You just did what you’re supposed to do

In Korea, they don’t put air fresheners or sanitizers into their urinals; they just throw a bar of soap over the drain.

Walking around the here, you’ll sometimes see white stains on rooftops and sidewalks that radiate out like remnants from a paint bomb. For the longest time, I didn’t realize that they were the melted remains of urinal soap bars, until, one day, I saw a group of children throwing bars of soap out of a 10th story window.

And yet, they call me dirty when I come into work without having showered for days. I may not wash, but that’s far less likely to spread disease than grabbing pissed on soap bars and chucking them around with your friends.

Sometimes you just wake up and you’re sick, but there are those few, rare occasions, when you can feel it coming days in advance.

There’s nothing more pathetic than a human being’s mind in those moments.

We go over all our negative behaviors and promise to change them: we brush our teeth anytime a foreign object enters our mouths; we promise to stop drinking things we find in stray Petri dishes; and we take our vitamins like good boys and girls.

None of these things are ever effective.

Well, that’s not entirely true; there is one effective remedy out there, but it goes by many names.

It all depends on how you like to take your placebo.

Of course, it doesn’t stop with medicine; each of us is perfectly willing to find miracle cures and signs everywhere, for ailments both physical and mental. The only prerequisite is that they meet our poorly defined criteria and allow us to read into them as much as we want without bogging us down in reality.

We all like role-playing games; some of us just prefer to use dice and hit points, eat Funions in our mother’s basements, and have our closes friends call us Qzilgnar the Destroyer.

At some point in our lives, we consciously decide how much reality we want to accept and that’s about the level in which we live from then on.

There are distractions along the way, tragedies that interrupt our television schedules and masturbatory habits, but, for the most part, we put our wheels on a nice mental track and start shoveling coal into the engines.

The longer we keep doing this, the faster the ride starts to go; time starts to disappear.

Eventually, when we are aging fast enough, we break through any and all barriers until every day is exactly like the one before it and it’s impossible to tell in which direction time moves.

Some people call this state dementia, but it’s as close to eternal life as we’re ever going to get.

Now, I know there are those of you out there who are convinced that you’re different, that you’re not in a rut, or doing the same things over and over again, especially if you have live in an exotic locale, have sex with anonymous strangers in poorly lit, highway rest stops, or take part in a particular, non-mainstream lifestyle; unfortunately, wearing cowboy boots to your job as an insurance salesmen, moving to East Crud Bucket, Nebraska, and introducing yourself to all the conservative Christian Republicans in town doesn’t make your life any less rut worthy.

Doing the same thing, day in and day out, with the exception of major holidays, is what makes most lives rut like, and there’s no amount of regimented behavior that can change our situation.

To truly break free, you’ve got to float through life wherever the wind takes you, say yes to all those experiences you’ve been too afraid to try, ring people’s doorbells and run away before they answer.

I realize that constant change is stressful, especially to those of you with young children, but your kids are much more adaptive than you can possibly imagine; since they’re so young, they have the ability to incorporate anything into their world view and move on… that’s what makes them such efficient killers.

Don’t be afraid to mix things up. Try something you’ve never done before: eat your neighbor’s dog, have sex with one of your less attractive coworkers, rob a bank.

The idea is to keep everything in such a constant state of flux that time progressively gets faster and faster, to the point where you can no longer distinguish between one day and the next; that way, when they ask you to take a polygraph, you want have to worry (besides, those things are almost never admissible in court).

Just don’t let yourself get to a stage where you’re afraid to put your hand into the urinal of life and pull out your own bar of fragrant soap to throw out the window.

Sex Mahoney for President


Currently listening to:

Blonde on Blonde
by Bob Dylan