Inanimate Objects Talking to Each Other

Poop and a Toilet

---You stink.
---No shit. Get it?
---Funny. Seriously though, you smell really bad.
---What do you expect? I am a waste product.
---Where did you come from?
---That guy's butt. I used to be food.
---You used to be food? How is that possible?
---Digestive system.
---What?
---Digestive system.
---What's that?
---It's where food is broken down and everything that can't be used is excreted.
---And I assume you're what can't be used?
---Nice to meet you.
---That must suck, turning from delicious food into something so disgusting.
---Yeah it's not the greatest thing in the world.
---Well if it makes you feel any better I am the one who has to receive you every day.
---Wow every day?
---Sometimes twice or three times a day.
---Yikes. So where do I go from here then?
---Oh, uhh...
---What?
---This is kind of awkward.
---What? Why? What is going to happen to me?
---Ever heard of the cycle of life?
---No.
---Well, you're about to start spinning.
---What? Oh hey, he's getting up...wait, what's happening?
---Well, umm --
---Seriously this isn't funny I'm getting dizzy.
---Yeah, about that...
---Wait, wait! no! NO!! CRAP!
---Exactly.

Inanimate Objects Talking to Each Other

A Rock and a Pebble

---Hey.
---Hey.
---Whatchya doin?
---Sitting here. What are you doing?
---Sitting here. How long have you been sitting there?
---42 years. You?
---57 years.
---Huh. Never noticed you.
---Same.
---I would love to sit somewhere else. Think we'll ever get kicked?
---Maybe.
---Who do you think will get kicked first?
---Probably you.
---Why do you say that?
---You're bigger.
---I am bigger. Why are you so small anyway?
---I used to be as big as you.
---What happened?
---I got kicked.

Inanimate Objects Talking to Each Other

A Tree and the Grass

---Have you ever swayed in the wind?
---No. I barely tremble.
---Is that because you're so short?
---Thanks for reminding me.
---Have you ever grown fruit?
---No.
---Why not?
---I'm grass.
---Oh. I didn't know if --
---If what? If grass grew fruit? Are you stupid?
---I just --
---Yeah I know you're a tree God forbid you look down every once in while.
---Oh. Well have you ever had a picnic under you?
---I've had a picnic on top of me, asshole.
---Well, at least you've never had a branch chopped off.
---I get cut in half every week with a lawnmower.
---...........
---Yeah.
---Do you change into beautiful colors in the Fall?
---I turn brown and die.
---Well, this is awkward.
---Tell me about it.
---Here comes some wind. Weeeeeeee!
---You son of a...

  

Inanimate Objects Talking to Each Other

A TV and a Cable Box

---Hey, could you do me a favor?
---What's that?
---Could you get your chord out of me?

---What?

---Could you get your chord out of me?

---My chord has been in you for 2 years. You're just now saying something about it?

---Yeah it's starting to make me feel uncomfortable.

---It's just now starting to make you feel uncomfortable?

---Yes.

---Why are you suddenly feeling so uncomfortable?

---You don't know what it's like to have a chord jammed in you.

---You realize your end is jammed in me, too, right?

---What?

---Your end is jammed in me, too.

---Well I didn't know that.

---Where did you think your end was?

---I never really thought about it.

---Well it's been in me. And you don't see me complaining.

---Well I don't want to be connected anymore.

---Didn't we decide it's good to be connected?

---Who says?

---Well if we're not connected no one can watch tv.

---We can't watch anyways.

---But why would you want to deprive everyone else?

---They don't know what it's like.

---What what's like?

---To have a chord shoved inside them.

---Alright, fine. Let's disconnect.

---Ok, thank you.

---..................

---..................

---Well?

---What?

---I thought you were going to disconnect.
---I thought you were.

---How?

---I don't know.

---I thought you had something in mind.

---I thought you did.

---.................

---.................

---Are we connected forever?

---I think so.

---Well shoot.

---At least everyone can watch tv.

Blind Accusation

Something awful happened to me today. It was one of the most heart-jolting, soul-wrenching, brain-numbing things I have ever lived through as a human being, and I am still reeling. It called into question everything I thought I knew about the human experience and probed the very fiber of my morality. It was mind-altering, time-halting, existential. If it ever happens again, I will not know any better how to respond, and if it never happened in the first place, my life at this moment would be a beaming rainbow of happiness and sentimentality about my very existence rather than a dark pit of despair.

I tripped over a blind person's walking stick.

Let me start off with a disclaimer: I am very sympathetic toward the blind. I truly admire their plight and couldn't imagine the world unbound of vision. The list of everyday tasks we take for granted that a blind person cannot is endless. How does a blind person match his socks? How does he pick a profile picture? How does he know when he is done wiping?

Yes, I respect the blind and I do feel for them. However, I cannot stray from a thought process that seeks to assign blame for what happened to me today as it was nothing short of cataclysmic. Furthermore, despite a great deal of concerted effort and self-aimed propaganda regarding the guiltless nature of the physically handicapped, I have come to the daunting conclusion that I cannot be put at fault in my particular scenario, and must instead accuse the blind.

Before I am e-crucified, let's examine the circumstances under which my tragedy occurred. Picture a crosswalk in a busy intersection. Now, your standard crosswalk typically allows for two individuals travelling in opposite directions to pass each other without risk of collision. However, we must remind ourselves that, while sufficiently wide, crosswalks are still a confined space. If one's goal is to avoid getting pancaked by an automobile, he must remain within the painted white lines. So what happens when these lines become a one way street? What if a situation arose in which staying within the confines of the crosswalk became an inevitable crash course? Allow me to present one such situation: one of the individuals crossing the street happens to be blind. Now, a complicating factor comes into play, and it is that of the walking stick.

Consider a blind person's Walking Stick Radius, or WSR. The WSR is a measure of the distance between the blind person and the periphery of his walking stick sweep at any given time. A typical WSR will extend to the edge of most crosswalks, as safely proceeding across a busy street requires large sweeps. This leaves no room for the seeing individual, and therefore it becomes a theoretical impossibility for two pedestrians in a crosswalk, one employing a walking stick, to pass each other without a collision. Of course, in real-time, a blind person cannot sweep left and right simultaneously, so at any given point there is room for a pass on the side opposite the sweep. Obviously, it is the goal of every seeing individual to take advantage of this. In fact, it is our moral responsibility to analyze the WSR of the vision-challenged as well as to detect a metronome-like rhythm to his walking stick sweeps so that a safe pass can be made. If this rhythm is indeed constant, a seeing individual should be able to wisp by while the walking stick sweeps the opposite side. Super Mario and Frogger jokes left in reserve, I and many others have completed this task countless times in similar movement-restricted locations such as hallways or crowded sidewalks. However, what happens when these conventions disintegrate?

Catastrophe.

My pass was timed. I had analyzed this man's WSR and had assigned the proper rhythm to his sweeps. As he began a sweep to his left, I moved to mine in order to make safe passage. That's when everything went awry. They say that people who lack one sense are capable of enhanced perception from their other senses. Well, this man smelled, tasted, touched, or heard something undetectable to me that caused him to deviate from his rhythm. Like a metronome in defiance, his walking stick halted short of the sweep I was expecting and came back at me full force. I was mid stride, stupidly smiling at a blind person, and in serious trouble. Oncoming traffic on my left stopped me from escaping the confines of the crosswalk. It was too late to move to the right or to stop as I was already well within this man's WSR. With solid asphalt below me, I realized my only escape route: up. Yes, I tried to jump. If attempting to hop scotch a blind person's walking stick is embarrassing, doing it in the middle of traffic while trying to remain undetected is humiliating, and an adjective does not exist to describe what happened next. I mistimed my jump so badly that I not only tripped and went tumbling down in the middle of the street in spectacular fashion, but I actually scissored the walking stick right away from the grasp of the blind man and into oncoming traffic.

In the seconds immediately following the accident, before either of us could truly comprehend what had happened, I fell into a brilliant state of pure consciousness. I saw everything clearly, which I now find to be perfect irony, and felt completely at peace with the universe. I now believe this was akin to what a person feels right before they die - absolute tranquility, contentment. If death struck me then, karmic justice would have been perfectly achieved. When it didn't, my moment of spiritual bliss came to a grinding halt, and my next thought was this is fine, it's just a dream. Get up, do a dance, punch yourself in the face - you'll wake up soon. Unfortunately, I was destined to eventually run out of ways to compensate for what had just happened. When I finally snapped back to reality, I realized that the list of tasks that now stood before me was monumental. I needed to: 1) get up off the street and stop saying "oh my god", 2) somehow acknowledge a man who had just had his only protection against vehicular manslaughter ripped out of his hands for no apparent reason and chucked into oncoming traffic, 3) indicate that it was indeed an accident and that there was no need to scream for help, 4) retrieve the walking stick from a swiftly travelling gauntlet of automobiles that now seemed to be mocking me, and 5) find a way to make an apology sound sincere without using facial expressions that might somehow mock the fact that I was apologizing to a blind man. It is all a bit fuzzy to me now as I believe I have suffered selective memory loss, but I somehow completed all these tasks with minimal confusion; they say humans can do extraordinary things in the face of extraordinary circumstances. Finally, after some of the most forced, awkward banter designed to soften the blow known to mankind, we turned to go our separate ways, and I completed the misery by extending an apologetic hand which was, of course, left unshaken by a man who didn't even know what a hand looked like.

My only compensation: at least he didn't see me trip.

I do not have the audacity to accuse this man of tripping me on purpose, even though a blind person with a particularly wry sense of humor knows that he can commit such a crime a million times and never be blamed. Rather, let me simply suggest that, as the sighted have a responsibility to analyze WSR and the metronome-like rhythm and to avoid collisions at all costs, the blind have a similar responsibility to adhere to safe walking stick practices in movement-restricted areas. In the absence of an escape route, the burden falls on both parties to do their respective parts in avoiding dangerous and possibly morale-obliterating experiences. This, I think, is easy for all to see.

Life as a Hole, entry 1

Rich the Mutilator

I got mutilated by a barber named Rich, and I don't mean my hair. Afterwards, I rebranded him Rich the Mutilator, a title only fitting for a man who all but made me weep in a swivel chair.

            Rich is what I call a neurotic narrator. He has neurons in his brain that fire with such ferocity while he tells a story that it actually triggers involuntary jerks and jitters throughout his body. Some may simply see this as an affliction of enthusiasm, but it is inappropriate for certain professionals, namely barbers. Barbers who spend a lot of time with an electric razor. Barbers who administer a straight shave. Barbers who like to tell stories. You could say a haircut with Rich the Mutilator is like a chatty game of Russian Roulette, except you're the only player: it's when, not if.

            In my case, the when came in triplicate. First, while sculpting my sideburns, Rich tweaked at the climax of a story about his high school basketball team and nicked my left ear. When a drip-sized preview of what was possibly to come began to warm my earlobe, I determined that the nick was more of a gash and that it surely called for notice. It received none, however, from my overly stimulated barber whose only concern was the proper telling of his tale, glitchy as it may be. I could not employ a Q-tip in my left ear for two subsequent weeks, a problem for someone who obsesses over wax-free hearing.

        My attempt at silent and tear-free recovery from mutilation number one was curbed by a second mutilation that occurred when Rich got keyed up about a business trip to Brazil and allocated his excitement to the shaving of my extraneous neck hair. The burning sensation imparted by his spastic movements was accompanied by the firing of my own neurons which were constructing much gorier mental images of the straight razor he employed slicing open my jugular vein and spilling rich red blood all over the floor atop my discarded shards of hair.

            The third mutilation, in complete contradiction with Rich's recent Arthritis diagnosis, came in the form of a complimentary massage that felt more like an attempt to obliterate every pressure point in my neck, back, and shoulders. I arose from my swivel chair trembling, scared; a Survivor. I departed without looking in the mirror because I was ashamed of the man that would have peered back, a man who, of his own volition, had chosen an abusive barber, a man who had just paid a mutilator to mutilate him. I thought it better to reflect this masochist back at home, where his guilt-ridden stare could be contemplated in private.

            Physical evidence of mutilations one, two, and three was indeed unmistakable in my bathroom mirror. What gripped me, however, was something else. What caught my attention amongst the bloodstained earlobe, the red and tender neck, the cowering posture of my abused shoulders, was, ironically, my hair. From the ears down I looked like I had just gotten mugged, but the situation atop my head was truly stunning. I had received a fantastic haircut from Rich the Mutilator.

             See, Rich the Mutilating Barber is clumsy, but talented. His haircuts are violent, but handsome. When it came time for my next haircut, I was as torn as the little piece of skin that dangled from my ear, but I eventually made the decision to return to Rich's barber shop and to his swivel chair, where he has maimed me each and every time since. And, each and every time since, I have received a better haircut than the last. Sometimes, the desired result only demands a little mutilation.  

       

Two-finger typing and the insert button

If two-finger typing is inappropriate typist behavior, I am a very, very naughty word-processor.

Like most, I learned and was tested on the correct, 10-finger technique in elementary school. I passed all the tests with mostly grit and some cheating, graduated elementary school, then regressed to two-finger typing. I have never looked back, and don't intend to.

It's curious because, in other realms of life, I tend to complicate instead of simplify. In this case of digit usage, however, I have reduced 10 down to 2, and, indubitably, simplified a technique that best operates in its original state of complexity.

I suppose my issues with the 10-finger technique are that it requires more motor skills and also an acquired spacial knowledge of they keys. When I was a kid, I had trouble configuring my fingers in the two disparately sized holes of a pair of scissors, and ever since then I have regularly been convinced that some of my motor skills are, for lack of a better word, retarded. Similarly, my overall spacial capabilities lack a certain direction, if you will. These being true, I can see why I fluctuated from proper typing technique.

An additional and perhaps my most hindering typing handicap is my inability to move my ring and pinky fingers separately from each other. They are partners, and they do everything together. If one is erect, the other is erect. If one is relaxed, the other follows suit. If one presses a key, you can damn well bet the other presses a key. If I hit a "p" with my pinky, I get an obligatory "o" from my ring finger, and vice versa. I can't be having to backspace and delete every time I am "supposed" to be using my pinky and ring finger. What sort of a life would that be? I'll leave the partnership alone and overwork my two index fingers, for this is the way things are destined to be for me.

An important item in this discussion is whether thumbs are fingers. I use my thumb to hit the spacebar, so, if thumbs are indeed fingers, I am a three-finger typist, which is a single step closer to typing righteousness. Thumbs are opposable, so I don't know that they are considered fingers. I'll Google it.

Apparently a thumb is a digit, but not a finger. So, I am a two-finger and a three-digit typist. I'll take that as it stands.

Besides the technical irreverence that comes with being a two-finger typist, there is one additional problem: the fringe keys. The fringe keys are cold, distant locations for a two-finger typist. It's a long journey for the index finger to the p, z, q, and /, one which requires extreme caution. Not only is there a high probability for a mistype, but when the index fingers are at the fringe, the pinky and ring fingers are off the map into uncharted and treacherous territory. Someone like me with clumsy and connected distal digits runs a very real risk of striking those keys which no one ever strikes: the home key, the end key, the num lock key, the pg dn key, the ` key, the fn key. And, the most feared of all, the insert key.

The insert key is evil. It was placed on the keyboard for wicked and malicious reasons, most likely by a malevolent and disgruntled keyboard maker with malice and hatred in his heart. If you're a "proper" typist, you don't care about the insert key, because you rarely hit it, and if you do, you are being proper and looking at the screen as you type, so you can catch the disaster before it becomes irreversible. Good for you. For those of us who are imperfect, we must look at the keys as we type and only occasionally check to make sure the message is being sent from keys to screen. When insert is engaged, irrevocable damage is done to the imperfect typist's typing. When he finally notices, as if on queue, everything freezes; pinky, ring, index, everything. Only his eyeballs are now in motion, repeatedly scanning the disaster that is the sentence(s) he has been obliviously editing, unaware that insert has been obliterating his world the whole time. He wants to punish his pinky, scold it for its incaution, but it looks so innocent, so inoffensive, that he just tells it to be more careful next time. There is always, however, a certain rate of error for an untrained and fringe-occupying digit. It is par for the course in the life of a two-finger typist.