Recently, I went shopping for Christmas gifts, which everyone does, because Christ died for retail. The lines at Best Buy are insufferably long, which makes me feel bad for people who work during the holidays. One of the perks of my job is that nobody buys a sofa for Christmas. If nothing else, the sofa would not get there in time. Anyhow, in that line, I saw a girl. I did a double take for no apparent reason, until I realized that I may have seen this girl before.

It turned out I had not seen this particular physical form in the past. I had, however, seen this girl before. You have, too.

Everyone knows this girl. She is the girl with the brown hair in a bun. She may or may not have dyed it red, because everyone wants to be a redhead. Her eyes are dark. She carries a pensive expression wherever she goes. Maybe its the line that has her pensive. Maybe it's something else. You've talked to one of these girls, and you know her story. Rough childhood. Maybe played a sport or two in high school. This girl certainly did, as evidenced by her high school hooded sweater. The team is not important - it only matters that she competed. Does she compete now? At anything?

Everyone knows this girl. She had a real shot to make it. But she fell in with the wrong crowd. Maybe she went crazy. She takes her pills every day, except when she doesn't. And when she doesn't, boy oh boy, that's a treat. She remains friendly to strangers. She might talk a little fast and loose about her personals, but sometimes it feels better that way. You might get to know her. Become fast friends. One drunken night at a party. We were young, we were foolish. Then she's late for her period and the feces fall like raindrops. A few of those girls have that story. I've seen this girl with a smaller child before. That must be her sister.

Everyone knows this girl. Maybe you knew where she came from. Maybe you know where she's going. But this girl is everywhere, and nobody seems interested in the whens and whys of the situation. Nobody pays attention. Everyone is focused inward, perhaps humming a song to themselves or going over their cosmic to-do list. Have sex before I die. Feed the dog. Three kids, picket fence. Grow old enough to have friends to send Christmas cards. I'll be home for Christmas. Another night with the mother-in-law. Another night alone.

Not another night alone.

Nobody says a thing about her, but everyone knows this girl. There is some conspiracy of silence against her, keeping her from whatever it was she intended to be. God only knows what she intended. The road to Hell and all that. How could she be so naive to think that she would get what she wanted? Maybe it's true. Maybe some people only exist to serve as an example to others. "But why me?" she might think as she stands in the line. But she's not an example. She's just the girl that everybody knows, but nobody knows why.

One of these days, I'm going to get that girl's story. I wonder if she sees me and thinks "I've seen this guy before." But then the line moves on, and business goes on as usual. Another opportunity lost.

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I have a habit of listening to other people talk. This habit is often extremely useful, because I get to figure out the attitudes of my area about certain things. One of the bits that puzzles me the most, however, is the collective attempt of one gender to understand the other. Often, talks about relationships will usually have a man saying "Women" and then some random plug-in cliché regarding how they are intolerable, inaccessible, et cetera, or a woman saying the same general thing about men.

I always enjoyed stereotypes. They allow for one person to be wrong about millions of people in a single sentence.

From my own personal experience, I have come to believe that women are completely insane. However, that same experience has taught me that men are just as loony as anybody else. This leads me to believe that men cannot understand women because neither gender has clue one about themselves, much less people of their own gender, much less people of the other.

I look at it like this: the entire human race is a jigsaw puzzle. If you choose to believe in a higher power, which most people tend to do, you could picture said higher power attempting to construct the giant puzzle in front of him/her/it. As we are but puzzle pieces, though, we cannot see the grand scheme of things. So a man looks at a woman, and one can stare at the edges as long as one wants, but the man annot see the big picture. If he cannot lock into place with the woman, he has a choice. He can continue to press the matter, stubbornly jamming a round peg into a square hole - all sexual connotations are intentional - or he can continue to look around and find the perfect fit.

Does this mean I believe in The One, the mythical one true love? For the sake of the metaphor, I will say yes. But that part comes later.

So, with this giant puzzle, what is there to do? One can constantly attempt trial and error, moving into piece after piece, or one can wait for that higher power to find ones exact place in the schema. The secret likely resides within some combination of the two. I would not advocate waiting for the perfect person to show up one day; one must at least keep one's head in the game if one is to have any idea what the perfect person will look or sound like. (Some people judge on appearances.) One must understand that the question is not whether men or women are completely insane. The truth of the matter is that neither one will really form much of anything without each other.

Now go give somebody a great big hug. Let them call you a fag. Let us continue.

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The previous bit of ruminating has a point. That point involves my girlfriend, who is no longer my girlfriend. She is now an ex-girlfriend. She said that she simply did not want to be in a relationship anymore after one year, one week, and one day. She later recanted, but the judges only accept the first answer.

This is all the space that this deserves.

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Now, on to the point. Since I am now a single man, I find myself being in the position of being lonely once again. I get lonely easily. So in the spirit of keeping my head in the pack, I have decided to do something silly that will not work, but gives me something to do. In order to pay the bills, I spend my weekends as a furniture salesman, a job that requires very little intellect, but a lot of personality. In the few months I have held this job, I believe I have learned quite a bit about selling things. As such, I have now decided to sell myself.

Not like that.

This is an open call to the college-age single females of the universe. I am now offering a deal that simply has to be seen to be believed. Right now, right at this very instant, there is a guy who is sitting around in need of someone to focus his attention upon. This guy is really something. Heres a few of his selling points:

- He has infinite patience. I mean, come on now. You've read most of this by now. He deals with an autistic brother, an insane mother, countless psychotic ex-girlfriends, and the world around him in general. Do you have mental issues? Paul can handle them!

- He is entertaining. Paul is not a guy who gets boring ever. Ask him how his day went. Say something about a random current event. Just talk in his general vicinity. The man DOES NOT STOP with the funny. Paul also enjoys surprising the unwary, so if you are looking for somebody who can give you the best conversations you may ever have, this man is your best bet.

- He is intelligent. Intelligence goes a long way these days, especially in a world where everyone appears to be getting slightly more stupid by the day.

The list really goes on and on, but I don't need to do all the talking here. Just listen to these customer testimonials!

nTo Hobbes (3:58:50 PM): Paul Kent rules because he's a man of the people.

nTo Hobbes (3:59:06 PM): If I was a truck driver he'd be my shotgun ridin Banana Willie.

Abmulabmu (4:03:27 PM): Paul presents an extremely dynamic, yet subtle show and consequently will require a state-of-the-art sound system. System shall be capable of covering the entire listening area, and must be able to achieve loud levels.

nTo Hobbes (3:59:16 PM): He got my out of quite a bind in NAM, let me tell ya

NBxtreme (4:21:29 PM): Paul puts the "fun" back in "Nazi"

OMG its Feely (4:05:58 PM): He has 50% less fat while maintaining that same delicious (if slightly salty) Paul Kent taste

NBxtreme (4:13:45 PM): He keeps me from seeing my own shaved and candle wax covered testicles for minutes at a time!

nTo Hobbes (3:59:28 PM): My daughter needed a abortion, Paul Kent was there

nTo Hobbes (3:59:43 PM): I needed someone to get my wife pregnant when I wasn't fertile, Paul Kent wasn't there

The people have SPOKEN.

Now, obviously there are some drawbacks to the Paul brand. For instance, Paul is not recommended for:

- extremely punctual people

- overly serious people

- those with a distaste for nonsense

- people with heart disease

Pregnant women should refrain from taking Paul out on a date. May cause chronic confusion. If confusion persists, please consult your physician.

For those who would like to continue this line of discussion, I am contactable by email at pkent1@gmu.edu, by AIM under "JumboGuttersnipe", by MSN Messenger under wgmumusic@hotmail.com, or you can give me a phone call at (703) 730 0322.

Supplies are EXTREMELY limited. Act now!

Currently, I am in a bind.

Some people have noticed that the site has gone without an update for a month.  This is because I have not been able to muster up the willpower to actually write something down.  This apathy has spread to a number of my everyday activities, for reasons unbeknownst to me.  I could blame it on a number of petty things, like a lack of energy, being busy with other activities that actually pay money, or simply being a lazy bastard.

I actually have a number of things to talk about.  I will talk about one of them now.

Being a people watcher, I tend to spread that view to a large scale.  In other words, I read the news.  There is always something interesting going on in the world, and yet more proof that there are powerful people in suits that are not as intelligent as myself, in a T-shirt and jeans.  I have known this for quite some time, but this did not make itself crystal clear until the events that have transpired since September 11, 2001.

I hope that there is never an official holiday name, like Labor Day or what-have-you.  I have been referring to it as Planes-Hit-Shit day in public, because I like how the words hit and shit rhyme.  I read that they passed a law to name it Patriots Day, but I am against that.  The minor reason would be that there is already a Patriots Day where I reside, that place being George Mason University, Home of the Patriots.  The major reason is that there is an inherent patriotism implied that simply does not exist.

Let me backtrack before I go into that facet.

Most people remember where they were when they heard the news, usually involving a phone call or a household member telling you to turn on the TV.  Mine was slightly different: I woke up an hour before my class, turned on my computer monitor, and saw an invitation to an AIM chat room.  This is normal, because I am a nerd.  Instead of a silly room title, though, the invitation read, Flee to Canada.  I entered and asked my friends why I was fleeing.  "Turn on the TV," said Jim, a friend of mine from Wisconsin who hunts, drinks, and is a member of the Teamsters.  So I did.  And the television showed the Pentagon aflame, with a ticker under it talking about the World Trade Center.

My first thought, which probably says more about me than I would like it to, was this: Well, this ought to be different.

As the day wore on, my initial reaction was correct: this WAS different.  This was an attack!  This was definitely something to be paying attention to.  Nobody knew who did it, so nobody knew whom to hate.  That was the kicker; until the following day or so, when Al Qaeda became a household name and Osama bin Laden became a name that John Q. Redneck understood, there was no enemy.  All we knew was that a few people had hijacked planes with box cutters.  They were novel, if nothing else.  We had been conditioned to expect rocket launchers, nuclear weapons, poisonous gas and heavy artillery.  This is what video games and movies taught me.  Box cutters, on the other hand, were a whole other ball game.  Nobody succeeded in movies with box cutters.  Grand Theft Auto 3, a video game which is currently being decried for excessive violence (an entirely true accusation), does not involve using box cutters to take over towns.  The rocket launcher, however, is a favorite weapon.

So everybody donated his or her blood, half of which had to be thrown out after a month.  My father works for the Red Cross, and he explained this part to me.  Blood donations, you see, had been few and far between at that juncture.  All those advertisements for giving blood were not the sounds of rich people begging.  Blood was that scarce.  That day, however, everybody and their mother and their cats went to the hospital to donate a pint to the thousands of people who could not use it anyway.  Tons upon tons of rubble, combined with fire and gravity, had worked to vaporize a good deal of them anyway, not to mention those who had jumped off the buildings.  The reserves were filled within the confines of that day.  This was because we were expecting even more.  This was not an unreasonable assumption; nobody saw planes being flown into buildings, after all, so who knew what these crazy bastards had up their sleeves?

No more planes came.  Some of the blood was used, and a lot of it went bad.  People got mad at the Red Cross.  My father got mad at people.  Blood does not last indefinitely.

People burned a lot of candles in remembrance, which was nice.  There were a lot of remarks of how much nicer everyone was being to everyone else.  This is because everyone was scared out of his or her WITS.  It is hard to be an asshole when the world is upside down.  Also, when Osama bin Laden entered the public conscience three or four years too late, everybody also became an asshole to anyone who looked Muslim. 

I have a friend who lives in New York.  His name is Tanvir.  People shot him mean looks for weeks afterward, people he did not know, and he is Bengali!  Bangladesh had nothing to do with anything, other than being the background for the occasional spot in a Save the Children commercial.  (EDIT:  This is not entirely true, as Tanvir pointed out on the AF: board.  We're not sure where I got the idea from; perhaps it was the story of his cousin, or some other story that he told, that made me think it was his experience.  I apologized, and he said it was cool, and not to take it out.  So I didn't.  But let the record show that I was a liar!)

The other fun fad that came out of September 11^th was the American flag.  Now, this thing had been all but unloved for a long time.  My family owns one, and we had been flying it ever since we moved into our new house, where there was room to put one.  However, now every two-bit so-and-so is flying a flag, flying TWO if their cars could hold one, putting them on their cars as bumper stickers, on their dorm room doors, in their windows, on their facesit was strange.  Looking back on it, one could see how much people needed something.  Since they had no enemy, they latched on to their own side.  This was an attack on AMERICA.  We are AMERICANS.  We have flags and everything!

It is six months later now.  Those flags are starting to come down off the cars.  Some of them were static-cling, so it was easier to remove.  There are a bevy of flags in my workplace that I try to give away to random people, and nobody wants one.  All flagged out, one lady said.  Patriotism in the world of short attention spans is ephemeral at best.

Did we get what we wanted to get done?  Were the dead people, vaporized by fire and stone and metal and gravity, avenged?  I would assume so.  We found our target, that being Afghanistan, and we blew the hell out of it.  Then we blew the hell back into it.  We dropped food rations (in minefields!), and then we bombed some more.  We kicked out the Taliban, a radical regime that oppressed women, and reinstalled the Northern Alliance, a radical regime that is the worlds foremost opium and heroin dealer.  If you are a heroin user, this is your moment of triumph.  In a few months, we will be up to our eardrums in the cheapest smack of the Drug War era.  My solution to this problem is to put me in charge of Afghanistan.  I will silence my critics with box cutters.  And then I will silence the heroin dealers with box cutters.  Then I will rename the country to Boxcutterstan.  This is unreasonable.

The Terror War has replaced the Drug War, in any event.

The War on Terrorism is a wonderfully nebulous thing that, if left in the hands of the people in control of America at this juncture, could ostensibly go on forever.  No official state of war has been declared, so this is a carte blanche affair where George W. Bush can blow the hell out of anyone he wants in the name of upholding the good name of America.  After September 11^th, this was just fine.  We had a worldwide coalition on our side, fully backing us in our decision to bomb a Stone-Age country back into the Precambrian era.  That lasted for about ten seconds.  Then everybody remembered who else they hated, and went back to their business.  Palestinians and Israelis did not miss a beat, and in fact made their situation even worse than it was before John Q. Redneck knew about other countries besides the ones in Europe, Iraq, Iran, and Japan.

In fact, the war has been extended.  Troops are landing in the Philippines to sniff out a radical group in the jungle.  Afghanistan is being fortified, with a watchful eye on Pakistan and India to make sure they refrain from nuking each other into oblivion.  And then, of course, there is the Axis of Evil speech, which may shape up to the biggest political blunder of the 21^st Century.  Of course, there are ninety-eight more years for somebody to do something worse than provoke three countries that had no idea they were going to be thrust into the limelight, but this might take some doing.

Iraqs official reaction to the speech is hysterical laughter.  Considering we have bombed them at random for most of the past decade, how does that make you feel?

North Korea, in particular, seemed a bit put off about the situation, not to mention everybody who had been trying to negotiate peace with them.  In fact, the North Korean government went so far as to call George W. Bush "a kingpin of terrorism," according to the Washington Post.  While this seems like the equivalent of replying yo mama, this probably holds more weight than we would like.  America is using the threat of violence to coerce the world to its viewpoint.  Is this not the exact same thing that Al Qaeda wants to do?  They think America is a wasteland of sin and depravity, so they flew planes into buildings to scare us straight.  Nobody converted to their way of thinking, of course, just as they will not convert to our way of thinking after shoving an AC-130 gunship down the collective gullet of the Afghans. 

The difference is that we are more devious than Al Qaeda, and that we also have television.  Television, alone, makes us the strongest nation in the world.  We control the world by giving them something to look at, and showing them what we stand for.  We stand for violence, sex, and fat people falling down.  Terrorists want to take this away from me?

Well, you can have it.  But Im keeping my Playstation 2.  Infringe on that, and there will be words.

Does this mean that I do not support America?  Absolutely not.  I like this country.  The laws that are intact allow me to be who I am without any real penalty, so long as I get a job at some point and pay my taxes every April.  I do not support Americans.  I do not support people who only feel a sense of national unity when their lives are being threatened, and then go back to being the same ignorant jackasses they used to be as soon as the coast is clear.  The status quo is restored.  The only differences are that airfare is lower, United We Stand is on the bumper of half the cars on the highway, and the former governor of Pennsylvania warns us to be careful every month or so.  Security is tightened in airports, which it should have been a long time ago, and still fails tests of crafty people who squeal to the media.  People actually stand up for the National Anthem.  And everybody who hated our country before September 11^th hate us today, with a few million others thrown in to boot.

If I put money into a Swiss Bank account, does the American government tax it?  If not, when I get rich, I intend to move into the mountains and never come out again.  I have a hard enough time dealing with the handful of people in my everyday life.  The whole world, however, makes me positively ill.

Of course, my cabin in the mountains will be Internet-ready, have running water and electricity, and will have satellite television so I can watch game shows and professional wrestling until I die.  God Bless America!

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