How do you return something like this? I don't even have a receipt.

It was the weirdest thing- It was like 3 in the morning, and i heard this really strange "crunch" sound. I couldn't tell exactly where it came from; it sounded kind of close and far away at the same time, and it didn't seem to come from a particular direction. It had a kind of ethereal quality to it. But then right after that, and since then, the entire world has been completely and totally trite. I think I heard the universe break.

It's just as futile, but you don't end up with any bruises.

He didn't remember my name, but I'll forgive him that- he had a lot of students. He knew me and that's all that matters. Asked if I wanted to go down the street and grab a beer. I told him I don't drink, but that I'd be happy to buy him one.

Conversations with me always get political, or at the very least sociological, and you can't go there with a tipsy teacher without risking an explosion of the sort of insecurities that plague people that actually care about what they do and have done. Did I think he was good teacher? I told him, honestly, that if I learned anything he was trying to teach us, I sure as hell didn't remember. But in a dense, suffocating mass of intolerable stupidity he provided a vacuum that we could expand in and fill. And above all things he himself was an invaluable lesson, a lesson of what bureaucracy and unrelenting indifference can do to a good, passionate person. He agreed, said he was so much worse for the wear of years spent banging his head against the wall, but that he didn't know what else to do. I told him to try writing on it.

He thought it was funny that I managed to pragmatically answer a figure of speech with another figure of speech. I always had a flair for teacher humor. And just like the old days, making the teacher laugh got me out of responsibilities- he wouldn’t let me pay for any of his drinks. I'll tell you, you can take the teacher out of the class, but you can't take the class out of a teacher. Except, maybe, with alcohol. Witness a couple slurry stumbling recitations of Keats (or maybe it was Yeats?) and you'll know what I'm talking about when I say truth isn't necessarily beauty, and that is definitely something I learned on earth.

It's about staying power.

This here isn't one of those deals where I got really excited about starting a blog and then quit after two or three posts. No fucking way- this is about dug in, hard as nails, cockroach kind of posting. Thousands of ugly little posts crawling everywhere and multiplying. Go ahead- just let me see you try to stomp on one of these posts. It's your monitor.

And kudos to Imperialism- it just refuses to quit. Centuries old and it's still swaggering around the globe like some kind of hip, homicidal spring-chicken bachelor. It's had a few face lifts to keep it looking young and fresh, but the careful observer can still spot its unmistakable style. Cockroaches and my posts may be hard to eradicate, but even combined they haven't killed anywhere close to as many people as Imperialism has. But for all it's accomplishments, it has still failed to deliver in one crucial area: affordable life-like squirrel costumes.

Sometimes if you're just a body part, you get a plotline...

Sometimes my tongue wonders
Where my wisdom teeth went,
And sometimes my toes
Want to get the hell off my feet.
I don’t fault my toes,
But my tongue is just stupid.

Totally sincere seasons greetings from the corporate entity that manufactures the only substance for which I have a chemical dependence.