Blah Blah Blah

I’ve got a lot of things to write about tonight, but try as I might, I cannot find a common thread to link them all together. And you know what? I don’t fucking care. Narratives are for fucking pussies or people that write books, and even then they aren’t worth shit half the time. What was the narrative behind Twilight, for instance? Vampires are cool? That’s bullshit. I almost wish that vampires were real just so all of the fucking retards who liked Twilight would get the chance to walk in on a real life vampire converting their grandma into a dry, withered husk, or more accurately, a drier, more withered husk.

So I installed an app on my phone the other day. (I know, stop the presses, right?) It’s called Acorns, and what it does is allow you to round up all your purchases to the nearest dollar and then invests the proceeds in the stock market according to a portfolio strategy that you choose:

• Conservative – Stock brokers will invest your money in blue chip stocks, or at least they will if they have any of it left over after hitting a strip club.
• Moderately Conservative – The stock brokers will also be having a few drinks at the strip club.
• Moderate – “Making it rain” becoming possible
• Moderately Aggressive – Time to visit the Champagne Room!
• Aggressive – Stock brokers don’t care if that stripper does needle drugs or not, there is a bull market on some muhfuggin’ poon-tang!

Because, seriously, if Wall Street doesn’t think twice about wiping out millionaires, how carefully do you think they’ll be protecting a nest egg consisting entirely of the change left over after having bought a Slim Jim?

Anyway, I started off the account with $20, and within five seconds, my net worth, according to Acorns, was $19.95. And for some reason, this upset me more than the great economic meltdown of 2008. At least that was linked to something logical, because in retrospect it doesn’t make sense to let vagrants buy multi-million dollar homes on credit. But this… What possible reason could there be for a quarter of a percent loss in less time than it took me to blink?

Here’s the thing: No one knows. Oh, sure, people will tell you that they know, but in reality they are just using a time-worn formula, a Wall Street Mad Lib:

(Word you don’t know) are (direction) today after (a familiar word) (an unfamiliar word) (direction) in (some godforsaken shithole) by (more/less) than (random number)

For instance, an “expert” on MSNBC will use this formula to inform you that “T-bills are down today after tractor-pull futures declined in Tierra del Fuego by more than 14%” What you don’t see are these same experts laughing so hard that they wet their pants afterwards because they know what we don’t: The financial world consists of people who are completely and totally full of shit, and we keep going back to them even after they’ve lost all of our money by investing it in poetry derivatives.

So, yeah, Acorns. I’ma be rich soon!

Cha-ching!

I did a little New Year’s cleaning this year, which is kind of a strange for me to admit, seeing as how in my wild and crazy youth I considered New Year’s Eve a total waste if I wasn’t hungover well into May. But I had the energy and the time, and so I cleaned up the house and gathered up a lot of stuff that was still more or less in good shape but wasn’t getting used, then drove it over to Goodwill.

Goodwill, for those of you who don’t know, is a place that accepts other people’s garbage, scrubs the cum stains off of it, then sells it to people who are not so well off, economically speaking. I don’t mean to make fun of Goodwill, because there’s an obvious need for it, it’s better to reuse things than just toss them in the garbage, etc., etc., etc.

But even though I’m doing nothing wrong, I always feel like I’m pulling a fast one on them. It’s not like I brought them a bunch of board games that I’d smeared with feces or anything, but in my mind I already consider that stuff trash and so when they take it from me, my gut reaction is to flee before they wise up. By the time they ask if I’d like a receipt, I’m already burning rubber and shouting “Sucker!” out the window.

I will admit to dumping major appliances off at Goodwill, even when I knew they didn’t work. I would justify it by thinking, “I don’t know how to fix it, but I bet the crack staff over at Goodwill donations will know what to do!” which is revealed as extremely wishful thinking when I roll up and the guy who takes the broken washing machine off my hands asks if it’s a hot tub. And once Cletus there has touched it, I am reenacting the Fast and the Furious across the parking lot. “Sucker!”

“Sir, would you like a receipt for this giant stack of Hustler magazines?”

As I’m writing this, CBS News is breathlessly analyzing President Obama’s State of the Union Address an hour before it actually starts. They are able to do this because the mainstream media relies on a technique known as Making It Up. Also, the White House has leaked parts of the address to the media so that “hashtags can be readied for use during the speech.”

I guess the thinking is that President Obama will call for something like Free Apple Juice for Seniors, and Twitter will explode with the hashtag #FreeAppleJuice4Seniors, and a largely hostile legislative branch will be forced to make with the fucking apple juice. This makes me think that the White House has never even looked at Twitter, because as of this writing the top trending hashtag is (no lie) #DescribeYourSexLifeWithABand.

And it says everything you need to know about how boring government is that the instant you read that hashtag, all thoughts of government went flying out the window while you tried to decide what was more appropriate, 10,000 Maniacs or U2 (because, you know, With or Without You).

In Oklahoma, they’d choose U2 for a different reason (Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?)

I think that if the government wanted to appeal to young voters, they’d get up to date on their lingo and really let the flame wars get out of hand. I, for one, would watch the shit out of C-SPAN if I thought that the Speaker of the House would refer to the Minority Whip as a “goatse-loving motherfucker”.

URGENT PRO-TIP: DO NOT LOOK UP THE WORD GOATSE!!!

Oh, Jesus, I’m watching the pre-State of the Union coverage, and this guy was talking about all kinds of serious shit when he was rudely interrupted by the host:

Analyst: And so the proposed deliberate use of tactical nukes to control protesters in New York is…

Host: HOLD ON A SECOND! WE’RE LOOKING AT FOOTAGE OF THE PRESIDENT WHO HAS JUST LEFT THE WHITE HOUSE AND IS GETTING IN A VEHICLE!!!

None of you reading this right now will remember when FDR was in office (but if you do, then I am giving you special permission to look up the word “goatse”), but holy shit, the President used to be able to be a guy who couldn’t fucking walk, and no one knew about it. Think about that. We once had a President who was bound to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and no one knew about it. (We also had another President (Taft) who had a thing for fisting game hens, which most people don’t know about even though it is clearly depicted on the back of the $20 bill.)

But now, getting in a car is considered so newsworthy that people will shout each other down to be heard commenting on it on national TV. Where does this end?

Analyst: In New York, the emergence of radioactive CHUDS has caused the division of National Guards protecting Wall Street to…

Host: I’M SORRY, I’M GOING TO HAVE TO INTERRUPT YOU RIGHT NOW, BECAUSE WE’RE GETTING WORD THAT THE PRESIDENT HAS JUST PASSED GAS IN SUCH A MOIST FASHION THAT AIDES ARE OPENLY DISCUSSING THE POSSIBILITY THAT HE HAS, IN FACT, SHARTED.

True anecdote: A girl I used to live with came home one evening and told me that we had to watch President Clinton address the nation that night. She was about as political as a hamster, so I asked her why and she proceeded to tell me that a friend of hers lives in Washington D.C. and knows someone who is friends with someone in the Secret Service who swore that earlier that day, Hillary threw a glass ashtray at her philandering hubby and gave him a black eye, something that makeup artists were working furiously to cover up in time for the speech.

Sure enough, when Clinton hit the air that night, he looked a little worse for wear.

Oops, wrong photo. Wouldn’t that have been awesome, though? And if midway through his speech Hillary had lunged at him from off camera and beat him into a pile of blubbering snot, it would have been the most viewed Youtube video of all time.

Which of course didn’t happen, but it did really look like his left eye was kind of puffy and discolored, which just goes to show you that the President can’t even get a toothy blowjob or beat up by his wife without the press finding out about it. (I’ve since looked it up, and apparently Hillary’s tendency to throw things and her uncanny aim are well known within certain Beltway circles.)

All right, President Obama is speaking now, and I have to go because apparently you get sent to Gitmo if the President says more than four words and you don’t give him a standing ovation. (I bet they didn’t do that when FDR was running the show, cause that’d be kind of a dick-like troll move, you know?) But before I go, I’d like to leave you with this mind-blowing fact:

Dog Food Lid spelled backwards is Dildo Of God