K.I.L. Team

  Now was the time. PMB and I were code named the Korean Infiltration Leader team, or K.I.L. team for short. Puppymonkeybaby joined the force three years ago, just after my internship turned into actual employment. We both started as field agents and were quickly placed together. They called me Bull-Moose Party because of my distant relation to Teddy Roosevelt and in part because I look like him. We had now been tasked with dismantling the nuclear situation in North Korea.
  PMB deployed just before me, right above Kijong-Dong. We had received intel that Kim had been using the location as a front for an underground nuclear sight. I grabbed my parachute with a BMP embroidered on the lip, strapped in my .50 cal revolver, and followed suit. It was nighttime and our stealth bomber was nearly invisible. We swiftly descended to the ground and met no opposition. PMB pulled his heat sensing goggles out of his diaper and placed them on his muzzle. He always wore a pink bow on his tail for these missions. He said it gave him good luck. He was easily the greatest agent I'd ever seen.
  After routine checks of a few of the buildings, we found one by the crappy Eiffel Tower rip-off with an elevator. It asked for a key card but PMB ripped out the device and it took us down promptly. Th elevator was see-through so we got a good look at the facility as we descended. There were hundreds of men armed with rocket launchers and hazmat suits. There were three large battle mechs at the far end and a large straight walkway to the control panel for a massive warhead. I knew that we'd have to fight our way through them some way or another.
  I turned to PMB to tell him we should be stealthy but he jumped through the glass before I could. I knew I couldn't let him go in alone so I had to jump out after him. There were flashing lights all over the place. It looked like a silver disco club decorated with a nuclear holocaust. PMB killed seven soldiers before I even hit the ground. They noticed us rather swiftly and began firing missiles at us. Puppymonkeybaby pulled out his gatling gun and began stopping the projectiles mid-flight. I also stopped quite a few with my revolver. After a swift period, we had slain all of the rocket goons.
  Then, not even a split second later, one hundred ninjas appeared from various vents and corridors. PMB and I began sprinting to the missile. He was grabbing swords and slaying ninjas left and right with his inhuman agility, whereas I had to rely on my vastly over sized handgun. The ninjas almost overtook us but PMB finally used his laser vision and finished them off. The ninjas scattered the floor from end to end. Then they began beeping. Every single one was a bomb. PMB activated his super speed and defused all one hundred of the bombs before they could detonate.
  That is when the mechs activated. They were each twelve feet tall and mounted with a gatling gun and rocket launcher. They formed a defensive perimeter around the hundred foot missile. PMB was about to pounce when they all began to move together. They met in the center of the pathway and formed a ring. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Kim Jung-Un himself jumped into the middle of the robots. He was easily ten feet tall himself with a stomach the size of a smart car. He was wearing nothing but a sumo belt bearing the North Korean flag. He extended his arms to either side and fused with the robots. He turned into a twenty foot, mechanized, Korean, ninja, pig. He spawned two eight foot katanas and charged.
  PMB jumped up and pulled his six foot katana from his diaper and engaged the brute. I began running around to the back of the beast but the samurai-like armor seemed to have no weak spots. PMB was holding his own like Yoda fighting Dooku. He was flipping and spinning and cutting. I began firing my Revolver into a small chink under Kim's right arm. The giant began to cry out in pain as PMB followed up by chopping off the ligament. We had gained the upper hand. The robot began trying to step on me out of desperation and I lost my rounded glasses in the tussle.
  Then he picked me up and I thought all was lost. PMB jumped onto his head and stabbed straight down. The body grew limp and fell to the floor. We had won. I ran over and set the bomb to detonate without launching and we climbed out. PMB activated his pocketcopter as we ran and we flew. I heard the explosion in the distance as a single tear fell out of my eye. We sang the "Star Spangled Banner" all the way home.

A Piece On Six Word Memoirs

Caloric intake doesn't mean a thing.

Black, gray, pink; my favorite colors.

Dad is gone, mom isn't here.

Wrenches, screwdrivers, still can't fix it.

A strong mother challenged by Atlas.

They don't get it, do they?

Diving right in. Please love me.

Bones crack below roaring car engines.

Fix son cereal, change the world.

All us nerds will rise up.

Forged in fire, softened by love.

On the Record

"One war at a time." 

-Abraham Lincoln

"I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear." 

-Nelson Mandela

"Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country." 

-John F. Kennedy

"With great power comes great responsibility." 

-Ben Parker

"Daddy needs to express some rage." 

-Deadpool

"You can't just make me different and leave." 

-Miles Halter

"No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful." 

-Wade Watts

"I've gotta go see about a girl." 

-Sean Maguire

"No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world." 

-Robin Williams

Writers as Readers

  I'm going to be real here, I'm about to spoil some books into the ground. If you have any desire to read these books without knowing some of the larger plot twists then you should skip the paragraphs beginning with their names. 
  My favorite book is easily Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It is a book about a bunch of nerdy shenanigans between a depressed anti-social gunter with no money and his friends who turn out to be far different and vastly similar all at once. Let us start with your most pertinent question: what in sam hell is a gunter? Well I am going to tell you. In the year of 2012 the OASIS is released. It is a virtual reality gaming system that was designed to be able to grow indefinitely by user contributions. The man who creates it kicks the bucket and leaves all of his fortune to who ever can find the easter egg hidden in the game. The players who seek this out are deemed gunters. This book is my favorite because it is littered with nerdy jokes, nerdy references, nerdy love stories, and nerdy social awkwardness. It is a bundle of joy and despair and badassery that cannot be ignored by modern readers.

  My second favorite book is Looking for Alaska by John Green. When I finished reading Looking for Alaska, I was angry afterwards because that's not how you end a book. You can't kill off my main character's love interest and not provide me with an answer to whether or not it was a suicide. That's just a dick move. In all honesty, the book is beautifully and crudely worded while maintaining the interest of the ignoramus and the intellectual alike. It is a study in love and despair and grieving, taking you through the life of a boy named Miles as he falls in love with a girl, proceeds to make out with the girl, and then falls apart because she dies. Bundles of joy from John Green, folks.
  I think that it is important to read alot because just out of these two books I have received worlds of inspiration. I firmly believe that the more you read the more effectively you write. There is something to be said about the fact that authors like John Green, Ernest Cline, Stephen King, Maya Angelou, John Steinbeck, et cetera, were all well-read. After all, there's no sense in expecting people to read your baffling and bullshit if you aren't willing to step into theirs.

Release of the Lonely

I felt no shame about masturbating. Thanks to Anorak’s Almanac, I now thought of it as a normal bodily function, as necessary and natural as sleeping or eating. 

I've always been one for shock value. Whether it be in the form of comedy or gratuitous horror, I have found it to be a necessity that you do something to maintain a reader's attention. I have truly never found a bit of random dicktitude (my made up word for the action of dicking around) to be of negative affections. It is easiest to get your message across when your readers, or listeners, are paying attention. Even in our favorite books I can guarantee that we have all had to skim through some less than interesting groupings of monotonous lettering. One of my favorite examples of throwing a curve straight out of left field (I know nothing about baseball) would be the section of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One devoted to the importance of masturbation. It reads like so:
AA 241:87—I would argue that masturbation is the human animal’s most important adaptation. The very cornerstone of our technological civilization. Our hands evolved to grip tools, all right—including our own. You see, thinkers, inventors, and scientists are usually geeks, and geeks have a harder time getting laid than anyone. Without the built-in sexual release valve provided by masturbation, it’s doubtful that early humans would have ever mastered the secrets of fire or discovered the wheel. And you can bet that Galileo, Newton, and Einstein never would have made their discoveries if they hadn’t first been able to clear their heads by slapping the salami (or “knocking a few protons off the old hydrogen atom”). The same goes for Marie Curie. Before she discovered radium, you can be certain she first discovered the little man in the canoe. 
It wasn’t one of Halliday’s more popular theories, but I liked it.
Now, whether I choose to agree completely with these words I feel like there is something to be gained by them. In listening to what he has to say it is easy to see the oppression us nerds have come to face from those who deem us unworthy of attention or sexual activities. This could be taken a step further to say that, on the whole, we aren't even considered functioning members of society by most. I know that personally I've had to adapt to a number of different social norms to obtain any kind of companionship. We aren't allowed to be us and masturbation is just one form of coping. Even if you are against it you have to admit that it's better than getting drunk or being high all the time. We thrive off of the noble sacrifice of adult performers and sleezy internet perverts. We make bank on the devices in your pocket and the words in your head. Now I want you to think about all of the people you have oppressed, you can't say that you haven't because at one point everyone has, and tell yourself all the ways you could've made them a little less lonely.

On Pillows

  The room is full and lonely. I sit up and admire the mementos of camaraderie. The times passed that brought me solace in company. I see the Statue of Liberty and the time I went to New York with friends from school. I see the debates trophies and all the acquaintances that provides. These are just a few of hundreds of small things I have kept over the years. With all these memories of other people, perhaps the loudest memory is just behind me. I turn to lay back down and peer at the fluff and cloth that I have become so dependent upon. It at first reminds me of years of pain. As a child I always isolated myself from people, and I suppose I still do, for any reason that struck my fancy. I cut off friends because I hated losing people. Rather ironic is it not? I cut off family because I saw myself through their eyes as nothing but a disappointment. I cut off the world entirely that lay outside the four walls of the room in which I was assigned. 

  I would stay in my room and play with Legos, usually Bionicles. Sometimes I would play video games. I say sometimes because I was often grounded. My pillow quite often saw the worst of me. I would cry into it, scream into it, beat it up, and sleep soundly it. The pillow became a sort of benchmark I suppose. It began to symbolize so many different things. It has supported my entire life so far. I love too hard and care too much and the only thing that has let me hold onto it indefinitely is that shitty, crumpled, blue pillow from Wal-Mart. I suppose you can infer a number of things about me from that. I'm a hopeless romantic and I guarantee that there are enough dried tears on my pillowcase to fill a small pond. 
  With all that darkness in mind it has long been a symbol of hope and security. There is a lot of achievement in returning home and lying down and feeling your feet breath a separate sigh of relief. The highlight of my day is lying down and letting the words flow through my head and listen to the thousands of poems and stories that fill my brain that could never all be transcribed. That pillow has heard more of my thoughts, opinions, and words than anyone in my life ever will. I know that I am at my happiest when I am burrowed in the solitude of cracked memory foam and broken zippers. My pillow is shitty. My pillow is blue. My pillow is from Wal-Mart. I love the hell out of my pillow.

The Good Fight

  As I fall, I thought nothing would catch me. The miles there were between my falling face and the ground with which I would soon grow intimate. This fight was not one of rage or pride but one of passion and love. The man before me is dating the love of my life. He is a disrespectful brute with no regard for others and a lack of concern for the value of a female. He also happens to have just punched me square in the face. Now I am not small I would say but he is considerably larger than me. I finally made contact with the ground, feeling a buzzing in my hears and getting dizzy as my head bounced off the cement. 
  I jumped up as quickly as I could, not completely stable but also unwilling to show weakness. I swung at where I knew he had been and caught him in the jaw. He did not go down but he was obviously shaken. My head was still spinning and I barely notice his next flurry of punches in time to get my hands up. He drew back for a big hit and I was able to hook him in the kidney and gain some ground.
  He was on the wrestling team and I was a boxer, so I knew where I had to keep this fight. He quickly realized that he would be too slow for me on our feet so he tried to tackle me. My head was beginning to clear however and I just barely moved. He whipped and whirled and I hit him right on the temple. I pictured the times he had beaten her. I heard all the times he had diminished her. I felt all the times he had broken her heart. I smashed his face in a little more for every little thing that entered my mind. 
  I began to notice that a crowd was gathering around us. The air was crisp and the sun was hot. My fury lightened and the world rushed back in. I stood back from his unconscious body, smelling the freshly cut grass and absorbing the cries of appraisal coming from the mass of flesh around me. And I felt bad. I had never wanted to be the guy that humiliated somebody else. I had promised myself that my fighting was only for self defense and letting off steam. 
  I sat on the curb as he began to stir. That is when she showed up. She looked at me and then at him and back. She had always doubted my ability to fight him. I stood and smiled and walked over to her.
  "You don't have to be worried anymore," I said, "it's over.
  Her eyes began to water and I spread my arms for a hug. A tear rolled down a bruise under her left eye, no doubt left by him, and she left out a few sobs. She slapped me. She never said a word to accompany the humiliation. She just smacked me in the face and ran over to him. 
  I stood there with my arms hanging, taking the brunt of the rejection. I wish that he would get up and just kill me now. I close my eyes and picture being lost, ending all of this and being happy. I picture him getting up, slamming my skull into the ground, and ending my suffering. I convince myself that if I dream long and hard enough, it will come true.