Ban On Smoking: Check. Ban On Fun: Pending

You're excited that the DC smoking ban goes into effect next week, making it illegal to smoke cigarettes in bars, nightclubs, restaurants, and pretty much everywhere else. You're an idiot.

I understand that smoking stinks. I get that you hate the way it smells in your clothes, in your hair, in your inflated sense of self importance. You'd go out more often, but you just can't stand all the young people with their chain smoking indifference to the obviously catastrophic health consequences associated with even being near a lit cigarette. You smoked until you were damn near thirty years old, but the important part is that right now you currently do not smoke, so therefore you have every right to demand that everyone else quit at once.

By your reasoning, cigarettes may as well be loaded guns pointed at the poor, innocent bar patrons who are simply trying to get their hands on yet another alcohol-loaded drink that is obviously not nearly as dangerous (well, except for the whole domestic violence, drunk driving, ruined liver thing) as something so terrible as a smoke. If we take a moment to ignore the bodies you've left in your wake as you puffed away until last call from the moment you entered college til the minute you bought your condo, we'll surely see what a victim you've become, trapped in your house while the young people are out enjoying themselves.
But what about the poor bartenders who are forced to work in that environment? Won't someone think of them? Someone as conscientious and aware as you, lawyer/analyst/researcher/human resources coordinator, someone with the foresight and compassion to make decisions for other members of the workforce relegated to such lowly jobs as taking your cash for your booze. Surely those poor souls didn't have the mental capacity to understand that, oh my god, people are actually fucking smoking at these bars where I've decided to work! Why didn't I think of that!? Thank you, dear upper-middle class patron saint of the service industry, for fixing the wrongs of the world. Perhaps you can help me get health insurance? Wait, where are you going? Come back!

So, you've gotten your wish. Starting next week, you'll be able to rejoin the cool kids again. You'll be free to restrict the rights of strangers, rights you yourself once enjoyed with absolutely no regard for people in your current position, just to further your own, selfish goal of extending your own health-conscience, miserable life a few precious days. Won't it be great? Bars full of late thirty-somethings dying to reclaim the night from those awful hipster kids who've been polluting the air these long years. Once we get Prohibition up and running again, this town might actually start to be fun again.

I, for one, can't wait.

I Won The Lottery!

Well, not all of the lottery. I won four dollars. That's pretty cool, I guess.

If you know me, you understand that bad luck tends to hit me in unexpected, devastating ways. One minute everything is fine, and the next minute everything is bleeding or something needs to be cut out of me or that bitch done run off and left or somebody shoots someone. It happens so often that, perhaps naively, I have full faith that eventually karma will balance the universe and I will be met with tremendously good fortune.

So I was excited a few years ago when my mother called me to tell me she had a dream I won the lottery. She was convinced that it was only a matter of time until I'd be obscenely rich, and it seemed like such a nice idea that I completely fell for it. I started diligently buying lottery tickets in the big jackpots, looking forward to drawings and the inevitable tipping of the great big scale called Destiny. It didn't work out though, and I learned a valuable lesson.

Winning the lottery is hard.

I'm a math dork, I understand the impossible odds. But that's not what I'm talking about. The actual process of going to buy a lottery ticket is more difficult than you'd think. I'm the guy who can't remember to take his clothes out of the dryer, even as the buzzer goes off. So remembering to buy a lottery ticket every Wednesday and Friday is a giant pain in the ass. When you add in the pressure of knowing that you're supposed to win the lottery, you can understand the tremendous guilt I feel when I forget to buy a ticket.

Baby has made it even worse. When I confessed about the lottery obsession, I also explained that I didn't have any lucky numbers that were going to be the key to my success- I just used the random-generated ones. She got surprisingly angry about that, and she set herself to figuring out what my lucky numbers should be. She came up with a combination of our birthdays and ages and the year we started dating, and I allowed her to convince me that those numbers would be the ones. And for a while, I was relieved.

But the first time I forgot to buy a ticket I realized I had made a terrible mistake. I was honestly terrified to check the numbers the following day. Of course our numbers would hit, and of course I wouldn't have bought a ticket. This is me we're talking about, after all. If anyone is going to fail to win the lottery when they're supposed to hit the jackpot, it's going to be me. So now I'm forever cursed to play the lottery to avoid fulfilling my own shitty destiny. Awesome.

Everybody Does It, Don't They?

I have this good idea. How do I know it's a good idea? Cause Baby thinks it's stupid.

I'm going to explain the idea, and I'm going to ask your advice. I would really appreciate feedback. You can simply answer if you do it or not, or you can comment on the merits of the idea and its chances for success. If you're ashamed to admit you do it, you can post anonymously. But I'd like to know what you think before I try it. I'll tell you what it is in a minute, but to fully explain it you'll need some background.

I love a trainwreck. I honestly do. I enjoy awkward situations, even if I'm miserable while they're happening. Even if they make my skin crawl after the fact.

Specifically, I love my past. It is full to bursting with an incomprehensible amount of embarrassing episodes and miserable failures. The kind of shit that decades of therapy cannot overcome. It's a miracle I haven't killed myself, it's that bad. But that doesn't stop me from coveting situations where I can revisit those misfortunes. Weddings, reunions, trips to the mall in my hometown, you name it. I go to those things looking for the last person on earth I'd want to see. Cause who the hell knows what will happen? It will be weird, it will be uncomfortable, and for some reason I don't begin to understand I will find it endlessly amusing.

Baby thinks that part is stupid, too, incidentally. But that's not the reason I think it's a good idea.

I can see what people searched for to find my blog. Blogspot must have some sweetheart deal with Google, because for some reason if you google "Gay Porn" you get my blog post about getting my neighbor's porn. Or at least, so I've heard. Phew, close one. So anyway yeah, for some reason this blog gets placed very well in search engines. I can sit and read the report each week and laugh and laugh at what people searched for to find me. At least once or twice a week I get some variation of "How much Ativan does it take to kill yourself?" I'm sorry, I don't have the answer for that one. But I can tell you that the answer is "a shit ton" because a handful won't do it. Trust me.

While we're at it, Baby thinks what people google'd to find my blog isn't funny, either. That email report comes each Friday morning at about 6:30am, and she's just not in the mood to laugh at that time of day. She has no sense of humor. But again, that's not the reason I think it's a good idea.

So I've been sitting around trying to think of ways to use this Google angle to drive traffic to the blog. I could make fake posts claiming to have pictures of naked celebrities, but that's sort of cheating. People looking for that stuff will just immediately click away from the site. Something tells me that if you're into that stuff, you won't find me all that funny. I want people to happen across this and actually find something interesting to read. And this line of thinking is what led me to come up with my Good Idea.

You know how you're bored at work and you google yourself to see what comes up? You do, don't you? Cause Baby swears normal people don't do that. She will admit that maybe she has done it once or twice, but she insists that she doesn't do it regularly, and she's certainly never sat around googling kids she knew twenty five years ago to see whatever happened to them. But I do it all the time, and I'm sure other people do it, too. So here is the idea:

I'm thinking of making a blog post that is just a long list of the first and last name of everyone I can think of from my past. Friends, enemies, people I barely knew, kids I got high with, teachers, bosses, girls I had regrettable sex with, everybody. I would try, where possible, to group them with similar people. That way, they would see their name and other people they might remember, and they'd be hooked. They'd figure out who I was (how many people know more than one person named Bryce?), and maybe they'd laugh. Or maybe they'd try to kill me. It's certainly possible. But I'm protected by the internets, so they can't really do anything. And as Lady Tiara pointed out to me, it's not like I'd be saying anything about them, I would just include their name.

So I'm wondering, do you ever google yourself? And do you think this idea is stupid? Cause I think it's awesome. And by awesome I mean potentially very fucking dangerous. But maybe also probably funny. Yet mostly scary.

December 15, 2006 update:

I'm still on the fence about this. Lady Tiara raises a good point about people being Googled for job interviews. That's not something I had thought about. And a friend recently pointed out that you pretty much always Google anyone you're considering dating these days. I'll need to do some more thinking on it.