How To Ignore Your Friends Without Losing Them

This isn't my first blog. My first blog was with diaryland, but I felt far too wussified to keep a "diary," so after about a gazillion entries of me PMSing about being a college student, I checked to see if my testacles were intact and moved to livejournal. I lost interest in it for awhile, and then myspace came along and proceeded to pillage the lives of almost everyone I knew of their physical, tangible surroundings. I don't need to be told how evil myspace is. I know it for myself.

So I deleted my account and elected not to tell my friends about my "new" blog that you have before you. It's nothing personal. It's just that they actually enjoyed my blogs and I thought this indicated some severe lack in taste. You're reading this now, so you're suspect too.

About me. I'm a marginally misanthropic 29 year old male from a little town called Hercules in California. Most well known people throughout the ages have a love/hate relationship with the place they grew up. How did such ambivalence become so fashionable? What a bunch of pussies. My hometown sucks. Monumentally. There's no gray area in this matter. They'll tell you that Hercules is the eponymous name of some gunpowder factory that supposedly operated there at one time, but I know the truth.

What actually happened was a little over a century ago, some dickhead fell out of a Southern Pacific train. He got up, dusted himself off and observed vast space before him. He was an ironic kind of fellow who drank heavily. He chuckled to himself, took a pull off his rusty flask and blurted out "Hercules!" He figured that the place sucked so bad, that the only way to de-suckify it and hopefully get people interested enough to move there was to give it a grandiose name. He built a shack out of cow patties and tree bark, impregnated a deer, and the first native of Hercules was born. Her name was Bilbar. She had hooves and actually peed out of her nipples. True story.

More about me. I know what you all are asking yourselves and the answer is, "Yes." I do have a nickname for my penis. Its name is Schroeder and it screens all my phone calls. Very handy. Seriously though, here's the kicker: my job is saving rabbits. It's not a job I especially like, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm in a real rut in my life. What I thought would be a temporary job will reach its three year mark in a week. I won't go into all the tragic details about how I ended up there. Just know that unless you're an undertaker or if you're one of those people who has to clean chicken carcasses before wrapping them up to sell, nothing makes a conversation with a new acquaintance more awkward than telling them that you save rabbits. A lot of people are so confused, that their reaction is just to pretend like they don't believe me. That's when I tell them that I'm joking and that I actually kill rabbits. Then I walk away. Their night is henceforth burdened with heavy drinking the hysterical confusion about whether or not that weird rabbit guy is just fucking with them.

I'm an animal welfare advocate, which is how I fell into the job. I think that right after we wake up and realize the fact that war mongering is way under our evolutionary scale as a species, a lot of people need to re-evaluate the way they treat other species. But it's not what I want to do with the rest of my life, and I'm pushing thirty. My parents are rightfully wondering when the fuck their son is going to get his shit together and decide on a career, and I'm sure they're haunted by the fear that in ten years I'll be some 40 year old, alcoholic, bipolar ex-con moving back in with them. I need to tell them something very soon, because I may be running out of options.

It kind of sucks when I get peed or pooped on by an animal, but if a person were to do it, I might bludgeon them with a banjo. That doesn't mean I'm one of those irrational dirt worshippers who values animals over people, but people do kind of bother me. It's like I was forced to join this club I have no interest being in. I think I have more difficulty getting along with the general human populace than the general human populace does. Sometimes I'll meet someone, and while we're making small talk, all I can think about is that human faculties make him or her capable of all the atrocious shit that has been going on for generations: starting wars, slandering good people, interpreting the Bible literally, cutting in line, voting Republican, etc.

I thought I'd have all these little inconstancies sorted out or even surpassed by now, but I've only learned to deal with them. That's what makes being human so neat and grating all at the same time. Perserverance and tolerance. That's why the bitter ones interest me. They've dealt with more of the stuff life delivers in bulk, and despite the biasness and hurt in the things they say, you can learn a lot from them. Them's good folks.