So have you heard about the new teen craze that’s all the talk among the high school halls these days?   No?  Oh, well excuuuse me.  I didn’t realize you were too cool to be hanging around the high schools, Mr. Sophisticated.  Nah, but anyway, have you seen the news reports about this new thing that the kids are doing?  It’s called i-dosing, and besides besides being a hilarious and terrible name, apparently it’s the latest fad on the internet that the parents are freaking out about.   It seems the youths of today are downloading “digital drugs,” audio files that, when listened to loudly in headphones, are supposed to get the kids high.  I think that’s how it works anyway.  Audio files.  Or maybe it’s both audio and video.  I don’t really know.  I haven’t paid much attention, but… hell, here, take a look.  I googled it for you:  http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504464_162-20011389-504464.html .

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Man, I’ve become an impatient son of a bitch over the last few years.    I was reminded of this yesterday while seated in the back seat of my brother’s car as he drove down the highway, cursing at the slow moving car in front of him.

“C’mon! What is it with all the slow idiots in Atlanta?  HURRY UP!!!”  he shouted.
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Well,  I was in the mood to sit down and write something, but I can’t think of anything in particular that I’m in the mood to discuss.  So you know what means, don’t you?  Stream of consciousness time!   Alright!

Damn, you know what, I’ve started off quite a few blog entries in this same fashion.  And considering that I don’t post very often, that means a decent percentages of my posts are about how I don’t really have anything to say.  That sucks, yes?  Maybe I need to come up with a theme or something for this blog.  Maybe I should focus on a particular subject, something specific that I could focus on.  I’m not going to do that, mind you, but I probably should.  Course, were I going to write about a specific something, what would this specific something be? What do I like?  I like beer.  But the internet has other people who like to write about beer, and they do it better than I could.  So what else is there?  Hmm, what else do I like to do?  Well, that’s about it, really. I like to do beer.  Like, do it.  What do you think about that?
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Hey, remember that movie A Beautiful Mind about the brilliant economist who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia?  Yeah?  Remember the scene where his wife steps into the shed and is horrified to discover the walls covered in newspaper and magazine clippings, all maniacally scribbled upon with mad circles around particular fragments of sentences?  It was a pretty creepy scene, was it not?  The poor dude was obsessed, thinking he had discovered patterns in the copy, sophisticated codes revealing the existence of a dark worldwide conspiracy.  Or something like that.  I feel a lot like this dude sometimes when I’m perusing the internet.

Now, I’m not suggesting that I think I’ve discovered intricate patterns of any sort.  Sure, I’m paranoid as hell, but I’m not paranoid schizophrenic.  Nah, I’m not seeing codes, but rather just certain words that seem to gain a weird popularity in the internet lexicon – in the blogs, the comment boards, the status updates – and once I see these words, I can’t unsee them.  Can’t not notice them. And it kind of drives me bonkers.
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I think I’d like to talk about Facebook again.  I’m fascinated by Facebook, you see.  Well, not Facebook itself, necessarily, and definitely not the content on Facebook, but rather I’m fascinated by the strange and sad fact that I continue to return to Facebook to read the updates.  Why do I do this, I wonder?  Why do I continue to return to this website with the meaningless name that would be more aptly titled, “All the Pretty Girls from the Past Have Kids Now…. dot com.”   Or, maybe even more relevant to me, “Unrequested information about mundane events in the lives of people whom I didn’t know very well in the past and know even less in the present… dot com.”  No, wait.  That second one should be dot net, I think.  Sorry about that.

Anyway, I’m not really sure why I continue to read this stuff.  Perhaps it’s simply because I’m constantly online and, like most of my generation and the ones to follow, I require constant information stimulation.  I need things to be always updating.  Doesn’t matter the quality of the content, only that it’s changing.  Constantly.  And Facebook provides this for sure.   But so does drudgereport.com, huffingtonpost.com, reddit.com, digg.com, slashdot.org, and virtually billions of other sites.

So why Facebook?

With the grand wealth of information provided by the internet, why do I choose to go back to a site to learn that someone I haven’t talked to in twenty years is enjoying the latest episode of Parks and Recreation?

I don’t know. I think I hate Facebook.

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You know what this upcoming Saturday is, right?  Yep, you’re right.  It’s haircut day!  I’m getting together with a group of my buddies and we’re all going to get our hair cut!  Hooray!

What do you think about this?  Does this piss you off?  Does the thought of five grown men meeting up at a salon on a Saturday afternoon to all get a trim make you want to kick my ass?  I hope so.  And I’m tempted to change the subject to something else entirely and never bring up that a group of dudes are getting our hair cut together again, allowing your imagination to wander, allowing the rage to build, the hatred to burn…  But I shan’t, my friends, cause I want to talk a little more about the Haircut Club.

What do you think about the Haircut Club?  Is that a cool name?  Say it out loud.  Haircut Club.  Does that suck?  Yes.  Yes, it does.  But the Haircut Club actually rules, dudes.  Because the Haircut Club is a group of pals who’ve concocted another excuse to drink beer all day.  The Haircut Club tailgates haircuts.  Or rather, sits at a bar all day next door to a salon, and each dude takes turns swapping his stool at the bar for a swivel chair at the salon, returns an hour later to the line of lushes hunched over their pint glasses, who will then turn to the admire the dude’s fresh cut, raise a toast, then turn back to their beers.  The next guy will finish his drink, get up and step over to the salon, return an hour later, etc.  This process continues until all 5 dudes’ have made their trip next door, each man progressively drunker than the one before, each man’s conversation with the stylist progressively weirder and more incomprehensible.  The Haircut Club rules because the Haircut Club is a bunch of dudes using haircuts as an excuse to drink beer all day.
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I’ve found myself having a lot of conversations lately about my beard.  I don’t start the conversations, they just seem to come up.  It’s kind of strange, actually, having a discussion about your own face.  Or rather, some big dumb clump of hair on your face and the big dumb rectangle of hair under your big dumb nose that whisps into semi-curls up towards your nostrils, as if it’s teasing, “Coming soon: A big dumb handle bar mustache… ladies, if you weren’t terribly unimpressed already, just wait till I get my hands on some mustache wax!”   I don’t know why I have this beard.  I don’t know why any dude has a beard, other than, I guess, to prove that he can grow one.

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Back in high school a buddy purchased from a toy store a hunk of cheap plastic in the shape of a microphone. When you spoke into it, it echoed your voice, producing a shitty imitation of what you might sound like speaking into a real microphone. We called this toy the “Idiot Machine,” since it seemed to possess a magical ability to coerce the wielder into always saying something terribly uncool and unfunny, much more unfunny and uncool than one would say when speaking without the aid of a piece of plastic in the shape of a microphone. It was impossible to say something cool into the “Idiot Machine.” We would hand it over to our friends to give it a go, solely so they’d say something lame, so that we could make then fun of them.

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