Ultimate Glory

When I told the cashier that my friend and I wanted the 911 challenge, she looked worried. Worried that we were just two chumps in over our heads, ready to quit after two wings. I asked her if the wings would be free, provided we both ate all 12. "You can take 'em home if you don't finish 'em" she tells us, because right now we're just skid marks to her. Rough spots in that gigantic underwear, covering the private parts of 911 challenge history. She doesn't think we'll be two more faces on the sacred wall of the Cluckyu Challenge Winners of Ultimate Glory.

Who would?

I woke up in the morning, nervous. "It's all mental," I tell myself, before I realize I'm talking to myself in the mirror. Mental. Somehow I find myself eating handfuls of M&M's in my parent's bedroom. Eating them like an Asian woman drives a car--that is to say, quickly, and without thinking. When I find Jon, he's more nervous than I am. I show him the tub of Vasoline and tell him that rubbing the stuff on the lips and cheeks will make the burning more bearable, and he sounds relieved. No one cracks the typical lubrication jokes that usually go hand-in-hand with the application of Vasoline. Shit is serious.

There's not much of a crowd at Cluckyu's during the day, so the food comes hard and fast. I don't know how food can come hard, but like hell it does. Before I know it, I have in front of me 12 of the hottest hot wings known to man, and I'm laying them all out on my tray, wings on the left, drumsticks on the right, all the while scraping off excess sauce. Seems like a waste of time to most people, but we both know it's necessary. It's gotta be done, so better do it when your mouth isn't burning. See, most people decide they'll try the challenge, and if it gets too crazy then maybe they'll stop. Most people quit.

The first three are a breeze, but after that I start to shake. I can't remember how I felt during the middle, so I can only assume I was in pain, and that my mind suppressed the memory. The last three or four just suck. By then Jon's already finished (amazingly), and I'm under pressure of running out of time. But then I stopped chewing so much, and held everything in long enough to finish! My face and fingers are numb, I'm crying, and I'm red all over. I would have looked like shit, but fortunately I was adorned with the unmistakable wings of victory.

In that restaurant, there's a wall that displays an array of polaroid pictures. Most of the people in them look like shit. Some of them still have sauce-beards. Others are holding up strange personal mementos, things that have helped them get through the tough times. But in each one is a smile. Now my mug is among these legends, smiling with the twinkle of accomplishment. A smile of a victory, hard-fought. That smile is tempered, because I know that (to put it in simple terms) passing the stool will suck.

Secrets And Truths

I have a confession to make. Whenever I'm involved in any sort of group hug, I secretly try my best to make everyone fall down in a tangle of limbs and love, often at risk of great personal harm and bonding.

Other truths I discovered today:

1) I try to say hi to everyone I know when I see them, and as a result I have a lot of relationships built solely on these short exchanges. Today I had a longer 'passing by' conversation, and I almost walked away proud of myself, until I realized I didn't know the person beyond what was going on immediately in their lives.
-------1.a) it's too bad this will never change, for the most part. Will it?
------------------1.a.I) In all honesty, no.

2) Speaking, when you do it right, is testifying. Not necessarily in the religious sense. Just that whenever words come from your mouth, they should be testament to some quality, some facet about you.

3) Undie-running in a viking hat will get you an ass-pinching, and rightly so.

I've Reached That Point Where Everything Sucks

I hate to say it, but these days sleeping is pointless, because you just get up and start studying again.
Eating also falls under this category.

I've gotten to the depressing part of Paradise Lost. Humanity has fallen, Adam just finished calling Eve a ho, and it's not like the rest of the book has been much fun anyway. It's not even the story that's getting me down, so much as I'm looking at it the from a 'post-religious' perspective (which just means I'm jaded), and it's not the interesting read I always thought it would be.

Now that I think about it, I got the same feeling from reading the apocrypha: one man trying hard to explain away the complexities of the Bible, but doing so from an age-old perspective, to an intended audience that's long dead. To me, it just seems like artifice. Actually, the fact that it's so political just makes it seem more political, but I don't think that makes as much sense to you right now as it does to me. In the end, it all translates to me not caring.

But I'm being unfair. That apathetic feeling I get reading the apocrypha only comes up once in a while with Milton, and that's really a tribute to the guy, considering that I'm starting to get that feeling more and more from reading the Bible. (Apathetic for lack of a better word; I'm not all sure how I feel about it yet).

If Milton read this he might die. I guess he's already dead, so he would have to die again. Or just not like me. Good thing Christianity isn't about reading the Bible all the time. I wonder what he'd think about that?

My roommates are asleep. I think I'll join them.

Blame, Or If You Prefer, Mike

The past few days have been rich. On Saturday I woke up at 4:30AM to drive to San Luis Obispo and watch Charissa graduate. She's my age, she's got her degree, and she'll soon be proposed to (and we're all sure of this). She also doesn't read my blog, which is a good thing, because it means she'll never know how boring her graduation was. I laughed while her brother made fun of the speaker's accent (battlecuruuzer operrrational), and then fell asleep.

That night I passed out around 8PM, only to wake up at 2AM. Gabe was asleep out on the couch. I got around to finishing Hamlet, then caught the sunrise for the second day in a row (not bad!). Gabe chipped in with his loud, angry sleep-talk, to my further enjoyment.



That morning I fought myself a little, like I always do (and like Hamlet did), then got down to Venice to look for homeless people. Actually, I went and wandered until someone asked me for a cigarette, but to be fair, everyone so far has been homeless.

"My name is Mike, but people call me Blame."
"Blame? Why Blame?"
"Because it's always my fault, and not anyone else's."
"That kinda sucks"
"Well, it's easier to blame myself than to blame other people."

There's a lot of philosophy that gets tossed around at Venice. The guy I met was a real-life Hamlet, sort of. He was "really confused spiritually" at the time, and he might've killed himself if he hadn't been scared of what was waiting for him on the other side. And I had just read that.

I learned that homeless people come to Venice because it's a convenient place to live. The cops back in Jersey will throw you in jail for sleeping on the streets, but not here. "Here you got alarm clocks with guns," he tells me. It all seems so easy. Even if you come come with nothing, like so many people do, you don't need to be slick; but odds are you won't leave with anything either.

All your dreams, everything you want is right here in front of you, but you can't have it. "That's why people go crazy," he says. "That's why you see people walking around talking to themselves."

The system makes it easy (in comparison) for the homeless at Venice, but it also makes it easier to control them. Even in Santa Monica, enforcement is stricter. It's like containment. You'd rather keep more people in one place.

This particular guy was sitting on his sleeping bag in front of a vision store. Upscale. He had passed out the night before and someone had stolen his glasses. Now he can't see very far, and unless his friend had picked them up, he's not going anywhere either.



...Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?

-Shakespeare, Hamlet III.1.76-82