WARNING: I’m telling you right now that this post has absolutely no relevance to business whatsoever and will be irrelevant to most of you. But it’s the week before Christmas and I’m in a festive, fun mood and kind of don’t feel like talking about money and business. So I’m going to talk about Bakugan. Oh, and there’s an expert interview at the end.

Anyway.

You may remember that a few weeks ago, I talked about how to get what you really want, and the example I gave of “outside the box logic” was my son Austin’s quest to figure out how to get a new Bakugan toy. Well… “What is Bakugan?” you may ask. And yeah, I hear you. What the hell is Bakugan? Because I didn’t get it either. It was a set of toys and it was a cartoon TV show, and it was somehow also a game. Beyond that I was lost.

So I started a bit of an anthropological study to find out more about this obsession of my son’s. I checked out the toys and watched the Bakugan Battle Brawlers: New Vestroia show a few times. And after much research and introspection, I can report my findings to all of you in blogland:

1. Bakugan are balls that turn into things and fight, not unlike how balls cause many human fights (and, ironically, are a weakness in said fights).

2. Bakugan are creatures from another dimension called Vestroia. They came here when someone ripped a fucking hole in the fucking universe, fucking AGAIN.

3. Bakugan are somehow paired with humans, most of whom are androgynous and have gigantic eyes and/or strange eyewear.

4. Said humans solve their interpersonal disputes by throwing their Bakugan forward dramatically amidst exciting graphics. EX: “Meatloaf for dinner AGAIN? Bakugan brawl!” [Exaggerated fight sequence commences]

5. Bakugan exist as floating toys with excellent merchandise tie-ins. If you want to turn them into giant flamboyant monsters, you throw them in an unnecessarily dramatic manner onto cards. This process then generates more exciting graphics.

6. During fight sequences, the human keepers tell the Bakugans what to do by holding up cards in the way a referee at a soccer match would hold up a yellow or red card and yelling, “Ability activate!” and then some other word intended to describe more exciting graphics. Then there are graphics and much yelling. Several times during fights, someone yells “Noooo!” amidst graphics that somehow signify tension. Sometimes the Bakugan are given armor or weapons. When this happens, the parties cease fighting long enough for the receiving Bakugan to star in a brief, 360-degree-showcased transformation sequence not unlike something you might see in Knight Rider reruns.

7. At least 75% of the show is spent in said exciting fight sequences.

8. It is in no way clear why anyone is fighting.

Many questions remained after my study. Why all the brawling? Why. when two people have a dispute, does one never simply punch the other in the groin? Why is everything solved via Bakugan in the same way that pro wrestlers solve even personal fights with pile drivers and leg locks? So, I decided to interview an expert.

This 4 1/2 minute interview with a Bakugan authority should set the rest of the issue straight for anyone with lingering concerns.

Enjoy, and happy holidays to you all. (Regardless of which holiday you choose. Yes, even the weird ones.)

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(If you don’t see the player above because you’re reading on Facebook or in a feed, you’ll want to click through to the original post.)

I toyed with the idea of writing a serious post today about how being a successful and well-rounded entrepreneur with a fun life requires big balls (or ovaries) and a stubborn determination to always improve every aspect of yourself, but then I remembered that I’m going to be playing poker with my college friends all weekend and am therefore in “dicking-off mode” more than “inspirational mode.”

So instead, I’m going to show you some of the hilarious shit I’ve found or rediscovered lately and encourage you to waste a bunch of time and be totally unproductive for a while. I mean, have those big balls and try to improve, but also take a break every once in a while.

NOTE: If you’re reading this via email or RSS feed or on Facebook, you may need to click through to the actual post on my blog to see the videos below.

#1 Annoying Orange

I’m late to the party on this one, but I just discovered Annoying Orange and so am going to share. If you watch the related videos on YouTube, you’ll see who he is: He’s an annoying orange, and he spends most of his time talking to other food and being obnoxious. The concept is so unfathomably stupid and such a waste of time that of course I watched many of them.

Here, he faces Jigsaw, the puppet mouthpiece for the villain in the Saw movies (or is Jigsaw the actual puppet? I never know.)

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#2 Marshmallow Murder

Same concept as Annoying Orange, and the same creators. This is what happens every time you go camping.

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#3 Zach Anner’s tour of Austin, Texas

If you’re willing to admit you watch Oprah, you may already know Zach because he was part of some promo a while back where she was going to give someone their own TV show. And if you do some research, you’ll also find that the evidence that said contest was rigged and that Zach should have won it is quite convincing. Either way, I’m really hoping I can talk to him for the Badass Project because he’s fucking hilarious.

All of Zach’s videos are great, so if these grab you, subscribe to his YouTube channel.

PART 1: Texas state capitol

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PART 2: Mt. Bonnell

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PART 3: “Keep Austin Weird” festival

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#4 The spider drawing

Lastly, I ran into this years ago, but Matthew Kimberley reminded me about it again and I laughed just as hard re-reading it now.

> > The spider drawing

So, I hope you have an unproductive but amusing day.

NOTE: I wrote this post last Christmas season. But since it’s funny and offensive and most of you have never seen it before, I’m running it again.

I was on a forum the other day when someone brought up the inconvenient hypothesis that saying, “That’s gay” might be offensive to gay people.

Typically, I’m a nonconfrontational offender. When I’m alone, I tend to think, “If someone is offended, that’s their problem.” It’s the same philosophy I use when eating meat. I love meat, but I have to pretend it wasn’t at one time frolicking in nature. I’ll let others kill for me, but if the apocalypse came tomorrow and I was suddenly required to kill my own food, I’d become a vegetarian. Same with offense. Once I can put a face together with someone being actually hurt, I often will pussy out and stop. Damn idiotic compassion. Knew I should stop following the Dalai Lama.

“There are worse things,” said my gay friend Nick when I asked his opinion, “but in a perfect world, I kind of wish that expression would just go away.”

Dammit. He was being cool about it, but the handwriting was on the wall. At heart, it bothered him.

He then added that his cousin keeps telling him how gay he is. She’s not doing it on purpose, either.

“She just can’t figure it out,” Nick told me. “Bless her poor, stupid heart.”

You’re probably wondering why I’m sweating any of this, but what you don’t know is that the gay arrow is among the largest and most powerful in my quiver. American Idol is gay, High School Musical is gay, Dancing with the Stars is gay, and the new Ronald McDonald is gay squared. There is no synonym to the way I use “gay.” “Lame” doesn’t cut it. “Dumb” doesn’t cut it. There is a certain particular species of lame/dumb to all of those things that implies that not only do they suck, but that they do so in a Bettie Boop wig, tap-dancing around with their penises tucked back between their legs.

“What if I’m not meaning for it to imply homosexuality in any way?” I begged. “What if it’s just a homonym that is actually an entirely different word, like ‘road’ and ‘rode?’ ”

“But it’s g-a-y, right?” Nick asked.

“A homonym that’s spelled the same way, then. Or maybe it could be g-h-e-y.”

“Look,” he told me, “use it if you want, seriously. Like I said, it’s not a big deal to me. But it will offend some gays, yes.”

Great. That’s like one of my black friends saying, “Well… I guess you could somehow justify referring to that hairstyle as ‘niggery.’ “

I sighed. “Times really do change. It’s funny – it was only 35 years ago that Carly Simon was able to score a major hit with, ‘You’re So Gay.’ “

“I don’t think that’s right,” he said.

“Well, between thirty and forty years, anyway,” I said.

Honestly, I think it’s all kind of unfair. Homosexuals annexed that word without notice. Overnight, it went from referring to a state of happiness and joy to one of wanting to have sex with dudes. Like, Liberace was always so bubbly and happy. In days past, you could have said he was gay. But then all of that changed.

And all of this at the gayest time of year. Revelers are gay. Tidings are gay. Hell, it’s December 6th, so thirty or forty years back, this was all one big gay season. “How are you today, Ted?” a man would ask his neighbor. “Very gay, thank you!” the other would reply. “I’ve never been so gay, in fact! And you, Roger – you’re also looking mightily gay. How’s the family? Gay, I imagine?”

As for us, we put up our Christmas tree today. While we were doing it, I made a point to think about how gay it was. I figured Nick wouldn’t mind. The true holiday spirit is one of universal gayness. This is the time of year that we can all be gay together as a people. We decorated; we hung tinsel; we listened to old music. If we wanted, we could even have roasted nuts over the fire.

I’m working on making peace with all of it. And Nick? He’s happy I’m trying.

“You should be my ambassador to the gay community,” I told him in the spirit of the gay holiday. “You know, help me sell some of my books across the rainbow border.”

“The cover art may need to change if you want me to do that,” he said, having seen the dog I placed on the cover of May Contain Nuts. “As it stands, your title implies an expectation that the book does not meet.”

I thought that was a funny thing to say, so I laughed and reveled in my holiday spirit of infinite gayness toward all mankind. I guess I can live without saying “that’s gay,” though I will indeed miss it. Perhaps I can find something less offensive, more universal.

But really, when you think about it, the whole situation is pretty retarded.

My son Austin just turned five, which is awesome because now he’s finally surpassed my level of maturity and it’s only a matter of time before I can con him into buying me beer.

The thing is, I just wrote two posts about being crazy. One is here, just a few posts back. The other will be on the Project Mojave blog soon if it’s not by the time this runs. (And by the way, you should head over there right now and subscribe to the RSS feed because I’m already PM faculty and as such will be posting there regularly.) But “crazy” has a cool vibe about it. Like that guy on the subway who thinks pulling his pants up over his face makes him invisible? Totally a mover and shaker in the world of cool. So you can say you’re crazy and it’s like saying you’re injured while you show off a scar. It’s like, “I’m wounded, which means I’m tough and dangerous. And I might pull my pants up really high.”

But maybe I’m not crazy. Maybe I’m just… an idiot.

For Austin’s fifth birthday, he got all these new Transformer toys, like this big Leader Class Megatron from the animated series where he transforms into this dual-rotor helicopter. And he got this big Bulkhead, and Bulkhead comes with the Headmaster unit, which everyone knows was created and piloted by this douchebag named Masterson in the cartoon, and the Headmaster unit sits over Bulkhead’s head and makes it so that Bulkhead says, “OWNAGE! TOTAL OWNAGE” in the Headmaster’s voice instead of the Bulkhead expressions. And then he got Lugnut, who is a Decepticon, and with his birthday money, he got Blitzwing, who is like a drunk Nazi with three personalities who is actually a triple-changer, going from robot to tank to jet, and he’s totally badass, and kind of sounds like Colonel Klink.

It’s cool when Austin goes to bed because I’ll sit on the couch and transform his toys from robots and then into planes and shit and I’ll be like, “You know, he really does need a better Optimus Prime. Optimus is the leader of the Autobots for Christ’s sake, and the only one we have has some sort of degenerative joint disease where he can’t stand up and collapses into an amorphous pile.”

My wife Robin will look at me and say, “How old are you?”

“Austin and I were talking, and he wants to get Blurr next, and then Sentinel Prime after that, but I really think our Optimus is pathetic. Like, a disgrace.”

“Ours.”

“Right.”

“Like, ‘Our car’ or ‘Our furnace.’ Optimus Prime as a staple of this family’s existence and keeping up with the Joneses.”

“You know the funny thing about Optimus Prime? He’s a truck, and he has this trailer, like he’s hauling crates of oranges or cigarettes or something. But whenever he has it and then transforms back into a robot, the trailer just kind of skids away and we’re supposed to forget about it. Where does it go? And where does it come from when he transforms into a truck with a trailer again? And most importantly, what’s in it, and why does he need it at all?”

She’ll get this look of mild amusement (or perhaps it’s pity) when I do things like that, but the joke’s on her because she likes the Transformers show too because she’s burned out on SpongeBob SquarePants, which I’ve been watching for eight years. Remember, my oldest child is five. The math does itself.

None of this is helped by the fact that a few years ago, I watched this Dvinsk Clan parkour video and this breakdancing video and decided I wanted to be able to do  cool stuff like that. So I tried to learn some rolls on my own and went to the park to learn stuff on the playground equipment, but then I hurt myself and got strange looks from mothers on the playground and decided I should go somewhere with big soft mats and fewer implied pedophile accusations.

So I started calling gymnastics facilities.

Most taught only kids, but it was okay because I wasn’t trying to learn kiddie stuff. I wanted to be Dvinsk! I wanted to learn parkour! I wanted to breakdance! I am manly!

And I finally found one that would teach adults and left a few messages for the instructor and she called me back after some good-natured gameplay wherein she pretended to be ignoring my calls. And she said, “So, I don’t understand. You want your kids to take lessons?”

“No,” I told her. “I want to take lessons.”

“Oh. How old are you?”

At the time, I was 31 and told her so.

“Oh.”

“I’m not really a typical gymnast, either. I’m six feet tall and weigh 205 pounds.”

“Oh. And you want to learn with your kids?”

“No,” I told her. “Just me.”

“Oh.”

So I’m sure she had a bet that it was a practical joke, but after a few lessons I was still refusing to go away and so she merged my “class” with the “class” of another singleton she had — a 9-year-old girl named Nicole. It became harder to convince myself that I was being manly, especially when Nicole’s parents showed up one day to watch.

“I’m not a creep,” I told them. “Honest.”

Luckily, the gym hired a male instructor shortly thereafter — a guy knowledgeable about the rings, the pommel horse, and all the other manly stuff. However, all hope for redemption died when his students showed up — a large group of high school girls who were clearly stronger than I was (bodyweight-wise, anyway, but can any of them deadlift 475? I THOUGHT not) and who kept looking at me with what I pretended was infatuation but which was actually probably closer to the way convenience store clerks are trained to study the defining characteristics of armed gunmen.

But if they had seen how quickly I can transform Megatron, they might have changed their minds about me. Like, he’s not a creep. He’s just a manchild, like Lenny from Of Mice and Men.

Sometimes I’ll be on a call with a client or something and Austin will poke his head into my office, asking me to transform Blitzwing into a tank. I can totally do it while conducting business. There are a lot of people out there who have been advised by a guy who knows that Shockwave actually infiltrated Autobot command by posing as a different bot by the name of Longarm. And a guy who, despite the suspicions of high school girls, can do an aerial and a back flip.

If that’s not a Renaissance man, I don’t know what is. Can Seth Godin make the claims I can? What about Frank Kern?

I have a 17-month-old daughter, too. She’s quite girly. I don’t think I’ll take up ballet, but I also used to laugh at grown men who knew so much about Transformers.

This could get interesting.

NOTE: If you’re reading this in Facebook, you’re probably doing it because I tagged you, which means that you don’t normally read my notes, you big asshole. That probably also means that you don’t know that these notes are actually a feed from my blog, and probably further haven’t realized that I’m a famous blogger now, which is kind of like being a famous janitor except that the janitor gets more chicks and has access to stronger chemicals.

So if that’s you, you need to head over to my blog and read it so that there will hopefully be more chicks and stronger chemicals waiting for me at the next high school reunion, as I’m entitled to.

By the way, I totally read italics like I’m whispering. It’s all like, “Psst! Read this! You big asshole!”

There’s a line from the Stephen King book On Writing (which isn’t about evil C.H.U.D.s but is nonfiction, strangely enough, on writing) that says something like, “When you’re in the middle of it, high school seems like the most serious thing in the world. It’s not until the second or third reunion that you start to realize just how bizarre the whole thing was.”

Well, last weekend, I went to my 15-year high school reunion.

And King is totally right.

Now that I’m a parent, I’m all suspicious of schooling. (Although I think this is a product of my generation, which, keeping with the grand tradition of generations, is completely and totally certain that we’ve got it all figured out and that those before us fucked up big time.) I don’t know if I totally trust school. Today, looking back, I think about the process behind it and I think:

1. From my current perspective as a 33-year-old guy, I actually think I enjoyed those years, but

2. What a conformity factory. I mean, damn.

I’ve got two kids now, and they’re all free-spiritied to the point that I get migraines and it keeps dawning on me that in another year, I’ll be sending Austin off to school for the first time. Part of me fears for the school. But another part of me is bothered by the fact that he’ll be required to sit down, stop playing, and learn about Alexander the Great.

Not that Alexander the Great isn’t worth learning about. I mean, he’s great. But when I was learning about Alexander the Great, I was not digging it. I only know one guy who dug learning about Alexander the Great, and he’s British and ordered some pink shoes from the U.S. and had me relay them to him, and when I opened the box, I was all, “Wow, these shoes are really fucked up,” and then I packed them in a box and shipped them off and marveled at the fact that in England, apparently young male history buffs who aren’t even gay are into pink shoes, and that struck me more as a serious fashion faux pas than as a statement of diminished masculinity, and then I thought of Austin starting to learn about history and being like, “Dad, I need these giant retarded shoes” and then I’d have to climb a bell tower with a rifle or something because that’s only one step away from thinking that Maroon 5 is the height of good music.

The problem with school is that it has to impart a very specific volume of knowledge in a very structured timeframe. Which means that kids have to sit down, shut up, and learn to retain stuff long enough to repeat it back at test time.

This isn’t a social statement. I don’t make many of those. It’s just that at the time, learning that specific stuff in that specific time — not to mention keeping up with social hierarchies — seems like the most serious thing in the world. And after 15 years, you still end up as a bunch of 33-year-olds standing around and talking about where you live and how many kids you have, and suddenly nobody’s giving you demerits for running in the hallway.

You’re like, “Dude. Detention holds no power over me anymore. I am free. I am super saiyan. My power level is over nine thousaaaaaaaaaand!”

You realize that the principal was just a person.

You realize that your teachers went home at night and watched shitty TV like you do now, that they laughed at coarse jokes as you do now, and if you’re a parent, you’re now the one in position to give demerits and detentions and to force people to learn about Alexander the Great. And if you want to buy your boys pink shoes? Totally your right.

You realize that class hierarchy means nothing, that it was all sort of a game.

You go back to a reunion, and if you’re confident enough to drop your guard, you’ll realize that you’re all just a bunch of adults with the same challenges and opportunities. You realize that you don’t have to just talk to your same old group. It’s okay now to chat with the former jocks, the former nerds, the former weirdoes, the former cool kids, the former foreign exchange student who you always liked anyway but whose first name is actually impossible to pronounce, and even if you try, he’ll tell you that you’re fucking it up and someone (possibly named Mark) can even be standing RIGHT NEXT TO YOU and he’ll say that there is NO DIFFERENCE between what you’re saying and what the Norwegian doctor is saying, even though said Norwegian is like, “That’s not even close,” and you’re all like, “My roommate in college was Norwegian and his name is Tim. Knock it off or I’m sending you pink shoes.”

I wrote on Twitter that I had gone to my reunion, and people joked that I was a masochist. There’s this impression floating around that unless you were on the pep squad, reunions are torture. I wasn’t cool back then, you think, so I’m not going to talk to anyone now.

I had a lot of friends across a lot of groups in high school, but I kind of don’t think I’d come close to saying I was cool.

But you know what? I enjoyed the hell out of my reunion.

What’s not to enjoy? You learn things about people and how they developed. It’s like a human time capsule.

Sarah had two kids. Dane is still ridiculously tall. Nancy’s a photographer. Reggie is willing to put up with the white-kids dance if someone would just play Michael Jackson. Jeff is a lot more tan than I remember. Ryan is willing to fight if anyone disagrees that the Class of ’94 song was “Runaway Train.” Andy, the Chinese guy who once told a student teacher, “Your hairs looks funky,” was nowhere to be found but appeared as a Facebook friend suggestion the very next day.

A room full of people. Just people. Cool people.

Those of you who refuse to go to your reunions, just fucking go already. Stop being a dick. High school is over, and like it or not, these are your peeps. They’re raising the kids who will work with, befriend, and marry your kids. At the time, it all seemed like the most serious thing in the world, but after the second or third reunion, you start to realize how bizarre it all was.

“Kjetil.” Starts with a breathy almost-H sound. I think he was fucking with me. Crazy Norwegians.

Happy Fathers’ Day to everyone… from an unemployed guy, apparently.

JT

I talked to my sister the other day and she was all yelling at me and screaming and throwing waffle irons and televisions and poodles and shit* because I haven’t been funny enough of late. And I was like, “Hey! Put down Fi-Fi. Did I not write about my internet lottery winnings? Did I not write about how I punish Austin by making him run around the house with a sheet over his head? Have I not, even in the midst of talking about something typically non-funny, regularly used the phrase, ‘…punch Ashton Kutcher repeatedly in the face?’ ”

She put down the poodle that she was brandishing. She had to agree. My reasoning was sound, and also, she was mistakenly subscribed to the mailing list I use to send out technology tips and sometimes my thoughts about various English puddings.

See, the truth is that I have been funny; it’s just been joined by a fair amount of businessy stuff in the past few months. The reason? Well, “pure funny” is great, and I eventually would like to move into it. The problem is that nobody pays me to do it.

Allow me to go off on a tangent at this point.

Here’s the thing. I’ve mentioned before that I’m a spiritual guy. I believe that all things happen for a reason, that we get what we attract, and that there is an intelligence out there in the universe that is better at Dance Dance Revolution than Lee Iacoca and Wilford Brimley put together. Sometimes I meditate. I believe in Karma, and I feel that we forge our own realities. I believe a lot of things.

Now, what I’m about to say may be a little bit too New Age and woo-woo for some of you, but something has changed in my life recently. I came to a turning point recently when I realized that all major spiritual teachings agree that nothing is more noble in a person’s life than to amass enough hundred dollar bills to make it possible to build a sizable fort. Jesus taught it, Buddha taught it, and whoever that blue Indian guy is with like ten arms taught it. It’s a universal law, and if you don’t abide by it, then when you die, most religions agree that you’ll have to wrestle Deepak Chopra in the Octagon for all eternity.

It’s like those old expressions say: “Money can buy happiness,” and, “Money is the root of all evil, with evil being equal to ‘awesome squared.’ ”

So with this in mind, I downloaded a few well-known photos of Ghandi riding in a Hummer with half-naked groupies and pasted them on my Wall of Inspiration.

“Oh all-knowing Ghandi, who was the majority stockholder of TCBY back in the days of M.C. Hammer’s stupid gigantic parachute pants,” I prayed, “guide me to the source of all unnecessary riches so that I may bathe in liquid gold, but be not burned due to my solid gold fire-retardant suit, made of the most malleable and durable gold which retards beyond the normal scope of retardation, to the point of retarded absurdity, and so that I may use diamonds to clean the grout around my bathtub, and not just shitty diamonds either, like the ones sold by that guy down at the bus station with the lazy eye and the box of Captain Crunch, you know the guy I mean, I think his name’s Hank? With the lupus? By the way, whatever happened to Roy Scheider? Is he still alive? I liked him in Jaws with Richard Dreyfuss, I mean, not that I liked him with Richard Dreyfuss, just that the movie starred both of them and Roy Scheider was pretty good in it, and also that chick got naked at the very beginning before getting eaten? Anyway, help a brother out. Amen.”

See, things happen when you find a way to align your talents with the pursuit of stupid amounts of wealth. And I’m getting there too, having already achieved the status of “somewhat less poor.” I did this by finding a way to be funny while also being something that people would pay for.

That’s the reason for all of the businessy stuff.

Also, by my very nature, I’m kind of all over the place. I asked you all a while back if you thought that I could manage to be the amusing online business guy, and not many people responded so I figured we were good to go. And also, nobody was actually paying attention.

So I ask again… can I be the somewhat entertaining guy who also teaches online technology? Can I be Learn To Be Your Own V.A. Johnny and chronicle my adventures here, on this blog, in between stories about how my college roommates used to electrocute pickles? Can I talk about my kids one day and about chickens the next day and about things like National Get Off Your Ass Month the next day?

Can I, in essence, be totally random, unfocused, and without direction? Can I be freed of all responsibility for linearity and sense?

I mean, this blog is already kind of that. I do shit like talk about how the news sucks and then talk about fighting turkeys. I just don’t know if it “works” in a universal sense. Can I inspire people and make them think I’m deranged?

It’s kind of a mess, I agree. Hell, I don’t know what I’m doing here. Who do you think I am, Ghandi?

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* NOTE: “Yelling at me and screaming and throwing waffle irons and poodles and shit” may actually have been one polite email. I can’t remember.

Dear loyal TEIH readers. Yes, both of you.

Allow me to begin by setting forth the traditional conversational offering of my people: a video of a baby enjoying Black Flag’s “TV Party.”

I offer this video because I have not been as funny lately as I would like.

I have been more businessy and/or introspective lately than I had intended.

I have referenced Tony Robbins more often recently than is healthy.

I have put off sending my newsletter by a week. You didn’t know that I was doing that until now. This is my way of telling you. Casually, so you can’t get too pissed and throw shoes at me, or at the president. Except that you know Obama is more spry than Bush and probably would have caught any shoes thrown at him by Iraqi journalists and then done some ninja shit to throw them back with all sorts of flips and shriuken, but with no loud noises because ninjas are silent killers. Although, you know, Bush was pretty nimble at dodging the shoes thrown at him. That’s a skill that most presidents don’t have. Maybe Bush is a ninja. Not that I’m accusing, because, you know, I don’t want him sneaking up behind me and slitting my throat. By the way, I was trying to think of that 1990s video game where some character yells “SHRIUKEN!” when he throws ninja stars but I couldn’t think of it. Does anyone know what game that was? Also, I knew this kid named “Ace” in grade school who had razor-sharp ninja stars and used to throw them at the cabinets in his kitchen. Now that was a classy family.

This said, I’ve actually made some really nice headway on the more problematic issues of life. Things are starting to settle down some. I’m finding I have a bit more time.

So I hereby resolve to work on the following. I’d like you, my loyal readers (yes, both of you) to help keep me honest about this:

• I want to finish the book proposal for my much-anticipated fatherhood guide. Because I have a lot to say about fatherhood, which makes me a guru. Except that I think that when you’re a guru, you have to have people actually listening to you. Which I don’t always. What do you call someone with a lot to say on a topic, but who nobody listens to? You know, they have a lot of them on PBS. Bert was one. Ernie too. Oh, right: “Ninjas.”

• I want to edit The Bialy Pimps and offer it as a serialized book online. Production is so much easier and cheaper that way. Maybe I email you a chapter a week as a PDF or something. The cool thing about this is that if nobody buys it, none of you will know. I can be all, “I sold a million copies!” and who are you to figure out I’m lying? You’re not Bert. Bert has a unibrow.

I need to get back to bidness for now, but I’m going to see if I can’t turn up the funny somewhat in the coming weeks.

P.S: Don’t open your coat closet. The one near the door. Bert’s in there.

I have this friend who’s working on a secret project. I don’t know all the details, but I do know that it has something to do with freaks. Not circus freaks — like the guy who can play a banjo with his ass bones or the girl who can lift weights with her nipples or Michael Jackson — but like the everyday folks whose differences from the norm make life “spicy.” The freaks who walk among us, freaking out the mainstream folks. With their freak flags flying high.

I say the term “freak” affectionately, because freaks are awesome. And it’s not like I’m coining a term, here. The woman who I mentioned just now? She describes herself as a “lesbian bi poly trans kinky pagan unschooler geek.” And actually, it’s not HER project so much as it’s THEIR project — you know, she and her blue-haired, pierced, tattooed wife. So it’s not like either of them are pointing any fingers.

At this point, let me introduce myself again.

Hi, I’m Johnny. I’m white.

Hi, I’m Johnny. I’m straight.

Hi, I’m Johnny. I’m more or less Christian, middle class, 33 years old, house in the country with two kids, no tattoos or piercings, and not into feet or furries (look it up when the kids are out of the room). Outwardly, I’m pretty whitebread. You wouldn’t stop to look at me as I passed unless I were riding a cow, which I almost never do anymore.

Yet, a bunch of lesbians found my blog almost as soon as it launched and quickly got on board. I now know and correspond with several transsexuals. Most of the rest of the people who read me are just plain weird. It’s like I’m this closet freak, drawing freaks to me like a big goth magnet shaped like John Waters’ mustache.

Or maybe I’m one of them and I just don’t know it. Maybe I’m in denial. Maybe I’m wearing some sort of invisible freak outfit that only freaks can see that includes a giant pink hat with, like, bananas on it. And maybe a midget sitting on top.

(If I were a midget, I think I’d want to be called a “midget.” “Little person” seems really condescending to me. It’s something you’d say about a toddler, and also those “Little People” Fischer Price toys. So I’m trying to be cool here. Little people/midgets, please sound off about this in the comments. If past experience is any indication, I know there’s a bunch of you out there, sitting on phone books and not quite sure if you should be mad or not.)

As a kid, I was brainwashed by the mainstream and didn’t “get it” to a large degree. So, when I grew up, I decided that I wanted to gather folks from as many walks of life as possible as my friends — people who were different from me. Punks and burnouts came first — and for a while, I kind of became one of the former. Black people came second. I met some Latinos and finally, much to my delight, realized that I had a few gay friends. Then a Chinese guy in high school who once told a student teacher, “Your hairs looks funky.” Some Jews (who aren’t skilled outdoorsmen. According to my buddy Will, “My people don’t fish.”) Met two African guys in college, one of whom was named Simeon and was built like a brick shithouse, like literally, like people use to walk up to him with toilet paper and try to open the door. Took a while to find my first lesbian. Even knew a red-headed dwarf in college who begged for change outside my place of employment and used to insist on shaking my hand every fifteen seconds.

But then, as the diversity of my group started to grow, I realized I had only scratched the surface of the types of people who were out there.

For instance, I didn’t know it was possible to be born a woman, identify as a man, remain biologically a woman, and be into men as a gay man. Back in a simpler, more naive time in my life, I would have collapsed the double negatives and ended up with “straight woman.” But not anymore. You can go back and forth and back and forth.

Another tragedy? These freaks have ruined my high school friend’s joke about being “a lesbian trapped in a man’s body.” Because apparently, that’s a real thing.

I talked to my gay friend Nick the other day and said, “Dude, you’re totally mainstream now. If you want to stand out, I’m going to at least need you to develop a watermelon fetish.”

And he’s like, “Why are you wearing a banana hat?”

I have this theory. Hear me out.

I think the internet attracts freaks. Because when you’re out of the mainstream, you stand out like a sore thumb in ordinary life. You get stares at a minimum or a beating if things escalate, just for being who you are. But online, you can be as ordinary or non-ordinary as you’d like, because we’re all reduced to words on a screen. And there’s weird porn for everyone.

As for me? I don’t know why freaks like me. Maybe because I’m cool with them. Maybe because I’m just trying to be myself in the same way they’re trying to be themselves. Maybe because freakiness is relative. Think about it. Society only thinks these people are strange because there are more of the mainstream folks.

I mean, what if all of the white, straight, middle-of-the-road people got onto a bus and went back to Dollywood from whence they came? In the society that remained, who would be the freaks? “Normal” people, that’s who.

Think about it. What if gay men were the majority? In the capital city of Homopolis, I’d be the weird one, talking about monster trucks at my store called Chicks and Weapons while the populace shunned me and my Chuck Norris ways. Don’t deny it, gay people. If society’s norms said that dudes should make out with dudes, you’d pick on the guy who chose to shack up with five supermodel exiles from nearby Lesbo Angeles. The less tolerant among you would deny me jobs or beat me up, and I’d lose those confrontations because I’d be all tired from smoking cigars and racing nitro cars.

I don’t exactly know why freaky people like my site and my writing, but I do know that I like that they like it. Who has more fun than the majority of the majority? Everybody, that’s who. What’s more fun than a bunch of white people getting together to discreetly celebrate a promotion with tea and cakes? Everything, that’s what. Take me instead to a black church, a Jewish Hora, a Puerto Rican festival, or a big gay party. Those seem like fun events. Everyone laughs and dances. Nobody talks about their stock options. (Well, except for the Jews.)

Now, I’m going to go try to get this midget out of my hat because I’m presently missing a midget friend.

Or is it “little person”? Hey, whatever he’s into.

* This post has received the seal of approval of transsexuals. How many of you can make that claim of any of your blog posts? Yeah, that’s right… I thought not.