A lot of people are anti-police, which is a reasonable sentiment. Police often use excessive force, and they can be boorish, and it’s hard to enjoy a party after Officer McPolicey threatens the host with a noise violation. But all this animosity towards police seems kind of unfair when you consider how long we’ve been letting firemen off the hook.

Where do firemen get their sense of entitlement? Sometimes they save lives, but big deal, that’s their job. It’s not like they’re working voluntarily (unless you’re talking about volunteer firemen, who make me sick to my stomach). When I see a fireman, I want to yell, “Hey, fireman! Why don’t you go shove that ladder up your ass?” They expect me to be impressed by their mastery of a fire hose, but to me they’re just glorified gardeners.

You say I can’t park in front of your precious fire hydrant due to the off chance that there’s a fire in the vicinity? Tell you what, if there’s a fire, go ahead and loop your hose around my car. Maybe this wouldn’t be “convenient” for you, but the world is not set up for your convenience. Nor were Dalmatians bred for your personal self-gratification. Sometimes I want to purchase a Dalmatian, but I can’t ever find one because you’re hoarding them all in your little fire engines.

For these reasons and more I’m currently organizing a mass protest against firemen. In the meantime I invite everyone to take part in my “stop snitching” campaign. If you see a fire and you snitch about it to firemen, you’re no better than they are.

I had a dream last night which was both vivid and stupid. I was in a house I didn’t recognize, speaking with a girl I’d never met. She was a credulous sort, taken to offbeat theories on spirituality. Specifically she claimed that one could transport oneself back in time with a certain kind of meditation. She was clearly crazy, but I asked for a demonstration anyway. She sat me down in a strange super-padded rocking chair and instructed me to close my eyes and attempt to visualize the history of a particular object she wore around her neck. I played along and began rocking back-and-fourth in the super-padded rocking chair, which was the finest and most comfortable chair I’d ever known. But after a few short moments of this my alarm went off and I was sent back into consciousness. I pounded my pillow and said, “Goddamned dreams fooled me again!”

If I’d known I’d been dreaming, I wouldn’t have even bothered trying to go back in time. I have long ago realized that I can count on waking up exactly one second before anything sweet like time-traveling is going down. For example, if I have a dream where I meet somebody who claims he’s going to take me to a planet populated entirely by robots, I’ll say, “Oh, a robot planet you say? I guess that means I’ll be waking up right about now. I can’t wait to miss fucking awesome robot world.” Sure enough, next thing I know I’m in the shower shampooing my hair and scowling—right about when I should be shaking hands with the mayor of Robot City.

But I got to thinking about my dream today, and suddenly it occurred to me: maybe my dream-state had in fact been the future. Perhaps the meditation had actually sent me to our present via the portal of the dream world. In fact, that is almost certainly what happened. You see, at some point in the future I’m going to meet that nutcase girl and, having forgotten about my dream, she’s going to show me her meditation technique and send me back to June 15th, 2007—and once again I’m going to be writing this dumb entry. I’ve probably been in this loop for all eternity, and it only seems like I’m living a normal linear life. I hate living in a time loop because even though I don’t remember the future, things get pretty dull after about the 20th trip through time. Still, every time I get sent to the past, I smile a little bit inside knowing that it’s only a matter of time before they invent those great super-padded rocking chairs from my dream.

Some people enjoy topping off a declarative statement with the word “period”—for example, “The best snack is blueberries. Period.” Guys, there’s no need to sound out your punctuation, and doing so doesn’t make blueberries anymore delicious. Also, saying the word “period” actually constitutes a completely new sentence, meaning you now need to employ an additional period. What you’re actually saying is: “The best snack is blueberries (period) Period (period)” So if you want to be grammatically correct you have to say, “The best snack is blueberries. Period. Period. Period.” But now you’re in a kind of quicksand, because each of these additional periods will also require vocalization—which adds yet more sentences and yet more periods. What I’m saying is, if you want to legitimately sound out all your punctuation—and apparently for some reason you do—you need to sit there saying “period” all day, infinity times. And all of this could have been avoided if you simply said you enjoyed blueberries, and we would have just kind of imagined the period in our heads.

Sometimes saying “period” isn’t enough an affront to the spoken word. Occasionally I’ll hear some guy end his statement with “Period! End of sentence!” For example, “You people need to stop eating my blueberries! Period! End of sentence!” Come on, man, what’s the point of that? It’s not like ending your sentence assertively precludes a rebuttal. Just because you’ve said a complete sentence doesn’t mean I can’t chip in with a new sentence. This sort of technique only works when you say, “End of conversation!” because then the other person is locked out from a response. When people say “end of conversation” to me, I think to myself, “Oh man! The conversation seems to have ended and I didn’t even get a chance to respond.” The only thing to do at this point is say, “Begin punch to the face,” and then you punch them in the face.

There’s nothing wrong with arguing—sometimes I do it for hours on end—but even I can admit that there are limits. However, some young people are so passionate about arguing that they travel the country in organized teams for the sheer joy of quarreling. If you see one of these so-called “debate teams” coming, you should immediately run in the opposite direction, because otherwise you’re in for a headache. Imagine going out to eat with a debate team and watching them try to divide the bill. You listen to them carrying on about caloric intake formals and obscure tribal dining rituals for a couple hours before you finally just slap your credit card on the table and yell, “Here’s the money! I’ll pay for the fucking dinner, but you losers need to stop arguing for ten minutes!” But then five minutes later they’re arguing about where to go get ice cream.

Some people claim debate is different from mere arguing, and maybe they’re right. Maybe it’s much worse than arguing. When you argue, at least you believe in what you’re whining about. But debaters don’t actually agree with what they’re saying—they’re spiteful enough to ignore their own world view and argue any position they’re assigned. During competitions their objective is to take this arbitrary position and rattle off as much supporting evidence as possible to spread their opponent with verbal detritus, thereby overwhelming them and preventing them from responding to everything. Rhetorical trickery is the rule of the day, and sidestepping points, employing ad hoc fallacies, and setting up grotesque straw man arguments are all vital techniques. Then these debaters grow up to be lawyers and politicians and there’s no getting through to any of them. They argue the agendas of their constituents and campaign financers and corporate donors and you couldn’t uncover a genuine conviction if you scanned their brains with a black light. Maybe these people were ill-served by their debate teams. Maybe they should have joined listening teams.