The Anxious Scribe

The Social Cookie: A Day in the Life of a Compulsive Facebook Checker

Posted on January 22, 2016 by Phil G

As of this writing I’ve been married almost five months and have owned a home and mortgage a bit longer. Almost every morning I follow the same routine. I wake up when I get up, about 5:30 AM. Around 6:20 I put on pants and a seasonably appropriate shirt to let my wife out of the driveway, since she leaves for work a lot earlier than I do and I’m usually parked behind her. I take my meds and eat breakfast about 7, hop in the shower at 7:30, and then get ready to leave for work.

In-between these familiar steps I’m usually spending alone time in my “mancave,” and as much as I try to make good use out of it, I find myself doing a lot of Facebook checking.

This morning, 5:30 AM or thereabouts, I was playing around on Amazon and decided to impulse buy one of my favorite shameless stupid comedies, Booty Call, on DVD. My wife and I each budget ourselves $100 spending money a month and I had some gift card cash credited on my account. The “Bootiest Edition” of Booty Call was six bucks (not including shipping…I regret dropping Prime) so altogether there wasn’t much debate involved in this purchase. Add to shopping cart, proceed to checkout, boom, expecting it on Thursday.

Then on the receipt page I saw a button to ‘Share’ my recent purchase on Facebook. “Hey, my ‘Friends’ might get a kick out of this,” I thought to myself. “It’s Booty Call – the ‘Bootiest’ Edition! Someone will smile.” I clicked the button and sure enough, the evidence appeared on my Timeline.

I circled the block to let my wife out of the driveway. I took my pills and ate my cereal. I showered. Then I drifted back to Facebook, where I discovered that no one had ‘liked’ or commented on my choice in 90’s sex comedy. “Maybe most of my common associates are still waking up,” I thought.

Onward to work. Now the national weather service has been going crazy over a terrible Winter hellstorm that’s due to slam into the east coast over the weekend. In my area the local forecasting has been wildly inconsistent with what we’re supposed to get, as local forecasts are wont to do. Again, my attention returned to Facebook. I figured the upcoming annual apocalypse would be a lively topic for discussion, so I posted a status update:

An hour or so went by, and in that time my Facebook friends had this to say about the circumstances surrounding our weather: nothing. Not a damned thing. Huh. Alright. Well hey, did you know about this?

Four hours passed. No one cared. Not about Booty Call, the weather, Bad Santa 2, or any of it. I posted a link to a YouTube clip that was also ignored, and then circled back around to the winter storm, which in my area is slated to be not much of a winter storm at all.

I kept checking, and checking, and…nothing. I realize that what I am presenting here is a relatively dull Timeline. All the same, I started growing anxious. Questions and worries began running through my mind, the usual kind I put up with as a chronic anxiety sufferer. “Am I really that boring?” “Are any of these people interested in me at all?” “Why do I feel like I’m talking to myself in an empty room?”

This is what it ultimately came down to though, and the point I’m getting at. It’s about, and it always has been about, the red numbers.

When I see that little globe go active in the upper right-hand corner, I get excited, elated, impatient to click on it and reveal what it has to tell me. There are two driving forces at work here. The first one is the obvious notion that someone paid attention to me, taking a few seconds out of their waking hours to click ‘Like’ or type a short sentence. The other is that the little globe is, in essence, a mystery prize box. Sometimes that prize is a freemium game request for a nail or a jellybean, but in other cases, if I’m lucky…

Those red numbers provide a brief, fleeting dopamine kick to my brain, and although the pleasure only lasts a second or two, I feel a compulsive need to collect more of them. To me that is the essence of the game, and the ultimate goal of owning a Facebook account. More red numbers means more little pleasure buzzes, and thus my mission is to collect more of them.

Facebook is providing its users with the easiest means of tapping the brain’s reward system as a free service. The problem is that when one comes to rely on that easy dopamine cookie and it stops being delivered, the natural response is to either try harder or get frustrated. The reason I shared Booty Call and jokes about the weather with everyone was the “throw against the wall until something sticks” principle. At some point there has to be solace in the mess.

Meanwhile, Facebook uses the hunt for the red numbers to soak up advertising revenue alongside their other infamous business venture, data mining. On the user end I’m the rat in the cage, hungry but ignoring the food dispenser over the pleasure button.

What’s interesting to me is that I initially came to theorize all this on my own after a lot of soul searching and self reflection. But a random Google search into the matter surprised me. It turns out that studies have been conducted into this very matter and have drawn the same conclusions—this time by people much smarter and more credible than myself. Moreover, Facebook can have rather nasty afflictions on the brain and brain chemistry. Modern psychology is not blind to the Facebook dopamine cookie jar.

With all this in mind, why do I continue subjecting myself to it?

The truth is that I am considering deactivating my account and walking away, and I have been for some time. But it’s a difficult step to take, and not just because of the red numbers. There are people on my friend list I actually talk to—strange, I know—and Facebook is my only means of communication with many of them. Another issue is that since the wedding, the photos, name sharing, new relatives and such means that my Facebook account isn’t really mine alone anymore. Just like real life, I’m married in the virtual world as well.

I’m done now.

I never got my red numbers.

Chronicles of the Fur Children Part Two: The Cat

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Phil G

She changed our lives. In those first few months I referred to her as the catalyst, pun completely intended.

It started on the last day before summer break at work, under a gloomy overcast sky. I was running an errand for the office, delivering something to another building.

When I came out, there was a cat. It was minding its own business. Curious, and with little to do in the few hours of work remaining, I ignored all my childhood lessons about stray animals and called out to it in the standard way.

“Kittykittykitty?”

Its ears perked up. It focused on me.

I got down on a knee. “Come here, kitty.”

The cat hurried over to me. At that point the voice of my mother and father spoke in my head in unison, “It’s going to bite you, and then what?”

Ignoring reason again, I reached out. The cat let me stroke its furry head. I stood up. It rubbed against my leg.

“Good kitty. Bye, kitty.”

I turned around and headed toward my building. A few paces ahead, I looked behind me.

The cat was following me.

I kept going, and the cat followed. I crossed over a section where two curbs were divided by a gravel street cutting through. I looked back. The cat had stopped in the middle of the street and was looking around in confusion. I became afraid. There was little to no traffic on this lifeless last day, but I didn’t want to take changes. I walked back to the street’s middle and petted the cat. It resumed following me over the curb and across the grass in front of my building.

At one point I stopped and took a picture of the cat as it rubbed against my pants leg a second time.

We kept walking, the cat and I, until I reached my building’s door. The cat stopped at the threshold. I petted it one more time and disappeared inside.

I went upstairs. I sat down. Now I had a choice to make.

Actually, I didn’t. One would be the ‘smart’ decision and the other incredibly stupid. I reached to several people live and via text messaging. The question I asked was, “I found this cat outside; should I take it home with me?”

The majority of feedback I received was a collective “hell no” for a number of reasons. My boss said, “There’s no way you’re going to keep an alley cat from shitting up your house.” My parents were equally against, hitting my phone with reasons such as “Do you know how much it costs to have a pet?” “Cats will turn on you in a heartbeat,” and above all, “You’re not allowed to have pets at your apartment, remember?”

But I knew there was only one person whose opinion ultimately mattered: my girlfriend, who was living with me and would have the final say in adopting an animal. I sent her the same question, along with the photo I’d taken.

“It’s up to you,” she wrote back.

I thought and I pondered. I reached a compromise. “If the cat is still out there when I leave work,” I thought and texted, “then I’ll bring it home. I won’t make an effort to look around for it.”

In the meantime, I did research. This involved Googling and reading articles about stray cats versus feral ones. The cat’s earlier behavior categorized it as a ‘stray,’ I discovered. A feral cat would have bolted from a human the instant I called out to it. Mark one in the ‘take it home’ box, I decided.

5:00 PM hit. I was outside and done. It had rained a little but the sun had since broken through the grime. I looked to my left. To my right. No cat. I went my car.

The cat emerged from beneath another vehicle. By following me it had ventured to strange territory and had been forced to take shelter in the rain.

You said you’d do it, I thought. So here we are. Conditions have been met. Now what?

“Here, kittykitty.”

It walked over to me. I petted it.

My rear passenger door was open. I took a deep breath, picked up the cat and placed it in the back seat. The cat immediately jumped out and looked at me, shaken but not frightened enough to retreat.

“This is a bad idea,” I told myself. “Don’t do this. This is a bad, bad idea. Don’t be stupid.”

I picked up the cat, put it in the back seat, shut the door, buckled in and turned the engine.

I started driving home. The cat hunkered down in the floorboard, terrified out of its wits. It allowed me to reach back and pet it as it meowed a song of frightened confusion. My inner monologue fired up at a klaxon’s pitch.

Stop the car! Let it out! Pull over and put it outside now, right now, right, fucking, now, this instant! Put it out and don’t look back! This is your last chance! Do it now! You’re making a terrible mistake! Goddammit Phil, you stop this fucking car!

The cat meowed louder. I winced. Animal kidnapping. Cruelty? What was I doing? I passed the security gate. I was out on the open road. I’d missed my shot. I was taking the animal home.

We got home. My girlfriend was waiting for me outside.

“I got a surprise,” I said.

“You brought home the cat, didn’t you?”

She followed me to my car. I opened the rear door and the cat jumped out. It poked around our parking lot, taking in its new surroundings.

“It’s going to run away now,” my girlfriend said.

I opened the apartment door. “Come on, kitty,” I called out.

The cat walked over the threshold, no questions asked, no coercion involved. I shut the door.

The both of us stared down at this new addition, which stopped and stared for a moment before rubbing (‘loving’) against all of our furniture. It wasn’t scared, just baffled.

It was home. But now my girlfriend and I had decisions to make and preparations to do. I left her to get acquaintance with the cat while I went to PetCo and bought a loot of cat supplies that ran me a little over a hundred: food bowls, food, litter box, litter, a carrying cage and toys. Outside, the rain returned with a cold hell’s fury. I trudged back to the car and drove home in an apocalyptic torrent.

The cat, whom we were referring to as a ‘he’ (a young cat’s gender is a bit difficult to tell by its genitals) tried to chew a hole in the food bag. I fixed it a hearty bowl and it wolfed the food down. We filled its litter box and showed it where to evacuate. Then my girlfriend cooked us some burgers. Dinner was a struggle because the cat kept jumping on the table and trying to snatch our plates from our hands.

It was getting settled in, and doing so a lot quicker than I expected. It still had a lot of wild ‘stray’ habits to break. If trying to steal our burgers was any indication, the cat was starving. But beyond that, my girlfriend and I faced a greater challenge ahead.

We were going to have to move. The apartment had a strict ‘no pets’ policy in place and I’d just violated that rule with a vengeance.

But first we had appointments to make with the local veterinarian. Though we were calling the cat ‘he’ we had a suspicion that it might actually be female. Then our fears escalated when we realized the cat might be pregnant. If that were the case I’d fucked up ten fold. I’d doomed us.

The first vet trip confirmed that the cat was indeed female, her age estimated around six months old. Whether she was pregnant was indeterminable. We agreed to bring her back the next day for a spaying. A regular spaying would cost a hundred bucks. Kittens present in the womb would add on an extra $25. All in all, I spent about $500 in vet fees getting the cat her shots and sterilization, money I’d thankfully had in savings.

Then we spent the rest of my summer break locating a new apartment and then packing and moving. There was no way we’d be able to keep the cat a secret for long, especially if someone from maintenance happened by with a big mouth. There were expenses. There was stress. My dad had to gift me financing to make the moving process smoother. But after surviving a storm of extra fees and hassles, we settled into a new place that allowed animals with a $350 pet deposit. We brought along Marilyn as well and managed to keep the cat from eating her until the hamster’s natural death.

A year later, our cat is fat and thriving. She rules the house. We have spoiled her with treats and toy hordes. Her favorite sleeping spot is my memory foam pillow, which is fine up until she starts licking my hair in the middle of the night.

I’d say putting her in my car and bringing her home with me was a good mistake. I believe she’s a lot happier being pampered by humans instead of struggling to survive in a parking lot. And I often wonder how different all our lives, including hers, would have been if I hadn’t made that split second decision.

Duggar, Dunham, Jenner…and Palin.

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Phil G

As someone who has been diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I do not know why I choose to indulge in social media while giving the slightest damn about my own mental health. When faced with this question I tell myself, “It’s because you can’t keep in touch with your friends otherwise, Phil.” While there is a semblance of truth to that, the reality is that Facebook and its bastard spawn only drive me closer to madness every time I compulsively log in and lurk around the political, fiscal, social, conservative and liberal pissing contests being aimed around on data mining platforms that are only safe and secure when its users post anecdotes about their cats.

Within the past week my obvious masochism has led to me to learn what a sampling of 350,000,000 people within the Earth’s population think about Caitlyn Jenner, Josh Duggar, and as of this morning, Lena Dunham and some inflections she apparently imposed on her own sister – a story that was first brought to me by Alaskan wonder Sarah Palin, reporting on words from her daughter, bastion of wisdom Bristol. It was a trending topic on Facebook’s righthand sidebar.

Opinions don’t drive me to the public forum unless I strongly believe they are wrong. To put it in the parlance of the popular metaphor, I drag my proverbial soapbox out of my pants when assholes are at their smelliest. In the case of the Conservative/Liberal Civil War that’s pitting brother against brother on an hourly basis, there are opinions and then there is my own opinion.

I’ve already introduced a lot to sort out here. I’ll begin with the simplest.

Caitlyn Jenner is a woman. It doesn’t matter that Caitlyn used to be a man named Bruce. This is because of how the transgendered individual operates within and outside of themselves. It is a physical, mental, biological, spiritual, psychological and discomforting feeling that one was not born in their correct physiological body. Like homosexuality, it is not a choice. A man does not wake up and decide to put on a dress and/or later take estrogen and/or have his penis surgically inverted into a vagina, nor does a woman wake up with the same random hair. This is a process that begins at birth, either out of an inward sense that corrections need to be made, or emerging from the womb as a hermaphrodite and being faced with picking one physical gender over the other.

In other words, it’s about science and nature.

Though trans people are cultivated by a scientific process, there are those among our population who don’t adhere to basic scientific facts. The same people who will only accept that the Earth is six thousand literal years old and was created in six literal days are not going to believe science when it says that transgendered individuals are scientific fact. One cannot go from wading safely in the indoor heated shallow end to landing face first in the cold, outdoor deep end.

This bothers me. But what bothers me even more is the quickness of the Judeo-Christian majority to forgive Josh Duggar for putting his hands on his little sisters, and in the same breath condemn Caitlyn Jenner, who transitioned into a woman but does not have the same history of molesting children. I have seen the Christian community kiss Josh’s ass, give him hugs, Tweet about the nature of forgiveness and God’s love and footnote it with a collective shrug of “boys will be boys.” Meanwhile, Caitlyn is the sign of the End Times, the seven year Tribulation and New Sodom rising up from a pile of ash to engulf America in raw immorality.

This was to be my second ‘level’ of complication within this cathartic clusterfuck, but it’s really no more difficult than the first topic because there is a clear distinction here: Caitlyn Jenner found comfort by embracing her femininity; Josh Duggar found comfort by feeling up small children in their sleep. That is not “boys will be boys.” At fourteen you know what you are fucking doing when it comes to bad touch even if your frontal lobes haven’t shaped your finalized personality matrix.

You know, or you should know, even if you belong to a fundamentalist sect/cult of Christianity that treats women like property and delegates their roles to baby factories and toys for their future husbands. I’m digressing into a nature vs. nurture argument regarding the Quiverfull Movement here, but even someone raised in a nuthouse like that should have some semblance of rationality. I’m not letting Duggar off the hook. To anyone who is not a complete asshole, hands stay off children even if those children are girls viewed by the family cult as second class citizens.

TLC, the subject of a future post I am certain, has canceled 19 Kids and Counting over the scandal, a year after striking Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo off the schedule, again due to molestation allegations. I’d like to be optimistic and believe that TLC will eventually drop all its culturally devoid reality geek shows and return to being owned by NASA as The Learning Channel, but we’ve a long way through the wilderness yet.

But onto Lena Dunham.

Well, let me catch my breath. When I spend my entire early morning turning “whats” and “what ifs” over in my head on the same day I have to report to work, that’s an early sign I need to take a mental health day, sit on the front porch with a bottle of flavored water and stare reflectively into the middle distance.

I confess I don’t know much about Lena Dunham beyond watching the first season of Girls and Tiny Furniture eons before that. She’s become a figurehead and cultural icon among the Left and within the contemporary Feminist movement. She likes to appear nude on camera a lot, an act that offends dickheads because her curves don’t give them as good an erection as a woman whose tits look more edible under studio lights.

She’s also written a book, Not That Kind of Girl, a tell-all series of autobiographical essays. It is a particular passage or series of passages within this book that has the Palins’ pigeon feathers aflutter.

“Do we all have uteruses?” I asked my mother when I was seven.

“Yes,” she told me. “We’re born with them, and with all our eggs, but they start out very small. And they aren’t ready to make babies until we’re older.” I look at my sister, now a slim, tough one-year-old, and at her tiny belly. I imagined her eggs inside her, like the sack of spider eggs in Charlotte’s Web, and her uterus, the size of a thimble.

“Does her vagina look like mine?”

“I guess so,” my mother said. “Just smaller.”

One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist and when I saw what was inside I shrieked.

My mother came running. “Mama, Mama! Grace has something in there!”

My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina. This was within the spectrum of things I did. She just got on her knees and looked for herself. It quickly became apparent that Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed them patiently while Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been a success.

Immediate thoughts: Questionable. Curious. A seven-year-old of either gender does not have the mental or physical capacity to really equate ‘sexuality’ with ‘gratification,’ unlike a fourteen-year-old who will have been decorating their bedroom with fluids for at least two years beforehand. At the same time, a seven-year-old who spreads apart an infant’s vulva, in my opinion, could benefit from some manner of intervention. This speaks of playing doctor on a stranger level.

The media, namely the right-wing media, picked up on the story and perpetuated it to the masses, doing what they excel at: fearmongering. Headlines like “Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister” leave little room for argument or a forum for discourse. There are people who do not read their news beyond the headlines, and the Right revels in this. Bristol Palin penned her blog post calling us all hypocrites, and Mama Palin expanded on it via Facebook and Twitter.

A quick word before moving on: the Left is not innocent of sensationalism. Not at all. Both parties wade heavily in this stink, and their respective news outlet share the guilt. This is why I try to avoid the politically polarized news as best I can.

So we have a woman who accounts doing something off color to her baby sister as a seven-year-old. With some reservation I can pass this off as a child not knowing any better. But as I delved further into the story, I kept reading comments and reminders that similar actions of Dunham’s continued until she was seventeen, and that this has also been chronicled in Not That Kind of Girl.

I see two problems here. First, I have not read Dunham’s book at this point in time. All of my information is being derived from the news, Left and Right, and the vitriol being spewed back and forth in comment sections. Until I read Not That Kind of Girl for myself, my only venue is listening to what the Internet says. Does the book really say this continued until Dunham’s late teens, or has someone made shit up?

Second, experience and common sense have taught me to take a Palin’s words with the smallest of smallest salt grains. I trust a Palin as much as I trust a rock.

Here’s the thing about a rock. Let’s assume, hypothetically, that it possesses a level of consciousness and self-awareness. A rock doesn’t like to move on its own accord. It is content with staying exactly where it is. This creates few opportunities for learning experiences. The only time it moves, and thus learns, is when it is moved by an outside force, usually a strong current or flood water. Such is a Palin.

In response to Mama and Baby Rock: we’re not being hypocritical when we speak against Josh Duggar. Josh was a horny teenage boy who put his hands where they didn’t belong. His family covered it up. His criminal record was destroyed. That is the issue, and that is why 19 Kids and Counting is gone and 45 minutes of the average American’s time is freed up to do something other than keeping up with their freaks – like reading.

The Left is dividing on Dunham just as the Right is screaming about it and telling us to stay afraid and be afraid. There is no Liberal double-standard here. My observations indicate that the Left is conflicted about this as well.

And again, Josh Duggar touched children. Caitlyn Jenner did not.

Learn where priorities are.

Addendum: I had to Google how to spell ‘Dunham’ and ‘Duggar’ multiple times throughout this article.

Chronicles of the Fur Children Part One: The Hamster

Posted on April 27, 2015 by Phil G

Before my girlfriend (now fiancee) moved in with me, I was living in an apartment unit that a platonic female friend described as a “Dude looking place,” referring to a complete lack of anything at all resembling decoration. The walls were barren. Empty spaces were void. I had river rocks arranged on the mantel and 1997 era Star Wars action figures in their display boxes above my computer, but beyond that the apartment was quintessentially ‘dude.’

Then my betrothed became a permanent resident, and suddenly my apartment was overtaken with the proverbial ‘woman’s touch.’ Paintings and framed photographs on the walls; Buddha statues in corners; Asian artwork in the bathrooms and on the curtains. Without her in my life I’d still be living in a four-walled world of eggshell white. I would also likely be dead because I didn’t have the slightest inkling of how to cook anything past Stouffer’s Chicken Pot Pies or Red Baron Pizzas.

The place we lived in at the time had a strict “no pets” policy in our contract. The owner was vehemently against any quadrupeds larger than a mouse, no exceptions. So against it was he, in fact, that one day the girlfriend and I came home to flyers plastered on every door of the apartment complex. The message was stern; the tone was venom drifting off the page. “No pets,” it reminded everyone. Anyone caught with a cat, dog or creature of that caliber would be charged a $30 pet removal fee and evicted. The bulletin also, if I’m remembering correctly, called for a Nazi-esque neighborhood watch program asking all tenants to report pet sightings to the manager’s office.

The girlfriend and I decided it would be best to avoid the Animal Gestapo. We were assured by the rental department that a caged creature would not summon a clop of boots. One morning I decided to surprise my girlfriend. I drove her to PetCo to buy her a hamster.

The hamster itself ended up being free. There were three up for adoption and my girlfriend picked the one that seemed to take to us. I bought our new fur child the essential elements of hamster raising and then we brought her home. Since our adopted legal-to-own pet was female, I wrote up a list of twenty female names. My girlfriend narrowed the list down to four, and then one. The hamster’s name was Marilyn.

Marilyn was an odd rodent. Her cage had the obligatory exercise wheel but she never used it. Never. Not once. As a result, Marilyn got incredibly fat.

She did have two methods of exercise: swinging from her cage and rolling in her hamster ball. We gave Marilyn chew blocks but she ignored them. The metal bars were far more sufficient at keeping her teeth managed. She gnawed at them every moment she was awake. Otherwise she was either eating, drinking, sleeping or attempting escape. She did get out once, and if I hadn’t stayed up past my usual bed time I wouldn’t have caught her. We put a Jack Canfield book over the cage’s top hatch, as that was the most vulnerable exit. We allowed Marilyn to roll in her ball while my girlfriend cleaned the cage, and every few nights in between for good measure. The study was right at the foot of the stairs though; the door had to stay shut lest there be a horrible accident.

While it was nice to have a companion in the study, I kept my fingers away from Marilyn. She could be quite a little bitch. If I tried to pet her she’d nip at me. Hamster teeth are nothing to toy with. My girlfriend handled Marilyn with little trouble, but at no point during the hamster’s three year lifespan did I ever try holding her. I was too nervous about being bitten, dropping the damned thing and having it crawl into oblivion to become vermin.

Marilyn lived for three years. I like to think it was a long, happy and fat life filled with comfort, food, water, a fake plastic television and bars to chew. Sadly, one evening we returned from a vacation and found Marilyn dead of old age. We each delivered a eulogy and then buried our fur child in the back yard.

The Poison Dew

Posted on April 22, 2015 by Phil G

Among the issues with my current (and past) drug regimen is extreme sensitivity to alcohol and caffeine. Those labels are not lying. Half a glass of wine, a third of a Smirnoff and I’m giggling like a fool, already past the threshold of ‘tipsy’ and into the realm of ‘drunk.’ This lightweight circumstance of mine has led me to swear off alcohol under all circumstances. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Alcoholism runs through my family history.

The same applies to caffeine, though the consequences are ultimately worse. If I drink a cup of coffee or knock back a Mountain Dew, the effects are instantaneous: a euphoric head rush, a burst of energy and then a miserable crash no more than an hour later. We’ve all heard of the so-called “2:30 feeling.” Mine happens at 11 if I consume caffeine at 10.

But it gets worse from there. Recently I rediscovered, for at least the third time, why my caffeine sobriety is necessary and why I abstained from it in the first place. I started consuming Mountain Dew again, one bottle or more a day for a whole week. I got the rush, the energy and then the crash. I’d drink a Dew at 12:00 PM and leave work at 5:00 so tired I was practically unfit to drive the five miles from my office to my apartment.

This sugar and caffeine self-destruct was bad enough, except remnants of the Dew seemed to cling to my insides, like that old urban legend about swallowed gum. Suddenly I was waking up at 1:30 AM every night and facing an apocalyptic war with myself to return to sleep. I made the connection and pushed the Dew away.

The insomnia continued. A week later my sleep patterns evened out, but that was when the rage started. Mountain Dew abuse always leads to drastic mood swings, despite it supposedly being days after I’ve pissed the last of it out of my system. Light stimuli, the ‘small stuff’ they call it, will spike my anger and I’ll go from content to the goddamned Hulk within seconds. I’ll have terrible morning commutes that involve yelling, screaming fits at traffic. I’ll arrive at work hating myself and everything else that comes to mind.

As of this writing, the poison finally stopped ravaging my mental state only a day ago, though it may be too early to call it. I know my medicine is at least partially responsible for these occurrences. That’s why I dream of the day when I can quit anxiety and antidepressant pills forever. A sense of normalcy would be the ultimate caffeine rush.

Vaccinate Your Children.

Posted on March 4, 2015 by Phil G

Do it.

“But I’m just not comfortable with all those chemicals being injected into my baby’s tiny body in a single syringe!”

Vaccinate your children.

“You know Marcy, the lady who lives down the street? Her little boy was fine, but then he got his shots and now he’s on the autism spectrum!”

That proves nothing. Vaccinate your children.

“But I just read a blog post that was very convincing! It linked to several damning case studies and even backed up its evidence with neat bar graphs!”

I don’t care. Vaccinate your children.

“Jenny McCarthy’s website just put up a report of some eye-opening…!”

Vaccinate your children!

“I saw a YouTube…!”

Vaccinate your children!

“This Facebook link that was shared on my…!”

VACCINATE YOUR CHILDREN!

“The only reason doctors want babies to get all those shots is because of how heavily the government is involved in the pharmaceutical industry and the control of our health care for profit!”

I consider myself left-leaning in many social matters. I’ve always been apprehensive about the sordid relationship between our government and business, and I’m well aware of all the deregulation, back-room deals and looks the other way that go on the name of money.

In this case, cut the hippy bullshit and vaccinate your children. This is not the place to rail against the dark side of capitalism. Refusing to immunize your babies puts not only your children but other children in danger. Collective ignorance in this matter runs the risk of bringing back pandemics that haven’t been seen in the United States in over 50 years. Stop whining and get it done.

“But what if…?”

There have been no scientific, medical or psychological studies that have provided any casual links to autism or other issues as a direct result of vaccinations. Vaccinate your children.

“Well they are MY babies and it is MY decision not to get them immunized! And that’s final!”

If that’s your attitude, what you are doing is the equivalent of punching your little one in the head. If your decision not to get your children their shots does not derive from a licensed medical professional’s advice, if your decision is based solely on your own willful ignorance and the trend of parents who choose not to immunize their babies based on no evidence, then your children should be taken away from you. And that’s final.

Your Car Horn Has Specific Purposes

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Phil G

Being an asshole is not one of them.

I don’t have nightmares often, so I remember them more than the usual fleeting REM nonsense. One I had a month ago highlighted a common routine that can ruin my entire day if I don’t get a grip fast enough.

I was in my car at a red light when suddenly the worst thing that could ever happen to a driver this side of being carjacked, kidnapped or killed happened to me: I went blind.

This actually happened twice during the dream. During both instances I was stopped in the same spot. The first time I just rubbed my eyes and my sight magically returned. The second time, however, I permanently lost my vision. I desperately pressed and clawed at my eyeballs, to no avail.

I remember my biggest fear in that nightmare was not that my life was veering into a different direction now that I was randomly blind. No, what I feared most of all was that the people behind me were going to start blasting their horns, completely oblivious or apathetic to the poor blacked out sap trapped in front of them. But before that happened, before the chorus of angry, impatient animals rose to a crescendo, I woke up.

Just to assure myself, I checked my eyesight.

The city that I live in is not the best in the country. There’s variety and enough activities for the non-shutins to keep themselves occupied. But there’s a reason the first syllable in the city’s name is often half-jokingly replaced with ‘Scum.’ Since I moved out here I’ve been robbed twice. The night is ruled by gangs and permeated with crime. But above all, what I hate more than anything, is how the drivers in this place abuse their horns.

I drive a midsize sedan. Its cut creates an unfortunate blind spot. If anything bigger than my car gets behind or in front of me when I’m trying to turn left at an intersection or a median, I cannot see until that person moves. Sometimes businesses put shrubbery or other obstacles in places where they shouldn’t be. In these instances, the safest thing to do is wait until the light is green or I’m sure there’s no oncoming traffic.

But the people in this town—many of them, apparently—don’t view it that way. They see a skiddish individual who isn’t moving because he’s fiddling with his phone or his air conditioner.

They decide to ‘correct’ me by applying their horns.

This doesn’t just happen during risky crossings. People will blare their horns at me the very millisecond a light goes green, as if anyone who doesn’t immediately floor it to 60 is ruining the entire highway system. I’m not asleep. I’m not distracted. I see the green and I move accordingly but apparently it isn’t fast enough. I’ve encountered these rude sons of bitches in every corner and crevice of this troubled town I’ve traveled.

Car horn jackassery does not discriminate based on age, race, or gender, though I have noticed a few common threads with the bastards. The demographic is usually that of an older white male with a gas slurping pickup…the same kind that when viewed from behind will have a Jesus fish embroidered on the back along with bumper stickers indicating the individual is Taxed Enough Already or prefers to keep his freedom instead of your ‘Change.’ His monstrosity often roars and rumbles like a souped up motorcycle when he steps on the gas. He may or may not wear a hat. He may or may not bear a Confederate Flag and/or a ‘Calvin Pissing’ sticker.

But as I said, horn abuse does not discriminate. Black people do it to me too. So do women.

If you are among these individuals who like rattling the person in front of them with a horn blast, I invite you to consider these two questions: 1). are you really that impatient? and 2). do your genitals really require that much more compensation?

Or perhaps you recognize this rude behavior within yourself and would like to correct it, in which case I offer you this refresher course. This is what your noise maker was intended to be used for:

Animals that have wandered out in the street.
Pedestrians who have wandered out in the street, either oblivious to oncoming traffic hazards, drunk, or both.
Cars that are veering into your space.
Children who aren’t paying attention.
Alerting someone that you have arrived at their house (though you could just leave your vehicle and knock on their doors to keep the peace.)

It is not for announcing to the world, and to me, that you are a dick.