Scott Blevins

How long has it been?
For how many nights?
Feeling so feral,
With no end in sight.

You enter the room,
no knock on the door.
Two minutes later,
You’re down on the floor.

The sounds you are making
the moans and the screams
I kiss you all over,
then rip off your jeans.

You lustfully kiss me,
with thirst in your eyes.
Your hand travels downward,
-a perfect surprise.

I kiss on your neck,
and bite on your ear.
Your back arches sharply,
as I pull you near.

I taste of your body,
I taste of your soul.
Your legs wrap around me,
and you make me whole.

You claw up my back,
I pull on your hair.
You’re trembling towards passion
I’m taking you there.

I lift you up roughly,
You quickly hit wall
Your siren song wailing
I answer your call.

Breathing and panting,
Your hips move with mine
You tremble and quiver,
Our legs intertwined.

Licking your back,
and breathing your hair
I’m turning you over,
Your eyes meet my stare.

As furniture sways,
our movements in sync.
We’re coming up empty
We’ve both passed the brink.

Your lips finish mine
You tremble and moan
We shudder and halt
Our passion is shown.

Life isn’t empty,
Life isn’t hell.
Your body completes me.
You know me so well.

But memories fade,
and time passes by.
I try to remember,
that look in your eye.

I’m feeling so empty,
-hollow and flawed.
But once in your arms,
I truly saw god.

Several weeks ago, I had a conversation that made me a little annoyed / amused. I was talking to a friend of mine and I suggested that we go to Starbucks™ for some coffee™ and conversation. Somehow, that was the worst thing I possibly could have suggested, because she then told me with a fair amount of venom: “Starbucks™ is a giant corporation and I don’t support them. You shouldn’t drink Starbucks™ because you are just supporting their giant global empire. I can’t believe you would want to go there. Honestly Scott, I expected better of you. I thought you were someone like me.”

To say the least, I was completely incredulous. I mean, I certainly agree with her in spirit, but she was being a hypocrite with that stance and I informed her of this fact. She asked me to justify that remark and so I did.

I said, “Look, I know you shop at Wal-Mart™. I know this because you’ve told me. I know this because we’ve even gone together before.”

She looked at me and blinked for a minute and then finally with an air of resignation, she said: “Point taken. Do you want a Frappuccino™? That actually sounds delicious right now.”

This is an open letter to the driver of the giant white Chevy truck with camouflage accents:

Dear Sir,

I wanted to write you this letter to let you know that I think you have the entirely wrong idea about me. When you decided to suddenly merge into the spot where my car was because you needed to make a right turn up the road, I appeared to be visibly upset. I apologize for this, because I was really only honking my horn to show my appreciation at the sudden change of scenery.

The truth of the matter was that I was considering just driving on the shoulder/ditch anyway and you merely helped me to make that decision. I think it was for my own good anyway because I know I can be awfully indecisive like that sometimes.

Also, when you saw me flashing you a “sign” with my right hand, I want you to know that it seemed to me that you got really angry. I couldn’t understand why someone who had just received the right lane as a gift like that could be upset at me for what I did except that I realized that you might have thought I was flashing you a gang sign.

I want to assure you, Mr. 50 year old redneck, that I was merely extending my middle finger and thumb because it is the universal symbol for “Do you speak sign language?”. In reality, I was trying to communicate so many things in that gesture such as:

1. I love your garishly huge white truck with quad rear tires. I think it is so cool how your front has only two tires and the back-end flares outwardly to accommodate your ridiculously awesome 6-tires-in-total configuration. My awe was merely compounded by your extensive use of forest-camouflage to accent and enhance your already sweet ride.

2. I wanted to let you know that I appreciated you giving me the opportunity to test my reflexes. It isn’t every day that a person gets to press their clutch and brake, shift into first gear from fourth, and honk their horn at the same time. It was an adrenaline rush and I am grateful to you for that.

3. I also wanted to let you know that I wasn’t at all worried about tearing the innards from the bottom of my car because I know how a Honda Civic is built for sudden off-road travel at 55 MPH. I wanted to simply reassure you that everything was going to be OK.

For some reason though, you felt like I had insulted you… and rightfully so. After all, it was clearly my fault and lack of communication that got us into this situation.
I realize that my bright-red car was probably hard to see in the afternoon sun because I must have been reflecting the camo from your truck, thus making me invisible. Camo reflected on red can have that affect I suppose.

At the time, however, I didn’t understand why you pulled off the road ahead of me and got out of your truck with a menacing look on your face.

To be honest, kind sir, I was surprised you would have considered the course of action that you took in this situation. If I had been you, I would have been grateful for the suddenly-open right lane, waved a greeting and turned at the light as you had intended to do.

However, you felt the need to approach my vehicle. Well, let me tell you that I know I can be unreasonable sometimes but let me assure you that I don’t normally exit my vehicle with the intention of hurting other human beings. I know I didn’t help matters any when I took a look at you and laughed. I didn’t mean to be openly scornful of your battle-prowess sir, but you were twice my age and half my size. It just seemed amusing at the time.

So you started yelling things at me and I quickened my pace towards you with my fists balled up and my neck muscles flexed. I hope that it wasn’t the reason you turned around and ran back into your truck and sped off. Please believe me when I tell you that when I get that “demon look” on my face and I am all tensed up like that it only means I was wanting to shake your hand and tell you all of these things in person.

I want to let you know that I am a fairly harmless guy. There is no way I would have beat you senseless with my fists on the side of the road and left you there to wake up sunburned and bruised later in the afternoon as a lesson in driving and humility. I really don’t know why you got so freaked out by my wanting to meet you because all of this was your idea and doing to begin with.

Nevertheless, you have taught me a valuable lesson. In the future I will do a much better job of showing my appreciation for sudden and forced lane-changes.

Oh, and rednecks piss me off. That too.

Sincerely,

Scott Blevins
The Driver of the Red Honda Civic

Why hasn’t anyone in Hollywood ever created the perfect movie? It wouldn’t be that hard. All you would have to do is take all the right elements, boil them in a pot and you would have an instant hit to rival Star Wars and Terminator 2 combined.

First of all, you’d need a script. No problem. There are literally tens of thousands of aspiring writers in LA waiting for their big shot. Most of them would be willing to submit a script just on the off-chance that they would gain notoriety from it. Just offer up a competition for a “Co-Writer” credit on any scripts you use elements from. Then you wouldn’t even need to pay for a decent script.

Now, the part where Hollywood messes up every time is who they let make the judgment call of what makes a decent script. Don’t let a single director or producer put their grubby paws on it. Just find the pickiest group of geeks in the area (Might I suggest a Linux Users Group or perhaps a Star Trek convention), let them all get together and read them all, and decide on what sounds corny and what will be put into the movie.

There are several great advantages to this. You wouldn’t have to pay them. They would almost certainly volunteer their time for free. Most of them won’t have active sex lives and they live for crap like this instead. Also, they would nit-pick the tiniest of elements and you can bet the script wouldn’t contain a single plot-hole or factual mistake.

Now, what would this movie be about you might ask? That is easy. Just combine the best and most popular genres and mash them all together into some super inter-galactic fantasy scenario where you can have the coolest and most popular elements all in the same movie. Picture it… a ninja and a pirate are trapped on a space station and being attacked by evil wizards who are hurling spells at them from their giant killer robots. Meanwhile, a super secret agent has infiltrated the military compound that contains the genetically enhanced killing-monkeys using futuristic weapons like “sonic swords” and laser guns.

Now, with your perfect script in hand, you pick the most popular stars with the biggest egos and offer them percentages of the gross to star in your movie. Also, you promise every single one top-billing on a series of posters where each one gets to be the star. You add a director to that mix and you are in business.

Find a studio that typically bankrolls really shitty movies and you sell them the plot. They won’t recognize the genius of the film of course, but you will have to simply tell one white lie and you will be in business. Tell them you are close to getting Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Segal to star in the movie where one will play a martial arts cyborg and the other is a kickboxer and they battle to the death with the Rock while spouting cheesy dialog. They will instantly hand you a check made out to cash for 1 billion dollars.

Take the money and spend most of it on production. Not the typical crap, but the bare essentials. Set design, editing, lights, the best camera equipment and some donuts and coffee. Make sure you buy sleeves of coffee cups from the trendiest of LA coffee shops and then secretly brew Folgers. The stars will be too coked out to notice the subterfuge and you will save about $10,000 per gallon of coffee this way.

Ok, this is the most important part of the process. You have a movie.. You have lots of raw footage to process and deliver in a spectacularly cinematic format. DON’T HIRE A HUGE SPECIAL EFFECTS STUDIO. Your costs will be astronomical. They will charge you 1,000,000 to render a single eyebrow on your super-monkeys. You need to do this next part on the cheap too, and you need people who are both talented and have lots of time on their hands to do it.

Once again, recruit an army of artistic geeks and give them all a killer Apple workstation in exchange for editing and rendering CG on your movie. Give them unlimited hot-pockets and Dr. Pepper and offer to pay for liposuction and tummy-tucks for the lot of them after the movie is complete. They will jump at the offer and your movie will look better than anything has ever looked before. The hyper-realism that will result can only be achieved by a super-geek at 3am on a Thursday in between D&D gaming sessions and looking at porn on the Internet. Rest assured, they will also nit-pick this part to death and your effects will be flawless.

Now you have your finished movie. It should have cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000 to produce. (Which will make the stars working for percentages of gross *very* happy.) Now you screen it, but before you do, write letters to every single special-interest group in America informing them of the travesties being perpetrated in the film. Pose as a concerned mother who has nothing else to do but lust after the pool-boy and watch reruns of “Little House on the Prairie”. This will incite all the publicity you will ever need. The movie will be so infamous that by the time everyone finally watches it, you will have made billions from the merchandise alone.

Release the movie to DVD exactly three weeks after it opens in the box-office. You will have already shattered all the records anyway beyond being touchable by any movie that follows. You will then make money hands over fist on the overpriced DVD editions which you will then proceed to change every 6 months like clockwork. Simply change the title menu on the DVD and redesign the cover-art and call it something else. Use the following keywords to help you keep things constantly fresh: Special Edition, Mega Ultra-Platinum Edition, Gold Edition, Special Enhanced Super Deluxe Edition, Killer Ninja Screaming Defecating Edition, Silver Screen Powerful Supernova Explosion Edition… etc.

The truly pathetic thing is that this movie will still be better than all other Hollywood films combined and it will have made more money too. You will have made enough money off this one film to buy every single movie studio in Hollywood and pay cash for them. Now that you own Hollywood and the MPAA, release every single movie ever made on the internet to be downloaded for a small fee. Don’t use any sort of DRM (Digital Rights Management) and let people also download a tool to convert the file to use on any device they wish. (DVD player, iPod, PSP, Palm, Etc).

You will then make more money in a month than the entire country of Japan will for the next 30 years. Life will be good and since you run things now, there will be no more movies with the line: “He’s holding me back! or “Meesa sayin nuttin.” And you will rest easy on your bed made of shredded 100 dollar bills, watching the best movie in the universe.

Dear girl I had dinner with in March,

I wanted to take this opportunity to say a few things that I was entirely too shocked to say so very long ago. I wanted to let you know that I appreciated the opportunity to be reminded of why I generally hold the practice of dating in a bit of disdain and why I am so picky when it comes to spending time with people.

You were the attractive, dark-haired beauty with fierce eyes that was shopping at Barnes and Noble, and I was the charming man who was quick to introduce myself with a smile and some light banter about literature. For whatever reason, your personality was not apparent to me at the time and I asked you out to dinner. I had assumed, at the time, that your apparent affinity for reading put you at an advantage for an enjoyable evening. I guess I wasn’t counting on you showing up drunk, 15 minutes late for our appointed meeting time.

Now, please be clear that I am not saying I was wrong, but I am completely unaccustomed to the behavior I witnessed and it was probably my fault that we didn’t hit it off famously that night. I wanted to apologize for that evening, because I did not mean to look so incredulous and upset whenever you loudly commented about how one time you were at this restaurant the food was “fucking shitty” but that how it had “not tasted like ass again” the past few times you had gone.

I am sure that the shocked looks from the other patrons was because they were entirely too uptight and didn’t realize how comparing food to fecal matter in an upscale dining establishment was uproariously funny. At least I assume it was funny, because you laughed so hard you sprayed me with the sip of your water that you were talking through at the time. Don’t worry, I rather enjoyed the act of wiping my face off with my napkin because it gave me the opportunity to hide my face lest I be seen by someone of any importance. This was just the beginning of the fun, I was quick to learn, because it seems that alcohol gives you license to speak freely, unencumbered by such trite and trivial things like manners or courtesy.

At first, I felt bad for our waiter because of the long-winded explanation you gave him on what constitutes good service and the expectations that you had for him that evening. I am now sure that it was a good thing that you did because I rather enjoyed thinking about the saliva, or worse, that was very likely in the food I was consuming. I am sure had you not given him that dire warning about his tip being on the line that he would have ignored us completely. So, again, I must bow you in gratitude.

As dinner progressed, I was more than happy to watch you shovel large forkfuls of food into your mouth. It is always nice seeing food being ground apart up close like that because we so rarely get to see what goes on “behind the scenes” in our own mouths. It is such an appetite bolstering act to chew with one’s mouth open while talking and gesturing with silverware, and I am sure that the old woman who couldn’t stop staring at you was only doing so because she was so transfixed like I was. When you made the implication that I wasn’t eating fast enough and that you were going to “win” I only gave you that dismayed look because I was not aware we had been in a race. The confusion obviously stemmed from the fact that I don’t race girls to “the bottom of the plate” until our second or third date lest I overwhelm them with my sexiness too early. So, again, that was entirely my fault.

As if the night couldn’t have gotten any sweeter, you ordered plenty of alcoholic beverages. When I made that sarcastic comment about me being the one who needed a drink, you didn’t seem to catch my subtle humor and told me that you would “drink [me] under the table” as if I were being completely serious. On second thought, maybe I was. Perhaps the alcohol would have numbed the embarrassing spectacle I was witness to and I would have blissfully forgotten enough where writing this letter would have been impossible. Alas, I was full of mistakes that evening and declined your drinking challenge with a rueful shake of my head and a laugh.

The next part is rather difficult to type but I wanted to apologize for not being as engaging in conversation as I usually am. I definitely feel that I tried to find some common ground and make conversation about anything but what the other girls in the room were wearing, and which couples were “probably going to fuck later” but it was to no avail. Your conversational skills were unparalleled and we made those things the bulk of the dinner conversation anyway. I very much enjoyed listening to you recant the tales of horrible things found in restaurant food by people that your friends know personally. I am quite sure that the maggot infested finger that your friend’s cousin found in her mashed potatoes was a simple mistake by the cook-staff. I was certainly grateful to you for the colorful tale while I was eating my pasta because everything tastes so wonderful when you are imagining maggots and severed limbs.

I don’t particularly have a weak stomach. I am sure I have my topics that bother me more than others but I am by no means a fragile man. Normally I would have, I’m sure, laughed along with you during your tales of horrific restaurant experiences, but it was merely enhancing the feeling I already had about my food that it was probably tampered with by our unreasonable and inept serving staff. Oh, by the way, I loved how you gave the waiter status updates every time he reluctantly came by to check on us before quickly darting away. I am sure he loved hearing about how you were going to deduct from the tip because he wasn’t bringing your drinks to you fast enough or checking on you more often. I am sure he was just intimidated by your vast amounts of knowledge and your dazzling wit. I am sure it was at complete odds with his overwhelming desire to bask in your glowing personality.

When I grabbed the check off the table, I was doing so because I wanted to get the night over with as quickly as possible. Rest assured I was thrilled about paying for all the drinks and the appetizer you didn’t even touch, but I was somewhat taken aback by you loudly saying that I was only paying for dinner because I “wanted to fuck you tonight.” I think that was the farthest thing from my mind, not because I was contemplating beating you over the head with a wine-glass, but because I wanted you so very badly and I was sure that it would take a lot more alcohol to convince you to do it.

Please know that I very much enjoy the company of boorish and vapid sluts who scream insults at serving staff in between giant, gaping mouthfuls of food and I would have done anything to sleep with you that night. Also, let me assure you that I am not at all picky about who I have sex with and I would most definitely want to have the opportunity to get a battery of blood tests the next week to make sure you hadn’t given me any “parting gifts”. Also, I would have very much relished the thought that there would be a possibility I would impregnate you and have the privilege to bring a child into this world with you, and thus tying me to you for the rest of my natural life. As appealing as all those things were, I just couldn’t understand why I wasn’t like every other man on the planet and didn’t jump on the chance to have sex with you. Of course, this opportunity was quickly yanked from me when you realized I had no intentions of following through with your assumptions. I don’t understand why you went from smiling and laughing to scowling at me all of the sudden, but I know you are probably not used to rejection and, again, I have to take full responsibility for that. Obviously, it is something defective with *me* for not taking you home and pounding your insides into liquid puree all night.

Then, in the parking lot when I offered to call you a cab, you looked at me like I was the lamest person alive- and I realize I probably am. Despite all of the obvious benefits of staying on your good side, I said something rather rude to you that I now regret saying. I wasn’t saying that I wouldn’t sleep with you without a stainless steel condom and someone else’s male-equipment, I was just saying that *at the time* it seemed like the necessary conditions for doing so. Walking away while you screamed things at me was gratifying, only because I knew I wasn’t nearly cool enough for someone like you and I had done the right thing by bowing out gracefully.

So, I am now writing this letter for the world to see about something I didn’t really ever want to share with anyone. I can assure you right now that the only reason I kept this night to myself for so long was because I didn’t want anyone to know how I had blown my one shot with the most charming, sexy, and enticing woman in Springfield. I think that enough time has passed now that I can safely laugh about being such a jackass that night, but I still wanted to take this opportunity to apologize to you.

Sincerely,

Scott

“Life is frequently good.” -Self Quotation

As the world spins around and as you find yourself searching for meaning in the vast emptiness of the cosmos, please take a moment to contemplate the following: The purpose of existence is to exist and the purpose of life is to live.

It seems like so much of our void is filled with trying desperately to add happiness or value to our experiences. We eat, we sleep, we fuck, we sing. We diet, we run, we shop, we buy. We kiss, we laugh, we watch, we share. All the while we miss the bigger picture- there is no bigger picture.

So much of our unhappiness in this life can be directly correlated to our inability to grasp this simple yet liberating fact and we fritter away and spend our precious time desperately trying to change it somehow. The world is set in motion and the immutable laws of the universe defy us at every turn. Yet we persist in trying to chase puffs of smoke when we should be asking ourselves why we are running to begin with.

It is both a humbling and awe-inspiring thing all at the same time to realize how utterly insignificant we are. We are not even a speck on the final painting yet we all feel like we own the canvas. In many ways, we couldn’t be more right yet insanely wrong at the same time.

All matter is connected and, for the briefest of moments in time, you are the canvas. You are the painter. You are the patron. Everything you do sends ripples throughout the entire pool and affects everything around you. The power of this, though shared with everyone around you, is truly awesome. The changes you make may not be lasting across the eons, and may seem utterly insignificant when weighed against eternity, but nevertheless for that moment you are a part of “god”.

Recently, I have had the clarity of vision to see all of this plainly and my life is happier for it. I have been letting life wash over me and around me, dipping my feet in to steer the course as often as the water permits. I don’t let directional changes overwhelm me because I realize that I don’t have the power to control the stream, I can only steer my ship as best as I can. Certain aspects of my life might be fixed, but I can control everything else and I will.

Does this mean my life finally has a purpose? It always has. I am alive and that is my purpose. Art is our way of mocking life for existing and life returns the favor. We should revel in the folly of it and laugh with the universe. The joke might be at our expense, but that doesn’t make it any less hilarious. One only has to stop and ponder their own life to become incredibly amused. Cease laughing, and you cease living.