Mental Hygiene the best thing you've done for your brain all day

I’m a consultant. I don’t do the things i recommend. I just recommend them.

so, you’re out there, roaming the world “searching for yourself”

did you ever stop to think who was conducting the search?

with all the hullaballoo about the two reigning political parties’ finally nominating the two schmucks that we all knew were going to be nominated back in february, i’ve been thinking about our political system. i think part of the problem of low voter turnout that’s brought up every four years or so – which really sucks, if you’ve been keeping up with it – has something to do with peanut butter.

yes, peanut butter.

people just can’t get passionate about peanut butter, since there’s really only two choices. sure, there’s your Jif or Peter Pan, even Reeses in some places, and the ubiquitous store brands (usually the kraft brand repackaged with lower margins and cheaper printing), but look at your basic choices: creamy or crunchy. unless you’re one of those folks that goes for the all organic, no sugar or preservatives, homemade stuff that you can get for ungodly prices at the hippie vegan store (i’ll bet you vote green party, too, so you don’t count).

smooth, without chunks, or thick with chunks of nuts.

choices choices. everywhere else we have lots of choices – olive oil comes in virgin, extra virgin, cold press, first cold press, etc. but not peanut butter. crunchy or creamy is all you get. a lot of people are die-hard crunchy fans, but they’ll settle for creamy if it’s all you’ve got. it’s mostly a matter of how you were brought up. your mom bought creamy, you’ll buy creamy.

but what about all the shades of.. well, brown, in between? when we look at the weather, it no longer simply says ‘rain’ or ‘sun,’ we get the myriad shades between mostly sunny and mostly cloudy, with a smattering of partly in between. and chances of rain.

so, should the peanut butter industry start to develop ‘partly chunky with 50% chance of nuts‘ to satisfy the picky eaters out there? probably not, but choice is good, and the more niches you can satisfy, the better the world will be. if everyone made their own peanut butter, from their own home grown nuts, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, but then it would be peanut butter anarchy. in a pure peanut butter democracy, we the people can demand choice if we’re not satisfied with the status quo. no longer will the picky eaters have to settle for something (or buy two jars of Jif and mix them to get just the right consistency)

have you ever had one of those days when you really really needed a vacation?

have you ever had one of those days when you just needed a tall building and a high powered rifle?

insomnia sucks, except that it keeps giving me these great rant ideas that i’ll eventually share with (all 4 of) you. it’s just that they keep coinciding with these brutal electrical storms…

where was i? oh yeah.. reality shows on tv.

yeah, i’d kick ass on survivor. i was a boy scout. i know how to cook over a fire, eat barely dead animals and fish for my dinner. i know how to tie a knot and swim against the riptide. i know that the trick to camping with a group is to set up a hammock 100 yards from every one else, 15 feet up a tree, and tell them all that you snore like a freight train

i’d probably get along with survivor cast like rudy, not because i can get along with people like him (i probably wouldn’t stand him if i knew him socially) but because he pissed off everybody else, and i can appreciate that.

as for big brother, brittany can get locked in my house any time :)

and what of the new fox show american high? (if you’re like me and enjoy using ‘alternate’ browsers like icab and lynx to do your surfing, you’ll have to go without seeing fox.com)

i’ll admit, i flipped back and forth when it premiered the other day, not because it wasn’t compelling and new – an actual ‘reality’ show with actual real people – and not that it wasn’t entertaining. i couldn’t stand to watch because it reminded me too much that high school really sucked. it’s like on happy days when i know that richie’s going to awkwardly ask out the busty blonde stereotype, and get shot down brutally, or when i see a repeat of one of those ‘worlds worst…’ shows and i know that the end of the clip that’s on is coming up, and that guy on the left doesn’t survive.

and for the high school-aged audience, it must have been a breath of fresh air. for all the trauma and tragedy that aaron spelling likes to push on teenagers, the lives of the people in tv high schools are bland, uninteresting, and depressing, but in a way that makes lots of money and makes the people that lived through a real-life freaks and geeks for four years (thank you fox family channel) feel really stupid for having wasted the half hour watching.

your life, no matter how entertaining to you, will never get a 1 share on network tv, because you’re not 25 playing 17.

imagine a world where you woke up one day and everything was upside down. the TV in your living room was upside down, people on the street were upside down, nothing was right. everywhere you went, signs and streets and cars and trees were all upside down. and no matter how often you told people to turn themselves right side up, they only gave you funny looks.

how stupid would you feel if it took you forever to realize you were the one walking on your hands?

what is the world coming to when real terra cotta planters are $20 apiece, and the plastic, fake terra cotta planters are twice as expensive?

reality shows on tv are taking off like crazy, at least on CBS.

with shows like BigBrother (a huge hit in britain, of all places, and elsewhere in europe, as well as Survivor it looks to me like at least the eyeball network has run out of decent fictional material

which doesn’t surprise me, considering the other networks have had to go running to their own big brothers (or deep pockets, you decide) – disney and microsoft at least – to keep the eyeballs rolling in.

but what about this reality thing? i remember the first couple of seasons of ‘the real world’ on MTV, when it seemed they picked cast members more because they already lived in the target city than any kind of audition process. Remember Puck? in season 3, he became the first roommate actually kicked off the show for being himself.

puck was actually interesting, he had a personality. i would have killed him, had i been forced to live with him, but still, he was at least fun to watch – getting arrested, fucking with the cameramen, pissing off his roommates intentionally. that made for good television. he had no problem picking his nose (or his scabs) in front of others. he was an exhibitionist with no prejudices. or inhibitions. in other words, he was perfect for the part. in other words, he should never have been allowed on the set.

later seasons of the show all blend together to me: each season filled with more of the politically correct, gender- and racially-mixed casts of teenage MTV manufactured Plastic People^TM. where was the reality? sure there were fights and confessions, and lots of sex – MTV needs to up the ratings sometimes, too – but, even considering i was the same age as most of these people, even i couldn’t help but wonder if they were raised by wolves, or if they stepped out of a vat and were issued baggy pants and an N’Sync CD on their first day out.

but now, here comes the real world, on network TV and in prime time.

gone are the teeny-boppers with their ten-second attention spans, and gone are the week-long MTV orgy ‘casting specials’. maybe next season we’ll get to see why big brother picked who he picked, and why some of the survivors that ended up on tv probably couldn’t get by in a furnished apartment, let alone a desert island.

i’m running out of steam (i chopped up a tree that fell in my yard this afternoon, and stacked the pieces), so this rant will have to be a two-parter.

next time: why i think i’d kick ass on survivor, and which of the bigbrother roomies i want locked in my house :)

say what you will about my redneck lawnmower, but it puts a hurtin’ on some weeds.. er.. grass :)