Late Night Random Man

It’s one in the morning and I’m plagued with restlessness that continually hinders my need for sleep. My mind is wandering, thinking of the most random of things. How long has that Windex bottle been sitting on the counter, half full with pale bubbles finding rest at the top of the dark blue liquid? Why does it even matter? It’s not like I use the Windex anyway, only my wife who is utterly motivated to keep things clean is the one who touches it. As I’m thinking this, I can’t help but to be annoyed by the soft, almost inaudible hum of my Xbox. It’s humming as if to say to me, “Dude, you haven’t used me since you finished watching, X-Men: First Class, and I’m just filling up with heat, can you please shut me off?” I could shut it off if I wanted to, but I’m too damn lazy to get off of the couch to find my controller to do so.


Wow, isn’t that lazy? I would most likely spend more time looking for the controller to shut the Xbox off when I could simply set my laptop to my side, lean forward off the tip of the couch, and gently touch the power button on my gaming device. Isn’t that how most of us American’s are nowadays? If we couldn’t find the remote to our television, we would rather spend hours looking for the damn thing rather than walking five steps to manually change the channel or volume straight from the buttons on the TV. Heck, for me it would be more about finding what was lost rather than changing the channel because there would be a little tick in the back of my brain all day (or night) about where the hell the damn thing could have gone. Why is it missing? It should be in the living room because that’s where it resides, but I can’t find it in there. I’d flip the cushions off the couch, dig beneath the fabric to debunk the possibility of it falling all the way to the bottom. I’d move the couches completely just to check under them. Without success, I’d move to the baskets that hide on the bottom shelve of my TV stand to see if it’s down there, I’d check my daughter’s toy box to see if she was messing with it. Half an hour would go by and I’d wind up thirsty. Now I have to take a break from searching for the remote, having already missed that re-run of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” only to find the damn remote sitting on the counter next to the fridge, the same place I left it when I went to concoct a late night meal. If a person was truly lazy, they’d bypass that entire search and change the channel on the TV, that or they’d be stuck watching Barney because moving from the couch is too much of a hassle.

My mind begins to float elsewhere. Have you ever walked down a hallway or sidewalk by yourself and realized that you were approaching another person who was walking in your direction? Depending on my mood, that situation could potentially be excruciatingly annoying. If I’m in a good mood, I’ll probably make eye contact and greet the person for the brief half second we cross paths. If I’m in a grumpy mood I’ll start debating with myself on whether or not I’m going to even look at this person. Do I look at them and say hi, even though another person’s voice could send me off to the deep end? What if I just stare at the ground, blatantly ignoring the fact that they’re even in my presence? I’ve seen people do it where they just stare straight ahead while I make eye contact. They’re looking, even though their eyes are gazing straight ahead, looking at you through their peripherals just to see if you, the person they don’t care to see or speak to, is looking at their display of social rejection. It makes me wonder, if you don’t care to look at or speak with this person, then why worry if they’re looking at your attempt to ignore them? Perhaps it’s to see if your gimmick will pay off. More likely than not, that other person is blocking you out as well, so mission accomplished for both parties.

What happens when we do make eye contact? We say, “Hi, how are you?” Are you kidding me? You don’t give two squirts of dehydrated piss about how that person is doing, yet we feel obligated, the same way we feel obligated to even look at them, to ask. Most people won’t see this as a significant annoyance, but I do. Typically you’re going to answer back with, “Good, how are you?” We utter this phrase knowing damn well that their answer is going to be a thing of the very distant pass just moments after the answer is given. We honestly don’t care how other people are doing, so why the hell do we ask? Can’t we just say hi, or good morning? Has anyone ever given a negative answer to this question from a random stranger?

“Hey, how are you?”

“I’m terrible and I’m contemplating suicide.”

Yeah, really don’t care, good luck with that. What are we suppose to do if something like that pops out of a person’s mouth? Stop them and tell them that they need Jesus? Sure, that would be the right thing to do, but most of us wouldn’t because their self inflicted death wouldn’t be enough to force a tear down our cheeks. Not once has that happened to me and not once have I ever stopped and talked with a stranger about how good we were doing. The only time I’ve talk to random people on the streets is when I’m telling the hobo that I won’t give him money because he’ll probably use it to support his habit that placed him in the predicament he’s in. Are you hungry? Do you want a sandwich? No? Well then fuck off; I don’t pay for other people to get drunk. That reminds me of when my wife and I were walking around downtown Honolulu and we passed this guy that was collecting money to give to the unfortunate people who live on the streets in beautiful sunny Hawaii. We walked right on by, tossing the piece of paper he gave us into the nearest trash can. He could’ve been a con artist for all I knew, why should I fork over that thirty cents I have left over from lunch at Senor Frogs? Not even two blocks down the road, a balding chunky man with a bright and shiny black eye approached us.

“Hey you guys look like you’re military, I can tell.”

“Okay, thanks?”

“Yeah man, I served in Vietnam. Could you help spare a few bucks so I could get something to eat?”

“Can you get on your knees and work for it?”

I didn’t say that last part, but it would have been hilarious if I did right? You might think I’m overly mean to the homeless, but I find it hard that civilizations in the past were able to survive without any of the modern things we have that make our lives fulfilled and easy, yet we have people in America who choose to be lazy and not get jobs. If an illegal immigrant can cross our borders and find work, then why the hell can’t you? This man was chunky so I knew he wasn’t that hungry. Also, the thing that really curbed my pity was the fact that ten steps before he reached us, I could smell vodka and stale beer. If he was so hungry, why did he get plowed instead of nourishing his body? Don’t care, just annoys me.

As a country, we’ve progressively gotten lazier, thanks to the internet and television. Why go to the movie theater when we can load up Netflix on our Xbox and watch movies from there? They may not be brand new, but I don’t feel like spending ten bucks a person on a movie that may or may not suck. Besides, I’d have to grab a shower and get dressed, peel my fat ass away from the couch, get blinded by the sun I haven’t seen in weeks, and drive ALL the way there. Driving makes us lazy too! Holy cow, we live two blocks away from the store, but we’ll take the car anyway. Oh, then what do you do when you get to that store? You drive around the parking lot for half an hour trying to get a spot that isn’t so far away. Lord forbid you have to walk an extra two minutes to make it into Wal-Mart where all you’ll do for the next hour is WALK around looking at insignificant garbage.

Speaking of going to Wal-Mart, don’t you hate it that the extremely obese get to have handicap parking places? I think that if these people are going to get their own spaces to park in, their spots should be located as far from the store as possible. Work off that chunk and you won’t be so out of shape that you have to park twenty feet from the store where you’ll just go up and hop into one of those electric carts that you can drive around because you’re too heavy to even walk. If you can’t get one, you just grab a regular cart and throw your gut over it to hold your weight. I’ve seen you people, so don’t deny it.

Not that I even go to the store anymore. What’s the point when you can buy most of the crap online anyway? Amazon.com is the best, not only are they cheap and tax free, but they bring it to your front door. The same can be said for grocery shopping, hell we even just order the fattiest foods we can get and have them delivered to our home, only to ensure that we put on weight. Video stores are going out of business too, now we can just sit at home and watch instant Netflix, or just have Netflix mail our movies out to us, same with Gamefly for games. To epitomize our laziness, the Xbox will take the cake. Here’s a machine that I can control completely from my fingertips. Turn on, turn off, play games, watch movies, ESPN, Hulu Plus. Man that thing has everything, if it could only collect my games and place them in the disk tray for me, then I’d purchase a couch that comes with a built in toilet and refrigerator and I could stay in one spot for months at a time, increasing my chance of heart failure of course.

You know what else bothers me, that stupid saying, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” At first it pissed me off because I took it literally. Who in their right mind would get themselves a piece of cake and not be able to eat it? That’s like telling me that I can’t have my truck and drive it too. I decided to do some research on who the hell came up with this terrible phrase so that I could find them and kick them for being stupid, only to realize that the saying really means that you can’t eat your cake and expect to have it as well. So if that’s the case, tell me why the saying doesn’t go, “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.” Whatever, it’s not important, just like all the stuff I’ve written about in this overwhelmingly long and random post.

I momentarily debated on whether or not I wanted to end this with witty fashion, but my restlessness has faded and I’m being consumed by fatigue and extreme lack of sleep. It’s kind of funny to see that I overcome with pessimism tonight, but you have to admit, a lot of the things I wrote about are things that cross your mind as well. Although I wrote this at one in the morning, it won’t be posted until later when I get the chance to read what is most likely a rough draft plagued by spelling and grammar errors and to make sure I don’t sound like a douche. But hey, you can’t have your blog and read it too. Goodnight.