A Word About Talking Out Of My Butt

Because that’s pretty much what I’m doing.

When I ranted about Lost, for instance, I had a raving attorney/Lost fanatic who dropped about ten pages of crazy on the Lost page, and mostly her point was, the makers of Lost didn’t promise me any answers, and I shouldn’t be posting an angry blog without citing links to articles in which the makers of Lost do so.

What she did, was she confused the daily blog at Future Tom for a formal hearing or an academic report or an article in Time Magazine – nice of her, but silly.

This is none of those things, and anyway, if you’re so smart then why didn’t you know that I could simply flush your entire ten pages of crazy right down the internet toilet by clicking a button? Fifteen thousand people read my rant, but only ten or so read the vengeful attorney.

No, loony – you’ll have to get your own blog, I’m afraid, where you can cite links for whatever you want, and no doubt lots of attorneys will show up to enjoy it.

Well, I’m sure she feels better, regardless. She did not have a very good point – a terrible point, in fact, for an attorney – but it helps to vent, and that’s what she did.

I went ahead and answered all of her questions and points, but I didn’t publish them. Upon finishing, I noticed that I was engaging in what was slightly less cool than a Trekkie debate about Kirk Vs. Picard, and anyway, when someone is looking for attention like that, a comical thing to do is simply ignore them. Drives them nuts.

No, I’m talking out of my butt half the time – I don’t get the chance to really think it through, and frequently I wake up the next day with a slightly different attitude.

For instance, the two women at the Cheesecake Factory that I wrote about last night.

Because you know, maybe the two ladies next to me were genuinely busy – they’d had to run by the mall to pick something up and got stuck in the interstate traffic like I did.

So they remembered getting the nachos at the Cheesecake Factory, and decided to come on over. You can get a hot dog at Dairy Queen, too, but there’s nothing dairy about it.

And maybe they don’t get out much, or they didn’t used to get out much. Maybe they only go to The Cheesecake Factory and other chains, where they’re encouraged to feel so entitled.

So they weren’t professional bar hoppers, and didn’t know how to be cool – do you want the thirty bucks or not?

I’m not convinced – I think they deserved it. But really – pretty hilarious of me to go ahead and judge them, while I’m sitting one bar stool away, blogging about blogging.

Anyway, the people at The Cheesecake Factory weren’t judging or blogging – they were polite and professional and awesome, and they should send me a gift certificate, a big one.

They didn’t get all emotional about it, like I did for some reason. They just listened and smiled, tried to fix it.

And you know, sometimes the problem is the other way around.

Sometimes, the server just simply starts out with an inexplicable problem. Like you’re bothering them – they know who they are.

That’s the weird, unexpected nature of The Curse of Future Tom. It’s every single day – I’m pretty sure I mentioned that. It’s every day, and sometimes I spend under an hour writing and posting it.

So it’s like when you write an email, a good idea is to sit on it until morning before clicking send.

I usually don’t have time to do that. So if I’m bored, the post is boring, and if I’m feeling nostalgic the post is nostalgic, and if I’m full of whiskey and shaking with rage, then it’s possible to detect that as well.

I don’t get to sit on it for a day – I just assume that how I am feeling will always be how I’m feeling – SEND.

The other thing I do sometimes is start REALLY long stories about ghost hamsters, and then later I don’t feel like finishing them. That’s an unpleasant feeling. From the numbers on the ghost hamster story – the hard numbers, the RATINGS – that was an unpleasant feeling for everyone.

Oh well, sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear, well he gets you.

As far as Comfest goes, I’m still on the fence. Comfest is hard to break up with – it’s super hot and calls me up at two am wanting to swing by, and then pretty soon it’s the end of the week and we’re right back where we started, relationship-wise, and I’m baffled as to how it happened.

Didn’t I just break up with you, Comfest? Why am I wearing your shirt?

So I can promise you that a few things are going to continue to happen as the year progresses. For instance, I will continue to shoot my mouth off without citing any links, because I’m just talking out of my butt – I’m not an attorney with a stick up there.

I will also continue allowing my wild and articulate mood swings to dictate the sort of content I post, and I’ll do my best to not apologize for it later.

And since it turns out I can walk into a bar and then type a story about it while I’m doing it, expect to see that from time to time – it beats writing about ghost hamsters, more people read it, and my wife can’t act like I snuck out because I posted it immediately on my blog.

When I’m angry, think of it more like a Picture of Angry, than a concise argument for why it’s cool to be Angry In This Particular Way. If I painted a picture, you wouldn’t want me to cite links about the hat the dude in the picture was wearing, would you?

There are a lot of new people showing up, too – I love it. Somebody new – quick, post a comment and then request a topic and I’ll talk out of my butt about it. It’ll be like I’m the crazy guitar guy at the park!

Yes, quite a stretch, I know.