The first

My Friday nights used to kick off with a heist. I remember me and a few of my friends, jacked-up on the hardest stimulants we could pilfer, racing down Back Beach Road toward our destination: A calculated, well-planned assault on a fine art warehouse. Or, you know, the middle school equivalent of fine art.

Video games.

Checking video stores on Friday nights for the latest and greatest PlayStation games sure felt like a heist. We would rush the door and file through the magnetic anti-theft pillars, scoffing like they were some advanced motion-detection system we'd hacked moments earlier. From there, we would all split up and take separate routes to our respective console's section of the store. And after a few moments, a victorious shout.

"They've got the new Metal Gear!" Or "Dude, the new Bond game!"

That was the thrill, perhaps more so than the games themselves. We would give proud, condescending glances to anyone who passed us as we were leaving. Don't bother, we thought. You snooze, you loose. And one confused parent would drive in silence as the car of over-caffeinated kids poured over the game's instruction manual and speculated about how good the "graphics" were.

I was always a fan of the party games, like Super Smash Bros. or GoldenEye, because by their very nature they avoided the situation I came here to talk about: Being the first. Everyone is equally inexperienced starting off a new party game. And no one person's skills come into focus. It's great.

But with single-player games, someone has to be the first to try it out in front of everyone else. Certainly not me. I would always find an excuse not to be the first to play the game when we all got home: It's your console, man. Your mom drove us. You didn't get to play first last time. Nah, I hate 3rd person stealth shooters.

I would literally say whatever it took to avoid being humiliated by the first five minutes of a new game. The last thing a middle-schooler with zero confidence and zero athletic skills wants to hear is that he really sucks at gaming, too. So I would let the bravest among my friends have the first pass at guiding Solid Snake through Shadow Moses.

Eventually the first player would die in some stupid way and one of us would make some snarky, immature comment about them sucking. You know, the way middle school friends treat each other. And then the question would be posed: Who's next? Oh, not me. That shit looks hard. Better let the other expert take the reigns instead.

I was 12 and already defeating myself at every minor opportunity to succeed. Even something as stupid and trivial as a video game.

There would always come a point, either later that night or the next day or maybe a few months down the road, when I would angrily think to myself "why am I not as good at Metal Gear as my friends?" Well, because I didn't have the practice. That didn't dawn on me back then, and I would shift into another unproductive mindset thinking that I'm just not as naturally skilled as my friends.

Those negative mindsets have stuck with me to this day, albeit surfacing in more adult situations. What's the point in apologizing? I can't ever make it up to them. I can't humiliate myself by talking to her. I'm not interesting. I can't do this, I can't do that.

And those thoughts and situations inevitably lead to sitting back, watching my friends excel and wondering if I'm just not as good at life as them. Wondering why people can program faster and more elegantly than me. Wondering why my brain feels so un-pliable and unreceptive to the prospect of new experiences.

Well, you may not ever be the best at the game, but dammit, you gotta play to get better. If you take this fact for granted, and you're thinking "well duh, Kyle," then at least consider for a second that it's not easy for everyone to place confidence in themselves, especially when defeating yourself has been a ten-year habit.

I wish I'd have learned this lesson when video games and a few derisive middle school insults were at stake, rather than my human soul. But I'm tryin', dammit. I figure that humiliating myself by trying is a lot better than humiliating myself by not trying.

How do high school seniors argue?

Surprise, high school friends! I took a little trip in my time machine back to a time when my liberal douching could set fire to the unaware passerby and my cache of argumentative ammunition was well-stocked. Check out these Xanga posts from back in 2004:

When President Bush decided to hop in his jet and stump down in Panama City, you can bet I had something to say about it. The cartoon in the link below is a sort of jab at all my friends who decided to attend the rally.
http://www.xanga.com/a_good_example/119693789/item.html

Of course, there was the occasional breakthrough of logic in my head. I still get those every once in a while but I've learned to suppress the logic in favor of smoking a cigarette. Oh, and me harping on heartstrings is just something you need to read anyway.
http://www.xanga.com/a_good_example/105596143/item.html

A discussion of whether I even matter. Definitely a good example of high schoolers at their best.
http://www.xanga.com/a_good_example/103900176/item.html

But it wouldn't be fair if this post was exclusively masturbatory. Check me being a true liberal douche, calling Michael Moore a "well-researched activist." Someone gag me with a mayonnaise-covered hot dog before Michael Moore eats it.
http://www.xanga.com/a_good_example/99299687/item.html

If there's one thing I still have, it's my ability to piss people off. I guess that hasn't changed at all. What I'd be more interested to find would be if my friend's political views-- especially the ones who argue tooth-and-nail in those above links-- still hold as strong to their views today. I know I don't.

High schoolers argue with an inflated sense of the world and their effect upon it. When you're limited to a school of 1200 students and teachers that get a kick out of seeing kids argue, you get the encouragement and audience necessary to feel like you're affecting something. These days, I feel like the true geniuses are the ones that see the futility in political discussions.

No one changes their minds anymore. No one is open minded. So you have to take clever, more intricate routes to changing minds.

That's where Kyle 2008 steps in to bitchslap his former self circa 2004 while, at the same time, appreciating all the fervor that put me here in the first place.

Houston Cares

It's a lazy Sunday by anyone's typical definition. I woke up around 2:30 to find that Mikey and Dayna were back from whatever and that the 90s ensemble is once again complete. Good thing, too, because we only have a week to plan for this little shindig we're throwing.

Reality about the coming semester is starting to sink in slowly. Eighteen hours of reality plus a good, healthy dose of social snafu and dammit, I have to mail my family's Christmas presents to them sometime before March. I think this semester's book cost, even if I drop one of my English classes, is going to come out to somewhere between $400 and $FUCK. I'll hit up the Amazon tomorrow and see if I can find some better prices than the Rice Rape Dungeon bookstore.

I truly have enjoyed these last carefree days before the semester starts, though. Nothing but YouTube during the day and drunken stupor during the nights. I've decided I can concede defeat and admit myself to be a YouTube whore but only because Google owns YouTube. Speaking of Google, if you spend any amount of time at all browsing, say, journals and blogs and stupid shit like that then boy do I have the tool for you. Google Reader. It's all rather self-explanatory, but basically it takes in RSS feeds and spits them all out on one page. It's a lot easier than having a big-ass list of bookmarks.

The upbeat of the past two weeks is starting to waver again. Someone help me keep tempo.

Ah, Funny.

Finally, one of my editor-in-chief columns from the high school newspaper.

America: home of apple pie, Wednesday night board games with the family, the Boys and Girls Club, and Sesame Street. The United States is definitely the pinnacle of moral values and innocence in the world, right? We have Elmo and Kermit teaching kids that name-calling is reproachable and that fun stems from cooperation. We have radio evangelist James Dobson working to get that heathen homosexual SpongeBob SquarePants off of the airwaves. And we have President George Bush instituting that the United States will not fund groundbreaking scientific innovations for the sake of moral justice.

That's all gravy, except that we're smearing blood in the faces of Islamic prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, making them unclean, and thus denying them their salvation. We're also wrapping prisoners in the Israeli flag and forcing them to soil themselves. Oh, and how can I forget the women interrogators who tease and touch these purported Islamofascists, again to make them unclean in the face of their god. These gems are just a few of new allegations that are leaking from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where Iraqi and Afghani rebels are held indefinitely and interrogated in non-accordance with the Geneva Convention.

I'm rather bothered by the fact that Americans hold their noses high in the face of other countries. There's nothing wrong with America having a moral compass but there's a clear double standard at work. We contend to be leaps and bounds ahead of Europe and the Middle East when it comes to values, yet we stack pyramids of nude Iraqi prisoners and take pictures. We make excuses for some of the most abominable acts in human rights history--- stuff that makes Chinese water torture look like a trip to Shipwreck Island. If those acts of torture really are comparable to “frat jokes,” I'm suddenly really, really scared of college.

Some right-wing zealots are quick to condone this behavior, pointing to the images of smoldering towers on 9-11; “they get what they deserve.” The war in Afghanistan to unseat the Taliban and al Qaeda was more than justified by any pretense of the word. Last time I checked, though, thousands of Iraqi and Taliban soldiers were dead and even more maimed. Our revenge has been had many, many times over. I would go so far to say that the revenge has even been exacted on innocent people. Maybe I could live with torturing the hijackers themselves and the higher-ups behind the terrorist attack in order to protect America, but I could never condone torturing a group of prisoners simply because they belong to the same religion and live in the same part of the world.

My favorite argument when it comes to torture, the one that makes me double-take like Daffy Duck, is “at least we're not as bad as [blank],” with the blank being filled with Nazis or the Taliban or the Iraqi insurgency. I'm sorry: America should try its darnedest to be the exact opposite of Nazis, not a notch or two below. No, we're not the Taliban: we're not beheading innocent hostages or driving car-bombs into hospitals. But on the continuum of really bad things, I'd say that renouncing someone's assumed salvation is almost as bad.

"No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” That's what the Fifth Amendment says. “Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.” That's what the Geneva Convention says. Those aren't really hard rules to follow.

Enter Alberto Gonzalez, President Bush's nominee for attorney general. Just like his predecessor, John Ashcroft, Gonzalez sees no problem in placing “terrorists” outside of the Geneva Convention's rules and regulations for prisoner treatment. Gonzalez is also very vocal about extending the rights of interrogators to a broad, almost “whatever means necessary” plan. To anyone who voted (or supported) Bush's re-election campaign, realize you may be a small part responsible for the appointment of a repackaged Dr. Joseph Mengele. You may be, with the tiniest sliver of guilt, responsible for unspeakable atrocities performed on wrongly-convicted prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

I realize that the American military has a job to do in defending this country. I also realize that the United States tries to make strides in defining and protecting the morals of its citizens. Heck, most American voters back in November made their decision based on the “moral values” of each candidate. Maybe we should step back and think about what those morals really are. Maybe, just maybe, those morals aren't all invested in one political party.

Too late for Pokemon, too early for sleep

My fucking god, it's six AM. Addictive children's games, I swear. I really was doing good and almost had a human sleep schedule just a couple of days ago. Anyways, I was digging around el computer and my old Xanga journal and found a few tidbits that really set me in a nostalgic mood.

Hey, it's my room during O-week! No posters, no nothing. Just my gay O-week shirt and a computer and a really not comfy Old Dorm ladder.



Me, all flipped out on Ambien I think. I don't remember any of it, of course, but that's sort of how Ambien works.



This was quickly Photoshopped and printed in time for Dis-O. In retrospect, I guess my sideburns should probably go under my hair.



Duct Tape our doors in anticipation of Hurricane Rita, eh? This was the window that started the sensation we've all come to know as Choke Sex. Stayed like that until midway second semester when Caitlin what's-her-face (started with a W, old President of WRC) told us we had to take it down or Housing and Dining was going to pull some FBI-esque raid shit on 216.

With titles so long you'd think Panic! at this Disco came up with them

Louie asked me to post more of my story bits from over the years, so here you go. This one's for him, because we're both from tourist towns and we can both relate to this. I'm actually more proud of this story than any other and I'll keep posting what I have if the demand exists.

I guess you could call me a bartender of sorts. I'm the enabler. I make people fat tourists fatter.

I'm a snow-cone vendor in front of Wal-Mart. Dollar-fifty for a medium, two-fifty for a large. We don't have a small. Watermelon is the most popular flavor. On a typical six-hour day I sell about $250 worth of ice and syrup. I wear an apron that has a picture of the Earth in a frozen martini glass and SnoGlobe written across the bottom in electric blue.

When most people think of a Wal-Mart, they think of an electronics department and toys and brand-less clothes and, if it's a Wal-Mart Supercenter, groceries also come to mind. But the Wal-Mart in Panama City Beach has a deal with vendors that peddle wears outside the store. I work for SnoGlobe, a national corporation that operates thirty snow cone stands outside department stores across the country. Roughly eighty percent of their revenue comes from Panama City Beach, Daytona Beach, Galveston, and Beverly Hills.

Snow cones are big business.

There is one other vendor outside of the Panama City Beach Wal-Mart Supercenter: an American flag vendor by the name of Eddie Crow. Eddie sells five-foot display flags, license plates, miniature flags, wall posters, and just about anything that can legally feature the likeness of America's glory. Above his modest stand is a neon red and blue sign that flashes:

BE A PATRIOT

So on that overcast Saturday in June I stood behind my freezer-on-wheels and counted all the Confederate flags I could spot in the parking lot. I was up to seventy-seven when I noticed that Eddie was hobbling his obese self over towards me. It's not that I hated talking to Eddie but I'm pretty sure the guy was trying to re-live his youth through me. And that's just creepy.

"How's is goin', hoss?"

Oh, and he called me hoss all the time. I really liked that. I told him that I had sold around forty-five larges in the past three hours.

"No, I mean ha' are you doin'?"

I guessed that I was doing fine.

"Weh, that's good t'ear. Yah have a good head on yah shoulders, Steve. So many fine youn'people these days lookin' for happiness in all the wrong places. With all the drugs and gangs and that sheeeeit."

I was going to tell him about my theories that drugs are the only fun thing to do in this town and that gangs only exist in cities with sidewalks, but I just agreed with him. Then I asked him how business was going. He took a bite of the corndog gripped between his fat fingers, thought for a second, then pointed the greasy stick at me.

"Oh well, you know. It's got its ups and downs. I only took in $475 yesterday. Last week I think I took in..." Little pieces of sausage and fried batter flew in my direction as he spoke, hurtling towards my apron and landing on Sri Lanka and Montreal and Belize. I imagined Canadians screaming in French terror as giant pieces of Eddie's spittle landed on their fair city. My continence didn't change while I let him drone on about profit margins. I made the occasional ah and oh and shook my head to give the illusion that I actually cared.

"... but I've gotta shooooow you somethin'! Hold on jus’a secon’." He turned around with the grace of a Mack truck on a two-lane bridge and stumbled back to his booth and grabbed some papers. I wondered if he had printed out some touching e-mail forwarded to him by a church friend, or if he had some pornographic photos for me, or maybe it was a picture of a really nice car. It didn't matter. It could have been the secret to eternal happiness and I wouldn't have cared: not because I wasn't interested but because it was Eddie.

"Check this out," he wheezed when he returned to my snow cone stand. There were two graphs: one of the Homeland Security Thread Advisory code over the past six months, and the other represented his revenue over the same amount of time. They were nearly identical.

"Isn't that crazy? Every time the Advisory goes up, my profits go up! And same with goin' down, too. So I got me one of these." He pulled a little stopwatch-looking device out of his pocket. A ticker ran across the front:

THREAT LEVEL: ORANGE

"I tell yah hoss, I'll be on top of business with this thing. Updates every minute and only costs me fifteen bucks a month!"

Suddenly: "What's it take to get some damn service around here?"

It was an obese, greasy man with a handlebar mustache and several tattoos and his hair wrapped in a Confederate flag bandanna. The fat fuck hadn't been standing there for longer than seven seconds but I turned around, greeted him with a smile, and swirled watermelon and strawberry in five large cups for his five fat fuck kids. Eddie hobbled back to his patriotic post and sold fifteen flags to a tour bus full of seniors.

When the sun finally fell beneath the condominiums on the horizon, I packed all of the flavored syrups and cups and spoons back into my aluminum cart, locked it up, and walked back to my busted-ass car.

Midway through the parking lot, a black Oldsmobile caught the corner of my eye. I turned around only to catch a glimpse of some Hummer's headlights. By the time I was re-focused the mysterious car had disappeared into the night.

Confessions of a 19-year-old taxi driver

Sitting in a blue box under Louie's bed in room 191 A at Will Rice College, 633o Main St., Houston, TX is a bag containing my entire family's Christmas gifts. All together now, children:

Fuck.

So I was catapulted out of deep sleep at around 9AM. Frantically, I plunged things my sleepy brain deemed important into a black satchel, threw my dirty clothes hamper over my shoulder, flung my backpack over the other shoulder, and proceeded to drive twelve hours back home. Lea rode shotgun. We talked about a variety of things, most of them too delicate and personal to stand the test of publication on the Internet. I will, however, give you a little tidbit.

Lea: Tell me something about Louie.
Kyle: I've never caught him jerking off. Not for the 12 months I've lived with him.

I got home at around 11:30 and said hello to my dear sweet brother and his dear sweet friend. Now I'm toiling on the Internet, thinking about how I'm going to tell my mom THERE WON'T BE A CHRISTMAS THIS YEAR. You know, among other things I have to think about.

My little guest room was completely how I left it, barring a few Christmas cards that were spread out like a dinner platter on my desk. The confirmation code for my flight back to Houston after Thanksgiving is still sitting on the floor in the middle of the room. Mom made oatmeal cookies and her trademark Santa Fe Soup in anticipation of my arrival. I have several doctor's appointments over the break that have all been written down on a piece of paper in the kitchen.

I am, as expected, not really compelled to do anything for the next two weeks except go out to dinner with anyone who will join me and watch all the trash I can on HBO. And sleep. God, let me make a dent in the sleep deficiency I amassed over the past few months.

Between "I'm From Rolling Stone," which debuts on MTV sometime in WHO THE FUCK CARES and Rolling Stone's list of the 50 best albums and songs of the year, I'm ready to wake up Hunter Thompson and tell him how his former employer is completely fucking the image of the magazine in ways that weren't fathom-able 30 years ago.

Here's a snippet from a story I started writing two or three years ago and never developed past page 15.

"Well, ohh-kay. You know that AP classes involve a lot of homework, don't you?" She's still not looking at me.

"Yes."

"And that AP classes involve--" and I cut her off by clearing my throat.

"Look, uh, Miss Armstrong." I scratch the back of my head in an attempt to look coy. "How long have you been counseling?" Oh, she's looking at me now. I can't tell whether she's surprised at my tenacity or just honestly trying to think of an answer. I give her two seconds before I keep on talking.

"Well, it doesn't really matter, because the minute I walked in here I realized you were a racist. You called me Alberto by accident. Alberto is a Hispanic name and I am primarily American Indian and Israeli and part German for christsakes. You didn't look at me when you were talking. You didn't even think I was apt enough to fill out the goddamn fucking course request form."

Her eyes are huge and something--maybe anger or maybe fear--is making her eyebrows slowly ascend. She's also making some sort of guttural noise, akin to trying to flush a toilet with a leaky, vibrating flush valve.

"I mean, Ms. Stein never looked at me either but hey, I doubt she could see that far in front of her with her shitty vision and all. Look, you probably have a ton of appointments today with students a lot dumber than me, and let me just assure you that I know I'm on track to graduate and I know what Advanced Placement means and I know that when this is all over, you're going to get up and clean out your adult diaper in the women's restroom because no seventeen-year-old has ever talked to you like this before, especially one that looks Hispanic."

Tick.

So I think I just blew some gasket in her brain. I stand up, tell her that she should try harder next time, and leave the room. From there, I gun it as fast as I can to the end of the hall. I peek my head around the corner to see Miss Armstrong, legs clinched, and making small steps to the women's restroom across the hall from her office.


Rock and roll.