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.

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.