Meteorological Fantasy Camp: When I was a little kid, I wasn't always 100 percent sure what I was going to be when I grew up. But thanks to television, for most of the time that I was in single digits, I was pretty sure that my future career would involve carrying a gun. That's the earliest instance of technology augmenting my internal self-schema, and now, thanks to quad-core microprocessors and cheap RAM, I spend most of my day pretending to be various things that I am ostensively not. For instance, although I am not a gun-wielding particle physicist saving humanity from the oppressive transdimensional alien Combine, I've spent so much time pretending to be one in Half-Life that I frequently dream about it. There's a widget on my desktop that shows pictures of the weather, giving me the opportunity to pretend to be Brian Busby if my girlfriend asks what the weather is going to be like. This morning, the weather widget has a picture of snow on it. TECHNOLOGY! There's a front made of snow moving in from the widget, y'all, now over to me with sports.
After the jump, my attempt to get into the Christmas spirit. Click here or here:
An eskimo with a harpoon! Maybe it's the spirit of the holidays, but as I was passing by the abortion clinic out by the airport, I spontaneously decided to duck in and start a "Pay it forward" daisy-chain whereby I discretely paid for the abortion of the next pregnant teenager in line, who then, delighted, paid for the abortion of the pregnant teenager behind her. BURT! ERNIE! MY MOUTH IS BLEEDING! MERRY CHRISTMAS! ATTABOY, CLARENCE! This went on for a while, and I was feeling all magnanimous and Santa-Claus-like, when I suddenly heard the receptionist say something about "random acts of kindness," and hearing that hateful cliche made me collapse into an unconscious heap on the floor.
Here's the thing: I'm really bored by lazy stereotypes and played-out catch-phrases, although saying that sounds like I'm giving myself a giant, non-ironic pat on the back for being a special snowflake. So just to be clear, it's actually because of my severe attention deficit disorder. My diagnosis is a symptomatic combination of A.D.D. and narcolepsy. Basically, whenever somebody says anything that I've ever, like, heard Jay Leno say -- "TED KENNEDY IS A GIGANTIC DRUNK," for instance -- I collapse into full REM sleep, right there in the bail bond office or the abortion clinic, or wherever I happen to be. When I kick my little legs, you can tell that I'm chasing something!
So my high school shop teacher, Mr. Donaldson, was a source of amazement to me. Apparently, polydactyly was just one of many congenital anomalies that ran in his family, but for a while, he was the only high school shop teacher in the United States with six fingers on each hand. In other words, he was the exact opposite of a certain lazy stereotype that had been literally knocking me unconscious for my entire life. He took me under his abundantly phlanged wing in a real Stand and Deliver/Dead Poets Society/Mr. Holland's Opus/Lean on Me-type relationship, only instead of teaching me about poetry or debate or whatever, we just built a lot of birdhouses. For an entire semester, I didn't lose consciousness one single time. I blew off all of my other classes, and when Mr. Donaldson got arrested for touching some girl's hiney in the gymnasium after hours, I just wound up dropping out of school and getting my G.E.D, and also my HVAC equivalency degree -- the legal equivalent of an actual HVAC degree.
Anyway, when I woke up after a few hours at the abortion clinic, somebody had taken my wallet and my Microsoft Zune, so let's just say that ol' Daily Briefs may be disinclined from any future demonstrations of Christmas charity for any unfortunate teens.
-- Chris Packham
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