At work the other day, and the local news had a story on about cheap gas prices in the area. My coworker saw the piece and I heard him exclaim, “Man! Gas for $2.35? Awesome!”

No, it isn’t.

Think back a year. $2.35 a gallon was high. Ridiculously high. People were bitching left and right about this, demanding the government step in and regulate this somehow. The fact that gas has since gone almost a dollar higher doesn’t change this fact. And now that we’ve seen gas selling in excess of three dollars, people see this as some sort of bargain. It’s not. It’s still high, just not as high as it has been.

C’mon, people, try to remember a little more history than “last week.”

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Now that October is over, can we please stop with all the Breast Cancer Awareness? Don’t get me wrong, I’m against cancer in all its forms, as it’s rather prevalent in my family and I’ve lost several relatives to The Big C. And as a heterosexual guy, I’m against anything that harms breasts. But I really do not need to be assaulted with the color pink non-stop everywhere I go. Case in point: Went grocery shopping the other day and counted eighty-four items either with the pink ribbon on the label, a pink label, or the item itself was now pink. And that’s not fourteen different flavors of Campbell’s soup, that’s eighty-four separate items from different companies: Soup, yogurt, crackers, cereal, muffins, bread, pasta, ice cream, the list goes on and on. There’s pink Brita pitchers, pink cookware, pink kitchen utensils, hell, there’s even a pink Dyson vacuum cleaner. And you gotta really be against breast cancer to buy a $500 dirt-sucker to show your support.

One of the oddest pink items? Madden 2009 for the Xbox 360. Forgive me for engaging in gender stereotypes, but I think most of the young adult male Madden fans will likely shy away from buying a pink video game, especially one so testosterone-laden to begin with.

Again, great cause, but can we tone it down a little? I’m about as aware as I’m going to be at this point.

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Being something of a horror buff, I used to love Halloween. As a kid, it meant costumes and free candy, which is something of a miracle to a six-year-old. Once I got too old for Trick or Treat, I could always count on loads of horror movies on TV, maybe a classic being shown at a midnight screening at one of the local theaters. Costume shops would spring up, filled with gory masks and makeup. Local organizations would run some haunted houses/jails/forests and the like, full of scares and splatter. Creepy-crawlies, demons, zombies, vampires, serial killers back from the dead… great stuff.

What happened?

You go looking for a costume now and it’s nothing but licensed characters for the guys and slut outfits for the ladies (which I’m actually fine with, but it’s not very Halloween). The best horror you can hope for on TV is the really-reaching-for-it “spooky” haunted house specials on TLC. Kids don’t get to go Trick or Treating anymore, and if they do, it’s regulated during daylight hours and only to houses where you personally know the owners aren’t going to try to slip you a bar of Snickers packed with Dran-O. Instead of haunted houses we have “harvest festivals,” because Halloween is all satanic and evil, you know.

You couldn’t take all the fun out of Groundhog Day or something? You had to ruin my holiday?

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I got thinking about pierced ears the other day. I know, it’s a weird thing to consider, they’re so ubiquitous. Women have them. Men have them. Hell, I’ve seen newborn infants with them. Very commonplace. But, realize, at some point in history, someone had to say, “Hey, I know what let’s do. Why don’t you get something really sharp and jab a hole in this soft, tender part of my ear? Then we’ll cram something in there—metal hoop, boar tusk, monkey bone, something—and see what happens.” And someone else agreed to help with this. Alcohol had to have been involved.

Not only that, but other people saw it and thought, damn, that’s a pretty neat idea! I want holes punched in my flesh, too! Of course, some brave soul saw this happening and decided, that’s fine and all, but why stop with squishy ear parts? Drill a hole in my nose! And my lips. Tongue, cheek, eyebrow, wang… go nuts. Swiss cheese me. And then one enterprising individual realized, against all logic, that people would actually pay good money to have someone hammer a sharp object through their body and then fill it with something. So he could not only get a hammering fee, but then could also sell them the trinkets to put in the hole he just made. And that’s pretty much where we are today.

I’m just saying, it seems like one of those things that if you stop to really think about it, you find yourself asking, “Yeah, what’d I do that for?”

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Sounds like David “I’m Not Mulder, Dammit!” Duchovny has checked himself into rehab to combat sex addiction. Wow, a guy who’s addicted to sex. I think I personally know at least eighty-five guys who would fit that definition.

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Okay, new rule: If you bring your small child to a restaurant where I’m dining, and the kid starts squalling, and you do nothing to silence or remove it, when the waiter brings me my plate and warns me that it’s really hot, I’m going to bring the plate to your table and set it on your kid’s head.

Seriously. I am done messing around with you people.

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Oh God, not another Olympics. Seriously? Are we still doing this? Do we still have countries coming together “in the spirit of friendly sporting competition,” even though it’s really just an orgy of political posturing, patriotic chest-thumping, and advertising overload where a corporate logo is slapped on anything that holds still for more than thirty seconds? Bizarre pseudo-sports that no one would even attempt if there wasn’t a chance of pulling a medal out of it? Two weeks of incessant coverage? Whining over partisan judging? Maudlin stories of athletes “doing it for their sick relative”? Performance-enhancing drug scandals? Constant updates of events that feature all the thrilling drama of standing in line at the DMV?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The only time countries meeting up is interesting is when automatic weapons are involved.

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Have you heard about this? My fiancee sent me the link to the site of a guy who was mentioned in Time magazine. Seems Dave Bruno took a good, long look at his life and, feeling weighed down by too many possessions, has decided to live one whole year with only one hundred items. That’s it. One year, one hundred items. Now, this, to me, is the definition of insanity. I’m a tech junkie and a stuff whore. One year with only a hundred things? Madness. Couldn’t do it. I’m all ready to be impressed by Dave’s fortitude, and then I visit his site and discover that he’s basically full of crap.

This guy has so many loopholes and cop-outs in his “challenge” that he’s not giving up anything. To start, anything “family” or “household” doesn’t count. So any and all furniture—couch, chairs, bed, tables, even the piano—and apparently the TV, stereo, VCR, DVD player, and everything in the kitchen all get to stay. Talk about roughing it. Next, only his personal items are being purged, nothing his wife or daughter owns. So he still has access to all his wife’s stuff. Needs to borrow her car? He can. Realizes one month down the road he got rid of something he needs? Use hers. Hardcore, dude!

But it gets better. One of my first thoughts when I considered living with one hundred things was my books. I’ve got a lot of books. The fiancee has even more. It would be extremely hard to part with those. Well, Dave thought so, too. His solution? Books don’t count. They’re simply not part of the challenge. He says he “might” pare them down but they’re “not a focus.” I also worried about my collectibles and memorabilia. Dave’s solution? Why, he gets to keep them! All of them! Woodworking tools, family heirlooms, his model train sets, they all get to stay. But he’s going to put them in a box he can’t open for a year. You are just sacrificing left and right, Dave! Oh, and anything in a “group” like socks and underwear counts as one item, no matter how many individual items he actually has.

But here’s the best. He comes right out and says this in the opening: “I get to set the rules and decide when a rule can be stretched or outright broken. Basically I’m going by the spirit of the challenge not the letter of the challenge.” So, essentially, if it gets hard or he doesn’t like it or he sees something he really wants, well, he can just change the rules. Can’t get by with one hundred things? Ahhh, make it one-fifty. Still in the spirit, right?

So, Dave was so disgusted by his cluttered lifestyle that he’s rebelling by living in a fully furnished house (with piano!), with a completely stocked kitchen and loaded bookshelves, while keeping all the personal items he doesn’t use everyday in a box for a year. Wow. Inspiring. Way to declutter your life, which, I believe, was the whole point of the endeavor, right? Or were you just looking for a little publicity?

You want to see people truly living with only one hundred things? Visit any college dorm in the country. You’ll find dozens of them. I’m willing to bet I spent my dorm years with about one hundred items to my name. Less if empty pizza boxes don’t count. Better yet, check any alley in Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York. You’ll find a lot of people there living with far fewer than one hundred items.

But they’re not going to get into Time for it.

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The fiancee and I went to see The Dark Knight in IMAX on Monday night. 9:15PM show and it was a sell-out crowd. Great movie, by the way. Recommend you go, and see it in IMAX if at all possible. Anyway, the movie gets done, the credits start to roll, and, I swear, at least one hundred people immediately flipped open their cell phones as one to see who might have possibly tried to call them or text them during the two hours when they were—gasp!—not reachable by cell phone!

What is this? Are you all doctors on call? Do you have some huge business deal pending at midnight on a Monday? Expecting a call from your lawyer about that escrow account closing? Folks, you don’t need to be in constant contact with each other twenty-four hours a day, especially for the kind of insipid, banal crap most of you seem to be talking about when you take these all-important phone calls while seated next to me in a restaurant. Honestly, are you that starved for attention and contact that you simply must check your cell phone anytime you have to go more than five minutes without being able to answer it?

In fact, you know what? Got a challenge for you cell-phone addicts. For one day, one twenty-four-hour period, turn off your cell phones. Just shut them off. Toss them in a drawer. Leave them at home. No calls. No texts. No email. If you want to be really crazy, the next day, erase all your waiting voice and text messages without listening to or reading them. Just go for twenty-four hours without being reachable at every waking moment for your friends to let you know whatever insignificant thought just crossed their minds.

Call me up and let me know how it goes.

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Our apartment is on the third floor, and offers us a decent view of the swimming pool of a neighboring apartment complex across the street. The other day, there were several people splashing around in the pool, having some summer fun. The sky started to turn dark as a storm began to brew in the west. I love a good thunderstorm and settled in at the window to watch it roll in. The swimmers swam on, unwilling to give up their fun for the threat of bad weather. There was a grumble of thunder. Soon, rain started to fall. Not a torrential downpour, just a good, steady rain.

At this point, the bathers clambered out of the pool and, still dripping, stretched their towels over their heads as makeshift umbrellas and dashed for their cars. And I had to wonder: Why? You were just swimming, you’re already drenched, and here you are scurrying under cover so you don’t get—what? More wet? I can understand wanting to get out of a large body of standing water in a thunderstorm, but there had been no lightning, and I sincerely doubt the towels would have helped a bit if there had. This was all about the rain.

So people who had been completely submerged a moment before were now attempting to not be dampened further by small droplets of water on their way to getting in their cars where they would sit and not be rained on, but remain wet. I don’t know, maybe the PH balance of that pool is way off or something.

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