A solution to the war

Let's talk politics right now. Most people are either Republicans or Democrats(Yea there are third parties and independents, but they don't factor in right now). A major point of contention between the two groups is the war. Most Democrats are staunchly opposed to the war and a continued presence in the middle east, and want our troops to be brought back home. Republicans on the other hand, are for the most part pro-war, and believe that we need tuh git the a-rabs uhcuz of that nine eleven. If we're not bombing someone, then something's not right. Now, I rarely, if ever talk politics in this journal. It usually leads to heated arguments and flame wars and I generally try to avoid those things. But I'm making this post because I finally had a stroke of genius, a solution to the war problem. I'll make the Republicans happy because we'll be bombing the utter shit out of something, and the Dems will be satisfied because this is an enemy that definitely deserves retaliation for years and years of pain inflicted upon people worldwide.

Ladies and Gentlemen...I propose we nuke...







"Let's get those cockblockin sonsabitches!"

Running the ball? What's that?

Washington Redskins defense in week 1: Gave up 154 rushing yards on 32 carries(4.8 yards per carry) against the Giants
Washington Redskins defense in week 2: Gave up 55 rushing yards on 19 carries(2.8 yards per carry) against the Saints
Washington Redskins defense in week 3: Gave up 126 rushing yards on 23 carries(5.3 yards per carry) against the CARDINALS


Houston Texans defense in week 1: Gave up 183 rushing yards on 39 carries(4.7 yards per carry) against the Steelers
Houston Texans defense in week 3: Gave up 158 rushing yards on 37 carries(4.2 yards per carry) against Tennessee


Kansas City Chiefs defense in week 1: Gave up 126 rushing yards on 28 carries(5.5 yards per carry) against New England
Kansas City Chiefs defense in week 2: Gave up 300 rushing yards on 47 carries(6.4 yards per carry) against Oakland
Kansas City Chiefs defense in week 3: Gave up 186 rushing yards on 36 carries(5.2 yards per carry) against the fucking Falcons


Maurice Jones-Drew entering week 4: 31 carries for 137 yards(4.4), facing Texans(giving up an average of 4.5)

Marion Barber III entering week 4: 62 carries for 285 yards(4.6), facing Redskins(giving up an average of 4.5)

Selvin Young entering week 4: 27 carries for 179 yards(6.6), facing Chiefs(giving up an average of 5.5)


Week 4 Results:

Maurice Jones-Drew: 7 carries, 32 yards, no touchdowns
Marion Barber III: 8 carries, 26 yards, no touchdowns
Selvin Young: 11 carries, 49 yards, no touchdowns.

YOU WORTHLESS MOTHERFUCKERS KILLED MY FANTASY TEAM THIS WEEK. DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW BADLY AND PAINFULLY I WAS FUCKED? THE GUY I PLAYED AGAINST DIDN'T EVEN NOTICE THAT ALMOST HALF HIS ROSTER HAD A BYE WEEK. SO HE PLAYED WITH ONE RECEIVER, ONE RUNNING BACK, AND NO DEFENSE. YET YOU THREE FUCKERS, GOING UP AGAINST DREEEEEAM MATCHUPS COMBINED FOR A FUCKING PATHETIC 26 CARRIES FOR 107 YARDS. MB3 HAD MORE THAN THAT ON HIS OWN LAST WEEK(28 for 142, 1 td). AND NOW I FIND MYSELF DOWN 8 POINTS TO A GUY THAT PROBABLY FUCKING FORGOT HE'S EVEN IN A LEAGUE! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

And Jacksonville, you sorry fucks. What happened to the defense that gave up only 20 to the Bills? 21 to the Colts? YOU LET THE TEXANS HANG 27 ON YOU? AND YOU CAN'T EVEN REGISTER A SINGLE FUCKING SACK? FUCK OFF AND DIE YOU ASSHOLES.

In Belichick We Trust

So it's official, Tom Brady is on injured reserve and his season is over. The offense is now in the hands of Matt Cassel. Ever since watching the hit I've been this sad, depressed sack, and it's time to end it. If there's one thing that every Patriots fan should know by now, it's trust in Belichick. The last time the starting quarterback went down, some 6th round unknown came in and led the team to a Superbowl title. Am I saying Matt Cassel will equal or surpass Tom Brady? No(although I wouldn't complain if he did). But the rest of the team is still intact, and the offense especially is loaded, so as long as he doesn't make mistakes and throw costly picks, the season isn't over yet. It's a stroke of luck that the Patriots had the league's easiest schedule this season, because there are going to be a lot of close, hard-fought games. With the seeming decline of the Colts and Chargers, the ascendancy of the Bills and Jets, and the yearly strong opening showing by the Steelers, the AFC is wide open for anyone's taking.

This is what happens when you get bored at work.

Ladies and gentlemen…I’ve traveled over half our state to be here tonight. I couldn’t get away sooner because there was a final piece of intel to be captured and I had to destroy the sentry guarding it. That intel is now safely stored in the RED base where BLU shall never see it again. I have more intel stored and more on the way. So..Ladies and gentlemen, if I say I’m a demo man you will agree.

Now you have a great chance here, but bear in mind, you can lose it all if you’re not careful. Out of all the men that claim they are worthy of the uber to destroy the sentries, maybe one in twenty will be demo men; the rest will be soldiers- that’s men trying to get between you and the demo men to get some of the intel that ought by rights come to you. Even if you find one that has stickies, and means to destroy, he’ll maybe know nothing about demolition and he’ll have to hire the job out to a spy, and then you’re depending on a spy who may get distracted and try to knife a medic. That is the way this works.

I do my own demolition, and the medics that uber me uber only me and they’re medics I know. I make it my business to be there and use their charges. I don’t have my stickies bounce off the turret and then abandon the mission. I don’t allow my stickies to be shot away by an engineer. I’m a family man. I run a family business. This is my son and my partner H.W. Plainview(SENTRY NOT DESTROY SELF). We offer you the bond of family that very few demo men can understand. I’m fixed like no other demo man in this field and that’s because I recently procured BLU’s intel. I have two fully loaded launchers ready to put to work. I can load extra stickies onto carts and have them here in a week. I have business connections so I can get a medic for the ubercharge- such things go by friendship in a rush like this. And this is why I can guarantee to start demolishing enemy sentries and secure the intel. I assure you ladies and gentlemen, no matter what the others promise to do, when it comes to the showdown, they won’t be there.



(If I had more motivation, and knew how to take and edit video from tf2, I've already got the basic storyboards for a trailer in my head. Maybe when I get some downtime I'll explore this further.)

The most amazing and disappointing dream ever.

My alarm went off this morning and I leaned forward, hit snooze, and dropped back into bed. But then I sat up again, and looked out the window. It was still very early, so the sun hadn't come up yet. But I was watching the moon descend below the horizon, and at the same time, the sun rise above it. This was all happening quickly, like a time lapse, but without the stuttery motion. The other thing is that the sun didn't seem to be lit. It was ghostly white(but not transparent or anything), and I could easily see the solar flares all around it. The most amazing part of the dream was that other than the sun and the moon, there wasn't much else in the sky...no clouds. But what there was in the sky, looked like this:




Just a bright red nebula across the entire sky, as far as I could see, and thousands of stars. Far, far more than you see in that photograph. And I remember just staring in awe and smiling. Then I laid back down. I got up soon after and thought to myself how awesome that was, and that I should go take another look at it. But then slowly my mind started to piece together the impossibilities, such as the non-shining sun, the fast movement of both the sun and the moon, and oh yea, the red fucking nebula plastered across the sky. And it was so vivid, that I initially believed that I had seen it, I was convinced. And as reality set in, I just got kind of depressed.

If you want to be amazed by space, look at this picture. It's called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, and it's an image taken by the Hubble Telescope between 9/03 and 1/04. It contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies. Now, to put that into perspective, look at this picture. The HUDF, those ten thousand galaxies, the frame of that picture is that tiny little red X.

Love...or something like it

'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.


Everyone's heard that saying at one point or another. It's frequently tossed out to comfort a newly single acquaintance, usually paired with the equally eloquent "There's plenty of other fish in the sea." To those that have spoken this line in the context of relationships, if you believe it, you've never felt love. I understand what loneliness can do to someone, how it can feel not having a counterpart by your side to progress through life, lift you up when you're down, and other cliches. But I can say for a fact, from personal experience, and from observing others, the feeling of being sans love is nothing compared to finding that love, and then losing it. It's not possible it can come close. Even if you take a person that is so lonely they're hopelessly depressed; if you were to give them love, and then take it away, they would sink into unimaginable depths.

Everyone has experienced loneliness. No one has their perfect match throughout their entire life, we've all been jealous of seeing the popular couple walk around school/the neighborhood/elsewhere and wondered why it couldn't be you. It's not easy, but it's not an impossible feeling to deal with. It's always there, but you manage to go about your daily routine sans interruption. But having that perfect level of happiness, knowing that no matter how bad your day was, you'll have that someone to talk to, there'll always be that person that won't turn on you, is one of the most amazing feelings in the world. And getting accustomed to, and then losing it, is an emptiness I would wish on very few people. The only way that I can describe losing love is being eaten alive from the inside. Of course, the common metaphor is your heart breaking. But it goes far beyond that. The normal routine you'd been accustomed to, having that person there to talk to or see, all of a sudden has been turned on its head. Your mind doesn't know what to do, because usually when you had a problem or something to talk about, that was the person you'd talk to. It's also the only thing you can think about. You wonder what caused it, did you make a mistake somewhere, did you take something for granted, what was the cause, and how can you redeem yourself? Everyone tells you it's best to move on, but you can't. Your body, your mind, they aren't ready to move on. You'd prefer to take a million steps backwards to fix the situation than to take one step forwards and move on with your life. You stop eating, you stop caring about anything else. You don't see your friends, you don't talk to anyone, you become a literal shell of yourself. Everyone on the outside sees you, they see a person standing there, the person they recognize from so many memories. But inside, you're hollow. The biggest part of your life just up and disappeared, and you don't know how to react. It's a swirl of emotions and some people get through it, and some don't. But trust me when I say that if you're still waiting for your first love, you're better off.

Life or something like it

Life. We all know what life is, but can we really give it an accurate description?

1. the condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally.

Ok, there's the literal, scientific definition. But think bigger.

3. the animate existence or period of animate existence of an individual: to risk one's life; a short life and a merry one.

Getting a bit closer, let's try it once more.

11. the course of existence or sum of experiences and actions that constitute a person's existence: His business has been his entire life.

There we go. We are all alive, we all experience life in our own ways. We're told that a person's goal is to make the most of their life. But what exactly does that mean? Every person or group has their own take on the meaning of life, from the various religious aspects(getting into Heaven, getting a bunch of virgins, Xenu) to the more simplified version(there is no afterlife, so do what you can, while you can). But there is no universal goal that every single one of us strives for. The reason for that? Life doesn't matter anymore.

Since birth, your parents are going to pound this idea into your head: Your goal is go to school, go to college and get a degree, and get a job that pays you a lot of money. Once you have accomplished those steps, you are now considered a "success". But why exactly is that? Why is the bar set so low? The average lifespan for a human in the United States is typically in the mid to late 70s. Yet this goal, the degree, the job, this can all be achieved by the time you're 30. So what kind of world is it when we're not expected to have ambition beyond the first 1/3 of our life? The long and short of it is, from the second you escape the womb, your clock is counting down. At some completely random point in your future, you will die. It could be 80 years, it could be 80 weeks. In theory, knowing that your time could be up at any moment, shouldn't you be trying to accomplish as much as humanly possible with your time?

The fact is that outside of a very, very, very small percentage of people, the life you live won't matter. I'm not trying to attack people or bring them down, but for the most part, your accomplishments, whatever they are, will not outlive you. When your day comes and the clock runs out, that's it. That job that you were so good at, that your boss loved you for? They'll hire someone else. That house that you saved up for years to buy, designed just the way you want it? It'll go back on the market for someone else to buy. It's like (and I'm not trying to make pop culture references here, but it fits) William Hung, girl x from the Real World, etc. When they get their 15 minutes of fame, they'll do all sorts of things to stay relevant and get attention. But once it runs out, no one will care. No one's going to lament the void left by the Numa Numa guy. Life is the exact same way. And the reason for all this is the fact that humanity as a whole is spoiled. Looking at life centuries ago, nothing was guaranteed. Life and survival had to be earned, there was no middle ground where you could just make enough money to get by and stop. You either strived for the best you could be, or you lived in total poverty and usually wound up dying rather quickly. But today? The instinct we had is gone.

When America was first formed, the early leaders had this idea of Manifest Destiny tattooed in their heads. And it wasn't a short-term thing, they were determined to stretch across the land "from sea to shining sea". And it definitely wasn't fast, it took a few decades, but they accomplished it. Fast forward a few more decades, and we're sending rockets into space, a place that had always been there up above everyone's heads, but we never imagined we'd reach. Then in 1969, we put a man on the moon. Common sense would have you think that it'd be the tip of the iceberg, but here we are, nearly 40 years later, and that's as far as we've gone. In fact, we haven't even been that far since 72. Apparently there is no interest in anything else out there. "We'll we've seen the moon, what else is there?" A light year is the distance that a beam of light can travel in a 365-day span, approximately 5.8 trillion miles. A gigalight-year is one billion light years. Now, we know that there are other galaxies and objects in space as far as a gigalight-year away, and the visible edge of the universe is 46 gigalight-years from Earth. So realizing that this tiny spinning rock makes up such a microscopic, negligible, minuscule part of the universe, you would think that there would be some sort of attempt to see what lies beyond. But alas, no. I mean, yes there are scientists who study this, hoping to find a break, or find some way of making it feasible and possible in the near future. But everyone else? You can ask people on the street about their hopes for space exploration, and they're probably say they're more concerned with what's going to happen on Grey's Anatomy.

So why are so many people content to just follow the blueprint? It's hereditary. You're going to have person A, who is told that the school-college-job formula is the definition of success. So they do it, meet someone, start a family, and pass on the blueprint. Instead of completely stimulating a child's motivation, telling them that literally anything and everything is within their reach, we're just telling them "Hey, this worked for me, why don't you give it a shot". When you get the child that wants to go off and do their own thing, to actually follow their dreams, they often become the family's black sheep. Instead of being supported and lauded for actually pursuing something they love, trying to find that balance between economic success and happiness in life, they're viewed as an outcast and branded as a failure-in-waiting. Creativity and a desire to actually change the world are viewed as negative character traits, and applause is reserved for the ones that walk in previously laid footsteps. And anytime someone does wind up doing something unique? They are immediately swarmed with parasites, and you'll see countless carbon-copies and clones pop up, trying to ride the wave of success.

I hate to quote Hatebreed here, but the title of an early album is Satisfaction is the Death of Desire. And that's the problem we face. And while it's partially because we're reaching our level of satisfaction too early in life, the main cause is the definition of satisfaction that we're being given. We as a people need to never be satisfied. Complacency is letting your guard down. Once you stop believing that you can fail, once you believe that all is well, that's when things will go South. I mean, if you feel that you've accomplished your goal in life, why stick around? You're going to spend the next 40-50 years wasting space. You don't have 30 years to stimulate your mind, and 50 years to live the same exact routine. You have an entire lifetime, no matter how long or short, to fully exert yourself mentally and try to actually make an impact. So do it. Whatever is in your heart, no matter how far-fetched or impossible it may be, shoot for it. Drop everything that would be a roadblock and pursue your own happiness.



I say, let me never be complete. I say, may I never be content.