SO its come to this eh?

Well it's official, I am once again unemployed. Got my walking papers last week from my temp job working at Massachusetts's largest charity organization. Seems with funding down and requests for help up in all the food pantries and homeless shelters there wasn't room in the budget for a glorified email forwarder. Kind of a bum out, but with so many starving people to feed, paying me to google my name all day long did seem kind of ridiculous. Besides, without a pesky thing like a job to monopolize my time I am now free to pollute the cyber-sphere with unrequested insight on a multitude of unimportant and/or pointless topics! Wanna hear the non-sensical ramblings of an unmotivated, uniformed, malcontent with an undeserved chip on his shoulder? Welcome aboard my friend. Got a hankering for a few long winded stories about a mediocre music career, as told by a man with no musical talent and what can best be described as marginal story telling abilities? Come on in, we'll make room for you. Oh look, there's an aisle seat free, right near the window too. Must be your lucky day champ.

So yeah, here it is, my first foray into the soul bearing world of blogging. Exploring the hot button topic of... pet ownership...

I love my cat. I know… guys with cats, weird right? Usually I get pretty hung up about arbitrary things that threaten my fragile perception of my own masculinity, but cat lover sits just fine with me for some reason. (To this day, I have NEVER held a girlfriend’s purse in public while she tries something on. These are women who voluntarily sleep with me/put up with my shit/post bail etc... but I still can’t bring myself to shoulder a 4 lbs bag for them in Target so as to maintain my inflated sense of machismo around the retarded people/stoned teenagers who stock the Keds in the ladies’ shoe section of a department store. I suck.) So yeah, no purse holding, no using straws when I drink, no carrying umbrellas… I pretty much respect every stereotypical ‘man law’ which has been forced upon our society through brow beaten husbands on sitcoms and/or commercials. (Coincidently, I’m fairly sure that most things on TV are written by pale, sickly, English majors that are so self conscience about their own lack of masculinity that they over compensate by writing contrived, slightly ironic characters and dialogue that they think middle American men can relate to. In turn mid American males see said show/ad and, being the sheep they are, assume that if its on TV it must be true and adopt the nonsense as their own personal philosophy. So really we have anemic, noodle arm English Majors to blame for the modern American Neanderthal male, but that’s an argument for another day…) 

 

So yeah I’m dude, into ‘dude’ stuff, but when it comes to cat liking I let my feminine flag fly. As far as kitties are concerned, I’m like that slightly overweight woman in human resources. Y’ know the one who starts wearing Christmas sweaters in mid November, and talks about her cats like they were people and not just the evolutional equivalent of hairy mice traps? Much like her I’m a ‘cat person’. This is not because I’m maturing and becoming confident enough in my own skin to be able to openly express love, (gross). I think my affection towards the feline has to do with the fact that cats help male animal lovers fulfill their need to be around critters, all without sacrificing their delicate sense of their own masculinity. To further the point I’ve complied the more compelling reasons for your enjoyment and/or discussion…

 

No Public Affection 

 

“Who’s a good boy? Who is a good little boy? You are! Yes… you… are!” I know not every dog owner talks like that, but if you care enough to own a pet, chances are you talk to said animal affectionately. That’s fine. In fact if you own a pet and don’t ascribe it some sort of personality and show it affection, you’re probably a borderline serial killer. But cats being indoor animals, or outdoor ones that don’t require you to hold their hand in public, negate such displays in front of other people.  I have nothing against talking sweetly to an animal, I just wouldn’t do it around strangers. Dog parks/walks tend to make men expose soft and fuzzy parts of their personality to strangers in a manner that never comes up with a cat. I talk to my cat regularly, but it’s more conversational than baby talk. If I’m on the couch and he strolls into the room a typical exchange would go as thus:

 

Me: ‘sup buddy, kill any birds today? Eat any mice?

 

Him: Blank stare, with just a smidgen of annoyance conveyed in the eyes, followed by repeated blinks, topped off with a furious grooming of his junk area.

 

Me: cool, I’m going to the bar for two days… see ya when I get back.

 

It’s like having a really chill roommate. We hang out when it’s mutually convenient but there’s no talking about feelings, or open displays of emotions. That shit is for the birds, or more accurately for the dogs.

 

 

Work Makes The Man

 

Real men work for things. Most people tend to take a path of least resistance in life, and everyone likes a free hand out now and again, but for the most part anything worth having/doing has to be worked for. This is precisely why sluts are popular at 2 a.m. in shitty bars, but no one really wants to date them. Sure a sloppy hand job in the men’s room is cool in an ‘I’m drunk you have a palm and most of your teeth, let’s light this candle’ sorta way, but no one is wooing or proposing to these girls. (And you can bet the damn farm that no one is EVER holding their purses in Target while retards and teenagers snicker in hushed tones form behind a wall of shoe boxes.) The sign of a real man is the one who rolls up his sleeves, digs his heels in the dirt and works for what he wants.

 

But getting a dog to like you is not work. It takes so little effort to elicit love from a dog that it’s almost insulting. For the most part, once a dog realizes that a human is not an immediate threat to him and his owner, they’ll shower anyone with the most god awful display of needy affection this side of a fat girl at a junior prom. Gross… and a little sad. For a cat to like you though, you gotta earn it. Establishing a relationship with a cat is like dating a girl that’s just a little out of your league. At first they’re aloof and kind of bitchy, but they’re also coy and smart enough to return your devotion with the smallest response necessary to keep you interested. Based on this token gesture of affection you suddenly work even harder for their approval. You pay them special attention, compliment them for doing shit that anybody with half a brain and basic motor skills can do etc… Though this display is a little sad and detrimental to the human, over time the two of you gradually develop a mutual, hard earned connection that’s worth more than a thousand freely given doggie kisses (a.k.a. getting licked by the same tongue that a few seconds ago was furiously probing the inner regions their doggie anus.)

 

Sure the cat will still ignore you a lot, sometimes passing you in the hall as if it didn’t recognize you, never mind that you’ve spent the past 5 years feeding it and shifting through sand to shovel its shit with a tiny spoon. But hey, that’s how the game is played – sack up and quit being so clingy for God’s sake.   

 

Gonna dress you up in my love…

 

Now this category applies only to a select few men, but still, it needs to addressed: putting clothes on a dog (or being seen with a dressed dog) is the exact same thing as playing with a dolly. Period. I know what the guilty are saying, “Bro it’s my girlfriend. She doesn’t like to walk snookums at night so I’m just being a good dude by putting the little fella in his turtle neck and taking him for quick jaunt around the block.” False. You are a grown man, walking around with small dog wearing a vest. I don’t care if you’ve got a Brazilian model with a three foot tongue waiting for you at home, all I see is right now is a dude in sweatpants, tethered to a shaking rat of a dog wearing baby clothes. There is a breed of woman (usually the type who own decorative dogs draped in accessories) who are always dreaming up new and creative ways to emasculate men, but forcing them to walk fist sized animals in sweaters has got to be the worst. For the record I have never seen a man walking a cat dressed in a little outfit. Man’s best friend my ass. 

So that's a pretty good description of what this thing will look like. Random stories and writings of the unemployed. If this appeals to you please subscribe and/ or sign up to follow it so I can be spared the embarrassment of having to post email blasts on Myspace to let people know I updated my blog. I'm a grown man for Christ's sake. 

And if the above wasn't enough to earn your loyalty, I'll entice you with hints of an upcoming post. I won't give you the details, but it involves me getting a HUGE, dark purple, perfectly symmetrical hickey, dead center on my forehead from a big, rubber dildo. To make matters worse the incident occurred the day before I had to go to work as a temp at Catholic Charities of Boston. And it all went down at a wine tasting party, BTW...

Cock unicorn: Before

Cock Unicorn two minutes later: the aftermath

If curiosity over that story isn't enough to keep you coming back for more, then you've got way too much to do. Time to loosen the schedule up a little captain no fun, sheesh.