Daily Archives: October 30, 2011

The Return of the Ghost of the Fooble Beast

Posted on by
Reply

In keeping with the season, BOO!

Scared you, didn’t I? Feel free to send me your underwear bill. I am starting a collection.

Welcome to Castle Fooblestein, the scariest place in all of Fooblevania, on this, the day before Halloween! Arguably, for us grownups, this is the real Halloween, because most adults will be at work tomorrow and so all the parties had to be on this weekend. Tonight’s your last chance, ghoulies and ghosties and things than go hump in the night… make the most of it!

Now, admittedly, foobles, being lighthearted creatures of silliness and mirth, do not do scary very well. The coffins here are all filled with candy, not corpses, the scariest thing our secret laboratory ever produced was fake blood that is actually a very tasty cherry drink, and our torture chamber contains nothing more painful than some feathers for tickling.

So don’t be surprised if the following foobles do not exactly send a chill up and down your spine.

We tried, we really did!

Like this guy, a victim of the recent floods in Thailand. He is, at best, only a little scary.

And not a single fuck was given that day

As always, click to enlarge.

You have to admire this dude. Sure, he’s in flood water up to his nipples. Sure, he’s already taking an aggressive fashion risk already by choosing to wear a “power purple” shirt. Sure, a lesser man would actually get the fuck out of the water before feeding his nicotine habit.

But god damn it, he has a smoke in this exact spot every single day, and no petty annoyance like massive flooding is going to get in the way of his indomitable will.

I mean, is that thing even lit? I fail to see how it could be, unless he habitually keeps his cigs and his matches in his hair or something. Otherwise, you would think both smokes and fire would be way too wet.

And while I don’t smoke myself, I have known enough smokers to know that, if that cig is wet, our bold hero in solid purple is not exactly sloshing his way through Flavour Country.

But dammit, it’s the principle of the thing. If he gave up his daily smoke just because his matches were wet, his smokes were wet, and there was massive flooding, someone might thing he was less than totally cool.

And that is something that will never, ever happen!

So was that guy scary kids? Or funny? I can’t decide. Let’s ask these two audience members.

Ah, what fun we have, kitty!

Funny it is. At least, those two seem pretty amused.

But how funny? Is it just a little funny, or the sort of thing to have people jumping into the air from the sheer joy of being alive?

Man, ever since Mary Poppins stopped taking homones, she has CHANGED

Wow, that good, huh? I blush with modesty.

Seriously, though, I absolutely love that picture. There is just so much marvelous eccentricity embodied in the picture that I cannot help but adore it. It just begs you to speculate as to what de fug is going on here.

The desert setting makes me think that maybe Burning Man is somehow involved. And while it is not impossible to deliberately adopt an unnatural pose while flying through the air, his exact stance makes me think that some clever sort Photoshopped something out, like say whatever it is that is holding him up.

Regardless of origin, it is a picture that makes me happy, and I hope it makes you happy too.

As our final fooble for today, I offer you not a picture but a link.

It is a link to a site called Literally Unbelievable, and it is dedicated to those poor, innocent souls who have no idea that The Onion is a satiric, and hence entirely fictional, publication, and who consequently provide public amusement in the form of credulous commentary on that hub of all hubs, Facebook.

Here is a small example.

Can you blame her? I mean, it's so plausible!

I feel sort of bad for laughing at this people, because, after all, ignorance is only a crime if it’s willful, and we all had to learn that The Onion was fake at some point, we were not born hip.

But I laugh anyhow, because honestly, you couldn’t tell it was fake from how patently absurd it was? Talk about completely failing the irony test. The evolutionary purpose of a sense of irony and the absurd is to keep you from doing and thinking stupid things.

Yours needs work.

Well, that is it for Castle Fooblestein for this year, kids. Time to go home and empty your pillowcases, plastic jack o’ lantern buckets, and the pockets where you put the really GOOD stuff so you would not have to go looking for it later.

See you next time!

Leading an unnatural life

Posted on by
Reply

It has occurred to me lately just how artificial and unnatural my life has been.

Now, I do not mean “unnatural” in any of the profoundly illogical and laughably wrongheaded ways people have abused the word in the past. The only “unnatural” form of sex is abstinence. Otherwise, every critter in the world gets its freak on and nature is not too choosy about how. Nature merely says “do that thing that feels good” and assumes that instinct will get enough of the right bits into their counterparts to propagate the species and anything else that happens is harmless biological exuberance.

Nor do I mean it in the sense that some foods are “natural” and others “artificial”. Whatever you are making something out of, it comes from nature, whether it’s the pure sweet honey from wild bees feeding from free range aloe plants lovingly and humanely transported by Andean monks, or the cheapest and most chemically unique of plastic products.

Oil is just as much the product of Mother Nature’s bounty as honey, after all. To suggest there is some sort of moral distinction between the two is to indulge in magical thinking of the most basic sort. Argue about healthy and unhealthy foods all you like, that has a basis in science and can be verified. But all that is possible is natural.

So much for the petty moralists.

No, when I say I have led an unnatural life, what I mean is that I have led a life which has been highly proscribed and compartmentalized by my desire to be logical and reasonable and sensible, to the point where all emotion is suspect and there are powerful all-encompassing blocks between emotion and action that render me essentially without motivation or even basic normal emotional functioning, and hence, I am a very ill man, emotionally speaking, and all in the name of supposedly being “smart”.

Well, smart is as smart does, and this smart doesn’t do jack shit.

It is like a ferociously micromanaged office. The office manager (my superego, I suppose) has lost all sense of proportion and is obsessed with making absolutely sure that every single thing, no matter how minor, is done in exact accordance with policy, and so doing absolutely anything requires his express permission, and he is just one overworked and overstressed guy, so there is only so many things he can approve in any given time, and so things happen very, very slowly and inefficiently.

And all in the name of efficiency, of course.

And eventually, things just grind to a halt, and the business of the office as part of a larger organization ceases entirely, and the office barely scrapes through each day doing the minimum required to keep the office itself going, and not very well.

And lots of parts of the office have not done anything ever, or not done anything in a long long time, and so the employees there are practically dead from boredom and have long since forgotten what it is they are supposed to be doing, let alone how to do it.

And all, of course, in the name of logic and reason!

What I am getting at is that this determination to always be logical and rational has had the effect of completely usurping the natural ecology of a normal person’s emotional metabolism. Certain things are supposed to simply happen naturally, flowing one to the other according to the purely internal logic of one’s unique emotional landscape, and not according to some preconceived and unnatural and unhealthy notion of how one’s emotions “should” work.

No wonder I feel so cold and dead inside. All this blocking and checking compleyely inhibits the lifeblood of my emotional life from getting to all the parts of my mind that desperately need it, and so I am downright cyanotic if not positively necrotic inside.

At the very least, I am more asleep than awake inside, and the pain I feel when I try to become motivated to do things outside my comfort zone is possibly nothing more than the pain one feels when trying to wriggle something life into your foot when it has fallen asleep.

Sadly, this bogus rationality is not something someone can simply decide to stop doing, all at once. It is a foundational axiom of my entire psyche, and you cannot simply throw those into the outer darkness without dire consequences for one’s very sanity.

But perhaps, with my therapist’s help, I can unpack, thaw, and release enough of these blockages to begin to be able to live a more natural and wholesome and happy life.

I want to be alive.