(Don't) Kill Humans

Today was too hot for me. When it gets too hot, my brain shuts down. Unfortunately, my mouth doesn't. What results is a variety of ridiculous (more ridiculous than average, I should say) musings, most of which I can't remember. I know that my friend Mickey Bobicky was trying to decide whether to be concerned that someone would steal her bike seat after she locked it up, and I said, "You know what would be a good idea to deter someone from stealing a bike seat? Fake skid marks." This seemed reasonable and not gross at all at the time, because of my poor heat addled brain. There was actually a whole conversation that followed that I won't go into now. It was pretty riveting.

We also had a debate about whether walking on the grass might be cooler than the sidewalk, because you only hear about it being so hot that you could fry an egg on the sidewalk/road, not the grass. But, I also realized if you try to fry an egg on grass, it's going to be full of grass, which might be the main deterrent, not the heat factor. Mickey thought that she would prefer a grass egg. She was right, I realized, because of the added fiber. This is what happens to my conversations when it's too hot. It's not pretty.

Before the heat broke my brain today, I was scheming a scheme, as I am apt to do. I realized that my life has been relatively dreamless lately. Well, I've had dreams, I always have dreams, but most of them are either unrealistic or actually take work. As soon as I have to do work, it takes all the fun out of the dream. Okay, that's probably untrue, but I think what I'm trying to say is that I like levels to my dreams. There's my A number one dream, for example, graduating school and not living in a box, that my day to day life is devoted to. I don't give it much thought on a daily basis, because I'm just doing it, it's natural, like breathing and such. Breathing, although important and missed when gone, is not something I find particularly fun. That's what A dreams are, the breathing of dreams. Then there might be some B dreams, which are usually somewhat more flighty and not likely to happen anytime soon, like, I hope someone gives me a bag of money just for being me, or I'd like to go swimming in a giant pool of lime jello. My C dreams though, those are the ones I've been lacking lately. They're the ones that are short lived, and potentially achievable, but still have the risk of failure. For awhile, I filled my C dream void with guitar hero, until I got carpal tunnel syndrome (since healed, but do I really want to risk it?). Today, I filled it with the dream of forcing Bark Montes to read this very blog.

I know, in my original introduction of my robotic friend Bark Montes, I indicated that I would rather he not read it so that he didn't know that we were all planning on chasing him out of town with pitchforks. This was true at the time. Since then, I've realized that people are less inclined to form unruly mobs as I had previously hoped, one of the many reasons you should teach your children early on that humans will only disappoint them. As a parent, I'm going to plant the dream of becoming dolphins in their heads early on, in hopes of steering them into an educational direction where they will perfect technology to turn people into dolphins, at which point I will use my motherly guilt to force them to make me the first dolphin human. Then, as the first human brain introduced to dolphin society, I will be able to manipulate their minds, which though intelligent are not quite evil enough to understand human tricks of logic. Among the dolphins, I will rule as their Queen.

Back to Bark Montes. Since realizing that I will not be able to rid the city of his creepy robot ways (the layers, the horrible horrible layers), I am concocting a new plan. That plan is to convince him to read this blog. Why? Well, I'm not completely sure of how his robot mind works, but I think that it might have issues comprehending my many tangents. Then, while it searches for the proper algorithm to understand grass-eggs, I'll hog-tie him. Then I'll put him on some sort of cart, and to the cart, I will tie a bunch of chihuahuas. Then I'll leave for a bit while I find a gardening store that sells pitchforks. When I return with my pitchfork, I will chase the chihuahuas with it, which will lead to Bark Montes being wheeled out of town forever. It's ingenious in its simplicity.

He knows something's up though, because every day I tell him to read it, sometimes multiple times, and he always says he will, but he hasn't. I'll know once he does, because he'll probably say, "Bark Montes?!", then furrow his robot brow and shake his robot fist. I'll know that I'm in no danger from his threats though, because it's well known that most well constructed robots are programmed so that they can't hurt their human masters.

Back to my scheme. I've begun to ensure that every time my dear friend Bark Montes wanders into my vicinity, either in reality or in the world of the interweb, I will remind him to read my blog. "Read my blog, Bark Montes!" I will say, except I will use his real name instead of Bark Montes because if he knows his name is Bark Montes already, I will lose my ability to tell if he's read my blog. I had thought that Facebook chat messages would be enough to scramble his programming into believing that reading my blog is his paramount quest in robot life. So far, I have been wrong. But, today I realized, I'm just one person. But what if everyone who knew Bark Montes was sending him messages. I know, I know, you already said no when I asked you about the pitchfork thing. But seriously, this way you don't need to purchase a brand new pitchfork you'll probably only use once, but you can still be protected from the chaos that will ensue when he starts breaking down and his "don't kill humans" programming somehow loses the "don't". Think about it. Yeah, I already knew I was right, but it's nice to hear you say it anyways.

So, what do you do now? Well, whenever you encounter Bark Montes, say or type this "Have you read Sharon's blog yet? downtothefilter.blogspot.com" How simple was that? It just saved your life in the future.

Happy song of the day: I was in the store and heard the song Landslide by Fleetwood Mac, which is not really happy, but I've realized I've been encountering it a lot lately, so on this hot day it's the only one I can think of. It can be uplifting though, with a few small lyric additions on your part. Whenever it asks a question, the answer is "yes". And the part where it says a landslide brought me down, just imagine that it did, but that what it means is that a landslide was coming and you rode it like a water slide of snow and it was friggin' awesome until it delivered you right onto a heated patio where they had a delicious hot chocolate waiting for you. Actually, I've heard that song is about drugs, but I've heard that about most songs. I don't know much about drugs, but when I was 9, some cops came into school and taught us how to recognize a crack bottle. It was useful, because I found 2 or 3 on my street after that, and otherwise I probably would have been inclined to play with the creepy burnt garbage, which would have lead to a lifetime of drug addiction and crime. Thank you public education. The point is, I can spot a crack bottle from a pretty fair distance, and that song doesn't have anything resembling a crack bottle in it. That is what I know.

Wow, I really shouldn't blog on hot days.

Blogirthday!

Today, I have officially been "blogging" every day for 1 month. It's my blog birthday, or blogirthday! So much can happen in a month. I got taller, but then I shrank, and then I grew again. That might have been shoe related though, like most people I have trouble telling. I nearly went on a hippo bus, but then I didn't. Other stuff happened.

Unfortunately, some things that I wanted to did not happen. For example: I really wanted the name Bark Montes to spread like wildfire, but not so much...yet. I was also hoping that someone would come to me on the street and say "I read your blog, here's a bag of money. Oh, wait, no, actually, here's two." Then I'm hoping that no police officers randomly shoot me because that person is actually a bank robber just looking to frame me. And then I look again, and it's not a person, but a bear wearing pants. Damn, they tricked me again.

Speaking of pants, today I saw the greatest pants ever. I could have taken a picture, but it would have been much too awkward, since it was a close encounter in an empty and ugly hall, so I couldn't even pretend to be taking a picture of anything else. I will draw a picture though.



The colours might not be exactly the same, and the buttocks are a little too large, but this captures the basic impression the pants made on me. They were like a reverse mullet: Party in the front, business in the back. I wonder if they're for people with mullets that feel a bit unbalanced. Like, if they work at a bar then they'd have the back of their head trying to move them to the party, but the front is saying "No, business." It probably causes more neck issues than we hear about. But not with these pants! Now your posterior and anterior can be equally party and business. Mullets everywhere are rejoicing, delicately, because they don't want to re-injure their cervical spine.

At this point I'd like to mention one of the many ways that blogging has improved my quality of life. I was scanning my pant diagram, when I thought, "Why does my pant picture look so much like my drivers license?" Then I though, "Wait, that is my drivers license!" And thus, were it not for the magic of blog, I probably would have left my license in my printer/scanner/copier until the next time that I suddenly found myself without vital photo ID. Which would probably end up being somewhere important, like a court date for robbing a bank that was actually done by a bipedal bear wearing zubaz pants (see how I just improved your ability to imagine me being framed by the bear. I bet that's called something exciting, but I never payed enough attention in English. Let's just call it "onomatopoeia" because I find the real definition rarely lets me use that word in an everyday sentence. "You just onamatopeoeiaed the crap out of that balloon when you put that 'bang' caption beside it then popped it!" See how it just doesn't work.) (I just realized that maybe you don't need photo ID at a court date. I kind of figured you would, because most serious things you would, but maybe they'd just be like, "We trust you, because we all saw the news report and subsequent YouTube video of you resisting arrest, screaming 'It was the bears, the bears I tell you, you have the wrong species, and I'm not even wearing zubaz pants.'") (I bet it's fun to decipher back to back parentheses.)

After encountering the greatest pants in the history of pants (which is a long and sordid one), I met my friend Saylinds Selfish who was doing inventory in the strangest storage room in history. She showed me how she'd found a bottle of Vodka (keep in mind, this is a school storage room), right above a tube of lubricant (which actually makes sense at our school, but it's more amusing to me if I don't really explain why and let imaginations run wild). Earlier, she'd found a vial of blood. If I found a vial of blood, I would probably try to clone it. I'm not sure why I'd only do it if I found one (as opposed to took one), maybe because I like things like kindersurprises, because even though the toys are cheap, Surprise! My random vial of blood clone baby would be like that. Either I eat through the chocolaty outside and inside is an awesome toy car, or I get through and find some sort of random figurine of an angry dolphin (or something equally inane). Now that I'm really thinking this plan through, most of my life's kindersurprises have either ended up in the garbage, or I've stepped on them and carefully removed them from my foot to place in the garbage. I think society might frown on me if I do that with my kinderclone. Which I guess means you win, random vial of blood....this time.

You Can't Buy Happiness, Even if you Can Buy Monkey Butlers

It was my first day waking up on my BC trip, which means that I was up at 6am due my inability to sleep-in regardless of how late I stay up combined with a 3 hour time change. It was good because I got to see my brother Shamus before he went to work, but bad because then I spent hours waiting for anything interesting to happen. Periodically I would decide to try to befriend Alfred Von Bunnikins, but I think he must have somehow sensed my similarity to Elmyra from Tiny Toons and was smart enough to hide in his igloo whenever I came close.

Since the rabbit clearly wasn't planning on entertaining me, I found a book on baby names and leafed through it until it offended me, as tends to be the case with most books. It had a section on the first impressions that names make with lists of names under titles such as: "Arty", "Charming", "Friendly" etc. I thought, where are the negative adjectives? Then I found it, "Cranky". And what was there, nestled below "Doreen" and "Myrna"? None other than "Sharon". Really? And yet the name "Stormy" is under "Cheerful"? If I ruled the world, I would destroy all copies of this book. Wait, maybe my reaction is a bit cranky. No, I think it's normal, because that book was clearly out to get me. Also, evil.

It also had a list of famous pairs, I guess for those expecting twins. If I had twin boys, I probably wouldn't have much issue with naming them Bert and Ernie. They're solid names. I might call them Robert and Ernest for awhile, just to make it look like I didn't do it on purpose, all the while knowing that eventually someone is going to realize the obvious nicknames and then it will spread like wildfire. I guess it is true that some people shouldn't be allowed to have children, most notably my parents for giving me a cranky name.

So, after thinking about baby names for awhile, my mind drifted to yesterday, when I was at the Edmonton airport waiting for my connecting flight to Abbotsford and trying to steal WiFi to kill time. As you probably know, if you've read my other posts, I have no technical abilities, so I don't know how I did it, but I managed to get a few minutes of Facebook time in before it caught onto me and tried to make me pay. It was just enough time to notice a posting by my friend Birchington Wongstein that perked me up. I hadn't realized that I needed perking until I was perked, but was quite glad it had happened, because I really did need a good perking up, if only to allow me to overuse the word "perk" in my blog today.

When you wake up hours before anyone who might entertain you, it gives you a lot of time to think about things that perked you up (if you're wondering, I am trying to break the record for most instances of the word "perk" and its derivatives. It would probably be easier if I had some idea of what the record is, but I think I'm doing pretty well). Birchington is one of those people who doesn't really need to work to perk up someone's day. Once I tried to tell him this, but it didn't turn out well. First I tried, "You're special.....but not 'special' with quotations," then I went for "No, no, I don't mean it that way, I mean it more like you're precious....but not 'precious' with quotations." So, sitting there, WiFi-less, I spent the time thinking about the number of friends I've been lucky enough to have that can't be adequately described without a word that is also used in quotations when humoring "special" people.

I worry that this blog might be quickly descending towards a rather mushy side today, but I think I need to say that I feel like I spend a lot of time thinking about things that I want, like truckloads of money and monkey butlers. But, even a million monkey butlers could not replace knowing someone like Birchington Wongstein, Yelsel D'Stupid, Neyney Charmin, Byla Rong, Katarina Yashtastico, Bark Montes or the dozens of other magical people that I am yet to create clever pseudonyms for. Even if they were to all suddenly disappear from my life, I was beyond blessed to even know them for 2 seconds, so I should probably stop spending all my time thinking about how I might acquire an army of monkey butlers and appreciate what I already have instead. Yeah, I lied when I said I was worried about getting to mushy, because I totally went there, but I'm going to publish this anyways.

To make up for the mushiness, I'm going to tell you my truck stop laundry story. It begins with: Once I was doing my laundry with friends at a truck stop. There, we met a trucker, who we asked if we could drive his truck. He said he would be happy to let us, but didn't think we could handle the 18 gears. I think it was 18, it doesn't matter exactly how many though, because what really matters is that he then said, "That's more than I can count on my hands and feet." At that point you could see everyone looking at there hands and feet, trying to do some quick math in their head and thinking "Wait...somethings wrong..." After the proper timing for optimal effect he said, "That's right, I only have 2 toes" (or 3 toes or something...it doesn't matter, the point is, he was a trucker who was missing multiple toes and clearly used it as smalltalk on a regular basis.) The strangest part of the story is that I don't think anyone in our group thought to ask him how he lost his toes. Or, if they did, I don't remember it, which doesn't seem like me. I usually remember stories that involve anything being severed. So, like most of my stories, this has a lesson: If you meet a trucker and they tell you they are missing any organ or appendage, ask them how, because you'll regret it if you don't. I know I did.

Why is it so difficult to find a pitchfork when you need one?

I was walking in the park with a friend when I made a horrible discovery. As we walked along on the warm, sunny day, I had an irrepressible urge to path dance. Actually, that's a lie, because I did repress it; but what I didn't repress was expressing my desire to path dance aloud to my friend. "Path dance?" she said, completely unsure what I was talking about. "Yeah, you know path dance," I said, to which she responded with a blank stare.

It was then that, for the first time in my life, I realized: Not everyone has irrepressible urges to path dance. For those that don't, I may need to explain what "path dance" means. According to the dictionary, "Path dance: the act of dancing along a path as if you live in a musical, often combined with path sing, but can also occur with no discernible external source of music." (Please don't ask for references, because I obviously made it up and, seriously, do you really need to make this any more awkward than it already is?)

Up until this point, I had gone through life assuming that we all secretly want to path dance but just don't. But, if one person doesn't want to path dance, there are probably others. My mind was officially blown. Then I thought, what about hall dance? Subway dance? Grocery shop dance? No, not even public washroom dance? Really? Are these all yearnings that I alone am repressing? No, I don't think that could be it. Others are probably just double repressing. Like, it would hurt so much to suppress their need for random musical moments that they've managed to hide that desire from even themselves. Unfortunately, instead of comforting me, this explanation just made me very sad.

But, then I remembered my friend Bark Montes (Note: all names are changed...badly). He not only appears to want to randomly dance, but does it. Sometimes he'll just start dancing alone, completely out of nowhere. I wish I could post a video, but that might defeat the purpose of so cleverly disguising his identity.

This temporarily comforted me, knowing that I couldn't be the sole person on the planet who wants to randomly dance on a day to day basis. Then I remembered that I'm pretty sure Bark Montes is not human at all, but a robot.

There are many reasons for this theory. First, he wears many layers. Far too many layers. For a long time I tried to figure out why one would need so many layers, until I realized it was to shelter his chrome heart and muffle the sound of creaking in his robot joints. Second...oh wait, it's mainly just the layer thing. But I think too many layers is a good enough reason to assume that a person is a robot and make plans to run them out of town, hopefully with pitchforks, if we can find them (I hope Bark Montes isn't reading this, or, to be more accurate, downloading it into his robot brain, because it might ruin the surprise).

Pitchforks aren't as easily accessible as they should be. I have often thought "this job would be easier with a pitchfork" only to realize that I don't have one. To be honest, I've never looked that hard, because my pitchfork needs are usually pretty fleeting.

So, after much thought, my one hope that path dance might be normal turned out to be a robot. That led me to think: "Could I be a robot?" Probably not. First, I wear very few layers. Second, I often use bad grammar. Third, I'm afraid of bears. Fourth, no one has ever made my head explode with a logical fallacy, mainly I just silently judge them. For these reasons, it's pretty clear that I'm not a robot.

Sometimes, when I'm bored, I like to silently judge people. But, sometimes when I'm bored and lazy I like to just pretend that I'm silently judging them. No need to go through all the trouble of actually judging when you can make them uncomfortable without it. Shortcuts are fun.