Because I Care

  Because I care, I've decided to compile a list of facts that I think will help you decide who to vote for when the time comes. 
  Fact: Barack Obama shares a suspicious personal relationship as a Chicagoan with the notorious artery-clogging killer deep-dish pizza. 
  Fact: Rick Santorum employs hundreds of robo-slaves to keep him in a constant supply of sweater-vests.
  Fact: Mitt Romney has a name similar to Mr. Littman's on Seinfeld, and they sound vaguely the same, if you don't try too hard. 
  Fact: "Eye of Newt" is a favorite cooking ingredient for both the witches in Macbeth and Michelle Obama (eyeballs are organic).
  Fact: Newt Gingrich is an aquatic amphibian. 
  Fact: Donald Trump is not running for president.
  Fact: Herman Cain should still be running for president.
  Fact: As a Mormon, Mitt Romney can't ingest things like the"special plants" Michelle Obama is growing in her "all-organic" White House garden.
  Fact: If gun control legislation is passed, Michelle Obama's arms will have to be chopped off. 
  Fact: After Newt Gingrich won South Carolina, Mitt Romney screamed "Dag nab it!", "Oh fudge!", and several other Mormonized curses and then sat in a corner and twitched for several minutes.
  Fact: Over thirty national conservative leaders have endorsed Rick Santorum. One of these was Jason Jones, producer of the film Bella, if that means anything to you.  
  Fact: I'm not running for president. 
  Fact: The word "fundamentally" has been viciously abused and should be put out of its misery before more harm comes to it.
  Fact: Newt Gingrich winning South Carolina is like Rocky in the sense that nobody expected him to get this far. Running with this, his campaign bus now reads "The Former Republican Speaker of the House Stallion."
  Fact: Nobody explained the word "fact" to me before I posted this screed. 
  Fact: I would vote for a slice of pineapple before I voted for Obama. If I could vote.
 
 

Things That I Really Want to Do: Another List, By NiteOwl

  I think the post title says it all, so I'm just gonna get on with it.

• Get a freaking book published
• Go ice skating
• Climb one of those cool indoor rock-wall things
• GO INTO THE OCEAN FOR THE FIRST TIME IN FIVE OR SIX YEARS
• Go on a Ferris wheel
• Laugh in the face of those who didn't believe in me
• Go tubing
• Get dogs and cats and hamsters and horses and...
• Be the best around
• Graduate and get the heck out of the school system forever
•  Go to Italy
• Go to Bloomington, Indiana
• Live

  P.S.--Happy Birthday to my friend Erin! I'm not late for once! It's actually today! Even though I didn't know until the last period of the day...but let's just focus on me being on time on here, all right? Because that's incredible enough. Happy Birthday!

It's the NiteOwl Centennial!

  Whoo-hoo! This is the Second Chance Blog's one-hundredth post exactly! This really has no meaning to it except to say that this is one hundred posts! One hundred shots of my insanity--and many hundreds more to come! 
  Please celebrate responsibly. I don't want anything on my conscience besides the crap that's already there.

If You Value Your Life, Do Not Go Here

  I was doing research recently for a story, because when I place a story or character in a specific place or time I don't want to go and just make crap up, and I was researching two areas of my beloved (um...) New Jersey, and I found a place called East Orange and rediscovered a place I already knew, called Camden. Perhaps you know these two areas. Perhaps you know them because you know to avoid them if you want to live. If you don't, here's NiteOwl to inform you. 
  I'm pretty scared, and I'm not even there. I mean, East Orange has a pretty high crime rate--sometimes higher than the national average--and Camden's not too clean, either. One area of NJ I found had a 213.5% crime rate, and I was planning on using that one for my book instead, but that was property crime only; turns out this place has a basically zero-percent physical crime rate, the kind that I'm looking for. 
  I mean, you can just Google it; those two are constantly ranked high on the "freaking dangerous" list, although maybe not in those exact terms. I found a website where people talk about different areas they are planning to move to and stuff and some people were discussing East Orange; all I saw was bad, dangerous, bad, and a recommendation on what kind of gun to bring (apparently, nothing less than a nine mm). 
  I think I found where my book is going to be set.

Eye of the Writer

  Never mind that my vision is utterly crappy (without my glasses, at least). What I'm trying to say is that up until recently, even though I want to get published very badly, I wasn't working at the speed that I needed to be to get something done and published before Dad made me get a job. I was writing a lot, yeah, but I was writing one paragraph a day in thirty different stories instead of thirty paragraphs in one story that I would try to send off. Things just weren't getting done at the pace that they needed to be getting done for me to actually, you know, do something. And it doesn't help that I'm just a slow writer, besides. I mean, I can know exactly what I want to say and have ten scenes planned and playing out in my mind but I can't get through 'em all because I write so dang slow. 
  What I needed was something to speed me up--something that wasn't illegal and, you know, potentially fatal (I bet Charlie Sheen could write a million books a day with all that extra speed  he has lying around). Just some motivation, I guess you could say, something besides my dad telling me that maybe his grandchildren could read my first published book to his gravestone or threatening to make me work at CVS or something like that. 
  And then, last Saturday, at the beginning of my three-day weekend, I got my swift kick in the pants. 
  Dad had seen this two-hour Rocky retrospective on the Biography channel a few weeks ago and I was checking the guide and it turned out it was on again, and I remembered Dad saying that he thought my brother would like it, so I told him and we recorded it. To shorten this a bit, we watched it Saturday night, and I discovered that Sylvester Stallone wrote the first draft of Rocky in an eighty-page notebook in three and a half days. Eighty pages in three and a half days. I couldn't write eighty pages in three and a half weeks.
  Consider pants officially kicked. 
  While the whole three-and-a-half day thing is a feat I will never be able to do by hand, at least (the only way I would be able to do that and count it as "amazing," because I could go a mile a minute on the computer any day and that's not that amazing), I have managed to focus a bit more than I normally would have, banging out seven pages four days in one story. 
  Yes, I think I've got my focus now.  

Holding Out for a Hero

  No, not me; I can save myself, thank you very much. I'm talking about the GOP. It seems to me that each candidate has some good quality but then some major insanity or flaw that completely cancels it out (see: RomneyCare, Huntsman's Chinese-speaking smugness, Santorum's sweater-vests). What I'm thinking is that we hire the guy who builds all those Kardashian robots and combine all the good parts of the each candidate into one super-awesome machine. Then nobody will not vote for it because it'll be the first robot to ever run for president and if they don't vote for it they will be denounced as rascist and cast out into the wilderness like they used to do to bad people in the good ol' days. 
  And yes, I'm completely aware that sales of sweater-vests have skyrocketed since one debate or another that Santorum was in, but who ever said we as a people have great decisive skills? I mean, look who we voted in four years ago. 
  I'll make a bet with you. If the chucklehead in office now wins reelection, by some sly maneuvering by Satan (a.k.a. The Left), I'll go to the Nerd Store and buy all the sweater vests there and wear them to school. 
  And I'll move to the moon.