None of Us are Safe From the Ten Commandments Killer (Or, “What I Learned in 14 Years at Two Different Catholic Schools”)

I, like a lot of people, have been watching this season of American Horror Story (AHS: Hotel). One of the major story arcs focuses on a killer who punishes people for breaking each of the Ten Commandments. For some reason, this is what I thought about when I first woke up this morning and couldn’t yet pull myself out of bed. Then another thought crossed my mind:

How many of the Ten Commandments have I broken? 

For the record, I am not religious, nor have I been since I was sixteen. I don’t put much stock into religion, personally. I did, however, attend a Catholic grade school and went on to attend a Catholic high school. I was raised Roman Catholic and made my Sacraments. And I do believe that some higher power exists, even if I don’t necessarily worship It/Him/Her or am not particularly grateful to It/Him/Her. And I want to be very clear that, while all of this is based on everything I was taught at two separate Catholic schools, this is in no way a religious message. I’m not trying to claim that we’re all going to hell because we’re all terrible sinners. This is just solely for entertainment purposes.

So, here is a breakdown of all of the Ten Commandments and how most of us have broken most of these.

1) I, the Lord, am your God. You shall have no other gods but Me.

So, here’s the basic gist of this one… It’s the very first on the list. God means business. Of all of the following Commandments, this is the most important one (yeah, even above murder). You have to love God above all other things. You can’t have “false idols,” as the other version of this Commandment reads; can’t put other things up on a pedestal.  And here’s why basically everyone has broken this one:

Everyone has loved someone or something more than anything else in our lives.

I’d be willing to wager that you parents out there love your kids more than anything and that if God wanted to turn you into the next Job, you’d tell Him to fuck off. In doing so, you are breaking His most serious Commandment (and the second, for that matter).

Aside from that, we have all had a hero or an idol in our lives. Maybe it’s a musician or a sports icon? Maybe an author or an artist? Maybe an every-day hero, like a nurse or a fire fighter? Maybe we don’t love them more than anything else (and maybe we do), but we’re placing them in a status that God wants us to reserve for only Him. So, yeah, we’re fucked from right out of the gate.

2) You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain.

Have you ever said, “God damn it/this/him/her/you/etc.?” Have you ever cursed at God when your life takes a shitty turn? If you answered “yes” to either of those questions, you’ve broken this one.

3) Remember to keep holy the Sabbath Day.

For Catholics, this means Sunday. If you don’t go to Church on Sunday, and if you do work of any kind on that day (chores and errands included), you are breaking this Commandment. No joke. The Sabbath is for worship only. It is a day to rest and reflect on everything that the Lord has given you.

4) Honor thy father and thy mother.

Oh, dear. How many of us have argued with our parents? How many of us have done exactly what they’ve told us not to do? It doesn’t matter if they are the shittiest people on the planet, you have to respect them and their wishes, and do what they say. To do otherwise would be breaking this Commandment. So, whoops.

5) Thou shall not kill.

Surely, there’s no way that I could have broken this one, you think. Well, you probably have. And don’t call me Shirley.

According to the Bible, God says that all life is precious. Have you ever stepped on a bug? Have you ever sprayed a roach with Raid? Set up lethal mouse traps? Had your home fumigated for termites? Then you’ve broken the fifth Commandment. Yeah. It applies to insects and other vermin, too.

6) You shall not commit adultery.

Hey, look at that! The first one down the list that I haven’t done!!

This one’s pretty self-explanatory and, unfortunately, it seems more people do this one nowadays. That’s all I have to say about that. Moving on…

7) You shall not steal.

This also implies the act of being dishonest, period. If you’ve ever cheated on a test, for example, it counts as breaking this Commandment. Not just if you stole your friend’s answers, either.

However, for the more literal translation, if you have ever borrowed something without permission (even if you brought it back and no one was the wiser), you broke this Commandment. Not big things, like cars or clothes, either. I’m talking pens and things of that nature. Seriously.

If you’ve ever borrowed something with permission, lost it, lost contact with the person who loaned it to you, and find it years later, but never give it back (even if you have no way to do so), that counts, too.

8) Do not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Or, simply, “Do not bear false witness.” Again, this pertains to the dishonesty thing I mentioned a second ago.

Most of us have told white lies either to not hurt someone’s feelings or to save themselves from awkward situations. A lot of us have, too, bent the truth a little bit as to not get ourselves into trouble. Both of those things count. Even if someone else didn’t get in trouble because of it.

9) You shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife.

Even if you aren’t into your friend’s significant other, or even if they are just a friend to you as well, but you look at the happy couple and think, That’s the kind of relationship I want… Guess what? Yup. You’ve broken this Commandment.

And it doesn’t just apply to people you know, either. Have you ever looked at a celebrity couple that seems to be amazing together and thought, They look so happy together! I want something like that, too! #LifeGoals! It counts.

10) Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s house.

… Or possessions. This one and the last one have to do with greed and jealousy, obviously. If you have ever wanted anything that someone else has, you’ve broken this Commandment.

Well, now that that’s out of the way, I think we should all go fortify our homes before a certain resident of the Hotel Cortez comes knocking.

-Jack

Writing

When I was seventeen, I was called into the guidance counselor’s office to discuss my plans for the future. Since it was our senior year, my classmates and I were prepping our college applications and this was part of the process. I sat down and the interview began.

She asked me which schools I was looking into, the clichéd  “where do you see yourself in five years,” and what I wanted to do with my life.

“I want to go into video game design!” I said, very enthusiastically. I told her about how I had been a gamer my whole life, about games like the lesser known Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy (which I recall, with clarity, that I cited specifically) that are visually stunning, and how much I would love to be a part of making something like that.

She nodded, and said that that sounded pretty cool. Then she asked, “Have you ever considered doing something with writing?”

I was a bit taken aback by that because I had never discussed with her that I wrote. Before I could form a response, she added something that has stuck with me ever since:

“Because I was talking to Mr. Safte and he says you’re brilliant.”

I was, quite literally, speechless for a few moments. Granted, Mr. Safte was my sophomore year English teacher and not Neil Gaiman,  but I had always respected him and his opinions. The fact that he had said something like that about my work made me feel better than I can express, even now.

Writing is the one thing that I have ever been able to say that I do well. I have been writing since I was about six-years-old, when I could first write a coherent sentence. I’ve had over two decades of practice under my belt. However, despite whatever confidence I may have in it and all the years that I’ve been doing this one thing, I doubt myself constantly and put projects on the back-burner quite a bit.

I also have a motivation problem. Even if I’m working on something that I’m excited about; even if I have everything mapped out in my head, the actual act of writing or typing it out thwarts me every time. The magnitude of the task at hand —getting all of that out of my head and onto the paper— crushes me constantly until my brain pretends it can’t do it at all.

The best example of both the doubt and the motivation issue is the book I’ve been writing for the past year.

It started out as a short story, but then my mind did that thing it does where it creates a whole bunch of stuff until I’m developing my characters well past what a short story requires and I fall in love with them too much to have my time with them be so brief. The next thing I know, I’m writing chapters and developing a plot, and rereading the article that had originally inspired my writing it in the first place. A couple of months of working on it faithfully and then… Nothing.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t think of what else to write. Thankfully, that’s never been an issue for me. It was that I was starting to doubt if I was doing it right. The book is within the horror genre, and I started to think to myself that I may be taking too long to get to the scary part. Or, perhaps, I wouldn’t be able to write horror that well at all, considering it was fairly new territory for me. Maybe I should put it away for a while and come back to it with fresh eyes? Maybe I would just never finish it, despite how much I loved what I had in store for it?

I decided that I would take a break from it. I haven’t seriously worked on it since last winter. Since then, I’ve written a bunch of things, though most of those have been NBC Hannibal themed role play scenarios with friends. Also since then, I started to read stories on the reddit forum for horror stories, called /r/nosleep.

I had seen a picture of a prank someone pulled in a public bathroom (where they had stuck a mannequin’s head over a bathroom stall as though it were watching the occupant), and thought about that in the public bathroom at work. I laughed about it to myself, and then noted how creepy that bathroom was when you were in there alone. One idea lead to another, and then I wrote a story called Mr. Sweetly.

After I was fairly happy with it, I read it to my brother to see what he thought. He told me he liked it and gave me a few critiques, which I implemented in the final product. I decided to post it on /r/nosleep, but wasn’t sure if it was as scary as I wanted it to be. I was expecting maybe fifty upvotes (readers can vote for or against [downvote] your posts, like a “like” or “dislike” button) maximum (which is really not that many), and possibly two or three comments. I remember saying to my brother that “if just one person tells me that I scared the shit out of them, I’ll be really happy.”

I had told myself that I wasn’t going to check it everyday to see if it got any attention. I had decided that I wouldn’t even check it out the day after posting it. But I am a flawed human who lies to myself a lot, so I looked. And I was stunned.

In less than 24 hours, it had already gotten well over six hundred upvotes and over forty comments. Quite a few people posted how terrified they were after reading it. The very first comment I received was from someone who told me that I should be writing books. Not being able to take a compliment ever, I slouched in my chair in discomfort, covered my mouth, and giggled a bit as I said, “Holy shit!” I kept repeating it, as though that was the one thing that I could remember how to say.

As though I wasn’t already beside myself with excitement, I noticed that several people asked me for an update, meaning that they wanted me to continue the story. At first, I told myself that I wouldn’t do it. Mr. Sweetly was only supposed to be a one-shot. However, more people started asking, and one of those people took the time to send me a message asking me about the inner-workings of the story. It was at that point that I was starting to change my mind about not making it into a series.

The two things, however, that definitively clinched it were my friend, Greg, and The NoSleep Podcast.

Greg and I had hung out a few nights after Mr. Sweetly was posted. I mentioned to him that I had written a horror story for /r/nosleep that was getting way more attention than I ever thought it would, and how excited I was about it. I then mused about possibly getting onto the NoSleep Podcast someday, though in the back of my head, I thought that was just a pipe dream. The following day, I logged into reddit and saw that I had a message. The message was from David Cummings, the producer of the NoSleep Podcast, and he wanted to use my story for an upcoming episode. I freaked out and contacted everyone I had told about the story. Greg’s reaction, though, was the best.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I had never actually told Greg what the title of the story was. After I told him that it was going to be on the podcast, he mentioned that he would like to read it. When I told him the name of the story to search for, this was the text that I got back:

The both of us are still trying to get over the fact that, of the hundreds of stories that post on that forum every day, he actually read mine.

As of today, Mr. Sweetly has appeared on The NoSleep Podcast, Chilling Tales for Dark Nights, and is supposed to appear on the YouTube channel, KingSpook in the near future. Also, it has 1508 upvotes on reddit as of the posting of this entry, as well as 143 comments. And I am deeply, sincerely, and completely shocked and honored. I am also in the process of continuing the series.

What this whole experience has done for me is that it has given me a much needed confidence boost. I’m always going to doubt myself to a degree, but that doesn’t mean that I am incapable. I am even going to start working on my book again pretty soon.

The other thing that has happened because of this experience is that I’ve begun to revisit the question that the guidance counselor asked me over a decade ago, now: “Have you ever considered doing something with writing?” Before, I’d make excuses about my lack of motivation or stamina to keep up with my brain and what it was creating. But now I think I owe it to myself to at least consider that this may be what I was always meant to do, and I just needed a little push or validation. And if I write, it doesn’t mean that I can’t do any of the other things that I want to do with my life.

Much like Mr. Safte, I may not be Neil Gaiman, but maybe I have the potential to do something really special and I’ve just been letting it waste away? One thing is certain: I won’t know unless I really, honestly try.

-Jack

Get the episode of The NoSleep Podcast featuring Mr. Sweetly here.

Watch/listen to Jesse Cornett’s narration of Mr. Sweetly for Chilling Tales for Dark Nights here.

What is my Deal?

As I begin writing this post, it is 9:40am on a Wednesday. I should be sitting cozily in my office, working on that big thing I do at the end of every month. Instead, I am standing on the corner of Broadway and Park Place, waiting to grab the 10:05 bus back home. And I’m thinking to myself, Why? Why is it always like this with me?

It seems to me that all of my fuckups tend to be of the monumental variety. The morning started off normally enough: woke up to a catchy song I set as an alarm, got ready in a reasonable amount of time, and I was out the door by 7:15 to make sure I got to the office by 8:30. My bosses have all been really impressed with me and I wanted to keep the streak alive. And today it was just me in the office, so I would get to flex my adult muscles some. Everything was going fine until I got to my office door. I reached into my backpack for my keys and… And… AND!?

You see, last night I took a walk to the corner store by my house for sandwiches. Had there been daylight, I would have just left the door unlocked and gone. My brother was home, and I’m sure he’d relish the opportunity to beat the shit out of someone dumb enough to think that there was anything of value in our home, but I don’t like to take chances. So, I took my phone, my wallet, and the keys and put them in a smaller bag. When I got home, I transferred everything back over to the backpack. Well, almost everything.

Realization dawned on me and I momentarily froze. Maybe the guy at the front desk knows what to do? Maybe he even has a key? So it was back down the elevator for me and then off to meet the building’s Super. The Super greeted me with pity on his face and a whole bunch of keys in his hands. “I have keys to every room on your floor but yours,” he said. Ah, yes. Hello, Sinking Feeling of Failure! How’ve you been?

Not knowing what else to do, I called my Uncle Mike, who is at least half responsible for getting me this job in the first place. I’m not entirely sure what I thought he’d be capable of doing, but when you’re panicking and you’re woefully frustrated with yourself, you tend not to think rationally. Anyway, he told me that he would try to get in touch with his employee who lives in the same building as my office supervisor. However, both of those people are home for the Jewish holiday. During holy times, for those who don’t know, Jews are not allowed to use electronic devices. Meaning phones. Meaning I had two options:

OPTION ONE: ACCEPT DEFEAT; GO HOME AND STAY HOME. WHAT CAN YEH DO?

OPTION TWO: GO HOME. GET THOSE DAMN KEYS. GET BACK TO THE OFFICE BY 12, BUT POTENTIALLY SAVE FACE A BIT.

Everything in me is screaming to just count this day as a wash and go back to bed, but I just know that I’ll be back on the bus again in an hour to go back to work. I’d like to think that this is because I am a responsible adult, but really it’s because I don’t think OPTION ONE is a legitimate option. Like my brain invented it just to attempt to make me feel better about this new monumental fuckup… That, and I’m very spiteful toward myself, so I think my oversight deserves this much extra effort.

While still waiting for the bus (it showed up halfway through my writing this post), I had this thought of, I better have X, Y, and Z happen for me because of shit like this! But this is not one of those things that happened to me. This is a problem perpetrated by my own stupidity. However, just in case this can be viewed as “just an honest mistake,” and I’m just being too hard on myself, here’s a picture of Captain America riding a narwhal.

Adulthood (Or “Please Excuse My Joker-Stripe Bedsheets”)

There is a definite disconnect between my generation and our parents’ generation. For example, my generation focuses more on happiness in their career whereas the baby boomers and their parents have/had the “a job is a job” mentality. My own grandfather, and many other people I know in his age-range and the boomer-range, were subject to nothing short of verbal abuse by their employers. Imagine going to work for someone who curses at you all the time and wastes no opportunity to tell you how useless you are. That would never be tolerated by today’s standards. One could easily take legal action if they suffer those conditions. But a job was a job, and “happiness” didn’t matter. If you were to say to someone of that generation, “I want to find a job that makes me happy, where I don’t dread going to work every day,” you will most certainly be met with a comment along the lines of, “It’s work. It’s not supposed to make you happy. There are assholes everywhere. Grow up and wake up.” Believe me, these are all things I’ve heard on numerous occasions.

I’m not writing about work, though. No. I want to focus on interests specifically.

If you know me at all, you probably know that I have a lot of stuffed animals. Admittedly, I probably have too many, but I honestly love them and have a very deep emotional attachment to them. I am, by far, not the only twenty-six-year-old to still have their first plush pal (as I sometimes refer to them), nor am I the only one who just keeps getting them. For me, it was actually a blanket that I destroyed as a baby (it now resembles something of an odd scarf), and named “Woobie.” Don’t ask about the name, I don’t remember why I chose it.

Fashionista, how do you look?

For one of my friends, it’s his own, equally dilapidated teddy bear that he can’t part with. For another, it’s her stuffed cat which has long since lost its stuffing. And yet another friend has an equally as deep emotional connection with her massive collection of Disney Princess dolls.

Do these things make us less adult? Do they make us less capable, or less responsible? Will these things hold us back from landing a good job that, yes, may actually make us happy? No. Last I checked, another friend of mine, who keeps specific stuffed animals close to him in case of a fire, is still a hard worker who has held down a job for quite some time and does alright. So why is it that our parents’ generation, by-and-large, want us all to get rid of these things that we hold so dear to us as though they were living and breathing? Yes, at the very basic level, they may be “just things,” and it may seem very silly to anyone above the age of twelve, regardless of their generation, but it is not silly to us, and that is all that should matter. To us, the very suggestion that we discard these “things,” quite honestly, feels cruel.

What happened to BFF, Andy!?

Next item on the list is TV shows. Again, if you know me, you know how deep my fandom runs. I’m something of a passionate person, and when I love something, be it a person, a place, or a thing, I love it wholly. It cannot be helped. That’s just my nature.

A while back, circa 2010, there was a show called Human Target.

Still waiting on the Season Two set, Warner Brothers.

I still consider it to be my favorite show, regardless of its cancellation and roughly four-year absence from the airwaves (it ran two seasons).

Since age is technically the theme to this post, I’ll tell you that I was twenty-one at the time. There was, at some point during Season One, a two-week-long hiatus (or, as I would imagine BBC Sherlock fans would call that length of time, “child’s play”). I was very upset by this. It literally ruined my whole night when I found out. Again, that might seem stupid, but there’s something I want you to try to understand: to me, that show was an escape.

Human Target (which was based on a comic book series by DC and had been tried as a TV series a couple of decades earlier) made its debut during the start of what would become the most difficult years of my life to date. Difficult years that I am still going through, and which have only gotten worse, in fact. My boyfriend of two-and-a-half years left me the day after my twenty-first birthday. That was my first serious relationship, though it would have hurt even if it had been my fifth. A couple of months later, my father was diagnosed with lymphoma. Regardless of the rocky and sometimes non-existant (as it currently is) relationship I’ve had with him, he’s still my dad and it hurt. And then there came this TV show, starring Mark Valley (whom I have loved since the ill-fated, but brilliant, show, Keen Eddie),

I miss you, Eddie Arlette.

that was so exciting and funny and well-written, that I latched onto it. For an hour each week, I got to go on an adventure with my three favorite guys: Chance, Winston, and Guerrero. For an hour each week, I was laughing, or I was excited about a stunt they did in the show instead of being rattled to my core with sadness or fear. For two weeks, that was taken away from me and I kind of panicked over it.

My Mom rolled her eyes and asked me which one I had a crush on. My  brother said, “Yeah, I’m disappointed, too, but it’s just a TV show, Jack.” No, I’m not trying to say, “Look how mean they were,” because they weren’t being mean and they weren’t even being unreasonable. Much like the people who are worried about my future because I have an army of stuffed animals, they didn’t understand. When I think about it now, I know that two weeks isn’t bad. I had to wait much longer for the second season of The Walking Dead, after all. However, as I said, I panicked. The one thing that made me happy in that moment was taken away, regardless of how temporary it was at the time. I still don’t feel that I over-reacted, but, then again, I get it.

Human Target is not the only show I’ve ever been that attached to, but it’s the best example I have. Before that, I was actually a huge WWE fan (prior to the split between Smackdown! and RAW). After Human Target, it was Person of Interest –which I am woefully behind on–  The Walking Dead, and Hannibal, all of which I still love. Currently, it’s the brilliant web series, Marble Hornets, Gotham, and AMC’s historical drama, TURN. But Human Target is still my number one.

For anyone who doesn’t “get it,” here’s the good news: you don’t have to understand it. For those of you who feel exactly as I do, here’s the bad news: the people in your life don’t have to understand it. But that’s OK. The only time it isn’t OK is when people put you down or think/state that you are immature because of the things you hold dear. Everyone has at least one something that they love deeply. For some, it could be a family heirloom. For others, maybe it’s their car, their house, or their pet. And, yes, there are full-grown adults who love their teddy bear like it’s an old friend. Because it is. It’s cuddled with us on nights when we were scared, whether we were ten or twenty or even thirty. It’s dried our tears when we scraped our knee or when we had a breakup or when the person we love most in the whole world passed away. There are some flesh-and-blood people who we considered our friends that wound up leaving, but that good ol’ teddy bear is still there.

No, you don’t have to understand it. But I ask that you at least try like most of us would try for you.

-Jack Mason

Hi, There, 5AM!

If you’ve never felt what an absence of feeling is like, I assure you that you want to keep it that way. Also, I envy you. But I’m not just experiencing pure absence of feeling. It is occasionally laced with extreme and profound dispair.

For those of you whom I don’t have close contact with, I just lost my Mom in May. I have been a mess ever since. I went through a brief phase where I felt that I could take on the world. My thought process was, The thing I was most afraid of happened. Nothing can ever be this scary again. I’m unstoppable. That did not, however, last very long. After that phase ended, not only were things scary again, but it seemed that everything was terrifying. I went from “I am unstoppable” to “can I please just function like a ‘normal’ person today?” I’m still in that mode.

I’m struggling to find meaning or pleasure in things that once meant a great deal to me or made me happy. It’s very hard for me to feel anything about most things anymore. For example, I was just on Facebook (which I often consider deactivating), checking up on people I’ve lost touch with and most of them have great things going for them. And I can’t feel. I can’t leave a congratulatory comment or say, “I’m happy for you,” because I’ve almost completely forgotten what happy feels like. And some of those people are people I made a conscientious decision to leave behind or restrict contact with. I just wish that I could feel something positive for a change is all.

I was going to write more, but I’m just too tired. And I’m so scared to even be.

“Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things”

“And it is still true, no matter how old you are—when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.” – Robert Fulghum

Yesterday, I took a bunch of books with me to the laundromat; one I got for my birthday this year & haven’t yet read (Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk), one I got for my 17th birthday & had only read 3 pages of at that time (The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien), and a book I have read cover-to-cover twice, even well before I rediscovered my profound love of reading (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things  by Robert Fulgham). After reattempting LotR & finding I did not yesterday possess the mental energy to read it, I went back to Fulgham.

When I was a kid, I used to read up to five Goosebumps books on one sitting. You know the ones. Horror tales for kiddies by one of my favorite authors (which I still feel to this day), R. L. Stein. I even did a book report on the man’s biography. Anyway, the point is that I loved to read and I used to read a lot. Those books are usually between 115 & 130 pages long. Literal child’s play. However, multiply that by five? That’s roughly a 575 page minimum. A respectable length for most adult-geared books. I would read that easily within an afternoon. And I loved them. Until school ruined the reading process for me.

It’s no secret that I am not a fan of school, and especially not my grade school. I’ve taken to calling it “The Hellmouth.” Still, after eleven years and counting, I want to take a wrecking ball to that place. Most of the teachers that are still there (and should never be allowed to shape the self-image of young kids) helped to shape me into the cynical, angry, school-hating animal you see in my profile pictures. Granted, it wasn’t all their fault. But it was a great deal their fault. And they took my love of reading, to boot. I think, to be fair, that would have happened no matter where I attended school. If you force me to do something, even if it is a thing I enjoy, I just can’t do it. I’m convinced, as well, that being forced to write essays about the most vapid and meaningless topics has stunted my ability to actually finish anything—meaning books, screenplays, and other things of extensive length— that I’ve begun to write.

The curriculum (as well as the demons I had for teachers) led to a drastic change in my scholastic behaviors:

1. By the eighth grade I had almost entirely stopped doing even the most basic of homework assignments.
2. Because of being forced to read a bunch of books that were only mildly interesting at best, I had completely lost my taste for it.
3. I began to use my genetically given talent of bullshit artistry (from my Dad’s side) to write just any old thing for my essays and would only quickly scan random book pages to find anything that supported my bullshit.

Of course, I will never tell my niece or nephew (to be born this December) about that. “Your Aunt Jack was always a good student. Mostly A’s and B’s, I got. The teachers loved me! Except for my 6th-8th grade math teacher, that worthless piece of sh… Uh, shirts.” And not every book we had to read was bad, though I didn’t read those either and just listened during class discussions.

Anyway, back to Mr. Fulgham. No, I haven’t forgot what this pseudo-op-ed is about. And I told you all of that for a reason.

When I was about twelve, I was watching TV in the living room one summer afternoon. During commercial, I noticed that there was a random book on the floor. It took me a little while to pick it up because, well, what preteen picks up anything from the floor? But I kept glancing at it. The cover was a vibrant, red-and-orange, paisley sort-of design:

I finally got off the couch to further investigate. I was very intrigued by the title. So, I read the back cover, still skeptical because it was a book, and I didn’t want to waste my summer by reading (I wasn’t going to even be reading my Summer Reading List books, so why would I elect to read something else?). The back cover read:

All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten.
ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW about how to live and what to do
and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not
at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the
sandpile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned:

Share everything.

Play fair.

Don’t hit people.

Put things back where you found them.

Clean up your own mess.

Don’t take things that aren’t yours.

Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.

Wash your hands before you eat.

Flush.

Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

Live a balanced life – learn some and think some
and draw and paint and sing and dance and play
and work every day some.

Take a nap every afternoon.

When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic,
hold hands, and stick together.

Be aware of wonder.
Remember the little seed in the styrofoam cup:
The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody
really knows how or why, but we are all like that.

Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even
the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die.
So do we.

And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books
and the first word you learned – the biggest
word of all – LOOK.

That was it. I was sold. I read it fairly quickly. Two years later, I read it again and became really excited when my high school’s library had a copy. I told a “friend” that she needed to read it and it would change her life. It changed mine.

One of my favorite parts of the book was one particular essay about crayons. Yes, crayons. He begins by telling a story of a time he got a pack of jumbo crayons for the baby of friends of his. He also, however, bought a pack of crayons for each of the friends/parents. He specifically told them that the crayons were for them, and not their son. They smiled at him. I would have, too. I love crayons. They’re simple, and colorful, and they make things pretty. However, I digress. Fulgham goes on to speculate what the world would be like if we (all people and all nations) dropped crayons over countries instead of bombs. How wonderful we would all feel. Yes, it’s all very idealistic and sounds really silly out of the context of the book, but these are the things that make you think. I found myself feeling very idealistic, indeed, reading it. It puts life and complicated concepts into simple terms that make the world make so much more sense, or at least gives good opinions of how things should be.

I’ll never be able to recommend this book highly enough. If you’re a person who is full-to-bursting with imagination and wonder, like myself, this book will hit the spot. I’ll even do this for you, and give you its Amazon page!

On that note, I’ll leave you with this image that I once found on tumblr. I find it wonderful and fitting.

~Jack Mason~

Sometimes, Life is Awesome!

I just came out of class and I had a writing assignment/test in it. Keep this in mind, because everyone’s obviously supposed to be quiet during tests and such.

Anyhoo, everyone who knows me knows by now that I am a huge fan of the show Human Target. Because of this show, I’ve also recently become a fan of Jackie Earle Haley, who is the actor that plays Guerrero on the show. Haley has also played Walter Kovacs (Rorschach) in The Watchmen, and is playing Freddy Kruger in the remake of Nightmare on Elm St. (which comes out the 30th of this month [*squeals with excitement though she is thoroughly confused about just why she’s as excited as she is for this considering she’s really not big on horror movies*]).

I bring up those two specific roles he’s played for a reason. In the Spring 2008 semester, I took an Introduction to Theatre class. The professor I had was Professor Kruger. This semester, I’m taking a Media Analysis course… With Professor Kovacs. Whereas this is highly amusing to me in-and-of itself (school will now and forevermore remind me of Jackie Earle Haley ^_^), that is not why I’m posting this entry.

Getting back to the quiet test time… I’m sitting there, in Kovacs’s class, trying to think of something to write, when the door (that my desk is right next to) starts to open slowly. I’m thinking it’s one of my classmates or something, but then I look up to see that it’s Kruger… In the same room with Kovacs… I thought my tongue was going to start bleeding from how hard I was biting it to keep from laughing.

I mean, what are the odds? Really? These two professors don’t even teach within the same discipline/major! They teach in the same building, but so do about 30 or more other people. Just, wow… What are the odds that these two would be in the same room at the same time as me… When I’m supposed to be quiet and concentrating, no less!!

~Jack Mason~

Deadpool’s C2E2 Commercial (made by ItsJustSomeRandomGuy on Youtube)

Oh… My… God… I love these things =3

~Jack Mason~

Another Dream of Note

This was one of my favorite dreams I ever had because it took itself seriously and was cool, funny, sweet, and creepy all at once.

===============================================

I was standing somewhere in NYC. It was starting to get dark and it was raining. The sky was kind of grey in color and you could still see clouds. I was leaning up against a building, just watching people walk past me. Just letting the rain fall on me. I smiled at a random couple that walked past me. Then my cell phone rang. I looked at the Caller ID and it read “MOM.” I answered it and she said that she needed me to come back to Headquarters and that it was urgent.

The next thing I know, I walk into this room to see my Mom reading files and Christopher Chance (yeah, from Human Target) getting off the phone. He turns to me and says, “It’s a good thing you got back when you did. He’s still out there, you know.” I nod in agreement and apologize for being out so long. I go and sit down on the sofa and flip open a laptop to start doing work. My Mom asks if I found out anything new while I was out and I tell her that I didn’t find out much. “Not many people even realize that he’s still out there, Mom. It doesn’t seem to matter how much we attempt to get the word out it just… Fades.” Chance responds, “We still have to try, Jax” (“Jax” is a nickname that some of my closest friends sometimes call me).

I tell them that I’m getting nowhere on the internet and that I need to go out to find more intel. They both tell me to be careful as I’m on my way out. I suddenly find myself back in that same grey world I originally entered. I walk down a different street as people pass me by. All of a sudden, I hear screaming, along with a familiar, crazed laugh. That’s him! I think to myself and draw my gun. Everyone is running away while I run toward the laugh. Then I see him. It’s The Joker from The Dark Knight. He looks right at me and says, “C’mon! I’ve been waiting for you three to come after me! C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” He takes out a machine gun and starts firing at me. I duck for cover and take some shots at him. I start hearing other shots fired, and see my Mom and Chance running toward Joker, guns drawn and firing. I come out from my cover and take a shot. It hits Joker in the shoulder as he starts running away, still laughing.

Chance looks at me and asks if I’m OK. I nod and my Mom says, “Next time, we need to get this bastard. It just got way too personal.” We hear a loudspeaker blaring with the Joker’s voice. He says, “You all think you can get me. I’ve given you chances and chances again to put me out of my misery [laughs]. So, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. If you don’t kill me by this time tomorrow night, I will release a toxic gas and lay waste to this whole city [laughs]!” The three of us look at eachother with that “oh, shit” kind of look.

The next thing I know, I’m in a random McDonald’s with my Mom. Chance isn’t with us. My Mom says to me, “I should get him something, too. He hasn’t eaten in two days. He’s running on fumes.” I smile a little to myself because I realize that, even though she’s a kickass crime fighter in this dream world, she is still very much my Mom.

The three of us are in HQ, eating and looking over files and whatnot. I’m back on my laptop, apparently trying to hack into something. Evidently, I found the plans to his massive poison plot. I call over to them and hack into the system. I completely cripple the program and any chance he has of going through with it should we fail to kill him.

Next thing I know, we’re in a standoff with the Joker. It almost seemed like a Boss Battle in a video game. Chance manages to apprehend him and we get him sent to Arkham. I look around and say, “Good job, team” (I actually do say that a lot in real life).

This is where I woke up.

===============================================

So, my Mom and I are crime fighters and we got to work with Christopher Chance. I told my Mom the short version of this dream earlier and she said, “Hey, that sounded like it was a good dream!” It was.

~Jack Mason~

A Phone Scam >:(

I live in my grandfather’s house. He is an 89 year-old man who does not always understand English (he was raised in Italy). Sometimes when I don’t have anywhere to go during the day, I notice through his Caller ID that he gets strange calls. The name just says “Jamaica,” and the number is almost always different. I just typically ignore them because I do not know who it is, nor does my grandfather. I always just figured that if it were important, they would leave a message. No messages were ever left by this caller.

Just today, however, I got a phone call from my younger brother who is home with a bad cold. This caller phoned the house and my grandfather answered. My brother picked up the other line to hear the conversation because he had seen this come up in the Caller ID as well. The caller had an accent and repeatedly asked my grandfather what his name was and, after he answered, kept telling him that he had a package for him. My brother then stepped in from the other line and started asking this mystery caller who he was, what he had and what he wanted. The caller just hung up.

My brother then proceeded to tell me that he immediately researched this number (we wrote down 2 of the numbers used under the name of “Jamaica”) and found out that it is a call-back phone scam targeted specifically at the elderly. The way it works is that a caller, in this case from Jamaica, will call an elderly person and tell them that they have something for them. The caller will then hang up, causing the elderly person to think the call simply dropped. When the elderly person calls back, they are charged heavily for calling the number (especially since it is an international number). These scammers are said to have made upwards of 300 million off of the elderly last year alone.

If this is happening to you, the way to deal with the problem, at least according to the news sources my brother viewed, is to contact your local authorities who will, hopefully, in turn be able to contact the proper authorities, such as Interpol.

The two numbers we took down are (876) 486-7793 and (876) 460-4618. I hope this helps someone out there.

~Jack Mason~