Man, my main Han Solo-ish ability is that I can talk my way out of anything. I could talk my way out of a sunburn. I think the reason people don’t think this works is because they just don’t try it. I have had bills reduced, fees removed, avoided jail, and so on, just by saying, “Is there any way I can . . . not do that?”

A long long time ago in high school I needed an extension on a paper for absolutely no good reason (I just hadn’t written yet), and so I wrote this super overwrought Shakespearean email and the teacher gave me an extra week. I remember writing back telling her that she was “a lamb among wolves.”

Recently AT&T was trying to fuck me over some old bills I still had from my house in Oakland, and they had slapped on about $50 worth of fees. All I did was ask the guy if he could remove all the fees. Just like that: “Can you please remove those fees?” He paused and said, “. . . yeah, I can do that.” Whoa!

Another time I had a layover in Detroit on my way back from Tokyo, and my cell phone was dead and I needed to call my girlfriend in Baltimore. They had these pay phones where you could insert a debit / credit card and it would bill from that. Well I guess I failed to read the tiny print saying it was like $2.00 a minute! A month later I got slapped with an $80 bill. I called their customer service hotline and asked them to remove all the charges and they did. I think I only ended up having to pay $10.

This is probably the most insane one: My friends and I got lost coming back to Northern Virginia from DC. I was driving my friend’s car. Somehow I blew through a security checkpoint outside a Naval base. It was dark and I didn’t see anyone in the booth and so I kept going, driving pretty fast, and suddenly these huge spotlights came on and a bunch of guys with guns and flashlights flooded out of a nearby complex and commanded me to stop. The dude in charge had me get out of the car. He had a pistol pointed at my head. Two guys frisked me and took my license out of my wallet and read off all my info. The main guy said: “In a post-9/11 world, we don’t fuck around.” I made smalltalk with him and asked him about his gun and his flashlight and stuff like that. I asked him about his experience with “real” invaders. It was a genuinely interesting experience! I told him one of my friends was really going to get it if I didn’t get her home soon, which was true, and that I was blindly speeding through the dark so that I could fulfill my mission. I said something like: “C’mon, look at me. I couldn’t even break into my own bedroom.” Man I guess that was good enough for him because he patted me on the shoulder and sent me home.

it was a good job

 

In my mind, if I remove the “extreme poverty” and “my car was stolen twice in one month” segments from Oakland and all the memories attached or related to them, then I had a really really good time over there. I’ve been looking through all three years of my Oakland pictures and man, I knew so many people and did so many things. I think that’s why I was exhausted by the end of it. I could never climb on top of the thing. I was always falling down that Chuck E. Cheese slide and trying to walk back up with just my socks on. I have many fond and strange memories anyhow.

why is opposition to your a beliefs a prerequisite to you believing in something? i have heard so many people say that their religious faith stems from the fact that, without it, satan and his demons would get them. in terms of christianity, for example, the core values are like . . . meekness, humility, charity, peace, forgiveness, unconditional love . . . what’s wrong with that stuff? why isn’t that stuff enough for you? in order to get through the day you need to believe that an embittered dark spirit is hiding behind every corner just waiting to poison your soul and make you murder and steal?

why not just . . . love people and forgive them and so on because those things are nice in themselves? why are you so obsessed with the galaxy-sized flaming torture chamber and all the people who are going to go there and not about your own quality as a person while you still are a person?

i don’t know man it just seems really weird and sad to me

this is a true story: the first job i ever got was as a bagboy (that’s what they called them back then) at a grocery store near my house. i was 15. and i got that job because i went up to the register with a tube of KY lube and a box of adult diapers. and as the cashier was ringing me up i asked if they were hiring and she gave me an application.

the best part was that after she had rung up the lube and diapers i said, “oh, shit, one second” and grabbed a bag of skittles and put them on the conveyor belt.

yeah baby!!!! that really happened!!!

An anonymous review of the author and, by extension, this fine website you’re reading:

“. . . a big pit of despair that is thinly veiled with sharp, dry, yet intelligent humor.”

(posted without permission (sorry!!))

I just saw a sticker on the back of a truck that was sort of like a Jesus fish except it was a shark and inside it said “SHIT HOUSE”

let me ask you something, boy

you uh. . . .

well listen you ever met someone whose soul was a mass-grave