"the best you can hope for is to die in your sleep"

I think the great philosopher Johnny Cash said that. I've been thinking about death a lot recently. A former employee of Eckerd just died at the ramshackle age of thirty two. And from what? Cancer. You're not suppose to die of cancer when you're thirty two. Not only that but she wasn't even diagnosed with it until three months before her death. I like how you can be going through life thinking it's not even half way over when in reality you're about to be saying goodbye to those you love. Is it natural to be frightened of getting older when you're only twenty?

On top of that, my girlfriend's grandfather just died. She was at college and called me up crying. I couldn't comfort her. I didn't know what to say and had to leave for work. Really great way to start off the day.

Death really isn't my cup of tea. I don't believe in any of that fairy tale afterlife shit and I don't believe there's a god and a plan for everyone. There isn't any point to life - death is the only thing you can ever truly count on. All I can think about to comfort myself is that hopefully her grandfather had a good life; one that he was content with when he left it behind.

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I might have just bought my mom one of the lamest birthday gifts in the long sad history of lame gifts sons have given their mothers on their birthday. I got her... a microwave. Pretty fucking sad. It wasn't a particularly great one either (A.K.A. the cheapest one at Wal-Mart) and it's by the same lovely company (General Electric) that made the piece of shit microwave of ours that broke in the first place, leading me to pick up this forlorn gift.

I think this little radiation producing box is an allegory for my penis. It's small and very underpowered. Seriously, the cord is like a foot long. Unless you have outlets installed every six inches in your house you're going to need back up in the form of an extension cord (that's sort one of those sentences where I could have just said 'you're going to need an extension cord' but used more words because I thought it would make me sound smart). Basically this gift says 'happy birthday mom; now go heat me up some left overs.'

I didn't do this on purpose - I just suck at buying gifts for people. For example, I bought my girlfriend a watch for Valentines Day (it was a pretty watch and all but still a watch - I think she just wears it to make me feel better). I'm not as bad as some people in my family though. My cousin got a ruler for Christmas once. It wasn't even a nice ruler. It was one of those cheap wooden Dollar Store ones. And two years in a row I got a bag of rubberbands in my stocking. And I'm not talking about a bag of rubberbands someone picked up at the store. This was a little plastic baggy full of used rubberbands someone had collected over the year. Honestly, if I ever get someone a gift that shitty, I'm giving them permission to punch me in the face.


"So I handed him my bottle and he drank down my last swallow.
Then he bummed a cigarette and asked me for a light.
And the night got deathly quiet, and his face lost all expression.
Said, if youre gonna play the game, boy, ya gotta learn to play it right."