Thoughtless Banter – John Bellone

Pennies for Thought

Nov

The Big Twenty-Four

Posted by JB at 12:27 am

Another year has gone by and I am once again typing to the sweet melodies of Slipknot, with a glass of Jack Daniels to the left and my MacBook at my right. This birthday unfortunately will be plagued with stuffing my nose into a physics book learning about electromagnetism, but I figured I would take a little time tonight to write a small little blog post about the things that I am thankful for this year. I find myself looking less upon the past as of recent so I think it is fair to give the time needed to acknowledge those that have had a profound meaning to me this year.

The Guys At Zinkk

What can I say? The past year has been full of amazing achievements for a group of guys that came together with a dream. We each are working through our lives to try and make this business float. Up until the past couple of weeks the outlook was gloomy, and then we pulled together to have an truly amazing time at the teacher’s conference. The late nights spent coding, planning, and sipping coffee with you guys are among what I cherish the most this past year. I hope, no matter what happens with our business, that our lives will allow us to continue to work together in some form or another. There is absolutely no way I would be happier if Type Aloud launched and immediately was taken down by a storm of rabid Twitter fan boys. We can only hope for such a mob!

My Friends, Close and Far

Many of you may not even know the affect that you have towards my ability to still be a sane person. Some of my happiest times are sitting at the universities’ pub drinking back beers and talking about life. Or spending a night drinking booze watching people make fools of themselves playing Asshole or arguing about the logistics of Michael Jackson being both a superstar and a pedaphile. I do have a myriad of misfit friends, but you all each play a specific role to my plan for future world domination, and I will make sure to treat you all like royalty in the new republic.

The Fam

They may or may not be reading this. Nevertheless, it need not be said, but I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them.

Well that’s about it for me. I am going to exit on that note (and Smashmouth – Walking On The Sun). I hope all of you have a great holiday, an even better year, and I can’t wait to see what the next twelve months will bring.

Oct

The Month Of September 2009

Posted by JB at 12:58 am

It has been nearly a month since I have slept a full night on an actual mattress. During Labor Day weekend, about a month ago, the unit above my apartment sprung a leak in the bathroom and an existing problem got worse. A small spot of mold turned into a swarm, spreading from the upper corner of the wall, down the closet and into my personal affects. A small growth of mold that we wrote to a landlord about in a letter with our rent had multiplied, and forced my roommate and I out of our apartment. The water pressure had also destroyed the tiles in our bathroom’s shower leaving us miserable and dirty to boot. As you can imagine this was not how I wanted to begin my last semester as an undergraduate at university.

Over the course of the month I have seem my health be affected by the disturbed sleeping pattern, the uncomfortable arrangements I have had to make, and my studies have hit an all time rock bottom. This was the first time in my life that I have been physically without a place to call home; luckily I have been able to shack up at the office on an air mattress (occasionally sleeping on the couch to give someone else the mattress to sleep on) which has definitely eased the pain a little. But I can honestly say that this has been one of the worst months of my life.

All throughout this month I have learned how much I am actually able to take without breaking. I really feel like shit right now, burnt out and beat up, but my mind is keeping my sicken body going. I need to get this work done. No matter how much trudging it takes I am going to begrudgingly finish everything as best as I can. I am going to keep my mouth shut, no matter how much I think a teaching method is wrong. Maybe one day I will be able to incorporate what I have learned at college into something meaningful.

I am writing this blog post now sitting on the air mattress that I purchased a couple of weeks ago. My room has yet to be fully finished, I am waiting on a contractor to finish shampooing the carpet, and I have piles of work that needs to be taken care of. The past two weeks I have been nursing a cold that had seemingly gone, came back, only to be gone again leaving a persistent dry cough. I survived the first round of midterm exams, have one more next week, and will be officially halfway finished in about two weeks. This semester has truly been the worst and I am absolutely looking forward to the real world. A world without examinations meant to trick you into the wrong answer, mislead you, and generally make you feel shitty about yourself. A world where the end result matters and not the theoretical process that you used to get that result.

I can smell the roses. Let’s just hope that life does not through another curve ball my way. My apologies for something that is less humorous – I have been unable to write a funny piece this whole month. I’ll make an attempt to get back into the groove of things soon. I promise.

Sep

Envy The Brainsick

Posted by JB at 5:01 pm

There are times that I wish I could be addicted to something. While hanging out with the local chumps I hear the war stories of people that were an addict. There is nothing better than listening to someone recount an experience that led them through the streets of Philadelphia on a path of destruction to find that last little shit who wants to sell him some crack.

Some of the world’s fucked-up people are the people that interest me. If you are crazy and hear voices in your head I want to know who they are. Do they sound like Burt Reynolds or Sean Connery? I think it would absolutely amazing to have the ominous voice of Charlie Manson speaking to me at totally irrelevant times. How many people can say that a serial killer talks to them while they are commuting to work?

I don’t care who you are. You cannot tell me that you have not at least once thought about what it would be to labeled clinically insane. I’m not talking about slit-my-wrists-emo insane; I mean the people that walk through the halls of Ancora eating crayons and smearing Elmer’s glue on their tongue. These are the type of people that decide to mold their feces in the shape of the Pope, or weave a blanket out of the hair that they had shed.

I am a firm believer that half of these people lie about these craziness. It would be nice to be delusional and hear the voice of a raving madman for a couple of minutes. Unfortunately I am not the type of person to go through a drug induced stupor in order to hear a second or third voice in my head whisper sweet-nothings into my consciousness.

Obviously a vast majority of these people are crazy. But what about the people that aren’t? Maybe Elvis is really speaking to that a random lunatic and all he wants is another peanut-butter and fried banana sandwich. Who knows?

Oh what I would give to be crazy for a couple of hours. It might answer so many questions in my life.

Sep

Beating Children Should Not Be Incognito

Posted by JB at 5:39 pm

When living in an apartment it has generally been an acceptable practice to take out the garbage on time, pay the electric and gas bills on time, and generally be a good neighbor to all of your fellow homosapiens. Another general practice is to make sure that the children that you have bore both in and out of wedlock are properly disciplined.

Now, back when I was a kid this meant listening to your mother, playing nicely with your siblings and doing what you were told. Back when I was a kid, if you did not do what you were told, Papa would come home and show you the wrath of God which usually resulted in you thinking twice the next time you decided to defy an order. If you were stupid enough to do the same thing more than twice then it was usually time to stop using the belt and starting using more inanimate objects: the door, the wall, a lawn chair.

When I moved into my new apartment in August, despite all of the usual expectations of an apartment in Newark, it was actually a rather pleasant experience. I had escaped the wrath of Residence Life deciding to turn on the air conditioning about the three weeks too late and a maintenance request taking longer than the trip to candy mountain to be serviced. The benefits most definitely outweighed the costs (and trust me, Residence Life despite all of their falters during my tenure there did not drop the ball when it came to that $750 cancellation fee).

That was until I found out there were two inexperienced parents living upstairs who decided to have children a little too early in their “relationship” (in quotes because I do not fully understand the situation regarding Mommy and Daddy). This meant that while I was watching a football game I had the second floor menaces screaming at the top of their lungs and playing their own game of “Who could be the loudest during the Giant’s football game?”

I am a firm supporter of parents having the ability to beat their children. The recent teachings about being a good “parent” and using “positive” reinforcement helps the development of children. We are living in an age where parents are scared to discipline their student because some gung-ho grammar school teacher will report them to child services.

I envision a future where we will begin outsourcing he beatings of our children to a paid service so that the liabilities can be transferred via ink on a paper. Because we are living in a world where we do not like to be responsible for our actions. But not I, because beating my child is one privilege of parenthood that I am absolutely looking forward to – DYFS, I’ll send you an IOU.

Sep

Old Isn’t A Band-Aid For New

Posted by JB at 8:56 am

As I have gotten older and older there have been less and less on television that interests me to a point where I would call myself a “follower” of a particular television show. While watching some Saturday morning cartoons I ask myself: Were cartoons this horrible when I was watching them years ago? But after doing some quick mathematics (and remembering a little from economics) I am starting to believe that due to the fact there are more and more channels available the amount of quality programming goes down.

There has been a resurrection of television from when I was a kid. I am starting to see older movies on television more often, the Cartoon Network has been playing the older episodes of ‘Scooby Doo’ and it seems that every week on television ‘My Cousin Vinny’ can be found on one channel or another.

I have found my pleasure in ‘House’ on FOX, more recently ‘Reaper’ on the WB and the ‘Bionic Woman’ on NBC. There were gambles taken with ‘Firefly’ (that proved to only gain a second life after the series was canceled) and ‘Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.’ But the television bigwigs are being way too cautious with programming and refusing to take gambles with new ideas.

Even the movie industry is falling back on old franchises to bring moviegoers back to the silver screen. Over the break ‘Alien vs. Predator’ hit the screens near Christmas, ‘Star Trek’ had a teaser trailer at the beginning of ‘Cloverfield’ and for the past six months Sly has been all over the screen with ‘Rambo.’

The executives of the major film companies would like to blame the fact movie sales have been at all time lows due to piracy, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t like purchasing a steaming pile of shit. Even if the odor has been disguised the fact still remains: the vast majority of movies lately have been crap.

Now, the fact has been obviously seen due to all of the re-makes, spin-offs and reruns we seen on television and in theaters. Unfortunately, the reason all comes down to the same thing regardless of which industry: money. It costs money to produce a new franchise that nine times out of ten wouldn’t yield the same result if they just slapped another ‘Star Trek’ movie together with a big name director attached.

I am tired of the same thing. Most of the innovation in the technology industry comes from start-ups, research universities or rogue elements of a bigger corporation. It all comes down to the little guy. When a single person has a great idea, the perseverance and rolls the dice: that’s when great things happen.

Hopefully a few good things come out of this Writer’s Guild strike. One thing I would like to see are more gambles being taken with relatively unknown writers. There are thousands of novels out there with great stories that when I finish reading them I think, “Damn this could totally be a great movie.”

So I hope that the industry will stop making a debauchery of my childhood. I am tired of seeing some half-assed adaptation of great movies (‘Alien vs. Predator’ immediately comes to mind) and I am tired of seeing the same television on all three hundred unnecessary channels. We should all tell the entertainment industries to grow a pair and stop blaming their lack of creativity on us.

If you have an idea for a story, short-film or series don’t be afraid to tell other people. Get the word out and start filming some amateur footage. Who knows, maybe you’ll be able to convince the idiots spending millions of dollars on liquid feces such as ‘Norbit.’

Sep

I Am Back

Posted by JB at 5:30 pm

The inner writer inside of me has been dormant for many years now. While in college I wrote a couple of pieces that I would chuckle over, but nothing that will giving my ego something akin to a raging hard-on. I was a columnist for my university’s newspaper, eventually an executive editor without the title, and finally the poor schmuck that was responsible for the whole newspaper. I thought that I would enjoy running a newspaper, but to be fucking honest, there is very little about that year that I actually enjoyed. If being an Editor-in-Chief of a newspaper got me laid regularly I would probably be singing a different tune, but hey, that’s the kind of shit that happens when you run a newspaper at a technical school. For some reason engineers get all hot and bothered over physics, mathematics, and video games. Who would have thought?

After a couple of months of writing meaningless tidbits which were merely mindless thoughts in passing I decided to quit the shit – I want to be involved on a blog that people come to read because they are looking for an honest opinion. One of the things that I hated was censoring what I wanted to say because I was worried about the man coming down on top of me. Now that the pressure of that happening is gone I’m going to use this blog as my entry into exploring every single perverted thought that comes through my brain. That may include (but not limited to) sexual exploitations of children under the age of eighteen, my lingering hatred for people from what is generally referred to as the “bible belt,” the irritating experience of having to emotionally please a woman, and why clowns always have to be so fucking happy.

I am a depressed twenty-something writer living in the Greater New York Area, and I have one thing to say to you: I am back, and this time I am not going to need a bottle of booze, a paper bag and the bottle of viagra to fuck you.

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