Oh, blogger, you wacky web thingy. I can't enter in a title for this post. I don't know why. Perhaps because my computer is made entirely out of potatos. Or something.

Anyway, this week's theme (which is almost over! We are masters of timely writing!) is Transit, if you couldn't guess, and it's especially relevant to me right now, as I'm noving to New York City for some reason. I guess. I mean, everyone does eventually, right? Unless you're like James, and live in Chicago, and are like, whatevs*. But given that right now I live in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere, it'll be a nice shift. For example, when bored, I can walk out of my sublet, and see things. As opposed to now, where I basically just get bored and then eat food.

*Whatevs indeed, James.

It's not really too new for me. I've been to New York before, and I know not to look up at them fancy-pants tall buildings (else betray my sorghum-root chewing, squirrel-eatin', hee-haw watching roots), though the last time I was there I got this awful sore throat. It wasn't too bad, since I talked like Tom Waits for a solid week, and got a free cup of tea at this cafe once. So I can't help but wonder if Real Tom Waits gets things like that - people offering him cough drops, throat lozenges, soothing chamomile tea. It must be pretty nice!

Speaking of scary things, I am infested with bird mites. They came from a nest of baby birds that live out on the back porch. Needless to say, the birds no longer live there, and their mites are slowly going away too. Having been infested with things before, though, I gotta say, bird mites are the way to go - they wash off easy, don't leave any horrifying, itchy marks, and barely bite at all.

Though, right, yes, Transit. I take the train. I would take the train to the effing moon if I could. It's like riding in a larger plane, where instead of being surrounded by vacationers, you are surrounded by one of four types of people, which I shall detail thusly.

1. Menonites - there will be dozens of them, and they all leave around Philadelphia. To where? Who knows! Once there was a large family of them on the same train as I, and they had an adorable child. The child, maybe two years old, kept walking back to me and staring. The anxious father, who looked to be about eighteen, would quickly scoop the child up, like I was the devil or something. When the father dropped the child on it's head while disembarking, I couldn't help but feel that my revenge was complete. Then I found out I was deriving joy from a child's injury.

I am good people!

2. Drug Dealers - you will know them, because they are dressed very well. Suspiciously well. Like, shouldn't be riding the train well. Their luggage is nice, their clothes are nice, and their cell phones are shiny and clean. They make poor conversationalists, though, perhaps because they hate the game, or something. Whatever, they're almost as big a bunch of douchebags as the menonites.

3. Old People - there was a time in my life when I didn't have any friends below the age of 65, so I dig old people. They're frequently crazy about Jesus. I once had an old man walk up to me, and ask me if I was a Christian. I responded that yes, I am, I'm Catholic. He then told me that boy, he's sure glad he knows the love of Jesus Christ. And I was like, yep. We then sat in awkward silence for two hours, before he started talking about Pittsburgh. Another time, I sat next to an older black lady, who was accompanying her enfeebled mother aboard the train. We talked about how people who don't believe in evolution are dumb. She was pretty keen on Jesus, now that I think about.

4. Young Jerks - the category that I fall into. They ride the train and talk loudly on their cellular phones about what Paula is doing and omg are you going to Claudine's tonight and Kendra's dating Michael again I thought they broke up! Many of them are trying to be young professionals, to which I respond, ha ha, you wouldn't be riding the train if you were successful, your ass would be on an aeroplane.

Passive Aggression is the only way to meet new people.

A working class hero is something to ... Be? Be in? Bean? Enunciate!

Internet! Hly crap! What have I done to harm you?

I'm actually typing this into a series of what look to be lines on a white void... oh, there it goes. Hello! My computer is a hunk of eight-yaer-old gaerbage. With five gigs, yet unfilled with strange, unlistenable music that only I like.

Speaking of which, I think I'm attending the Bitchfork* music festival at some point. I just don't know when. I'm vaguely aware that it's happening - my self sabotage has only just begun. Maybe I can sleep on James's's couch. Maybe I can sleep in an alleyway! Chicago is the town that doesn't exactly sleep, but stays up all night reading and maybe watching a little TV, drifting off around four, until some guy starts puking (like some kind of perverse coo-coo bird) in the alleyway around five.

*I saw someone else call it that, and thought that it was the very height of wit.

Anyway, I'm in a coffee shop right now, and was pretty much convinced that I was just going to be the old-looking, sullen, beardy guy, and then like, eight people older than me came in! One of them, I think, was the janitor at my high school. He may have some kind of infection or maybe his belly is swollen with gasses. Is that a beer belly? So I feel pretty good about myself, since my own beer belly is yet in larval form.

The only other people in the shop (which I think closes in three minutes) are some teenagers with bad hair and black T-shirts and skateboards, and they were gossiping savagely about Karen and maybe where they should go next. I really wish, sometimes, that I hadn't spent the entirety of my teenage years playing dungeons and dragons (omg monstrous manual five? WTF am I going to do with all these monsters? There are not enough dungeons in the world for this. I call shenanigans, dungeons and dragons) and instead making new friends or driving or drinking illegally or trying meth or whatever. Out of purely intellectual curiousity. It's like how I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be a girl or good looking.

Anyway, my Iced Tea Latte is rapidly septerating, and the barista is shooting me dirty looks, so I'ma cut this short.

Also, screw the theme week.

In Which the First Theme Week is Introduced

Hello!

Welcome to the blog. I'm Thomas. Hi, how are you doing? I love what you've done with your hair. No, no, not ironically - I really mean it. I accents your face. Before we get going in earnest, I think it's important to mention that Zach has made his way into the eye of the internet itself.

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=4543

So, how's that for legitimacy?

As mentioned earlier, we're just saying hello. It's something I don't do every day, because I'm basically a recluse. The people that I say hello to are captives, people working in the service industry who I buy my food from. I don't mean to sound like an uptight Roman aristocrat, but I do enjoy trying to lighten the day of the working class. Actually, I totally meant to sound like an uptight Roman aristocrat. Someone needs to fetch me wine, and to tell that one slave to dance - his antics amuse me.

Personal predilections aside, saying hello is an interesting sensation. We are presenting ourselves with our worst foot forward; we are not who we introduce ourselves as. Our real friends know what lazy, indulgent, inept, and deliriously self-important sophists we are. Meeting someone new, we have, what, thirty seconds to convince the new person that we are witty, charming, urbane, athletic, and good looking.

Further, people carry filthy diseases that they then transmit onto you.

Meeting new people brings with it untold existential stress. Since we often seek to define ourselves through how others see us, to hold very complimentary mirrors up to reality, then, what we say and do literally becomes who we are. How many people out there have met a really cute guy/girl/other at a bar, stumbled out an awkward introduction, and then felt like leaping off a cliff, because the sad charade of their existence isn't worth the resources they're consuming? Similarly, how often do you meet some drunken, unshaved lout, and then the two of you continue to talk the rest of the night, discussing the threat of Uggo Vampires?* Meeting new people, then, becomes an inadvertant form of narcisissm. We value strangers for their appearances, because they present themselves in the ways that we wish we were. Their rejection is a confirmation of our own faults. Likewise, talking to crazy people about made-up undead menaces serves only to compliment our own social grace and tact, that we can so impolitely convince someone less than ourselves of the rightness of our ideas.

*I mention this only to let the rest of the world know - in our struggle against these unnattractive princes of the night, you are not alone.

The internet is the worst thing ever, if only because audiences are then held captive. The written word is historically unable to convey proper conversational dynamism that's needed to create proper communicatin'. Which is why, perhaps, that the upsurge in blogs (like this one!) is a good thing for society and for language. More options mean more divergence from tradition. While small-minded hill-people may smear Youtube with their hateful screed, overexposure to this lowest-common-denominator numbs our senses. All that is foul about spelling and grammar set into the ignorable norms, while people who are inventive with language fall to the much-noticed margins of popular viewing.

I can only hope that Eleven Names is able to follow through on it's original mission statement* and provide some kind of entertainment or whatever to you, the viewer. Incidentally, I did just re-read the above, and after reading "inventive with language", I kind of want to jump off a bridge. SEE? SEE?

*Zach: The internet can pay for our beer, Thomas!
Thomas: Where do I sign up?