It's been a while since I just sat down and wrote something, anything, without an idea to begin with or a place to end.  Sometimes these kinds of things turn out pretty good, sort of like when you're walking all alone on the street and some nice stranger offers you candy and a ride in his shiny automobile.  He wasn't groping me; he said that he was checking for cancerous lumps on and around my body and I believed him.  You say that I am naive; I simply call it having faith in humanity.  I find his eternal quest for lumps a noble goal and realize that you're simply bitter because you're jealous.  Jealous of my lump-free existance or the fact that I was touched by someone older I'll never know.  We long stopped talking to one another.  Of course, you never could talk because you're a mute and I was always too drunk to learn sign language.  Pictionary was fun though.

Still, despite my somewhat-more-impressive-than-Michael-Brown track record when it comes to writing these updates, like Michael Brown, sometimes even the best plan can go horribly wrong.  Ok, not quite as bad as "I slept through a huge hurricane and now my FEMA response plan sucks" scenario, but if you gave me enough power, I could probably fuck up just as bad.  No, sometimes these things just aren't funny.  I blame the supply chain management infrastructure for not supplying enough funny to go around.  Of course, trying to please my audience is like a man with no arms trying to win a masturbation contest -- you're destined to fail and fail hard.  Plus, I have no experience judging an Arabian horse and pony show and that is, apparently, some kind of pre-requisite for being a leader in this country.

I've got enough half-written updates right now that I could turn around and publish some sort of halfway completed book full of unfinished material.  I think that it would sell pretty well, at least half of the time.  I made the previous statement not because it was a clever play on words and a brief glimpse into my witty insight (albeit a half-assed one), but because I wanted to point out how rigorous the quality control is for each of these updates and just how much I spare you from the really, really bad stuff.  Ok, so I mention American Idol too much and I once made a poor joke about 50 Cent and the "G-Units of currency," but I was going through rehab and I will use that as an excuse.

Ok, looking around, everyone appears a little tired.  I know that it's early in the morning so I am going to take a little break.  There is some coffee over there in the back if anyone is thirsty.  Now, this isn't part of the lecture so you don't have to write this down if you don't want to.  It won't be on the test.  A strictly hypothetical scenario: Let's say that I have this friend who happens to be seeing this stripper.  Maybe she's bi-sexual, maybe not, but since this is all hypothetical, we'll say yes for the duration of this exercise.  Now, let's say that my friend hypothetically notices that she might not be completely stable mentally, like a war vet from Vietnam who yells at passer-bys from his kingdom shaped like a wheelchair.  Maybe she called him a day or so ago crying her eyes out and leaving minute-long voicemails.  Now, my hypothetical friend has two possible options to play with here: he could kill her, because killing people in hypothetical scenarios is not against the law yet, or he could kill her, because even though I said he had two possible options, he really only has one.  Thank you, on with the class.

There was a social lesson that could be learned from the above story but, really, I'll be damned if I know what it is.  Certainly promoting the idea of killing strippers, while a fun and exciting time, is not exactly morally sound.  If there is one thing that I really try to stress in these updates, it's that being an upstanding, ethical, moral person is the only way to make it through life; I'm pretty sure it said so in some chapter of the book, "How to Make Friends and Influence People."  I'm sure that there was another chapter dealing solely with violence and intimidation, but I never got that far.  In fact, I never got anywhere with the book because the nice policeman hauled me away in handcuffs after I got caught shoplifting it.  He and his partner beat me near unconscious in a back alley using a variety of stuffed animals and golf clubs.

People write me emails all the time wondering how they can get in on this update action; how they too can make it big in the world of Internet Journalism.  These requests often come written in crytpic code phrases like, "You're a freak" or "Oh my God you are dumb" but my translation skills are top notch and I am able to know the inner meanings of such things.  I also get a lot of requests to give "shout outs" or "name drop" during my frequent ramblings.  No Tom, I won't do it.  Crap.  Well, I won't do it again.  You people seem to think that it's all fun and games up here but frankly, my arms are a little tired from holding my block down, reppin' the streets, and always keeping it real.  You simpletons wouldn't understand.  If you had your way, I'd be writing about reality television and soap operas all day long.  Hmm, that's not a bad idea.  I'm sure that i could churn out something pretty piss-poor concerning either of those topics.  Or I could just keep writing about this little fantasy world that I live in where acid is plentiful, the unicorns roam free, and everyone drinks from the purple river.  Yeah, river.