Things I Hate, Natural Born Jerks

I have never understood those people who are natural born jerks. What kind of a plan is that?
Maybe, just maybe, I could see someone doing a jerkish thing if they thought some gain might come their way because of it. Oh it would still piss you off and probably be low down or underhanded, as jerkish things most always are. But if they thought they would gain something from it then maybe you could understand their reasoning in doing it. This kind of a jerk is not a natural born one though, this is more of an “Opportunity Jerk”. They seize the opportunity to be a jerk if they see that it can benifit them or maybe a friend or someone in some way. This is NOT the kind of jerk that this blog is about and was only mentioned here in order to more clearly define the type of jerk that this blog IS about. So we shall leave the Opportunity Jerk (OJ) here and move on to the heart of the matter.
Natural born jerks, from here on referred to as NBJ’s, are the kind of people who go around pissing you off for no real gain to anyone. These are the most loathsome people on the face of the earth.
Most people have a sort of neutral starting point, or even a positive starting point, from which they recieve new persons into their life.
Think of it like this, let’s say that you just started a new job and you’re getting to know your new coworkers. Most people are friendly and helpful and will go out of their way to help you out. These people have a positive starting point. They remember when they were in your shoes and how much it sucked and are willing to help you have a better time of it than maybe they had.
Then some people aren’t over eager to point things out or give advice. They won’t sit with you at lunch when they see you sitting all by yourself. But, if you ask them questions or for their opinion on something they will then open up a little and, usually in a friendly enough way, help you out. These are people who have a neutral starting point. They could become friendly or they could become real bastards but that depends on you and if they like you or not.
Then you have the NBJ. These are the people who remember how much it sucked to be in your shoes and are determined to make it one hundred thousand million times worse for you. They don’t show you how to do anything and when you do it wrong they point out to everyone, at a meeting for example, how pathetically helpless and obviously stupid you are. When they see you sitting by yourself at lunch they not only don’t go and sit with you but loudly make comments like, “I see you’re sitting over there with all your friends!” or “Maybe if you would acquaint yourself with some soap and water you wouldn’t be so lonely!” or they will wait for someone to enter the room and say “Don’t sit with the new guy. Man, we were all over there a minute ago and he let one rip that would have choked a skunk!”
Now one must ask ones self, why would anyone act this way? What possible benefit is it to a NBJ to do these things? I myself always look at things from what effect they may  have in the future. If I’m a jerk to everyone then why would anyone be willing to help me out if I ever needed it? So do NBJ’s never need other peoples help or do they just assume that people will lend them a hand no matter what?
I have used the new employee example here, to illustrate, but NBJ’s take on many, many forms.
They are the people who nearly run you off the road while talking on their cel phones or they continue chatting on their phone while walking through a construction site and then glare at the jackhammer operator like he is a jerk for making so much noise while they’re trying to talk on the phone. Oh boy, cel phones bring up millions of possibilities.
They give waiters and waitresses a hard time simply because they are the customer and they can. Even at Friendly’s or Denneys they act like they’re at some high end place and complain about the service.
They pull up to a drive through ATM at 4:30 and commence to inserting and reinserting and then rereinserting their card and once a receipt gets spit out they won’t go to a parking space to try and figure out what’s going on, because then they would have to go to the end of the line, they just sit there balancing their checkbook and reconciling their bank statement and then they rerereinsert their card and by this time you have gone so you don’t know how many more insertions were actually carried out.
They go to the grocery store and leave their cart right out in the middle of the aisle where no one can get around while they walk over to the shelf and begin perusing the items. Meanwhile you’re trying to get around their stupid cart and finaly have to push the thing to the side and they whip their head around and glare at you for having the audacity to lay your dirty, stinking hands on their cart. The thing is obviously too inconvenient for them to have in their way over at the shelf but how dare you act like it’s inconvenient to you sitting in the middle of the aisle.
Well that should be a good enough description to get my point across. I’m sure you’ve all ran into them and thanks for letting me get this off of my chest.

Live Your Life And Let Others Live Theirs

I was recently watching the Antiques Roadshow (yes, I know I’m a bore) and saw an interesting item that made me long for the good old days.

This person had brought in their grandpa’s ashtray which had been given to all passengers on the Hindenburg to commemorate their flight on this iconic airship.
Now most of you probably know this but for those who don’t, the Hindenburg was a zeppelin from Germany that made trans Atlantic flights until bursting into flames and crashing.

This ashtray had an arm like half an arch sticking out over the tray and hanging from the arm was a glass replica of the Hindenburg. Here is the best part of all. The glass replica of the Hindenburg hanging out over the center of the ashtray was filled with the fuel that the airship’s engines were burning to get everyone to their destination.

Only in the 1920s would you be able to get away with that one.

We are supposed to live in a free country but since everyone is so worried about what everybody else is doing, or not doing, you can barely move without breaking some law, regulation, statute, code or getting sued by somebody.

I have to put my two kids in a child seat to transport them in a car and I had better be wearing a seat belt myself while doing the transporting, or I’m breaking the law. In a “free” country shouldn’t one of the simplest freedoms, that should all but be taken for granted, be choosing for yourself how you are going to ride in a vehicle that you own. Whether I’m wearing a seat belt or not concerns not one other single living being but myself and presents a hazard to no one but myself.

Man when I was a kid we used to jump back and forth from the front seat to the backseat. We used to lay up on the back dash (cars actually had those back then) and wave at the people behind us and just stare up at the clouds. A really good time was standing behind the driver seat while your brother stood behind the passenger seat and taking turns jumping so that you rocked the car from side to side while going down the road at 50 mph. Never do that while dad was driving though. That was too dangerous for us.

We used to sit in the bed of a pickup truck. While it was moving! GASP! We even sat up on the side of the bed and the wheel wells! Sometimes we would take the tailgate off and dangle our legs out over the back bumper!! OH STOP THE TERROR!!

Our swing set was an old metal tube contraption that when you would get swinging too high one leg would rear up into the air because it wasn’t cemented in the ground. No one died from it.

Oh sure, you would almost shit yourself sometimes when you really pushed it and you thought for a split second that the whole thing was going over like a sinking ship, keeling up to begin it’s final voyage to the murky depths. But that was what made it fun. Without that little moment of terror, swinging would be boring and you would lose interest in it. That little bit of sheer horror proved to you that you were alive. You learned that it was fun to push yourself. In the occasional instance where you did get hurt, you learned to pick yourself up and carry on because who knew what other delicious little terrors awaited your discovery and you would miss out on them if you just lay there.

Unsecured and or improperly secured swing sets are probably in violation of our towns code and even if they weren’t, if someone saw our kids swinging like this they would most likely sue us, thus depriving our kids of the chance to prove to themselves that they really are alive.

Twelve kids died from improperly secured swing-sets in 1972 (I’m just making these stats up to be facetious) so therefore no other kid shall ever have the privilege of swinging on improperly secured swing-sets ever again. No matter how fun it may be. Being a parent myself, I could not imagine the loss someone would feel to lose a young child, or any aged child for that matter. In the course of living our lives though we face certain dangers and must deal with them and not become locked up from fear of them. We can’t forgo living life for fear that life will end. Because it most definitely will one of these days. It’s unavoidable.

You have to live your life in a “best case scenario” mind set. Sure people have accidents and are killed on our roads and at their jobs everyday but if you lived what amounts to ninety-nine point nine percent of your life in fear and terror of what might happen in that last point one percent, your life would be dull and terrible.  Your life would be summed up as existing solely for that last point one percent which you had lived in fear of and which may or may not happen.

Why don’t we just pass one big law that says no one is allowed to live? That would pretty much sum up all the laws that dictate to me what I can and can’t do in and with my own home. What I can and can’t do with my own body. What I can and can’t teach my kids. Etc. etc. etc.  The ultimate irony though, would be that in a world so restrictive as to not be worth living in, with living it’s self illegal, it would still be murder to kill someone and suicide to kill yourself.

I believe that much anger and argument in today’s social issues revolves around some childish need to force others to admit that you’re right. For instance, the tired old Creation Vs Evolution argument. I personally feel that there is an intelligent design to the universe but if someone else believes that evolution is the ticket, I’m not going to make it my goal in life to get Evolution declared illegal or sue them over it. It all comes down to an intellectual ego that needs to be superior to the other. After all, if someone proved beyond a shadow of a doubt one way or the other, the sun will still come up tomorrow and my kids would still need food clothing and shelter and neither theory has done anything towards helping me or anyone else get through our daily lives. Yet some people get really pissed when they hear on the news that some school is teaching this or that. Neither way helps them in the real world. Proof of their way proves their intellectual superiority.

It’s the same if my neighbor decides to paint his house electric blue and orange. I would have to consider that it was his adult decision, that appealed to his particular tastes, applied to his home that through his labor alone became his, that led him to do this. I would never paint my own home in such a fashion but it is not my place to demand that others adhere to my tastes.

Do you believe in Evolution? I don’t care. Do you believe in aliens? I don’t care. What I am not saying is that nothing is important. What I am saying is that if you have followed some course of logic that has brought you to the conclusion that Bigfoot is gay and thinks that the Easter bunny is a bad influence on kids because L Ron Hubbard was the real savior then you are more than welcomed to draw that conclusion and I still don’t care.

I would be happy to hear your opinion and share mine with you but if you go home still believing the old L Ron Hubbard gag then more power to you. I’m not going to go out and try to get a law passed forbidding you to believe it. I definitely won’t lose any sleep over it and I probably won’t even try to sue you.

Fires of Hell Linked To Global Warming

Yes, the Earth is getting hotter. Yes, mankind is to blame. Not for the reasons you’ve been led to believe by the media though.

The popular belief, portrayed by the media, is that we humans release too much carbon into the atmosphere through our burning of fossil fuels blah blah blah.

How stupid is that explanation? Very.

The real reason the Earth is getting hotter is because Satan is stoking the fires of hell in preparation for our arrival. And yes, mankind is to blame because we have given satan cause for ramping up the hell fires.

Let Al Gore make a movie about that.

A Planet Of Playthings

I want to know why nothing ever works out to my benifit. Not just my benefit but our benefit. Our, being the human race.
Why is it that the laws of nature or the universal standard or whatever you want to call it, always works against us?
For instance, if you eat Moon Pies three or four times a day, everyday, you will die. Same goes for Goo Goo Clusters, Baby Ruths, Butterfingers, Twinkies… The list goes on and on. Why does it work that way?
The pleasure receptors in my brain say that eating this stuff is good so I do it. And I die. What kind of plan is that?
Supposedly scientists say that the pleasure sensation is what pushes us to do mother natures bidding, such as having sex to reproduce the species. So mother nature figures that if she makes sex pleasurable then we will do it more than we even have to, to keep the species alive. And she’s right. We do. And this is good for all of us all around. But beyond the reproduction of our species, pleasure receptors in our brains are more like little Greeks hiding out inside their Trojan horse just waiting for the chance to do us all in.
These pleasure receptors tell us to eat too much and get fat and die. They tell us to engage in snorting, drinking, smoking and injecting pleasurable substances into our bodies, until we die. They urge us on to over indulge in the very reason we have them, reproduction instincts, until we catch some horrible disease and die.
That’s just from the inside.
From the outside we also have just about everything working against us. First and foremost is the fact that every animal’s deepest need is to eat and, in a lot of cases, we could be that meal. Why can’t we all just get along?
Just today I was dusting and it just seemed like a futile, never ending endeavor. I couldn’t help but think that it just figures that good old mother nature would have to go and make the earth out of dirt. The one thing that causes so much extra work in trying to rid ourselves of it. You have to shower to get it off you and you have to vacuum and dust and sweep to get it out of your house.
Wouldn’t a nice glass earth have done the trick just fine? Then there would be no dirt to get everywhere and turn into mud when it rained. No dusting, no sweeping, no vacuuming…. no showering.
It would be sunny twenty four hours a day because when the sun was on the other side of the world it would just shine right on through the earth and we would all be warm and sunny all the time.
Scientists could more easily find the massive quantities of oil that I require to keep my SUV running and my house air conditioned because all they would have to do is literally “look” for it.
We could start manufacturing large quantities of super glue and storing it out in space somewhere so that if the earth is ever hit by an asteroid we could just glue it back together. But everyone must understand and accept the fact that there WILL be that one little sliver of earth that we will just not be able to find in order to glue it all back together like new. Oh and everyone also should understand that no matter how well our repairs of earth are carried out, it will be noticed by some geek appraiser from Antiques Roadshow. A good rule of thumb for future generations would be to just not take earth on the show to have it appraised, no matter how old and rare they believe it to be. They’re just setting themselves up for disappointment.
The biggest advantage to having a glass earth may just be the fact that we could look up the dresses of all those little Asian women.
I’m just saying that it just seems like there could be one thing that would work out in our favor but have you ever heard of a virus that miraculously returns everyone to the state they were in at age sixteen? How about a cigar that opens up the lungs and has a regenerative effect on the alvioli? What if chocolate was a fat burner that made you lose weight and added twenty years to your life?
These are kind of big things that I guess would be too good to come true but what about a little thing like straightening up the earth so that it is a constant seventy degrees year round everywhere? Or maybe just not getting fat from eating those frozen, caramel covered, chocolate turtle pies everyday of your life? Maybe gaining just one or two IQ points over the course of your life that could solidly be linked to having watched every episode of “The Simpsons”?
Ok, if I could just have one plus I would ask that peoples singing voices not develop until they are at least twenty-eight so that we will never have to be subjected to another “New Kids On The Block” or Brittany Spears or Jessica Simpson or any of those sappy adolescent droners.

Things I Hate, Dishwasher Safe

There are certain kitchen use type items on the market that carry a little note on them advising you that they are safe to place in your dishwasher. Some items make no mention what so ever as to their dishwasher status and yet others strongly caution you against putting them in the dishwasher.
I never look for these little pieces of advice.
I let the dishwasher sort them out for me.
I don’t have time to read every little note on every single cup or bowl or plate before putting it in the dishwasher. Can it not be assumed that if I run something through the dishwasher and it comes out in pieces that it wasn’t dishwasher safe? Good! Once it is identified as so, then it doesn’t make much difference if it’s broken because it was going to wind up in the trash anyway. I need dishes that are as tough as I am. Dishes that don’t need any special attention.
“Get your candy ass in there with the other dishes and stop whining about special treatment!” I say.
I hate people who think that they are special and need treated differently than anyone else, so why would I accept it from a bunch of dishes? I paid for those dishes. I OWN those dishes and if I want them in the dishwasher then that is where they damn well will go. If they can’t hack it and wind up breaking or cracking then good. At least the weaker, non hackers will be weeded out. Then the survivors will have proved themselves worthy of bearing my next plate of Hamburger Helper or my next bowl of Top Ramen.
What’s in a dishwasher that makes it such an unsafe place anyway? You got some water a little arm that sprays that water around…. Where is the danger? It seems a lot safer than being banged around in a sink before being attacked with a steel wool scratch pad. I mean, it’s not like there are wild animals or little kids (basicly the same thing, I know) roaming around in there.
Who would make a dish that can’t be put in a dishwasher anyway?
Gee, I think we should design a really cool car with all kinds of neat features but it can’t be ran through a car wash. NO!
Let’s creat a delicious cake mix that can be mixed up and baked at home. Oh, but you can’t mix it with an electric mixer it must be done by hand. NO!
I think the whole non dishwasher safe thing is just a way for companies to make you think that their dish is just a little finer than your other dishes.
It’s a premium, delicate dish that must not, under any circumstances, go in a dishwasher. How harsh. How unrefined. A dishwasher. Not our dish. It would scrub the fineness right away if it were ever introduced into the hostile lower class world of a dishwasher. That’s where your coffee mugs go and all those Coke glasses you got with your meal at McDonalds for only a $1.99 more when you supersized it. Go ahead, put your glass ashtrays in there and your plastic cups that your beer came in at the last baseball game that you were too cheap to just throw away. No, our dish was meant for higher things than those lowly “trailerpark” dishes. Therefore, we demand you treat them as such.
Whatever.
I still say, “Get your candy ass in there with the other dishes and stop whining about special treatment!” “I OWN you so I’ll be the one in charge here!”
Fortunately my wife has never entered the room while I was having it out with one of these dish snobs. She may find my exchange of words with dishes a little disturbing so it’s best that she not be subjected to it. This is one of those areas I believe to be “Mans” work or “Dirty” work. It’s more pleasant if the women folk were left oblivious to this crude and sometimes cruel fact of life. You know, like it’s the man of the house who must put the old, blind and struggling family pet out of it’s misery or the man who must put down the horse who’s broken it’s leg or it’s the man who must deal with the bat that’s flying around your ho………well, come to think of it, I don’t think bats….. never mind. You get the picture right?
While I’m on the topic I feel I should go ahead and point out that clothes are the same way. They try and tell me how to wash MY clothes. Well the day that they start paying for my clothes is the day I’ll follow their directions in how to care for them.
I take an arm load of clothes and pack them in the washing machine and pour a cup of Tide over the top and turn the thing on and walk away. When it is done I pull the wet clothes out and stuff them in the dryer, throw in a dryer sheet, turn the thing on and walk away. When the dryer is done I slowly use each item out of the dryer as I need it. Why take up drawer space and time when the clothes are perfectly safe and protected in the dryer?
(The same goes for the dishwasher. Once it is done, what’s wrong with just using clean dishes out of the dishwasher? It is a kind of cabinet isn’t it? Probably a more convenient cabinet than your real cabinets because it has those racks that slide in and out for easy access.)
If I pull out a shirt that shrunk or underwear that have turned blue or red then good. It’s best I find their weakness out now than to find out they’re going to fail me while I’m wearing them. I can get rid of them and replace them with the tough and worthy kind of clothing that I demand.
Don’t let the people who take your money tell you what to do. If you’ve paid for that stuff and you own it then you have the right to do with it as you see fit. If their product can’t stand up to the test then don’t buy it anymore. Get something that is as tough as you are.

Mony Mony Syndrome, A Pop Culture Theory Of Everything

I have this theory that I use the aweful Billy Idol song “Mony Mony” to illustrate. I refer to it as the “Mony Mony Syndrome”. Now don’t be offended if you’re a Billy Idol fan because I consider myself to be a Billy Idol fan. There really is no good explanation for his producing such a shining turd of a song as this “Mony Mony” number.
Alright, the theory is that every time I am at a dance or club or something and the song “Mony Mony” comes on everyone screams and rushes out on the floor and begins furiously dancing, as if their lives depended on it. Now we know that the song “Mony Mony” really, really, tremendously, in every way one can think of, sucks. Whoever talked Billy into recording it, whoever had a hand in arranging it or performing in it, whoever even lended him their support in the project should all have their asses removed to prevent them from spreading this kind of dump anywhere else, ever again.
I thought that recording a song involved some sort of high tech magnetic tape that captures the converted electrical signals fed through super sensitive microphones. But it seems that some times , if you leave some blank tape laying around and your cat takes a big old dump on it because you haven’t cleaned out the litter box in three months, a process can occur that distills the essence of those cat turds into magneticly stored information. Kind of like quantum tunneling or something. When you put the dumped on tape into a player out comes “Mony Mony”.
So knowing this, why do people pretend that it is one of the greatest dance songs ever written?
I think that somewhere along the line some person who was really popular but obviously tone deaf must have genuinely liked to dance to the song. Everyone else saw Mr or Miss popular going nuts over this song and thought that it must be the cool thing to do and, not wanting to be seen as uncool, they flocked onto the dance floor as well.
That was the seed incident and soon it spread to where everyone believed that it was a sign of coolness to flock onto the dance floor when this shi… I mean, song, came on.
If you had a device to read the minds of the people dancing to this song you would pick up stuff like, “Man this song sucks but hey, I’m cool.” and “Please, dear God, let me fall dead of a heart attack. I can’t take much more.” and “I’m almost to the point of accepting being a social outcast if it means never having to hear this sh*t again.” and “HOLY SH*T, did this guys cat sh*t on this tape or what?”
The meat of the theory is that in a room of a hundred people, if the percieved to be coolest person said that eating fecal matter was cool, you would have 99 people miserably eating fecal matter and pretending that it was prime rib.
This theory would explain why everyone pretends to even slightly care what Nicole Richie or Paris Hilton are up to. Why anyone would even consider purchasing any of that ugly F.U.B.U. garb. Why anyone would pay the asking price for Polo, Nautica or Tommy Hilfiger stuff. Why the Back Street Boys, 98 Degrees, NSYNC, Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera, or any of their ilk, haven’t starved to death by now as they damn well should have. Why people fork over two dollars for a half liter of water in a plastic bottle. So on and so on, you get the point.
I don’t want it to seem that I am picking on this generation in particular, it’s just that this is the most recent setting in which Mony Mony Syndrome has chosen to raise it’s ugly head. To be fair, my own generation, the generation that fanned the flames of “Mony Mony” hell to begin with unfortunately, was just as guilty. We were Mony Monyed into wearing multiple bandanas tied up and down around our legs. We were Mony Monyed into wearing leg warmers and tights (the girls at least) (Oh, and Richard Simmons). We were Mony Monyed into wearing jelly shoes and Keds (again, the girls) (and maybe Richard Simmons who knows). We were Mony Monyed into not only buying a Swatch but also the little rubber “Swatch Guard” that protected the face from getting scratched. Some people were Mony Monyed into buying many, many Swatches and wearing them all at the same time. We were Mony Monyed into wearing red or black patent leather jackets with a thousand zippers all over them. We were Mony Monyed into Members Only jackets, Izod shirts, Bugle Boy jeans, The United Colours of Benetton, LA Gear shoes, Le Tigre clothing, Jams and clam diggers, MTV, Alf, Atari, and maybe most unforgivable of all, New Kids on the Block because they helped open the door for the above mentioned “artists”.
It is my deepest hope that now you have read and hopefully understand the theory behind Mony Mony Syndrome, you will be able to detect it’s onset and defend against it in yourself. Do not rely on the support of freinds and those around you because Mony Mony Syndrome preys on peoples silence about what they truly think and feel, and fear of others opinions of them. Most often your friends will believe you are testing their coolness if you express an opinion that goes against the Mony Mony mindset. Therefore, they usually will not express a true opinion for fear of being “found out” and will simply quote the widely held Mony Mony opinion. You must do it for yourself, by yourself.
Join me today, in this fight against a terrible and debilitating syndrome. The fight can be won but it will take the efforts of all of us. The reward is a world for your children where Mony Mony Syndrome has gone the way of Smallpox and Polio and the Dodo.
Remember, for yourself by yourself. And besides, it would be the cool thing to do. Mwah ha ha ha.

Some Tips On Naming Your New Grooming Business

I don’t know why I let little meaningless things get to me. Ok, actually that’s a lie because today I figured it out. It’s because of the stupidity demonstrated by the people who are to blame for these meaningless little things.
Today, while traveling on the road, I came across at least three businesses, and I use the term loosely, with cute, pun riddled, disgusting names.
It pisses me off that some asshole can open a business washing dogs and name it something like “Shampooch” or “It’s Pawsible” or “Fur Heavens Sake”.
Am I the only one that goes by one of these places and gets pissed? Does everyone else drive by saying, “Ha Ha Ha Ha. Shampooch. What a cute name.” Or maybe they think it’s a “fun” name or clever or something. I think it sucks and it’s stupid.
Do these people that come up with these names not realize that they are not original? That’s what pisses me off. You give your business a name like that to be original but by naming it like that you are just following the same old pattern set 250,000 years ago by some caveman named Ug who opened the first dinosaur grooming business and named it “Dino-Mite Groomers”.
The same goes for these small time hairdo places with names like “The Mane Attraction” or “A Touch of Elegance” or “Cut Ups”. Mane and Elegance seem to dominate this field as necessary elements in the business name. I assume the association of “Mane” in this field is between your head of hair and a horses mane. I also assume the association between the owner of this business and a horses ass.
Another classification of businesses guilty of naming stupidity are antique and craft stores with names like “A Moment in Thyme” or “Thyme and Again”. For some reason they also think it’s really clever to spell “Antiques”, Anteeks. Or they like to write the “q” and the “s” in “Antiques” backwards, which I cannot demonstrate for you since my keyboard doesn’t give me that option. Do these people think that just because something was made a long time, oh excuse me, thyme ago that the people who made it were idiots? The people who made these things way back then were not idiots. The people selling the stuff now are the idiots.
Please forgive me for such a cynical blog but somebody had to say something sooner or later. Also, please don’t ever open a business and delegitimize it by naming it something fun or cute because you will not be seen as fun or cute. You will be seen as an asshole.

Why I’ll Never Be A Real Man

For years I was a real man. I played football in high school. I served in the Marine Corps for six years, with Second Marine Division for most of them. My unit even had Recon in it’s name. My fellow Marines and I downed more than our fair share of beer and spirits and we chased women while out on the town. The Oakland Raiders are and have always been (even when they were in LA) my favorite football team.

During all this time I never drank hot tea and I drank coffee only black or maybe with just a little bit of that fake powdered creamer in it. Just as a side note, I found out in the MarCor that the powdered creamer was very flammable. If you sprinkle it over a flame it flares up like the fires of hell. That just seemed to make the idea of putting it in your coffee even more man like.

The reason I can never be a real man is because my wife introduced me to this tea called Chai. I love the stuff and in going to the unmanly coffee shop where it is served I… OK, OK, I admit it. I got hooked on Lattes and Cappuccinos and all that femanine crap.
I get to the place and order a Caramel Latte and when I get it I slip off to the corner and drink. After the first couple of sips have satisfied my jonesing I wallow in self loathing and misery.

How did I get reduced to this? What if my old MarCor buddies could see me now? Good old hard core Marine Corps Steve, sitting in the corner of some yuppie, high class coffee joint sipping on a Caramel Latte. They would probably ask me if I had a buck in my European Carry-All  that I could loan them so that they could walk down to the Exxon and get a cup of black, truck stop coffee and drink in their man-nes. They would ask me to walk along with them but I might get a stone in my Birkenstocks and hurt my poor little foot.

I keep looking around to see if there’s anyone I know in the place. Thankfully, I haven’t ran into anyone yet.

So here I sit in misery. Longing for the good old days of manhood when field coffee served out of big 50 gallon urns was good enough for me.

I try to blame others. It’s those dang old flavoring makers. They put opium or something in that stuff. Maybe it’s nicotine to make it as addictive as cigarettes. No, No. It’s those girls at the counter. That one looks like a crack whore who wouldn’t think twice about dropping some crack into your drink. What am I doing? Man I need help.

My mind wanders to what humiliations are probably in store for me. I see myself at Bed, Bath and Beyond looking for that perfect set of sea shell soaps to put on the back of the toilet. I see myself attending Longaberger parties and getting catty when someone else wins that retired basket I have been after for months. Dear God, what if I end up at Bath and Body Works chatting about how simply delicious it is to sit in a hot bath with that lavender chamomile bath salt in it?

Once I was able to go for about six weeks with just plain coffe but I had to add those little green cups of Irish Cream flavored creamer. I thougt I was getting somewhere when some guy watched me add that Irish Cream flavored creamer and said, “Hey man this ain’t Starbucks or something”. That sent me toppling right back down into the corner of the coffee house with a Caramel Latte.

For now, I guess I’ll have to just live with this curse. But if the words written here can save even one other mans manliness, then at least I will have accomplished something.