I couldn't determine if I should wear my seat belt. Then it clicked.

Not weaning a seat belt in your car or truck can get you to Heaven faster. 

This photo is empirical proof that even the Pope wants to get to Heaven faster. He is not wearing a seat belt in this car.

"The Vatican said Pope Benedict XVI greeted with a smile the news that a German citizen had filed a complaint against him for not wearing a seat belt in his popemobile."

The logic behind this is the same reason why riding a motorcycle can also get you to heaven more quickly. The reasoning is based on a loop hole for the requirements for getting into Heaven. You see many Christians see suicide as a type of murder, in God's eyes. Murder is a sin. Therefore the sinner is dying in sin and sent immediately to Hell for all of eternity.

The loop hole is that the Bible says nothing on engaging in  more risky than necessary behavior on a daly basis.  Therefore while premeditated suicide will bar you from Heaven, engaging in consensual high risk behavior will not.  Motorcyclist have a fatality rate about 20 times higher than individuals driving four wheeled vehicle the rate is even higher if you do not wear a mass of closed-cell extruded polystyrene foam covered in a thin layer of plastic around your cerebral cortex. By dying faster you will be able to get to Heaven faster. And everyone knows Heaven is the best place in the universe.

Think twice before you buckle up, it may be state law but when you don't buckle you ride with Jesus.

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(Disclaimer: Riding without a seat belt is statistically unsafe)

'Come see my fishpond', she said coyly

A chronic sense of loss is what I have been feeling for the last few months after the loss of my long term girlfriend.  She even changed her number even though I only called her seven times in two weeks, treating me like I am all of a sudden some type of stranger/stalker overnight.  My friends have told me, by the way when I say "friends" I really mean anonymous posters on internet message  boards that  I have never met or had any kind of previous comradeship with, misogynistic thing such as "Men age like wine, women age like milk", "Women are all whores" in a lame attempt to support my less-than-amazing mood.

At first I honestly did not know why I felt like this.  I had been meaning to break it off with the girlfriend for quite awhile.  She is not intellectually gifted and at 5'1" she is three inches under the US average female height of five feet four inches.  She has very poor vision and has some significant health problems which could potentially bleed into any of her offspring. She barley can support herself as she works as a waitress while attending a small college for what is surely to be a field of study with less than ideal employment options.  She does have many positives but this is not the time to list them.

Yet I still feel a persisting, congesting heaviness.  After reading this feedback from one of my "friends" I got to thinking.

"I know everyone here wants to be a tough guy and say "LOL deal with it!" but honestly, as a person who harbors both a sentimental heart and a grudging, firey temper I'll tell you the truth.

There's nothing you can do. "Deal with it" is not an answer. You will continue to feel like shit and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it, you just have to wait for feeling to slowly, fade day by day.

On less emotional level, this is for a reason. It's one of the few things that literally is supposed to piss us off. As a male human being, when we have sex with a chick we have a feeling that we are making her ours. I know the pencil necks and feminists will call this 'sexist', but it's human nature. The thought of another male mating with a woman you've 'mated' with is supposed to drive us absolutely insane with rage. Jealousy, hate, and anger are not inventions of the human social system, but as human beings we have to remain civilized about it. It's because of this that even after you've fallen out of love with a woman, the thought of another man having sex with her will still scramble your emotions."

There is nothing you can do short of petty revenge. You just have to wait."
The reason I feel bad is because I lost something that actually had value.  I lost a piece of property that I owned.

Looking on backpage.com, the average prostitute in the "escorts" section costs 163$.  Assuming I had sex with my ex girlfriend twice a week that would be a value of:

 2 x 52 x $163 = $16,952

My girlfriend also provided me with cleaning services, craiglist.org shows that I can get residential cleaning done for 40$ a week. 

 $40*52 weeks = $2,080

Lastly she provided me with someone to talk to and share my feelings with everyday over my cell phone.

A girlfriend phone hotline would cost me 2.99 per minute. 

 
2.99 min x 20 min x 365 days a year = $21827

$16,952 +  $2,080 +$21827 = 40,859 U.S. dollars = the equivalent value of having a girlfriend for a year

Looking on Craigslist for land in Wyoming, someplace I could find peace of mind, I found a piece of property for less than 40859:

$40000 for sale - 80 acres (Red Desert)

Price reduced. 80 acre raw parsel, Sweetwater county. The sale of this property needs the approval of the Bankrutcy court of Wyoming. Legal description and mapping directions will be sent to those interested. Asking $35,000

So when  I lost my girlfriend I lost the financial equivalent of a 80 acre ranch on one day.  Money is similar to fecal matter in that you only feel it when it moves.  A quote from the popular television series "Game of Thrones" about losing money and whores.

Ros [crying] (one of Petyr Baelish's prostitutes):
"I can't stop thinking about it, I can't sleep.  Poor little baby."

Petyr Baelish [emphatic]:

"You know you remind me of another girl.  A lovely thing I once acquired from a Lesian pleasure house.  Beautiful, like yourself and intelligent, like yourself.  But she wasn't happy. She cried, often.  I  asked her why but, we didn't have the kind rapport that you and I have.  Yes it was quite sad.  Girls from the Lesian pleasure house are expensive.  Extremely expensive.  And this one wasn't making me any money.  I hate bad investments.  Really I do. They haunt me.  I had no idea to make her happy. No idea how to mitigate my loses.  A very wealthy patron, he offered me a tremendous amount of money to let him...transform this lovely ,sad girl her, to use her in ways, that would never occur to most men.  And you know what occurs to most men.  I would not say he succeed in making her happy, but my losses were definitely mitigated.  Take tonight off.  I'll see you tomorrow and you will be happy.  That makes me happy. "

A pretty extreme and disgusting piece of dialogue but I can definitely empathize with the losing money part.  It has been said that hate and love are not on opposite sides of the coin but actually on the same side of the coin with apathy on the other side.  I need to start charging my ex-girlfriend rent for space inside my head.  The soon she becomes someone that I used to know the better.   

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The frog is always greener on the other side of its belly

As a less-than-optimistic person I spend a disproportionate amount of time day dreaming what it would be like to live in another area of the country.  I often am tempted to attribute the majority of my failures on things out of my control.

"If I only lived in X city I would be able to make more money, have more opportunities, meet more girls because there is 5 million more people in this city" or "the GDP per capita is $19,000 more in Y county, there is more money in circulation there".

I realize this is faulty logic because while the mean income may be higher in one part of the country there is almost always extremely high personal financial variance and just moving someplace will not make me a wealthy person or significantly contribute to me becoming wealthy.

Here are the current 13th largest United States Metro Areas I have been focused on:



Source: US Census

As you can see over the last 20 years the populations of 12/13 of these cities has been absolutely growing.  Detroit is the only area that lost people and it lost 156,307 people from 2000 to 2010.  The deltas in red are the cities that have slowed grow rates. The cities in yellow have virtually the same grow rate as the previous ten years and the minority of cities in the green have a substantially increased grow rate.  Houston, Washington D.C. and Riverside are accelerating in population growth speed.  Almost every city is increasing its population velocity except Detroit.

The following data is only growth over one year but is more recent.

Taking this data and extrapolating into the next 65 years we get a forecast of each metro area's population:

In a nutshell, Dallas (deep purple) will over take New York city before the end of the century as the most populous city in the United States with Houston right behind it.  Chicago (deep green) and Philadelphia (dark orange) did not fair so well.  Detroit (light blue) is the lone lost child almost falling off the line graph.

This forecast makes gigantic assumptions based on what little data is available and should not be taken as concrete scientific analysis.  For all I know global warming could significantly stagnate migration to the southern and warmer states or the African American birth rate differential could become so disproportional to other races that Philadelphia and Chicago become the next Detroit.

My day dreams are now set in Dallas, Texas based in this data.  I am glad because Los Angelos has earth quakes and the worst air pollution outside of big city China.

Tools used: Microsoft Excel, Paint
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Word of mouth on Fillings

I have been told on multiple by my dentist that when I was an infant I had a intense fever that somehow deformed my permanent molars.  Regardless of the reason, growing up one by one each pearly white baby molar was replaced by a rotten decayed brown molar.  These molars required immediate drilling.  Here are pictures of two of my filled in molars.

In addition to functioning as a battery when coming into contact with a metal of different reactivity (aluminium foil gum wrapper, saliva acts as electrolyte ion bridge generating generous amounts of pain as the electrons reach an equilibrium) I have recently found that these fillings have been leeching the highly toxic metal Mercury directly into my nervous system over the past ten years.

In the witchcraft known as Dentistry this metal combination is called Amalgam and is an alloy of 50% mercury and other metals. Individuals with these fillings have shown significant increase of Mercury in their urine (μg of Hg/L in urine).  This may help explain the less than sane thoughts I have been having at points in my life.

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And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done and defecated creating this blog

  The goal of this blog is to improve my writing skills while widening my vocabulary.  My name is Mike Powell and I have failed at almost everything I have ever attempted.  Here are just a few of my main failures:

• Failed to make the High School soccer team.
• Failed T shirt selling business from a website I invested years of my time into and thousands of dollars.  Not one shirt sold.
• Failed to learn Spanish
• Failed to really understand what Calculus is used for, even after passing Cal 1,2 and 3 at university.
• Buying a ~$300 dollar 1080i computer display only to find out the graphic card located in my computers chassis is unable to support the monitor's dimensions.
• Unable to find a job after graduating from University, now living in parents basement.
• Girlfriend broke up with me after a seven year relationship, I am still not sure why but I am sure it has something to do with me failing in some aspect of my life.
• Unable to grow facial hair
• Unable to spell any English words except the most basic and fundamental of words.  The only reason words seem to be spelled correctly in the blog is because of spell check.

Those are just a few off the top of my head.  I have succeeded in some things though:

• Investing time and money at my city's Casino, compulsively gambling away any few scraps of money I happen to accumulate. 
• Over one hundred edits on wikipedia.org
• Creating vast sums of student education driven debt.
• Lying to everyone that has the misfortune to come into any sort of pathetic dialogue with me.  Mostly in a thinly veiled attempt to hide or mitigate my lack of successes.
• Able to drink large quantities of ethyl alcohol
• Great ability to masturbate to ever increasing amounts of taboo porn.

 I would like to elaborate on the last bullet.  Alcohol is really a poor drug to use for any sort of recreational activity. 

• It taste's resembles rocket fuel and is harsh on the taste buds and throat.  Even beer tastes like shit.  Many of the beer drinkers say beer is acquired taste.  "Acquired taste" is a youthinism for it tastes good once you become an alcoholic.
• It is a major diuretic, which means it increases the frequency of urination.  Unlike herion or marijuana where you can dose on it and then just relax on the couch for hours, Alcohol forces you to empty your bladder every 20 minuets.  Getting up to use the bathroom this often is very annoying
• Significantly decreases ability to maintain an erection.  This is a serious problem.  Not that I have sex any more or will be having sex any time in the next couple of years.
• Dehydration.  This is related to alcohol being a major diuretic and I assume one of the driving forces behind a hangover the next day.

Alcohol is cheap and the high is enjoyable but for the above reasons I will be sticking to marijuana for the near future for my recreational drug of choice.

Okay back to cannon rushing in Starcraft II

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