The last time I spent my lunch hour in Topeka, New York.

Okay, the first thing I am going to admit is that I haven't been to Topeka, New York. They tell me you just go to New York City, Hit Wall Street, take a right at Starbucks and walk until you see the sign or you find the bottom of the Bay, either way you will see about the same thing.

The point (if there is a point) is that as long as you are there or anywhere, it could be a great place to have lunch. Just grab your hat and duster and step through that doorway into the next week of your life.

Speaking of which I recommend the Coney but not the Chili (terrible gas).

Life may be getting you down and life might be getting harder. The road may be getting steeper and the days drier. But sometimes as you are slogging along through this meaningless existence, it's important to stop. 

No, it is absolutely critical to stop

and enjoy the view.

This is the universe that occurred or got created from something so immeasurably small or large that it cannot be quantified or classified or explained away in the 

obvious assumption that we will ever live long enough

to be able to do so.

It doesn't mean we should not try.

It just means that you should enjoy this lunch break.

So, I am sitting here, on my lunch break, observing the state of the world. It is about as bad as it looks. Humanity.

Destruction- willful, chaotic, unprecedented on a scale that boggles the mind and hurts the soul.

I am the bile that comes after eating bad chili as I watch our collective downward spiral into the age of hope and despair.

See Jack. Didn't I tell you to avoid the Chili?

Why did I have the chili? Because destruction and desolation taste good at first like those

who revel in revenge and hatred.

It does not leave you wanting dessert.

 From

 

where I sit I can see, the modern versions of Good and Evil playing chess in the park. Checks are infrequent and Checkmates even more so, like playing poker will flying a bomber over the Atlantic looking for an Hawaiian 

  to ante up you bets by calling your hand with a pair of aces and three suicide Jacks. Yes it is a crazy metaphor for what level on the unpredictability that makes living it worthwhile.

Speaking of Jack, I am thinking of taking up running

I hear he's an expert at this kind of thing.

 I don't know much, but I suspect that Mario could give

Jack some pointers

Air Glides

I wish I had the money it would take to help out Mario.

Still if I can get a pair (and they work or kill me in the process)

I am going to take up running.

You should check them out. The Air Glides. 

In the meanwhile, I am going to undertake smarter tactics in mob control.

You know what that means?

It means it is time for me to take the Holy Hand Grenade from Turin, Yorkshire and toss it into the middle of my sedentary lifestyle.

Ed and I enjoy explosions.

The clinical psycho told me that I would need to completely change my lifestyle.

So I am. 

I will walk 500 -499 miles each day.

I will stick to my diet.

Yes, Cookie Monster, that means it's over.

Get your crumbs and start walking @ 7am each day.

It's the way of things man...I mean monster.

anyway, I am going to seize the bull by it's proverbial horns. 

Then I will be enjoying life and living like a...

Go on say it. The visuals are killing your data plan.

Well. Get over it.

I always envied R2D2. partly because he has an easy to spell name, but also for that holographic projector and memory banks. The Blaster Scoring was really sexy too.

Well. It had to happen. This lunch break is over.

I will leave you guys with the above thought and one last one I heard today.

Opinions ARE like assholes. Everyone has them and many of them stink.

BUT, Opinions differ in one aspect. They needed to be constantly scrutinized, picked apart and examined.

I will just credit this comedian who is both funny and virtually unknown except in Canada and Australia

which is pretty much the same thing (being unknown)

Tim Minchin.

Okay, now you can applaud 

no really go ahead.

If you don't I will take it that you are reading this in the presence of your wife/husband and don't wish to explain

you rapid joy at being entertained with such

quality entertainment that seeks to

not only annoy but inform the dickens and tolkien out of you.

Now go take a walk.

or not.

You might even find me slogging along @ 7 in some park.

and that is Life According to Mike

on Mondays.

It was almost like a song....actually it was a day just like a song.

So here it is Thursday. A day largely ignored by the Western World.
I need to write a blog so...
I am writing it with song.

let's start with the only song I could play well enough to annoy my family (they were not huge country music fans- okay that's not fair, they weren't country music fans period).

The one song that I could actually play on the piano without messing it up. So I played it until my brother, the ever tolerant, Stephen van Vuuren, came up stairs and begged me to learn something/anything else.
so I did.
It's funny how life forms around things that come along. I have always been very absorbent and thus much of what I am, the way I am is from a constant influx of books, movies and music.
I many ways, my early psyche was from this song. I loved long before most children ever show an interest in it, and thus the loss that comes with love came early to me. I really didn't know how to cope with it until the next song came along anyway.

When my brother realized that I could play this he probably swore off country music FOREVER. Well, it could have been that or the fact I played the Staler Brothers Greatest Hits over and over again until the nail pushed out of the hardwood floors and My brother threatened to smash the records. Then I discovered Peter, Paul and Mary.

And Here is further proof that I am solely responsible for my brother's depraved childhood...

he was so good as to remind me of the ones he despised more than the others.

Fortunately for SV2, we live in separate states and I grew a sense of humor whereas He went deaf. (it's a lie, but it is funny).

ANYWAY

moving on.

Now this would be the song I would dedicate to my exes...that is if I actually had any worth mentioning. Okay that is also mostly a lie, some of it is true, at least in the fact that I loved way more women than they loved me back. Mostly i say this to the women I flirt with one Facebook. They only know me well enough to know how truly awesome I think I am.

IN OTHER NEWS

there has been an outbreak of Baha in my life a time or two, fortunately I mostly live alone. There's a cat, and while he finds me mildly amusing. he does leave the house when I play:

These days songs and music take me to many places, as often as my moods take me. When playing World of Warcraft, one gets tired of the music loop after about an hour (with every patch/expansion it gets shorter)

So I took to listening to my music collection (at 1 time it was 250 GB of music I had ripped/torrented/found/bought/borrowed. It was enough to last over a year nonstop) then the drive died before I had backed it up and it was gone, all gone. The irony is that I had stopped listening to it by that point.  Pandora  had come along and changed the way I listened to music.

Then along came Spotify and changed it again, so now I am rebuilding that 250GB music collection playlist by playlist.

Now I will take a brief excursion down memory lane with the odd music I listened while playing various Video Games.

Castle Wolfenstein was first.

This wasn't hard since the sound track wore really then after 3 levels (I was playing the first 100 when I knew something had to give) Thus enter the CD player.

Irony: It was American GI vs. Nazi zombies and SS chain gunners with Restless Heart playing in the background. Now I can't play the original Wolfenstein without hearing the songs in the back of my mind.  I would just put the CDs on repeat. Sawyer Brown was in there somewhere with some Kate Bush and Queen.

By the time DOOM had rolled around, soundtracks had improved.

 The Soundtrack was Rockin' for 2 games, but by Doom 3 it was getting old. At that point Internet Radio had first surfaced. Slacker Radio came along, there were other but by then I was with them. So i was rocker my shotgun frenzies to the likes of Red Hot Chili Peppers:

I also listened to Faith no More (Epic) and the like

Then After Doom had shot out it's last bullet, It was time for Quake II, I had already been playing Quake (1) but it did not grab me like Quake II did. 

 I came late to Quake II. One thing was that the original Quake did not appeal to me at all. It was this weird mish mash of guns/scifi/fantasy/horror and annoyance.  When I like a Video game i will play it death. I played QII to death. Also the music go old too.

Quake II music (via youtube)

so I found suitable songs to listen too.

I ran this back to back with some NIN, Monster Magnet and the like. But it was "Save Yourself" that would become my theme song for QII.

Somewhere in the midst of this I got Tomb Raider. 

The music is quite staid and soft, even the boss battle stuff is mild compared to other things. So I had to kick it up with something (we are talking playing the game straight for hours and hours) (yes I played through it several times). So I cast about and ended up with. I kind of went on this Hip-hop rap outshoot

and before you know it I was Crunking it and listening to stuff that got me kicked out of the white boys fan clubs. Not that they would let me in the Crunk ones either. I guess I couldn't get low enough. I was on a ninja roll by then. 

The point is until Pandora came along I was more about listening to a song over and over again than fleshing out to listen to new stuff (at least while playing video games.) I did explore around the wide world of music doing other things.

My music was fairly random at the best of times anyway. 

After I gave up on Pirate Bay (music) thanks to the RIAA witch hunts and the Public Library crazy mish mash of CDs. I let Pandora's algorithm roll me around some but then spotify came along and has since brought me back to finding music that not only suits my needs but often suits the video games I play once the soundtracks wear thin.

Now when I am out in the Borderlands, I can get as much   and 

And there you have it. At least for today. 

Life According to Mike.

I just need a theme song to go with that....

just some random songs I found while writing this blog:

enjoy:

Wow, time flies when you are having fun.

 The world continues to spin and orbit and somehow stay attractive to the sun. Time continues to appear linear to us. Days come and go, hours and minutes turn like gears around life's clockwork masterpiece.
I find myself wondering how I found myself standing on a street wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and holding an Auggie machine gun.
Then I remembered that the world ended yesterday.

 

 That's right, mostly, except it wasn't yesterday exactly, it was long enough ago that there is grass growing in Times Square. 
You might ask me, "How could it come to this?" but you are dead, so you can't.
You might ask me, "how do you know I am dead? Who's holding the camera?" 
"Well, I can tell you that it's not you. She is much better looking."
I would be lying of course, she is also were a mask. A Harlequin to be exact. 

 Sunsets are a lot nice in the city than they used to be. There is not many people left. Those who survive had to go back to farming and gathering and hunting. A real Fight Club Future it is.
Unlike the other possibilities that could have happened. But I am getting ahead of myself.
How did it come to this?
There is quite a story in this..
Unfortunately for most of you 90% of human population perished in the chaos that consumed all the world we thought we knew. There wasn't a zombie apocalypse with hordes of zombie monsters consuming all they could find. Actually, I am lying there was a "zombie" apocalypse but instead of rotting monsters roaming the streets- there were humans who had dehumanized themselves into a sort of cannibalistic mass consumer who wasted all the planets resources until all that was left was this nightmare city. Then the world rebelled and as the monsters consumed themselves having nothing left raw unmade material to produce and waste, nature rose up in the vacuum of reason and struck down the masses in droves until only the enlightened remained. These days there are only the memories of those monsters to haunt us in the empty fields between the remains of buildings. 

You might ask what led to this downfall?

Ignorance.

In a word, a relative flash of a few hundred years, humanity surrendered all traces of intelligence to collective thought, following whomever would lead never questioning the fact that the leaders had even less judgement than those who promoted them to become thus. At first, the sides of the war used words like socialism, communism, capitalism, republicanism, democratism and tyranny. In the end it did not really matter, because the words had become meaningless as had any concept of individualism. In the end, the mass of humanity looked only for the next entertainment, the next meal, the next gadget that would simplify their already meaningless lives even as the few cried in the wilderness that devastation was setting in.

In the end, only the few who would see the coming days, did anything to save themselves.

The rest of mankind went to their dooms, smartphones in hand believing that everything would be okay and that the world was really doing fine.

 A lot of it is unclear, but one thing is clear. 

It's my dream.

It's my nightmare.

I am Sarah Connors looking into the unavoidable date with destiny

Then I woke up and saw that the world was still around me. That there was still a future.
That Ignorance has not yet won.

All is still right under God's Universe.

There only a few things worth fighting for.

There is still time to find some small happiness in a little bit of tenderness
Like this picture, even if it is only in your imagination.
We can all dream of love and passion


So here I will leave you with words of hope and inspiration
of
the world's greatest slam poet.

William Shatner.

Live life
Live life like you're gonna die
Becasue you're gonna
I hate to be the bearer of bad news
But you're gonna die

Maybe not today or even next year
But before you know it you'll be saying
"Is this all there was?
What was all the fuss?
Why did I bother?"

Now, maybe you won't suffer maybe it's quick
But you'll have time to think
Why did I waste it?
Why didn't I taste it?
You'll have time
Because you're gonna die.

Yes it's gonna happen because it's happened to a lot of people I know
My mother, my father, my loves
The president, the kings and the pope
They all had hope

And they muttered just before they went
Maybe, I won't let go
Live life like you're gonna die
Because you are

Maybe you won't suffer maybe it's quick
But you'll have time to think
Why did I waste it?
Why didn't I taste it?
You'll have time
'Cause you're gonna die

I tell you who else left us
Passed on down to heaven no longer with us
Johnny Cash, JFK, that guy in the Stones
Lou Gehrig, Einstein, and Joey Ramone
Have I convinced you?
Do you read my lips?
This may come as news but it's time
You're gonna die
You're gonna die

By the time you hear this I may well be dead
And you my friend might be next
'Cause we're all gonna die

Yeah, oh maybe you won't suffer and maybe it's quick
But you'll have time to think
Why did I waste it?
Why didn't I taste it?
You'll have time
You'll have time cause you're gonna die
Yes, you're gonna die
You're gonna die, I tell you
You're gonna die
You are gonna die

'Cause maybe you won't suffer maybe it's quick
But you have time to think
Why did I waste it?
Why didn't I taste it?
You'll have time 'cause you're gonna die

Live Life
Life life like you're gonna die
Because you're going to
Oh yes
I hate to be the beater of bad news
But you're gonna die

Maybe not today or even next year
But before you know it you'll be saying
"Is this all there was?
What was all the fuss?
Why did I bother?
Why did I waste it?
Why didn't I taste it?"
You'll have time, baby
You'll have time
'Cause you're gonna die
You are gonna die
Oh yeah

(the sung part in the background)
Y-O-U-apostrophe-R-E-G-O-double-N-A-DIE Die!
You are gonna diiiiiie
Lung cancer, heart attack, diabetes, drug overdose
Choke on a chicken bone
Hit by a lightning bolt
Spider bite
Airplane crash
Car wreck

And that is Life According to

Mike...

and probably

William Tell

Shatner.

entirely new random thoughts by Mike V.

 you can probably guess who

I saw the other day. He is the best at what he does.

"I am still Smarmy."

He Says.

This is what I get for blogging about my dentist...that arrogant bastard.

I love him- well I love the fact that he was cool about it even if he still has dropped it.

I may not be the sharpest pencil in the pocket protector but I can at least say that I try to keep my HB close @ all times.

It goes without saying (I am typing though)

I LOVE women, even if I will probably never actually be in a relationship with one (no I am NOT objectifying here). Also, only a handful (no pun) of them seem to like/tolerate me. There rest act as if they can brainwash me into not noticing that they were there in the first place.

People are, like Mike don't Jinx it. If you say you won't you never will. They are probably right.

It's been over ten years since I actually kissed a woman (no not any men either).

The truth is- there is a day that goes by that I don't miss the sweet sensation of the contact.

The truth is yes, part of my brain knows that it will never be as good as it is in a Disney movie.

The truth is, that it can be better.

It's your kiss after all, not theirs that matters.

 Having said that, keep in mind that if you say this to me

 Or if you pucker up for one, I am liable to cross Heaven & Earth to comply with your request

women only (sorry guys, while there is a very attractive blond woman here- I have no bias to hair or skin color on kissing).

We all have our opinions

our words can hurt or comfort

 It's strange, you know, when you realize that you know more words than people around you.   I think of Robin Williams Stand up tour Words of Self Destruction

 I stop, on occasion...
I know that might be hard to understand where I am concerned. In some ways, my words and the intrinsic understanding of them get me in and out of trouble. 

Everytime I realize that I have reached this point in my eventual narrative- I force myself to stop and recognize that I am both prolithic and long winded.

So what do I mean?
Take posting on Facebook since I do a lot of this. Things or rather words escalate quickly.
Tick Tick Boom
(think Susan Ivanova)
"There probably be a boom tomorrow- there's always a boom) 

This is an awesome yet stupid picture

but whose counting anyway.

It does sum up my thoughts on Syria today though.

I mean considering the alternatives to giving Russia the High 5 and all.

(note: Russia is more like that wild cat then one should take for granted, wear gauntlets on next High 5).

Again, thank you world from removing the threat of imminent Nuclear retaliation.

War, war never changes...

except when it doesn't happen!

That also being said there are alternative ways of dealing with your problems

Isn't that right 007?

You can say that again, James.

Silencer Diplomacy is more effective than 

overwhelming force anyday

 Rorschach, it looks like we win this one, today anyway. Speaking of which, does anyone see the sinister parallel here with the Watchmen and the Chemical Attack?

Anyway...

I digress.

And now it is time for my happy dance!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cnQCk0u49w

And

That is life according to Mike

Just sit back and enjoy the world (with Daft Punk)