5 things that terrified me as a child...

We all have fears. Most of them established in us when we were young, and remaining there for years to fester in our minds and causing us to shiver at the mere thought of them, years, even decades later. These are the things that would cause me to stay up at night, panicked, sweating, clutching the blankets over my face praying that the noise I just heard was the wind coming in through the leaky window.

#5 Creepshow
From as early as I can remember until High School I spent just about every Friday and Saturday in our basement with my dad, listening to the Rolling Stones, playing darts, longing for the day I would grow up and drink beer and smoke cigars, and look as cool as he did.  Early on we had a cemented routine, either we'd watch The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly or Gettysburg. I maintain that this is where I acquired 95% of my personality traits. My love of terrible horror movies, my musical taste, sense of humor, etc. I'm basically a clone of my Dad, let's leave it at that.

The first cheesy horror movie I can ever remember watching is Creepshow. At the time it scared the crap out of me. In, what I can only assume was, an attempt to preserve my childhood innocence, my Dad instructed me to throw a blanket over my head when the scary bits happened. Though upon further review I probably should have either thrown the blanket over my head about 10 times, when the 'scary bit' happened for the other stories

Like this.

I only did for one. A daughter kills her father on Father's day. Dad returns from the grave and kills daughter. Simple enough. Throw the blanket over my head for the murder and when the zombie-dad serves his daughter's head as his Father's day cake. However there was a fatal flaw in my dad's plan: The blanket was only a blanket it name. It was more of a loosely connected association of threads. So his attempt to make me not see this

ended up looking like this.

Good try Dad, I'm only deducting half points for the nightmares.

#4 The Opening Scene of Goodfellas

This also took place in one of those smokey, late nights with my Dad in the basement. In an attempt to branch out from our usual routine of war and westerns my Dad went through the drawer of VHS tapes we had. He took out one, looked at it knowingly for a moment, then slid it into the VCR.

First scene.

Oh?

Dad?

.....

We only watched that first scene. For whatever reason my Dad decided that it was time for bed. Thanks Dad. For the next several years I spent many a night laying awake wondering why they were stabbing that opera singer in the trunk. I don't know what the first time I saw it I thought Billy Batts was an opera singer.

#3 Full Metal Jacket

Another late weekend with my Dad. (I'm starting to notice a pattern here.) My father watches this movie that same way that he watches Saving Private Ryan and apparently Goodfellas. 'Watch the awesome bit, then change the channel.'  So after watching R. Lee Ermy berate the guy from Criminal Intent forever my Dad pulls the blanket over my head. However because I hadn't willingly wanted to shield myself I found a hole in the confederation of threads, so I saw all of this unobstructed. 

My first thought? I'll show him, It probably won't be-

Oh...

...

...

This one's on me Dad.

#2 The Blue Boy

Long before the days when The History Channel became The Manly Reality Show Channel they used to have shows that at least on the surface that pertained to history. One of those shows was Haunted History (See! History is in the title!) Fridays at 10. (SURPRISE, I watched this in the basement with my Dad.)  Two episodes of that show were devoted to Gettysburg, which at the time, very relevant to my interests. 

One of the stories they told was that of a young boy who was raised in a local orphanage.  The head mistress was cruel so he ran away to the college about a block away. Two girls there decided to take him in. Shortly there after the woman that runs the dorm searches the room to see if the missing boy is hiding there, so right before she comes in they put him in the only logical place where the lady won't see him: The window sill. Oh yeah, it's the middle of winter and it's snowing like North Dakota in.....well, basically any time in North Dakota. 

So after the lady searches the dorm and can't find anything she takes the girls to lecture them or something. They leave the kid on the window sill. When they return hours later he's vanished. He didn't fall, he isn't on the roof. He just evaporated....straight through the walls...

So a hundred years later every once in a while a girl will look at her window and see 'Em Pleh' written in the frost. Pssssh, whatever. I watched D'Onofrio blow his fucking brains out, what the hell does this show got on tha-

Tap Tap Tap

...Hah. Yeah. Think you got me. Nah brah. I'm not afraid. 

Tap Tap Tap

....Ha ha, Seriously, stop it.. I'm not going to do it. 

Tap Tap Tap

I will not be a horror movie victim stereo type. I will not be a horror movie victim stereotype.

FUCK IT, WHAT'S BEHIND DOOR #1?!

Look at it. Look at it long and hard. Look into his eyesOHWAITTHEREAREN'TANY.  I'll leave it at that.

This probably sparked my addiction to horror stories for a while. I read every book on ghosts and spirits and horror and murder that my middle school library had to offer. Then I would lie awake for hours in the dark in pure and utter terror. Expecting this bastard to be looking at me.

#1 Bully

No, not the video game, that was awesome. I'm talking about the movie. I actually blacked this from my memory. It seriously caused some emotional scars....stuck with me for years.  

Oddly enough this did happen in the basement long ago, though it was with my best friend Ryan, not my father. It was like 2am, astronomically late for us at the time. (an early bed time for me now) At that point in the night I was on auto-pilot, cruising through the channels for something to watch. preferably something simple and or awesome. Once I got to the later movie channels, more than likely Cinemax, I saw Bully.

What I thought I was getting was this:

DON'T JUDGE ME

What I actually got, was this:

Bully is about a group of kids in Florida. They seem to revolve around the beck and call of this guy Bobby:

What's not to like?

Well apparently he was a jerk or something, and may or may not have raped one of the girls. But c'mon! Look at that smile! 

Well his friends go ahead and over react and decided to kill him.

Wait, what? 

Yeah. 

His best friend Mark

His girlfriends cousin or something and all around psycho Donny 

And a 'hitman' with a mullet 

So they lure Bobby to a swamp with the promise of women, liquor and drugs. There Donny strikes first, stabbing Bobby in the back. To which he cleverly responds 'fuuuck,' then turns around and yells, in an annoyed, why-aren't-you-here-already kind of voice for Mark.

"Yeah," I thought "Of course Mark will realize that what ever it was that Bobby did to him was trivial and hel-

Oh shit.

Mark does rush to the side of his friend, and he promptly aids him by STABBING HIM IN THE STOMACH. 

mfw

His guts start to pour out. Bobby tries to hold himself together (buh duh tssss) and cries out 'Listen, Mark, whatever I did, I'M SORRY!"  Mark responds by stabbing Bobby again.

outa nowhere: Donny. and after Mark slits Bobby's throat, the Mullet man finishes it.

Good God, a gun would have got him just as dead.

It didn't help when that whole 'Based on a true story' thing came up either. When the movie ended me and my friend awkwardly looked at each other. Pondering what the other was capable. Ryan broke the silence by saying 'Tim, I will never be mean to you again."

huh.

Fanaticism is Bad

Have you ever known somebody who was obsessed with something? I don't mean the kind of person that has a bunch of one band's albums, or has an extensive collection of one genre of movies in their room, or the person that decides to start liking a sport once the last game of the season rolls around.

I'm talking about the kind of person who has every single album, every EP, every single, every b-side track, every DVD of a band. They have posters and t-shirts, and can rattle off the year every song was produced, knows all the hobbies, favorite drinks and birthdays of all of the band members, and will continuously talk about every single little band fun-fact to the point where they don't become fun anymore.

I'm talking about the kind of person who's walls, ceiling, desktop background, facebook photo album, cellphone case, bed sheets, toothbrush, folders, pens and pencils, binders, t-shirts, jewelry, book shelf and DVD case are all related to one individual and the movie franchise that he drives solely based on his moderately above average looks.

I'm talking, albeit to a much lesser extent, about the kind of person that quite literally created a shrine devoted to his favorite film series, complete with the DVDs, one of which has a collector's edition screaming book of the dead case, posters, musical playbills, the comics that continue the series, action figures, and a chainsaw similar to the one used throughout the series to top it all off.

These kind of people, ladies and gentlemen, are the type of people that ruin our world. People don't get obsessed about normal things. I don't know a single person who's addicted to grocery shopping. People get obsessed about weird stuff that only they like. And drugs I guess. Some people get obsessed with drugs. But that's a topic for another blog.

Right now I'm talking about people that get obsessed over weird stuff that only they care about. It's particularly destructive to our universe because, currently, everything revolves around social networking. With facebook and tweeter and tumblr and livejournal and every other site, people have the opportunity to spread their wealth of knowledge and opinions and diversity across the world, creating a more unified and connected existence.

Except those damn fanatics. All they can do is talk about Edward Cullen or Justin Bieber or Ke$ha or Channing Tatum or whatever they hell they freak out about. Every post is a quote from a movie or a song or something, and they post a lot. The worst is when they upload pictures. Entire albums chock foll of hundreds of images of celebrities with girls' faces poorly photoshopped next to them. Stop being such a pre-teen girl. At least make the picture look believable, I know dogs that can photoshop better than that.

Originally, it wasn't my intention to write about this, but it irks me too much to avoid. People that are obsessed with a normal person. Not like a celebrity. Usually, it's an ex. And they just can't seem to stop making statuses about them. The target of these statuses is probably blatantly aware of every single thing that is being said at them, and yet the posts never stop. They're always something like "You promised you'd never break my heart, way to be a heartless liar." Every single day, you can count on this person posting some random, annoying status about the boy that crushed them and how they'll get get over it. BUT THEY NEVER DO. If they were getting over it, they'd probably stop talking about them rather than posting statuses EVERY SINGLE DAY. That's not getting over it, that's wallowing. And wallowing is pathetic, annoying and should be done in private, not for all of facebook.

Sorry, I probably shouldn't check my news feed in the middle of writing blogs. Anyway, I've had a moment of introspection, right after I took a brief writing break to watch some improv comedy, and it has changed my entire belief system. I apologize to those of you that read this far thinking I was going to damn weird obsessions to a watery grave. Instead, I'm damning the extensive use of social networking to a watery grave, or as terrible of a grave as a blog that nobody reads can do.

So stop using facebook to spread your poorly photoshopped pictures of your face on Kristen Stewart's body caught between Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner. Create a photobucket account and just give your friends the links in a personal message, because the rest of the world really doesn't want to see that. Stop using twitter altogether because if you can say it in 140 characters, is it really even worth saying? Stop with the inane crap and the pointless, worthless nonsense nobody wants to hear. And, if you can't refrain yourself from being a waste of digital space, at least use your privacy settings. You can control who sees what and who doesn't. Please, spare me.

What I'm trying to say is that obsessions are fine. Everybody gets obsessive. It would be foolish to write an entire post about how bad obsessions are considering you can't avoid them. Out of those three scenarios above, one of them is specifically about me, and at one point I was well on my way to becoming the living representation of another. I get obsessed.

To be perfectly honest, I'd probably follow a select few people to the ends of the Earth. If Sam Raimi told me he needs my personal help funding his next film, I'd say "Point me to the nearest bank," as I steal my father's handgun and don a ski mask. If Frank Darabont told me he wanted a real corpse rather than a prop for a scene in The Walking Dead, I'd stab my own best friend in the heart. If Christopher Nolan told me that I was really dreaming and the only way to wake up would be to jump off a bridge, I'd be a little bit skeptical as to whether he was Christopher Nolan or just a clever forger, but I'd probably jump off that bridge.


We all have our weird obsessions, the point is that we keep them to ourselves, because if we spread our infatuations across the world or the network or wherever, at best we meet one or two people that agree and annoy our other hundreds of friends, and at the worst, we look like we need a psychiatrist because we've admitted we'd rob banks and kill others as well as ourselves just because we look up to someone.

HI THERE

HI!
Anselm of Canterbury here, and I'm gonna sell you on the existence of God in 9 simple steps!
First things first, let's define God!
God is the being than which none greater is possible.
By greater I mean superior to or better than.
In my book Wisdom and Moral goodness are great-making qualities!

The second thing we need to straighten out is Things that exist in reality, things which don't exist in reality, possible things, impossible things, and things that exist in the understanding.
Examples are the easiest way to sort these out.
Things that exist in reality: dogs, televisions, trees
Things that don't exist in reality: the fountain of youth, Santa Claus, unicorns
Possible things: Santa Claus, Unicorns. (Just because they don't exist doesn't mean it's impossible that they could.)
Things that exist in the understanding: Basically anything you can imagine.
Things that don't exist in the understanding: a four sided triangle or a three sided square, things that have never been thought of that may exist, and things that have never been thought of that don't exist.

Whew, OKAY! Now that we've handled those little disclaimers, lets get the the meat an' potatos of this discussion.

1. God exists in the understanding.
2. God might have existed in reality. (God is a possible being.)
3. If God exists only in the understanding, but might have existed in reality, then he might have been greater than he is.
4. Suppose God exists only in the understanding.
5. God might have been greater than he is. (2, 4, & 3)
6. God is a being than which a greater is possible. (5)
7.  God is a being which none greater is possible.
8. It is false that God exists only in the understanding. (4 - 7)
9. God exists in reality as well as in the understanding. (1, 8)

Dreams

 I had been meaning to write something on this topic for several weeks. I feel there has bee a string of recurring concepts in my dreams that make them odd even by dream standards. At first I attributed it to odd sleeping habits, then watching weird shows before bed. Now I have no Idea.

The first one occurred in December over winter break. I had stayed up just about all night playing madden and passed out around 10am. I slept for just about 2 hours, yet in that two hours this occurred:
 I'm in my backyard, only it isn't my back yard. It looks like my backyard but where my neighbor's fence usually is is now rolling landscapes peppered with large pine trees. I imagine this is how Montana would look. The next thing I know me and Brad are walking through the woods. I'm holding a map that leads us to the secret. What the secret is, I don't know, I suppose that's why it's a secret. Suddenly from no where: Bear attack. Bears everywhere. Not the New Jersey black bears either, Canadian, I'll eat you and your family, bears, big bears, bear cavalry bears. We both run. I make it back to my kitchen and from the window over the sink I see Brad still in the yard. Trapped between the jaws of a massive grizzly, slowly being ripped to pieces. The bear stands in the tree line looking right at me, almost mocking me by taking my friend's life.

At this point I smelled someone making bacon, and that was enough of a kick to send me out of my dream and into the real world with a sense of 'the fuck just happend' and 'Oh man, I'm starving.'

The next several weeks I don't remember in such detail, but there are definitely two common themes: More bears, dead hookers and dead ex-girlfriends.

This morning I suddenly found myself in the building I have most of my classes in, only it wasn't that building, it was the main entrance of my high school. I see my ex girlfriend walk in, ex-a for all intents and purposes. The thing about her was after we broke up she insisted on trying to be my friend. Now, I never understood this concept that girls have, but for my own personal coping methods, when a girl broke up with me I just cut off that whole portion of my life. Anything we both were into, any friends I made because of her, whatever, just, gone so I wouldn't have to think about it. So, seeing her in class everyday for an entire year and having to deal with her trying to play nice and everything got old fast.

So ex-a walks into the room and instantly sees me. It's as if I can hear the tracking computer in her head go 'target acquired.' I instantly take evasive action, into the stairwell. Now the building has the stair case for my dorm and I'm damn near sprinting up multiple floors. (missing frames) I'm in her room talking to her, only it's not my ex-girlfriend, it's a hybrid of my ex and current girlfriend (missing frames) My sister sees me talking to her. I need to get her. This cannot be spoken of. She'll rat me out for sure. I try and chase her down before she can get to the telportation portal. (missing frames) My hybrid girlfriend is dead. I'm dragging her body somewhere, a feeling of desperation creeping over me. My alarm goes off, I wake up with the feeling 'God dammit, I need a dream interperter.'

If my brain were to release a greatest hits CD of my dreams it'd be called "Hookers, Bears, and Girlfriends: the life and times of Tim."

My Brain Is Shutting Down

This:



Awesome facebook posts #2

I was having lunch with a friend yesterday and he reminded me of this coversation. Good times.

Move in day

UPDATE:   I felt it necessary to add that, aside from myself and Brad no one else on the planet has ever been almost killed by a TV.



How many people can honestly say they were nearly killed by a TV? This guy can.  On Janurary 17th 2009 I hurriedly packed up my belongings and went to school against my will. Having returned home in the extremely early hours, only to get an email from my school saying "hey bitch, be here tomorrow."

Tomorrow rolls around, and We're enroute. I'm ansy all day because the Jets are in the playoffs and they're rolling. I'm the only one it seems who thinks that they don't only have a shot against the Chargers, but will win.

I miserably carry my stuff in through a freezing rain while texting my angry girlfriend who I had to blow off to go back, but didn't believe I even was at school. After about 4 back and forths between the car, and the 4 flights of stairs to my room I watch the Cowboys get beat down by the Vikings. Alright. It's game time.

I hurry to my room and first things first, TV needs to get set up.  Without question the best place in my mind to put the TV was atop my roommates closet, it's in the corner, you can see it from everywhere in the room, its the best spot.

My TV isn't new. I'm pretty sure I got it on my 13th birthday. It's huge and bulky  and nearly impossible to hold comfortably. Not only is it hard to hold normally, but at that moment I was standing on a chair that was built to rock slightly. As I go to raise the TV onto the closet my left shoulder suddenly decides that "hey, I've been working non-stop for 18 freakin years. I'm going out for a smoke."

I start going left like a racecar that just blew a tire. I fall backwards, first I felt the floor. Then I felt the TV, crashing down, onto my ribcage. I was 90% sure at the time if I wasn't dead I had deffinately broken something. Even though I didn't my shoulder hurt like a bitch for a few weeks.

MORAL: I'm not really sure what the moral is, but falling off a chair and having a TV land on you fucking sucks.

(An artists dramatic depiction of what occured.)