He'll probably just ride away

About four months ago, I was obsessed with the idea of being a cowboy. Not one of the modern ones with WIFI and GPS and all of those other technological acronyms, but one of the classic cowboys: one who eats beans from the can and sleeps next to his doggies on the prairie and rides into town on a black steed named Silver to give the town villain his comeuppance.

I’m fully aware that these types of cowboys didn’t really exist. So, I dropped my infatuation with the impossible and continued with my mundane city life. But lately, Willie Nelson has convinced me to spit in the face of reality and imagine my days away. And now I want to invest in a nice pair of cowboy boots and a high quality cowboy hat.

I don’t care if I can’t pull off the hat. I want to be a cowboy, darn it.

What is it?

For those of you who have seen the “What is it?” commercials on television and really, really want to know what “it” is, stay tuned. Your answer’s coming shortly.

For those of you that want to let the advertising campaign work its magic, close this window.

But me? I was curious.

After seeing a commercial drumming up “it” to be the greatest thing on Earth, I went to the Web site that the commercial specified at the end (http://whatis-it.com) hoping that I would figure out what “it” was. No such luck. Apparently, the powers that be won’t be unveiling the true nature of “it” until October 20.

But my brother and I are innately inquisitive. So, with his trusty companion Google, Ian did a WHOIS lookup for the mystical URL and found the name of the woman, Megan Bundy, who registered the domain. Turns out she works for an advertising firm in Manhattan. Yes, we got a name. And an address. And a phone number.

After calling at 10:00 p.m. last night and getting her office voicemail, Ian left a message that was not returned.

However, today I gave Megan Bundy’s office a call. Luckily, I did not talk to Megan herself; I spoke to another young lady who, even though she didn’t get the memo not to spill the beans, was conscious enough to request anonymity when I asked her name.

“I would really prefer to keep that information confidential,” she said.

However, after our two minute conversation, I came away enlightened.

“Think about it,” she said. “What can you get on eBay?”

“Anything,” I said, just realizing the simplicity of it all.

“Exactly. I bought ‘it’ on eBay.”

That was the gist of the conversation. I then spent a minute lauding her presence on a staff that came up with such an idea. It’s so simple. And so good. Because I was so curious and because I tried endlessly to uncover “it,” it’s easy to see that this campaign worked. She offered to transfer me to their creative department, but I had already found out that which I wanted to know.

Congratulations, Megan, on a truly ingenious scheme.

My Crazy Old Aunt Josie

Last night, I had a bad dream. It involved a certain old Aunt Josie (who does not exist) who was mentally ill and kept biting anyone and everyone around her. I was designated as her caregiver and, without fail, her mouth (which was both bloody and foamy) made my left arm its pacifier. I promised her a Coke if she would stop biting me, but after she was done with the soda she wasted no time at making me her chew toy. It was horrible.

But on a much lighter note, I found out in that same dream that I was capable of doing back flips. That was the saving grace that evened everything out and made sleeping fun again.

A walk in the park

I know, it’s silly. But there’s this one space in the parking lot at school that I find particularly nice. So, I do what any other sane person would do: I make my carpool get up 20 minutes earlier so we can make it to the parking lot by 6:30 and stand there for a half hour until school starts. Makes perfect sense to me.

We're 4-0.

I love football. My childhood years meshed together into a giant ball of light orange and countless notches in the “L” column. But then again, such was the plight of a “Buccaneers”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampa_Bay_Buccaneers fan in the late 80s and early 90s.

I was raised to appreciate everything about the game: the plays, the players, the strategy. I was brought up in the nosebleed section of old “Tampa Stadium”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houlihan’s_Stadium (you know – back when we had to sit in bleachers and when season tickets cost 25% of what they do now), and I was there to say goodbye to the old field in 1997 at the Bucs’ first playoff game since 1982 (against the Detroit Lions, no less).

See, we used to get tickets to whatever games we could so that we could go with Dad. However, since Tampa Bay moved into the new stadium, we’ve only been able to get two season tickets, leaving my good brother Ian and me at home, watching Chris Collinsworth make a buffoon of himself each and every Sunday.

Not anymore. Our name came up on the season ticket waiting list. Sure, our seats are three rows from the top in the farthest corner of the stadium. Sure, they’re in the middle of the row. But darn it, it’s football. And did I mention that I love football?

The Return of the Man Boobs

My mom just found a T-shirt from Jimmy Buffett’s 1981 Coconut Telegraph Tour. It was one of the first concerts that my folks enjoyed together. Unfortunately, my love for Jimmy and my mom’s slender build at the age of 20 do not mix.

Now, I present for your viewing pleasure the cliche Internet photograph of an unkempt blogger wearing a shirt too small for his frame and looking to his right:

Can't live with 'em

Because I’m on the yearbook staff at school, I had the pleasure yesterday of observing teenage girls in their natural habitat at a time during which they are particularly vulnerable: school picture distribution day.

It’s funny how every girl responds in exactly the same oh-my-god-my-pictures-are-so-horrible-but-I-think-yours-are-so-pretty-oh-no-mine-suck manner. I’ll be sure to add this one to the list of peculiar girlisms that is already longer than _War and Peace_.

So, do you wipe twice?

Because after 12 years of public schooling I’ve run the gamut of things to talk about, I was discussing with my carpool the merits of bidets this morning as we drove to school.

Now, because I’ve grown up in Clearwater as a member of this family and I’ve lived a relatively simple life thus far, I’ve never used one. I’ve never even seen one. I’ve heard about them and seen them on the Internet, but I’ve never actually seen one. So, they might not actually exist.

But my friend Angus says that they are real and that he’s used one. I have trouble believing that anyone from Beckley, West Virginia named Angus has actually used one; but I have no reason not to believe that he experimented with the one in his New York hotel room, so I’m reasonably convinced.

So, now that I know these things actually exist, I’m kind of curious as to how you would go about using one. I asked Angus, but his recollection of the bidet adventure was just fuzzy enough to facilitate his delivery of an overly ambiguous explanation that made about as much sense as a sneaker in a toaster. So, I asked everyone I saw before school today.

Apparently, such topics of conversation are not popular among my friends, especially those of the female persuasion.

So, I was left in the dark all day. And I’m still out of the know. All because my friends are uptight squares who don’t like to talk about their pooping habits. Lame.

Chippy, Chippy

Having accepted my fate as a lonely little man for the rest of eternity, I decided last year to scope out chicks with whom I have no chance and watch them from afar. And don’t think that this was some sort of intricate system of hiding out in trash cans outside of girls’ houses and lowering myself into their bedrooms with rock climbing equipment – it’s just normal public girl watching, and the last time I checked, that’s pretty legal.

Anyhow, last year there was this girl at school who I only referred to as Chippy, half because I didn’t know her real name and half because she looked like a chipmunk. Of course, I’m no strange guy with a chipmunk fetish or anything; she was a genuinely hot human chipmunk girl. Anyhow, I digress. She was far less than 5 feet tall and walked around in her nose ring and hanging off of this intensely awkward looking boy who had a giant red bush atop his head, which was just scraping the 7 foot barrier. They were an interesting couple to watch, to say the least.

After a while, though, I realized that Chippy and I were just incompatible. I mean, if I ever brought a girl with a nose ring home to my dad, he’d have a cow. Heck, he’d have a whole herd. It just wouldn’t be pretty.

However, this year, I’ve noticed that Chippy no longer goes around with the Red-Headed Wonder. Maybe it’s because her legs were so much shorter than his that she couldn’t keep up and he’s long gone by now. Or maybe it’s because the mechanics of any sort of physical contact were largely inefficient and, therefore, she is in the market for someone more vertically challenged than Red. Or maybe it’s just because he went to college and left her behind. Either way, she’s roaming the campus unhitched.

Thus, my mind has begun to wander again. And while I am fully aware that she and I are most likely very incompatible, I can’t help but wonder what our babies would look like. And while I don’t ever plan on saying anything to her, I’m curious as to whether a conversation with her would be slightly interesting. And while I know that I really would rather not pursue any sort of relationship with her, I continually ask myself if her mother would like me.

Uh oh, I think this qualifies my life as the saddest existence ever known to man.

Straighten up and fly right

Yesterday at lunch, I had a revelation that I decided to share with all of my classmates as they entered and exited through the left side of the double doors leading into the cafeteria. I yelled at the top of my pathetic little lungs at them, but I don’t think they noticed. So, I’ll fume about it here, which is the only place many people pay attention to my unceasing quips and clever insight.

Okay, people. It’s not hard. You drive on the right side. At a four way stop, the car to the right goes first. 90 percent of you are right-handed (or so says “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-handed). Your computer mouse is a right-handed device. The right side has become so well embedded into the framework of our society that it is the default direction for most common actions. Therefore, wouldn’t it make a boat load of sense to use the right side of double doors whenever you’re in a situation wherein you’ve got to make passage into a building?

Honestly, there is nothing that makes people look more stupid than a giant traffic jam around the entrance to a building that festers for a few minutes before someone realizes that the right door hasn’t been opened yet. It’s like a bunch of sheep being herded into the slaughterhouse with a mass of cattle making a break for it through the same door at the same time.

Here’s a novel thought. Why doesn’t everybody just follow primordial traffic laws when they’re walking? You know: walk on the right side, don’t speed, don’t go so slow that the people who have places to be pummel you, and, for the love of God, go through double doors on the right side.