Sob Stories

I had a two paragraph introduction that involved an Indian girl getting her diaper changed in a library bathroom while I urinated only feet away. It seemed like too much of a distraction so I’d like to get right into the purpose of today without getting too detailed into child diaper changing station etiquette.

I had a choice of two places to sit down at the library. One was next to an old woman with reading glasses and the other was next to a guy with a hat. I sat next to the older woman. Perhaps she had a granddaughter. And maybe if I’m lucky I remind her of the guy who deflowered her in 1957, Mitch Timmons. She can relive some sick vicarious fantasy through her granddaughter. That’s what caused me to sit next to the older woman. Thank goodness I’m crazy. Sitting next to hat-face might have turned out worse.

(Mitch Timmons hanging out with his boy Sticky looking cool with their tucked in shirts and hatred off all things square)

Things were going smoothly as they always go at the library. I don’t think I saw the guy who I’m convinced is a huge drug kingpin. I won’t go into exactly why I think he’s a drug kingpin because it would seem racist. I am writing a television pilot based around him though so stay tuned for that to never go anywhere. The guy with the hat whom I will from now on call Bojangles began talking to the black woman next to him. She seemed like your average black woman in her 50s. She was well-spoken, wearing a purple blouse, and was looking at pictures of Oprah online then claiming that they were the same person. Bojangles began talking to her and I heard him mention that he watched some Boy Scouts event at the mall across the street earlier. “Great, a queer” I thought. “Better get out a rope to drag him through town” chimed in a mind reader pointing out my derogatory summation.

The conversation continued and if you haven’t figured it out by the name I chose for him, Bojangles mentioned that he was a homeless. I never would have guessed it either. He seemed like any guy in a band. My guess was he was 30-years-old tops. Basically, he looked too normal to have fallen through the cracks of society. I would have guessed he worked at Hot Topic and enjoyed watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. For a brief moment I thought to myself we could be friends. Then he started talking and I was happy with my choice of sitting next to Murder She Wrote.

(Angela Lansbury gets off on writing about brutal murders)

Further into his life Bojangles went with the black woman. They talked about how he had made a few mistakes. He had apparently gotten with the wrong girl. Because we of course all know, whatever a woman does a man should always follow. Dating a girl and that causing you to become homeless makes you the most pussy whipped man of all time. I’ve heard of guys ditching friends or seeing bad movies for a girl, but never doing so much where it led to you becoming homeless.

Not wanting to invite Bojangles to stay with her, the black woman asked him if he had any family. He said he did but they lived in New York and he didn’t want to bother them with his problems. That makes sense. Because a family isn’t supposed to help you out with things like having a place to live. I’ve said it before, but you need to be one shitty person to not have a single family member or friend to live with. How many bodies did Bojangles have to walk over to get to this place in his life? That place being at a South Jersey library on a Sunday afternoon. You know, heaven on earth.

The black woman was so kind she offered Bojangles information on a friend of hers who might be hiring for a construction job. At least that’s what I heard. I was starting to get really angry that my mind began to drift. Bojangles complained about how his ex-landlord screwed him over and stole his computers. Now you’re getting a little too James Bond for me. If my computer was ever stolen I’d probably follow-up with a police report. I started to think Bojangles was a liar. I knew for a fact that he was a liar when he said he comes to the library to read and I saw a really nice laptop in front of him. So there’s a homeless man giving out his sob story and he owns a laptop. I think his computers weren’t the only thing stolen by the landlord. I think that greasy Italian also took Bojangles’s sense of priorities. You can live your life however you want and prioritize it in any order. For me it goes Food-Shelter-Transportation-Phone-Computer. Something like that. Maybe toss in deep personal relationships with other human beings. I’m still undecided about that one. Bojangles has really turned me off from all human contact.

(Gee, I wonder what this evil landlord is going to get Betty Boop to do to him for her late rent payment)

Like any member of the downtrodden, Bojangles had complaints about politics. He went on and on about the city of Camden. You’ve probably never been to Camden. You’re reading this which means you’re alive. It’s not a very good city. Imagine an infant shitty blood. Now make that a city. You have Camden. Bojangles also made mention of how he used to own a pizza place in 1997. Well there goes my theory of him being 30. I was 10 when he owned a pizza place. The home run record was still 61. Fight Club was only a book. Osama Bin Laden was just a lanky Arab with bowlegs. How did Bojangles through all of this away to end up in the same place as I was? There’s nothing wrong with making mistakes. Starting over is sometimes the only way to get through a difficult time. But please, spare the sob story.

Holy Lands

“A religion is only as good as its holy land is fertile.” – John P. Higgins, Philosopher/Homeless Man

Okay, John P. Higgins is a made up name. I thought the name sounded reputable. John usually makes us think of someone boring. The P. in the middle shows that he’s scholarly and possibly shares the same name with someone else in his field. The Higgins part of the name was chosen because it’s obscure enough, yet sounds very much like that of a WASP. You’d have to be an idiot to make up a name like that!

The Philosopher/Homeless Man part was just my way of saying that they are no different. Homeless Men really are the greatest modern-day philosophers. They have all day to pontificate and do other things that they don’t know the meaning of or how to spell.

I am not homeless. That still does not mean that I cannot come up with new ideas. I have the time. Today’s idea isn’t so much an idea as much as it is a SIMPLE OBSERVATION!!! It’s about Holy Lands and what they mean in modern times.

The most famous Holy Lands are in the Middle East. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, are three of the biggest. There are those other little religions that pop up all over the place. The Sunnis, the Sh’ites (really?), and a few others that I have heard about but know nothing about. This isn’t about those counterculture religious rebels so forget about them for now.

A lot of these Holy Lands are in that central location because that’s where humanity began. Some of the first civilizations were built there and from them came our earliest religions. I’m not an expert on this topic so I will stop trying to name facts. My knowledge of that time period really starts with how the Sumerians invented irrigations and how Fred Flinstone’s boss was Mr. Slate. Early history bores me. It’s all “well we don’t really know, but taking into account blah blah blah.” They don’t even know how the pyramids were built. Why bother learning about it? All they can say is “here are some giant stone buildings that we don’t really know the purpose of or how they were built” then gaze at the students awkwardly.

(In the 1950’s all villains and bad people wore glasses)

The problem with having so many Holy Lands in the same space is that it causes a lot of problems. So many of the wars that go on in the Middle East is over territory for ownership of the property where something may or may not have happened. I don’t know why you need to stick a flag pole wherever it was that your deity died at. Isn’t your God so much bigger than one town? Isn’t he with you always? Does he not control the universe? And once you get that land, what do you do with it? Open up a theme park? Lots of people died for ownership of the Holy Land in the Middle East. There were about a dozen Crusades or something. All of those knights on the European side and all of the Muslims on the defensive side died because they thought that two different versions of the same story happened on the same fucking blades of grass. It’s insane! I used to think that knights were so awesome. Then I found out that all they were doing was slaughtering other human beings for a fucking mug that Jesus drank out of. Fuck you and your holy grail Lancelot. No wonder you shits had to make up dragons to seem more daring.

The Holy Lands of the Middle East are by far the most violent. It’s because the biggest and most influential religions claim ownership of that territory. Then there are a few more Holy Lands that are a lot less appealing. Take the Amish for instance. Their Holy Land is in Lancaster Pennsylvania. Nobody wants to take over this landmass. You have to take a Septa train to get there and they’re always on strike anyway. I applaud the Amish for choosing such an uninteresting location to call home. They never have to fear an invasion from an enemy religion. It’d be so easy to take over too. The Jews should just give up on defending Israel from their surrounding enemies and make their location to Lancaster. Once night hits, the Amish are fucked.

Mormons are the other silly religion whose Holy Land lies in America. They call their home in a big useless state called Utah. It’s where D.B. Cooper buried his money, according to Prison Break. This was another great choice of a location to set up. Utah is too far away from California for anyone to even notice it exists. They have one giant lake in it, but it’s filled with salt. Woopie! What a lousy state that is. Their capital is named after that crap lake. That’s when you know nobody great has ever been born there. When you name your capital after a giant mass of water that is undrinkable. The only thing worse would be if it was filled with Seltzer. God, I hate that stuff.

(I hate Seltzer so much that instead of putting a picture of that, here’s a picture of Brian Setzer. It’s Jump-Jivin!)

Finally there are the rest of the religions around the world. Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, all of them. They don’t get a bad wrap for being violent because nobody else wants their Holy Land. If all of a sudden all the Cajuns who believe in Voodoo discover that their origins lie in Beijing, shit is going to get violent. It’s not fair to judge a religion on how violent it is. They’re all violent really. You may think Buddhists are peaceful, but wait until their land gets taken from them. We’ll see how passive those bald hippies really are.