Things I Am Cultivating

The things I am cultivating:

1) A pencil mustache. I'm assuming that growing one will make all my spoken dialog 50% snappier.

2) A third-world outlook. I don't own a car. Denver has eight inches of fresh snow on the ground. Pair these facts up, and there I am, attempting to ride my bike through a blizzard. It's cold, slow and probably dangerous, but I gotta get to work somehow, right? In a way, I think this is healthy. Hardship provides perspective and makes me a more compassionate man. People living in non-industrial nations do this sort of thing all the time. I lieu of cars, they make do with a what-else-you-gonna-do sort of pragmatism that often ends in frostbite.

Though some people have to peddle through malarial heat instead of snow.

Or walk because they can't afford a bicycle.

And the swamp/mountain pass between their home and the place they work might be held by a rebel group.

That rebel group's child soldiers might be high on ten kinds of crack and looking to rape just anything that comes within raping distance.

On the post-rape leg of the journey, there might be an IED planted in the gutter.

But before they get exploded by the IED, a Predator might mistake them for a tango and the bicycle (that they might not have) for an RPG.Prior to the War on Terror™, that sentence would have made zero sense.

Which might not actually cut their lives all that short because they might have AIDS and malaria both, with no access to any sort of medical treatment.

The things I am actually cultivating:

1) A ratty fringe of hair on my upper lip.

2) A bizarre sort of non-sexual masochism.