According to the Map, We've Only Gone 4 Inches...

Roses are red,
Violence is black and blue
... and red, actually...

Oh, nevermind...

Dave the Solo, reporting for blog duty! The house is mine for the next several days! MUAHAHAHAHA!!! I can do whatever I want! I can consume whatever I want! I am my own man! So what did I do tonight? What great place did I go out to eat at? What fun activity did I participate in? You're dyin' to know, aren'tcha? I went to this Botox Experiment, and I had a little accident... does it really look that bad..?

Actually, I had a normal day at work. On the way home, I hit up the bookstore, looking to see if they happened to have Abercrombie's new book out a day early. No such luck. So I came home, walked around the inside of the house like a man lost at sea, checked my email, sighed and looked around, making funny noises with my mouth... Ah, I know! Food! So I contemplated running up the road to On The Border and getting a nice meal... but there's something fundamentally sad about eating in a nice restaurant alone. So I did the only thing more sad than that... I stayed home and made eggs. Some chopped onions, a diced chicken breast, grilled together in my favorite pan, toss in 4 eggs, scramble it all up nicely, add some cheese and BBQ sauce, and chow down. Got out a giant tumbler, filled it with crushed ice, poured in 2 cans of Dr. Pepper, and watched some self defense DVDs on my computer in my office.

Ah, such fun! Complete freedom, options a'plenty... and I choose eggs, DP and an instructional video on how to catastrophically injure someone. There is something wrong with me... Meh, not really. I'm not particularly sanguine, you know? Introverted, a homebody comfortably ensconced in my little corner of the world... I'm not the social type, eh. Crowds, loud music, dancing, neon lights, smoke-filled clubs/bars... about as unappealing as can possibly be. I'm just not wired that way.

I'm sure after this post, I'll play some sort of game, maybe watch something streamed on NetFlix, and read a book into the wee hours, like just about every other day in my life. Hey, it's not a bad life.

I find the self-defense DVD course to be endlessly fascinating. If it wasn't copyrighted, I'd rip some of it and post it here. If I did it anyway, then I'd get arrested, tossed into Federal prison, and then get a chance to use my self-defense training against big tattooed psychopaths that want to shiv me! That would certainly be a change of pace from my usual daily routine, eh? The thing I'm appreciative of, in regards to the self-defense DVDs, is that it strips away the mystery and the fear behind violence, and shows it for what it is: a neutral tool that has an extremely limited, specific purpose, and while violence is almost never the answer, there is a time when it is the only answer... and at that moment, it's a very necessary tool to have, if you want to continue living. The course goes to great lengths to differentiate "social violence" from "asocial violence", and making it very clear when to be smart and walk away, and when to act.

In "social violence", the issue is communication... someone is trying to get a point across, normally verbally at first, then posturing, shoving, huffing and puffing, then maybe punches, etc. The whole "alpha male", social pecking order thing, like a buncha apes. In "asocial violence," there is no communication at all. A violent criminal wants something, and takes it. He wants to hurt/kill, and he just walks up and does it. There's no talking him out of it, or reasoning with him - his brain doesn't work that way. He wants something and has no problem with immediately doing whatever works the fastest to get it - usually involving often fatal violence. Knowing how to immediately tell the difference between the two, and how to respond in both cases really strips away a lot of the underlying fear inherent in just living each day. It doesn't matter how big or psychotic or mean-looking a person is, there are certain things anyone can easily do to that person to cause injury that will immediately turn the tables on the encounter. The human body is quite easily injured, if you have even the barest amount of info about it...

Anyway, they certainly don't advocate learning this stuff so you can then strut around and use it to increase your place in the social pecking order... it's basically information on how to ruin a person if the life-or-death moment presents itself. Again, it will likely never happen for most of us, but if it does, knowing how to use the tool of violence will thoroughly turn the tables. In those cases, it is the only tool that will work.

Lol, I'm like a commercial here.

Violence is such a touchy subject. Being a Christian, the understanding is that we should trust God that nothing violent will ever happen to us or our loved ones... that He will protect us, as He said He would. If violence presents itself, the Christian thing is to just let it happen and write off the consequences to God Will. "Well, He must have wanted (me/spouse/child/etc) to be (robbed/raped/injured/killed), for some reason unknown to me. His ways are above our ways!" Something like that. I don't know... something about that doesn't strike me right... we seem to cannibalize the scriptures, and pull out little pieces to use as promises, and hope for the best, all the while dreading the thought that God might decide you're the one He will not, in fact, protect, but will allow some horror to befall... let's be honest here... horrible things have happened, and still happen, to people that call themselves Christian all the time. We're to be pacifists and trust in the Lord, right? Well, a scriptural case can certainly be made for such a statement, true. Lambs to the slaughter, right?

But there are other verses... Proverbs 21:31: "The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the Lord." That tells me that yes, ultimately, God can and will protect us from trouble, but there may come a time when a battle is necessary, and it stands to reason that you would need to know what you are doing when that day comes. God seemed to feel it necessary for His people Israel to have an army... they weren't just a buncha pacifist traveling monks, subject to the whims of the warlike peoples around them. Sometimes God protected them and fought on their behalf... sometimes He required them to fight.

I watched yet another documentary last night, called "10 Questions for the Dalai Lama"... wait, hear me out here. I'm not turning Buddhist on you, nor am I advocating such. I'm just curious by nature, and wanted to see what the dude and the religion was about. It was relentlessly hokey - the guy that made the doc was a thoroughly hapless liberal, beside himself with self-satisfaction for being able to gain an audience with the Dalai Lama, and ask him some questions. The DL was pretty well-spoken, but didn't honestly strike me as any more wise or important than any other random 75 year old dude, offering his opinion on different subjects. In fact, some of his "wisdom" was pretty ridiculous - he suggested more picnics and festivals and such as a route to peace in the Middle East, lol. Anyway, he's a thorough pacifist, but even he said that if your life, or the life of a loved one, was in immediate danger, you should do everything you can to protect yourself and/or them. From him, it seemed quite a contradiction... "Violence is never the answer... except when it's the answer." I think even he might be onto something, that's all I'm saying... and that it doesn't seem to contradict the scripture as a whole, either.

So anyway, I'm learning how to quickly and easily produce any number of catastrophic injuries on someone, in case someone with a shotgun kicks my door in one night while we're sleeping. Sure, I could hope that God would deflect the buckshot as it's fired at me while I cower in a corner praying... or I could pray as I close the distance to the guy and get my thumb into his eye socket. Then his gun won't matter; his hands will be at his face, and I will be picking the next part of his body to break, as wifey calls 911.

Dang. I had no intention of talking about all that, sorry. Mr Free Association strikes again. I can't believe I tripped like that! Look, I'm sorry if I came off a little nutso, I'm not really.

Better throw in a funny video clip here. I'm sure some of you might have seen this today; it was too rich for me to shelve, I have to post it now...

There goes his shot at the "Dad of the Year Award." I'm sorry, I know it's a cruel joke, perhaps spur-of-the-moment, without much forethought given, and he likely regrets doing that to his own kid, but dangit, I laugh every time I watch it. A side note, what the heck is up with that dog's ears? Why would they wrap them up like that, I wonder?

Not much of note happened on this day in history, other than Prince Charles marrying Lady Diana in 1981, but I couldn't think of a funny one-liner for it, and there was nothing else to mention anyway... so I guess I'll pass on that. I can, however, add a Funny Picture, to help take the edge off the lingering effects of my banal meanderings on self-defense...


Man, talk about a literalist. Something tells me that the cake decorator didn't speak English so good...

I think I'm going to pack it in for tonight. To the top of Mount Nool, as fast as lightning, away I go! If I'm not back in five minutes... just wait longer. Until tomorrow, remember, this is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.