Numbers game, 2010.
Impossibleblog has now been in existence for a little more than 2 years, and with the recent reinstatement of it’s domain name, it’s likely to continue on for at least another two.
In the last year, Impossibleblog has been viewed by 33,203 visitors totaling 109,527 total page views. Even assuming 80% of that is spam, we’re still doing pretty damn well, and getting better by the month.
To this date, my Google adsense account has generated $161.81, from your clicks of my ads which has gone predominantly to liquor, Taco Bell and porn.
The authors of Impossibleblog have generated 186 total blogs, some of which were utter garbage, but the majority of which have been stellar insights into the minds of the respective authors.
All in all, I think it’s been a pretty great two years, and we’ll keep on writing as long as you keep reading. Thanks for your patronage, and get to clicking the fucking ads already.
Attention Foreigners
So, although I usually just bitch about how much people suck and I hate them, I’ve also been known to occasionally write a story. OR a chapter. Or a vignette. This is the first of what was intended to be a set of three, but I’ve been stuck on the third one for a year. If this site stays up, I’ll eventually feel like posting the second also. Here you go humans, some fictional entertainment:
ATTENTION FOREIGNERS..
-1-
You see the sign on a lamp post, if it can be called a sign. A flyer, plain white paper, the text copied and recopied and left out in the open to blur. “Attention Foreigners” it says at the top of the page. Underneath, in a foreign alphabet (Native, you must remind yourself, you are the foreigner here) it could say anything. Five or six lines of shapes your brain just can’t recognize as letters forming tight groups that could be read in any direction as far as you’re concerned. Your eyes keep returning to the page as you wait for the intersection to clear so you can cross the street. “ATTENTION FOREIGNERS” and at the bottom, “EXTRA MONEY” and only one flap left at the bottom, crookedly cut and barely legible. A phone number with an area code you don’t recognize, having been in this country a week. You glance up and down the street, suddenly uneasy. You notice that the street is full of other “foreigners” like yourself. You wonder how many of them have this number already, and how much “EXTRA MONEY” there can possibly be for all of you. You stare at the flyer, trying not to look like a person staring at a flyer on a lamppost at a busy intersection. You debate with yourself over whether or not you should take the hanging slip of paper, and whether or not you would ever be seen taking something like this back home. You wonder if anyone is looking, and then decide it is ridiculous to believe that anyone would be. You reach out tentatively, a finger barely touching the jagged edge of the hanging slip.
The light changes in front of you and suddenly you’re shoved into the intersection. Deciding quickly and without a backward glance, you reach out and tear the phone number from the bottom of the flyer, nearly having your shoulder dislocated by someone pushing past you in the process. As you cross the street, you notice how loud it really is here, how many people there really are, for the fifth or sixth time today. Looking around to identify the sources of all the sounds you hear, you are nearly hit by a motorcyclist who is currently paying no heed to the traffic signals. Mumbling under your breath and feeling completely alone as the cyclist yells incomprehensibly at you, you shove the tattered piece of paper into your pocket. You raise your hands in an apologetic way, hoping that you do not look as lost as you know you are. The man continues to scream at you, gesturing wildly, as you stand frozen in front of him. “Just ignore it,” says a voice behind you. “Fucking racists.” You turn and see a young man approaching you, speaking English, but looking like the locals. You smile weakly at him as he walks past. The light above the intersection starts flashing and some kind of horrible keening noise accompanies this change. You hurry toward the other side of the street, nearly knocking over an old lady in the process. You do not stop to apologize a second time. You make it through the intersection alive.
Throughout the afternoon, you don’t notice yourself absently fingering the scrap of paper in your pocket. You don’t remember taking it, not really. You walk around the neighborhood for hours, trying not to gape at any of the things you see. You try to shop for T-shirts, maybe. You try to find a place to eat where you can both read the menu and recognize the foods being served. Later on, as the sun is finally going down but the air is failing to get any cooler, you go out to a club full of other foreigners like yourself. Over a few drinks, you meet new people and lament about your choice to move halfway around the world alone. “Attention Foreigners” you think to yourself on the way to the bathroom, but at this point you really don’t know why. You stay at the bar too long tonight and plan to end up paying way too much for a taxi home, if you can even remember where you live. It turns out you haven’t the slightest clue, and the cab drivers in this country are not all that friendly or helpful after dark. It has started to rain, and you are drunk and miserable. You wait outside, hoping for a cab for maybe an hour anyway, thinking that someone must know where you live. Eventually you give up. You end up renting a hotel room close by and pay someone for the privilege of sleeping on a lumpy mattress too close to the floor. You don’t really notice, and are just relieved to have someplace dry to lie down at this point.
Sometime in the early morning, you may be awakened by the city winding back up around you and you stumble to the bathroom. You stand in front of the mirror, barely recognizing your own face and less able to stand than you feel you should be. You contemplate whether or not someone slipped something into your drink last night, but you can’t really remember. You don’t see a reason why anyone would. You made it to a hotel alone, and you don’t feel like you’ve been injured. You study your face and torso in the mirror, looking for cuts or bruises and find none. You shrug, blaming your current state on jet lag and drinking strange foreign booze. You turn on the water in the sink and let it run for a moment, to get it as cold as possible before you open your mouth under the faucet. After a few swallows, you remember being warned against drinking the water here. You kneel in front of the toilet, contemplating the worst possible outcome of this situation and while you think, the nausea hits you full-force. You vomit for an eternity before crawling back to the lumpy mattress in the other room.
Pulled suddenly back into consciousness, you hear a coughing sound in the hallway followed by an earth-shattering pounding noise. You try to speak, but can’t seem to remember how to form words. Your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth and feels like sandpaper. Your teeth taste like bile and vomit and booze and disgusting slime. You raise an arm to keep the light out of your eyes and try again to speak. There is a sound like water running somewhere close by but you can’t really place it in the current scheme of your existence. You ignore it as a barely recognizable human voice says something in gibberish from a few feet away. You peel your tongue from the roof of your mouth with considerable effort and grunt (you hope) loudly enough for the voice to hear you.
“Ereben o-crok. Way-gup time. Time you going home now” says the voice, and you try uselessly to decipher the syllables. You glance around, moving your arm a fraction of an inch, and you do not recognize your surroundings. You sit upright a little too quickly, throwing a thin blanket off yourself, and through the pounding vertigo, you vaguely remember drinking with some people last night. Walking over what seemed to be miles and miles of winding sidewalks, trying to talk to the people you met on the street and laughing uncontrollably when it got you nowhere. Trying to understand some brightly lit place and a man smiling at you. You gave him your passport and the last of your money. He gave you what? A key, you finally remember. You look around, trying to locate this key and find it in the pocket of your pants, which are crumpled on the floor beside the mattress. The smiling man from last night doesn’t seem too happy now, and he is still pounding on the door mercilessly. You stumble three steps, and leaning against the doorframe, you open the door an inch and a half. Breathing a foul breath at the very short man standing outside, you grunt something like “yeah, I heard you”
“Ereben o krok,” he says again, emphatically gesturing at his watch, “you go now.” You move away from the door and manage to climb back into your pants and wrestle your boots onto your feet (which have grown overnight by at least a size and a half). You do not bother to shut the door as you dress and the man stands in the hall and watches as you gather your shopping bags and wallet from the table in the corner. The hallway is too narrow for both you and this little man, so you have to maneuver around him, shoving him a little more roughly than absolutely necessary into the room you just exited. You move down the hallway and out the door into the sunlight, reminding yourself to look for new shoes as soon as possible, and try to find your way home.
Hours later, and you’re finally back home. Well, you’re in the single room that will be your home for the year that you will live here. Barely furnished, and all the furniture having seen more than its share of owners, this is your home. You drop your shopping bags onto the floor and fall onto the bed next to the front door.
You lay for awhile, trying to forget the lengthy journey back here and all the inconvenient little hassles that make up your life on a daily basis. As you think, you begin to notice a stench in your apartment. You can’t place the smell, but it is terrible and soon becomes overwhelming. You stand and circle the room. The trash can is empty; there are no dishes in the sink. The bathroom is luckily not leaking or mildewed. Standing in the middle of the room, bewildered, you catch sight of yourself in the mirror hanging on the wall at the end of your bed. You take in your unkempt hair, your rumpled clothes. You look down at your hands and the dirt under your fingernails, and you realize the stench is coming from you. You stink of diesel fuel and stale cigarette smoke, of whiskey and of sweat and of the smell of the thousands of people crowded into the non-air conditioned subway earlier. You strip off your clothes, depositing them in the washer in the corner. You go into the bathroom, shut the door, and turn on the shower. You remember as the first high-pressure drops of ice water hit your skin that you forgot to turn on the damned water heater. Cursing, you move to avoid the spray of what you would on any other day swear were ice chips. Once out of range, you assess the situation. You could step out of the shower, cross the room, turn on the water heater, and wait, simmering in your own disgusting stench, for fifteen or twenty minutes while water heats. Or you could stop smelling bad right now. You sigh and decide to wash quickly. As you scrub the filth of the past two days off your skin, you begin to feel more human. You brush your teeth twice, trying to get the last of this morning’s vomit taste off your tongue. You step out of the shower, which is actually just the bathroom and towel off. After you are sufficiently dry, you toss the towel in the washer and start it running.
The next morning is Monday. You wake up for work and realize that you fell asleep when you came back from dinner with a coworker last night with wet clothes still in the washer. They probably smell of mildew. You shudder and hurry (as if it will help now) to hang them up on the rack in your living/bedroom. As you pull your clothes out of the smallish washing machine, you notice what looks like confetti clinging to the fabric of your favorite pair of jeans. You brush it off, reach inside the pockets. In your front left pocket, you find a cheap green plastic lighter, even though you don’t smoke. You set the lighter on the small shelf in the laundry area, believing that maybe one day you will need a lighter after all. In the right front pocket, you find seven dollars and some change left in your jeans from yesterday. This will pay for lunch, you think, so you set it on the table attempting to flatten it. As you hang your jeans, a sopping wad of paper falls from one of the back pockets. You finish hanging your clothes and pick up the soggy mass. You try to unfold the wet white sheets, but they crumble in your hands. You can vaguely make out numbers and more of those foreign letters on the pieces. These must be receipts or something, probably not important. You drop the entire wad into the trashcan beside your bathroom door. “Attention Foreigners” you think to yourself, chuckling at the sign you barely recall seeing. You don’t remember taking the piece of paper from the bottom of the flyer. You don’t remember if you ever called the number, but it shredded in your wash and covered your clothes for most of a day. It is on your floor and in your washing machine and stuck to your clothes in pieces you couldn’t put back together if you wanted to, and you are safe.
Save Impossibleblog.
The impossibleblog domain name expires in 3 days… 1/22/2010. Do you still read this site? Do you like it? Would you like it to stick around?
Then comment on this post. My traffic meters have stayed stable for months now, and as far as I know it might all be ad bots, so if you’re still reading this site periodically, comment on this post. If I get more than a handful, impossibleblog will be around another 2 years… if not?
it’s been nice entertaining you.
The prancing idiot and the ideologue.
Gah, I just lost 4 paragraphs to the ghost of vindictive internet fairies…. fuck.
Where was I?
Oh yeah…
“Sedentary” creeps in slow like an old lover… First it’s just calling you every once in awhile recommending you stay in for the weekend, or skip laundry day, but the next thing you know you’re all tied up in some crazy bitch you bailed on 3 years ago because she turns you into an unhealthy shit sandwich.
This kind of lifestyle attacks in spurts, and you tend to fall victim to it without realizing it, until one day you wake up and realize you’ve gained 8 pounds, you haven’t gotten laid in a month, you have a beard, and it’s gotten… unruly. Hitting your restart button when you’re beginning to drip with the congealed jellies of your own emotional juices is a tricky proposition, and to be honest I don’t know that I’ve ever figured it out. However, just today a friend introduced me to something I’ve never seen before.
In 1994 Henry Rollins wrote an Essay for Details magazine called “Iron and Soul” where he extols the story of how little Henry Rollins became the most intimidating man in rock, and… be it 15 years old or not… it’s fucking phenomenal. You don’t have to look hard to find out how razor sharp Henry is. I’ve had a quiet respect for the man since my brother told me stories about his shows at the not-yet-a-byob-strip-joint Outhouse when I was like 11 years old, so though I never really got into Rollins’ music, I never stopped admiring Rollins the man. This essay further solidifies his Heroic position in my personal pantheon of respectable musicians, and it comes at a very opportune time.
Y’see all of this sedentary nonsense is in direct violation to the very core of my being. To not act is to wither, and to wither is eventually to die… what better way to make it stop than to follow the Henry Rollins implied guide to personal awakening? I can buy some weights, get a gym membership, and begin the much vaunted process of self improvement until at some point I’ve either destroyed myself, or have achieved that same oneness with the Iron. A good friend on Sunday afternoon reminded me that the only thing we ever actually have any kind of control over is our actions (or in this case my lack of action), and to allow ones own actions to degrade ones life is tantamount to suicide.
So begin anew with me a voyage of self discovery and self improvement, peoples of the instarnats, and I’ll meet you in my garage where I’ll wrap you in duct tape and use you for a heavy bag.
revisiting an old topic I know but…
So it’s come to my attention recently that I go around expecting “a lot” out of people with regard to being my friend and other such relationships. I disagree. I expect way less out of people than I actually give them, but there’s this problem. See, evidently there are like five people on Earth at the moment who were taught what it means (to me) to be “reliable”. Reliability is like this, as far as I’m concerned–
Let’s say I promised I would help you move the furniture out of your house next Saturday. I will. That is all. No need to call and confirm a bunch of times, but it’s probably a good idea to remind me once so I’m sure to have it written down somewhere. Even if it’s like a million degrees below zero outside and hailing, if you still need your furniture moved, I’ll be there in the stupid wasteland to help you. Even if my friend who I haven’t seen in a decade just came into town unexpectedly and will only be here today, I’ll still help you move because I said I would (I’ll tell you my friend is around and try to get it done early, or try to find a replacement human if I absolutely must, but your furniture will still get moved and it’ll still be my effort). Even if I’ve suddenly got Avian flu and cannot get out of bed, or have the worst hangover of anyone’s life ever. I WILL BE THERE. Because I said I would, or I will find another way to get your furniture moved, even if I have to pay someone to do it for me.
Now, honestly, I don’t expect other people to go to these extremes, and they’re a bit exaggerated, but the point is that I do things for other people which are inconvenient for me or which force me to compromise other things I would rather be doing all the time. Even when I’m not feeling well. What I expect from other people is the general idea that I can actually count on you to either do the things you say you will or LET ME KNOW you can’t enough in advance for me to make some sort of alternate plan that doesn’t involve relying on you anymore.
Also, I mean really humans, if you say you’ll be somewhere at 10, either be there at that time (or close to it) or LET ME KNOW you’re gonna be late. Generally, you don’t find out you’re gonna be late for something ten minutes after it was supposed to happen. I have been known to call people to let them know I would be two minutes late for something because there was a slight amount of traffic between me and there.
Further, if I expect all this out of myself, and other people have learned that they can expect it from me, why shouldn’t I expect some sort of reciprocity? If I’m willing to put myself out over and over again to make things easier for other people, shouldn’t I expect the favor to be returned every once in awhile? If I’m calling you to tell you I’ll be ten minutes late because of a car accident on the road, shouldn’t you be expected to call me if you’ll be two hours late or not be able to show up at all?
Someone once told me that the (I think) small amount of effort I ask from people in the name of responsibility and whatnot is “just too much for one person”… Right then, I was doing him a favor I did NOT feel like doing simply because I had told him I would do so. Point. I know if you’re on this site and you’re reading this, you probably have already expressed roughly the same opinion or some agreement therewith. I just don’t know where all these fucking jerkwads get off playing “centre of the universe” all the time and continually expecting that someone won’t catch on.
Another thing. Fucking excuse-making. Like this: “dude, you know I’m bad at planning so you shouldn’t have expected me to actually be there anyway.” Fuck. You. I can’t get away with telling my landlord “Dude, you can’t evict me, cause I didn’t pay the rent. I’m just super-bad at math. Ask anyone.” Because I signed a contract with that individual in which I would continue to pay money each month and they would continue to allow me to live on property they own. And to me it’s the same. If you tell me you’ll do something, and I’ve told you I’m counting on you to come through, we have basically (well in the law ACTUALLY) a contract. That said, the same way a landlord wouldn’t accept my deficiency at math as an excuse for non-payment, I don’t feel I should be expected to accept your deficiency at planning as an excuse for not showing up to something you’ve had plenty of time (and reminders) to get into order.
I know I know I KNOW I’m preaching to the choir here, as it were. I just want to know if anyone has any idea what can be done about this problem (which I and a few close compatriots only see growing as time passes) short of bringing on the apocalypse or investing in tazers. (I’m really all for the tazers idea…kind of like the electro-shock collars they have for dogs that bark too much…) I also want to know when it became acceptable behavior for ALL people (or at least the vast majority) to have absolute fucking zero accountability and why I wasn’t sent the memo so I could let myself off the hook every once in awhile when I’d really rather get drunk than go to someone’s fucking wedding.