whats available.  I generally use everything I get, with 1 exception: The super-shitty rain jacket STP gave out last year.  It’s free-as-in-beerness offers only a half-hearted mitigation for the incredibly low-quality nature of this jacket.  It’s made of the material they use to make race-bibs. It is not machine washable.

But that’s not the story I want to tell:

Here’s something you might not know about the Historic University Theater:  It eats clothing.  In whatever netherworld exists beyond its hidden doors you would find a pair of my pants, a shirt, and my favorite sandals.  I always watch for my clothing in their productions in case of foul play. Most recently the vest part of my 2-part bike-jacket fell victim to the HUT’s unslakable thirst for vestment.

But that’s not the story I want to tell:

You probably are aware that getting rained on sucks. Armed with that knowledge, you will, I trust, forgive me when I admit to taking asylum in that horrible horrible STP jacket in lieu of my actual rain jacket.  While it is ill-fitting, cuts circulation to my wrists and ‘breaths’ like a millennia-old mummy it does, in fact, provide a barrier to rain.  No lawyer could argue against it’s purported use: ‘rain jacket’.

So I used it. I am using it.  On the rainy and cold mornings and evenings you will find me, easily, as the jacket is hideously colored, riding to and from work in that jacket.  Two weeks later it smells. I worry about washing it as I am convinced it will disintegrate in my hands if I do.  So it smells.  I plan on buying a super nice when the paychecks start coming in but due to timing my start-date the way I did, I don’t get paid until december. So it smells.  I wouldn’t say it is a noxious stench, more of an odor you are vaguely aware of.

But that’s not the story I want to tell, this is:

An interesting thing happened to me at work.  I had just changed into my bike clothing and headed to the elevators to go home.  I was holding the aforementioned stinky jacket in my hand as I walked and thought better of it. I decided to put on the jacket; why wait until I was already in the cold?  But then I rounded the corner and saw a lovely young lady waiting for the elevator.  I suddenly felt great shame about my stinky jacket and as a result rolled it up and began to put it in my bag. I figured I’d just wait.

But then I noticed a ring on her finger. Without thinking I unrolled the stinky jacket and continued to put it on. Any shame I felt was entirely lifted from my mind.  I did not realize what had happened until I was already halfway home.

So, I pondered and here is what I have come up with:

1. Women are the cause of shame

2. The entirety of society as we know it was built by man, yes, but only to get laid.  It is a Woman’s world.

3. This civilizing affect might be worthwhile, but is certainly unnatural.

Sidebar: Did you notice the pun? Did you? I was pretty proud of of subtlety.

Does anyone else dislike the word ‘copious’?

I defy you to create a sentence that makes semantically subscribed use of the word ‘copious’ without ruining the beat of that sentence. It seems that the word was created by stitching 2 words together that otherwise had no business being so adjacent.  Perhaps ‘cope’ and ‘pious’?  I do not know.

I, however, did not need to have known the people who constituted Frankensteins creation to know it was an abomination.  I just needed to observe the grotesque stitches holding together pieces of flesh of dissimilar colors.

Only in this case people are inviting the creation to fine dinners and counting themselves of the upper echelon.  And I feel like the one person who is at these dinners, watching otherwise intelligent people give rapt attention to a monster’s gurgling cocktail stories.   The image is absurd.

And sure, Frankenstein’s monster had some semblance of humanity, enough, at least to suffer emotionally.  But our most high-minded would balk at bringing him/it home.

So I ask again. Does anyone hate the word ‘Copious’? I do.

Sidebar: I’m all for high and mighty vocabulary. And if you can’t move beyond ‘copious’ thats perfectly fine. I have my crutches too.  Just…Jesus people, just put it before some other word besides ‘amounts’.   Those two words are fucking discordant  together.  They don’t work.  Granted, it’s because of the points I made previously about ‘copious’ but ‘copious amounts’ is an atrocity.  You have difficulty getting those two words out because they don’t go together, not because they are fancy.  And the satisfied smirk at the corner of your mouth when you get through the phrase looks, to me, like George Bush after properly pronouncing ‘Nuclear’.

Oh, and yes, you do. Just think about it for a moment.

In which we discuss our shortcomings as caught by our listeners, the noble song and musical metaphors of doing it.

In which we discuss what exactly entails promiscuity and athletic endeavor.

In which we discuss plausible movies and Everest.

LATE!

In which we discuss what exactly entails promiscuity and athletic endeavor.

In which we discuss Jesus' hobbies and corporate structure.