Anxiety

It’s not entirely their fault, but buck-toothed people make me anxious.

This has always been the case for me but was never able to categorize such feelings enough to give them a name. That the category is in itself a time dependent disorder is another matter all together but I’ll get to that in a moment. First, I will put in order the basis for the anxiety.

I am not designating it as good or bad but I think faster than I need to most of the time. Recently, while watching a buck-toothed person try to force English through what I could only describe a fence row of teeth bent so far out of skew that it made me think of a chain link fence torn from its moorings by floodwaters, it occurred to me that I was developing somewhat of a tick.

It’s like when you see a car driving down the highway with the hood popped but not completely open because it’s held by that little safety latch that’s never in the same place when you go to look for it. I couldn’t help thinking that an errant gust of wind might flap through here, catch what I could only refer to as an airfoil sticking out of his face and rip the top of his head off. Now I would not mind this but require a bit of preparation for such a thing.

Then it occurred to me that, as anxiety is a time dependant disorder meaning that your mind is there while you’re here and trying to deal with a situation that hasn’t happened yet. I got stuck on the word time for a bit too long and went straight to the Lorentz Transformation as an extreme example of why I can’t understand the words being pressed out of the mouths of buck-toothed people the world over.

The Lorentz transformation deals with the phenomenon of light exhibiting the same velocity for observers moving at different velocities in respect to one another. Like a car, traveling one-hundred miles per hour by someone on the side of the road is only going fifty miles an hour to someone going fifty miles per hour if both think they are at rest.

So I thought the words coming out of a buck-toothed orifice would seem to be leaving point A (the mouth) at time P (real time). However the words actually left at point A1( the tip of the teeth) at P2(P+the time sound takes to travel distance between A and A1). The brain responsible for manipulating these things is sending words out with respect to me C( location way out side of A or A1) by mistaking that I’m listening. Now the difference between AP and A1P1 is such that it creates a different location slightly closer or further away from the buck toothed person where the garbled English makes sense. Were the words traveling at the speed of light I could understand them. However, if I cared what the words were all I would have to do would be to lunge toward or away from the origin. But I didn’t care what they were saying and didn’t understand them anyway. Hope it wasn’t important.

Hilter Youth Crunch

Not long ago, I noticed how the theme of breakfast cereal seemed to have reached a point of both banal consciousness and far too much sugar. There are tiger’s, bears, mildly homophobic elves, big beaked birds and even a stoned mountain lion from what I could tell; all trying to sell breakfast cereal to children. I merely wondered if enough time had passed as too allow a real person not related to sports to step in and sell a themed breakfast cereal.

After adequate thought, I settled on Adolf Hitler. If anybody could sell cereal, it would be him. How hip would it be to, while strolling the breakfast aisle, to have your eyes fall upon a box of Hitler Youth Crunch? But you would have to play to your audience. So I wondered as to how you bring out the fun loving side of Hitler while remaining true to form. So I thought about how a television commercial might go.

Picture this: A mildly overdrawn cartoon version of Hitler pounds the dais while screaming god knows what at a stadium full of children in those nineteen-thirties underwear/gym suit outfits they wore. The crowd of kids goes wild. They give the raised hand heil salute only they are all holding aloft a bowl of Hitler Youth Crunch. Hitler gestures to his left as the stage starts to tremble. From behind a humongous Nazi flag goosestep, a trio of heavily lactating cows. Each one, teat in hand, squirts a fountain of milk into the bowls of the children in the first few rows. The crowd goes wild. Camera zooms in for a close-up. A snaggle toothed future practitioner of mass genocide smiles into camera proudly displaying a spoonful of little sugar coated swastikas.

Allow me to digress away from the vision for a tick. I just realized how cool that feels as it leaves your mouth. Say aloud its nice…SUGAR COATED SWASTIKAS. That’s fun. See if you can work that into conversation at some point today. I did during a brief exchange with a pet supply store owner.

But back to the vision… Hitler does that crazy ass thing where he runs his finger into the air like he’s checking the prostate of someone standing above him. Then he reaches under the dais and grabs a box of cereal. He holds it aloft and the children chant, “Hitler Youth!” then bite down on a spoonful of cereal for the crunch. Hitler throws the box into the frenzied crowd and it explodes showering the stadium with sugar coated swastikas.

As the crowd goes mad, a voice-over comes in to explain the added features and special offers available. “Hitler Youth Crunch! Part of a balanced diet! Act now while supplies last get an authentic Railway to Auschwitz train set for twenty-nine ninety-five with three box tops! And the first one-thousand orders receive a free one-hundred percent pure jewhide wallet! So act now!”

And it should probably end there I imagine. You know now that I think of it, perhaps that is a bit too much but I would still like to see it aired just once.

Cat Litter Epiphany

I came to an odd conclusion the other day and it all started with a piece of blue cat litter.

I recently started cleaning my house more. Not in the realm of As Good As It Gets type of stuff, just regular things most normal people do I suppose. Which brings me to squatting naked in the shower wiping down the walls. Now keep in mind I had finished cleaning pretty much and there really should be nothing left but there it was right in front of me. A piece of blue cat litter. Now I have a cat who does play, not pee I check, in the shower so such a thing is not beyond the scope of reason. What I did with this small bit of seeming nothingness disturbed me a bit after I realized I should have stopped myself at some point. But this is what happened.

I tend to skip the obvious and try to rationalize the fringes of rationale. Sure, the cat may have put it there by accident but that just flew by before I could eat it with my mind. I thought perhaps it could be more than a piece of cat litter. What if it were an errant piece of an accidental misinterpretation of a legal process that may or may not exist somewhere far far away that could affect me more than I could ever know.

Didn’t even slow down with it. It made sense that in heaven there is a lawyer, that got past the goalie to speak, and is earning his keep doing pro bono work for people that never knew they needed it in the first place.

This is just a for instance but I needed to validate the science of my own thoughts. Say a guy is trapped in a elevator and in his dismay formulates a plan that calls for him to appeal to the lord for specifically, a duck with a phillips head beak and a size 12 golf cleat.

Now it would be the attorney’s job to represent the idiot in the elevator not to get him out of the situation without abusing his limited direct intervention face time with the lord.

The attorney might say something like this: “Yes lord, my client is not in his right mind as you can see. He panicked. Please don’t hold this against him or grant these prayers.”

The lord may answer thusly: “Hmmm. You may have a point. There are far too many of these beings walking around. This is a waste of both our respective time. Perhaps I should cut the cable and see who sticks there head in there to see what the noise is. That would kill to or maybe more birds with one stone.”

“No lord. We’re not on the same wavelength here. I don’t think you need to kill anyone. I just think my client may need real help in the future or, now I’m just free associating here, he may have a deeply benevolent thought.”

“Are you sure? Because your last client wished for a piece of blue cat litter and you had no such thoughts.”

Attorney winces a bit, “Well that’s not entirely true. I just didn’t speak fast enough and did manage to grab your hand as you tossed down there. The blue cat litter didn’t even get to the right place so it didn’t count. I don’t know where it went but some poor bastard is dealing with both our misjudgments.”

Now that may not be where the cat litter came from but it occurred to me that it was more than likely not where it came from. I decided at that moment I should probably go with my first instinct more often than not no matter what the consequences.