This Isn’t How You Do It

legit news can suck it

Due to the obnoxious heckling from several of my coworkers, I reluctantly joined some stupid online dating service. So far I’m doing pretty well. I received messages from three fat chicks and a girl who listed bi-polar disorder under the “First Things People Usually Notice About Me” category – I’m seriously thinking about talking to her. I did send a message to a very nice looking lady because she had this 60s Italian film called Blow Up listed as one of her favorite movies, along with some other cinema I’m a big fan of.

I labored over the two paragraph message for almost an hour, scrutinizing every word, and in the end produced something witty and playful that made me sound charming, but with a hint of melancholy just below the surface (so not really me at all). Her reply was a little startling. She must have either had somebody proof read her profile page or she drank half a liter of Schnapps and pumped her ass full of horse tranquilizers before she wrote me her reply, because it was so full of grammatical errors I had trouble deciphering the meaning of half the sentences. She also didn’t use periods. Like, at all. Doesn’t believe in them apparently. You know how hard it is to read something that has no punctuation or capitalization in it? It’s goddamn fucking hard is what it is. I’d rather try and translate ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics than have to look at that mess of shit again. I started to get anxious halfway through it and was practically having a full-blown panic attack by the end. It went something like this:

hey i’m anna i really liked your profile pic you have nice hair : ) yeah woody allen is great but a lot of his movies are all sort of the same blow is one of my favorite but dont really like chick flicks though everybody thinks I would lolz accept maybe breakfast at tiffanys wich i noticed you like as well i think thats cute cuz…

Shut the fuck up. What are you five years old? And don’t ever talk about Woody Allen ever again. Wait, you have writing listed as one of your hobbies? Really? Are you fucking serious? I hope you die of autoerotic asphyxiation… actually, I don’t know if girls do that. Is that only a guy thing? I’m not even sure how it works. I think it has something to do with cutting off the oxygen flow to your brain so your orgasm is more enjoyable. I don’t get that. Who orgasms and then thinks to themselves, “Well, that could have been way better.” You’re doing it wrong buddy. Try the left hand or something. Don’t strangle yourself; that’s just reckless.

The thing is, if you’re a nice, intelligent, interesting, attractive girl, why would you be doing online dating? You wouldn’t. You would either have a boyfriend or be out on the town bashing boys out of your way with a large club and trampling over their corpses until you found the one you wanted. That’s normal. Or, maybe you don’t want a boyfriend, and would prefer to stay home at night and watch re-runs of Felicity and touch yourself. That would be understandable too. The point is, you wouldn’t be uploading pictures of yourself to a website full of losers, and answering questions like, “What would you do if you caught your significant other watching porn?” in the hope that you’ll meet Mr. Fantastic and his ten inch…

So far I’ve discovered two types of women who use this site. There’s the some-combination of fat, ugly, and stupid ones, and then there’s the attractive girls who joined because they thought it would be funny (also very likely to be retarded as demonstrated above). Well, I ain’t laughin’ bitches. I keep getting recommendations to message cute girls who haven’t logged on for six months and there doesn’t seem to be any preference to solve this dilemma.

After about two days of putting up with this, I said fuck it, and started messaging them anyway, since it’s not like I have anything better to do. It’s not so bad really. I actually find it sort of entertaining to get drunk and write long messages to hot women knowing that they will likely never read them. I’ll search for my type of girl (the cute hipster breed) who hasn’t logged on since November of last year, pull up the compose window, and start typing whatever comes to mind. I sent “vinyllover” about a thousand words on the current state of affairs in Libya and how Syria isn’t getting the press coverage it deserves. One girl got a very educational four paragraph description of how lasers work, and “cutelexi4u” received a lengthy explanation of why I don’t own a cat but would like to.

Maybe they’ll log in one day, read them, and it’ll change their lives, or maybe they won’t, and my prose will simply fade into the Internet ether, never to be read by anyone but me. Either way, leave it to me to take something so purposefully designed to get you laid, or at least get a date, and turn it into a way to sit alone and drink. One of my best friends says I’m simply not trying. He also says encouraging things like, “That’s your problem. You’re stupid,” and “Why can’t you think like a man?” and “You’re a punk. You don’t have that go with the flow sort of desire that will land you a woman.” He’s a good guy. I think he should be a motivational speaker but I think he has other plans.

In conclusion, do any KAB readers speak whatever language Anna does and can tell me what to say to her so she’ll sleep with me? I don’t want to but it will make my friend proud.

Don’t Take Me Home Until I’m Drunk

With the recent amount of actual news and reporting on KAB, I imagine the bullshit they let me put on here will seem even more out of place than usual. 

“I sabotaged her computer so she would have to call me to fix it.  That way I’d get to talk to her.  Oh, and I connected to her computer and went through all of her stuff of course.”
“What?  Really? Why don’t you just go and talk to her Matt?”
“Lopez, I don’t want to seem like a creep.”

I think I still have a bit to learn about this whole courtship thing.  In my defense, if the other help desk guy hadn’t shown up to work early that day and fixed her computer before I had the opportunity to, it may have worked out.  What can I say?  I’m a romantic.

Actually, it wouldn’t have worked out because as it turns out, Cute Girl Who Works In Sales has a boyfriend, which makes sense – most cute girls have boyfriends.  I found out about the boyfriend situation when, two days later, her computer broke all on its own, and I came skipping in to fix it with bright eyes and a big stupid smile on my face.  I felt like a fucking butterfly I was so happy. The stars had aligned for sure, I thought. And oh boy, they aligned all right. They lined right up to fuck me in the ass.  Thanks stars.  In the end I got turned down for lunch through an email. It could have been worse I suppose; she could have sent me a fax.

I think I need to find out how to differentiate between when a girl is flirting with me, and when she is trying to giggle at my bad jokes in an attempt to cope with how terribly awkward I am around pretty girls.  What I’ll do is start hitting on ugly bitches.  Wait, hear me out.  Trust me, this is scientific; I’m not lowering my standards.  I’m doing research.  Stand back while I attempt science folks…. If I go and make my bad jokes around the unattractive chicks and they act the same as the hot chicks, I know the hot chicks are flirting with me because I won’t have the “talking to a pretty girl awkwardness” about me.  I’ll just be normal semi-awkward Matt.  This is legit.  I’m serious.  I’ll wear a fucking lab coat when I do these studies.  There will be charts, graphs, and lots of arrows pointing at things.  I was a hard science major.  I rocked an A in advanced physics lab.  This will be as easy as pushing an old lady down a flight of stairs.

All of this is to build confidence.  Bitches loooooovvve confidence (bitches also like it when you put a lot of repeating letters in words to emphasize them). Then I’ll be able to continue my research even further.  More charts, more graphs, and even bigger arrows.

It will all culminate in a formula.  It’ll probably be logarithmic – it’s always fucking logarithmic.  It won’t be some bullshit unification theory formula either.  I don’t give a shit about the four fundamental forces.  This will be way better. This will be the equation to women, and therefore the equation to ultimate happiness.

Want to know why your girlfriend left you?  Solve for x asshole.  Bam.  There you go.

Hey, why does my girlfriend seem to ask me questions there is no right answer to?  Integrate with respect to time motherfucker.  Boom.  There’s your answer. Ah yeah.

Then I’ll just patent it, sell it to the highest bidder, and make many men happy. It will be as if Rogaine fucked Viagra – better than curing prostate cancer.  Life solved.  I’ll die happy for sure.

And thus we come to the end of the formula – not the impossible formula for understanding the eccentricities of the female mind, but the formula for everything I ever write for KAB.  Start with something outlining a serious point, expand on it to the point of absurdity, and hide it under a wrapping of profanity. When the dust settles, conclude with a short paragraph of honest inner reflection.  Mention how you drink too much. Allude to how despondent you feel.  End with a few words of apathetic observation.  It’s an easy equation to solve, though the answer is hardly worth the effort.

… until I’m very drunk indeed.

Another verbose article full of hyperbole… and quite a bit of obscenity

I dedicate this to “Pete” who I sincerely hope goes and fucks himself.

The novelty of having your own apartment is quickly extinguished after you take your first crap with the bathroom door open and jerk off in your kitchen a couple times.  After about a week of that you realize, not only are you a depressed, pathetic pervert but also a disgusting human being.  Having roommates keeps both of those things tempered somewhat.  Without them, my inner slob is allowed unimpeded flow throughout the halls of my apartment.

So, I’ve taken to decorating, which is a delightful activity despite the fact I often find myself climbing on top of things drunk – I have stumpy little arms that can’t reach anything, attached to a hobbit like frame, yet I live in an apartment with ceilings high enough I’m considering raising a giraffe in my pantry.  I need a step ladder.  I would drink less but it helps me deal with the fact that the most expensive thing in my apartment right now is a rug.  I hope it was woven out of pony fur and is being held together with virgin spit because if not, I doubt I can live with the fact I paid over a hundred dollars for a fuzzy brown pattern to put on my floor (apparently it’s actually made out of something called Olefin which I’m pretty sure was the name of a bad guy in a Bond film).

Floors help us cope with our ever present struggle against gravity, providing an important surface for passing out on and making sure we don’t fall into our basements.  I’m not really sure where rugs come into play but I have one now so I guess I’m civilized.  Maybe it’s because I walk around like Charlie Brown all the time looking at my feet that I decided to enliven the perpendicular plane beneath me.  I still can’t help but think that decorating the ground is a bit like polishing your asshole (sometimes my analogies don’t make a whole lot of sense and you should probably know that I don’t care).  It has also seriously limited the space I have for drunkenly practicing my soon to be mad-awesome moonwalking skills.

My dining room, which has massive floor to ceiling mirrors in it, great for scaring the shit out of yourself when you walk from the shower to your bedroom naked, is completely empty except for my bicycle, which has become about as useful to me as a celibate hooker.  For some reason I don’t ever feel the urge to ride anywhere in Austin like I did in Albany.  Of course, I was situated in prime biking real estate back in New York.  Friends, bars, and unsavory Price Chopper parking lots were all a short ride away.  I live in North-East Austin though, which is about as happening a place as my bedroom.  If I wanted to ride my bike down a fucking thruway I suppose I could hit up downtown proper, which is apparently a whole bag full of awesome for any bicycle enthusiast.  Or, you know, I could take a leisurely ride down the street I live on and enjoy the campus of Dell Headquarters.  I think there’s a cement factory after that.

Those mirrors however, are great for scribbling nonsensical poetry and/or physics equations on at three in the morning.  I bought a set of multicolored dry erase markers just for this.  Sometimes I get bored of that though and start tracing body parts on it instead… at least those that will fit (barely veiled big dick joke taken care of).

It may be apparent at this point that I’m trying to be obscene simply for the sake of it.  I’m going to blame television for this, despite the fact that I don’t own one.  I’ve started thinking that everybody has the sort of obscene thoughts as the ones I’ve written, if not worse, and maybe it is of some comfort to see them written down.  This probably isn’t true, and is only a projection of my own character flaws.  I think it would help if these perversions existed to obfuscate some underlying point, but unfortunately I haven’t found much point to anything lately.  The smut I have written is simply that.  It’s a page full of profanity and crudity constructed in a vain attempt to elicit a laugh.  While I used to choose my words carefully, and on occasion created a meaningful sentence that resonated with sincerity, they seem now to fall upon the page with little regard for any sort of substance.  It’s hard to write anything genuine when you stare into life and see nothing staring back.  Maybe Pete is right after all.  There’s this possum (or opossum, I can never remember which is the American one) that lives in the brush somewhere near my apartment.  When I sit on my porch and drink late into the night, he often makes an appearance.  He usually sits on the lawn, stares into the distance, and busies himself with absolutely nothing.  He seems to exist without any clue as to why he is, but I get a sense of smugness from him, and profound happiness.  I often look at him and hope he’ll reveal something to me – tell me something I’ve been missing this past year or so.  Maybe he has some great knowledge hidden away somewhere.  But then I remember he’s just a possum.  He eats trash.  So, I go and trace my hand on my mirror.

I’m Trying To Find This Girl

There was this girl in middle school who was pretty, and nice, and she talked to me once.  That was enough for me to fall in love with her.  I’d like to think I’ve matured since then but that’s still about all it takes.  By my count, I fall in love on average about four times a week.  Sometimes I sneak in a stipulation regarding intelligence in an attempt to augment my standards but I often find my regard for it muddled in the sub-conscience desire I have to put my penis in, on, or at least next to the girl in question.  It’s not a conscience choice because I’m so self deprecating that even in a state of reverie I can’t get laid.  In my imaginary world, that I have complete fucking control over, I somehow manage to shit all over everything.  I end up with a modest fantasy about getting coffee with a girl I know nothing about, and with Pygmalion like control, shape her as I see fit, chiseling away the imperfections and filling in the cracks until she is perfect.  Having carved a woman from ivory who is far too good for me, I am of course rejected and am forced to go home and masturbate myself to sleep.  But that’s in my fantasy.  In real life I’m actually masturbating fantasizing about masturbating after rejection.  Rejection itself seems great but I never get that far.  It’s very confusing.  It’s like watching Inception but with your dick in your hand and considerably more crying.

I blame all of this on Marry Poppins of course.

You’d like me to explain that wouldn’t you?  Okay.

Every person around my age or younger had that one movie they would watch over and over again as a child.  Usually around the age of three or four we would come across a cartoon, fall in love, and that’s all we’d ever want to watch for the next year.  I think this might be the first thing we ever love actually.  I didn’t know this until about a month ago, or maybe I had banished it to the deep, dark recesses of my forgotten nightmares, but when I was four years old my cinematic love affair was with a retarded musical by the name of Mary Poppins.

Sweet merciful Christ, there’s no way that didn’t fuck me up, right?  You might be able to watch that movie a couple times and still maintain your sanity, but not everyday for a year straight.  This rosy cheeked nanny, who clearly dabbles in cocaine as much as she does witchcraft, comes down from the clouds on a fucking umbrella, blows a bunch of little old ladies down the street, and then has the audacity to declare herself perfect in almost every way like she’s the the second coming of the messiah.  She’s a selfish, disciplinary bitch who is about as pompous as the pope and is so implausibly happy she can actually sit through a fifteen minute dance routine between five animated, indentured penguins and a lunatic chimney sweep pretending to be a penguin.

I’m surprised I have my shit together as well as I do now.  It should be considered child abuse to let that happen.  Make me watch racist shit like Dumbo.  Hell, make me watch Dwarf Goes Fishing or Ernest Scared Stupid.  Anything.  But Mary Fucking Poppins?  Really?  Children are very impressionable at that age.  It surely messed with my developing brain.  I have undoubtedly been carrying around some serious mental baggage from it that will stick with me until I die, like one of those nasty STDs you get from banging a Tai hooker.  Instead of letting your kid watch Mary Poppins, do them a favor and just give them herpes instead.  They’ll be better off.

But instead of having a parent who loved me and would never do that to an innocent child, I was subjected to a crazed musical countless times over and now I am incredibly attracted to Marry Poppins.  That’s the amazing part.  It freaks me out but I can’t help it.  Maybe it’s something about her outfit and the way she speaks.  She’s all proper and has a nice British accent.  She has really great hair too.  And nice hats.  That has always sort of done it for me.  It’s enough for me to excuse the fact that she probably abuses LSD on a regular basis.  In my defense, when the film came out Julie Andrews was only 29, so not all that much older than I am now.  I tested to see if maybe I just have the hots for a young Ms. Andrews.  I threw on The Sound of Music.  Nothing.  I actually sort of hoped the Germans would kill her whiny, singing ass.  Victor Victora?  Too old already.  Cinderella?  She was my age in that film but I’m not feeling it.  No, I don’t care for Julie Andrews.  That’s not it at all.

While I was visiting Albany over the holidays, one of my best friends had me chart out my ideal woman.  He thinks I’m a sad, lonely bastard who drinks too much and needs a nice girl to make me happy.  This activity was supposed to help.  It involved describing this elusive damsel’s disposition, personality, interests, tastes, desires, and of course her body.  I had to come up with places I might meet her, the first thing I’d say to her, and how I might go about seeing her again.  It filled up several pages of a Moleskin and took multiple cups of coffee to finish at the Ultraviolet Cafe (trying desperately to relate this to Albany somehow).  Of course I just had to run Mary Poppins through this gauntlet of dissection.  She didn’t do too well.  She got points for her looks and having a fashionable wardrobe.  I figured she can cook pretty well and probably has a nurturing side even if she is a total cunt.  Personality suffered a dreadful loss however.  I doubt we’d have much in common.  I definitely wouldn’t be running into her outside a Scorsese flick.  But I don’t care.  I still want to do nasty, perverted things to her.

This has been a difficult revelation for me to live with.  For the longest time as a child, being raised by an athiest, whenever people talked about God, I thought they were talking about Godzilla and they were just abbreviating it.  When I found out what they were actually talking about I was very confused and my insides felt funny.  That’s how I’ve felt the last month.  Maybe I’m overreacting.

I think this might have leapt the boundary from comical into bizarre.  Actually, I think it sprinted across that boundary naked almost five paragraphs ago.  I’m writing this with my friend Jim Beam and he whispers peculiar things in my ear while I’m trying to think – stops the dogs from barking at least.  I suppose I’ll just end with a warning: If there are any pretty, nice, optionally intelligent girls out there (preferably with a Mary Poppins costume), who are willing to talk to me, prepare to be fantasized about in really weird ways.

Where You Went Wrong

Up until this point in my life I had been working towards something.  The only time I remember differently was as a small child but as I’ve grown older and started drinking like a total fucking lunatic almost every night, I find myself resorting more towards that infant state.  Drunken Matthew and Matthew circa 1988 have remarkably similar habits.  I fall asleep in positions that no one in their right mind would describe as comfortable.  I can’t form a coherent sentence.  Get grumpy for no reason.  Storm out of rooms mumbling. Talk to stuffed animals.  Yell at doors.  Throw things.  Drool on myself.  Wake up and can’t find the bathroom and cry about it, or even worse, wake up covered in my own urine (at least I hope it’s my own urine).  The more I drink the more I have in common with toddlers.  The only possible conclusion is that I’ve found the fountain of youth, out of which pours forth a time traveling elixir known as alcohol.  I can’t say I have a lot of substantial evidence or logic to back this as a scientific theory but I’m prepared to continue my research with an utter disregard for my own health.  I do it for the children.  I’m sure there will be doubters. But people doubted Newton and then he invented the cat flap.  I very possibly didn’t make that up.  I think he did some other shit involving gravity too but the cats didn’t fair as well in those experiments.

I’ve had various goals just about my entire life.  I wanted to learn to read, I wanted to escape elementary school, I wanted to escape middle school, I wanted to have sex with almost every girl I went to high school with (I failed to attain 100% of that goal by the way), I wanted a car, I wanted to get the fuck out of Gloversville, I wanted to graduate college, I wanted to leave New York…. and then something happened.  I hit a brick wall and it all stopped.  I don’t even know what I want for Christmas anymore.  I guess I’d like to want again.  It’s an odd emptiness, not really unpleasant, just a little funny feeling.  It’s like I’m missing out – some party I wasn’t invited to but all the cool kids are going.

I am all of a sudden skeptical of my “alcohol as a facilitator of eternal youth” hypothesis – you know a theory is good if it only takes you eleven sentences to start questioning it.  Drinking to solve your problems is a bit like trying to kill your enemy by shooting him through your own head.  It is impressive looking and oftentimes hysterical for sure, but you do wind up with a rather large and unpleasant hole in your skull.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to quit drinking.  My mamma didn’t raise no quitter, but perhaps I’ll consider other ways to occupy my time.  They say a man needs a hobby and by they I mean idiots.  I’m thinking either model trains or not collecting stamps.

Besides bestowing feline society with the great flappy door entrance, Newton also suggested this notion that light was made up of these tiny so called corpuscles and that matter was made up of grosser corpuscles and they interacted on some chemical level.  Personally, I think he should have slapped a patent on that cat flap invention of his and retired.  He was totally wrong about those corpuscles of course, postulating these ideas well before our modern quantum understanding of the wave-particle duality of light, and unsurprisingly, likely pulled a mad hatter in his later years, dying of mercury poisoning from his experiments with alchemy.  So I know a few things I don’t want, e.g. dying of mercury poisoning is remarkably low on my New Year’s resolution list.  I hope that’s a start.

I am looking forward to returning to New York for the holidays.  I have a rather miserable car waiting for me and a handful of people who make me smile.  Somehow I managed to convince myself I needed to move to Austin because I had something to run away from.  Turns out no matter how far or fast you run, yourself has a nagging habit of catching up with you.  I thought I needed to get further away, so much so I wrote a terrible song about it and made my friend sing it, but I think I missed some crucial truth in my panic.  Of all the things I should want, I suppose I ought to want to be me first.  Maybe I’ll work on that and while I’m at it I’ll try to be less of an emo pussy who says things like I should want to be me.  I need a new haircut.  I part it but then it falls down on the one side and I look like an assbag.

Despite a haircut that seems to fit right in here, Austin continues to exist only as a backdrop to my empty set.  The audience never showed, likely because I never invited them.  It’s only me on stage, sitting atop my throne of alcohol.  It makes me forget for a while but I can’t seem to escape the fact that returning to Albany feels like going home.