two million one hundred two thousand four hundred minutes

by mg at 01:10 PM on October 03, 2004

Today marks Bad Samaritan’s fourth anniversary. This site was started way the hell back in October of 2000. It probably doesn’t need to be explained that a lot of things have changed, both in the world and in my life, over these past four years.

In the last four years I’ve contributed nearly 700 posts and too many comments to count. But, for all the stuff that has made it on to the site, there is more that never made the cut. It may not be evident by the quality or grammatical correctness of my posts, but a certain amount of editorial oversight goes into decisions about what makes it onto the site and what doesn’t.

There are about 50 or so Word files on my computer with posts in various stages of completion. So, in honor of today’s truly momentous occasion, I’m going to sit on my couch all day and watch football. No, wait, in honor of Bad Samaritan’s fourth anniversary, I thought it might be interesting to go through all these old files and pull out the best of the worst.

I’m not sure where I might have been planning to go with this, but I think this post-fragment from June of 2002 is still true of me, and very funny-strange:

I have this habit of answering questions with the first thing that pops into my head. Most of the time my answer is somewhat appropriate to the question. Other times I end up answering 'Where should we eat dinner?' with the name of my third grade teacher. I guess that isn’t really lying.

I’ve gotten much better about this, because I realize how responding to questions with non sequitur answers might thoroughly annoy someone you live with. Unfortunately, this isn’t some affectation, but something I do without noticing. It probably comes from when I got hit in the head with a javelin when I was 12, but purple mountain’s majesty.

Back when the celebrity boxing craze was sweeping the nation, or at least the part of it that considers Fox to be quality broadcasting, I came up with the idea of doing a post about “Historical Celebrity Boxing.” This was the only example even remotely funny:

Hitler vs. Napoleon: Who wouldn’t love to see these two despotic midgets go at it? But, we all know it’ll be over before even starts; France surrenders. No, seriously, the edge would have to go to Napoleon because any who can lead the French army into victorious battle has got to be a little special.

If that was the best of them, you’ll see why the full post never made it the live. Keeping with the boxing theme, this was in response to one of Mike Tyson’s many loony tirades:

Last week Mike Tyson did what he did best. Throw a punch or two, and then bite someone. More than that, he performed one of the most quotable monologues in recent memory. “I’ll eat your asshole alive, you bitch. Ain’t nobody alive can fuck with this. This is the ultimate, man… Fuck you, you ho... I’ll fuck you in your asshole in front of everybody, you bitch. C’mon, you bitch… I’ll fuck you ‘til you love me, you faggot.”

Tyson used those lines once before, in 1988 when he proposed to Robin Givens. Unlike Salzberg, she took the line for the beautiful display of love it was meant to be, and agreed to be his bride.

Like Givens, I was apparently in love with Tyson for a while, because I was also working on a quiz comparing his sociological deficiencies to Michael Jackson’s with “Is it Tyson or is it Jackson?” Here is a sample question:

Your romantic history can be summed up as: a) You were married to the star of a high school sitcom and were arrested for raping a beauty queen b) You think children are beautiful, until they reach high school, when they get too old for raping

Over the years I’ve often made fun of celebrities like Tyson and Jackson. It is just so much easier sometimes than revealing parts of my soul. I was planning on making Macaulay Culkin: Porn star into a regular feature, where I just pornalized a star’s IMDB filmography. I’m glad I didn’t because that is so hacky. But, here are some films from Tom Hanks’ filmography, if he were a porn star:

Tom Hanks: Green Penile, The (1999) You've Got Male Genitalia (1998) "From my Groin to your Moon" (1998) That Thing You Do with Underage Children! (1996) Sex Toy Story (1995) Apollo 69 (1995) Forrest Hump (1994) Joe Versus the Volcanic Ejaculation (1990) Every Time We Say KY (1986) "Bosom Buddies" (1980)

Occasionally I talked about serious things. This document, which contained just a single line, wasn’t one of them. This must have been in reference to the Iraqi (dis)Information Minister, and the speech he’d presumably give at the end of the war:

We have destroyed over 1000 of your Tomahawk missiles with our buildings.

There was a lot of stuff about Iraq that I never posted. There were tons of post-fragments and at least 3 complete posts that never made it up on the site. Most of it was too tedious for me to read now, so for the most part I’m very happy most of this stuff never went live.

If you don’t want the veil lifted to expose the real Wizard of Oz, skip this next one. Okay, In addition to all my posts, I’ve also done the couple Osama bin Laden posts (but not the comments). I began this post as Osama, about Saved by the Bell’s Zach Morris replacing Silver Spoon’s Ricky Schroeder on the cast of NYPD Blue:

There is no love lost between me and the New York Police Department, but I’ll admit I’ve always been a die-hard fan of NYPD Blue. Sure, it may not be as controversial as it was back in the bare man-ass days, but who needs all that controversy?

…

Schroeder's best friend on the Silver Spoons was Alfonso Robeiro, who later starred as Carlton on Fresh Prince of Bel Air. My best friend is the prince of Saudi Arabia (and the only thing fresh about him is his breath, NOT).

But outside of making fun of celebrities and getting way too worked up about politics, I have revealed much about my life and emotional turmoil. This post-fragment comes from a document dated back in March of 2002. My head must have been in a pretty messed up place at the time.

I was just listening to a remix of Bjork’s All is Full of Love and got to thinking. Now, I can't speak for the rest of the world, because I don't know how full of love it is. But I do know one place that isn't full of love and that place is inside of me.

The great thing about running this site is that I have this recorded history of exactly what I was feeling or thinking on nearly 700 specific days over the last four years. But what is always so strange is going back and reading those things and not even recognizing the person who wrote it. There are so many posts where I am unable to understand (or remember) where my head was at and why I was thinking and feeling the way I was.

Going back to read the above post-fragment now is weird, because, while I can certainly understand the feeling of never being in love again, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what, specifically, triggered that feeling on that day. I am so far away from that feeling, I can’t even remember what caused it. It is like a completely different person wrote it. And that was just two years ago! What a strange and wonderful thing it would be if this site continued on another four, five, six, or even ten years?

And to complement the above fragment is this one from April of this year, showing just how much happier I am these days:

I love my wife. I know a lot of people say stuff like that, but being inside me and feeling how much I love her, when I hear other people say they love someone, I can’t believe it. I just can’t imagine anyone loving anyone else as much as I love her.

Now, you might be thinking I’ve done something wrong, and this public display of affection is some little thing I’m doing, like buying a box of chocolates or a dozen roses, to crawl my way out of the doghouse. Well, you’d be wrong.

Wait, maybe I shouldn’t include that one now, just in case I do someday need to pull off that public display of affection? Oh, who am I kidding, I’m the perfect husband; I’ll never need to apologize or anything.

This post-fragment was in reference to one of the many main-stream articles that bitch about blogs being unimportant, and then the inevitable backlash against the article by bloggers who act like revolutionaries.

I just do this because it is fun. And, it is a great way to record history. But, some people take their site’s way too seriously, as is my response to the blogosphere’s outcry over a mainstream journalist putting down the quality and content of writing on blogs in general:

Even if you are the all-star shortstop for your company’s softball team in the Bumfuck Kansas Main Street Business summer league, you aren’t going to get drafted by the New York Yankees. And that is the misconception so many blogging types have, that they are doing something earth shattering, and the whole world should take notice. The problem is they aren’t.

Back when this was written in April of 2002, it was true. But now most professional media outlets have bloggers on staff. It was a bunch of bloggers who broke the CBS forged document story. Blogging has become so significant that the biggest politico-bloggers frequently get referenced as sources in mainstream news stories. And it pissed me off to no end. All these Johnie-come-latelies are hitting it big, and I’ve been at this for four god-damn years and I’m in the exact fucking place I was when I started?