What Have You Done To His Eyes, You Maniacs?!?

Posted by E

Thursday, December 20, 2007

I went out and got myself a nice upgrade yesterday. Gone are the days of grainy, blurred images obscuring my objectives. Everything looks gorgeous now, with full anti-aliasing, anistropic filtering, bump mapping, and all sorts of amazing visual doo-dads leaping out at me. I have moved from the world of bland and muddy textures running in low resolution to the astounding clarity of full HD. What exactly was this upgrade? Did I invest in an 8800 GTX? Nope, already got one. ;) Was it a new monitor? Sorry, not even close. I finally went out and invested in a nice pair of glasses. And let me tell you, this world doesn't look anything like I've been imagining it all these years.

Sometimes we just have to face the facts and acknowledge certain things about ourselves. I finally came to grips in the last year with the fact that I am not a 7 foot tall ripped and muscular sex machine. In reality, I'm only 6'1". And although that ONE trait prevents me from being a paragon of human perfection, these features are only skin deep. (Except my toned and ripped abs. Those are muscle deep.)

But of the attributes that go beyond merely the physical, my eyesight is the one causing me the most distress of late. About a month ago I put out a moratorium on passengers in my car after dark. I felt I could no longer vouch for the safety of anybody in the vehicle beyond myself. If I go careening off the road and slide into a busload of handicapped children, I'm gonna be really embarassed if one of my friends is there to see it.

So, in the interest of NOT being made a fool of by the court system, I decided to go ahead and get my eyes checked. Much as I suspected, my eyesight was slightly less than perfect, in the same sense that Rhode Island is slightly smaller than Jupiter. So, after taking all of their fun tests and trying out a few frames, I settled on a pair that I liked and ordered away.

Yesterday I received the call that they were ready and I rushed from my office to pick them up. Well, rushed in the sense that I sat in 11 miles of traffic for an hour, as this IS Atlanta at Christmas time. After picking them up I headed outside to face life with halfway decent eyes for the first time in who knows how long.

And I have to admit, I giggled like a schoolgirl doing whip-its. I spent the next 20 minutes in traffic flipping my glasses up and down to compare life with and without them. The difference is quite astounding, really.

My favorite moment was noticing that a car in front of me had a 3 foot wide sign in their back windshield....but only if I had my magic glasses on. Without them, it was just a normal pane. With them, a white and blue sign said "BROOKLYN". And just like any other green blooded reptiloid, I took note of that location for "future reference".

If you have been reading all of this expecting some amazing insight or witty rejoinder, you're out of luck. I have no philosophical diatribes to launch into. I will not begin with the, "I never saw the inhumanity of man until I SAW humanity" type crap. The tale is fairly simple. I couldn't see. I got glasses. I can see now.

And yes, now that I can see, it will be WAY MORE FUN to slide into busloads of handicapped children. At petting zoos. Feeding the elderly. I'll take my camera, I swear.

As with everything I post around here, you've just been tricked into reading my verbal masturbation just long enough for me to grab your wallet. I'm heading for Mexico. Peace out, y'all.

All I See is Pornograffiti, All I Hear is Pornograffiti

Posted by E

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Like many others here at Bonez, I pride myself in striving to put forward the very best original content I can muster. Whether this endeavour is successful is ultimately a subjective decision. I'd like to think that at least one or two of my missives offered a minor amount of mild entertainment to somebody, though I'm sure at least one of my works has caused someone to spontaneously claw their own eyes out while screaming for me to get out of their head.

All that being as it may, I cannot help but notice a fact, of late, that I've discovered to be a tad disheartening. As you may or may not have noticed, over there on the right panel doo-dad, we maintain a list of the "Bonez Top Hits". Like anybody else that posts here, I strive to make my material of a quality that attracts an audience and a few hits. Truth be told, I've managed one or two posts that seem to find their way onto (and back off of) that list regularly. But there is a darker side to that list, and it is a trend I've seen plastered across these multiwebs in various manners. I've tried to stay silent on the topic for ages, but the time at last has come for me to speak.

Take, for example, the Bonez Top Hit List of the last 24 hours. At the time of this writing, here are the top 10 entries. Let's see if anybody can spot the trend:

1) Orangina and Kyla Ebbert Exposed
2) Beauty and the Breast
3) Interwebs Porn Wins Over Iran Nukes
4) Female Porn
5) Japan's Tiny Butts No Contest For World's Best Bottom
6) NSFW Video of Hot Cam Babe Stripping
7) Flexible Women and UFO's
8) HOOPZ is Sexy Latin Dance Video
9) Free Viagra Robot Sex Cow Molesting Aliens
10) JK Rowling's Boobs Make Personal Appearance

Did you spot it? Don't be upset, it's easy to miss.

Now, please don't take this as an indictment of my fellow Bonez crewmembers. I am not denigrating their work or contributions, nor am I implying anything. It's just hard to deny what the big draw is here.

Let's go for another example. I'm going to give you two possible titles for this entry. I want you to select the one that will get me more hits:

1) A Personal Diatribe on the Overabundance of Sexual Material Apparent in Internet Trends and a Discussion for Methods of Reversing Them

2) Totally Naked and Hot Brazillian Chicks Doing Dirty and Naughty NSFW Things in Schoolgirl Skirts

Again, who do you think the winner would be here? I'm gonna have to go with number 2, though stranger things have happened, I suppose.

As I stated before, this isn't a Bonez related trend. This can be seen across all of the intarwebs. Let's look at the trends on Wikipedia...

Number 4 - List of Big Busted Models and Performers
Number 6 - List of Sex Positions
Number 10 - List of Female Porn Stars

Need I point out that Wikipedia is a fucking ENCYCLOPEDIA? Yeah, I think I'll go spank it to Britannica, back in a few. Usually when I'M hitting Wiki, it's to, I don't know, LEARN something? I like to feel like I leave the encyclopedia a little fuller than when I arrived and not emptier. [wink, wink, nudge, nudge]

Seriously, folks, there are a great many people out here who are trying to offer content. Substance, if you will. It can be a bit annoying to put forward your best effort (good or bad as it is) knowing that you'll automatically lose out to the SAME SHIT YOU SEE EVERYWHERE ELSE. It's not really hard to find porn on the net. It's kind of like trying to find grass in a field.

I've discussed this dilemma with Bonez himself on many occassions, as I refuse to stoop myself to writing about any of the following: breasts, boobs, milkbags, jugs, tits, winkle, vibraphone, booblies, perky erect nipples, hot and ready women, and/or Edison wax cylinders. I just can't bring myself to do it.

Does this make me an elitist? I guess it's how you want to look at it. I just consider it having some boundaries. I'm not offended by it, I'm not upset by it, it just seems like it's all kind of been said. I'm not certain what position, perversion, or fetish hasn't been written about by now.

For the record, said perversion would be photopyrobestialpedonecrophilia, which you now know is the act of achieving sexual gratification by having photos taken of oneself having sex with flaming dead baby animals.

Dead animals? You disgust me. You sick, sick pervert.

Tune in Again Tomorrow, Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel

Posted by E

Monday, December 17, 2007

It always begins the same way... I walk into the backyard of the nameless man, who then greets me and leads me to a fenced in area. The man is dressed in a dingy safari style outfit, complete with pith helmet. It's apparent that I know this man and have known him for some time. In the middle of his yard is the fenced in section that is filled with a loose dirt. When I first came across him, there was nothing but the mound of dirt. With each subsequent visit human bones have begun to pile up. At first just a skull, but by now there is a pile a good two feet thick. He always seeks to entice me into the fenced in area. At first I had no reservations about this. It's always been apparent that I knew what he was doing with the bodies, and until recently he seemed to accept that I wouldn't say anything. But a hint of malice is now starting to cross over him on my visits, and I am becoming more and more wary of entering that area. I was further upset last night by him mentioning the need to dig a mass grave to "get rid of some of his problems". What am I supposed to do? Should I join him in the fenced in area? Am I one of the "problems" or am I part of the solution?

You're probably reading all that wondering what the hell I'm on about. Everything mentioned previously is part of an ongoing dream I've been experiencing. Dreaming for me has always been a strange phenomenon. I rarely have just a regular one-off dream that comes and goes over the course of an evening. When I dream, it tends to be a serialized affair. I will have the same dream every night for a month or two. For the first couple of weeks they will progress a little bit further until I reach a point where I am presented with a challenge. My goal is to determine the correct approach to that challenge. Upon determining the correct answer, I always get two things:

A) Some insight into my psyche that allows me to understand what it is the dream is telling me about my life
B) The dream will go away and I will never have it again.

Sometimes the dreams will go away for months at a time. Once they return, I will have them almost every night. Every dream brings a different feeling. This particular dream started out just fine. Oddly enough, I was never put off by the grave or the bones. But the comment the man made last night shot me awake and sent a cold chill through my blood.

As a good example, let me mention my favorite of these dreams. I had this particular dream recurrently around the age of 21. Even though the content seems grim, I never had an ill feeling in it. I was always calm and at ease.

I was walking down the street and would be approached by a man wearing a white suit. He would always look at me and offer enlightenment, if I would but follow him. Every night I would follow and we'd end up at his house. Inside this house was a small room, perhaps 10'x10'. The floor was covered in pools of coagulated blood. Set around this room was a series of shelves, each covered in human heads. Around this time I would turn and face the man in the suit, who was now brandishing a sword.

"The path to enlightenment lies in the destruction of the self. Do you understand?" he would ask me every night.

The answer was ultimately to nod and bow forward, exposing my neck to him. He swung and my head fell. I watched through my own eyes as it dropped, hit the floor and bounced.

As always, I received my insight upon recognizing the question. At 21, I was still pretty freshly out of my teenage years, and I hadn't always been the best person up to that point. I was a manipulator and ultimately untrustworthy. My dream awakened in me the insight that to blossom as an adult I needed to do away with the negative portions of who I was and metamorphose into what I have since become. After some self-imposed exile and a LOT of reading I came to complete grips with what it was telling me.

Ultimately, it was a very eye-opening and positive experience. It almost always is. Though the insights are not always so profound, they do help me sort out my personal issues. They are simply the manifestation of whatever turmoil is rattling inside my head, be it unseen, ignored or otherwise unnoticed.

I have yet to meet anybody else who dreams in this manner. They're not recurrent insomuch as they do tend to change over the first week or two. Once they've provided me with the choice, they are unchanging until solved. They are both exciting and terrifying, and the current one fills me with enough dread that I don't wish to have it again, though I know that ultimately what it's trying to tell me is a good thing.

But fact is fact, and last night's statement of the graves had a pretty profound impact on me. If you've ever seen the episode of The Twilight Zone called "Twenty-Two", then you'll have an understanding of how I felt. It was the same as the woman emerging from the morgue saying, "Room for one more". [shudders]

A Christmas Memory

Posted by E

Sunday, December 16, 2007

I guess now is as good a time as any for a little literary thievery. Yes, that's right, I'm stealing the title for this missive, so my apologies in advance to Mr. Twain. I know that you're probably aghast by this point. I've already admitted that I'm stealing the title of this piece wholesale from somebody else. What about the contents? Well, I stole those too, FROM MY OWN LIFE. Deal with it.

Let me take you back a few years to a simpler time. A time where folks were friendlier, when the roads were paved with gold and the world held hands to sing songs of harmony and understanding. I am speaking, of course about 1987, the idealized salad days of my youth. And let me tell you, to a teenaged boy in 1987 there was no grander wish for the Christmas season than a Nintendo Entertainment System.

Mind you, I'm speaking without hyperbole here. The NES is one of the progenitors of the modern day geek movement. Go to any male between the ages of 25 and 35 and ask him the "Konami code". Chances are very high that they'll know it. (For the record, U,U,D,D,L,R,L,R,B,A,Start...add a Select before Start for two players.) This little baby sold 60 million units and birthed Super Mario Bros, Metroid, Zelda, Castlevania and a number of other popular and still active series.

This wasn't just a game system, this was a cultural movement and my lack of ability to play Super Mario Bros meant that I was falling behind the curve and would assuredly reach the end of my life a failure, incapable of even the most basic social interactions because I lacked proclivity at claiming and consuming mushrooms and fiery flowers.

As any child around Christmas time is wont to do, I made it known at every conceivable opportunity how fantastic and appreciated a gift like a Nintendo would be. Assuredly, I would be the most contented child on the block who possessed the two greatest and most loving parents of all time because I got an NES.

Though I made every attempt to interject my passion for all things Nintendian at each conceivable moment, I found my efforts somewhat rebuffed by a pair of parental overlords who did not seem to view the holy gray machine with the same misty eyed adulation that came so naturally to me.

Nevertheless, I found my countenance undeterred as I optimistically believed in my dream coming to fruition. And not long after my sister returned home from college a large wrapped present found its way under our Christmas tree. Seeing that box only made the long wait until Christmas all the worse. Knowing what was in it caused my insomnia to flare up again, as I mentally pictured the hundreds of hours of digital entertainment awaiting me when sleep should have been taking me. Mario... Zelda... Contra... Metroid... So many fantastic worlds for me to explore and so many new characters to interact with.

Still the days crept by ever slower, the tree and it's promises mocking me each morning on my way to school and presenting themselves so tantalizingly real and yet so untouchable in the evenings. Which set did I get? Did I get the one with the robot? Were any of those smaller packages games? Which ones would they be? Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the big day arrived and I paced the house, eager with anticipation, salivating at the thought of holding my beloved NES.

When present opening time came you know which one I wanted to rip apart first, but rules are rules and that was the "big final present". So, we maintained our yearly tradition and opened the presents from Grandma first. Grandma's gifts were always good for a laugh. I don't know if she purchased these gifts with a smirk of irony, or if she really just didn't care. One year my sister actually got a bag of catnip and some bobby pins, no kidding. Grandma's presents this year were par for the course. A set of thick brown socks and a jigsaw puzzle. Actually, not bad considering...

Gift after gift made its way through the room and we each opened ours in turn. After making my way down to the final box, I couldn't help but notice the complete lack of Nintendo games that I had opened. But oh well, it kind of made sense, as they wouldn't want to give away the big surprise. And finally all packages were accounte for, save one, and the time arrived for the big reveal.

Intending to give everybody their money's worth, I opened the large package as slowly as possible. Hands trembling with excitement, I began removing the paper coating from the box. After removing a portion of it, I noticed that the box underneath was plain cardboard and not the black glossy box I would have expected. That was fine, though, they were just playing a trick, hiding the NES in a larger box so that I couldn't possibly guess what it was.

After having removed enough paper to see the uppermost section of the box, I undid the tape holding the flaps together and slowly pried them apart, waiting for the choir of angels to burst forth with their trumpeting and the golden light of holy electronic love to bathe my face in its irridescent glory.

Except, there wasn't another box to be seen. Just some logs. Plain old firewood. And a shit encrusted cat box scoop. My mood, which seconds before had been bursting with joyous anticipation immediately dissipated. A large and painful lump encased itself deep within my throat as I began to notice the sounds. Laughter. From everybody in the room, directed at me. Eyes watering, I looked up to see what the joke was, and as I feared it was me.

"If you want a Nintendo so bad, do some chores and earn the money for one," they said to me between bouts of laughter.

To my young brain this was proving to be too much. Was this serious? Had they planted this...JOKE under the tree for all these weeks? Surely, any moment now the laughter would stop and they would run to a closet and pull out my real gift. Right? But no such luck was to be found for me that night. Although I kept waiting for the reassurance that it was all just a mean spirited joke and here was your Nintendo, it never came. That lump stayed in my throat the rest of the evening.

There was no joy to be found in my other presents. No consolation in the fact that I had gotten other gifts. Hell, to this day I can't name ANY of the real gifts I got that year. The only gift I can name is the crushing sense of how unfair life can be at times. It was definitely a hard pill to swallow and to this day sometimes it is referred to jokingly. I can put on a fake smile and "laugh" about it now, as an adult, but even all these years later it stings me when I think about it, and a slight sense of anger always comes over me on Christmas Eve.

As a side note to this story, I got a job managing a restaurant in our town (it was a VERY small town) shortly thereafter and did, in fact, buy my OWN DAMN NINTENDO with my OWN DAMN MONEY. Merry fucking Christmas, indeed.

We Suck Young Blood

Posted by E

Thursday, December 13, 2007

It's funny how life can work sometimes. I've been struggling to come up with something to say for awhile. It's not so much that I have nothing to talk about, but more like my mind has been a bit clouded and unable to arrange all these letters the way I'd like. It's a common issue with me and one that I rambled about pointlessly on my personal blog. But regardless, I have slowly been clawing my way from the funk which has so completely ensconced my brain as of late. Myriad topics have infiltrated my mind and it has taken everything I have just to keep pace with it all. But that's all neither here nor there.

Since successfully ridding myself of my lifelong nicotine addiction, I have been trying to slowly incorporate a few healthy habits into my life. Not too quickly, mind you. I don't want to shock the system. ;) Anyways, one of these habits is power walking with my sister a few nights a week. There's a local mall that's a circular design and just happens to be about a mile around on foot. So we make our way up there and walk it three to four times, striving for the best time we can achieve. Tonight we were making very good time. (10 minute laps!)

As we were doing our third lap, I noticed a little girl who couldn't have been more than seven years old walking to our left. I primarily noticed her because she kept looking over at me with a rather sad expression in her eye. I took a quick mental note of myself. No offensive t-shirts on tonight, tattoos completely covered. Truly, I had no idea what was catching her eye. After about the fifth look she cast at me, I flashed her a quick smile. No sooner had I done this than she started to cry. As she was walking the mall alone we couldn't help but stop to see what the problem was.

After my sister snapped into maternal mode and asked the girl what was wrong, we discovered that she had lost her parents. She was wandering the mall looking quite terrified and really had no idea where they could be. We tried to find out what store she had lost them at, but we really couldn't understand what she was telling us. So my sister took her hand and we made our way to find either the store or someone capable of paging her parents.

Amazingly enough, the little girl seemed to have a pretty keen memory as to what her parents were wearing, and the reassuring touch from my sister seemed to calm her. We had her with us for about 5 minutes before she saw her father. She took off running and we watched until she made it to him. We then smiled and waved and continued our walk.

It really kind of bothered me at the time, to be honest. I'm a decently nice guy and I actually do have a little bit of a heart, even if I do tend to hide it. But the fact is that I'm a bit of a softy when it comes to little ones. That poor little girl was terrified and reached out for help. But as an adult male in the 21st century, I'll be damned if I can offer it. All I could think as we were escorting this girl is that I can't hold her hand. I can't give her a reassuring hug. I can't touch her in any conceivable way. If I do, I can rest assured that a lawsuit is headed my way.

This country is so helplessly terrified of its own shadow that it has become inconceivable that a grown man could actually just CARE about the well being of another. It's beyond the realm of feasibility that I cannot stand to see a child crying or that I just want to help them find their parents. Nope, I MUST be Ian Brady and my sister is Myra Hindley.

Pardon my French, but at times I just want to scream at this country, "Va te faire foutre!" When I was a kid, every single adult wasn't out to kidnap, torture and rape me, only to discard my dessicated corpse in an abandoned field. In fact, when I was a child we were told that if we got lost the first thing we should do is "Find an adult". Kids today must just look at the adult world as nothing but snarling perverts and deviants.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the parents of today the kids of yesterday? Seriously, if we didn't spend our entire childhood in fear of the gnashing teeth and sharpened blades of the adult populous, why do we feel the need to inflict this fear on our offspring? It's rational and natural to worry about your children's welfare, but it's easy to reach a point where your concern becomes self serving and ultimately damaging to the childrens' psyche. Is it necessary to terrify them with nonstop tales of horror? Yes, there ARE bad people out there. Yes, bad things DO happen. But not every day and not to every kid. Teach them common sense. Don't get in the rusty van with the stranger offering candy is a good lesson. Don't ask anybody in a crowded mall for help when you're terrified? Not quite as useful in my book.

I'm glad we were able to help that kid, and I'm glad that it's still somewhat socially acceptable for my sister to offer comfort, but truth be told the system is broken and somebody needs to fix it. At least, that's how I see it.