“Whose pain is greater than whose” is an endless rabbit hole, a juvenile dick-measuring contest, because there’s always someone out there whose pain is greater. That’s not a game I’m interested in playing.
What I AM interested in is trying to make my pain into a tool—pull something constructive out of it—so that others might glean utility or inspiration from my seeming “low point.”
Musings, Volume 1, available on Amazon Kindle: Musings, Volume 1
Bitefighter, my loyal little buddy, 10 lb. Terrier Extraordinaire, and 83rd level intellect, yells: “ROOF ROWF ARFOLOGIST REX!” (THERE’S A FINE LINE BETWEEN STUPID AND BRAVE, KENT, AND YOU JUST CROSSED IT TEN TIMES OVER! FUCKING DUMB-ASS TWO LEGS!)
I lean forward and yell, “STOP BEING RACIST!”
He looks over his shoulder and gives me a small, furry middle finger. “Arf barko McBarkskies!” (We’re trapped in the bleed between dimensions because you couldn’t keep your cock in your pants! We need to get the fuck out of here! FAST!)
He’s right goddammit—he’s right. If I had just stuck with Soccer Moms, I would have been fine. Instead, I was lured into an evil gathering of Yoga Moms courtesy of their mouth-watering yoga pants (don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about—yoga pants are the greatest invention known to boners) and their sweet, sultry, yoga voices. Down dog all day EVERY day, baby! Know whu’m sayi—
“ROOF!” Bitefighter turns around in the cockpit of our multidimensional cruiser, and slaps me across the face. (Get ahold of yourself!)
“And how the FUCK am I supposed to do that???” I scream, clutching my cheek. “THEY SENT US THROUGH AN INTERDIMENSIONAL PORTAL! INTO A PLACE THAT MAKES THE NINTH RING OF HELL LOOK LIKE A GODDAMN CAROUSEL!” I fling a hand toward the enchanted glass that comprises our cockpit. Outside our craft, embodied concepts race alongside us. Malevolence, rage, and gut-churning vitriol snap at us with a variety of weapons. Due to our mammalian perceptions, we see them as tentacles and claws. In reality, they’re something far more horrible.
“Arfo Barko McRowf!” (Calm the fuck down, Kent—I’m fucking trying!)
SLAM! The craft rocks sideways. A set of cracks web across its surface.
“BITEFIGHTER! THEY JUST HIT THE—”
SLAM! This time it’s from the other side; alarms begin blaring inside the cockpit. A feminized, robotic voice says, “Multi-nauts—your craft has sustained critical damage. Breach is imminent. Multi-nauts—your craft has sustained critical damage. Breach is immi—”
Fuck it. No options left. I reach in my pocket and open my eReader to Musings, activating its reality distortion powers. Magic flash.
“HI YO QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT!”Neil DeGrasse Tyson jumps out of a portal several hundred yards to our front. As we go racing by, he quickly jigs his hands, and then—
CL-CLANK!
—grabs onto one of our thrusters, holding on as we jet through the multidimensional bleed. Despite the danger we’re in, I can’t help but wonder: how the hell is he even alive? The conceptual madness outside our craft would tear anyone to—
He screams, “LOGIC, BITCHES!” And extends his free hand toward our pursuers. Long chains of glimmering equations blast from his fingers, enveloping our attackers in clarion blazes of deductive syllogisms, fragmenting them apart into half-formed thoughts. Cheesy, triumphant music blasts through the air. Tyson does a triple somersault—hup hup HUP—onto the window of our cockpit.
He points at our cracked windshield and booms: “Let me just fix that for you.” He closes his eyes and mutters a bunch of stuff about black hole causality and string theory akindras (yep—I have no idea what the fuck he’s talking about, but it sure sounds cool). A magical light sweeps across our windshield and fixes the cracks.
Thank FUCK.
He opens his eyes and blurts, “Gotta go! Schrodinger’s cat just invited me over for cheese and wine!” He snaps his lapels down, winks at us, and disappears in a twinkling fade.
Me and Bitefighter exchange astonished looks. We don’t have to say a goddamn thing. Neil De Grasse Tyson just saved our lives. Pull my scrotum over my dick and call it a bullfrog, that is some amazing shit.
😀
Have you somehow been funneled into the bleed between dimensions, and now need to call upon the Greatness of Neil? Never fear! Get Echo Vol. 1 on Kindle here: Vol. 1 on Kindle. Vol. 2 on Kindle here: Vol.2 on Kindle Vol. 3 on Kindle here: Vol. 3 on Kindle Vol.4 on Kindle here: Vol. 4 on Kindle Echo Omnibus here: Echo Omnibus Echo Vol. 1 & 2 Combined Edition here: Combined Edition Musings, Volume 1 is available here: Musings, Volume 1 If you wanna hear me babble on about anything and everything, and strain my FREAKIN’ BRAIN, then here’s a link to my podcast: Strained Brains! It is on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and Google Play! Please give it a listen and a five-star review! Here’s the miscellaneous gear that I use to try and become an uber-human: Optimization, and last but not least, my buddy Jumar Balacy has made a supercool microsite at kentwaynebrain.com! Go check out his computer-based wizardry 🙂 🙂 😀
Hold on! I just got approved to be an Amazon affiliate! If you’re going to buy ANY product from Amazon, and you’d like to support my efforts for absolutely free, then simply click on one of the Echo links I’ve provided—they’ll send you to Echo’s Amazon page—and THEN buy whatever product you wish. Amazon gives me a small referral fee each time this happens! In this manner you can support my books, musings, podcast, zany ads, or my adventures along the noble path known as The Way of The Man Child WITHOUT spending any more money than you were already going to! Should you do this, I vow to send you a silent blessing, causing your genitals to adopt the optimum size, shape, smell, and death-ray attachment of choice that paralyzes your enemies with fear and envy! Entire worlds will bow before your nether parts! 😲💪 😜
One of the best ways to bring people together (and inoculate them against pain and discomfort) is to imbue their minds with a sense of meaning.
You don’t need a lot of resources to pull this off; you can simply do the best you can with what you have. By consistently striving to do the best you can with what you have (which includes examining mistakes and adjusting accordingly), you will—by default—demonstrate discipline, strategy, and the perennial qualities endorsed by societal luminaries. Over the course of time, you will maximize your chances of success, and subsequently, maximize the odds you will inspire someone else. You’ll be able to build off smaller successes, and springboard onto large ones.
It all starts with doing the best you can with what you have, regardless of who takes notice. Life is already hard, so why—over the long-term—make it any harder than it has to be? Do the best you can with what you have.
Musings, Volume 1, available on Amazon Kindle: Musings, Volume 1
Humans have evolved to indulge in immediate gratification and it makes perfect sense; those base instincts once encouraged our survival. They have driven our evolution.
But in order to keep evolving, in order to keep surviving, it is essential to reign in our desire for immediate gratification. It is essential to play the long game.
As always, discipline and strategy are of the utmost importance.
Musings, Volume 1, available on Amazon Kindle: Musings, Volume 1
When pursuing your dreams, do what you can as often as possible, or your options will be taken away one by one, and you will be increasingly forced into doing what is necessary. As time goes on, “doing what is necessary” will serve your dreams less and less.
I think it’s better to do what you can, while you can still do it.
Musings, Volume 1, available on Amazon Kindle: Musings, Volume 1
The shallower measure of a test is whether it ends in victory or defeat.
The deeper measure of a test is whether I can use it to become stronger or weaker.
Musings, Volume 1, available on Amazon Kindle: Musings, Volume 1
It has been a long, hard battle. Life has whittled me down to a withered shadow of my former self. A pitiful semblance of what I once was. The fates have conspired to reduce me to a neutered facsimile of Kent Wayne the Man Whore, but it ain’t gonna happen. A spark of defiance still burns hot within my beleaguered soul.
My family, my neighbors…everyone in my social circle thinks of me as Respectable Dad. How wrong they are.
Maybe I’m not ripped and all boner-ed up anymore, but Respectable Dad still has some fight left in him. Respectable Dad still eats magic mushrooms every now and then. Respectable Dad still watches Adventure Time. Respectable Dad still—
“KENT! DINNER TIME! AND REMEMBER WHAT I SAID ABOUT MY NEXT PIECE OF DIAMOND JEWELRY—IT BETTER BE WORTH SIX MONTHS OF YOUR GODDAMN SALARY, NONE OF THAT CHEAP-ASS THREE-MONTH STUFF!”
Respectable Dad wants to commit seppuku. With a dull kitchen knife.
I trudge over to the dining room table and plunk my ass down, mumbling under my breath with the maximum defiance my predicament will allow—razzumfrazzumI’llshowyoudiamonds—and dourly scan the evening Noms. Oh great—some yuppified veggie entree with those stupid sauce swirls on the edges of the plate.
“Enjoy, honey.” My tyrannical wife, Irma Horfendorff, leans down and pecks my cheek. “Remember,” she whispers. “Diamonds. Or I’ll neuter you with a hammer.”
With a conscious effort, I manage to restrain the single tear that wells up in my right eye and threatens to roll down my liver-spotted cheek.
Get through dinner. Finish the meal.
My teenage daughter—she’s a freshman in college—sits down at the table, expelling a giant sigh and performing the requisite eye-roll. My hand—now holding a fork so it can dig into the non-meat travesty lying on my plate—shakes and trembles. The tines of my fork rattle against my plate.
“UGH! Guys are SO disgusting!” she exclaims.
Irma takes a seat and spreads a napkin across her lap. “What’s going on, Grace? Are the boys at school giving you any—”
“I just got a piercing in my nose, right? But all the guys in my sociology class think it means I love anal. How stupid is that?”
Irma raises an eyebrow. “That’s…that’s very unfortunate. Why would they think that—”
“It’s not because I love anal—it’s because I want TWO COCKS AT ONCE!” Grace slams the table with both fists and looks at Irma and me with a pair of overly mascara’d, furious eyes. “DOUBLE PENETRATION! IS THAT SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND?”
Jesus Christ. I keep my eyes fixed on my food, eating forkful after forkful in utter silence.
“Kent?” Irma clears her throat. “Any advice for our darling daughter?”
Translation: say something smart. Defuse the situation or I’ll cut off your balls and mount them on a pike.
I wipe my mouth with a napkin. “Um…ah…”
Come on—you can do this. Respectable Dad. Respectable Dad.
“Do you, ah…”
They lean in like hungry predators. Holy shit—they’re fucking testing me.
“Do you, ah…ah…” My voice cracks.
Finally, I manage to get out, “Do you use protection?”
Both of them erupt into angry clamors—WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU DAD—and: KENT YOU ARE SO FAR OUT OF LINE I AM GOING TO PEG YOU WITH THE EXTRA-LARGE STRAP-ON TONIGHT I HOPE YOU’VE BEEN DOING YOUR BUTTHOLE STRETCHES—
I try to protest. I raise my hands to try and articulate, but it’s no use. Irma’s gesturing with her knife, making cutting motions with it while simultaneously making clutching motions with her free hand. She’s finally going to do it—she’s going to castrate me. Grace is screeching like a stuck pig, coating my face in a rain of spittle.
Their words blend together into one long angry scream. My eyes tick back and forth, and beads of sweat roll down my quivering forehead. I’m about to lose my cock. I’m going to bleed out in my own dining room. I can’t believe that this is how it ends…
So I reach into my pocket and open my eReader to Musings, Volume 1, activating its reality distortion powers. Magic flash.
“OHGEEZDON’TCUTME!” I bolt straight up in bed, gasping and panting.
Wait…what the fuck…I’m back in my San Francisco studio with my 10 lb. terrier Bitefighter. Haven’t been here in over twenty years…
And then it hits me: it was all a dream. It was all a dream.
Thank FUCK.
Bitefighter cocks his little mustached face at me. “Roo?”
“It’s nothing, buddy.” I stroke his back and lay back down.
“It’s nothing.”
Whew! That was a close one! But it also serves as a valuable lesson: I am NOT cut out to be Respectable Dad! I’m Kent Wayne—sci fi author and perennial Man Whore, biznotches! Ha HA!
😀
Has your once-bright soul been worn thin by Hallmark-borne materialism and trend-inspired rebelliousness? Never fear! Get Echo Vol. 1 on Kindle here: Vol. 1 on Kindle. Vol. 2 on Kindle here: Vol.2 on Kindle Vol. 3 on Kindle here: Vol. 3 on Kindle Vol.4 on Kindle here: Vol. 4 on Kindle Echo Omnibus here: Echo Omnibus Echo Vol. 1 & 2 Combined Edition here: Combined Edition Musings, Volume 1 is available here: Musings, Volume 1 If you wanna hear me babble on about anything and everything, and strain my FREAKIN’ BRAIN, then here’s a link to my podcast: Strained Brains! It is on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and Google Play! Please give it a listen and a five-star review! Here’s the miscellaneous gear that I use to try and become an uber-human: Optimization, and last but not least, my buddy Jumar Balacy has made a supercool microsite at kentwaynebrain.com! Go check out his computer-based wizardry 🙂 🙂 😀
Hold on! I just got approved to be an Amazon affiliate! If you’re going to buy ANY product from Amazon, and you’d like to support my efforts for absolutely free, then simply click on one of the Echo links I’ve provided—they’ll send you to Echo’s Amazon page—and THEN buy whatever product you wish. Amazon gives me a small referral fee each time this happens! In this manner you can support my books, musings, podcast, zany ads, or my adventures along the noble path known as The Way of The Man Child WITHOUT spending any more money than you were already going to! Should you do this, I vow to send you a silent blessing, causing your genitals to adopt the optimum size, shape, smell, and death-ray attachment of choice that paralyzes your enemies with fear and envy! Entire worlds will bow before your nether parts! 😲💪 😜
