Oh, hell, do I have a lot to learn.

So, the new Facebook thing is to look up your name on Urban Dictionary and post the first result to your Facebook page.

Since I’ve got plenty of space, here are the best of the first few results:

Rob
Synonymous to ‘rage’.
Hence, to ‘Rob’ is to rage, and gives rise to such terms as ‘Rob quitting’ and ‘ROB ROB ROB ROB’

Rob: “Guys, I’m not in the mood”
Someone Else: “That’s what she said”
Rob: “That’s it, I’m out.”
*Server: Rob has left the server*
Someone Else: “Dude awesome he just Rob quit.
“Robrage”

ROB
Roll Over the Belt. Girls who wear tight shirts and have a roll of fat that goes over her belt is a ROB.

1: Dude, check out that girl, she looks dope!
2: Forget it, you’ve got your beer goggles on, she’s a ROB!

Rob

The boy that every girl wants
The boy that every girl needs
The boy that I want
and
The boy that I need

Omfg rob is so fucking hot I love him
rob boy love need want fuck

Rob
A person with lots of hair.Someone who plays Might and Magic on the weekend.Someone who enjoys the rusty trombone manuver.He who sleeps with one eye open

Person 1: Hey Wes, what are you doing this weekend?
Person 2: Aww man, I am gonna hang out with Rob Little this weekend.
Person 3: Damm… that sounds like a tight weekend, that guy knows how to party!!

A friend says it’s “Doppelgänger Week” on Facebook. You’re supposed to change your profile pic to that of some celebrity who resembles you. My choice may be stretching the rules a bit, but this evil bastard haunted me all through high school, because (and it pains me to admit it) I looked and talked pretty much exactly like him.

Here’s the commercial, in case your mind has repressed the trauma:

Everyone hated him.

I have no idea what he’s doing today, but I hope it involves filthy amounts of money and hot librarian groupies. If there is any justice in the universe, being the Encyclopedia Britannica Guy should entitle him to a lifetime of hedonistic decadence, and I hope he’s living it up.

In my dreams, the creators of Blackboard all die in a plane crash.

They find themselves in hell, face to face with Satan, who giggles and capers as demons drag them into a featureless white room that is completely empty but for a series of small desks with simple laptops.

“Welcome to my home,” Satan tells them. “You’ll be staying here until you learn the escape code. Fortunately, it’s not hard to find. All you have to do is complete a simple, 3-question quiz that you can find easily: just look it up on Blackboard.”

As the demons chain them to the desks where they will spend eternity, the Blackboard developers begin to scream and scream and scream…

Unfortunately.

In less than 24 hours I went from three weeks of this:

to THIS:

Normally, my dish soap is an oddly pretty jewel-tone bluegreen color, but my kitchen got so friggin’ cold it DEMULSIFIED MY DISH SOAP.

The cold also froze my kitchen pipes. I’m making coffee with water from the bathroom sink and waiting to see what happens with the pipes when the world unfreezes. Maybe I’ll get lucky and there won’t be a horrible spray of water from shattered plumbing. Maybe.

The jury’s still out on whether the fridge is broken. Not that it matters. Today, I could just open the kitchen window and leave the frozen food on my stove.

Ahh, Abilene. How I’ve missed you.

I found this on the internet (the template is here), and thought it would be a fun way to blow a little bit of post-finals time.

The rationale behind my choices*:

Last Words: Yeah. You know me. The end of the world is probably a bad time to have horrible A.D.D.

Sidekick: Since zombies aren’t real, I think it’s safe to assume that my zombie apocalypse would be like a movie or a comic book. In any decent zombie movie, my real family would have died tragically, leaving me a tortured loner who screams a lot and takes reckless chances because I don’t care if I live or die.  In the second reel, I would meet Stoya (don’t google her from work, folks), the cynical stripper with a heart of gold…

Location: Hawaii seems like a good choice.  It has a relatively low population, so we could just show up on a boat with enough ammo to clear a foothold on one of the smaller islands and set up a defensive perimeter. We would venture out to the larger islands as supplies (or the plot) demanded. It’s beautiful, rich in natural resources, we wouldn’t have to worry about freezing to death, and it would provide a nice destination for the physical journey that symbolizes our character development throughout the film.

Stronghold: A cave with a main entrance and a concealed back exit. Easily defensible, cozy, and with impermeable walls; a nice three-bedroom, split-level cave located in a good school district is the perfect stronghold for riding out the end of the world.

Vehicle: You can keep your hardened-coffin F-450 pickups – I am a dude who favors speed and agility. If there are zombies, I want to be able to move. Besides, it ain’t like the 7-11 is just gonna get another shipment of gasoline next Tuesday. All of a sudden “energy conservation” would take on a whole new meaning. Oh, and hell yes, it’s a Honda. This is the zombie apocalypse.  I need something I can count on.

Clothing and  Footwear: Leather and denim, lots of zippers and pockets. Unimaginative, but functional.

Main Weapon: Once the island is clear, the danger will not be waves of attack by massed zombies, it will be surprise encounters at relatively close range. Thus, the twin Springfield Armory custom .45’s are in the “Main Weapon” slot.  They’re reliable and accurate, they hit like a hammer, and they hold a decent amount of ammo.

Secondary Weapon: The M-4 with the grenade launcher will be handy for clearing zombies, and would be the weapon of choice should we screw up so badly we find ourselves making a stand against multiple attackers at range.  The secondary-secondary weapon is my Marine NCO sword, because the classics never go out of style.

Inventory: Wild Turkey and Marlboros, because cirrhosis and lung cancer would be merciful at that point. A simple, good knife is probably the most essential tool of survival in mankind’s history, and the Ka-Bar is without peer. Claymore mines because, well, they’re claymore mines. If you don’t know why a fella needs claymore mines during the zombie apocalypse, you might as well just lie down in the road and cover yourself with steak sauce right now. Also, the comm wire. Comm wire is to a defensive perimeter what Ka-bars are to combat knives.

Battle Anthem: It’s at the top of the playlist in my right sidebar. If I’m zipping around on a motorcycle blasting zombies John Woo style, this is the song I want playing.

* There are web sites and books and all kinds of places where autistic nerds expend endless amounts of energy compiling endlessly-debated and exhaustively-detailed plans for a zombie invasion that’s never gonna happen. This ain’t one of those places. I’m just killing some time until the booze takes such a toll on my fine motor skills that I am no longer able to sdjm.,mkkkkk;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;…………

x + y = z

Where:

x = comps passed
y = classes completed
and
z = much celebratory drinking of cheap bourbon

The first semester is in the books. Next semester brings the promise of unrelenting, sadistic brutality, but that is several sweet weeks away. In the meantime, I will be soul-searching about various aspects of my life, cleaning house, and working on some Rob Projects^®. All of that starts tomorrow, however.

Today, there is half a jug of Old Crow and a whole internet to play with.

(But I’m playing hooky from Sunday School…. sssshhhh!)

I’m working on a couple of posts I’ll put up later, but I’m putting this here really quick for now so I remember to look into more later:

I’m thinking if I can get in the habit of popping in here to make small updates, I’ll be less likely to abandon it completely once school starts again.

Someone recently pointed me to an article about the “Top 10 Nicest Asses in Videogames.” The list is an electronic temple built to honor the shambling Lovecraftian elder god of Mountain Dew-soaked desperation. It is an eldritch orange monument of sadness built with bricks of cheetoh dust mortared in place with the lardy excretions and greasy nerdpaste of the loathed and wretched. It is, in fact, so very foul that just one page of it managed to achieve what decades of badgering by my female friends have not: I have now been shamed into avoiding the word “chick.”

While doing dishes last night, I managed to slice open the webbing between my ring finger and my pinky. It bled like hell, stings like a son of a gun, and the way the wound is positioned means that band-aids either fold in half and stab it with the crease or ride up and slice it with their edges.

I’m not sure which would be worse: soaking my hand in lemon juice or re-reading that video game article.

If you click that link, don’t blame me. You were warned.

On Thanksgiving Eve I got onto a drunken streak of telling jarhead stories and I told her I’d dig this out and pass it on.  It was originally written during Bush the Lesser’s reign, when I was highly irate that the right wing had arrogantly commandeered the notion of “patriotism” and appropriated it for themselves.  I have never entirely outgrown my stubborn streak of childish teen rebellion, so the writing is just a touch blasphemous, and the story is gleefully and unabashedly profane and scatological.

I know I’ve got some tender-hearted little delicate flowers who read my blog. If you fall into that category, this may be a post to skip.

Just sayin’.

Four Minutes of Freedom

There’s a web site where wingnuts go to stroke each others’ fantasies of turning the United States into a theocracy and using the force of arms to make the entire world an American colony. One of their luminaries, a young man named “Dave”, got into a pissing match with his community college teacher and posted about it on the boards there. The site’s posters, the very picture of godly compassion and Christ-like love, descended on her like jackals and made her personal and professional life hell. It turned into such a mess that the board has now deleted those threads, but many of them involved scathing attacks on the teacher’s liberal views and her peace activism. There were many assertions that Freedom® isn’t free and that she was squandering the Freedom® that had been purchased for her by Real Patriots®.

I posted the following piece on one of the forums where I hang out.  It is dedicated to Dave.

Being in the military sucks.

One of my strategies for coping with that suck was to remember that I was doing it for a reason: the people back home that I cared about. As I’ve said before, most of peacetime military life consists of tedious bullshit such as scrubbing your toilet for half an hour only to have your platoon sergeant tell you that you missed some piss crystals under the rim and you need to keep working on it.

Usually, when cleaning, remembering my mother and grandma would help me calm down and keep scrubbing. When I needed a little extra juice to squeeze out the last chin-up for a perfect score or to keep my legs pistoning just enough for my run time to be under 18 minutes, I thought about Carrie, the first girl that I ever really loved. At the end of long hikes, her face would float in my mind long enough for me to get through whatever it was that I had to do.

I knew that they weren’t in danger. I knew that scrubbing my pisser was not protecting grandma’s freedom, and I knew that the rape-hungry Iraqi hordes were not at the door of Carrie’s house in Yuba City. While I hoped that I would never have to use violence to defend my ideals, I knew that day might come. The more work I did in peacetime, the better prepared I would be in war. So I remembered the people back home, reminded myself that I was doing it for them, and kept doing my job.

—

A six-hour hike on a Guantanamo Bay afternoon is not a fun thing. Full cammies and combat boots are less comfortable to hike in than the bermuda shorts and hawaiian shirt that any sensible person would wear. A full ALICE pack weighs a shitload and rides directly on your kidneys. You sling your weapon, but your pack and gear make it ride funny; it will slip off and clatter to the ground if you don’t keep actively fucking with it. You have to lean way left and hitch your gear up, while marching, to dig your canteen out for a drink of stale water that is, literally, hotter than piss. The weight of your helmet cinches a vise around your temples that becomes infinitesimally tighter with every step, and you are taking a lot of steps. You sweat a lot. The sweat gets on your glasses and eventually reaches a point where your sweat-soaked cammie blouse does nothing but smear the sweat around, coating the world you see with a murky layer of mud. The same fine dust that sticks to the sweat on your glasses also sticks to the lining of your throat and nose.

On really long hikes, you reach a point where you don’t care about any of that. You don’t see, think, or feel. Your entire being becomes nothing more than the simplest biological mechanism required to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

The hike in this story was not one of the really long ones. We were only about 4 hours into it, which sucks but is not mind destroying. I was going okay, keeping up, trucking along, when I felt something bad. My guts began to slide around on themselves. I felt the liquid, serpentine slither of everything below my belly somehow getting slippery. Whatever I had eaten was going to come out, and it was going to come out ugly.

I can’t describe the next half hour, and I’m not going to try. I will say that I managed to keep it together, though by the time they called a halt I was on the edge of just breaking down and letting it all go and just dealing with the misery and shame. Nobody’s face was in my mind but my own.

When the command came to halt, I popped the straps on my pack and it whumped to the ground before anyone else had come to a complete stop. I’d kept my eyes on the prize, and the gates of heaven were about to swing open as a choir of angels sang me to my seat: there was a single puke-green portapotty less than 20 yards away.

I raced to it, elbowed some poor fucker out of the way, and jumped inside. I threw my weapon in the corner and shucked everything down. I was seated and braced before the door slammed shut.

Nothing happened.

I sat there in the sick green light filtered through the plastic walls, with wads of single-sheet MRE toilet paper cluttered around my boots and my head thick with the superheated chemical-shit stench, and nothing happened.

Then it did.

My guts twisted and cramped and my bowels exploded in a backblast of shitrain that hammered the portapotty’s tank and made a sound so loud and so horrible that I heard the guy outside say, “Jesus fucking Christ” with a mixture of religious awe and absolute revulsion. The first blast was followed by more, each time accompanied by cramps that wrenched my entire body and made me twist on the seat, each time that same sick spatter of clotty, frothy, liquid hell.

Relief was a physical thing for me, sanctified and holy.

It didn’t take long to get everything out, and when I was done, I knew that everything was, indeed, out. I had weathered the storm and triumphed. Only then did I realize that there was no toilet paper in the potty. I did what anyone would do: I pulled my Ka-bar, cut my own underwear from around my ankles, and used my skivvies to wipe the horror off my ass. I threw the filthy rag into the tank and stepped out into the bright sunlight.

I still had time to sneak in a smoke before we got the order to saddle up.  I would guess that I was in the portajohn for about four minutes.

—-

Some of the things that I did, I’m very proud of. They were worthwhile and necessary, and I am honored and fortunate to have been able to do them. Those things I did for my friends and family, and for Carrie in Yuba City.

The four minutes that I spent in that plastic shitpit, however, were the four minutes that I spent specifically defending Dave’s freedom. Those skivvies are for you, Dave. Remember them with pride.