Just to clear up some recent confusion:

ahhhhhhhhh: Wow I sure am relaxed now

aaaaaaaaah: I am freaking out!

awwwwwwwww: What a cute little kitty!

ohhhhhhhhh: I understand that now.

oooooooooh: That's really cool.

Keep this handy guide with you.

I've mentioned before some of the unusual searches that lead people to my site.

This morning I saw this Google search in my server logs:

Why does my cat hiss at me?

Typing this, I imagine, is some poor little girl, perhaps eight or nine.

It's just so sad. I hope her kitty still loves her.

Yesterday was not about beer, though there was a lot of beer consumed.

Yesterday was not about sleep deprivation, though I went about 30 hours without sleep.

Yesterday was not about Las Vegas, though I'm here.

Yesterday was about the fact that I couldn't stop laughing.

This is a new kind of insanity for me. My mood became so much better than it'd been for the past couple of weeks that the whole evening and night was like an extended emotional orgasm or something. I didn't want to go to sleep because I was afraid that the reality of the situation would somehow claw its way back to the surface of my mind.

Well I did sleep eventually, and while I'm no longer laughing, I'm still grinning.

Things are still gloomy, but they no longer threaten to completely obliterate me. Things are actually back to exactly what they were three weeks ago. The cruelty being directed at me was not coming from the person they pretended to be. At least that's the story and I'm sticking to it.

So I've managed to scramble back into the frying pan, and that's what yesterday was about for me.

There was beer involved too.

Most of my day and night consisted of a simple two-step dance:

1. Drink a couple of beers.

2. Try to get some sleep.

This dance repeated a half-dozen times, so I drank a lot of beers. I rotated between Newcastle, Smithwick's, and Guinness, and at one point had a Stella Artois. What crap. Here's my rating:

(draft) I asked for a Belgian and got this awful thing. I don't like lagers, and this was a pretty bad lager. Bland mixed with boring.

Now it's Sunday morning and I'm surprisingly not hung-over.

I'm sitting here second-guessing a decision made a couple of weeks ago, and second-guessing has become second-nature to me, so I'm back to normal I suppose.

As normal as I get anyway.

Just a quick entry to say I arrived in Las Vegas safely and I sit here more confused than ever.

This may be due in part to the fact that I had to wait four hours before I got my room assignment.

But only partly because of that.

I wish that was the whole reason.

That was fun. Not.

After our Thanksgiving meal today we went out to the woods and shot up a car with a machine gun, of all things.

It was very cool, but I now know that I'm much better with the virtual machine gun in Half Life 2 than with a real one.

Rambo I'm definitely not.

In the movies the guy almost always wins the girl in the end.

Of course, he first has to deal with obstacles, mistrust, poor timing, and all manner of pitfalls, but in the end, some grand gesture will usually win her heart.

Then the credits roll and most everyone assumes that the couple will live happily ever after.

Not I.

I know that reality will soon set in, and that's when the real tests will begin.

This is the problem with grand gestures. The other person falls for it, not you. It's like some elaborate bait-and-switch scam. You fall in love with a person that only exists for a moment then, once that moment has passed, you're stuck in a relationship with a comparatively boring person.

What happened, you wonder, to the person that threw everything away to be with you? What happened to the person that serenaded you, that sent flowers to you at work, that walked through the desert to profess their love and bare their chest as if to say my heart is yours, you may do with it whatever you wish?

That person no longer exists. Born of a moment of passion and desperation, that person ceased to be the instant the moment had passed.

I've made a grand gesture a few times in the past. It's got me laid more than once (though that was not my sole intention), and it got me a relationship that lasted a few weeks.

It's also at times been met with rejection and scorn.

And there's the rub.

To put it all on the line of course means risking it all. This is scary enough, but to risk it all with a lie, with a grand gesture that, if successful, will shortly be held up as the standard by which the entire relationship will be measured - that strikes me as insane.

Then again, I guess love is a form of insanity.

Here we are again,
a couple of days from Thanksgiving,
perhaps my least favorite holiday,
probably because of the mall crowding that it begins each
year on the day after.

But I do like the holiday itself
in that I like to reflect and
ruminate on the things I'm
thankful for. I would probably like the
holiday more if I could spend it in solitude with no social
demands placed upon me. I
am aware that this makes me seem like a
yeti or some other antisocial creature.

Little is known about the yeti,
as it probably doesn't even exist except
perhaps to scare children into going
to bed. So in that way I'm not like the yeti
or any other legendary creature. Because
people don't generally use me to scare their children.
Godzilla or a goblin would be better. Well
it looks like I've almost
rambled on
long enough.

After I post this entry I'll bet that
nobody thinks it's clever and everybody will think it's
dumb.

Maybe people will just see the strange line lengths
and assume that it's some kind of a
new-age poem or something but only
young people write that kind of poetry and I'm too old.

My brain just doesn't provide a very creative
outlet for my deeper thoughts so I end up coming off as
retarded when I try so I hardly
ever try.
                                                                                     

I've already mentioned that Saturday night we played a game called Loaded Questions. This is a game where everyone answers a question and the person whose turn it is has to try and guess who answered what. It's a fun game.

One of the questions that came up was What will you be doing in ten years?

I reflexively answered Kicking myself in the ass.

The more I think about it, the more I think I may have answered truthfully. But not for the things you may imagine. Not for the big things. It's the little things that nag at me.

The big, world-shattering mistakes I've made, painful and embarrassing as they were, are what made me what I am today.

Such as I am.

Once the initial discomfort has passed I no longer regret these far-reaching actions any more than I regret breathing.

There are, however, a whole bunch of little stupid and mean things I've done or said (or not done or not said) that I'd really like to forget.

I kick myself in the ass about what a jerk I was to that one girl back in eighth grade. She's certainly forgotten all about me by now, but I could have made her night a lot better than it was.

I kick myself in the ass about being so wrapped up with a new girlfriend that I let my all-time favorite waitress move away from Omaha without even a goodbye - let alone the hug I knew she wanted.

I kick myself in the ass for the way my friend Kelly and I used to turn on our friend Todd and make him go home crying.

Then there are the countless times that I've said the wrong thing to someone that I cared about and ended up starting a fight over it.

You know, I could probably go on for days, listing all of the times I was an asshole to someone. Every time I'm reminded of one of these incidents I'm a little embarrassed for myself. It's hard for me to accept that indeed I was that much of a prick, a shithead, an insensitive pig.

I think the thing is that I'm not that person, and I really never was. Those isolated incidents were just that: isolated. Just because I lied to a girl in the eighth grade doesn't make me a liar. Just because I hit a kid when I was five doesn't make me a bully.

Those things are not me. They're some other guy who's not nearly as nice as I am. I would never behave like that, although I have and probably will again.

The large-scale mistakes are another story entirely. I cannot shrug off the major fuck ups I've had. They are me, and without them I wouldn't be me. I'd be a happier person perhaps, a more content person certainly, but I'd also be so boring that even I couldn't stand to be around myself.

We learn from our mistakes as the saying goes. I wouldn't want to unlearn those lessons or erase those scars. They're me.

Those little things, though, I'll keep kicking myself in the ass over those. They piss me off.