On Religion

I understand that religion draws much of its power from explaining things to people who need things explained. Mostly, these are things like "What is the purpose of life?" and "How do I find meaning in a seemingly cold, finite existence that is but a blink in the eye of the measurable universe?" You know, philosophy.

Then there are people who make me think that if you're going to make the decision to be part of a religion, you'd best pass a test evaluating your competence to comprehend and distinguish things like parables and literalness. Example:

I don't mind having to explain to you that the King James bible is a translation commissioned by the court of King James of England in 1604 in order to further distance the Church of England from the Catholic church, who still performed mass in Latin up until 1965. That's not something you'd be expected to know. Hell, I had to look up the dates while I was typing it just to have something better than a ballpark figure.

I may get a little miffed when I have to explain how the King James Version and the New American, and New International, and Revised editions are all different translations of the four gospels and such, made at different times from mostly the same source material, accounting in newer cases for more accurate descriptions of people and events, as reflected by modern English. The actual differences allude me, so why should you know more than that they are different in subtle ways, but tell the same story in predominantly the same fashion.

I get pissed when I have to take the time to explain to you twice that all Christian bibles will have both the Old and New Testaments.

Listen, I get that you're trying to get your daughter into Sunday School and faith young, but that child is going to have her faith drastically shaken when she turns nine and realizes she's smarter than you. You don't want to risk her getting brainwashed because you didn't know what it was you were teaching her. I have a friend who was taught there were 36 weeks in a year, until I confounded her with math in her early twenties.

If I ever had faith, it would not be in humanity days like this.

The Abnormal Force

I always hated the Normal Force in physics.

The idea that there is a force, intrinsic to all things, the moment you set one object down upon the other, thus converting all of the top object's kinetic energy into potential energy. And this force is miraculously exactly equal to the weight of the object, effectively negating gravity's pull and supporting the object by pressing up against it from beneath.

Bullshit.

I call bullshit. Grab your mops and brooms, kids, I'm formalizing a declaration of shenanigans.

This "Normal" force is just the structural integrity of any object. It's saying something is "solid" and sturdy enough to support a weight on top of it without snapping in half like a .GIF of a fat person breaking a tiny chair. There is no "structural integrity field." Trust me, I've seen science fiction. It'd be great if there were, but there isn't. "Normal force" is just shoddily designed math to make physics professors happy. Oh, the math balances. Great for you! You know what doesn't balance? Physical structures. They sink. Because the ground doesn't have a magic number holding it up. It has amorfous dirt and bedrock.

Today I met a computer engineer, whose degree was initially in chemistry, though he worked with physics mostly. We got talking about calculus, then Riemann sums and spatial understandings of math and tesseracts, and then I just out and out called bullshit on the Normal Force to his face.

And he agreed with me. He openly admitted that Normal Force is just fudging numbers to make all the forces come out equal on paper. God forbid an object at rest is actually pulled upon by gravity forever and supported by only mostly stable matter beneath it. Fat guys are fat until they break the chair, they don't find a perfect balance and stay in place forever.

So there you have it, Mr. Lopez. You may have been fun in high school physics class, but I just got a scientist to agree with me. Normal Force is bullshit, and you could have just told me so, but you stuck to your guns and just played your smooth jazz.

But now I have an English degree and work in tech support, so who's laughing n–

Wait.

On Being A Beta

This is going to sound like I'm very bad at disguising when I'm bragging–which is true; I'm very, very lousy when it comes to covering up how highly I regard myself in many respects, but mostly because I fear that if I ever sounded as modestly unmoved as I felt, I would believe it enough I might never convince myself again.

But in other, less depressing news:

I'm not sure how it happened, but I'm in another one of my "I am a sexy beast" stages. You just can't convince me otherwise. I see myself in the mirror at night and I'm more than a little impressed with what I'm seeing. Then I realize I do nothing and have changed nothing about my lifestyle to merrit this, and I love and hate myself a little bit more, wanting to purposefully brag so that others will hate me, because people hating you out of jealousy is the greatest feeling next to starring in a reality show on MTV.

The problem is I'm getting a little intimidated.

Not in an existential way, mind you. I'm not worried about the future, the upkeep on being a sexy person, nor the prospect of being more successful simply by virtue of being more attractive and then having to weigh that success against my own merits, forever wondering if the two are similar in kind enough to satisfy my own standards.

Really, I just catch my reflection in the bathroom and I'm worried that if I look at that guy funny he might beat me up.

I promise you, this is real. I am not making light of even a vague impulse merely to further the comedy routine, I really, truly feel a visceral fear of my own visage, because I'm so used to being easily fucked with and easily startle. Beta is putting in nicely, this is full-on Omega male behavior. If we were a pack of somethings, the females would hump me for dominance.

But now? Man, if I can keep up this B.S. front to you all long enough to really convince myself, my confidence might finally drop like a third, spiritual testicle that never quite descended.

And that could be pretty sweet.

On Colonoscopies

It occurs to me that if I ever need a colonoscopy, it might be comforting to get a gay male doctor.


I'm sure my regular guy is well versed in the procedure, he might even be technically gifted, but I feel like, at least subconsciously, with a distinct stereotyped bias, the new guy might just be more gentle about the whole procedure.

Scented candles, warmed instruments, maybe some relaxing music, I'm not asking him to take me out for soup and steak, I just think he'd be a little less clinical about the whole experience and understand the position I'm in.

Also, he'd probably take all those accidental innuendos and just run with them. How funny would those jokes be?

"Innuendo? In your endo!" Ah-ha-ha. So good. Thank you, Doctor; that really lightened the mood and set me at ease. I am now ready for the large metal snake to check my internals for signs of ill-health.

On Writing

I will tell you a truth about being a writer. No one else will tell you this, because they will say it is too simple, that it generalizes too much and diminishes the role of artists in our culture, but it is true.

There are only three writers.

Either you are talking about The Way Things Are, or Why Things Are What They Are, or you get mad and decide to talk about Something New Entirely.

That's it. That's the big secret.

The First Writer is important. He is a reporter, a chronicler of the Here and Now. She keeps our society from becoming to outwardly focused, keeps us returning to self-evaluation when we get too enthralled by the bread and circuses in our daily lives.

The Second Writer is a very fun person. She sees the relationships between disparate trends, understands the root causes and how A influences B. Second Writer points out what others fail to see and explain our lives in ways we hadn't considered, making us introspective with purpose, instilling the impetus to do good and provide betterment to our world.

And provides nothing.

Noticing connection and discussing philosophy is important, yet changes nothing. They are passive forms of thought. Important, useful, but ultimately not creative.

No, perhaps that is a poor, diminishing word. These modes of expression take effort. They are important, imperative. We must have them to be inventive. They are the long division of empirical thought. Philosophy is descriptive; ethics are an effort, a choice. We are given an understanding of the world, but choose how we will proceed.

When we have teased all the meaning we can out of life, when we can no longer abide comparing Miley Cyrus to Batman and we are tired, and we want truly to affect The Way Things Are, writers give up on description until they find something of their own to describe again.


I enjoyed being a First Writer. I had nothing to say, but a great desire to say much. So I was verbose. I learned a terrible number of adverbs and adopted the semicolon like an orphaned Cambodian child I could feed for pennies a day. I wrote scenes, all emotionally charged and all in which absolutely nothing happened, and what did happened happened without explanation. It was self-indulgent and subconscious, and it accomplished for me nothing.

Being a Second Writer is an incredible pain in my ass. I have so much to say still, but I recite it feeling like I'm retelling the same jokes to my friends. I was openly criticized last week for telling a story about a funny joke I made to someone else, because it wasn't funny as a story. I followed this by commenting on the dead air and implied a friend who had just left would shout from the back door like a prick at a flailing New York comedy club, "…You suck!" This got better laughs, and in telling it now I achieve nothing, because even that story isn't funny on-the-cuff. I have jokes, but no goal for them. I've been told that being a Writer means having to kill your favorite children. So as loath as I am to lose them, my progeny drown slowly in the bathtub.

I'm starting to build my own beliefs. I have ideas for reasons and I'd like to tell you about them, and I'm working to make you listen. I want to make it easy, but I don't want to spoon-feed you. I want to convince you by showing you what I've seen and making my case, so that we can go forward together.

There are things I want to say to you. I hope one of them will feel Entirely New.

On Sleep and Vacations

Mila Kunis can do whatever she wants to me while I'm asleep.

The older I get, the more I start to think that being an adult just means never feeling like you get enough sleep. By that logic, the most adult guy I ever met was that wacked out Vietnam Vet with the tinfoil hat.

Get a day off from work? Errands. Second day off? Good luck sleeping late when your body's used to getting up earlier the other six days a week. I used to sleep ten hours a night. Yeah, I was officially unemployed and clinically depressed, but the point it I slept until I couldn't anymore.

Now I wake up at 9 a.m. after going to bed at 3 on my one day off. What's your beef, Circadia?

[Fun fact: apparently, "circadian" comes from the Latin "circa diem," or "about (a) day." Neat!]

That's probably why parents always seem so tired. They've made the poor decision to manage other people's lives on top of their own. And now vacations make sense, because adults just want to avoid responsibility and sleep. Except kids ruin that by wanting to do things.

So I'm going ahead and making the call to take my vacation time wisely: without any children, and in my bed, snoozing for a week straight, until I get bored and go out, then sleep again until I have to go back to work. It's frugal, and exactly what normal people try and fail to get on "real" vacations. Don't call it a "staycation," that's just dumb. Don't call it a comeback, either, because that's just factually inaccurate.

Screw this, I'm gonna go "nap" for about 9 hours. You all have fun being "adults."

Michael J. Fox Worries for Your Immortal Soul

Someone left this at work last week. As expected, the paper was of low quality, as was the logic. Surprisingly, the writing was eloquent, though clearly the proofreader was ignored when (s)he [Let's face it, it was probably a he, as religious leaflet orderers tend towards the … shall we say domestically "traditional." - Ed.] pointed out that the first six entire folds were negated by the final point made in the seventh.

But wait! What's that at the bottom?

Why, it's Marty McFly!

"What are you, in the navy?"

Why does Marty seem so concerned for my Jesusly well being? He never seemed that religious, what with the teenage rebellion in his mid-twenties and the time traveling and fate altering.

Then again, he's got a steady girlfriend he intends to marry, finds temptation to sin but manages to avoid it with some sage advice and a little extra-natural help. Maybe it was a stealth-Christian film.

You know, like anything with Kirk Cameron that isn't overtly Christian.