Make Choices. Your Bitch.

There is nothing we live with harder than our choices...

Me and Santa were sitting around the other day shooting the shit and after several Car Bombs (the old man has a real affinity for those things), Disciple Rob pushed his way past the other five Robs and stared the old codger straight in the eyes sitting above the rosy red cheeks and said something pretty profound:

"Red suited mushroom man, choices are the family you can't file a restraining order against."

Santa looked sadly at the pictures of Mrs. Claus that adorned his living room, shed a tear, and replied softly, "Fuckin' A man. Fuckin' A."

It is in this spirit that I've come to the bar tonight with my friend Miller Lite to try to soothe your ills, to ease your pains, to quench your horny thirst. A girl who married the wrong man asked me to provide some insight into love and life and choices and maybe some other things and she couldn't have asked someone betterer than me. While I've attempted to convince her that having an affair with me would broaden her cultural horizons and possibly answer some of life's stickier questions, I've been informed that her husband may in fact have a gun or five. So if the pen is truly mightier than the sword, let's get deep.

My dad e-mailed me one of his Jesus God America forwards today. Here's how it starts:

"Love ya!

One morning you will never wake up.
Do all your friends know you love them?"

I like this strategy. No matter what you're about to say to someone, if you start it out with "Love ya!", how can they get mad? And if they do, they suck.

"One morning, you will never wake up." I'm not going to lie. While I love everyone, there are some people in that little "everyone" category who I'm praying won't wake up one morning. Maybe tomorrow? Or maybe just me? And if it's me, I'm using this forum to demand a really super neat funeral since I've never had the chance to get married before and I've been to plenty of your fucking weddings. Which I loved, by the way. Love ya!

"Do all your friends know you love them?" Duh. Yeah. Some of you I've loved in more fun ways than others, but I really do love each and every one of you. I guess. I mean, I haven't received a card or a gift from any of you in a while, but it's cool.

All this stuff is the foundation for each day. You wake up knowing you love, that you could die or that others could die, and you hope that you've had the chance to get the last word in--I mean, you want people to know you care. But I used to think that choices in life were sorta like those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books I read when I was a kid--where you'd get to a certain point in the story and you'd be given a choice as to what happens next:

"If you want the Hardy Boys to go into the haunted mansion to do some more exploring, turn to page 26. If you want the Hardy Boys to go find Nancy Drew for a wicked three-way, turn to page 32."

Ya know, like that. But choices aren't such a fucking crapshoot, kids. If you wake up and do all that shit we talked about before and then decide what's important and what you truly want, you tend to make the right choices--even if they lead to a few nights in the pokey here and there. Hey, you can sit behind bars with regrets or you can go into jail full throttle--knowing that guy got what he fucking had coming to him.

I used to like to believe that Katie Holmes was the victim of a public kidnapping. But as time has passed, I now think that she decided that there were certain things in life she wanted--wealth, security, a permanent place on the cover of US Weekly. These things weren't as important as--I don't know--love, credibility, independence. And while we all may dog her for that choice because we value the latter, Katie may in fact have decided that while those things are nice, she can live with the former. Hey, with enough drugs, the whole Tom Cruise reality might not be so bad!

So I suppose I know what I want. No, really. I mean it! I want a job that pays for my cable and my CDs, a girl who loves me and that I love all over my apartment in various ways, and a social life that gives me minimal headaches. That's pretty much it. And I know this when I wake up and I know this when I'm making the choices I make that are in accordance with this supercool American dream of mine.

In summary, hot blonde sexy little princess, you've got to stop making choices that stray from the basic things you've decided you truly want. You fucked up because you made choices out of fear and perceived obligation and convention and all that shit. But ultimately, all the people enveloped in that little circle of bad decisions you made will figure you out because they'll be able to see into those deep and pretty eyes of yours what you really want. And when they know that the truth doesn't involve them--well let's just say it's never happy good fun time. Rip the Band-Aid off quickly before you need surgery from an expensive doctor outside of your insurance company's network to get it off. Choices are the family you can't get rid of. You have to face them and deal with them and defeat them and make the right ones before you're too old and weak and worn out by the world to do so.

Don't end up like poor Santa with an alcohol/painkiller addiction, a bad marriage, and eight fucking reindeer who shit everywhere. I've made some bad choices. But I've made some good choices and yeah--they hurt sometimes at night when all the lights are out and I've got nothing but BBC Five Live playing on my computer to keep me company. However, life as it is now may not be sparkly and the single guy's porn fantasy I was sure someone had promised me. But it is mine. And I can live with that. I can sleep on that. I can hope with that.

Album of the Week: "Let It Die"

Artist: Feist

Song Highlights: "Gatekeeper", "Mushaboom", "One Evening", "Inside and Out"

Song of the Day: "Phantom Limb"

Artist: The Shins

Album: "Wincing the Night Away"

Lyric of Possible Relevance:

"So, when they tap our mundane heads,

To zombie-walk in our stead,

This town seems hardly worth our time,

And we'll no longer memorize or rhyme,

To fall along in our crime,

Stepping over what now towers to the sky,

With no connection."