If ya'd known me then...

Wanna kill me? Have you been holding a grudge for whatever reason? Did I spill a drink on you or call you something you suspect is a curse word in Spanish? Please do it today. I scanned 421 separate fucking letters between douschebags in four fucking hours. I'm obviously no longer human. No jury would convict you. It'd be just like tossing your toaster in a garbage compactor.

Just please, not this one.

I'm feeling a little burnt out from my day at work (like Lincoln felt a little burnt out after his night at the theater) so I'm gonna do an easy post today. Blogatmebro showed me this little list of easy ideas, so I figure I'll tackle a few of them (though not literally, as my feet are equal parts blood and blister).

I know this is kinda square but I suppose I'll start with number one.

FIVE WAYS TO WIN MY HEART

I know of only one proper way to win my heart, so I'll substitute steps for ways.

Step 1: Finding Me

This should be pretty simple. To quote every drunk friend I've run into in the past three months "JOO NEVURR HANNG OUT ANYMOR!". So I'll be at home. Or, more often than I'd like, at work. Easiest step by far. 

Step 2: Capturing Me

This should still be a pretty easy step. Sure, I'm kind of a husky guy with a little MMA training and alcohol-induced pain tolerance but I'm still a total klutz. Besides, this is kind of exactly what all sorts of tools are for.

What the fuck is a nail?

Step 3: Transporting Me

This is definitely the toughest step. Good luck getting my drunk, bleeding, buxom Cuban ass anywhere. A car or truck is a must, as is at least two or three physically fit individuals. I'd advise you to lift with your legs and not your back, but you'll hurt yourself either way. Who knew bacon addiction was a viable self-defense strategy? Anyway, once you get my incapacitated husk to an appropriate place it's time to start thinking about...

Step 4: Dedicating Me to a God

The difficulty here is going to be which god to choose. The Jewish God hasn't been heard from in a while and it's unlikely my weak, greasy heart is gonna bring him out of hiding. The Christian God seems to frown on blood sacrifice unless it's mandated by semi-literate oil heirs. Which of the big three leaves only Allah, who is getting enough bad press without you, thank you very much. So you're left with the gods of antiquity. Despite Thor's current popularity due to the Summer blockbuster he's probably a bad choice unless you want to get Loki all jealous and inadvertently set a tsunami on Sri Lanka or some shit. I personally am gonna recommend Acan in case all that 2012 stuff is true. Plus, I think it'd appreciate the buzz it'd catch off my ticker.

Step 5: Removing the Heart

If you've come this far I think you know exactly what you need to do. 

Now that I'm done I feel like I may have misunderstood this prompt. Oh well. Cheers to that.  

A Memorial Day to Forget

- I am definitely not going to turn this blog into an office supply review site (I'd rather let someone let someone maim me with a trusty Swingline stapler than do that). However, my sheer hatred for one particular appliance merits some mention. FUCK BOSTITCH STAPLERS. The only way those pieces of shit can get to pieces of paper bound together is by inspiring a primal rage in the user that allows him or her to fight through the pain and staple the documents via headbutt.

- Going through these files, I see that one of them is a lawsuit. The plaintiff was a major fast food franchise, the defendant was an independently owned Cuban restaurant. The claim? That the cuban restaurant was selling a croqueta preparada before eleven, thus violating an exclusivity contract. This is why there is no karma. In a just world the addition of a freshly fried croqueta to a warm piece of Cuban bread ought to make you a candidate for sainthood, instead in our world it makes you a candidate for BULLSHIT.

- Now they're arguing over what constitutes a neon sign. This thought leaves me a semi-conscious drooling mess for the better part of a half hour. I reassure myself I can make it through this only to find that the next document contains a definition for "person". It is sadly very limited.

Sorry old buddy.

 - Whoever originally filed all this obviously also had their mind blown by the last few stacks of paper. His stapling has become more and more erratic, with staples binding documents no more related than Muhammad Ali is to Al Bundy. They are also attaching post-it notes ranging from frantic and confusing ("RECOPY, UNPRINT!") to characters and symbols no human-designed keyboard has buttons for.

- Wow! All these papers sure have a lot of pretty scary confidentiality notices all over them!

- Ok, some of these have confidentiality notices for completely blacked out sheets of paper. What the hell have I gotten myself into?

- Some of these documents have been copied and recopied so many times they look less like text and more like the world's worst magic eye. I relax my eyes and stare at it, after a minute of staring I find only disappointment. I make another copy of it anyway.

- Now the shopping center is suing the Cuban restaurant for selling loaves of Cuban bread. I realize the concept of the "free market" is flawed in even more ways than I had previously thought. I crave Cuban bread, I remember it has the same ingredients as beer. I think about adding lard to beer. I become aroused.

- Looking through more and more legal documents I keep seeing gratuitous, masturbatory Latin phrases being tossed around like racial slurs at the Daytona 500. Latin has been dead as a language for hundreds of years and yet in the deepest, darkest holdouts of academia, law students and philosophy professors take every possible opportunity to play with its corpse. It's been stinking up the place for years now and I think it's time to quit pretending it's breathing and give it a proper burial.

You're not fooling anybody either, Roman.

- How does one place have eight separate Certificates of Occupancy? Is somebody fucking with me?

-Ok, just found number nine. This is not a funny prank.

-Oh. Wait. I work for crazy people.

- Everything in this file is marked with "URGENT!" in big red letters, is there something terribly time-sensitive about mattresses I don't know about?

Don't feed after midnight?

- Every old white guy thinks they can sing "Proud Mary."

- I still giggle whenever I read "monies" in a serious business letter.

- At the end of Forrest Gump, aren't we left to assume that Jenny died from AIDS? Wouldn't that mean there's a pretty good chance that Forrest has AIDS? Doesn't that also mean their son will have to deal with not only being raised by a functionally retarded father but with said father's premature death, and then possibly, his own? How was this a feel-good movie?

- This document. One document. This single, individual lone document is bound by eighteen staples. EIGHTEEN. It took me one staple to get it back together. I hate to think this, and I hate to think about the last person who had to do this, but I think this one feat makes me eighteen times better at staples than they were.

- That's SO going on my resume.

- The mere sight of office supply stores now turn me redder than Elmo after a day at the beach, and far less giggly.

- This file contains serious legal documents addressing the difficult and important question, one that will help define us as a nation: "Is a donut legally a pastry?"

- My employers are fucking nutzo.

- Tom Petty played on the radio the whole ride home. Things might be lookin' up for me, let's just hope they're not staring up at a pigeon.

SHUT UP LIVER! MY TONGUE THINKS THIS IS A GOOD IDEA!

-At the Greyhound station, whilst trying to catch up on far too long's worth of reading, I kept hearing the word Oprah repeatedly coming from the television. I turned around to look, assuming Oprah would only get this much attention if she say, formed a paramilitary group out of her followers, or, for instance, had her book club read The Satanic Verses. Unfortunately, real life tends to be a pale reflection of the healthy imagination, and the story was that her show was ending. More specifically, they were analyzing and debating what her last show was going to be like. I, and forgive me if it has already come on, like to think it will end just as it lived, by spending forty minutes on the suffering of child prostitutes worldwide and the last fifteen giving away worthless luxury goods to a room full of yuppies.

-The bus I eventually got on started cold. Colder than a glacier's heart, colder than a polar bear's urine, colder than well refrigerated fingertips of despair. As the ride went on, it got warmer, which naturally put me in a bit of a better mood. I then realized the source of the heat. It was body heat. I was Greyhound body heat. It was the humid, evaporating sweat of the type of filthy, half-evolved humanoid beings (myself included) that ride the Greyhound. I, perhaps for the first time in months, feel concerned about my health.

- One of the neat facts I read while distracting myself from the fact that I was being steamed alive by my fellow humans was that the book of mormon (intentionally uncapitalized) contains the phrase "and so it came to pass" 2000 times. Now, while this was a very blatant attempt by Joseph Smith to stall while verbally defecating a laughable attempt at a religious text, I feel the phrase still has an important use. The words "and so it came to pass" are key words in just about every drinking story I've ever told and likely ever will.

- Greyhound seats are obviously designed for dinosaurs, as no human has ever been comfortable sitting upright with their neck jutted forward by a hard metal plate only a masochist of the highest order could call a cushion.

One possible fictional exception

- To allow you to understand how hungover I am right now, writing that caption involved me debating between the words "exception", "exemption", "exhibition", "example" and "exemple". At least one of those is not even a word, will investigate when I can no longer take my pulse by listening to my brain scream.

- Someone's tag on the bus was "GLA$$ BITCH". Now, even the first part of that has me curious. I imagine the most likely case is that the person is involved in either the manufacture, distribution, or consumption of crystal meth. But let's explore other options, shall we?
      -The tagger is in fact translucent and is raising awareness for individuals with the same condition.
      -Similar to the above, but is instead raising awareness for his supervillainesque plan to melt New York City with a gigantic magnifying glass.
      -The person was about to tag something that made sense, but suddenly had a severe stroke and the ensuing word salad wound up as their only memorial on our mortal coil.

That or they were just high off their fucking ass. But it's nice to dream.

- We stop at a rest stop about every fifty minutes, I suspect my driver is a cocaine addict. I realize this is how my itinerary was planned by the computers down at Greyhound. I get angry at every computer from abacus to iPad.

- When I overcome the filth and disgust of my surroundings, I get hungry. The bus stops at an Arby's. This is the bad luck equivalent of finding a stack of face down pennies on a broken mirror. I eat the sandwich with the most bacon in it's name, I wonder why anyone would wrap bacon in bullshit, and soon after, where I can find a bathroom and/or a surgeon.

- Someone finally gets the gall to ask me to move my bag so they can sit down. It's an old guy with a smoker's cough as intense as his mustache who appears to be as nonplussed about this whole experience as I am. He leaves the small talk to the small people. I figure this is among the best potential greyhound neighbors and accept my fate.

- The man leaves the bus at the next stop, presumably to hunt down the people who killed his family.

And I wish him all the luck in the world.

- He is replaced by a little kid. FUCK.

- The little kid has a Speak and Spell. FUCK FUCK FUCK

- Just breathe easy, he has to get tired of it sometime.

- WHAT KIND OF MIRACLE BATTERY DOES THIS BULLSHIT RUN ON AND HOW DOES AN EIGHT YEAR OLD FUCK UP SPELLING "COW"? FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFFFFFFUUUU-

- He's gone. My fists unclench. My heart slows. My eyes stop ejaculating pints of blood. I am at peace.

- I search every rest stop for a bar or liquor store within a mile and a half on my Droid. There are never any results. This is both statistically impossible and fucking terrible.

- The Orlando bus station, in stark contrast to the low key Miami one, resembles a sort of Anglicized North Korea, retaining the constant, excessive police presence, but losing every hint of natural beauty.

- My next Greyhound neighbor was nobody. Nobody keeps me amazing company and I sleep soundly for a long while.

- I feel the world has enough sing-alongs, but not nearly enough sin-alongs. This may one of our biggest cultural issues as a nation, and as a planet.

- The driver insists on avoiding I-75 for the last stretch of the trip and instead take us down every last dark, Deliverance-esque road he, and apparently only he, can find.

- I consider yelling "THIS AIN'T NO MYSTERY MACHINE MOTHERFUCKER!".

- I realize that would involve me having to walk down said roads. I bury that thought deep down.

- Frank Sinatra's lyric "You're nobody til' somebody looooves you, you're noooobody til' soooomebody caaaaareees" happens to be pretty similar to my stances on abortion and embryonic stem cell research.

You sly dog, you.

- After clarifying to someone that I meant "I get around" like The Beach Boys do and not like say, chlamydia does, I make a stunning revelation. They actually intended that song to be about their virulent sexual promiscuity. Said promiscuity would leave Brian Wilson with a terrible case of syphilis  that would inspire the beauty and insanity that was Pet Sounds. Take that moral guardians.

- My next career move is to run for city commissioner in Gainesville on the platform that we ban bestiality. Yes, even between animals. Have you seen dog dicks? GROSS.

- My thanks go out to El Indio's carnitas burritos, Midnight Oil at the Palomino and the hospitality of friends for keeping me kicking these past few days. It's comfortable that even in the rising muck, Gainesville still has its gems.

- Lastly, someone I'm growing fond of demanded this next article include kittens. Now, in order to maintain a few scraps of dignity, I'm compromising. Here is a single, almost adorable kitten.

He will save us all.

Ok, one more. 

I have gone so soft.

Frazzled thoughts of a fizzled out frontal lobe.

- Did you know leases can include clauses for foreign invasion? Check yours, and if your landlord isn't planning for a siege by our "neighbors" to the north, ask for a rent reduction right away.

- Nobody with a business degree knows what discrepancy means.

- Sending black faxes to someone's fax machine isn't nearly as good as sending ten to their cell phone.

- People who mark every e-mail urgent are gonna be the subject of the 22nd century's equivalent of Aesop's Fables.

- Today, I saw enough highlighter to make me hate Wiz Khalifa. Black and Yellow? More like Black and BULLSHIT!

- Why does Adobe even have a scan as text function? Is it hoping the jumbled mass of ASCII it produces will act as some sort of technoNecronomicon?

- Today, I scanned a three year old Christmas card. For tax reasons. My soul hurts.

- Life is not an RPG, and if it is, you are wasting points by investing them in "Greater Resistance to Staples".

- I work for crazy people.

- Leases often include very specific, and ominous, clauses about Radon gas. I'm concerned. I think I'll report this to the proper authorities, namely: Coast 2 Coast AM.

- In business letters, the word "please" and all it's conjugations, have lost all meaning.

- If God was real, and actually played a role in writing scripture, descriptions of hell would involve a lot more staples.

- Fuck staples.

- I never thought I'd have to type "Re: Sales Tax and Catastrophic Events". I'm still not sure why I did.

- I work for crazy people.

- Making anyone write out dates in YYYY/MM/DD format ought to be punishable by beheading. Twice, starting from the crotch up.

- Rich people have terrible handwriting. Awful. Now, if you've seen mine this may seem like hypocrisy, but this has never stopped me before and it sure won't now.

- I scanned twenty gigabytes of paperwork today. For comparison's sake, every Batman comic made for the entire 70 years of the character's long and storied history add up to about fifteen gigs of comics. That's a difference of five gigs. Which is a hell of a coincidence, since today I lost a fifth of my soul.

- I have met multiple Cuban men with the first name McDonald. I know it's because their parents associate the franchise with America but I also secretly hope at least one of them ages long enough to become "Ol' Mcdonald". Farm optional.

- My boss routinely ends memos with "Govern yourself accordingly,". I work with crazy people.

- The word remit also means nothing to businesspeople, yet they seem to get orgasmic pleasure from using it.

- I work with crazy people.

- Gainesville tomorrow. I'll miss Miami, but I hope this time apart lets me capture some of that old magic, that or I'll get too drunk to remember my name and roll instinctively to the block. Either way, let's hang. On porches rather than ropes, but I ain't picky.

Be well.

Fuck you Subway, Fuck you.

One company I work for manages a shopping center with quite a number of stores. Naturally, they keep physical logs of their correspondence with said companies. Somewhat unnaturally, they let these physical files stack up until they weigh enough to serve as an effective weapon against a T-1000 and then have me unstaple, scan, restaple, label and save them to a server. Over the course of two days. There are 32 shops in this center. This is my inbox after scanning the correspondence for just one of those shops, a popular submarine sandwich franchise. In case you can't read that, that's 83 separate documents. Each contained at least one staple. Assuming only one staple each, at this rate, I will have used 5312 staples by the time I'm done. Needless to say, if that Clippy motherfucker ever shows his face again I am going to beat that monitor until my hand is an unrecognizable mess of glass, wire and sinewy flesh.

My slow, slow day at work.

THIS IS TOTALLY A WORK OF FICTION AND NOT REAL AT ALL. I WORK REALLY HARD AND SOBER.

Knowing I'd have all of jackshit to do today. My breakfast was two percocet, a steak marinaded in whiskey and a half-pint of Scotch. Let's see how this goes:

7:00- Leave the house, stop for cuban coffee, take colada as shot. Realize later it is a hot beverage, a very hot one. I regret nothing.

7:05- Regret settles in, I realize the scotch in my pocket in slightly colder. I excuse myself to the bathroom for more of that. I remember scotch also burns. I chew some gum hastily and exit the men's room, which smells at 7am like it should at 7pm.

8:00- I begin filing every piece of paper, cardboard and linoleum ever produced. I wonder how four people can generate so much paper. I wonder why I am filing physical copies of documents we have saved on six computers and seven backup drives. I am wondering why we kept a receipt for an .80 pastry. I find the answers to neither of these in punching my own head, so once again I check the bottom of the bottle. It too, has no answers.

9:00- I am amazed I still have paper to file. And even that there is even a single tree standing. I begin to wonder how much all this paper weighs. I wonder if it weighs more than I do. I realize drunken rambling can also happen in typed blog posts.

9:05- I find a power bill for a model home that is more than my monthly salary. That's right, I can't afford to live in a fake house. With fake appliances. For fake people. I can however, afford to take my benzodiazepene.

9:10- I just heard my boss ask "Are you the lady with whom I am speaking?" and the language and logic sections of my brain melt.

9:30- I realize whoever filed these last believes honestly and truly that "R" comes after "S" in the alphabet. I perpetuate their lie.

9:40- I get a case of the "OH GOD MY HANDS FEEL LIKE PILLOWS" munchies so I call my Grandma to make sure she's cooking tomorrow night. I am very insistent she buys wine. I use every last bit of Spanish vocabulary I have to stress the point, she agrees. This hurts my head, I take some more percocet.

9:50- Cuban coffee arrives. See 7:00.

10:20- I go out to get coffee for the office. I stop by the liquor store and pick up a half pint of skol and a cigarillo (having just seen fistful of dollars) burn the SHIT out of my finger lighting it. Seriously, it looks like some scanners shit. I pound the skol in the bathroom. I notice my breath reeks, I gargle mouthwash, I swallow some.

10:25- "Hey, please sort and pay these wicked complex bills, k? Thx!"

11:00- I go downstairs and pound a colada and two beers, which I now buy at a discount. Costco can suck it. If that sounds like a Viking's pre-battle breakfast, it probably was, as I have to get pumped for...

11:40- I basically have four managers between me and the head honcho. They have no other lackeys (nobody took ECO1101. One of them is my mom (Sweet!), one of them is on vacation (sweet!), one of them is the world's prissiest accountant who is too busy pretending to be cultured, listening to taylor swift and dealing with his own form to be of any help or supervision. The last manager happens to be a decent, down to earth, honest, competent dude. So, of course, he is never there. So, he shows up for twenty minutes and I have to ask him questions at a pace that would make an auctioneer wonder if he had been dosed. Despite being a decent human being, he expects me to produce twenty checks to twenty different companies within ten minutes.

12:00- BOOYAH. Complete it and take a celebratory pull of scotch. Start singing "The Body of an American to celebrate. It is met with harsh stares. I stumble back into my office and type into my blogger. Which is a fucking dumb dumb dumb word. dumb dumb dumb.

1:00- I Hvae a steak with tequila lime sauce. the sauce has no other ingredients and is raw. all other bosses have left. will now listen to tom waits for rest of day and answer phone. hopefully in english. Wish luck on me you fine fellows and fellowettes.

‎1:30- been to the bar downstairs so often I get rusty nails half price if I keep tipping the guy like a g. Also, some old cigar smoking dude came up to me and told me "Mijo! Los jovenes que fumen cigarillos son delinquentes, tu fumas puros? Asi se hace los hombres, trata este!" and gave me a mondecino. His name is Rodolfo. He is now my homeboy.