Iron Fist

The thing about crazy people is that they seem to have no idea how goddamn crazy they are. I suppose that’s part of what makes them crazy, right? The more-or-less sane people in this world have that built-in mechanism so that when we start to do something crazy, this little safety gets tripped and a little voice says, “Hey, don’t you think this is a little, you know. CRAZY?” or maybe you get a feeling in your gut that what you’re saying and doing is really just ridiculous. I would argue that it’s this early-warning system going off that lets you know that you’re not crazy. The nutty-and-delusional, however, are lacking this internal check and so go right along with their crazy behavior.

I would further argue that for the non-crazy, if they should somehow start down a course of action towards something crazy and somehow missed their safety check, they will at least be open to someone else pointing out the craziness of what they’re about to do.

But if you’re really crazy? Good luck reasoning with someone like that. For example, I remember during the last presidential election, when the Lyndon LaRouche campaign people were swarming all over campus trying to hand out campaign literature and garner support for their candidate who, if memory serves, wasn’t even on the Oregon ballot. It was less than a week before the election when one of them jumped out in front of me while I was on my way to class. “Hey man, got a minute?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Listen up man, you’ve got to get on board with LaRouche, now, because we’ve only got four days left to get rid of all the Nazis.”

“The Nazis? As in, like, the real Nazis?”

“The Nazis, man. All of them.”

I looked into his eyes and saw his utter conviction that we were, in fact, infested with Nazis in this country, actual Nazis, no doubt slinking around the suburbs right now in their shiny boots and crisp uniforms, probably going through my ‘fridge and eating the last of my ice cream or stealing socks out of my laundry, and only by getting on board with the LaRouche campaign could we defeat them. There would be no reasoning with this guy, and there was certainly no “little inside voice” telling him, “Hey, you don’t happen to think all this talk about the Nazis is a little crazy, do you?”

So rather than argue with him, I just agreed with him. “All right, man. The Nazis. We gotta get rid of them. But right now I need to get to class. You still going to be here in an hour?”

“Yeah. You’ll be back?”

“Hell yeah!” I said, pumping my fist in the air to convince him of the full extent of my red-blooded American patriotism. “You hold down the fort till I get back!” Then I walked away to class, already working out the alternate routes between my classes and my apartment that I’d have to take for the next week.

Is there a larger point to all this? Absolutely. I just can’t get into it right now, as it’s all just a little too, oh, disturbing and ridiculous and completely fucking crazy, if you will.  Maybe I’ll get into it all later.

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Because you demanded it…the Fuck You List. Here’s a collection of fuck you’s that have been accumulating lately:

• Comment Spam: To all blog-perusing webspiders and robots from eastern Europe and other assorted parts of the world, without further ado, fuck you. Seriously, is comment spam even fucking useful? What’s the point? Do you really think people read blogs and say, “You know, some of the stuff he had on his site was pretty interesting, but I sure am glad he had those four thousand links in his comments to sites that feature lesbo sex and viagra”? (Note: Iron Fist will be launching lesbo sex and viagra categories later this year. Stay tuned.) Thankfully, I got on the Akismet bandwagon tonight and have been obliterating my comment spam. Here at Iron Fist, we don’t just block spam; we Fist it.
• Asshole Customers: A 14-pack of tools waltzed into a friend’s work and decided that instead of her real name they were going to call her ‘Dave.’ Oh yeah, that’s clever, asshole, real clever. You know what else is clever? Fuck you and your circle jerk party. I’m glad you got iced tea poured on your crotch. I only wish it had been kerosene instead. Dick.
• Whoever peed in the elevator: OK, so I don’t really know if that was a puddle of piss in my apartment elevator, but I wasn’t about to bend down to smell it to find out. If it was piss, fuck you, that’s gross. If it wasn’t, one of my shitweed neighbors still left several pools of something in the elevator. Come on, you jerks, we have to live here, don’t trash the damn place.
• Construction vendors: I’m not going to name the company that did the work on my new office/closet at work for liabilty reasons, so for ease of reference I’ll just refer to them as the Society of Mouthbreathers. I don’t know what kind of credentials you need to join the Society, but I don’t think it’s anything terribly difficult to come by. For all I know a preponderance of knuckle hair is enough for you to make the cut and get hired there. Then you can install my ceiling access panels the wrong way so that no one can use them, which is crucial since earlier you and your half-wit buddies installed an air conditioner that didn’t work and now nobodoy can get to it to work on it. So what’s your solution, Society of Mouthbreathers? Bring in a Volkswagen-sized portable AC unit and set it up right by my desk where I’m supposed to sit? Leave it there for a week before you get around to installing a thermostat? Install the thermostat the wrong way so that it cools my room down to 58 degrees? Good call, dickburgers. Oh yeah, and fuck you.
• Herpes: Actually, I’m just kidding about that one. Everyone loves herpes — it’s great!

Right, that’s it for now. Come back later, I’ll be cranky again soon.

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Partly because there’s so little daylight, partly because people are burned out from the holidays. Also, it’s cold. Normally I don’t gripe about the cold as much as I have been lately, since I’ve moved beyond my SoCal ways and come to accept the changing of the seasons here in the Northwest, but for some reason the cold this year is really getting to me, and I find myself very antsy in anticpation of spring.

But I digress. January is no good for blogging because it’s cold and there’s no daylight, and I just haven’t had the creative urge lately.

Don’t hold your breath or anything, but I might manage to cough up a “Fuck You” list tomorrow for the last day of January. If I don’t…this month sets a record low for posts.

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Dammit, I hate being sick.  I’m going on fucking day three now of this, all spent at work because my company is too cheap to pay for sick days.  I’d do anything not to be sick anymore.

Well.  Almost anything.

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I know that just a few days ago I was lamenting about how badly I needed a haircut, but when my regular stylist was unavailable for so long, I finally caved and went to the little haircut place in the mall during my lunch break and got a haircut. These places are great because you can tell them how you want your hair to be cut, and then they just go ahead and give you the haircut that they feel like giving you, and it ends up being a surprise because they turn the chair around so that you can’t see what you’re getting.

So my stylist ended up cutting my hair shorter and shorter in what I assume was a minor fit of desperation as she tried to even out the cut. See, although it’s not obvious when my head-pelt is at its luxurious thickest, it turns out that my overly large head has a lumpy, irregular shape, sort of like a lopsided potato. The tiny Cambodian woman who cut my hair didn’t realize this until after she’d mowed down some of my hair and saw that it was still sticking up in places. I suppose I might have brought this up to her before she started, but I’m still looking for a way to casually inject a warning about my asymmetrical cranium into conversation.

Last night I feasted on Thai food and on some world class cookies from my friend Sibyl!; then I came home and (once again) fell fast asleep in an uncomfortable position sprawled out on top of my blankets. I realized a little before 4 AM that my lights were on and I was still mostly clothed, so I finally ‘got ready for bed.’ I’m still up. It’s almost six.

Oh well. The weekend starts now!

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