Monday, June 30, 2008

Dreadful is the day, "I search for the meaning of life."

I need to be more careful. I just dropped a blue tablet of 2000 flushes into my toilet. I washed my hands carefully and poured myself a glass of sugar free Ice Tea. On my third or so sip of the tea I noticed that my finger had a blue stain from the chlorine tablet. I used that finger tip to pick up my glass so I am sure that I am going to die from chlorine poisoning or something. I guess that is why I have gone ahead and posted this blog entry.

I have only been writing a little bit and not posting any of it. I can't live up to even the humble writing standards of this blog. I've been depressed I think. I am trying to convince myself that I need to go work out today. I joined the gym on the first of the month and a visit today would only be my third.

I did eat a massive portion of fried fish and french fries from a local fishery, and by fishery, I mean a local fast food joint that serves it's fish battered and drenched in grease. Pete's fish and chips comes with a kind of watered down hot sauce mixed with ketchup.

You can't ask for regular ketchup and they charge you 25 cents for a small 1 ounce cup of the stuff. I think they make all the profit from the shop this way. They do sell cokes for 69 cents in the summer and big cheeseburgers for a dollar, so you can't really complain. Even though I just did.

I wrote a long boring article about complaining and philosophy. I said that the only thing universal to humankind is complaining. You gather ten people in room and in no short order they will begin to gripe. Philosophy is just like complaining, which is what turns most people off about it. I defended philosophical thinking by suggesting that it is one method that people use for truth seeking and truth is seeking is the only way one can speak of things meaningfully. If we want any meaning out of our lives we need to remember to seek truth.

Don't worry I deleted it, so I won't appear here. But I wrote that because I was pissed off at EMO-culture and I was comparing it to the (hahah) more enlightened and time tested weltanshaungs of Nihilism and Existentialism.

I always get existential whenever the tedium of my job gets to me. What I mean is there is always the dread living with me. It tugs at me gently (and even not so gently) by the unending exercise of looking down at your stupid groceries, your stupid open swim suit covers that expose your stupid fat chests with stupid too tiny crucifixes hidden in the plump cleavage of a 40 year old women with too much mascara, buying bottles of wine, with her long colored nails digging into her purse for change, asking me if she can buy a deli rotisserie chicken and pay with food stamps. No you cannot.

On and on it goes. Every single human who walks by me and thing they buy- I list off a reason why they should not be on this planet, or why their purchases bother me. I detect skin problems as they fiddle with the electronic payment system. They hand me over their sweaty money with nails invaded by green fungus. They come to the store after work stinking of urine and axle grease. They forget rules of etiquette. They swear and talk on cell phones. The attractive look at me with pity and disgust, or they don't look at all. They go on the next line because the other cashier is taller and thinner than I am. So many of the patrons bore me with conversation that sometimes I bore them back with my stories.

Here is one:

Yesterday and old women driving one of those old people scooters crashed into a front end display full of peanut butter and glass jelly jars. The thing came tumbling down like an avalanche of purple glass. The shattering of which brought a cacophony of thunderous noise to my ears which barely caused me to look up from my screen. I swipe away at the next item. I don't want to seem too interested in the events. Maybe the manager will want me to clean it up.

I am lucky. He asks for help from the customer service desk. A dwarfish female with the sexual perversions of two high school football teams walks over and squats down. She picks glass with the latex gloves doctors use to inspect your rectum, an idea from the manager, who by some small piece of brain engineered power, assumes the quality found in latex which prevents semen from leaking out of condoms could protect hands from the cutting effects of broken glass. He was right. No one was cut, and the old women who knocked down the wall of pb&j passes through my line sheepishly.

She doesn't hear well. I repeat the price and tell her that her total is 25 dollars. She eyes the two twenty dollar bills in her twisted hands with trepidation, almost afraid that the 15 dollars in change she has coming back should be put towards the hundred jars of spilled product that now lie useless on the floor behind her. She does not ask for help out to her car even though she needs it to get the scooter back inside. She wants to leave as quickly as possible.

I pass the time in my head. I remember all the things I need to do.


  • I need to go the gym
  • I need to stop drinking cola
  • I need to drink more water
  • I need to attend a communist party meeting
  • I should donate money to the needy in Africa
  • I must ease up on the masturbation thing if only to allow some feeling to get back into that dumb rod of mine
  • I need to stop being so self involved
  • I need to buy some antacids
  • I need to write a book
  • I need to stop spending 8 hours a day on the Internet
  • I need to finish the post on sexual double standards -I tell pervy dwarfy girl I call it "Cut Of f your PUSSY!" -- ("Why do you care about those kind of things?" --asks the dwarf) "Why do I care about anything?" I answer the girl.

I search for the meaning of life, but get caught up in the circular meanderings of my mind. The atrophy of depression is confusing to me. I try to think of reasons to do things, but then the back of my throat starts its morning cry.

"Good morning sir, and will there be more soda today? If so you can look forward to the tickle becoming a stinging, like the swallow of bumble bees."

A few burps later and the acid will eat away at the remainder of my esophagus.

"I can wake you in the middle of the night and you can gasp for air. My tight grip will be the noose and you will hang today. We are in the Old West. I will offer you no jury."

At least I understand the horror of asthma now. I was sure I was going to die the first time I woke and could not breathe. I had no idea why. My chest inflated to twice its regular size in a desperate search for air, my eyes are like saucers, my hands wrap reflexively around my neck, I hop up and down in vain. Then magically the grip relents. My throat opens just enough. I drag in the sweet air. I sit up right for the next few hours on my bed. I will not test sleeping again. I swear off cola.

Though I am sure it is just a symptom the acid reflux. A gentle reminder that the ingestion of carbonic acid for 10 hours a day was not selected for by our ancestors. Such sweet terror. Oh, such poor Darwinian luck.

I want to suggest to myself that doing something is better than not doing anything at all. I want to pretend to you that I did not buy the five 12 packs of cola for $12 at work last night, but I did. I place a can can in one of the new cozies that I just purchased. I bought 10 can and bottle cozies, each for a quarter.

I have no idea why I need so many.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Somebody gets me a gift that could be "entered in" as evidence against me in a trial


I'm broke again even though I heroically work one part time job that pays under 10 dollars an hour. I went drinking twice in the past week or two and that "good time" basically gutted all my savings. And by savings I mean the hundred dollars I managed to stock away since I started working at the grocery store.

I'm the kind of guy who buys a dozen pregnancy tests at the dollar store and stuffs them all under the bathroom cabinet in hopes that you will find them when you are snooping through my medicine cabinet to teach you a lesson about learning things about people you don't want to know.
I guess that is why one of my best friends dropped by yesterday just to give a poster of Hannah Montana. I think it will go great with Mary-Kate and Ashley hair gel that I have on my bathroom sink counter top. I don't know where I will hang the poster yet, but my roommate said I could hang it in the living room. If I hang it in the living room I think that will defeat the whole purpose of the poster which I assumed to be for masturbation.

Normally I would be psyched about getting a poster of such a fine piece of jailbait. But lately I have come to the conclusion that my well known predilection for under aged girls maybe coming to an end. It might be because I am finally getting mature, but it probably has more to do with the fact that none of them know who Morris the cat is.


Seriously, it's almost like you can't have a conversation with one without explaining every other reference you make from the popular culture zeitgeist of 1970's TV. Furthermore, you can assume that they don't read the papers or watch the evening news, they get their news from the internet. And I think I don't need to tell you how I hate it when teenagers feign grown up feelings like nostalgia.

The boomer parents of Generation Y have a thing for nostalgia, and now their children feel entitled to it. I remember a few years ago Gen X got in trouble from all the weekly magazines (god they hate us) for an early case of nostalgia fondness. But at least when I say "that takes me back" I am not referring to 2006 and the whole S.A.R.S. scare. "I remember buying one of those surgical masks, it was like a way scary time to be alive." Christ, maybe Tom Brokaw had it right about the greatest generation thing.

(To the teens reading this blog on their palm pilots --Tom Brokaw was a news anchor on NBC --the network that Jerry Seinfeld started--back when people waited for the news to be read to them by an old white guy at 5:30 in the evening with their TV dinners you actually cooked in the non microwave oven because our mom's cared about our health way more than your moms care about yours.)

Sunday, June 22, 2008

I was a famous podcaster way before I was a famous blogger

WARNING... i WROTE THIS BOG POST dRUNK!

I might not be a famous blogger, but I am a famous podcaster. That shit is kinda ironic as my podcast is simply me reading my blog out loud to all you fuckers who can't read. I know that is most of you and I want to thank you dyslexic fucks for all your help making me famous on the internets. Just because you can't read doesn't mean you are useless to me.

My podcast over at Switchpod.com is number 23 on the top podcasts. I don't know if it is you who is ranking me so high, but thanks. I honestly feel pretty pumped ab0ut that. Yes, I am totally drunk, but that has nothing to do with me climbing the summit to one of the lamest top 10 lists for podcasts out there.

I am confident that the list is real as my ranking is only a 3.0 out of 5 which seems pretty reasonable. The highest ranking that any podcast has on switchpod.com is 3.3 so it looks like no one is gaming the system by ranking themselves over and over with 5's.

Even though I # 23 for Switchpod.com (they have over 6,000 podcasts) I saw only a modest jump in my statistics. I had about 50 extra downloads today. That is not a lot. This blog has had more than a 1,000 hits in a day before. I do have about 140 downloads this month which is double last month and we still have 1o days to go. If the trend continues I will get 500 this month which would be double the best month I have had. (update: I got nowhere near that only about 200 downloads for the month!)

Don't get me wrong. I am sure I won't stay on the list. But I am kinda excited that I was featured on the top podcasts from Switchpod.com. The ranking is based on reactions from listeners, so that makes it even more flattering. It's because of all you lame ass fags that I am getting famous.

Like I said, it appears no one is gaming the system. Since all you would gain is a few hundred listeners it would not be worth the effort anyway. If you suck you will quickly fall out of favor and drop off the list and 200 added listeners is not worth feeling like a schmuck by ranking yourself a 5 over and over again. I am absolutely blown away that this little podcast can be in the top 50 out of 6,000 plus podcasts. My blog has never gone matched that kind of success before.

Most of my "readers" have tons more hits and Google page rankings than I have. Maybe some of you should think about podcasting. I have been told my voice is creepy and maybe some of you will do better.

In other news my blog offends my friends....

At least two of my friends have come forward to tell me that they won't hang out with me because I blog about my real life and they don't want all their personal shit on the web. What is funny is that the two people have probably the least number of postings of all my friends and I am quite sure that they aren't hanging out with me for other reasons. Like maybe they don't have free time, or they think that I am way to cool for school.

The truth is that they are long time friends who I value way more than this blog and I have never exposed them by name, nor would I. A simple request to remove any offensive material would be all that is required or a request to not mention them or any contact with them would get them removed.

Now you know how to get your shit removed from this blog. I do tend to fall in love with what I have just written, but any writer will do that. I know that I am not at all loyal to any thing in the archives by more than a week. So call me. Write me. Yell at me if you want. This goes for my blog friends. I can alter the past because no one cares about history.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Self Help Podcast # 21

I was recording this podcast when I got interrupted by a phone call from work. They wanted me to pick my schedule for the upcoming week. I have to work 6 days next week. Not a big deal as I typically work 6 days a week so I can at least get near 35 hours.

When the phone call came I was watching Netflix online. I was watching a documentary, Stripped. The documentary is about a woman who goes undercover to work as a stripper and records her observations and those of her co-workers.

My co-worker wanted to know if I was jacking off while I was watching the movie. I told her that while the movie had a lot of nudity it was no an exploitation movie. The movie was directed by a woman, so it was not sexual it was informative.




What did I learn? Women who strip like money. Women who strip like the attention from men at first, it reminds them of daddy. They say so explicitly. But eventually women see the biological side of men. That we are erect penises. That we we are being sexual we don't need them emotionally. But then they get resentful of the men who want to connect emotionally with them. Because they have already given so much when they dance for men they are too tired to give anything more.

By the end of the movie most of the women are dead, or they are in comas. I assume that is why every time you go a strip club you see different women. They have a high mortality rate.

Go read Grace Undressed if you want to get into the mind of stripper. I suggest it even when she deleted my comment on her blog that indicated that if she publishes a book before me I would slit my wrists and it would be her fault. I guess ex-strippers don't have a sense of humor. Netflix thought I would rate this movie 2 stars out of 5. But I give it 3.75 stars.

And now here is a list of drinks in my fridge:
  1. coke
  2. dr. pepper
  3. milk
  4. bottled water
  5. red bull
  6. fresca
  7. barq's root beer
  8. big k cola
  9. big k lime-lemon
  10. bud select
  11. miller lite
  12. mich ultra
  13. minute maid orange aid
  14. mm fruit punch
  15. mm lemanade
  16. o'douls
  17. diet dr pepper
  18. light apple jiuce
  19. power aid
  20. fanta orange
  21. diet orange
  22. margarita mix
  23. protien shakes
  24. diet lemonade

Thursday, June 05, 2008

My frontal cortex is shrinking and my penis is not getting any larger to make up for it

My brain is shrinking. I guess that is the kind of thing that happens to you as you get older. I was reading an article from the Boston Globe that was explaining forgetfulness and that common feeling of having something on the tip of your tongue. I think you should read the article, but I forget why. I know I should worry a little bit more about that, but I am not going to. I do remember why I liked reading this story though, it's because it helped me explain why I can't remember proper nouns anymore. Something about how the frontal cortex goes looking for things your conscious mind forgets and how as you age you lose your mind (literally) and that's what makes recalling memories so difficult.

Before I read this article I assumed it had something to do with the dental work I had done on me a few years ago. Back when I had health insurance, the first thing I did was to have all my molars removed and replaced with some kind of toxic mercury compound. I never understood why mercury was considered toxic to humans except when you placed it in your teeth, but my dentist was a rather cute petite Asian lady who meant no harm.

I have lots of things to worry about other than my growing senility, like just how I am going to keep my ass under 215 pounds. I decided I needed to have a plan even though my plan in life has always been against having plans. I decided to be against plans after I read a few 'alternative' history books about Adolf Hitler and how he should have waited to attack the Soviet Union. According to all those alternative histories if Hitler never opened that 'second front' in the war he would have won WW II and then we'd all be speaking dutch or whatever Germans speak. Right then and there I decided that having a plan for anything was as bad an idea as a winter assault on Moscow. Bad.

All that is to say that I am going against my previous position and ban on plans by deciding to have a "plan" to join a local gym. The only way I can afford to join a gym is by cutting back on some of my expenses, because unlike the government I don't operate two sets of books, just one and that book says I am broke and the gym I am thinking of joining likes to make sure they stay profitable by refusing to let you cancel your membership. I figure I better darn well be able to afford joining the gym or I will end up paying hundreds of dollars I can't afford to my bank in overdraft fees.

I am not sure that joining a gym will really get me skinny. I think not eating does that. But at least you have to admit that you never saw this move coming. I like to do that to you. Set you up for something and then give you the opposite. I do that because everywhere else in your life you have trained the people, corporations, government, family, pets and Tivo to give you exactly what you want, when you want it. Well I won't do that for you. And it shows you just how low your self esteem is that you keep coming back for more.

Toodles,
Romius T. (AKA Mr. Buff_)

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

I have this idea about blogging about not having ideas and how you should probablly at least have an idea when you blog

I was going through my voice mail and I found one where a very nice sounding guy was telling me that I had entered a contest to win a Lincoln Navigator and he was just calling to tell me "he had some very good news." He went on to tell me to call some chick named Michelle or something and gave me a 1-800 number to call. I deleted the message or I would print her name and number on the Internet for people to harass her.

I know the guy is lying because I can't remember ever signing up for a contest to win a Lincoln Navigator and I always remember which contests I enter because I write down every contest I enter and check on the outcomes of the contests by sending postcards to the the address that promises to send you the names and addresses of the actual winners of the contest who never happen to be me.

One day I will take the list of names and addresses and a gun and do a little of what I like to call "god's work" on those folks who probably think to themselves that they are lucky and god is shining down on them. What they don't know is that god is simply preparing them for a test and that test comes with a 9mm and a pretty good aim. I was born is Texas Y'all.

Even if I thought I actually won a Lincoln Navigator I would not call that 1-800 number. With gas prices near 4 dollars and soon 5 I can't afford two cars, much less the 200 dollars it would take to fill up Ford's soccer mom station wagon on steroids.

None of this has anything to do with a new theory I am working on about how I should not be blogging about my inability to blog, but I wanted to let you know what goes down in the Romius T household on a daily basis.

Also, I can't remember exactly what I was going to say so instead I will just suggest you go and listen to a podcast from This American Life that covers everything you need to know about the Home mortgage crisis. I found it highly informative. Much more informative than the prank winning navigator calls I get left for me on my voice mail, and more informative than this messy post on stuff you aren't supposed to do anymore that never gets around to the thesis.

Monday, June 02, 2008

EYE BALLING YOU


Phillips Electronics recently applied for a patent for a "camera system to track eye movements of shoppers." I have one word for that. Offensive.

And as offensive as such a system would be it is even more frightening. What makes corporate America think they are entitled to knowledge like this?

Link Via Boing Boing!