Traversing the Globe

As I type this, I'm sitting surrounded by animals in the nice kitchen in the middle of my grandparents' house, situated near a mining town in the spacious and beautiful Sonoran Desert, a town known as Globe, Arizona. I could go on about how absolutely gorgeous the view from just about anywhere in the region is, but it'd seem like I was being paid for it. And besides, I have an entire post for that. So instead, I will speak thusly: Greetings from the Elder Fielders' residence. 

     This all started about a week ago, in the great big patch of dirt, fencing, gates, small leantos, and horse manure fields a short distance from this house. There, my grandparents keep a couple of horse manure producers; namely, horses. Around this time last week(so I was told), the one I refer to as Old Old Man(as my dad is Old Man, my brother is Young Man, and I'm just Dude) was taking his horse out for exercise. As he rode through the open gate to take the horse to the other pen, the horse randomly decided to attempt to explode. It was like any time a Fox News host was talking about Obama's part of Obamacare that would require employers to provide contraception to their employees free of charge, with a section written by Kathleen Sebilius specifically to exempt religious organizations from the requireme - I mean, war on religion this weekend: total anarchy. The horse for some reason started bucking and jumping up and down and trying to throw off Gramps and all-around raising hell. Choosing to just fall off instead of being trampled into a bloody pulp by a half-ton of twister powering the downward force of four iron U's, he got his feet out of the stirrups and fell just as the horse was at the top of its jump, about twelve feet of gravity in total, straight into about a millimeter of loose dirt and about 10,000 miles* of hard Arizona ground(*rough estimate from core to crust). This is where he came in lucky: The internal organs of his torso could have burst like ballons, his skull could have smashed to bits and airated his thinking muscle, or he could have snapped his spine in twenty-seven places and paralyzed him from the eyelids up. Instead, he just broke a few ribs(four on the left side and seven on the right, if I remember correctly). 

     He landed just about face-first, cutting open his head quite a bit and making him look really gruesome. This scared the living everything out of his wife, who called 911 immediately. The dispatcher had a helicopter drop in and airlift him straight to the Phoenix hospital, and having driven by a building with a sign out front denoting it as the Globe Medical Center(it looked abandoned). There they cleaned him up and alerted everybody related to him that they could reach(with some notable exceptions) to his status of being within an inch of death. There were around 6 people visiting him in the hospital, where he was doing his best to recover and/or breathe. After a few days of looking terrible and feeling worse(you try breathing with 11 broken ribs), he was sent home Thursday(about 2 days ago). 

     While preparations were being made for him to head back home, I was on my way to Little Rock to take my first plane ride ever. I got checked out of school(for some reason I was sent there for an hour and a half) and rode with the Old Man to the Little Rock airport. After spending a half-hour alternating between standing around and walking, we got our boarding passes and went to go stand in line for another few minutes. This line was for the metal detectors(I removed my shoes, wallet, belt, glasses, jackets, phone, and had to take my 3DS, laptop, MP3 player, and charging wires out of the backpack I brought my stuff in) and the digital naked machi - full-body scanner. I opted out of being thoroughly patted down by a Touching Someone's Ass member. After going through and it being decided that I was not, in fact, a terrorist or Sith overlord, AND a black hole not opening up and consuming the planet, I spent a few more minutes putting all my shit back in order and heading down to sit around for another hour. To be fair, I actually stopped at the 'secure area's' sandwich shop(half the space, twice the price!) to have a nice sandwich. There was a little fridge full of water bottles with the warning "These products may contain nuts" which amused me to no end. I'll need to put that picture onto this post right about here when I get home. 

     Soon enough, we were loading onto the submarine with wings also known as a plane. The seats were about as spacious as the average airsoft pellet, but I did get a window seat so I got to see the endless forests between Little Rock and Houston whiz by(I didn't get to take any pictures as my 3DS is my main camera, and my phone is the other, and I'm not sure whether the 3DS was allowed to be used on planes because of how it actively seeks out signals) for an hour and a half or so. It felt vaguely like a roller coaster for small and retarded children, absolutely nothing to fear at all. Of course, I did not once go into an uncontrolled 600-mile-per-hour vertical dive, so my view may be a bit skewed. Houston's airport was spectacular in size. We didn't have to walk from where we landed to the terminal we were going to get on the plane; we had to take a tram, in which my face almost met tram floor at least three times. The layover was only 40 minutes, so I only had enough time to boot up my laptop to realize that unlike LIT, Houston's airport didn't provide wi-fi, and buy a pack of gum before getting onto the next plane, which was slightly more spacious, about the volume of a slice of cheese. I was in the window seat this time too, but my fellow rowmates were complete and uptight strangers(who pestered me until I had the window shade mostly closed. Bastards). Most of this 3-or-4-hour-ride(Arizona doesn't do dayight savings, so when I last came out it was 2 hours earlier, this time one hour, and the boarding pass didn't point out time zones) was spent reading my gaming magazine, which I will scoot around advertising by not naming, since I couldn't get a good view out the window(the New Mexico/Arizona landscape is beautiful, even from 30,000 feet up, though). 

     A few hours later, we arrived in Phoenix's airport, which claimed to be the friendliest airport in America(I'm sure only all the airports claim that!). It was actually a really nice place. Nice tones that didn't make the building look suffocating, the people at work were somewhat human in demeanor, and there weren't endless piles of crap that I ran into on the way out. We went to rent a car(which is hard to make fun of, not that I'm particularly good at it), and then drove to the Elder Fielders' residence. My grandma's daughter(my dad's stepsister and my random stranger) was there along with one of Gramps' old friends. And a dog, two cats, and two birds. I'm allergic to cats too, and the generic allergy medicine took twelve hours to kick in. Lovely. The next day I woke up late(a few minutes before 8 AM) to find the step-aunt-person and friend of the Old Old Man had already taken off back to Wyoming. The day was spent taking pictures, watering plants, feeding horses, de-pooping the backyard, cleaning a pool, de-pooping a stable, and feeding horses. Good day of honest work helping people that really need it, and that wasn't completely sarcasm. I still got plenty of doing nothing with nobody around in to boot. 

In my home country, we call this a horse and/or a person. 

     That's me, by the way. I'm a guy last time I checked, and I was mostly worried that the horses would take out their hunger on my hair so I was on guard the whole time I was out with the horses. There were two horses, actually. 

 A black horse of some kind...

 And one that is slightly emo-looking in this shot. 

     I'm not sure which one tossed Gramps through a Rube Goldberg machine into the hospital, unfortunately. They were both pretty mellow though. And they loooooooove alfalfa. Not to mention they take dumps everywhere. At the house there are the two cats(Sonny and Sharon), the two birds(Orion[more on him later] and Pretty Bird), and the dog(Babydog). Such classic naming unparalelled by anyone anywhere. The cats are basically two-year-olds that don't speak and climb literally everywhere. In fact, in the process of typing up to this point each cat has mosied over and sat about an inch from my screen to see what I'm up to. The dog is more or less a log with legs and a head, friendly enough but after the first few minutes she doesn't seek out attention. Today I wandered around a swap meet(basically a pawn shop without the building and with multiple vendors) and a gift shop. There was so much obviously fake stuff at that swap meet, it was like Congress was meeting in about an acre of gravel in a small town in Arizona. I didn't buy anything that interested me(there were some things, but I dare you to take a small battleaxe through airport security). Ended up buying a little ceramic fox at the gift shop, I might send that to someone as a gift but that's somewhat classified information so we'll end the paragraph there. Hopefully it won't get me detained when it gets scanned at the airport tomorrow. 

     The cats are somewhat docile as far as cats go. I'm told they stopped turning the knobs on the stove after being burned one too many times and they don't really tear anything up, so they're alright as long as I'm medicated. 

This cat was not, in fact, a dish waiting to be washed.

My grandma was so pissed that the cat moved before she could take this picture, she almost burst into flames. Lucky for me I had my 3DS on me at the time.

      I'm really about halfway done with this post, but I'm gonna pull a lazy asshole and just post the other half about Orion and the trip home(which I have yet to go through in fact) when I get home. Hope you enjoy what I have so far.

 

Some Filler(and/or something that may or may not turn out to completely suck in a few years' time)

     I saw it out of the corner of my eye in a dingy storefront window – a small dodecahedron, a somewhat soccerball-like shape whose faces are pentagons, slightly metallic in color, completely smooth surface save for one groove across three faces. I turned to get a better look at it and all the color seemed to fade out around it, with a feeling that my vision itself was being pulled into it. Time seemed to slow while I gazed at the peculiar thing, my thoughts seeming to evaporate into nothingness. I became aware of a faint buzzing sound in my perception . . . perhaps an insect near my ears or something.

      I had to have it. I felt as if I was not in control of myself but merely watching the mundane purchase unfold through the vision of someone else. The clerk's voice sounded far-off and distant, even as he told me that the shape was not for sale. I remember picking up the dodecahedron and then my memory fades. The next point I can remember, my senses were back to normal and I was in control of my body again. Turning to the register to ask the clerk the price, I didn't see anybody there. Perhaps he'd gone to place some items on a shelf, or to check a price for another customer(not that I saw anybody else inside during my entire time in the pawn shop). There was movement in a shelf behind me, and out came a small burly man with thick glasses and a scowl on his face – but wearing a shirt that showed him to be an employee.

     “Excuse me, do you know how much this costs?” I asked the guy, hoping it would be a number I could afford.

     “That thing? Nobody's been interested in that old paperweight for years, we were probably just gonna sell it for scrap. We had it priced at... oh, fifty dollars, if I remember correctly. You want it?” His loud and authoritative voice startled me with his rambling reply. Fifty dollars . . . too much. I had thirty-five on me, and I didn't have a credit card or debit card(not that there was a machine that would let me pay with one anyway).

     “Fifty bucks? That seems a bit much for this thing nobody wants, don't you think? I'll give you thirty for it.” I decided to try my hand at haggling the price, hoping there was some flexibility to exploit. This was a pawn shop, after all.

     “Thirty... there's no real market and I've never seen another of these things before . . . I guess that'll do. At least we'll be able to use the shelf space for something we can make money on.” The old man meandered behind the register to perform the transaction and get me out of the store. I pulled out my wallet with a shaky hand, took out the appropriate amount of money, and hastily handed it to him.

     “Th-this is enough, right?” I have no idea why I was nervous after feeling and appearing totally confident moments before.

     “Yeah. Have a good day.” The old man directed me out of the store indirectly, for whatever reason. Probably just wanted the have the store to himself. I wonder what happened to the original clerk . . .

I put the metal prize in my jacket pocket and turned to go home. Shit. I just spent the cash for groceries on a hunk of metal, I thought. Xuan's gonna flip. I just thought I'd figure out how to placate my soon-to-be-angry roommate when I got home. No use trying to think up and rehearse some bogus excuse now; she never fell for it anyway. I pulled the metal out of my pocket to take another look at it. It was surprisingly light compared to what you'd expect a piece of metal(it was definitely made of some sort of metal that I couldn't name, but different alloys were never my strong suit anyway). Must be hollow, I thought. Wonder if there's something it goes to?

      Now that I was holding it close, I could see that the color wasn't fading out around it. No, it looked like color was being pulled into it somehow. I couldn't feel anything, so I decided I must be imagining it. The buzzing returned again – I'd hardly even noticed its disappearance – as I turned the object over to take a look at the groove and see if it looked like something I'd recognize.

      Not a groove, I noticed. A hole. The 'groove' was like a porthole, making the novelty seem more like a bell missing its noisemaker than anything else. Looking into the hole revealed nothing, since the inside was strangely dark, even for an enclosed metal space. Ah well. If nothing else, it'll make a nice trinket to – I was nearly hit by an old Camaro, cherry-red and sounding like the idiot owner took the muffler off to make the engine sound better. Somehow in staring at and pondering the identity of the dodecahedron, I'd managed to walk out across 5 lanes of traffic without even realizing. I didn't even hear any cars either, at least not loud enough to realize I was within inches of being part of their grills. Just as I stumbled out of the way, hell, as soon as I looked like I might have been out of the way, the Camaro jackoff revved up and zoomed off, as if he was late for the 2072 Douchebags' Convention. Maybe he was, come to think of it. It had a big turnout that year, if I remember correctly. I was there.

      Maybe I can find some use for it at home. Maybe actually use it as a paperweight? I was mulling over uses for the object, especially uses that would save me from Xuan's wrath. Money was extremely tight for us lately, and with the nosediving economy and ridiculous taxes, things didn't seem to be looking up anytime soon.

      Keep a strong mind and you will be of use to it. Who said that?! There wasn't even anybody nearby, the road was deserted for 50 yards in either direction except for cars, and that dark voice sounded like its owner was right behind me. Odd....

My Piece of Land is Better Than Your Piece of Land!

     Ah yes, good ol' nationalism. Or, as it's known here in the States, being a good patriot. I prefer to call it being proud of a complete accident and taking your worth from the accomplishments of others. But that's too wordy. I think I'll just call it American Syndrome.

     Why am I talking about nationalism, of all the infinite things I could be talking about? Because I think rambling on about nationalism will scare off the type of person to shout "USA! USA! USA! USA!" as a politician talks about how our country is just the pinnacle of enlightenment, civilization, and open-mindedness(more on that later). I don't want anything to do with that type of person, and I hope they want nothing to do with me. I've got some more bombshells waiting in the wings to drop on the poor little internet at a later date, but I need to save them. Maybe until I manage to pick up enough followers to make getting some hatemail over my ideas a certainty. Besides, nationalis - I mean, patriotism, is encouraged by just about every person with any authority in the entire country(my country. If you're in Sweden or something, consider yourself lucky). 

     Before I can tear nationalism to pieces, I should define the word so that people know what it is. Nationalism is the unwavering and absolute support for your country or birth and/or residence, and the taking of immense pride in the accomplishments of your fellow countrymen. The EDL(English Defense League, the UK's premier white nationalist(which I will also get to later)) and the Tea Party(basically the US's version of the EDL, but a lot more politically active and a bit more dangerous)  are prime examples of organized nationalism. Hell, just about every politician in the United States calls on nationalism. "God bless America." "America the great." "Land of the free." and so forth. It boils down to "The piece of land I was accidentally born on is better than the piece of land you were accidentally born on!" if you really examine it.

     But Fielder, surely you take pride in your own country! I mean, it took until the 1960's for people of a different skin color to get equal rights! And in 44* states you can't marry the person you love if they happen to be the same gender as you! And, and people are terrified enough of Middle Easterners to submit to being put through what amounts to a digital naked machine or being pat down by a guy who has a job to make sure stupid people feel safe, just to fly within their own country! This is a country where whether a legislator has a D or R by their name matters more than what they're actually proposing(unless it raises the military budget, includes tax cuts for the upper class, or increases taxes on everybody else)! What's not to love about that, right? We're the country steadily losing ground to China, India, and Germany and completely convinced that we're going to be at the head of the pack for the rest of time, dude! You were born here, so you'd better fucking love it or get the hell out, you commie pinko liberal towelhead marxist socialist nazi! Do you see why I'm not a flag-waving patriot? How about the part where many politicians including at least one FORMER PRESIDENT aren't sure whether I should be considered a citizen because I don't believe in God? Or the whole 'entire country is divided along party lines and nobody will give anybody a straight answer as to why' bit? Does this sound like the land of the free, or the home of the brave to you?

     Granted, the US has done some good things. Like going to the Moon, and other miscellaneous space travel. Oh right, shuttle program got cut(and not by Obama. Look at the US Congress, which is where the decisions on such things are made. But Obama is to blame as well). Or investing heavily in alternative energy, except for the part where Reagan gutted that program and Japan went full throttle with it, or the oil executives have spent years bribing - I mean, lobbying, to politicians. We have been the picture of freedom though, unless you were black until 1865. 

     How did I get off on that tangent? This is about nationalism. What's wrong with being proud of my country, aside from the things up there? 

     The blind support of everything this country does isn't some fringe thing. It's encouraged heavily. "If ya don't like the US of A, get da hell out!" is a catchphrase used so much that it's since stretched so thin it broke and bled out all over the Constitution(which would explain why people seem to forget about the whole separation of church and state thing). I can't comment on other countries, as I haven't lived in other countries, but I'm relatively sure that at least a few other countries are like this.  Why should anybody stop holding groups accountable for their actions, or completely support them, just because they live where that group reigns supreme?


     Also, I seem to have two followers. I wonder Hao I managed to trick two people into pretending to pay attention to me.

Joey

As an addendum to my first post(I don't believe in edits): I'm extremely ashamed of myself for starting a blog. I'm even more ashamed of myself for the shameless self-advertising required to get it anywhere near even remotely capable of being considered popular. Even the word 'blog' sounds repulsive to me. Kinda feels like shit. Maybe because it has 'log' in it. Now then, on to the post. . . .

     I don't have a few pet fish like most people(I hate seafood), or a pet rodent of any kind. Parents have a dog, but the dog(which I refer to as Dog, since Dog is the only one that answers to it) hates me. I have this little guy.

He's my little buddy. A corn snake, if I remember the 'color morph' correctly, he's an albino motley sunspot or something like that. I looked it up once. A few weeks ago. 'Color morph' is something the 'herpetologists' - I mean, reptile geeks, came up with because patterns aren't important enough. These are the same people that will tell you that it's not a cage the snake is in, it's a 'vivarium' filled with 'substrate' instead of bedding. 

     Anyway, point is, I have a snake. A corn snake. It doesn't eat corn and it isn't made of corn, so the name might be misleading. Traditionally, they were found in large abundances near cornfields, where they would eat field mice, second basemen, and my ancestors. 

     Note to all dumbshits: Farmer jokes and baseball jokes are not funny or clever. Just because my last name is Fielder doesn't mean you can use what little tiny shred of free thought you have to make a joke that's been made about 447.932 billion times. Same goes for those of you who make Wizard of Oz references because I'm from Kansas. Those jokes stopped being funny about 20 minutes after the movie originally came out in the 1930's.

     So I have a snake. I'm loathe to name it, since as it has no legs it can't happily run over to me when I call it. Still, it is a *corn* snake, and there's a bit of a story there, and a name that doesn't sound like it was developed by a clan of octaplegic deaf squids made of melted butter.

     There's this one dude, a couple years older than me, a good friend of mine. His beard-growing skills are legendary, as are the legends of his life. Legendary legends. Who knew. Some say he failed kindergarten twice. Some say that he sleeps under a different person's bed every night. Some even claim to see him looking at them through their windows in the middle of the night. Still others report that he's from an ancient tribe with no lineage, no culture, and no distinguishing features. Enter: Joey.

     Joey's about as tall as me, a lot better gamer than I am, and a dropout. I mean, he was 17 years old last year when we were freshmen. He dropped out at the end of the year and I visit him every now and again. He lives behind a place that sells chicken in bulk. And he has his own parking lot. I thought I was a slacker, but I'm the type to do as little work as possible, and not really a slacker at all. Joey is the textbook definition of slacking. In the classes I had him in, he never did a single iota of the work. Man is a legend. 

    The escapades we got into are the type of things that epic poems of ages long gone are written about. Being relatively the same type of person, and having the same insatiable need to get rises out of people, we were constantly fucking with everybody. 

"Hey Joey, did you see the jackknife billboard with the pancake sauce on it? Kinda by the pine trees out by that one box in the backyard, where the monkeys were always contemplating that bouncehouse?" 

"Sure did. They used to have those at that one store, sometimes red, sometimes green, all different colors. There was a sale a while back because there were too many of them, and I think the snowman bought some for the diving board."

     One of his favorite phrases is "Gimme your co-ahn bread, nergeh." Probably spelled exactly like that. I forget what movie it's from, but the word nergeh was written in a health textbook in 8th grade(probably by the type of bigoted little  spineless fish that wants to tell people how superior his race is, but still doesn't want to step on any toes. Or was just retarded. Here in Arkansas, you can never really tell the difference). He made this into one of the most versatile phrases of all time. Want to borrow something from someone? "Gimme your co-ahn bread, nergeh." Looking for some help? "Gimme your co-ahn bread, nergeh." Creeping someone out but forget your line? "Gimme your co-ahn bread, nergeh." I wish I could come up with a phrase this versatile and awesome. As soon as I wrote that, I got on a social networking site I am ashamed to be a part of and called another friend of mine a bag of dog asses. It's got a bit of a ring to it, but it's not the staple of life I'm looking for. Do dogs even have asses? 

     And, of course, many a day came when the school cafeteria actually served cornbread. He would go up to every single person with cornbread and unleash the phrase, no matter who the person happened to be. If Hitler, Stalin, and Dubya were sitting at the table, he would have demanded that they hand over their cornbread. He racked up quite the reputation, one that I'm envious of to this day. People would steer clear of him and leave him alone, or watch from a distance as he turned an unsuspecting person into a source of hilarity. How he managed to keep a straight face is a secret not known to this dimension. And, of course, being left alone is all he really wanted. And all I really want. I wish I could learn the secret to his success and use it for my own purposes. 

     And that's how my corn snake came to be named after a god.

Step 2: In Progress

I finally got bored enough to consider a blog a good idea.

Step 1: Establish presence on World Wide Web

Step 2: Bloody conquest of world 

     If I remember to update this blog regularly, and if I continue to post quality content(which is physically impossible for me to do), maybe I'll be able to use this very blog to begin my hostile takeover of the universe. Or maybe I'll just make a few bucks. Depends on if I can get a hold of any thermonuclear weapons. Or slingshots. Shouldn't be too expensive. I mean, the United States is selling their politicians, and you don't have to tell slingshots/nukes what to say/do. Can't be too hard. 

     The tab button doesn't indent. That will be a pain the ass. 

     I'm not quite sure what all I'm gonna be rambling about. I would prefer to make Youtube videos, and I've made a couple in the past, but most people have tiny attention spans and they'd get tired of listening to a brainless idiot rambling after a few seconds, then proceed to go walk through an automatic car wash. Especially if the brainless idiot is a self-critical loudmouthed belligerent asshole like yours truly. So either I turn my videos into a flurry of jumpcuts and terrible jokes about other videos, or I stick to text. I like to think I have slightly more respect for my work than that, so text it is. Besides, the new Youtube layout is slightly better than being shot into the Sun, so any excuse I have to not deal with it, I'll take.


     I am an insane, upgraded, out-of-date standard American teenager with no manners and no sense of style, jammed between channels, looking for my own voice, and complete, set in stone and subject to change, and totally confident. I hate Country music and Rap noise, and I dedicate my life to nobody, not a faceless group, certainly not an incorporeal invisible Sky Daddy. I'm my own man and an outsider by choice. 

     And I'm pleased to meet you.