Echo

This story makes me so angry.

Colorado cops are assholes:

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/9063737/detail.html

The Politics of the Office Shit

There are three ladies’ rooms in our office building (one on each floor), and each is distinct in its own way.

The one of the first floor sits across from the dentist’s office and apparently shares their air circulation system, because it always smells like a dentist’s office. This one, unlike the others, has no decoration (if you call a framed piece of advertising for the management company decoration). Despite the slightly unpleasant olfactory connection, this one is my favorite because it’s always clean, and it’s always empty because outside of the two dentist’s assistants on that floor, the offices are predominantly male.

The one on the second floor is never too cold and by far smells the best. We used to work on the second floor before we moved to a larger space on the third, and while this bathroom had more traffic, it always smelled like apples and cinnamon. Maybe someone on the floor had a thing for Apple Jacks and it reflected in her pee, but this bathroom has a homey feel like you’re in a little old lady’s house, albeit a little old lady who has a deep appreciation for an industrial flush.

The one on our floor sucks. The good thing about it is that it’s the only one that has a full length mirror so you can thoroughly check to make sure you aren’t leaving the bathroom with your skirt tucked into your underwear. But on the other hand, it always has this awful chemical smell that comes through the vents, making me think about chemical warfare and what that would smell and feel like. Also, this is apparently the building’s designated Shitting Bathroom.

Now most people (women at least…I’ve noticed that my male coworkers actually seem proud when they fold a magazine under their arm and proclaim that they’re taking the Browns to the Super Bowl…in fact, once my boss actually told me that he was going to the bathroom, then seconds later, called me to discuss different accounts as his words echoed on the tile around him), most people do everything possible not to do their business at work. The office bathroom is a shared space and to hot box a shared space with mcnasty is just embarassing and will quickly have your co-tenants hating you. Yet for some reason, our bathroom always smells like the most unkind hotbox.

I started timing when I go to the bathroom based on the traffic that I see out the window coming in and out of the bathroom. If I see someone going in there and they don’t come out within 3 minutes, I’m not going in there for at least 10. I don’t care if they were just doing their make-up, my fragile psyche can’t chance it. If I walk in and there’s someone already in one of the stalls and they suddenly go silent and stop moving, I assume they’re waiting for me to leave so they can continue taking a shit, so I jam out of there as quickly as possible. I notice that when I walk in and there’s someone already in there, I’ll get going with the peeing as quickly as possible as if to say, “Don’t worry! I’m just peeing! You can take your time in front of that mirror!”

The worst thing is when you walk in and someone has already laid a stink bomb. Now you have to think…well, now that I’m here, the next person who walks in is gonna assume I did this. And depending on the level of stink, sometimes I walk right back out. I can’t hold my breath for that long anyway.

Sometimes when you walk in, you discover that someone hasn’t fully flushed. My first reaction is always to jump out of the stall to get as far away from the offending toilet as possible, and then run all the back to my office. But the bigger, more mature voice in my head will convince me I can always use the other stall. Here’s the thing though…if you discover someone left something nasty for everyone else, it’s in your best interest to flush it. Because let’s just say that you use the other stall, but as you’re leaving, someone else walks in. They have no way of knowing that you used the other stall. For all they know, you left the monster in the toilet. So you have to flush it, even if it’s none of your business, even if it means you get sprayed by tiny microscopic shit particles as the industrial toilet whooshes the offense away.

So in conclusion, please don’t shit at the office. Shit in the alley out back or in the corner of the parking garage where your boss always parks, but please don’t shit at the office. And if you have to, make sure you use one on another floor, so if you manage a perfect covert getaway, it will never be linked to you.

Today was a day without meaning. Like a sentence without fragments. I found that a part of me really liked the echoes.

Today I was browsing profiles of people who went to my high school on myspace. I clicked on a girl who looked familiar, and she claimed that her current mood was “In Love.” I clicked on her photos to see who she was in love with, and it looked like apparently she had just gotten engaged. So deciding on further investigation of what type of person could make a person designate “In Love” as a whole moodset, I went to her Top 8, found the gentleman, then clicked on his photos.

In the first one, he was wearing a fanny pack.

How does one fall in love with a man who wears fanny packs?

I really don’t understand what’s going on.

I made up a new word today (and I was happy enough to share it with Thode on myspace):

peginis (pe-JY-nis)

It’s like a bacon wrapped hot dog…but with genitalia.

A Trip Into Human Psychology (aka flexing my internet skillz…)

Because my claim to fame is my ability to find things on the internet, here it is before the internet gods take it down:

You guys have heard about the guy who killed that 10 year old girl and then planned to eat her. It’s a super fucked up story. Well, the press is claiming he had a blog that hinted at twisted things.

So here, for your psychological delving: http://futureworldruler.blogspot.com/

And his myspace page that you can’t access directly from myspace because “it’s going through routine maintenance,” if you call investigations into psychopathic murder “routine.”

There’s a comment from one of his friends who myspace has encrypted the name and link. Posted 2/24/2006 8:41 PM:

“There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die. “

And still…more than you need to know…

He had an Amazon.com wishlist that has since been removed. On it, he had desired a book on cannibal culture, a villain how-to book ……….. and the William Shatner CD.

There’s also message board where it’s rumored that the posters encouraged him to follow up on his subversive fantasies.

One poster writes:

_______________________________________
Crazy motherfucker posted:

Man, work sucked tonight. It was really busy. And Nathan and Murray talked about Dragonball Z the entire night. The ENTIRE night, from 4:00 to 11:30. I like Dragonball Z, but they were ridiculous. They’ve both seen or read about like every episode of every series, even the episodes and features that haven’t even been shown in America yet. They were having debates over things like whether or not non-Saiyans could learn to power-up and become like Super-Saiyans, and what certain characters, like King Kai, would look like if they did. And then they were talking about what it would look like if they could design their own character. They were like “I’d give him Trunks’ hair and clothes, Gohan’s body…” and blah blah blah. All Night.Whatever happened to Ben Stein? Other than the old Clear-Eyes commercials, I haven’t seen or heard about him in a long time. Ben Stein is cool. But I get really tired of people comparing me to him, it used to happen all the time. I may not look or sound very enthusiastic, but I certainly don’t sound like him. I wish I did though, that would be cool.
______________________________________
This is scaring the fuck out of me. He’s like a regular nerd, and all the sudden he’s like “BWARGH NOW I AM A PEDO CANNIBLE PSYCHO RAARRRR”. Humans are the scariest species on Earth.

(end of post)

Seriously, how does a person go from just a “regular” seeming person who spends a hell of a lot of time on the internet and has a lackluster social life, to suddenly coming out as a psycho pedaphile cannibal? What’s the trigger?

Lastly, a detailed look into his world from his blog:

Thursday, September 08, 2005

The Past

I did a lot of thinking today. I spent most of my work day lost in thought as I performed the mindless, physical tasks. Well, I spend most of the days like that, but even more so today. I was just thinking better, or something, clearer. It was one of those days I have once in a great while where I think about my past, and remember things I had forgotten.

I realized today, that one of the (many) reasons I like Melissa so much is that she reminds me of what I’ve lost. Of how I used to be. Melissa is often silly, and goofy, and makes her coworkers laugh. I used to be like this, years ago. Back when I was in school, I was always well known. I wasn’t popular, no one liked me much, but everyone knew me, because I was so weird and funny. Sometimes, people I didn’t even know would come up to me in the hall and say things like “Do something weird,” or, “Do the chipmunk laugh.” Even as far back as elementary school I would get in trouble every day for talking too much, and being too loud. Such a far cry from my present state of complete and total shyness and timidness.

1998 was the year that a large part of me died. Well, part of it was in 1999, but most of it was 1998. In all it was a period of about a year. I usually refer to this year span as “the longest year of my life.”

I graduated from high school in 1998, and most of my friends, except for Chris, either joined the military, or went off to college, so I didn’t see them much anymore. This caused me to retreat even further into the world of online chatrooms, which I had been battling an obsession with for two or three years. My main obsession was an AOL chat room called “Witty.” It was full of great people. Regulars who were always in there, and I became great friends with many of them. It wasn’t your regular AOL chat room, the Witty regulars were all a little more intelligent than your usual chat room inhabitants. They discouraged people talking in all internet slang abbreviations and A/S/L checks, and things like that, so the idiocy was kept to a minimum. It was here that I met Melissa. I don’t remember exactly when, it was sometime in 1998, I don’t remember if it was before or after I graduated. We became very good friends almost immediately. I had a crush on her even back then, but she had a boyfriend, but we still were good friends. Then, a few months later, about the time I went off to college, she was going to lose her internet access for a few months, I don’t remember exactly why. This was another major blow, I lost another one of my best friends. It was about this time I started getting really depressed.

I went to college, and this was a MAJOR blow. I’d always been shy around people, even though I was always goofing off and being the class clown in the past, I was still shy in certain situations, especially when it came to one-on-one human interaction. Goofing off for a class full of people I could handle. But trying to talk to just one person made me nervous. It had never really been much of a problem before, though, but when I went to college, it got out of control. As time went by, I kept getting more and more nervous and scared. There were just too many people around, even though I was going to a small college. I started to get panic attacks. I’d skip class and just sit in my car for hours, or sit in the library, in the stacks where there weren’t any people, and read. Anything so that I wouldn’t have to go to class, or walk through the people-filled halls. Then I got so bad I couldn’t even work up the courage to go into the library anymore.

And at the same time I was fighting this crippling social phobia, other things were going on which just added to my mental strain. Me and Melissa were writing real letter to each other, but I hate writing letters for some reason, just like I hate talking on the phone, so we only exchanged a couple of letters. Well, she wrote me four
, but I only sent on or two. I’d sit there in the library hiding, and try to write a letter to her, but I just couldn’t and this depressed me even more, because I thought she would think I hated her or something, and I would lose her as a friend permanently.

Also, I was failing all my classes, mostly because I never went to them, and, even when I did, I couldn’t pay attention because I had so much more on my mind, or couldn’t stay awake. I only slept a couple of hours a night, because my chat room dependency was getting worse and worse. I would sit in the chat room for hours and hours every night, talking to pretty much the only friends I had.

After I lost contact with Melissa, I fell in love with one of my coworkers at Carl’s Jr. Her name was Genie. I was very in love with her, but, like always, I never said anything to her, I never told her I liked her, or asked her out. We were friends, and talked to each other a lot at work, but that was all we were. Then, she started dating a guy that also worked there at Carl’s, who was also my friend. His name was Tim. This made me even more depressed, but I didn’t give up hope that maybe they’d break up or something, and someday I’d have a chance with her. In time, I would come to regret ever hoping that something would cause them to separate.

Then, it all came to a head at once. The strain of all these problems, especially the social phobia, was too much to bear. I was in danger of having a mental breakdown at any moment. So I finally decided that I would have to drop out of college. I went to my mom, and told her for the first time, about my depression and social phobia, I’d never told anyone before, not even my best friend Chris. I told my mom, and told her about my social anxiety problem, and that I was going to drop out of college and start going to a psychiatrist. She didn’t really understand my problem, and still doesn’t (whenever I try to talk about how shy I am around people, her answer is, “Just stop, don’t be that way.”), but she was supportive anyway. So I dropped out of college, this was in early November. I never did see a psychiatrist, because as soon as I dropped out, I started feeling a little better, and I hated the idea of going to one because I knew all they’d do is give me pills.

And then, towards the end of November, the shit really hit the fan.

Friday, November 27th, 1998. The day after Thanksgiving. The biggest shopping day of the year, and also one of the worst days of the year for automobile accidents. On this day, two of my friends, including the woman I loved, became a statistic.

Me and my mom and sister had all been out shopping most of the day too, and, as we were driving back to Purcell, going south on I-35, we drove over a spot where you could tell there had been a horrible wreck recently. The road itself was actually melted in one place. Then, when we got home, I got the phone call. Genie and Tim had been in a horrible wreck. Tim was dead, and Genie probably wouldn’t make it. It turned out the spot we had driven over was where the wreck had happened. They were driving northbound, and had a blow out, and spun out of control, they went clear across the median, into the southbound lanes, where they spun into a large van going full highway speed. Genie wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, was thrown something like 20 feet through the windshield. Ironically, this is what saved her. Tim, who was wearing his seatbelt, was still trapped in the car when it burst into flames. He burned to death, and was burned so badly they had to use dental records to identify him.

Up until they re-paved the highway just a year or so ago, you could still see the burn mark on the highway. It was an almost daily reminder for me of the accident. Also, someone kept flowers there in the median of the highway at all time for many years. I don’t know who, some of Tim’s family, I guess.

I went to Tim’s funeral, and I also went to see Genie in the hospital every day. She did make it through, but she was in the hospital until December 18, the day before my birthday. I went and saw her every day, and I would sit there for hours. Even the days she was unconscious, or so doped up on morphine she barely even knew who she was. Even when she was conscious, she’d still be so doped up I had to help her eat. Most days I was the only visitor she had, her family hardly ever even came to see her. Partly because it was about an hour’s drive to even get to the hospital she was at. But I drove it every day, and sat with her every day.

I felt like a horrible person. Because in the back of my mind, a voice kept telling me, “Hey, she’s single now, just give her a couple of months to get over the loss of Tim, and then make your move.” I’d tell that voice to shut up, and stop thinking things like that, but it kept coming back.

Of course, this made me slip farther and farther into depression. She got out of the hospital on the 18th, and I spent the next couple of weeks in a state of deep depression. I would drive around aimlessly in my car for hours, listening to depressing music, and thinking depressing thoughts. Actually, it wasn’t exactly aimless. Most of the time was spent driving around Lexington, where Genie lived, trying to get up the courage to visit her at her home. I was just biding my time, remaining her friend, until the day I thought it was safe to ask her out. And then she shocked and surprised me. Just a couple of days after she got out of the hospital, some other guy at Carl’s asked her out for New Years, and she accepted. I couldn’t believe it. It was too soon after Tim’s death. I was shocked by this, and also depressed further by the fact that it wasn’t me who was going out with her.

I spent the next few months in a state of deep depression, and seriously thought about killing myself on several occasions, but never had the nerve to go through with it. Which made me feel even worse. I was such a coward. I was too afraid to talk to people, too afraid to ask girls out even after being in love with them for months. I was even too afraid to kill myself even though I wanted to.

Over time I started getting a little better, but I battled depression for a couple of years. I still have the social phobia, and very occasionally small bouts of depression, but I’m much better than I was then, at least when it comes to the depression.

But still, over the last year or so I find myself becoming more and more detached from the world. I almost never leave the apartment except to go to work or my parents’ house, and when I do leave the apartment, I walk around like a zombie, with a blank expression on my face, not looking at anything or anyone. In fact, the last couple of months, I’ve noticed that my eyesight is going, probably because my eyes are getting weak. Whenever I’m out of the house, I never focus on anything, I stare blankly ahead, operating on a sort of fuzzy peripheral vision. The only things I ever really focus on and look at are books or computer screens for hours on end, which strains my eyes further. When I’m not safe in my apartment, I am silent and expressionless, looking at nothing. I have no personality. If someone says hi to me, I either ignore them, or grunt out a small “hi,” or “ok,” if they ask me how I’m doing. It gets worse every day, I withdraw farther and farther into myself with each passing week.

My spirit has been totally crushed. Anyone who looks into my eyes can see this.

I wish I could be like I used to be. I wish I could be like Melissa.

I wish I could be human.

Or Perhaps, Here’s the Trigger (from his blog):

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Going Back; and also some good news.

This is something that’s been going on for a while now, but I’ve never told anyone about, except for my parents, and I briefly mentioned it to Phillip when I was working at Carl’s. I’ve
not even told Chris, which will probably make him mad, because it’s such an important thing. He will probably say, “I thought we were best friends? Why didn’t you tell me?”

‘m moving to California, to be with Melissa.

I’ve known her for almost 8 years now, and we’ve been really good friends the entire time. We’ve known for years that we were perfect for each other, but there was the pesky problem of us living about 1500 miles apart. She didn’t want to move to Oklahoma, and I would’ve hated for her to have done so, because Oklahoma sucks, and I don’t even want to be here. I’ve always wanted to move to CA, or somewhere else on the west coast, even before I met her, but I couldn’t move to CA because I was too poor, and CA is so expensive to live in. But a few months ago, shortly after she broke up with her last boyfriend, I brought up the idea of me finally moving to CA, and we started to seriously talk about it. I told my parent’s and Phillip about it way back then, and I was going to tell Chris, but it was something I would’ve rather told him about in person than online, and every time he came to OK on leave, I just couldn’t seem to find the right time or place to talk about it, I didn’t really want to talk about it in front of his entire family, as I am a shy person, and don’t really like talking about matters like this in public.

After a while though, the plan sort of fell through. Mostly because she was taking her last breakup really hard, and she also said she didn’t want to force me to move halfway across the country and so far away from my family. So we stopped talking about it, and I had pretty much given up on the idea. But then a couple of weeks ago, she brought it up again, and since then we’ve been talking about it again, even more seriously than last time. Unless something unforeseen happens, it’s going to finally happen this time. But we don’t know when. Basically, as soon as I can save up enough money to feel comfortable doing it. CA is expensive, and I won’t have a job when I get there. I’ll be living with her, but I don’t want to be a total dead-beat and have to mooch off of her. I don’t really have a target goal on the money issue, but I’d like to at least make back the $1200 I had to spend on my car a while back. Then I also need to get some work done on my car first, nothing major, just a new set of tires, and before I attempt the drive I’d want to make sure I got a good tune-up and stuff like that. So, we don’t know for sure when this will be happening, but I’m hoping two or three months at the most. She’s got a vacation coming up in early October, and she’s hoping I can get a week off from work to come stay with her for a few days first. I was really hoping to maybe be moving there by then, but she insists, and it is a good idea, that I should come stay with her for a week or so first, because for some reason, we may end up not getting along together in real life, though I don’t see that happening at all. The main reason I don’t really want to do this is because that’s extra money I’ll have to spend. I’ll have to get a plane ticket, and take some spending money, and on top of that, I’d be missing a week of work. I may not even be able to get the time off from work though. I don’t know for sure what the policy is on stuff like that.

I really hope it doesn’t take too long. I would move out there today, if I could. We’ve already wasted so many years not being together even when we knew we should be, that I hate to waste even one more day.
posted by Kevin @ 3:10:00 PM

*******
Sunday, October 09, 2005

Argh.

So, I never wrote the other day like I promised, but that’s because something happened. So now I can write about what I was going to write about, combined with the new developments.

If everything had gone as planned, I would be in California right now. That’s what I was going to write about the other day, me and Melissa finally had all our plans set for me to come visit her in California. She is on vacation this week, and I was going to go to California to visit her while she was on vacation. I had my plane tickets bought and everything, I got some great deals. But then, a few days ago, she called me up in the middle of the night and said I couldn’t come anymore.

She had gotten all depressed, thinking about her ex again, and said she was too depressed for me to come. But worst of all, she gave me the old “lets just stay friends” talk. I hate that thing. I’ve heard it so many times I know it by heart.

I guess I’m just too nice, women all want to be friends with me. Even girls I don’t like have told me what a nice guy I am, and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, I’ve even been told that “I actually forget you’re a guy, I don’t even think of you as a guy, you’re like one of the girls to me.”

That fucking hurts.

But anyway, Melissa cancelled the trip. My plane tickets are non-refundable, so she said she’ll pay me back, but it will have to be in small payments over a period of time. I don’t know how she’ll do it though, she already owes her dad a bunch of money she borrowed from him. I actually feel bad about her having to pay me back.

Like I said, I’m too nice. I should be mad at her. I should be like “Bitch, you better pay me back!” Instead, I feel bad about her paying me back. I’m pathetic. I let people walk all over me in social situations. I inconvenience myself just so other people can get what they want. Like if I was in one of those Christmas rush things, where everyone is frantic trying to buy the season’s hot toy, if I got to the toy first, and it was the last one, I’d give it to the next person so they could have it.

I’m not mad at Melissa though. Dissappointed, but not mad. I could never be mad at her.

What really gets me about the whole “lets be friends” thing, is that they always say they don’t want to date because “I don’t want to ruin our special friendship.” What they don’t seem to understand is that that pretty much ruins the friendship as well, because it’s pretty much impossible to stay friends with someone you are so in love with, but they don’t want you. It hurts to talk to them, or hang out with them, because the whole time all you can think about is how badly you want them and can’t have them.

And I do love Melissa, I love her more than anything. Maybe it’s stupid, considering that we’ve only met once, for a few hours once, and she had a boyfriend at the time, so nothing happened. So you might think it’s stupid to be so in love with someone you’ve hardly even met, but I don’t think it is.

Ok, I’ve got other stuff I could write about, but that’s the most important of the stuff that’s happened recently, so I will save the others for another time.

posted by Kevin @ 4:16:00 PM

Signs that the book Helter Skelter is scaring the shit out of me:

1. I find myself constantly checking the back seat and the floor of the passenger seat of my car through the window to make sure there’s no one there before I get in.

2. I check for people lurking around my building and inside the garage before I pull in.

3. I was leaving work on Monday and shared the elevator with another woman. Sometime in the middle of the ride, she dropped a full plastic bottle of water and it hit the floor with a bang. I leap away from the sound in sheer panic, slamming into the side of the elevator. Unfortunately, this woman was one of the psychiatrists who shares an office on our floor. Fortunately, her attention had been focused on picking up the bottle and she hadn’t witnessed my extreme reaction nor my look of pure terror.

4. Later that night, I was in the garage of my building walking to my car on the way to the gym. My neighbor must have gotten home not too long ago because his engine, as it cooled down, suddenly made a loud pop. I dove out of the way ala duck and cover, then frantically inspected the area of his car to check for persons hiding inside or around the car. There was nobody.

5. After spending 4 hours at a bookstore reading the book, I went home to watch the pilot of Lost. I had the lights turned out and I was in bed, when Reggie walked in close to midnight. Even though he had called no more than half an hour before to say he was on the way, I was nonetheless so terrified to see a dark figure suddenly enter my room that I screamed and catapulted the remote control that had been loosely cradled in my hand into a wall across the room.

I plan to marathon the rest of the book right after work while there’s still light out, just to have it finished so I can rectify its damage to my psyche with children’s videos, images of petting zoos and happy, happy thoughts.

Last night, the phone rang and the caller ID popped up as Kristi Lang* (name slightly changed). I picked it up and the person hung up.

Then, sometime around 3AM, yes, I repeat, 3AM, the phone rings again. Now, I’m the type who gets really jumpy when the phone rings in the middle of the night, because you never get good news when the phone rings in the middle of the night. I look at the caller ID and it says Private Caller, which gets me more scared because that’s how my parents’ number comes up. So I pick it up in a mild panic, and this chick goes (none too politely), “Is Richard there?” I’m uber-irritated because I don’t know who the fuck Richard is, but he sure as hell isn’t at my house at 3am so I tell her she has the wrong number. She quickly hangs up. About 5 minutes later, the phone wakes me up again and this time, the ID says, “Kristi Lang.” I answer the phone and she says, “Is Richard there?” I yell, “You called me last night! There isn’t a Richard here.” She asks me if this is a new number and I say no, and then she hangs up.

So I’m really irritated because I’m just not the type of person who likes being woken up, especially by really bitchy strangers looking for their mensfolk. But then I’ve also been reading Helter Skelter which is all about the Charlie Manson cult and the brutal Tate murders, which has had me sleeping with the light on when I’m home alone because it scares the hell out of me. So now a part of me is irritated for getting woken up, and another part of me is scared that the call was someone who was checking to make sure I was at home in preparation of breaking in and killing me. I decided the best defense would be to curl up in a fetal position and go back to sleep, but I have to say, when I woke up this morning, I was really tired and cranky and irritated with that caller.

So I did a reverse search on her phone number and came up with her address. I’m thinking if I were evil, I could probably do something with it, like send her weird mindfuck things in the mail like cut out pictures of farm animals or disposable kitchen utensils at random intervals. Or if I were just mildly evil, I could call her at 3am tomorrow night and ask her if Richard was there.

Mostly, I think I’m just irritated that she woke me up at 3am twice, but wasn’t even polite enough to apologize.

Richard…your chick is rude.