Josh Blackshire

Over the past few days, I’ve come to realize something interesting about my friends… I have two different groups of friends. Those who are my age and those who are much older than me. The ones who are my age can be broken down further into two groups. Those who are in a serious relationship that I no longer see except maybe 3-4 times a year and those who are single who I see fairly regularly.

I know I rant about this quite a bit often…I guess it shows that no matter how much I claim it doesn’t bother me, it does.

Continuing on… I find it funny how those who are in serious relationships blow me off because they’re too busy with their women that make them “so happy”. Why do I find it so funny? Because my friends who are much older than me are married with children and to be perfectly honest, most of them aren’t very happy and wish they’d stayed single and just continued dating around. That’s also the main reason why we all spend so much time together at the bar. They don’t come spend time with us with their family…we get together after work and drink until they decide it’s time to go home and face the wife.

And my friends who are closer to my age…we just get together whenever the hell we want. Some days we’ll just hang out wherever, some days we’ll meet at the bar, other days we’ll go out to eat together, catch a game somewhere, etc.

So I guess what I’m getting at is I’m gonna enjoy the future, when my friends who are currently blowing me off for their relationships are sitting with some young guys at the bar, miserable…and me? I’ll be out enjoying my life somewhere.

…although hopefully I’ll be playing the field a lil more and not quite as single as I am. I’ll admit, being single without even a simple relationship blows ass…but I still don’t want to be  tied down.

One of my biggest pet peeves these days is ignorance. Whenever I’m discussing my hobbies with someone, if they’re scared of it, they immediately freak out and when given the opportunity to face their fear at their own pace in a controlled environment, they reply back with “Fuck that!”

This happens a lot with me liking weird and arguably crazy stuff. For instance, snakes…for some of my friends, I even mention the word snake and they freak out. My roommate is cool with me owning them but refuses to be in the same room with one while it’s out of its cage. Hopefully he’ll see how cute the new python I’m getting is and start to get over that fear. Another friend’s girlfriend is so scared, he’s asked me not to even mention that I own a snake…let alone that it’s sitting just a room away in my bedroom. Are you fucking kidding me?

I’m not going to pretend I’m “Billy Badass” because I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m a sissy…but I also will man up when I’m afraid of something and while sometimes I may need to have a fire lit under my ass, I’ll usually face my fears.

Take a look at my current hobbies…

As a kid, lightning struck in my front yard while I was standing at the front door looking outside and I was traumatized of storms. I slept with a night light in my room until I was probably 14 because if it stormed, the flashes of lightning scared the shit out of me. I was also scared to death of tornadoes and our house being destroyed. I often had nightmares revolving around tornadoes. During thunderstorms or after these nightmares, I ended up sleeping in my parent’s room or in the guest room next to their room.  Yeah, I was that scared.

But I faced that fear and I got involved in storm chasing. Now when it storms, I’m either on the phone monitoring it with Rhett, monitoring it from my computer (until the power goes out), or if has the potential to drop a tornado Rhett and I are high tailing it to a good point of interception.

I was and still am scared to death of snakes and being tagged…so I started keeping pet snakes. I also make trips to IL every spring to find and photograph venomous snakes and one day, maybe I will be given the opportunity to be properly trained in handling hot (venomous) snakes. My eventual goal is to own a couple of the more “mild” hots.

I used to be scared of guns…I was afraid of the recoil and losing control of it. When my friends would go shooting, I was always a spectator. I faced that fear and bought a gun.

I used to be scared shitless of creepy crawlies like tarantulas. So I accepted Roth’s offer to take his tarantula off his hands. I also faced my fear and held that tarantula (and it took a lot of alcohol, but my brother also did the same!).

I once was scared to death to drive home drunk…I was afraid I’d get stopped and ticketed for DUI. Okay, seriously, you don’t believe this for a second do you? I’m not THAT stupid.

Anyway, my point is…our lives are short. Why do we waste them away having all these irrational fears? Get up off your asses and face them for a change!

Once upon a time there was this lonely single guy named…Slosh Brackfire…who is in no way related to Josh Blackshire.

He was a computer geek and loved to play with different pieces of software. One of the most intriguing pieces of software he’d recently begun to play with was his new “Flash Video Downloader” which basically allows him to download any flash videos playing in his browser (ie youtube videos).

Being that he was single and lonely…and a typical guy… he’d recently decided to start building his porn collection back up.  Using his new Flash Video Downloader, he was able to go and save almost every embedded video that he liked from his favorite two websites.

One night he felt especially curious about a few different videos, but they cost a specific amount of money in order to view them for 24 hours. One was 16 minutes long and cost nearly $5. He decided this could be a worthwhile investment…utilizing his new Flash Video Downloader, he could pay $5 to download and keep the video for as long as he wanted (or until his hard drive crashed).

So even though he was nearly broke, he decided to add $15 to his account (hey…you never know…if he just buys that one, he may wanna buy one or two others later).

As soon as the transaction goes through, he clicks on the button for his “Flash Video Downloader”, hits the ‘Download’ button, and….video not found.

Fuck.

Not My Time

I’m giving it all up
it’s time to call it quits.
Taken too much shit
and received nothing in return.
Load all but one chamber
a spin and a kiss for luck.
Put the barrel against my head
With sweat pouring off my hands
I just can’t stop shaking
death awaits my next move.
Working up the courage
swallowing the lump in my throat
I Slowly squeeze the trigger…
Click.
Must not be my time.
Damn.

JB 1/17/05

I rant about relationships quite a bit…if you don’t like it, then hit your back button.

I’ve noticed something with most of my friends lately and it bugs me a bit. It probably shouldn’t bother me so much, but when your friends blow you off constantly for their significant others or it’s impossible to spend any time with them without their significant others tagging along, it gets to a point where you have to ask yourself, “Who are my true friends?” and you decide it’s time to give them the middle finger.

Three out of my four best friends are in serious relationships and now that I’m enjoying stalking people on Facebook…I mean, keeping in touch with everyone, I’ve noticed it’s a common trend with many others as well. As soon as a relationship becomes serious, the person’s social life becomes virtually non-existent. Now if you want to lose all your friends, that’s probably no big deal, but considering most relationships are not going to last forever (sorry to burst your bubble if you believed otherwise), you might want to try to retain your friendships. True friendships are forever.

Here’s a brief rundown of how I believe a healthy and long-lasting relationship will go…mind you, I’m no love doctor as my Facebook status will prove to you.

First you meet…you get to know each other with a lot of in-depth discussions. You don’t fuck on the first date…or even the second or third. Relationships based on sex will eventually fail once you get bored with the usual routine. Or maybe that’s just because I’m hung like a hamster and last about as long…oh, you think I’m joking, don’t you?

Anywho, if you click and things go well, you begin to get a bit more serious…you see each other more often and you agree to remain faithful to one another. You continue to stay faithful and see each other regularly, learning more and more about each other each day. This includes personal preferences, pet peeves, how to get along in fights, and for many will also includes preferences during sexual activity and perhaps even living together. In other words, this forms the basis for a healthy relationship.

The next step is engagement…once you’ve felt each other out for plenty of time (in my opinion two years of a steady relationship is good…less can work, don’t get me wrong, but personally it takes me more than just a year to really get to know a friend whether it’s romantically or platonically), this is the point where you decide you believe you want to spend the rest of your life together. This period should last another year or so and should include you living together and sleeping together (honestly, before engagement is probably even better). Now as a Christian, this is the point where some of my fellow Christians are about to ream me. But honestly, would you want to marry somebody who can’t please you sexually? I personally would want to know how the sex is, before I decide to spend the rest of my life with that person. Basically this is the point where you continue living both like you were before you got engaged and living like you’re married. This is the point where you need to make sure that this is indeed the right choice. Trust me, I speak from a friend’s experience, divorce is time-consuming and expensive and you really want to avoid it at all costs.

Finally is the marriage…and now you are both living your lives together, united as one. I don’t need to go into detail on this one I hope. To summarize, you are spending the rest of your life together…or you’ll be just another statistic for the divorce rates.

So to summarize, there are three major steps of a relationship:

1.) Dating/Courting

2.) Engagement

3.) Marriage

The problem I want to focus on is socializing with friends…almost all of my friends have decided that their significant others are the only people important in their lives and as such I have basically given them the middle finger. If I’m asked to do anything, I typically turn them down…either I’ll have a legit excuse, or I’ll use the excuse stemming from everyone feeling I’m an alcoholic and tell them I’m drunk or have plans to go to the bar that night. Do I actually go to the bar? Nah…I’m usually sitting right here…or watching tv.

So let’s focus on how socializing should work during the three stages of a relationship:

Dating/Courting

During this period you should have four aspects to your social life all taking up roughly equal parts of your time:

1.) Life with your girlfriend
2.) Life with your girlfriend and your/her friends
3.) Life without your girlfriend
4.) Life with your friends and without your girlfriend

Engagement

Same four aspects, but now you’re going to want to spend a little less time alone/with your friends and a little more with your lover. You shouldn’t cut your friends out completely however. This comes later.

Marriage

There is one aspect for your to follow in regards to marriage. Life with your love. Now this doesn’t mean that you HAVE to spend all your time together, but now you are OBLIGATED to at least invite your lover to join you. If the guys want to have a guy’s night, you must ask permission before doing so and if the wife says no, then you’re not having a guy’s night. This isn’t because you’re whipped, but when you went up to that podium and said your vows, you vowed to be united as one and to give your lives to each other.

In other words, what I’m getting at is simple…when you get married, your social life dies. So you need to get out and enjoy it while you’re not fully committed yet. Apparently most of my friends seem to have forgotten that part and they can’t seem to spend a single waking moment away from their lovers. One I blame him for…his girlfriend is a great girl, but he refuses to leave her side unless she ends up planning something without him. The other has a girlfriend who’s like a leech. When she’s in school, she has to spend every waking minute on the phone with him. If he hangs up, she gets pissed off. I invited him to come hang out with me for a weekend of camping and searching for snakes down in southern IL with some friends and she got pissed off at him for putting her on the spot, though that is the primary reason she said yes (yeah, had it been me, I woulda said, “Fuck you, I’m going.”), and then when we were there, the entire time she was sending him on a guilt trip via text messages and phone calls. Of course, I can’t blame her for it all, he puts up with it.

Then there’s this one night, my roommate and I decided to plan a guy’s night out while all their girlfriends were at a bachelorette party together. They didn’t show up until late…and even then, guess who tagged along? Oh yes…their girlfriends joined us as soon as they left the bachelorette party. Some guy’s night out, huh?  We also decided to have a big Ohio State football party a while back…that was even more shitty…we gave our friends plenty of notice (like over a month) and come the day of the party, both ended up being busy with their lovers. Of course, my roommate’s girlfriend’s friends were able to make it…we ended up canceling seeing as how it wasn’t much of a party anymore…

So for you guys…fuck you! I hope you enjoy spending the rest of your lives with your lovers and nobody else.