Time For Change, Part One: Prawnish Delight

As I slowly march towards death in a humble fashion day by day, I tend to think more and more about all of the things that I have never done due to high moral standards, or just personal procrastination.  Whichever the case may be, I feel that in my mind the decision I make is rightfully justifiable. For instance, as mentioned in a previous Facts, I refuse to eat any form of seafood (even Tuna), simply because I find that our edible friends of the sea taste like stale vomit laced with mercury. Nothing, other than money, could change my mind to even consider licking, much or less eat, a finned friend of the ocean.

But then my moral structure collapsed, and I ended up doing the exact opposite.

While on vacation in July I was having a coursed meal, and the ‘appetizer’ that was being served was an animal of the prawn variety. This prawn also happened to be slightly spiced up, which I’m assuming was to hide it’s vile lead based taste that lurks behind every 'edible' creature we humans pull from the water. Including penguins.

Once it was served to me, all I could do was gaze upon this strangely decorative piece of sea meat, and think to myself of all the times that I had been confronted with the same situation. Loads of food plopped right in front of my face, served only in the most delicate fashion only for it to be the food that you have the upmost hate for.

Then I promptly picked up one of these prawn carcasses and bit a piece of the disgusting prawny flesh off with my teeth and chewed it semi thoroughly. The whole time I gnawed, small pockets of liquidy flesh burst onto my tongue, exploding with every small bite I took before finally letting it slide down my throat so that it could infect my entire body with its putrid, prawny like hideousness.

And you know what surprised the ever loving shit out of me? The prawn really wasn’t that bad. Sure, the pod like flesh popped in my mouth with every bite that I took. Sure, the texture of the meat was exactly what I would imagine it would be like biting into the hide of a giant mutant grasshopper from a post apocalyptic future. Sure, I wasn’t able to eat the lettuce that the prawns were laid upon (because dead prawns appartently need a blanky more than I need a filler in my stomach to tamper down mutant insect chicken seafood hybrid meat). But I was avidly happy to find out that it was an overall delicious experience. I think the spiciness of the meat helped.

All in all though, they didn’t taste that bad, and after I was done eating all four of them (four!) I felt like a true champ, a big boy! I ate all the food off my plate, save for the lettuce, and nobody had to tell me to do it. I did it all by myself!

Why did I perform this horrific act of eatery, having a full mental preparedness that the Prawn would fill my body with disgust and foulness? Like the title of this Fact suggests, it was time for change. I’ve only got so much time left before I can no longer say that “I’m almost 30”, and soon I’ll just have to say “sigh, I am 30”.
 
I don’t want to be a cantankerous old man who refuses to try anything new, or do anything different, just because he’s set in his ways even though those ways are right and true. I at least want to be able to say that I have tried a certain amount of things before I get to that point.  And now I can say I've tried nasty, spicy prawn meat.

So it's a Fact: If I wake up one day and have a hard outer shell, I know what to blame.

Time For Change: Prologue

During this last month of summer, it was my plan to take all of you fine readers (how ever many of you there are out there) on a strange and wonderful ride through some strange and wonderful Factual Bob-like journeys on a semi regular basis.

These Facts were not going to be just any Facts though. No, these Facts would have been different. They would not have been the ordinary strange, obscure, sometime perverted pieces of my life that I bestow upon you to help guide you through your life like journeys.

What in Gouda's great name could these Facts have possibly been about? Read on to relieve tension!

An actual chronicle of Facts with a running theme throughout that was actually consistent. PLUS AS A BONUS: they would also be current! So they wouldn't be culled from my fragmented memory of years past, only weeks past instead. Perhaps on first reading this amazing concept you might feel a tad bit underwhelmed. Well I'm not, and that's what matters!

So what's the running current event based theme?

I had realized that I had gotten to a point in my life where I had become to set in my ways. I had been eating the exact same foods every day. I had been drinking the exact same type of drinks each day. Wearing the exact same types of clothes all the time, and going to all the same places to do whatever it is I wanted to do (shop, eat, hang out, buy pens).

I also realized that this repetitive, or stagnant, way of living was really starting to weigh me down both mentally and psychotically. Thus, as the title of the Facts suggests, it was time to invoke change.

As I said earlier, my initial plan was to pepper you all with the amazing adventures of change I had sprinkled myself with! Tales of Fish, Prawns, Hair and Peeling Flesh! Unfortunately I spent far too much time trying to indulge in these very agents of change that I hardly had the time to sit down and actually write about them (that and I was lazy too). So now that I'm all done with these amazing adventures of mine, I will begin assaulting you with said amazing adventures, one by one!

Right after this Prologue.

So it's a Fact: Prologues are just a big ol' cocktease.

Freak of Nature

Last week, for four days, I was completely holed up in my house doing absolutely nothing but sitting on my couch, drooling blood on myself, and watching television as the hours of the days passed me by. Why on earth would I do such a horrific and incredibly unsanitary thing such as this?

On August 4th 2009 I had the four remaining wisdom teeth that I had in my mouth removed. They were causing me great pain, they were causing me great bodily damage, and they had to be dealt with properly. I say remaining because I had already removed two wisdom teeth years prior to this incident while I was still employed by this fine country's military.

I am of a rare breed of human being that is lucky enough to have the privelage to produce, own and bare extra wisdom teeth (six total in my case). Which got me to thinking to the purpose of this particular Fact: I am a freak of nature.

Not just because of the extra wisdom teeth, oh no. There's plenty more freakiness where that came from. It's just that while sitting there, paddling around in my own pool of blood that drooled out of my mouth that got me to wonder about all of my other bodily oddities. The ones that make me stand out from the rest of the herd.

1. I have a large, obnoxious bald spot on the back of my head. This would be the first and most noticable one for everyone to see. When I was born, apparently the skin on the back of my head didn't heal all the way (or some doctor like rubbish along those lines), and left a hideous mushroom like stamp of barrenness on my scalp. Despite hollow promises that hair will eventually grow back on this patch of nothingness, there is still nothing there. I am forced to walk this earth with an oddly shaped patch of veiny skin, that lies amongst my beautiful main of hair.


2. During the early twenties of my life, I started to learn strange new things about my body! Certain things like that it apparently came with inherint abilities, and powers, like being able to recieve messages from God! Or as doctors like to call these 'messages': seizures. Yes, I have epilepsy, and I am an epileptic fool. Without the aid of medicine I would be flopping around like freshly fried bacon, or a fish out of water, or some other pathetic analogy of something that flops.


3. During one of these Messages of God/Seizures/Epileptic Hissy Fits, I just so happened to fall on the ground and flip out just right that I was able to break some bones in my body. Unfortunately those bones just so happened to be my back bones! So due to my efficiency in epilepsy, I have a Compression Fracture in my spine. I can still walk around and lift heavy objects, but I tend to get worn out if I lift anything too heavy, like a pillow or a small kitten. Also I can't really run anymore. I can trot from here to there in small bursts, walk briskly, or if I'm really feeling up to it I can flat out sprint for three seconds! But run? Eff no! That crap hurts.

Those would be the major ones, the ones that stand out the most and make me oh so unique. These are the conversation starters, the ones that I can bring up when things get dull: "Soooo, did you know that I have a broken back? But did you know it's because I hada seizure?"

Of course there are even more freakish charactistics that I harbor, little things that no one else would notice or have to deal with but me, but I'll save those for another time or place.

So it's a Fact: If I was a kitten I would have been the smallest, weaker one that the mother cat slept on to put out of it's misery.

The Price of Protection

Prophylactics. They have always been a constant in my life, in that no matter where I turned they just happened to always be there. Which is strange since I don't ever remember buying them. For me the condom is a lot like canned soup; It's just always there ready to be used, until you actually need to use it that is. Then you either don't have any or you don't have the right type.


Yes, you heard me, I said right type. You go over to grab one of two badly bruised 'love mittens' that happen to be in your possession, and wouldn't you know it, they're un-lubricated! To put this into a better perspective, and to also fall back onto the earlier canned soup analogy, you go to grab a can of Condensed Chicken and Mushroom for a wonderful casserole you're about to prepare, and all you have are three cans of Chicken and Stars.


This is when I am forced to go on a rare quest: A quest for condoms.


This quest is not one that I particularly like to embark upon. Not because I am an immature man that still giggles himself into a frenzy at the mere thought of putting a 'latex sheath' over his manhood, though I am drooling with silliness as I write this very fact. It is the hazards that one encounters while purchasing 'rubber love gloves' that makes the entire experience cringe worthy. It is a stressful, time consuming and humbling experience.


How could buying 'passion socks' possibly be all that...horrendous? Like I mentioned previously, buying 'child stoppers' has never been a part of my regular daily schedule because they have always miraculously been there. I don't have any experience with location of said 'love bags', their cost, or their variety. So for me to just run in to my nearest retail location, grab a box of fun, and run out is definitely out of the question.


Whenever I do muster up enough courage to wander out in public to be seen purchasing a box of 'rubber love sleaves', I always end up doing just that: wandering. I have no idea where to go, I always end up backtracking into the tampon section, and somehow I always run into at least two to three old women in battery powered wheel chairs that impede my useless progress.


Once I finally do meet my destination it's almost impossible to describe the overwhelming feeling of ineptitude that fills my body. Standing in front of a seven foot tall wall full of condoms, filled with dozens of variations in sizes, colors, and flavors, is incredibly confusing, especially when you only need to pick just one. It's even more intimidating when the first thing you see at eye level is a giant row of Magnums that you know you will never use in your entire life.


Going back once again to the soup analogy, it's hard to try and pick up just a can of Chicken Noodle when all you can see are Chicken and Basil, Chunky Chicken, Chicken Base and then all the variations of Tomato soup right next to it. And none of it is in order.

After embarrassing myself by wandering around the health section of any nameless retail store, and shoving my way past numerous handicapped elderly women, my fears and stress have only just begun. Once I go to actually purchase the 'groin protectors', I somehow always manage to run into one of two scenarios: I either A.) have a cashier that is of obvious strong christian base and morale's, and sneers at me the entire time he/she helps me purchase my box of 'goo catchers', never wasting a moment to stare down at me letting me know that I am committing a moral sin. Or B.) I get stuck in a long line of customers constructed primarily of well to do families!

So there I stand with nothing in my hand but a big glowing blue box of 'cock bags', while in front and behind me are loving families consisting of parents and children, who are all running around and playing, and having a wonderful time shopping, while I stand there trying to hide my box of goodies. And eventually it happens, some kid comes up and asks me what I'm holding in my hand. It's all I can do to not say "something your parents should have bought". Instead I just stand there red faced and let the tears of shame run down my cheeks.

In fear of running into either of those embarrassing situations, I would just as much rather run home and wrap my sex glaive in a sandwich bag, dunk it in vegetable oil and shout out at the lucky woman that I'm about to bed and proclaim "Gaze upon my sexual ingenuity and pray that it does not fail!" Problem solved and a good time had by all.

So it's a Fact: Being the responsible adult that I am I do not run home and wrap my baggage in a baggie, and simply brave the horrors that one must encounter to ensure proper protection. For it is the price one must pay.

Bonus Fact: Happy Belated Father's Day

Film, Static, Lava...Hate!

Some of you may be too young (or too old) to remember this, but at one point in mankinds spotted history of media indulgence, there was one format that we as humans dabbled in that was doomed to failure. No it was not VHS, Beta or Reel to Reel. It was known as the VideoDisc.

An entire film, television show, or pansy ass musical stored onto a record like storage device, which was then placed into a plastic sleeve, which you THEN shoved into a VCR-Record Player combo/hybrid machine to watch said visual splendors. When half of your eye candy galore was over you simply walked up to your machine, slid in your plastic casing, slid out your casing, flipped it over, slid it back in to the reverse side, and resumed watching whatever the hell you were watching...which was probably Grease 2.

Yes, the VideoDisc was from what I could remember, and google, the precursor to the Laserdisc. You could fastforward with the touch of a button, you didn't have to rewind it when it was over and altogether it was just an amazing thing to behold.

Yes, it was a glorious thing to watch, listen and yes, love.

As you can probably tell from this Fact, my family were one of the few beholders of this amazing piece of technology in not only the untamed wilds of Priest Lake(where technology was considered black magic), but also the world. I can't exactly recall how we came into possession of this lost technology, but it was of little consequence to me. What really mattered to me was the fricking movies!

We had things I had never seen before and couldn't believe existed: Airplane! Star Trek the Motion Picture, episodes of Star Trek, The Longest Day, Fiddler on The Roof (which for some reason I kept watching though I couldn't stand. Topol must rock that much), Charlie Brown cartoons, and more...because I honestly can't remember the other ones. I know we had the unfortunate happiness of owning 'Grease 2', and an episode of 'Little House on the Prairie', but trust me we had a shitload of other films of higher quality and Oscar worthy esteem.

It was always something I could count on, that VideoDisc player. I could always go down in my basement, turn on the TV, and slide in that big square plastic monstrosity of a film and just relax and know the only time I would ever have to get up was halfway through a film, and never ever be bothered to rewind it when it was over. It was truly bliss dear readers, truly bliss.

But bliss can only last so long.

One day, as I giddily flew down the stairs to try and attempt to watch yet again the final episode of 'The Fugitive' (having never seen any other episode in my entire life), something was awry. The warm, comforting VideoDisc logo and its soothing theme song didn't play out on the television like I had memorized it. No, it was replaced by something else. Something awful.

Static.

Not just any static though. The kind of static that would just barely let you see the magical wonder that lay beyond it's flickering snow like blanket of pain and confusion that consistently blasted in your face. The kind of static that is so loud and obnoxious, that it sounds like a dozen tiny leprechauns just magically jumped out of your sofa and immediately started dancing and flatulating in your face.

The kind of Static that fills you with hate.

My blood boiled red! This could not be! I immediately pulled out the disc and switched sides to see if the same affliction had cursed its backside. Once again, nothing but hate filled static. An immediate solution presented itself: test another disc to see if it too is suffering the same fate as the finale episode of 'The Fugitive'. I then turned to a trusted classic, 'The Fantastic Voyage', which had never let me down before. It too had had succumb to the fate of the hell static.

Now it was a matter of desperation. I pilfered frenetically through our vast collection of discs and as fast and efficiently as I possibly could I slid them in and out of the player to see if they were infected with the same strange disease as their fellow brethren had been.

One after the other it was the same thing: static, static, static! Finally after I had gotten around to 'Ordinary People' I had given up and decided that they were all doomed to suffer the same fate. Sitting on my knees in front of the television, head hung low, I faced the fact that an old friend had finally passed.

I somberly walked back up the stairs to tell my parents the sad news. "Well, you're father will take a look at it." was all my mother said, not realizing the gravity of the situation. I didn't have the heart to tell her that all was lost.

Days had passed. Or was it weeks? I couldn't remember, it was all a haze. The shock of it all was so hard to take that everything was a blur for quite some time. But then the real tragedy came.

As my mother had promised my father had indeed taken a look into the horror that had befallen upon the VideoDisc player. Rather than discovering what was wrong with said player and correcting it, he had stumbled upon something far worse.

Somehow, with his keen detective skills, or both of my parents combined, it was found that my younger brother and sister had decided to take it upon themselves to enter the wonderful world of their imagination! In this wonderful world they also decided to create and play a game called "Don't Fall In The Lava". Let me explain the rules!

The game goes like this: the entire carpet of the basement is considered lava, and you can't touch it. You can only stand/step on furniture to be safe. THIS INCLUDES VIDEODISCS!!!!

So, unbeknownst to everyone, my two little siblings were down in the basement happily bouncing around on VideoDiscs for hours on end, doing their very best to stay safe from the unending dangers of carpet lava. During this hapy little time they managed to destroy every single VideoDisc film we owned.

Finding out what had happened to my dear VideoDiscs offered me no closure. Oddly enough I was the only one who was pissed off at this whole affair. Everyone else seemed to brush it off as an "Eh, it was going to die anyways" type of event. Not me. No, I saw it as a vast collection of fine film and strange, sporadic episodes of television just being tossed away in a blink of an eye, never to be watched again.

At least my brother an sister are safe from the lava.

So it's a Fact: I'll never get to see that last episode of 'The Fugitive'. Though if I remember right it was pretty damn crappy.

Over Not Under!

It's the little things in life that matter the most. The tiny day to day issues that your normal, 9 to 5, carbon based life form tend to not notice, but that immediately raise red flags for you once they cross into your field of vision and are forced to interact with them.

I'm almost positive you, the gentle reader, already know exactly what I'm talking about:

the person who doesn't wipe the spit out of the corner of their mouth when they talk,

cars that take up two parking spaces,

pubic hair on a toothbrush.

The list could go on forever. Tiny little nuances that could be corrected oh so easily, but for some damnable reason they never are. They just sit there, staring you in the face, mocking you with their simple idiocy.

What makes it worse is having to be forced to stare at these faults knowing that you could easily correct any one of them in an instant. But, dare you?! Dare you invade someones personal facial space and wipe off their salivary shame? Dare you call out all those who would be proud enough to join you and lift a random strangers car and re park it properly in the lot of a TJ Maxx? Dare you risk the possibility of infection to remove the unsightly mess of curly love hair from a tooth brush just because it's the right thing to do?

Probably not.

Like you I have many, many little tangents that I run into in life that tend to piss me off to no end. The one that I seem to run into the most often, and hence piss me off the most, is one I think goes far too unnoticed.

Toilet Paper Placement.

When I sit down to take care of business, and I finish said business, I expect only one thing afterwards: to be able to place my hands on a clean roll of ivory, imitation cloth like splendor, and pull off as many sheets as easily as possible. Emphasis on easily.

Now in my mind, this should not be a hard thing to expect at all! It should be expected! Why am I complaining then? Because for some reason, some unexplainable god forsaken reason, there is a trove of human beings out there that cannot grasp the simple fundamental concept of properly placing a roll of basic fucking toilet paper onto it's little holder.

Am I going too fast for you? Am I getting too far ahead of myself? Well let's go back a step!

The basic design and physics of a roll of toilet paper, i.e. how it was ordained by God, is that when pulled, the sheets of butt cleansing paper must roll off the TOP of the roll of toilet paper. Let me reiterate.

The...Top.

"Why is this so important that it needs to be explained and also deems worthiness to be a Fact of your Life Bob?" I'm glad you asked!

Nothing irritates me more than when I have to wipe my tiny ass, and I go for a sheet or five, and lo and behold...there's nothing there! I see the paper, it's right there in front of me, yet nothing is coming into my slightly stained finger tips! How is this even humanly possible?

Because some Podunk fool didn't take the half second extra out of his/her life to think about me and use the horrible physical effort I'm sure it would have taken to actually turn the ungodly heavy roll of toilet paper around and put it in the dispenser properly.

Or to put it more eloquently, because some A-hole put the Toilet Paper in upside down.

Because of this I now have to sit on the toilet, feeling like a moron, either fingering the back of the toilet paper roll desperately trying to get just a shred of paper for my grimy ass, or spinning said roll with one hand and catching the extra paper from the back with the other. Either way I feel like a retired 70 year old woman at a casino desperately trying to get coins out of a slot machine. Except I'm on a toilet.

Fortunately for me I have the ability to change the world with this affliction of mine. Kinda. Obviously I have control of my Toilet Paper in my own personal surroundings, that goes without saying. BUT If I am at a friends house, and I happen to see the Toilet Paper upside down: around it goes buddy boy, around it goes. I will not have it in my presence.

Sadly there are instances where I cannot alter this bastardization in anyway: restaurants, grocery stores, firing ranges. Reason being because they smartly keep their TP under lock and key for protection. Protection from me.

So it's a Fact: Over not under folks. And if I find my Toilet Paper upside down in my house after this post I know that you did it!

Game Over *sniff*

I'm sure by now that you have all gotten the idea that I like to play videogames on a semi to fairly regular basis. In my younger more fertile youth filled days I played them quite a bit more. So I guess that would put them into a category of regular to unhealthy basis of play.

My point is that the wonderful world of video games has been a large mainstay of my life. Even as a child my parents would take me to arcades and waste their quarters on me so they could watch me mash the joysticks endlessly on Frogger as I squealed like an idiot, pretending like I knew what I was doing. They would smile and laugh at my happiness, the whole while hoping that I wasn't mentally handicapped and was just easily distracted by bright colors and loud noises instead(note: technically I am mentally handicapped).

Throughout all these years I have been able to do one thing for the majority of my game playing: keep my cool. By that I mean whenever I lost, or sucked absolute anus at a video game I didn't start yelling or screaming at the top of my lungs, or cry like the tips of my pinkies had been cut off. Nope, I just went on playing and generally kept an even keel.

Generally.

Unfortunately there are always exceptions to the rule. It could be something as simple as fatigue, caffeine or even a dead pet. For me, my own exceptions were just the games themselves. They were my breaking point, the things that were to cause me to briefly go insane.

I know it sounds sort of like an obvious reason, but the games that made me lose it weren't just any games. No, these were games that were so ungodly hard (or stupid) that they couldn't be beaten and the entire time you played them it felt like they were mocking you for even trying to do so. And for some stupid reason, even though I knew better, I kept trying to beat them regardless of how many times they spanked me in defeat. And when they spanked, they spanked hard.

Now when I say I reached my breaking point, I don't mean I raised my voice at the T.V. and said "Come On!" or threw my hands up in the air. Oh no. I broke down like a blubbering idiot. I stomped my feet, screamed like a girl, and after 2 hours of being bettered by an 8 to 16 bit machine I started to shed tears and blame the machine for cheating. Which it was.

What I would like to present to you now is a condensed list of the various games that have caused me irreparable mental anguish in my life, the ones that have done the most harm.

• Ghosts and Goblins (NES) - Why man was allowed to create this game I will never know. It's difficult to the point of embarrassing...literally. Any upgrades you receive are actually worse than the weapon you start out with, the equivalent of the mouth of hell opens up and is constantly out to rip you apart every two feet, and on top of that you are forced to walk around in your underwear if you underperformed. Difficult AND degrading. If you want your child to never play video games, force them to play this one over and over.
• Battletoads (NES) - Pretty fun game at first. It's a strange Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle knockoff whose main characters are named after bodily fluids. It's fun for the first five minutes, and then the game punishes you for enjoying those five minutes. Every moment you play after that is absolutely unforgiving to the point where you can't even play the damn game.
• The Super Star Wars Series (SNES) - It looks Awesome! It sounds Awesome! It's Star Wars! It must be the greatest thing ever, right?! Eat my butt. These are the games that actually made me burst into tears because it made me feel like I wasn't a good enough person to play them they were so effing hard. What made it worse was that it would give you glimpses of hope that you could actually progress further in the game, and then it would slap you down like a fool and crush those glimmers of hope, or do one better by letting you go to the next level and not even let you move five feet without killing you mercilessly. I loathe these games. I'm crying right now.
• Street Fighter Series (Arcade) - Now I wouldn't cry after playing these games, but just get pissed off. Why? Because any time you would go to an arcade to play one of these games, some A-hole would come up, put in a quarter, play Ken and beat the crap out of you because he memorized every special move and then he would go on and play for three more hours. So you just had to stand there without anymore quarters and not play as E-Honda for probably what would have been five more minutes, because some prick wanted to be just that: a prick. You know what, screw it, I hate all fighting games because of crap like that.

There are of course other games that I loathe and hate, that cause madness and anger to spring up inside me, but these are the ones that have caused me the most pain. These are the ones that have poisoned my life. I'm sure there are more than this, but I think that the traumatic impact of playing them has caused my mind to blank out that experience altogether.

So it's a Fact: Unless you want to see me turn into a blubbering idiot keep these games away from me.