Today at work, I read an article on cracked.com about how Mr. Fred Rogers is irrefutably the Greatest American. No one I know would dispute that; everyone I know would, however, disbelieve that I share a shred of his kindness, generosity, and love of life. But guess what suckers! I have a story to tell…
In the city, the weather has been awful. If the calendars didn’t say “First Day Of Spring” at the bottom of March 20th’s (Mr. Rogers’s birthday) little box, you sure as shit couldn’t tell from looking out a window around here. Fine Monday weather today: painfully cold, windy, rainy and/or snowy, gray and depressing and FUCK WINTER, right? So believe me when I tell you, the drive home was garbage from the second I started my car. Stop, go, stop, go, stop. Stay stopped. Go? No, stay stopped I said! Now go BUT NO STOP! Rush hour, in the Motor City. Just as I began cursing everyone around me: fellow commuters in the “express” lanes where we were all furiously sitting, the clear and speeding lanes of oncoming traffic, those slow fucks in the “local” expressway lanes, the teen drug-addict mothers who birthed these non-driving fools & the scumbag fathers who abandoned them before birth, the incompetent C-average engineers who slapped this whole nightmare highway system together, the laws of physics & that asshole Henry Ford; just as I was tearing humanity a new asshole, I saw a puppy.
“Holy shit puppy! What are you doing YOUAREGOINGTOGETMURDEREDASFUCK!!!!”
Thankfully (sit down, Henry), I was at a complete stop when I saw him, heading straight toward me on the shoulder of the freeway. And thankfully (go fuck yourself, Henry), I’ve had to wrangle a loose pup or two in my day. So in my infinite puppy wisdom, I leaned over, pushed open my passenger door, and asked this cute puppy if he was a good boy and wanted to go for a ride.
He ran right past me. Didn’t even look.
So I pulled over onto the shoulder and I got the fuck out. That’s when I realised I wasn’t the only one.
As I ran after this poor little guy, in the rain, bitter wind stinging my cheeks, cars surging every few moments, I saw there were about ten or fifteen other people who had pulled over and were also trying to help this dog, who, it should be noted, was a roughly 6-7 month old gorgeous blue pitbull. We ran after him, puddles splashing, horns blaring, everyone calling out to this dog:
“Who’s a good boy??!”
“Good boy wanna go for a ride??”
“Who’s such a cute baby puppy??!”
“Come here good boy, such a sweet boy!”
“Who wants a treat?! Good puppies get yummy treats!!!”
He would get close… And then dodge. Run right toward your arms… Then cut across traffic. Walk toward an open car door… Then duck and run the other way. It was all we could do to ask each other, “is he yours?”, and eventually realise his owners weren’t One Of Us.
Then it happened.
He was coming down the shoulder toward a blond woman and me, and we crouched down low as we busted out the baby talk to try and calm him down a little. A man crossed over from the other shoulder behind the dog, trying to corral him toward Blondie & me. As soon as Dog realised what we were trying to pull, he leapt up and over the median wall separating the express lanes from the local lanes… And was immediately almost hit by a speeding car. It was so close, my heart stopped, and I thought we’d surely be able to get him now since that asshole just mangled his poor little puppy feet. But rest assured, only person who will read this, he was ok, unharmed, and finished darting across the last three lanes of highway to disappear over the crest of the embankment, hopefully toward a warm home with a nice soft towel to dry his crazy, almost-annihilated puppy feet. We all stood still at our respective positions along the shoulder, scanning the top of the embankment for several minutes, just to make sure he was safe from the murderway that almost claimed his sweet puppy life.
As he ran, we ran along after him, some in jeans, some in sweats, some in coveralls, me in a skirt and tights, unbuttonable coat flapping open around me, cars left on the shoulder of the highway in the pursuit of something greater, greater than speeding home after work to sit on the couch and watch tv, greater than rushing home to yell at your kids for doing whatever it is shitty kids do, greater even than the instinct for self-preservation. We did something great today, even if we didn’t succeed. Thank you to my anonymous comrades, wherever you may be now. Mr. Rogers would be proud. (IPOY 143)

I was on Instagram (because I’m obsessed), and I saw a post by a guy I used to work with a few years ago. Pretty standard, Instagram is just supposed to be facebook without the inane, whiny textual posts, right? Well, the post in question was a picture of a VFW sign that said something about inviting the president to release a background check. “Background checks? Good idea, Mr. President, you go first”, I believe was the gist of it. There are so many things wrong with this sentiment and I need to vent about it. (I was going to post a comment on the photo but instead, I un-followed this guy & minded my manners, because being the lone voice of reason is an easy way to lose that voice amidst the wall of noise ignorance can create). Here I go:

First of all, are people still operating on the premise that our president is a socialist Kenyan Muslim? Because that is straight-up banana nut crazy. All these idiots must have forgotten the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy. “Rev.” means “reverend”, guys, and reverends are Christian. Also, just because half of his parentage is foreign (read: Africa is black and black is scary) does not mean he is foreign; neither does the name bestowed upon one by their parents have any indication of said person carrying any resemblance to any other person who happens to share the same name. Mr. Obama’s father was Kenyan, and Mr. Obama was born here in America. He released his birth certificate. Get over it, you guys, seriously. Did any of you even know a long-form birth certificate was a thing before this controversy? I didn’t, and I know lots of stuff! I’m a notary, even! Nor had I realised that since my middle name is Marie, I must be just like that bitch Marie Curie, discovering radiation and shit. (Props Marie, now so many good American citizens are DYING from all the radiation you discovered and everyone is looking at me like it’s my fault! I hope you’re having a shitty afterlife.) So, ok, point one, all of you staunch, plainly-racist-but-desparately-trying-disguise-it-as-religious-indignation birthers are fucking stupid. Barack HUSSEIN Obama is a Christian American Democrat. The truth? YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
(P.S. It is not a very Christian thing to disguise hatred or intolerance against your fellow man as religious indignation, especially if they believe the same thing as you but are ever so slightly different than you, amirite gays? It just means you’re ignorant and narrow-minded and you should be ashamed of yourself for being content within your ignorance. Hate people when they’re shitty toward you, or if you know they suck as humans, not because they love who they love or they happen to be a certain color, or they make a responsible PERSONAL decision about their own PERSONAL body that only they PERSONALLY have any say about, period. That’s absurd. That is like me saying, “Hey vast majority of people I currently know or will ever meet, I hate you because you like beer and beer is smelly to me. So fuck yourselves. Traver out.” How fucking stupid and asinine is that? C’mon people! Fuck! We’re the dominant form of life on this planet. I’m writing these meaningless words from my magic pocket computer that allows me access to anything I could imagine ever, and a) we’re still predominantly religious despite a little something called SCIENCE, and b) WE DON’T EVEN REALLY CARE ABOUT THE TRUE NATURE OF THESE “SACRED RELIGIOUS TEXTS” ANYWAY. Child-raping priests get more slack from the Catholic Church than my gay aunts (who, for the record, are episcopalian, I believe), who have been together for over twenty five years but probably won’t be able to get legally married before Naomi succumbs to the fucking BRAIN CANCER she’s been fighting for three years now. Religion is a front for stupid, mean people who just want to be stupid and mean and not face the consequences.)

Moving on to background checks. Bear with me… Isn’t being elected to the highest office in this fucking country background check enough? I mean, hypothetically, let’s say a teenager does some bad shit as a juvenile, something felonious like drunk driving a stolen tank through his high school gymnasium at lunch time screaming about stealing drive-thru tater tots from the lunch lady he raped last week while burning American flags and strangling bald eagles, right? He pays his debt to society, his record is sealed and/or expunged, whatever, ok? This guy grows up and runs for Office of Commander in Chief of this Entire Ridiculous Hypocrite Country. Enough people vote for him and he just becomes president now (assuming the election process in this country isn’t the huge, unfunny joke that it is nowadays), no questions asked? Or does EVERYONE pore over EVERYTHING he has EVER done EVER? Yeah, I feel safer in going with number two. So that said… Was that sign trying to imply that mandatory background checks for people who want a gun are a bad idea? This is an offensive idea to people? Like, really, there are people, living, alive people with brains in their heads, who think that mandatory background checks are an infringement on their second amendment right? Listen: if everyone could just go out and buy a car and not have to register it or keep all the paperwork in order every year, this entire country would look like the First Annual Bath Salts and Cocaine Demolition Derby and half the population would be dead in minutes. How is it ok to be cool with keeping one of your hugely fatal machines (your car, or if you’re a REAL asshole, your Hummer) insured and registered, and having an identification system in place to identify which vehicle belongs to which asshole and what the aforementioned asshole has done wrong with the aforementioned vehicle, but not be ok with even the POSSIBILITY of the IDEA of having a similar system for your OTHER hugely fatal machine (your gun, or if you’re a REAL asshole, your assault rifle)? Automobiles are crazy regulated, guys, and even that isn’t enough. I believe there should be MORE roadblocks to getting and keeping a driver’s license, just as I believe that owning a gun should be regulated to DEATH. It’s harder to find weed sometimes than it is to find a gun, and if you can prove a single death caused by marijuana to me, I will give you all the money in my wallet right now (you can’t, so I’ll keep those two singles and handful of dirty pennies, sucker). I’ve heard a lot of shit from a lot of gun-nuts (Mom… Aunt Tammy… This guy I used to work with…) about how politicians are only talking about taking guns from law-abiding citizens, not criminals. But Adam Lanza was never convicted of a crime before he shot 27 people to death. Dick Cheney was sitting Vice President when he shot a man in the throat but has a clean record (unless you count starting a war based on a lie [so you & your cronies can reap the monetary benefits because CAPITALISM] as an illegal act). This argument is invalid. I, little old me, Sarah Marie-not-that-french-bitch-Curie, have more of a record than either of them, and all I did was smoke a little grass with my friend. I never shot anyone. I’ve been vehemently anti-gun since I was twelve. Wanna know why? My best friend and his mother were shot to death. By his father. Who was a Detroit firefighter. No, he didn’t just snap. He actively planned the double murder of his wife and fourteen year old son, his ONLY child, because his wife wanted a divorce and he didn’t want to pay alimony or child support. Yes, this is only one story of thousands… Thousands? I’m sorry, 10.2 gun-related deaths per 100,000 people in 2012 so rather… MILLIONS of stories, but diminishing the magnitude of any of these isolated tragedies can’t demean the facts: criminals are evil people who get caught, not all evil people get caught, and an inalienable human right under our Constitution is presumption of innocence until proven guilty; ergo, plenty of “non-criminals” commit crimes that plenty of “criminals” would never dream of committing. We, as a nation (I know you’re probably thinking in like, micro-geographic terms right now, as in, “people in my city/town/neighbourhood/state don’t act a damn fool so the CRIMINALS shouldn’t be able to ruin the fun for the rest of us”, because I tend to think that way also but that is like, micro-xenophobia and that’s shit human animals are naturally inclined toward because of SCIENCE. To legislate on a NATIONAL level, you have to THINK BIG: three hundred and fifteen million people live here), we are not ready for the responsibility gun ownership requires. To legislate truly responsible gun laws, we would have to be ready to accept invasive regulations, and that alone requires a massive upheaval of oh-so-many time-honoured tenets of the founding ideologies of this country.
And what, pray tell, do you gun freaks need guns for anyway? Is it so much to ask that maybe, instead of you keeping guns, you could maybe go to a gun range to shoot? Or hey, keep your gun, but you only get bullets to shoot from a gun range? If someone breaks into your house, you can still pistol whip them! And you hunters… Oh, you hunters. Hunting isn’t a sport when you get to use a gun. It’s just murder, that’s all. You do it for food? Then do it the honest way: work for it with a bow or chase something down aided only by your wits and a fucking Paul Hogan knife. Otherwise, go to the fucking grocery store, you asshole. Using a gun means you aren’t using your brain, and your brain is literally YOUR WHOLE LIFE. If that’s too much, then maybe we can set aside hunting preserves where you can rent your guns and ammo, get your sadistic thrill of murdering the fuck out of a living creature, and the government can generate some revenue from it. Boom. You’re welcome, America.

The thing I’m trying to say here is that the second amendment was written by a bunch of renegade traitors who hated their leaders and hence, needed every capable hand already equipped with guns to fight the inevitable war. We’re the product of a revolution, and just because PTSD is a recognised mind-fuck now doesn’t mean they weren’t reeling from it back then. They needed guns to fight a revolution and they needed a revolution because they weren’t happy, and the country today, though still unhappy, is also distracted as fuck and therefore is in no danger of a revolution and has no need for lackadaisical gun-ownership laws. There are hundreds of other things everyone should be MORE concerned about than whether the president is a gay transsexual alien from Thailand with swastika tattoos on his ass or whether people should have guns. Are the armed civilian militias roaming the boardrooms of Wall Street? Are they patrolling the streets of the ghettos of Detroit or Chicago? No. They’re at home, watching the fucking Kardashians while their teenage son is slipping their registered pistols into a duffel bag and going over his plan of action for school tomorrow.
Can we use our fucking brains here, people? Sheesh.

powerfulbeard:

As a reminder for The Powerful Beard benefit. Which is more like a celebration of Adam overcoming some pretty ridiculous hurdles. I don’t like being touched, but I have a lot of hugs I’ll be giving out. So, free hug from Adam’s wife with admission. Just don’t be a creep about it.