Hey Jon, what have you been doing?

Funny you should ask. I just finished up a fairly elaborate pie chart that breaks down how I've been spending my time lately. The first thing you'll notice is that I don't track how much time I spend in the bathroom. Now you know where I draw the line. The second thing you'll notice is that I can't draw very good circles. I drew this while watching The Fast and Furious. Maybe now that you know my brain was completely numb at the time, it's not so bad, is it?



As you can see, I lead a pretty fulfilled life. Yet another reminder of why you want to be me. Some of the things I do are related, like pretending to be busy and sleeping. They just go hand in hand. I would have preferred to spend a small portion of my time purchasing winning lottery tickets, but it was not to be. There were two winning tickets sold in that 333 million dollar megamillions jackpot. One was sold in New York and one in California. I've lived in both of those places in the past. Sounds like someone needs to update their address book, megamillions.

Suddenly I'm overcome with bitterness. I've gotta go.

* Eating sunflower seeds and watching the Dodger are the same thing, so you can use those interchangeably.


-- Posted From My iPhone while eating sunflower seeds.

Topical

I'm guessing (mostly hoping) that a lot of you misread the title and are expecting a post about either fruit punch or an exciting tale of romance and intrigue in the south pacific. You'll find neither here. Instead, horror, mayhem, shock, awe, disgust, nausea, giddiness and a little bit of constipation.

You may or may not know this, but there has been some talk of healthcare reform lately. You might have missed that though as it was pushed off the news desk in favor of a story about what will be happening to the official pictures of the after party for the flowers that were used in the dress rehearsal for Michael Jackson's backup memorial plan in case the first one ran into problems, which it didn't. (just so we're clear here, I'm trying to belittle the television news media, not MJ. I'll do that later when enough time has past. )

A little background info for you: I currently have a job that gives me no medical, no dental, no vision, no retirement, no vacation pay, no sick pay and no bonus options of any kind. Of course, if I can find a little overtime, I do have the potential to clear 22k/ year. Before taxes of course. It's about 17k/ year after, which should be more than enough to live on, right? I should be able to afford my own medical coverage and still be able to pay for wild vacations to the suburbs AND buy that fancy yacht I've had my eye on. I don't do that though. I spend my money on frivolous things like food ( what a waste, I'm always hungry again), the mortgage, electricity, college loans and a cellular phone.

For the most part, my complete lack of medical coverage hasn't bothered me. Then this happened:





I don't know if it's obvious in the picture, but my left arm has become completely separated from my body at the shoulder area. Turns out, I use that arm all the time. I didn't even realize it.

Why is this such a big deal you say? Because I've been asked to play softball again and I can't resist the chance to unretire like so many other great athletes. It's my achilles heel. Sure, I can play with one arm and start a new trend of one armed softball teams, but I don't think the world is ready for that. I think we all still remember how badly Jim Abbott failed and he didn't even go full one-arm. He was like one and three quarters arm...

My point is this, I'll be playing softball again in about two weeks. My shoulder better heal the crap out of itself, or I'll be forced to get a better job with health benefits and a better salary, and I know nobody wants to see that. *

Ps. I don't know why I just wrote any of this. It doesn't even make sense to me either. It took a long time to write what with the one arm and all. Probably a lot of my problems can be traced back to the blood loss caused by my missing arm. Well, missing isn't really an accurate term. I can see it right there on the table next to me. That's a self diagnosis though, so it might just be bursitis of the shoulder and require some rest. Either way, hope you enjoyed the picture attached to these rambling words. I really don't have a compass right now.

*I've actually been searching for said job for quite some time. No one seems to be hiring though. Is there some sort of problem with the economy that I'm unaware of? I've got to read those memos I keep getting.





-- Posted From My iPhone. Jealous?

Hair loss

Below you will find my future. I need to face facts. I'm not going to have hair on the top of my head forever. I can already feel it thinning out. I've taken the time to create another stunningly accurate picture of what my future will look like.



As you can see, the hair on top of my head is completely gone. It's still growing strong on the sides. In fact, it looks like my future hair will actually be quite thick on the sides. A combover could be an option. If that fails, my eyebrows also seem to be coming in nicely which means I could also have the option of a combback. Allow me to demonstrate.


As you can see, I've cultivated a unibrow at this stage in my hairloss so that I can have a nice uniform combback. Obviously I've done this to avoid looking creepy and weird. I can only imagine what kind of horrible things children would call me if I had a gap in the middle of my combback. Probably something like gappy. I don't ever want to be called gappy.

That's all I've got. I apologize here and now where an apology most certainly belongs.

-- Posted From My iPhone. Where hairloss is just a fact of life, like Tootie, or Tudy, or Toodee, or however the heck you spell it.

History Lesson

What is the definition of Greek tragedy? While no one person could ever completely and accurately answer that question, one thing is sure: I will try to do so with a series of pretty terrible drawings.

Most of these pictures speak for themselves and the ones that don't you can bet will be elaborated on by yours truly.

What follows is an entirely accurate and truthful tale of a truly true story about what happened to me this morning. Some of it may be made up, but that is only to protect the guilty.



This is how my day started. Almost every day starts with jazz hands. It's how I mentally prepare in case the morning commute turns into a dance number. I like to be loose and I don't know of a better way to do that than with jazz hands. I also have a marble plaque cemented into my bathroom floor that says "Noble Jon" so I never forget where I came from. I never want to slip back into that painful place in my life again. I also make loud bellowing declarations in case it's not just a dance number, but a song as well.



As you can see, putting on deodorant is pretty important to me. It also makes me smile. That plays an important part on the tragedy of the next drawing. Please take a moment to prepare yourself for the atrocity to follow...



I'm not going to lie to you. I knew going into the deodorant application phase of my day that this could happen. I use a clear stick type deodorant ( the brand of which will go unnamed until they pay for their product placement) and when it gets down to the end, it often falls out or goes all crooked. A design flaw that nobody seems willing to address. But I digress. I guess what I'm trying to say is, this could have been avoided if the deodorant gods didn't have it in for me.



When I realize something is both Greek and tragic, I say it out loud. Doesn't everyone?



Try not to look at this picture for too long or you may end up crying yourself. It'll happen, trust me. I wouldn't even show you this if I didn't want a life like depiction of the raw emotion I felt this morning.



The end result was that I had to use a differently scented deodorant to finish the job this morning. As you can see above, it didn't go over well. The general public can be very cruel when they put their collective minds to it.

I hope you can all learn from my mistakes.

-- Posted From My iPhone. For a list of all product placement fees, email my assistant at jonsassistantnoreallynotjustanaddressjonmadeuphimselftomakeitlooklikehehasanassistant@gmail.com.

What if?

A little while back, I twittedededed that my body was not leaking from anywhere and that that was a good thing. That was an entirely factual statement. It has not changed. My body is still leak free. But what if the circumstances were different? What if I WAS leaking? What would that be like? Today we're going to play a game of, "what if?" I should warn you, the image below is intensely graphic and not suitable for children over the age of 3.



As you can plainly see, I am leaking from my elbow. The above artist's rendering is in HD, so you know that it is stunningly accurate. That's what HD means.

A thorough inspection of this picture reveals significant details about what my life would be like with a leaking elbow. For instance, you may have noticed that I am smiling. This is important because it shows that a L.E.L. (Leaky Elbow Life) is not a painful thing. Further more, I must not be expected to clean up the elbow fluid myself and it must not be ruining my clothes. If any of those things were true, I can assure you that I would not be smiling.

Another notable observation is the lack of facial hair. Not only are my beard and mustache absent, but I seem to have removed my eyebrows as well. Couple those facts with the additional hair on top of my head and we can only assume that I felt the need for extensions and wanted to use my own, natural hair. This is most likely because I thought the leaky elbow made me look like I was balding. In an attempt to look younger, I added my facial hair as extensions and went with a messy looking hair style that is all the rage with the kids today. I'll be honest, I think it's working.

Finally, let's take a look at that puddle of elbow fluid developing around my feet. It's a fairly substantial amount of fluid, so we can draw a couple of conclusions here. Either the Lakers are on the verge of winning another championship and superstition precludes me from moving or changing position, or the flow rate of elbow fluid is abnormally high, creating E.F. puddles around me everywhere I go. I'd like to think it's the former rather than the latter because if it's the latter, I probably won't get invited to many guitar hero parties and that would make me sad.

I hope I've answered all of your questions concerning a world wherein my body leaks from my elbow. If for some unthinkable reason I haven't, you know where to place you queries.

-- Posted From My iPhone, which is also completely leak free.

Clarification/ update

I'm not sure why, but that last picture seems to be unpopular. I can assure you that it is, in fact, chapstick on my lips, not frosting. I wouldn't be able to leave frosting on my lips long enough to take a picture, let alone the 38 I did take to get the right one for the post.

I have prepared a very thorough illustration to explain what happened to create the scenario which seems to be causing nightmares among children ages 23 to 78.




I hope that clears things up.

If further clarification is required, I'm sure you'll let me know. Be warned though, an equally impressive illustration like the one above will be used to explain why I use illustrations to explain things.

-- Posted From My iPhone. Illustrations brought to you courtesy of my girlfriends wacom graphics tablet. All typos are subject to copyright and are totally intentional.

C. A.

Hello, my name is Jon and I'm addicted to chapstick.




Discuss.

And for those that were not aware, this Boston/ Chicago series is freaking AMAZING!!

-- Posted From My iPhone. Do they sell chapstick in bulk?

A very necessary list

Below, you will find a list of thing I am not afraid of, but would be if I were a cat. I'm going to count them down in order of fear. I'm sure you'll find this list to be very enlightening. It should also give you some good insight to the current state of my mind.

7. Escalators.
- This is definitely a cat fear. However, it isn't something they are likely to encounter very often unless they either live in a super fancy house, or are one of those creepy cats that is led around on a leash by its equally creepy owner.

6. The Ocean.
- Ever see a sail boat crew made up entirely of cats? Yeah, I didn't think so.

5. Kids Dribbling Basketballs.
- How many times have you seen a pack of cats minding their own business on the basketball courts at the park only to have a group of kids ruin an otherwise nice day of BBQ-ing (Blacktop-Basketball-Qourt-loungING*) by dribbling their basketballs all over the court? Worse yet, the kids don't even play basketball. They just mumble some nonsense about working on dribbling fundamentals.

4. Radio-Controlled, Cat-Catching Robots.
- Pretty self explanatory.

3. Cat Leukemia.
- Who among us doesn't fear cancer? Cats are no different.

2. Ensemble Casts.
- to be fair, this high ranking comes from a decades old misunderstanding that cats have of the word "casts." When said quickly, as this phrase often is, cats don't hear the word "casts," they hear the word "cats." For whatever reason, cats tend to imagine a Voltron like creature comprised of several cats joining together as one, immensely powerful cat. This is something cats find utterly terrifying.

1. The Number 10.
- Turns out, most cats we interviewed were already on their 9th life. 10 is considered to be the most unlucky number world wide by cats of all types. In Colombia, the drug cartel cats mark the houses of those they intend to kill with a red 10. In the state of Texas, a cat motorcycle gang known as "The Death Tabbies," show their loyalty by getting the number 10 tattooed on their foreheads. Kittens are taught to fear the number 10 from birth by having their mothers follow every ninth cleaning lick with a hard bite to the ear. It's harsh, but effective.

Well, that about wraps it up. Just to clarify, I am not, nor have I ever been, afraid of any of the aforementioned things.

Ok, bye.

*Cats are notoriously bad spellers and even worse at coming up with good acronyms.


-- Posted From My iPhone, so you know it's factually accurate.

Clarification post

There seems to be some serious confusion regarding my wearing all pink as a terrible idea. I was not merely suggesting that I wear a pink shirt. I said ALL pink. That means pink shoes, pink socks, pink pants, pink underwear, pink shirt, pink gloves, pink hat, pink cape, pink spats, pink glasses, pink face paint, pink tie and a pink pinky ring. All pink. What say you now?

Just a pink shirt is easy. I've done that before. One comment references an outfit I wore every Monday night for over a year. See below.



As you can plainly see, whether the shirt itself proclaims its own toughness or not is irrelevant. I wear it tough, and that's all that should matter. The name of our bowling team was "Bowling With Scissors." If that isn't the very definition of dangerously tough bowlers, I don't know what is.

I hope that helps clarify thing for you. Trust me, all pink is a terrible idea. Me dressed as pictured above is tough.

-- Posted From My iPhone. Tough enough for you? Enjoy the spelling errors courtesy my iPhone.

Terrible Idea

For me, life is a constant struggle not to make terrible decisions created by my own terrible ideas.  Here are some examples from today:

Terrible Idea:  Wear all pink today.

Terrible Decision:  Averted.  I ended up not wearing any pink today, but that decision really had nothing to do with my own common sense and almost everything to do with not having a single pink item of clothing in my wardrobe. 

Terrible Idea:  Remind all of the Cubs fans I work with that I'm a Dodgers fan and we totally destroyed them in the playoffs last year.

Terrible Decision:  Averted (Temporarily).  It's way too close to St. Patrick's Day to be tossing that kind of smack talk around.  I'm pretty dumb, but even I know better than to remind Cubbie fans just how cursed their team is.  I'll wait until September to do that.

Terrible Idea:  Try to post more often.

Terrible Decision:  The jury is out.

Terrible Idea:  Make shirts that say, "Punch me, in the face, I'm a jerk."

Terrible Decision:  See below.

As you can see, I went ahead and followed through with this one.  I see these more as a gift you would give to someone else rather than something you would buy for yourself.  Most likely, these will be given to illiterate people that you don't like.  I'm not really sure there's a market for this, but that obviously didn't stop me.  I added the commas for a little extra emphasis on the overall statement I want these shirts to make.  I'd like to encourage everyone to click on the shirt, buy several dozen (they're cheaper when you buy in bulk, and lets face it, you're probably going to want to hand these out to a lot of people.  Am I right?), tell all of your friends, and let's get to face-punching jerks ASAP. 

Not that any of you were wondering, but the Government has yet to purchase a single shirt regarding the bailout.  I'm pretty shocked by this.  I only mention it because I don't want anyone to get upset that they haven't yet received their official 2009 Bailout T-Shirt.