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.

"Daughter? I hardly know her!" works less well as a joke.

Another quickie. P.S. Scotch.

While plowing through all six seasons of The Sopranos in the last few weeks (I already have a job, shut up), I realized something interesting about creator David Chase. I worry that someone might take the observation I'm going to share as a sign of distaste for the show, which could not be further from the truth. I truly believe The Sopranos should take the place of high school economics courses (likewise The Wire will be screened in lieu of Civics, Deadwood in lieu of history and the film They Live in place of everything else). I discovered that His Holiness Sir David "Tougher Than Day Old Cuban Bread" Chase LOVES to watch James Gandolfini wake up. Seriously, I think, on average, Tony Soprano wakes up two times an episode. I realize that the show has had multiple writers and directors, but I am led to believe that they operate under the telepathic control of Mr. Chase, likely for tax purposes. However, these other creators (mindless minions or not) similar love for filming our protagonist sleep only emblazon me in my belief that James Gandolfini wakes up better than anyone in recorded human history. And I have found yet another way to feel inadequate. Thanks alot, Jimmy.

Hop on the cliche expressway.

Anytime a character in a TV show or movie lights a cigarette while behind the wheel of a car, even whilst church sober, will act as though it is the first time they have ever laid hands on a cigarette, a lighter, or even a motor vehicle. Furthermore, against all realistic expectations, they will never crash while doing their best excited muppet impression and the worst repercussions they'll have to deal with is a couple honks (in quieter towns) or maybe a "Watch where you're goin' lady!" in L.A. or New York.