"Ass-Blasted Ink Blots: Using The Gas From Your Ass to Peer Into the Mind of a Killer"

Today I told a friend he should write a coffee table book about his farts (his farts are epically awesome) complete with big, glossy pictures.  The exact words I texted to him were "You should fart into wet ink and blow it around so it looks like those Rorschach Tests."  I didn't think twice about typing those words to him or hitting send, even though it's one of the grosser ideas I've ever had.  Really -- try to picture it: a grown man hovering his bare ass over a puddle of ink on a sheet of white paper, then farting so hard it blasts the ink around into a random image which would then be shown to a murderer to find out what he sees in the ink blots to explain why he did that thing he did with the kittens, hookers and box-cutters.  No one should think of that, and if they do, they certainly shouldn't tell anyone about it.  Except that's how I talk to this friend sometimes, and sometimes it's how he talks to me.  He's the same friend who talks me down from the metaphorical edge quite often -- explaining things to me in a way that I would never think of on my own, or reminding me that no matter how badly someone tries to treat me, I'm strong enough and important enough to fight back when they try to beat me down.  He and I can have the single most ridiculous conversation you've ever heard one minute (the kind you walk into halfway through, shake your head like maybe you're stoned and don't know it, then walk away fairly confident the two people you just heard talking have spent the last three years licking cheap toys from China) and later that same day, he's smiling kindly and not judging me when I have a laugh/cry fit over something completely pointless.  I can only hope I make him laugh just as hard as he makes me laugh, and that I can offer him even a fraction of the peace of mind he offers me when my mind gets lost.

To have just one friend like that is a miracle (is what I would say, if I believed in miracles) but to have as many as I do is a fucking statistical anomaly.  No one should be as lucky as I am when it comes to the people I choose to be around, and the people who choose to be around me.  I marvel at the chance and circumstance that collided to bring together a group of people who all meld together so perfectly -- not despite of, but because of how wonderfully different they are.  Some of them don't know each other, some of them know each other as though they were the same person, but all of them combine to create the greatest group of people I've ever known.  Even the ones that act like retards 75% of the time, and the ones that frustrate me with their infuriating but perfect logic, and the ones who can make me feel like a blistering idiot one moment and the smartest most-bestest person that's ever lived the next.

Some of them I see too much, some I could never see enough.  Some don't super-duper adore each other, some live with each other.  Some are people I loved the moment I met them, and some are people whose friendship (after years of knowing them in a few cases) is something I still can't explain. 

It all makes me wonder: in this giant world where this weird-ass group of people can come together and get along so well, why does anyone anywhere ever need to hurt another person or hate another person?  If a relatively tiny number of people -- all different in so many ways -- can care about each other this much, then how can entire chunks of the globe hateeach other so much?  Why is it so hard to love people, but so easy to hate them? 

I wish I could take my group of friends -- the funny ones and the serious ones ... the smart ones and the dumb ones (I'm sorry, but some of you are very dumb.  You won't know that I'm directing that description toward you, though, because of how dumb you are, so that's ok.  And I love you even though -- and sometimes because -- you're dumb) ... the ones with strong faith and the atheists ... the nerds and the jocks ... the hard workers and the slackers ... the kind ones and the harsh ones ... the crazy ones and the calm ones ... I'd like to take them all and put them on a stage for the whole world to see and say "Look!  Look at these people who are so very different in so many ways ... who shouldn't like each other at all by your way of thinking yet care about each other so much ... who are so very different yet spend their time together, taking and laughing and getting drunk and playing bongos and dancing and eating skeezy french fries at even skeezier all-night diners and laughing and screwing around and working together and playing together and crying together and taking care of each other and sometimes suggesting the odd fart into a puddle of ink for the sake of art.  We can do all this, and you -- YOU are hating each other.  You are killing each other. 

It's silly and it's naive and it will never, ever happen in a million-billion-gazillion years, but just try to imagine it.  Try to imagine that the whole world is just like you and your amazing group of frigged-up, ridiculous, shouldn't-be-friends-in-some-cases friends.  They won't always get along, but that's ok.  They'll get mad at each other sometimes, and they might swat at each other sometimes, they'll make each other cry sometimes and wish they'll wish each other would die sometimes.....until they sit down and chill out with a cold beer on a patio or a back deck, and all is forgotten and forgiven.  That sounds like such a stupid thing to say, even now as I read over it again (checking for spelling mistakes because every misspelled word kills a puppy somewhere in the world.)  In fact, I kind of want to delete it because it's so lame and cliched and dorky -- but I like the idea.  I like to think maybe one day before I die (apparently in a drunken lawnmower accident that features no fewer than three midgets, a gas can filled with ethanol and a woman with a mullet -- don't ask, I just know) people will at the very least stop blasting the ever-loving FUCK out of each other for no better reason than 'because I don't like you and I don't want you around me.'

This is not a perfect world.  It never will be, and that's just too goddamn depressing for me to think about anymore.  If I can't fix the whole wide world and make everyone smarten the hell up, then I'll just focus my attention on my friend's soon-to-be-released fart-based coffee table book, tentatively titled "Ass-Blasted Ink Blots: Using The Gas From Your Ass to Peer Into the Mind of a Killer."  In stores this Christmas.


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