Who's gonna save your soul now?

This one time I almost ate some dude's soul.

Not that this is what I set out to do, mind you. I didn't wake up in the morning and give a quick run through of my To Do list: pay bills, do dishes, buy eggs, eat some souls. It was pretty much an accident. It's one of those situations anyone could find his or herself in. One minute you're hanging out with friends havin' a good ol' time, the next minute BAM. Some poor sucker's soul comes sweeping towards your mouth, like when you were a kid and spoons could fly like airplanes. Everything started off innocently enough. I was visiting a local watering hole to partake in some good wholesome karaoke. After a bit of cajoling from the aforementioned friends who threatened to not let me leave until I sang, and helped by enough libation to make me not be terrified at how horrible an idea singing in front of people should be, I was primed to start things off. I put on some big pink sunglasses so as to not be able to see the danger I was in, and proceeded to do my best Lenny Kravitz impersonation. Somehow the world did not seem to implode on account of my performance, though perhaps that would have been better than what happened next. The people that sang after I warmed it up weren't so terrible, I mean they were no me but they made some good picks, enough that I could get into 'em a bit and sing and dance along. And that's when it happened. One of those friends stands up at the mic and starts in with some Tenacious D. Which just so happens to blow my mind a little bit. Still new to this karaoke thing and that was a selection that had completely escaped my notice. I accompany him from across the room as he sings the greatest and best song in the world. Everything seemed to be going fine until it got to the line "plaaay the best song in the world, or I'll eat your soul". And that was when I came up behind some dude at the next table as I sang along. BIG MISTAKE. Evidently he was too surprised to get that it was just a song, cause his eyes bugged out about a mile. He abruptly stood up, left his table of friends behind, and went to go sit down with MY table of friends where apparently he thought it was safer from rabid soul eaters. I wasn't sure what to do at that point, I was worried I had broken him or something, and what do you say at a time like that? "Oops"? So I did the best thing I could come up with, which was to sit down with his friends to half apologize / half finish singing the song. Seemed like the ideal choice.

Call Yourself a Man

I'm a big fan of life's great simple joys. The way the wind sounds or the sun looks as they stream through the trees, for example. I think it's a rather nice outlook to have for the preservation of sanity and enjoyment of life without always being caught up in the superficial. One of the great simple joys of being a man, I find, is the ability to open jars. Given that in our present day and age there is not typically much cause for me to exhibit my strength and skill by hunting, opening jars is one of the last remaining vestiges of manhood. I have upper body muscles, therefore no lid shall stand in my way. It appeals to my inner caveman. So why is it, then, that I so often find myself doing dishes while also making pasta? On the Mohs scale of jar-opening hardness*, pasta sauce jars rate at about 7.2. Not really all that difficult, because as I mentioned I happen to be a man. But with wet hands this task becomes near impossible. The hardness may as well have jumped up to >10 (that's the range of nanocrystalline jars, also known as hyperjars). Makes me feel like an infant. By now you might be thinking to yourself, "But couldn't you just wipe off your hands? Or wait for a while until they've dried?" The answer to that of course is, "No, you fool." Wiping off your hands doesn't actually work, as anyone who has ever attempted to do so in a public restroom can tell you. The paper towel dispenser / air hand dryer industry is a sham, by the way. It's completely futile. As to the second question, I don't want pasta later, I want it NOW. Perhaps some of you are possessing of enough foresight to begin cooking before the first pangs of hunger start to set themselves upon you, but my brain does not function that way. I can't even be bothered to get my procrastination done on time, because I'm always putting it off til later. As a result instead of figuring out what sorts of things I could put in my mouth I'll just lay around, gradually growing weaker while also increasingly hopeful that someone will pass by and drop something delicious within arm's reach. This is always a mistake, as my metabolism is a force to be reckoned with. It's fierce. When I don't feed it, it gets quite upset with me. Should you threaten its supply of sustenance it just might murder you in a shadowy alley. Finally, just before it threatens to turn against me (I wonder what the name of the concept of being killed by an aspect of your physiology is?), I make a last ditch desperate stance to cook something. Sated, the beast goes back to sleep for another four hours. I really ought to plan my dishwashing / pasta making schemes better, so I can help myself avoid some of these near-death situations.

*I promise it's a real thing. It's one of the lesser known contributions by Friedrich Mohs. You think diamonds are hard? Try opening a jar of them sometime. You pretty much can only get into them by scratching the lid off with other diamonds, but oh wait, they're all in the jar. Don't ask me how anyone ever got the first jar of diamonds open. I really have no idea. Some people feel the Mohs scale is a bit archaic as it is a purely ordinal scale, and would prefer to switch to rating things on their absolute jar-opening hardness, but I like the old ways myself.

Favourite Worst Nightmare

As an adult I like to think I've largely outgrown the effect of most bad dreams. I simply expect them to not have the same power over me as they did when I was a child, but every so often I find I'm proven wrong. And it's not that what I just dreamed about was among the more terrifying or disturbing things I've witnessed while sleeping... But it was solidly unpleasant and odd, for scene after scene. Somehow when you put it all together and look at the whole that makes it worse than any one of the pieces. Plus at the end it involved me being awake at 6:30 on a Sunday morning and it's twelve degrees outside, and that is not okay on so many levels. Did have some good news in it though. And a little bit about Jesus. Not the part about getting nailed to stuff, either, just about Jesus being Jesus, and going for a walk. At first it was historically inaccurate: Jesus and one of his boys were trying to get away from something to someplace else so they had to travel under cover of darkness. For a moment it looked like any typical walk you or I might go on, then my dream fact checker chimes in, he says "Hey, ancient Jerusalem didn't have sidewalks. Or streetlights. Come on. Keep it real." All that disappeared to be replaced with what he thought was a more factual representation, including a rocky arid landscape blanketed by almost pure darkness. And sandals. They then continued on their way, but now I was terribly concerned that they would walk right into or off a cliff (could they have even a few streetlights, for safety?), or that they would get blisters. Then there was another part about playing ultimate, or trying to. Couldn't throw or catch or even run worth a damn. That's what sitting around for weeks and eating pie will get you. I predict this will be repeated in real life in about eight weeks. And it isn't like I'm the best player ever or anything, but relatively speaking I should have been smoking people right and left. Instead I was so very mediocre. Can't say I care for that at all. Especially when the wind picked up to a strength capable of carrying off small dogs and little girls in red slippers. So not at all helpful. But then my friend got married and bought a house, and it was kind of out of the blue, but I was happy for him. That was nice.

Matt & Kim - Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare