My name is Andy, and I’m a twenty-something white kid from the suburbs who pissed away his parents’ money at Ohio State and is now making a pathetic attempt to pursue a career as a writer in order to justify a $30,000 bachelors degree in English.  On that note, I’m going to be treating my comments section like one big creative writing workshop, so please give me feedback.  If you like my writing, I want you to tell me why. If you don’t like my writing, I especially want you to tell me why. I can take it.  Just don’t be an asshole solely for its own sake.  If you must crap on my hopes and dreams, be constructive about it.

When I was researching the best way to go about starting a blog,  the number one thing that I was cautioned about was blogging about nothing.  In other words, everyone said that if you’re going to write a blog, have an area of expertise:  write about something you know inside and out.  That way, people will have a reason to come to you, i.e., for advice on said area of expertise.  Unfortunately, I don’t have a real marketable skill set, or a thorough knowledge of anything relevant, so I’ve decided to completely ignore rule number one.  Not that it really matters, because if you have found yourself  in the unlikely circumstance of caring about what I have to say, there’s a %99 percent chance that you have a previous relationship with me (varying in intimacies, of course).

Whether you’re a member of my massive family, a college friend, or an old high school acquaintance, you’re familiar with me, but you probably don’t have a full understanding of who I am; and if you went to high school with me, there’s a 50/50 shot that you thought I was a douche bag, and may have laughed when I fell off that cliff.  Well congratulations, you were right, but only about me being a top tier knob job. If you took pleasure from a kid falling off a cliff, you might want to seek help, because you’re probably going to grow up to be a serial killer.  Fortunately for me, in the years that have followed I have been taking regular doses of humility, and as a result, my eyes have been opened to how little the world cares about ungrateful little crotch pimples like myself.  Now, I know I’m important to my family, but that’s different, they’re obligated to love me. I’m talking about the world as a whole, and if I died today, an almost infinitesimally small portion of that population would truly give a shit.

So without further digression, here’s some things about me that you don’t know.

• I’m a dick by nature, so I have to make a conscious effort to hold my tongue and be polite. It’s only when I become comfortable with people, that I start to make fun of them…they don’t always take it well.
• I can’t walk by a mirror without checking myself out.
• I despise people who are self-centered, so as you can imagine, I have issues with people in general.
• I don’t take compliments well, often at the expense of the person complimenting me.
• I make stupid jokes and then laugh at them because I know no one else will.
• I believe in true love, but I don’t believe it happens by chance. You have to get off your ass and go find it.
• It’s hard to gain my trust, but once you do, it comes with intense loyalty.
• I love girls who have a foul mouth.
• I’m a self-deprecating narcissist:  I’m highly self-aware, especially of my faults, and think that makes me awesome.

So this is where it begins, where I begin.  This is the exact point in time that I stop filling my head with senseless crap like funny videos of people I don’t know, or the turn-by-turn layouts of every Mario Kart track.  This is the precise moment that I stop occupying my evenings with countless hours of television shows created by people who stayed determined and focused while everybody else was busy watching television.  This is where I stop waiting for inspiration to move my hand and become my own motivating incident.

Why today? It’s difficult to say for sure. Maybe I just got a sudden hit of self-confidence laced with courage.  Maybe I got sick of making excuses for my own inactivity, or I realized that those excuses were being directed at no one other than myself.  Maybe I saw too much of my own inadequacies reflected in the people around me, people for which I held serious contempt.  Maybe I refuse to be pulled into the vacuum of monotony that is the plight of the working man:  dedicating my mental and physical energy to a job that does nothing but sustain a life centered around itself, while allowing brief forms of respite one can find only in a bottle or a bag.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that type of life is insignificant, so long as you have a motivator based in something real, i.e., something more selfless than the sweet release of whatever drug-induced euphoria that you deem necessary.  My dad led such a life (of hard labor, not drug-induced euphoria), but he did it with purpose.  Initially, his purpose was to take some of the burden off of his mother, who was raising 14 kids by herself.  After that, his purpose was to make damn sure that his children wouldn’t have to be subjected to the same type of strife he had been.  He worked his ass off for decades in order to provide me with an opportunity, and here I am squandering it, getting stoned week in and week out, and watching it decay under my debilitating apathy.  I think it’s about time I do something about that.