I, here-on-out, don’t give a shit if someone refers to my pets as a him or her. As long as they get the species right, that’s fine. Some clown comes in calling the cats zebras, he’s hitting the bricks regardless.

/me lies in bed staring at the ceiling, afraid to fall asleep.

Well what about this? You’re making your way down the steps toward the exits having the same conversation everyone else is having when the music softens, the words move to the side of the screen, and the GAG REEL STARTS!!!

Now you’re left standing in the stairway and watching the gags as you keep walking on the way out because you’ll be damned if you’re going to turn around and march back to your seat. You could move to the side and stand there to see the gags, but then eveyone will know that you’re the kinda dude that gets ahead of themselves and are now reaping what you’ve sown.

So you walk right out, listening to the fading laughter of the rest of the theater that kept their cool and stayed in their seats. Well, not tonight.

Tonight, we caught I Love You Man, which was funny as all get out. When the credits began, I felt an unseen hand on my shoulder and a whisper in my mind saying, “Hang out, brother. Let’s play this one cool.”

While everyone else filed out, we sat it out to glory. The gags came on and all the jokers standing in the stairwells looked over at me with a sorry look on their face as if to say, “Dang bro. You played it cool and I’m played for a fool.” I’ll give them a nod, but that’s it. I’ve got gags to catch.

It wasn’t long before the women started flowing over into the mens room. One of the initial pioneers into our facilities was a girl who was falling over drunk. She marched into the bathroom declaring she had to go! She dropped her drawers, and to everyone’s amazement, sat right into the excrement-filled bowl. The seat was up, so she basically plopped right into it, sloshing the fluids out everywhere.

I saw her the next day at graduation and the juxtaposition of her dolled up in her cap and gown smiling for pictures with her family and the image of her wiggling her way out of a bowl filled with shit and piss, saturated with bodily fluids with her soaked pants around her ankles was almost too much to handle.

My favorite activity during these snow days was to get to work on that season’s snow cave which would serve as the staging ground for countless other snow activities. The key to a good snow cave was a well hidden hillside that was drifted over to minimize construction time.

The last snow cave that I ever built was one for the books. It had enough space for me to move around, stockpile snowballs, vertical air vent, and a movable snow boulder as a door. I was set.

One fateful afternoon, I was planning an epic snowball attack on the neighbor’s garage when things went downhill fast. Teika, our Alaskan malumute, was bounding about in typical Alaskan fashion when she bounded down the hill my cave was strategically hidden.

I, blissfully unaware of the ensuing chaos, was constructing my aresenal of snowballs when a full grown, overweight dog fell through the ceiling of my snow cave. From the look on her face, she was just as surprised as I was that she suddenly found herself inside my cave. Unfortunately, with her came an avalanche if snow that filled my cave in an instant.

I’m as claustrophobic as the next guy, as long as the next guy flips his fuckin lid when his snow cave collapses around him like I did. Teika and I thrashed with all of our might to power through the casket of snow we found ourselves in. Her front paws were going crazy, so I positioned her on front like a lawn tiller while she burrowed our way through the snow. We eventually tumbled out of the hillside with our lives that day. Teika would eventually lose hers to obesity years later, but I didn’t forget the lesson I learned that day. Don’t go where you aren’t sure of unless you’re square with your god because there’s no telling when your card is up.

We’re talking brave new world stuff here, folks. Say I want to blog about how I gave 72 cents to some homeless guy because it would make me feel better about myself? Now I don’t have to save the mental image of the man’s warm, toothless grin in my head until I’m in front of my computer. I can simply snap a photo, or iPhoto, and blog the shit out that mess and be on my way.

In a way, I feel like that monkey that goes nuts with the bone in the beginning of 2001. I’m at the forefront of evolution. Join me or get trampled and then blogged about being trampled by me…instantly.