The past few weeks have been strange and stressful. Thankfully, I have a handful of good friends and video games that distract me from all that's been weighing me down. My dog is the coolest animal to ever live, and that includes all humans throughout history.
Things are starting to look up. I think that some creases are being ironed out, I'm done moving, and I'm crossing my fingers that I get a job doing web maintenance and other assorted stuff at a high-end guitar shop in Franklin. REALLY high-end guitars, like the kind you don't touch unless you plan on buying one. I really hope I get that, because hopping from McJob to McJob since I've been taking a little break from school is getting tiresome and isn't helping my stress levels.

So now that the election excitement and fireworks and stuff have all been set off, my mind is returning to where it normally is this time of year: obsessing about college football. It's pretty much my favorite sport, and since there are so many teams, you can have a handful of root-fors besides your favorite (which if you have ANY character at all, should be your alma mater). Sometimes I'll root for a college just because one of my good friends is a big fan of them. This kind of Laissez-faire favoritism allows one to both cheer for your friends teams when something good happens, and give them a hard time when something bad does. For example, my excellent friend Shaun is an Alabama alumnus and a freakish Crimson Tide fan. I'll send him congratulatory texts when Alabama gets bumped to #1, but I also get to make fun of him when Alabama loses in a defensive battle to a mid-major that was beaten by mediocre and beloved Blue Raiders in a barn burner the week before. It's liberating. You should try it.
So, it's a little past midseason and my Blue Raiders are still feeling the effects of the scholarships lost under Andy McPoopforbrainsCollum. We have no offensive line, and therefore we are getting our asses handed to us by FREAKING FIU. Seriously. So far our 2 wins are over the defending SBC Champs FAU and #23 Maryland. Tell me how that makes sense. You can't, it's okay. Not even Sarah Palin could explain that away with a cutesy anecdote and a wink.
Speaking of unexplainable, the only blemish on Florida's record is Ole Miss. WTF? It's still a wtf. WTF?!?
I grew up going to mostly-empty stadium TCU games while they were still in the defunct Southwest Conference, and I gotta say they weren't really known for their winning tradition. Now that I live in Tennessee and can't go to games with my Dad at his alma mater, they fucking rule. They're ranked #10 and play #11 Utah tonight. It's gonna be a HOOTENANNY! There might be a few mormons there. Oh, the potential for surprise buttsecks there would be at that game. In case you didn't get the memo, mormons are THE most fun people to surprise buttsecks. They're all chipper and cheerful and are like "oooooooh! That tickles my lily white buttocks through my holy underwear!"
I'm also a part-time fan of Texas A&M and Rice, just because of family ties to those Universities. Another WTF: Rice is strong this year, A&M is about the worst I've seen them, ever. Dude, WTF?

Eight years ago to the day, I woke up in disbelief.
"How the fuck could this happen?" I thought to myself. Al Gore had been declared the winner, until Fox News reported that Florida had actually reversed from what had been reported earlier on election night by the other major news networks. Florida, whose Governor was Bush's brother. Reported by Fox News. I remember sitting on my couch in my apartment in Denton, Texas; thinking about what a shitty governor that George W. Bush had been in his short tenure, and hoping that we could skate by for four years without anything seriously bad happening. I didn't need to wait for Michael Moore to release a movie detailing the corrupt forces that had taken a huge proverbial dump on America. I tried not to worry too much about it. After all, I still had a decent job and a nice place, good neighbors, nothing in particular excess but life had been pretty good for the past eight years under Clinton. A few short months later, the company that I worked for hired my replacement and he went to work for a fraction of my salary on the other side of the international date line. I was one of about 350 trained and proficient technicians replaced by foreign workers less proficient in our language than the technology we supported. I then moved to Nashville, TN to work for the technical services department of a domestic manufacturing company, and life started to look up a bit.
I was driving to work one morning, listening to the NPR through static on the stock radio in my '83 GMC pickup, which I had to trade down from the Infiniti G20 that I had driven to work in Texas. At first I thought some yahoo had accidentally flown his Cessna into a building in New York City. "Poor bastard," I thought to myself "I hope nobody else was hurt". Events that filtered through the crackling radio became clearer on the short drive. None of my coworkers or I got much work done that day. We mostly just sat around and stared at each other, waiting for the server traffic on any news website to recover and give us something. My hope that America could endure 4 years of Bush's bumbling fell with the towers in New York that day. The building in which I worked stood empty not long after, and still does.
3 years and 2 months later, my faith in the American public failed as well. Were we truly a nation of idiots in 2004? We had just re-elected a president who hadn't actually been elected to his first term, who failed to protect those thousands of innocent people in the World Trade Center, who failed to bring justice and closure to anyone affected, and started a war with a country not connected to our loss which still continues at our expense of life and prosperity, not to mention the innocent people of Iraq who suffer worse than we at the Republican Party's cruel and irresponsible whim. The answer is yes. We were truly a nation of idiots to re-elect Bush. The economic disaster that we're in right now is a direct result of the dipshits that voted for Bush in 2004. The rest of us are getting what they deserve. Thanks a lot, morons.
This country's foundations were not built under the constitution trees or the mansions in New England. Our founding fathers provided direction, but our country was built by the sweat of a race of imported slaves from Africa. Our cities' foundations were laid by African slaves, our culture is permeated with African contributions and in most of the 143 years between last night and the end of the Civil War, the descendants of the slaves that built our nation have been treated like dirt. Yesterday, Black America rose up in unison and saved us all from ourselves.
This morning, for the first time in 2,918 mornings, I have hope for our nation.

Most of us have been waiting 4 years for today to actually happen. By most of us, I mean pretty much everyone on the planet minus the 51 million incurable fucktards that actually thought 4 more years of George W. Bush fucking up everything he came within 2000 miles of would actually be a good idea. I actually have a good friend that was running as an independent for the US House of Representatives, but I didn't vote for him because the only voting record that I know that he has is that he was one of those 51 million incurable fucktards. Sorry, dude. Oh, yeah, that's why I didn't contribute anything to your campaign. We can still hang out and go fishing or something.
So, back to the point. I voted early, which seems to have been the popular idea this time around. I think that most of us actually want to give a little bit of extra time for our votes to be counted right. I'm hoping that it actually works, and the corruption that has plagued our last two presidential elections is gone. If everything works properly, we will have gone from a country reliant on enslaving a race of people to being led by a descendent of said race in a mere 143 years. In the grand scheme of history that isn't very long, but it's about freaking time. If when we wake tomorrow morning and we're scheduled to be led by a senile old lapdog and a "category 5 moron" (thanks Bill Maher), it may be time to think about living in a different country. One that has mostly white folks, because it would kinda suck to move abroad just to be bombed by a republican-guided brown people blower-upper. Oh, and one that follows it's own rules. Which is basically everywhere but here.
Maybe McCain supporters will be thinking about moving to Canada tomorrow morning. Good luck, assholes. They don't want you there, either.
"YARRRRRRRRRRRR!"
Ninjas are far cooler, John.

...but horseradish isn't.
This public service announcement has been brought to you by the letter silent h.
APPY ALLOWEEN EVERYBODY!
I still don't have a costume. I went to a costume store last night that had been pretty well picked clean, but they had plenty of costumes left where the costume is a jumpsuit that looks like you're wearing your pants below your ass all ghetto-g-whillakers style. So, like, someone at a costume company shoulda gotten fired for that. If I have to explain why, please give up on your dream of becoming a famous halloween costume thinker-upper right the fuck now.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Skanks and Morons, or whatever the hell you might consider yourself or other people consider you to be, I give you the first of many copyright infringement picture posts:

It's a good thing that there are plenty of bratty little snot-nosed American children that drive up the demand for tiny basketball shoes, or these guys would have to play badminton, which of course would be just as fucking hilarious.

I found myself feeling really inadequate one day because I wasn't on livejournal. My self-esteem has been made INVINCIBLE now! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAAAAHAHAHAAAAA!
Bow down before me, and I will give you a snickers mini.