A good way to threaten somebody is to light a stick of dynamite. Then you call the guy up and hold the burning fuse up to the phone.

"Hear that?" you say, "That's dynamite, baby!"

Random thoughts/memories from the past little while:

• Having exposed hypocracy, those to whom it's revealed become staunch supporters of the exposer. Others just discount it, saying "It must have been done for a good reason."
• To grow older is to grow more wicked.
• Buffalo Kisser thinks that because he has an interest (but no background) in psychology, that makes him fit to pronounce on all matter of things. Case in point: DiceGimp got called a faggot on the SkyTrain while wearing his uniform. A couple of weeks later, a guy fixing his car looked up to see DiceGimp watching him, and called him a fucking asshole. Buffalo Kisser's take on these two events? "You should smash your glasses on the ground." Thus spake the oracle.
• I have to reassess what my concept of "ignorant" is. DiceGimp and I were talking about Israel, but it turned out that he didn't know anything other than surface bluster. So then shortly after, the subject of Greece came up. Half-jokingly, I asked if he knew where Greece was. "East of Israel," he said. I stared at him, and he corrected himself. "Straight north." "Straight north?!" "Yeah, there's Israel, some other countries, then Greece." He was not, in fact, joking. However, subsequent people of various ages and educations that I've told this story to have been unable to immediately pick a direction from Israel to Greece. So perhaps I'm the odd one here.
• After getting called back time and time again to babysit patients at hospitals, I'm recognising what a horror it must be to be trapped in your own mind, filled with wind and mist.
• Evil Property Manager and the company he works for, along with the bike patrol guys that work during the daytime are frantic about kicking the garbage pickers and butt collectors from the site. Apparently one of them (we call him Chemical Ali, because he sniffs solvent and has some fairly odd behavior) spit on an employee from another building the other week. I've met him and talked to him a few times, and my bet is that someone told him to fuck off while he was conversing with the ghosts in his head or making sweet love to the parking lot, and he spit on her. Bothering them in the daytime gets your windows broken at night.
• Enemies make you stronger, allies make you weaker.
• Keep secrets all you want. But what kind of person keeps secrets from themselves?
• It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Every experience carries its lesson.
• I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory yesterday with my folks, and it wasn't bad. But you know what really made it for me? The little boy sitting next to me. "Look at that giant chocolate bar!" and "Here comes the chocolate river!", along with gasps and "Wow!"'s and the rest. What does that say about me?
• We accept too damned many things on the explanation of people who could have good reasons for lying.
• Long-term supporters at the site I work at have indicated that they'd like me to succeed Barney as chief security guy. Many of them also indicate a willingness to help hasten that day. Dare I swim in water when I can't identify the undercurrents?
• When politics and religion ride in the same cart, the participants are suffused with a sense of invulnerability. Gathering speed in their forward charge and believing that nothing can stand in their way, they forget that the road is not always straight and level, and fail to see the crevasse ahead of them.
• Also at my site, protective pro-Rimmy supporters are looking to hook me up with some sweet young thing. I find this incredibly disturbing.
• Sometimes you have to test something to destruction.
• I'm harsh in the way I talk and dissect what others think/do/say. I admit this, and there are no lack of angry people who bark it to me in their defensive heat. They tell me about how I make them feel when I don't smile and nod and agree with what they say. And they seem discontent with my contention that anything less than abject submission has to have some attack in it.
• School is looking better and better, but not as a means to anything other than access to more information and interesting diversions.
• I've been astonished by how much more depth I've found in The Book of Five Rings lately, as opposed to other times I've dipped into it.
• Equality doesn't mean sameness. The strong and the weak may be equal, but only one of them is fit to open the pickle jar.
• Similarly, just because you have an opinion doesn't mean it gets treated to the same consideration as other opinions. You might espouse that people who drink an A&W root beer float before setting out on long car trips don't run out of fuel, but don't think that's going to carry weight in a discussion on mileage.
• How far inward can one turn before they forget there's a world outside as well?
• I've nicknamed one of the bike patrol company's day guys "Q-tip". I'm wondering if that's too harsh.

You may not like what I have to say, but I'll defend to your death my right to say it. ;)

Updated Monday, July 18: Q-tip walked in this morning with a haircut. Anybody got a good name for a tall skinny guy that's a bit of a close talker?