Yesterday was a great day for freedom-loving, law-abiding citizens everywhere, and a dire one for criminals or people who just generally piss me off. Yesterday, the Missus and I both got our concealed weapon permits for Pennsylvania. Finally I have the government’s sanction to stroll around public with a loaded weapon tucked under my shirt.

Whenever I tell anyone that I got the permit, they look at me like I’m a lunatic and ask me why. In my life, I’ve pretty much become accustomed to that reaction to any number of things I’ve done, but in this case, it’s kind of odd. After all, the answer should be self evident.

“So I can shoot people!” I respond. “Duh!”

Somehow, that doesn’t assuage their misgivings.

That just further underscore how people have no idea what to be afraid of. They look at an unloaded gun in terror, and then speed down the highway at 90 miles per hour with no seat belt. They freak out when they see a spider, then they light up a cigarette to calm down. God, people irritate me so much, I could just shoot them all!!

We bought a couple of guns to go with our shiny new permits. I got a used semi-automatic Remington rifle, and the Missus got a Walther pistol. Both are only .22 caliber, since she’s still getting over that residual fear of guns that the Society of Pansies has ingrained in her. We have a grand time target shooting with them, though.

What struck me about her Walther, though, is that it’s practically impossible to accidentally shoot yourself. It can’t fire if it’s dropped. It can’t fire if the clip isn’t in it. You have to manually load the first chamber. It has a safety lock AND a trigger lock. The thing’s got more safety features than a damn nuclear power plant. My rifle, being older, has only a safety button and a stern admonition not to point it at anything you don’t intend to shoot. That’s back when guns were made by MEN for MEN, dammit! The stupid got weeded out pretty quickly.

Of course, it’s worth mentioning that within two minutes of first handling her gun, my wife was looking down the barrel of the business end. I guess the safety features are probably a good idea after all.

Especially now that I have a card that says I can kill anyone I want (more or less), all of the hand-wringing anti-gun sissy-ism is even more annoying. Women, of all people, should love guns, since they make up for the comparative physical weakness of the female gender. We men need guns to protect ourselves from all the gun-toting women. It’s a beautiful circle of gun ownership.

I almost forgot the punch line. As we were leaving the courthouse after getting our permits, a cop was asking some of his fellow officers if they wanted an extra tuna hoagie. Nobody spoke up so I said I’d take it. Not only did I get my permit to carry, but I also got a free tuna hoagie! It was the best trip to the courthouse ever!!

It was also my only trip to the courthouse, but it set the bar pretty high!

...and that was the day I realized that my wife was insane.
What? I have to start over for the latecomers? Dammit. Don’t say I never did anything for my audience.

Spring is upon us, as you may have noticed (unless you’re from the southern hemisphere, in which case your seasons are screwy). Now that the snow has finally decided to melt, the insects are beginning to crawl out of their winter slumber.
Over the past few nights, I’ve found half-inch long beetle-ish insects crawling around the house. Not being an entomologist and lacking the motivation to do the research, I can’t identify them. For the purposes of this story, we will refer to them as nondescript bugs.

So what do I do with captured insects? Well, I’ve got about a dozen hungry tarantula mouths to feed. Heaven knows it costs me one, maybe two dollars a month to provide them with food. Naturally I’ll use any free source of tarantula food I can find. If I see a menu item walking up the wall, by golly, I’m going to grab it.

For reasons I cannot fathom, my wife is filled with sympathy for the bugs. On each occasion, she asked me not to feed them to the tarantulas. She is concerned for the well being of these insects. I should point out, though, that her empathy is extremely asymmetrical and does not extend to all creatures. She gets bent out of shape when I try to feed beetles, earthworms or kittens to the tarantulas, but when it comes to superworms or crickets, she doesn’t mind so much.

But that’s not why she’s insane.

This evening, I caught another one of these bugs. As per usual, she asked me not to feed it to a tarantula, and, as usual, I scoffed at her. Then I hatched a fiendish plot to test her dedication to this insect who she doesn’t even know that well.

“Fine,” I said. “If you kiss the bug, I’ll let it go.”

“Do you promise?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“I’ll kiss it on the back.”

“No! I demand a mouth-to-mouth kiss, or else it’s going to the tarantula.”

So she did. She did it a second time when I protested that I didn’t think she did it with enough feeling. Being an honorable person, I kept my part of the bargain and tossed it out the window. For all I know, it was snagged out of the air by a bat as it fell, but that’s my problem.

The upshot is that I’m married to a crazy person. She would say the same thing about me, but at least I’ve never kissed a bug.

Not on the first date, anyway.

I hear people complaining about the disproportionate amount of press that celebrities get in the press. Sure these people would be completely inane and beneath our notice if they weren’t famous, but is it wrong to take a perverse pleasure in seeing Britney spears hit bottom and shave her head? Probably, but it’s nothing new. People have been fascinated by the antics of the rich, famous and powerful for thousands of years. We’re not so bad in comparison, right?

Well, that’s what I used to think. Yesterday, on CNN.com, there was a particular story that got my attention. In amongst the “Top Stories”, nestled in the protective arms of tales of death in destruction, there was a story about Paris Hilton.
It seems she got a traffic citation. The amazing twist is that she was driving on a suspended license.

The typed word cannot express how utterly aghast I am that such a story made it on to CNN at all, let alone be declared a so-called “Top Story”. Sure I could write in all caps, but that wouldn’t quite convey my exasperation. I don’t even know what font I would use to illustrate the revulsion in my spirit.

Talk about your inane stories. Anna Nicole Smith, another upstanding citizen, has been in the news as well, but at least she is/was newsworthy! Death, drugs, and potentially 5 baby-daddies! THAT’S news! That’s entertainment! Is it sleazy and pathetic? Yes, but at least is full of the things that makes America great! Paris getting a traffic ticket doesn’t even compare. She didn’t even go on an anti-Semitic rant!

In short order, has-been of the year Britney Spears got married, jammed out two kids, got divorced, had a public viewing of her fur cottage and shaved her head. There was something in there about rehab, but who cares? She shaved her head!! It Paris did that, THEN she’d be newsworthy.

That’s not to say that Paris hasn’t been newsworthy in the past. Her X-rated video was her greatest claim to the public eye, but personally I’ve always been a fan of how she lures other hot broads down the path to self-destruction. Look what she did for Brit and Lindsay Lohan.

As lame as it all is, it’s hardly a sign of the End Times. Well, not that in itself, anyway. People have always delighted in the misfortunes in the rich and famous. It makes us feel better about our own crappy lives. Should it happen to someone with a formerly clean image, so much the better. But Paris Hilton getting a traffic ticket? Maybe it IS the End Times.

Either that, or a very, very slow news day.

Rejected again! Oh, the suffering! It's not the rejection that bothers me so much as the possibility that I'm completely wasting my time. Instead of writing almost every night, I could be euthanizing my brain cells with television. It would be a lot less work, that's for sure, and in the end, I'd be too far gone to care about what a crushing failure my life has been.

Sigh.

Oh boy! There’s another election tomorrow! Yes, I know it’s only a mid-term election, but in a recent poll I saw that 77% of eligible voters said they would vote. 77%! That’s got to be some kind of record for an off-year election. Somehow, I doubt that all 77% will manage to drag their bloated carcasses off the couch to the voting location, but I may be cynical.

Not that there’s that much reason to vote, as usual. As is typical, the field is inundated with candidates I would trust unsupervised in my house, let alone run the country. They’re mostly rich, narcissistic, and power hungry. They talk a good game, but at the end of they day they wouldn’t hesitate to shoot you if it meant one more vote for them. That’s not to say I endorse voting for the lunatic fringe, either. That they get any votes at all makes me wonder if some people are still using lead paint.

The sad thing is, there probably are a few good statesmen in the bunch, but you’d never know it. Politics these days is a quagmire of sound bites and half-truths. Mass marketing is the key to success. The part that REALLY sucks is that if you buy a vacuum cleaner and don’t like it, you can usually take it back. If you elect a loser, not only are you stuck with him/her for at least two years (depending on the office), but this new official won’t just leave you with a dirty carpet.

Add to that the frothing, fanatical faithful of each parties who are full of bile and devotion in equal measure. They are so slavishly in love with their own party while consumed with visceral hatred to the other that voting for them is easy. All you need to do is shut off your brain and let others tell you what to think to get rid of all of the angst that free will brings. I once asked a former acquaintance who happened to be a pandering, slobbering follower of the Democratic party, if he would be willing to vote Republican if Jesus Christ himself was running on the ticket (yes, he was a religious Democrat). Even in that hypothetical situation, he couldn’t bring himself to vote Republican. Well, he was a retard anyway.

So what is the middle-of-the-road, thinking person supposed to do? One solution would be for regular people to participate more in primaries so that the field of candidates isn’t dictated by the aforementioned numbskulls. I, however, think this is an imperfect solution. After all, if people can’t be motivated to vote in a real election, how can we expect them to care about primaries?

No, my friends, the solution lies in purging the electorate! It seems that now they’ll let ANYBODY who’s over 18 vote! How can we expect to have a decent government if every overweight sitcom-addicted marginally-literate degenerate gets to randomly smash his/her hammy fists on the voting screen? We need to restrict voting to those few who have the character to make wise decisions! We need to grant suffrage only to those with hearts of iron!

That is why I propose that every potential voter be forced to hold a tarantula of no less than four inches on their bare palms for at least ten seconds. They and only they will be allowed to vote. All others will be turned away in shame. Then, and only then, will we have a government we can be proud of. Some critics may make baseless accusations that this may bias the vote in favor of the pro-arachnid faction, but what do they know? Soon my arachnid army will be ready, and then I will reap the harvest of my righteous vengeance upon the unbelievers.

Oh, uh, never mind that last part.

The Earth has whipped around the Sun thirty-three times since I clawed my way from a place that is far too horrifying for me to put into words. In that time, things have changed quite a bit. I’ve finally reached the point in my life where I can look down my nose at younger people and say, “In MY day, things were different!” I’ve longed to be able to be that snooty old man who sat on his rocking chair throwing acorns at neighborhood kids. So let’s get started!

In MY day, we didn’t have any fancy-schmancy PS3’s of Xbox 360’s or Nintendo anything. We had the Atari 2600, which adjusted for inflation cost more than the PS3. Games consisted of maneuvering a red square through a maze or similar mind-numbing drivel, but that’s what we had! As far as computers, well, they sucked.

In MY day, we didn’t have 200 cable channels or high-def! We had 6 Channels! ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and a couple of UHF channels. That’s right, we had a UHF dial! Kids today don’t even know what that is! They don’t know what it’s like having a passing airplane mess up the signal! They don’t know what the antennas on the tops of old houses are for! We went to the drive-in to see movies, and if you missed a TV show, well, you were SOL!

In MY day, obesity wasn’t an epidemic. People were still fat, but the solution was Richard Simmons and Joanie Greggains. Gastric bypass surgery wasn’t even a glutton’s wet dream. The nutritional information labels on your food gave you a vague idea of what you were eating at best, and nobody flipped out about peanut allergies. M&M’s came in dark brown, light brown, orange, yellow, and green. There was no red or blue or any other colors of the full spectrum they have today. Ranch flavoring did not exist, but sour cream and onion were everywhere. No fast-food joint ever considered putting jalapenos on a sandwich, and Chicken McNuggets were new.

In MY day, Iraq was at war with Iran, China was as industrialized as my backyard, and the Soviet Union was still our enemy. We controlled the Panama Canal and Hong Kong was British. We had TWO Germanies, TWO Yemens, and Yugoslavia neatly tied up all of the ethnic loose ends in the Balkans!

In MY day, you didn’t advertise condoms, but you could still find cigarette ads in magazines. Cocaine was the drug of choice with the occasional glue huffer thrown in. Michael Jackson was known for his singing, OJ Simpson was known for football, and Dana Plato wasn’t dead yet. There was only one Star Trek and George Lucas was still whoring out the Star Wars trademark to anyone who could fit it on their product. AIDS were people who assisted a professional in their jobs. Administrative Assistants were still called secretaries. Garfield was funny and Miami Vice was cutting-edge. Our sole sources of anime were Speed Racer and War of the Planets. Digital watches were new and cool.

Of course, some things never change. In MY day, we still had high deficits and Islamic terrorists. Parents were horrified by rock music and by the violence of video games. They were still trying to convince their kids that drugs and sex weren’t cool and still failing. People were still wringing their hands gays and family values and other things that don’t matter. Illegal immigration was a big deal, but nobody did anything about it. We still haven’t been back to the Moon or improved on the Space Shuttle. Also, just like in my day, the Steelers were Super Bowl Champions. You also still had the nutcases that insisted that somehow the world would be a paradise if only we decided to become communists, religious whackos, and/or hippies.

I can’t wait until I’m 60. Then I can totally go off.

What better way to begin my brand new LiveJournal than with the biggest announcement of my recent life? At last, after six years of endless drudgery, unrelenting sorrow, and grossly inadequate pay, I FINALLY got a new job.

Today was my very first day. It was a bit of a culture shock, I must admit. For one, the ceiling wasn’t leaking. I hardly knew what to do when I didn’t have to dodge streams of acrid fluid as I walked down the hall. I’ve grown so accustomed to walking in a zigzag pattern, that I almost got motion sick walking in a straight line. What’s more, the wallpaper isn’t peeling, and the carpet isn’t stained!

Another thing that nearly blew me away was the fact that I finally have a computer that was more than just a glorified paperweight. Sure, 256 Megs of RAM is good if you’re just playing Solitaire or surfing the Web all day (which, I confess, took up a great deal of my time in my former job), but on those rare occasions when I actually tried to do work, it would literally spend a good 30 seconds or so just remembering how to bold a sentence. Now I have a full gig!

I also have a career path! There is something to look forward to other than my eventual death! At last, the sole reason I get up in the morning won’t just be because I’m way day closer to sweet, sweet oblivion! I’m actually working TOWARD something other than the continued enrichment of my boss.

And, of course, I’m finally making enough money that I don’t have to supplement my income by robbing bums. Their money smells.

That’s not to say that my old job was completely horrible. After all, I got to wear jeans of Fridays, which I will miss. There were also a handful of people who I didn’t mind associating with. Then there’s the…uh…well, I’m sure I think of something.

Six years. Six friggin’ years in the same place! I’ve been there so damn long that the entire company must have rolled over at least twice! Yet there was poor, dumb Jason, still plugging away. The truly sick thing is that I knew that I didn’t like the company almost right away and had begun searching again. SIX YEARS it took to find something! Well, it doesn’t matter. My dark, miserable past is behind me. Now I have nothing but happiness and light before me! A better job, a super wife, a passable house, the dogs are okay…the car could use some work…the cats are annoying…stupid fuel prices… Never mind. Things are looking up!

Now watch me get hit by a friggin’ bus.