That woman was insane. She had platinum blonde hair and a nazi-borne approach to bus driving. However, she wasn’t any good at actually driving or controlling her state-sponsored transport vehicle. We always joked about her hitting houses or running over cars while taking curbs, and on one particularly hot day in September, we ironically had our wish granted.

Williams High School has a “strangely-crafted” bus lane. It branches from 17th street and continues on as a massive parking space slash bus lane until the edge of the campus, where it merges back with some other street perpendicular to 17th, and it also features an s-shaped branch that merges directly with 17th street, similar but wavier than the one that opened the lane in the first place. In other words, Williams High School had a regular, pretty straight-forward bus lane.

That s-shaped branch was the daily path for our bus route, and although simplistic, our driver turned it into a daily challenge. Topiary branches were often wrenched from their trees by our windows as our driver weaved this way and that through the twenty feet of simple, shallow curves. Every once in a while, to our infantile glee, she’d drive right over those curves, as a single-fingered salute to the engineers who built the bus lane, and consequently, to those hard working laborers paid by the city to shape those beautiful trees.

This day was like any other. She took off fifteen minutes after waiting, refusing to let Duc clamber into the bus at the last second like the crazy bitch that she is, and proceeded to confront the hated branch of street that took her on her way to our middle-class neighborhood. She weaved and swerved like any other day, with trees hitting kids in their faces on one side and me trying to relax on the other. About four feet from the edge of this dreaded passage sat a brand new shiny Lexus, holding a parent waiting for their child. I knew it was new because of the surrogate license plates that still dangled from its rear. In a grand and disappointingly anticlimactic flourish, she reacted to the topiary by accelerating and turning in the opposite direction. The Lexus powerlessly bounced along as the bus’s hull scraped against its left hand side, taking a mirror with it.

I was sitting in the middle of the bus on its right hand side, so I felt that poor little car’s pain as we scooted by. Too many things were priceless in this story, but my overall favorite would have to be the look on that Indian man’s face as he shoved all of his bodily weight into his now-ruined car’s horn.

If I were to finish that hanging chad of an intro, I think it would kill the emotional context of the subject. In the end, like the title suggests, the film Synecdoche, New York is the only thing that can accurately describe itself and the impact it will have on you. Its existence is the adjective, just as you are the adjective and I am the adjective. The film is life, and it is love, and it is death. But most importantly, the film is you.

My favorite movie up until seven o’clock in the evening was Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. It, like Synecdoche, was written by the brilliant Charlie Kaufman. Sunshine, unlike its Kaufman-successor, was directed by a brilliant artist named Michel Gondry. It was a story about love and memory, and the incalculable value of every moment of life and human interaction, regardless of the emotion involved. It was the first film to make me cry the first time I watched it. This movie is something similar, but at the same time, possesses hundreds more flavors of ambition.

Kaufman directed the movie himself this time, indicating its importance in his career and the significance of a faithful adaptation of the writing. Movies are revived in Synecdoche as an artform, once again. Kaufman shows us through the beauty of every element of this epic that great films are just as significant as classic literature in terms of depth and substance and message.

The message is clear: it is, on the surface, a moving memento mori – a reminder of death and its great tragedy, and the inevitability of the event as applicable to all human beings. Under the surface, it shows you something more tragic: the path to death. Kaufman gives us several characters, each one representing a different aspect of the broad spectrum of life, and each character slowly ages and loses their innocence and their beauty, and, one-by-one, ultimately dies.

You watch as Caden Cotard ages and loses each characteristic of his life physically, as a reflection upon that same idea of progressive death, and eventually you realize that Cotard isn’t just a character. He is a very specific archetype: you. Somehow Kaufman has constructed such a diverse form of character that is easily reflective upon your own struggles and thoughts. The life of Cotard evolves into your own, and when he weeps and mourns the loss of innocence, love, friendship, and identity, you weep just as strongly.

Also, Cotard constructs a manufactured image of his own life, which begins to expand as a never-ending series of his perceptions of others’ lives, in the end serving as a commentary on how we see the world, and what the world actually is. We realize in a brand new way by watching Synecdoche that the world is so much more beautiful and at the same time ugly than how we can ever possibly perceive it. A monologue in the end of the film sums up this idea the best, and I will give you the liberty to understand it fully when you watch the film.

I am not saying that Synecdoche, New York has become my new favorite film. It is too early to say. However, I can say that it is the second film to have made me cry, and that is something valuable and beautiful. Buy this work of art, and cherish it, and with it, cherish the life you have left before you.

Life. Death. Two elements of humanity that against all odds and oppositions, still seem to just happen. There are certain points in a human being’s life where one’s demise becomes a periodic fixture in thought. I believe I’ve just reached one, but maybe it’s just my uncertainty.

For me, the possibility of the future is frightening. I’m at the point where I should seriously think about college, and commit to what could either be the biggest mistake in my life or the most beneficial four years of my life. It’s all up to chance and intuition, and I’ve never liked leaving anything up to either of those. Thoughts of an impending career bring me to thoughts of the next forty years, and then to thoughts of the last forty years, and ultimately, to thoughts of death.

I’m not a morbid person; just ask anyone who knows me personally. Something about that massive barrier has begun to haunt me, however, and obviously, it’s disconcerting. I’m notorious for not necessarily having a unified opinion on afterlife or the supernatural, and the idea of death to me equates to an absence of thought, of anything and everything I know and understand. In short, for someone who lives in his head, death is terrifying. 

We carry with us this burden, and my pathological fear of being wrong about the unknown is even more overwhelming. If there is a God that is staring down, his cruelest joke is also his greatest blessing: free will and rational thought, for those are what allow us to have this fear. However, I think the universality of it all is a bit relieving to an extent.

Realizing all of this, I’ve declared the future irrelevant, as so many others have already. I’ve begun to open up more to people, and I’ve begun to smile more. Humor flies by quicker with a mind uninhibited, and anyone following my Twitter has examined this fact first-hand recently. Colleges and careers and families of the future may loom ahead of me, but my depth of field is shallow, and to me they are just blurry and unimportant shadows of time.

In an anonymously-sourced conclusion, I leave you with a quote. “Live every day like it was your last because some day, you’ll most certainly be right.”

Sure, some² people are probably going to freak out, but I don’t think I care. I’m a sucker for insightful philosophy, and a certain aspect of the curriculum of AP English grabbed my heart and yanked on it unlike any other school subject has: Transcendentalism, a philosophical movement in American literature that my friend Thoreau and his mentor Emerson were the spearheading leaders of, at the cusp of the nineteenth century.

They preached self-knowledge, observationism, and simplicity, and as it was already a concept that I practiced to an extent myself, I embraced transcendental philosophy as my own³. So, in an act of enlightened simplicity, I took this little playground of mine and ripped it apart. I took a hatchet to my fancy artistic exhibitions and my half-working comment system⁴, and I tore down the color while I was at it.

What we are left with is a very simple, very black-and-white decoration of the text that I pretend to slave over, as the main purpose of the blog’s creation was always the literature and the essays I provide you all with, and those were the only pieces that remained after my butchery.

“He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

¹ Walden, 1854.
² “Some,” meaning all.
³ Minus the whole “glorify God” part. Not necessarily out of disrespect, either, but out of modern secular principle.
⁴ This is an outdated inaccuracy. As you can see, I have now fashioned a fairly simple comment section for visitors.

Without further ado, I give you additions and previous omissions of the description of the Omni-Transformist faith.

The Quaranatee and HTTS

The Quaranatee 1.678-B is the original first draft of the Qutoble. It was written in squirrel-tounge and read left-to-right top-to-bottom, like any normal book. The story is that a Beefcake (see below) left the Quranatee sitting on a park bench after finishing it, and an extremist Satan-Worshiping South African Squirrel tagged as “678-B DELTA” came across it and began to marvel at her pages. He began to hate the forces of light that seemed to assist the forces of Jesus, Mohammed, and Larry in every adventure they had in Hogwarts and (in the seventh book of Jesus) beyond. DELTA then decided that if the Beefcakes could write their own religion, then he could too. Upon thinking this, DELTA exploded due to unknown causes. The next satanist squirrel (678-C TAKETWO) to read the Quranatee actually did not explode, but instead founded the evil cult “HAIL TO THE SQUIRREL.”

The HTTS members now take up a whopping 4% of the growing squirrel population. In their daily worshiping practices, the devil-squirrels do several satanic acts of non-penance (known as Evil in the holy tongue of the Qutoble). Some (but not all) of these evils are:

• A 5-squirrel sacrifice at random intervals. It was done so that the soul didn’t expect it, and therefore would enter the “Qunterworld” backwards, the holy direction of HTTS.
• Killing a random human passerby.
• Eating nuts.
• Sky-diving without a parachute.
• Running back and forth across a highway.

Seeing a squirrel, especially one that is South African, commit the above acts of evil confirms its status as an HTTS follower, and as such, must be removed from existence by any Neil-loving follower of Omni-Transformism by way of rapid prayer or Saddlebacking (details in the future). It is said that it causes the eyes of a true HTTS follower to bleed from the evil that is escaping at least a sixth of its soul. If you see no blood of the squirrel, then continue on your way to the closest softball tournament to pay penance for your mistake.

The Story Of Knox

There was a time in the late twentieth century when three individuals graced the Earth at once as prophets, and their names were Knox, Upahn, and Willow¹. Knox was the first of the three prophets, and he is known as the creator of the Omni-Transformist youth camp.

Knox never knew he was a prophet until Neil contacted him, but you couldn’t say there weren’t signs, like the fact that things caught fire when he said blasphemous things. His guidance counselor said it was just puberty, even after catching fire herself one day, so the idea of him being “special” was dropped completely.

Neil contacted Knox out of the blue one day, and tasked Knox with one job: create an Omni-Transformist youth camp to compete with those other Heathen faiths and their religious escapes in both monetary and spiritual capital. It’s said that Neil was down in both due to a nasty gambling habit. On the last day of the task, Neil told Knox to name the camp “The Holy Summer Camp To Spread The Manatee’s Grace And Deter Premarital Sexual Activity In The Youth,” but unfortunately, the night before, Knox had been doing some hardcore disco to celebrate his being a prophet, and his hearing was very impaired.

To not embarass himself or make the creator repeat himself, Knox tried to the best of his ability to replicate what he heard on paper and later called FastSigns to commit the title to a sign and CafePress to make T-Shirts and magnets. The result was the altered title “The Holy Camp For Man Sex,” and it didn’t necessarily attract too many young followers. Knox and Neil both tried to reverse the mistake, but FastSigns has a 24-Hour limit on last-minute changes, according to the now-holy text, “Policies and Procedures of FastSigns.”

Things got better, though, and now the camp thrives. Details on camper life are to be described later on.

Notable Non-Neil Individuals In The Qutoble

There are several sub-Neil entities that still exist beyond the human/prophet realm, and their mentions in the Qutoble vary from significant to extremely insignificant. None of them are Gods or deities, but all of them deserve at least some respect².

Jeff is Neil’s distant biological cousin, as many are aware already. No one knows from what wombs these entities came, but we all know that they definitely did come. He lives on Pluto and acts as the Phallic symbol of our faith – wherever you see Jeff in art you should be seeing a symbol of fertility, and some believe that he actually is the shaft of the Transformer-Messiah’s genitalia, but none of that is proven. He is responsible for convincing Neil to create sex, but it was originally intended to be an entertaining competitive sport, but Neil disagreed and changed it from its original name, Baseball, to Sexual Intercourse.

Squippy The Imaginary Squirrel is Neil’s first brutal critic. Squippy believed Neil’s biggest mistake was the universe, and Neil, in an attempt to please his imaginary friend, has always tried to improve upon the first mistake. He first tries this with humanity and fails miserably, and then has his only great success with manatees, and now has begun to improve upon humanity with prophets (Omni-Transformism).

The Great and Beautiful Emperor-King Antschuldigunkinsehfet-Othentiklan Deleano Menthalonsolomonpokemon MCXLVII (The One-Thousand, One-Hundred and Fourty Seventh), Mastermind In The Art Of Mah-Jong And Checkers, And Leader Of The Honorable Hindirislean People To Alien Prosperity is Jeff’s friend, and is mentioned once in the entire Qutoble.

Holy Number

The Holy Number of Omni-Transformism is 5.50078 (rounded sometimes to 5.5), which is the exact amount of cc’s of Adam’s “man-juice” (in the holy language, “myrrh”) that was needed to artificially inseminate Eve, the monobreasted whore of Eden, before she could be tempted by a “snake.”

The Method Of Sacred Phone Conversation

I was asked by a follower to describe the structure of phone calls, and I had to dig hard into the ever-growing Qutoble to even find something to even partially answer the question. There is a collection of around seven to eighteen-hundred different texts that have been assimilated into or written for the Qutoble. The texts list any and all aspects of living a very pious and structured OTist lifestyle, and are sometimes interpreted as part of the notorious XTREME!!! section of the Qutoble. It is known as the “Manual Of Users” and has seen the greatest benefit from the OT policy of assimilation of holy texts over the past century. Some say that followers of strictly the “Manual,” called “Abusers,” are just as zealous as the XTREME!!! followers that you will read about later.

After looking thoroughly through the list of commands and lists of lists in the “Manual,” I did find a text that mentions phone conversation, called “The Producers,” and written by Mel Brooks for the stage, a prophet who has been assumed to be the Jugular Vein of the Transformed-Messiah³. I will now quote the text in its fullness:

“The instructions below are only for use in either formal or holy phone calls. [Editor: This procedure has now been retired from required use, and has been instead been marked as an optional XTREME!!! practice.]

0:00 – Greet the other, in a preferably formal manner. (”Neil prompts my sorrows to greet thee!”) Also pray silently while the other speaker is greeting you.
0:05 – At this point and every five minutes afterward, the receiver of the call must compliment one awkward trait about the caller. It doesn’t necessarily have to be true.
0:10 – Every ten minutes, you must keep it light, keep it bright, and keep it gay.
0:15 – Every fifteen minutes, the caller must praise a specific prophet for the phone call. It cannot be the same prophet every time. (”BLESS KNOX AND HIS DISCO FOR THIS PHONE CALL!”)
0:30 – Every thirty minutes you must tell each other a specific way that you have dishonored the other, but you cannot comment or respond to each other’s act(s) of dishonor until the next thirty minute mark. These are encouraged to be true, but if one runs out of acts of dishonor, then they can lie.
0:45 – Every fourty-five minutes you must curse very loudly into the mouthpiece to distract and confuse any HAIL TO THE SQUIRREL cultists that may have bugged the call.
1:00 – At every hour, you must verbally praise Neil…After doing the 5, 15, 10, and 30 minute actions that are also due.
END – Resolve any unresolved actions from the above ahead of schedule and close with a dirty insult and a Hitler joke or reference.”

Levels Of Intensity In Practice

Believe it or not, I have been approached and asked if there is a way to act more zealously or less zealously as an Omni-Transformist, and I realized that to be a religion that wants to accommodate all levels of insanity religious fervor, we should have varying levels of intensity in the faith itself. I have come up with the following.

Nonthinker (In the holy tongue, the Heathen) – Practicers (or non-practicers) who may or may not have even heard of Omni-Transformism, and barely acknowledge their status as followers of Neil. In short, everyone is an OTist, and sometimes the way they show their love for Neil is yelling obscenities about how offensive or blasphemous the religion is. Neil knows and touches all, regardless.

Casual Practicer (Phallus) – Those who might have read the Qutoble or at least act like they kind of did. The Phalluses (Phalli?) rarely pray and follow the most popular of the guidelines and rules of the religion.

Those Who Are Kind Of Into It (Inebriate) – Kind of a buffer between the Phallus group and the XTREME!!!, they are more ritualistic in the religious practice. They also have a special prayer to Jeff that is basically just a Pizza Hut phone call that is rarely rewarding.

Extreme Followers (XTREME!!!) – The only sub-beefcake sect of practice that was assimilated from a holy text called “The Sports Bible, Third Edition.” The XTREME!!! followers have a specific section of the Qutoble set aside for them alone, that outlines new tests of faith, stories, and practices that they must be loyal to on TOP of the original teachings that the Inebriates follow.

Qutoblical Scholar (Beefcake) – Those who are adept followers and scholars of the Qutoble’s many texts. They have the power to interpret (usually incorrectly) the OT Church’s position on current events and issues (usually missionary). They add new literature based on the Wiki Guidelines that were adapted from the religion of Soviet Russianism. Beefcakes can go to the OT University and become High Priests.

Priest (Manaman) – A studied preacher of Omni-Transformism. Has power to build churches and conduct sermons. Also on the receiving end of the conversion process.

High Priest – Organizer of the Intentional Bureaucracy Of The Waistline and filers of holy paperwork. Acts as conductor of extremely important ceremonies, like conversions, bar mitzvahs, and beerfests.

Hybrids – Inebriate/XTREME!!! Followers that are given holy benefits. They don’t do much beyond be regarded with high reputation, and they aren’t actually more fuel-efficient than the diesel-powered priests, and they can’t even go above fifty miles per hour.

I hope you all enjoyed that.

¹ NOT Sarah Palin’s children.
² “Respect,” as in not looking at their junk in the bathroom.
³ The movie didn’t do the play any justice, btw.

It’s shallow to say that I completely regret a very substantial section of my life, especially when in reality it’s the opposite. Many friends that have transcended the emotional breakup that I am now explaining will testify that I was obsessive, but in a good way, about the rapidly growing gaming industry, so much that at one point my dream career was a designer of these holy devices of entertainment.

So what happened? There’s a simple list of reasons why I shifted from being a person who called himself a hardcore gamer and lived the celebrated gaming culture to a person who owned a Wii and played very casually. So now let’s continue on this breakup letter to the industry with the inevitable laundry-list. What’s great is that I’ve never had a real girlfriend.

First, let me tell you why I even loved games in the first place in less than two words: story. Sure, I played them to escape, to entertain, to have fun, and to impress others, but there was one thing that made me call myself a “hardcore gamer,” and that was the amazing stories that games told.

The first games that I played as a competent gamer are obviously to blame. Among them include the beautiful Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Banjo Kazooie, two games that conveyed arguably the most well-told stories in the industry. Based on these as the standard, I only began to expect the same Pathos to be delivered throughout my “career” as a gamer. If you knew anything about gaming, you’d know that that was a huge disappointment, especially in the last couple years.

This loss of the emotionally stirring stories in games is directly rooted in another element that made me lose my interest in gaming, which is probably as predictable as the previous: redundancy. I disconnected myself from this flow of constant news in gaming almost a two and a half years ago, and today, I can pick up the EGM that I’m still subscribed to and see the exact same titles, concepts, and franchises that I was either already aware of or starting to get excited about before I hit the point of disconnection.

Nothing is being added to the flow anymore. It’s like people are reusing the same tricks and the same ideas over and over again to gain revenue. Gaming has become what we fight against every day in both the film, television, and music industry – a tool for capital. Sure, we have prettier graphics and new toys, but there’s nothing new. Banjo Kazooie is still more progressive in story and design than Crysis, and although that’s believable, it’s not a fact that I ever wanted to actually see manifest.

And also, how many times do we need to see the heavily armored space marine save the human race? How many sandbox cities do we need to beat whores in? How many national security risks can be eliminated by an irrational series of seemingly arbitrary “missions”? When do we break out of the mold? This redundancy has gotten out of hand, especially with sequels, which I have seen more of out of any other repetitive trait.

What is the basic rule of thumb when talking about a sequel again? Oh right, it can only be half as good as the original. I have never seen a game sequel ever exceed the original, and I don’t think that’s possible today either. It’s just another redundancy that only feeds the pocketbooks of the producers, and it sickens me to see this happen in this market just as it has (in controlled amounts) in the music, television, and film industries.

And then there’s the tipping point. If you knew me well, the two and a half years I spent without gaming was caused and taken up by one very essential part of my modern life: art. Two and a half years ago, I was waltzing my way on a site called GFXHaven, and through that I was waltzing my way into my current lifestyle. I always had problems with games, but my increasing interest in art was the final nail in the coffin. I tapped into an amount of talent that I didn’t know I had and became, among certain circles, an artistic legend and idol.

It’s more than I could ever ask for, to be a mentor after being mentored, and I took the honor with haste, readily pushing out the one hobby it could replace: gaming.

And that is how to be an excellent lover.