I should add at this point that the dog in question is a small Yorkshire Terrier named Howard. Howard thinks he’s a badass, weighs 150 pounds, and eats nails for breakfast. In reality, he’s a tiny brat who would probably get his ass kicked by Richard Simmons’s dog if indeed Richard Simmons has a dog. And let’s face it, if he does it’d probably be just as much of a fairy as he is.

I found myself thinking that the whole concept of a racist dog seemed a bit silly, so I decided to do some research. Lo and behold, it would appear that such things aren’t only possible, but common. I found an article at Slate.com that’s titled, “Can a Dog be Racist?”. In there, they have an interview with Dr. Nicholas Dodman of Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine wherein he states:

“Any behavioralist knows that dogs don’t like subsets of people,” he says, and though the most common subsets are broad—strange men or little children—”sometimes it can be quite specific. It could be tall men, or men with beards. It might be men who are wearing big shoes, might be as subtle as men who smoke cigarettes—which can be hard to pick up on—but it can also be black guys.”

Wow, it’s really true. Howard is a racist bastard. So what is there to do about this boiling pot of canine prejudice? Not being a racist myself, it’s a pretty awkward thing to deal with. It would be one thing if my name were “Bubba” and I drove around with the white sheets in the back of my pickup truck; heck, it’d be Bubba’s dream to have a racist dog. As it is though, I’m wondering if this is going to cause major relationship issues between old Howard and I.

The absolute worst part of the whole thing is this: Howard the racist dog, being a Yorkie, is mainly - that’s right - black! He’s a little brown and grey too of course, but for the most part he is black in color. This would at first seem to pose quite a conundrum, but I figure that he must be like Richard Pryor in that movie “See No Evil, Hear No Evil.” You know, the one where he plays a blind guy that finds out in the middle of the movie that he’s black? Maybe Howard doesn’t realize he’s being just a little hypocritical with all this racist behavior.

I found myself thinking that perhaps a little quality time with a mirror would set him straight and he’d then realize the error of his ways. Then I remembered that dogs are colorblind. As anyone who has watched Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” knows, there are a lot of colors that look like black when rendered in black-and-white. Take for example, the blood in the shower scene. What is obviously red comes out looking black as midnight. Because of this technical detail, I think it may in fact be very hard to convince Howard that he is indeed black. If pressured on this point, he would most likely claim that he is red instead. So much for leveraging hypocrisy as a means to disabuse him of this antisocial behavior.

At this point, I’m completely flummoxed on the topic of Howard’s racism. I suppose that I could look into a little canine sensitivity training, but I’m thinking that there aren’t probably a lot of resources for such a thing in my area. Without such an option, I am probably left to take on this task myself. This could prove to be a difficult task, indeed.

I will post more on this in the coming days, but I’m forming an idea that will expose him to that which sets him off so much in an effort to desensitize him to the racial stimulus. Perhaps with enough exposure, he will see the error of his racist ways and perhaps even come to accept himself as a black individual. More to come…

Something else entirely being the newly-minted About page.

Click the link or look up above on the navigation bar for “About” and click that instead to read something of potential interest rather than this cop-out of a post that does nothing other than direct you to something else.

Now that I think about it, I feel somewhat bad for subjecting the front page to such an unexciting post as this one. I will therefore include some Knowledge so that you might be Edified:

How to Catch a Polar Bear

• First, go to a frozen lake. This is very important. Also, bring some peas.
• Next, cut a hole in the ice with a diameter of approximately one polar bear.
• You should then proceed to place peas around the circumference of said hole in the ice.
• Then you wait.
• Finally, when the polar bear comes to take a pea, you kick him in the ice hole.

If you don’t get it, read the final step over and over again until you do.

We think we’re so smart.

Guess what? We don’t know shit from shinola.

Think about it this way - if the Universe is made of shit, and everything outside of it is made of shinola, then the chances are that never having dealt with shinola (because remember, our Universe is just shit) will result in us being fully incapable of comprehending it. Therefore, any attempt to try and explain the nature of what’s outside of our Universe is pretty goddamn futile. Yet still, there are those that persist in their claims that they know what’s out there beyond our mortal knowledge.

Some will come along and say, how do we KNOW that everything outside of the universe isn’t made of shit as well? In such a case, surely we would be particularly well-situated to comprehend such a place seeing as how we’ve lived our entire lives dealing with shit?

To which I first say, “Shut up, smartass.” Then, after the shock of such a retort has worn off I proceed to explain that, to our knowledge nobody has succeeded in creating a universe made of shit inside of our universe made of shit so it’d be hard to believe that someone or something else was able to do so. How’s that for clever?

Not very, you might respond - and you’d be absolutely right given that we occupy such a small inconsequential space inside this universe that we don’t know half of half to the 9709510510935th power what else might be inside of it. Bottom line - maybe what’s outside of the universe IS made of shit, but that’s only one option. There are - to our unknowing minds - infinite other possibilities regarding the makeup of what’s outside our universe. It could be turtles, for all we know.

Further (here’s the important part), the chance of something being true is the number of times it’s true divided by the times it isn’t. Given that shit is just one possibility among infinite, and that 1 divided by infinity is a whole fucking lot, I guess I just threw that smartass’s theory right out the goddamn window didn’t I? If only that smartass was someone cool instead of me playing Devil’s Advocate to myself, I might get some street cred out of the deal.

I want to also toss something else in here. It’s pretty popular these days to make the argument that since our perception of the universe is filtered through our minds, nothing about the Universe matters except that which we perceive. Sort of a corollary to, “I think, therefore I am” that says, “I’m thought, therefore I am”. In other words, the Universe is me*. And since we already established that we don’t know anything about the Universe…

All I’ll say at this point is that it’s a pretty messed-up existence when the most significant thing I can say about myself is that I don’t know anything about myself.

And oh yeah, I’m tagging this post as ‘Meta’ because if this shit isn’t Meta I don’t know what is. In fact, it’s so Meta that another post about this one would probably cause this whole mess of a universe to implode upon itself upon itself upon itself upon itself…

*At this point some redneck in the back row is standing up saying, “Wha…you sayin’…uh…lesssee…that I’m made of…SHIT?”

Now we spin onward to the topic at hand:  procrastination.  There are a lot of ways to define this concept.  My favorite is the following:

“Procrastination is that which makes moot the possibility that one can become a superhero.”

Seems a bit abstract at first, but think of it this way - most of us want to be better people, and the pinnacle of self-improvement is so purely embodied in the superhero spirit.  So why aren’t we all Masters of our personal Universe?

Some folks do have valid excuses, i.e. they’re in the middle of Antartica at some godforsaken research station and how are they supposed to be models of self-improvement when it’s ass-cold in here because Johnson can’t even remember to shut the goddamn door for chrissakes?  For most of us though, it’s not that we can’t in a physics-of-nature-is-preventing-us-from-doing-so sort of way, but rather that we can’t because we simply can’t get enough of our shit together well enough for long enough to do so.  Why? That’s procrastination, brother.

Procrastination is a BITCH.  That’s because if you have an issue with procrastination, and want to solve it, well it’s pretty easy to procrastinate the solution seeing that you have an issue with procrastination, and want to solve it, well it’s pretty easy to procrastinate…well shit, just fuckitall already.

So there you have it, some of us are destined to throw our hands up in the air and accept our nature…and on the other hand are those of us with our noses to the proverbial grindstone who insist upon convincing ourselves and the world that we will eventually triumph over what is most certainly the rawest element of human nature ever conceived if only we read what Ben Franklin, Stephen R. Covey, and all those other jerks have to say on the topic of futility.  Namely, that $29.95+tax at Barnes and Noble will buy you at LEAST a week’s worth of self-confidence, if not a pair of tights and a trusty sidekick.

Those that have read thus far with interest will do well to remind themselves at this point that the world does in fact run fairly smoothly despite the fact that we are so blatantly superhero-less.

We’ve all got our faults; mine include a literal tic that causes me to use ‘have got’ instead of the properly-simpler ‘have’.  What truly separates the great from the average though is not the ability to fix our faults but to work around them.  This is true no matter if the fault in question is a tendency toward procrastination, a wooden leg, or an inability to find humor in my writing.  What the aforementioned jerks REALLY need to write a book about is how to change the rules in our favor as opposed to fighting it out on the home turf of The Man who is constantly keeping us down with his model of superhero-perfection.

Of course if they did, and it worked, well — [NOTE TO SELF:  Finish this part later.]

I am currently sitting in the LIBRARY of my alma mater. Ever wonder why they call it your ‘alma mater‘? My theory is the following:

1. People use words that they think their peers have never heard in order to sound intelligent.

2. A made-up word is by definition one which hasn’t ever been heard by anyone.

3. The smarties that thought up Universities decided that after they graduated and weren’t feeling so smart because they weren’t actively going to school, they could refer to the place they went with a MADE UP WORD so that they would sound smart as provided for in items 1. and 2. above.

4. Hence, therefore, the term ‘alma mater‘ doesn’t mean anything - except that maybe the person using it is feeling a bit insecure in their intelligence. This is, of course, fodder for a whole other post.

There you have it - QED. What, you don’t know what QED means? You sad, sad, education-less individual.