Welcome to the inaugural edition of Fork in the Road. Many of you do not know me; others of you know me as Geoff, Moderator of the Parking Lot, IS300.NET’s off-topic forum where more or less anything goes and the primary activity is deconstructing people’s egos and calling them names not normally found outside of prisons – all in good fun, of course. If you haven’t experienced the surreal dementia that is the Parking Lot (or PL as we so creatively refer to it), I invite you to come by and have portions of your brain instantly smashed by illiterate hordes that have escaped their wardens to gain access to a keyboard. It’ll change your life, one way or the other. Really.
Like the Parking Lot, this column’s purpose is to have no real purpose. Most any topic will fly here, provided it’s within the boundaries of reasonably good taste. It will occasionally be related to the IS300, cars in general, really horrible drivers, or some aspect of being a car enthusiast that warrants particular commentary. However, for the intermediate future, I have no concrete agenda for these columns, and – I can’t believe I’m offering this – that’s where you come in. Scary prospect, I know. If you think it’s scary, you should try being in my shoes. I’ve seen how some of your minds work (or don’t work, as the case may be), and there are nights I wake up in a cold sweat and ponder, under a heavy blue-black blanket of fear and sympathy, what exactly happened to some of you.
But I digress.
Every month a new column addressing a new topic will appear in this space. Unless otherwise provided an idea that I feel escapes the jaws of idiocy, I will write about whatever I choose, which is something of a bad idea, depending on who you ask. However, if you think you’re clever or smart or funny (hint: you aren’t), then you can fire up your email and clumsily hamfist out your dumb idea and send it to mailto:[email protected] as a suggestion. Chances are I’ll laugh at you and delete your idea within milliseconds, but there have been forumites who have surprised me, so even though you spend most of your life getting rejected and failing spectacularly, feel free to give this a try. If your suggestion gets used, you will get credit as a Temporarily Smart Person in the Parking Lot with a sticky thread, and you can pretend you’re a regular superhero. If your idea is a sucking chest wound of infantile creativity, I’ll tell you so via email so you can go back to being the uninteresting, vanilla-flavored dupe you really are. Or maybe I won’t tell you at all in a smashing act of aloofness and mockery. Simple, really.
A bit of a disclaimer is in order, I suppose, because I don’t want (a) anyone to misunderstand me or this column’s place in the world, or (b) to spend my time deflecting angry emails about this column’s content. I’d like to get a few things on the table right from the get-go so we don’t have any confusion moving forward.
Very occasionally, this column may veer into the realms of politics, religion, ethics, social commentary, and current events. This veer will probably include a complete disregard for the politically correct convention we have been coerced into embracing over the last several years, which means the more sensitive among you might get angry and feel compelled to either kill me or organize a grass-roots, save-the-world campaign to banish from the world this column’s evil. Let’s get this out of the way: if you are a sensitive, tree-hugging, offendable, PC-type, this column might not be the best place for you. You might bump into the occasional sweary word or off-color innuendo, for which I will make no apologies. At times, I’ll probably make fun of you, the reader, because I’m a jackass that way and people with the ability to understand humor might get a chuckle out of it. If you were robbed of your humor at an earlier date, it follows that you will have trouble understanding me and this column. If that’s the case, I suggest you move along right now. This column is as mild as it’s gonna get. ****er.
So, let’s recap things right quick so you can go back to whatever it is you were doing before you got sucked into my personal black hole of biased opinion here:
<UL>
<LI>This is a brand new column dedicated to no particular topic.
<LI>If you like what you see here, I invite you to come visit the Parking Lot forum, which is a veritable ocean of stuff like this.
<LI>Despite the fact that many of you might have the average IQ of a tomato, I will happily entertain any and all new ideas for column topics, even if they’re ridiculously and impossibly stupid, which they probably are, so don’t even bother, dummy.
<LI>Moving forward, this column is not the place for the easily offended, stupid, overly-sensitive, humor-deprived, or sadly misguided crusader looking for a fight. If you email me about how angry and offended you are about a column I write, I will either ignore your email outright or respond in a manner so massively offensive and repugnant that you’ll probably be sent into a spiral of unrecoverable depression and rage, and you’ll know without a doubt that the world is just as nasty, cold, mean, and spiteful as you’ve been telling yourself all along it is. If, however, you send me an email telling me how funny you found a particular column, I’ll probably do the same thing. I’m all about equal opportunity.
</UL>
So there you have it. I’m both flattered and honored you took time out of your busy day to read a thousand words that, in the end, equated to absolutely nothing of significance. If you liked what you saw here, stop by often, as I’ll be updating this as frequently as necessary.
Like the Parking Lot, this column’s purpose is to have no real purpose. Most any topic will fly here, provided it’s within the boundaries of reasonably good taste. It will occasionally be related to the IS300, cars in general, really horrible drivers, or some aspect of being a car enthusiast that warrants particular commentary. However, for the intermediate future, I have no concrete agenda for these columns, and – I can’t believe I’m offering this – that’s where you come in. Scary prospect, I know. If you think it’s scary, you should try being in my shoes. I’ve seen how some of your minds work (or don’t work, as the case may be), and there are nights I wake up in a cold sweat and ponder, under a heavy blue-black blanket of fear and sympathy, what exactly happened to some of you.
But I digress.
Every month a new column addressing a new topic will appear in this space. Unless otherwise provided an idea that I feel escapes the jaws of idiocy, I will write about whatever I choose, which is something of a bad idea, depending on who you ask. However, if you think you’re clever or smart or funny (hint: you aren’t), then you can fire up your email and clumsily hamfist out your dumb idea and send it to mailto:[email protected] as a suggestion. Chances are I’ll laugh at you and delete your idea within milliseconds, but there have been forumites who have surprised me, so even though you spend most of your life getting rejected and failing spectacularly, feel free to give this a try. If your suggestion gets used, you will get credit as a Temporarily Smart Person in the Parking Lot with a sticky thread, and you can pretend you’re a regular superhero. If your idea is a sucking chest wound of infantile creativity, I’ll tell you so via email so you can go back to being the uninteresting, vanilla-flavored dupe you really are. Or maybe I won’t tell you at all in a smashing act of aloofness and mockery. Simple, really.
A bit of a disclaimer is in order, I suppose, because I don’t want (a) anyone to misunderstand me or this column’s place in the world, or (b) to spend my time deflecting angry emails about this column’s content. I’d like to get a few things on the table right from the get-go so we don’t have any confusion moving forward.
Very occasionally, this column may veer into the realms of politics, religion, ethics, social commentary, and current events. This veer will probably include a complete disregard for the politically correct convention we have been coerced into embracing over the last several years, which means the more sensitive among you might get angry and feel compelled to either kill me or organize a grass-roots, save-the-world campaign to banish from the world this column’s evil. Let’s get this out of the way: if you are a sensitive, tree-hugging, offendable, PC-type, this column might not be the best place for you. You might bump into the occasional sweary word or off-color innuendo, for which I will make no apologies. At times, I’ll probably make fun of you, the reader, because I’m a jackass that way and people with the ability to understand humor might get a chuckle out of it. If you were robbed of your humor at an earlier date, it follows that you will have trouble understanding me and this column. If that’s the case, I suggest you move along right now. This column is as mild as it’s gonna get. ****er.
So, let’s recap things right quick so you can go back to whatever it is you were doing before you got sucked into my personal black hole of biased opinion here:
<UL>
<LI>This is a brand new column dedicated to no particular topic.
<LI>If you like what you see here, I invite you to come visit the Parking Lot forum, which is a veritable ocean of stuff like this.
<LI>Despite the fact that many of you might have the average IQ of a tomato, I will happily entertain any and all new ideas for column topics, even if they’re ridiculously and impossibly stupid, which they probably are, so don’t even bother, dummy.
<LI>Moving forward, this column is not the place for the easily offended, stupid, overly-sensitive, humor-deprived, or sadly misguided crusader looking for a fight. If you email me about how angry and offended you are about a column I write, I will either ignore your email outright or respond in a manner so massively offensive and repugnant that you’ll probably be sent into a spiral of unrecoverable depression and rage, and you’ll know without a doubt that the world is just as nasty, cold, mean, and spiteful as you’ve been telling yourself all along it is. If, however, you send me an email telling me how funny you found a particular column, I’ll probably do the same thing. I’m all about equal opportunity.
</UL>
So there you have it. I’m both flattered and honored you took time out of your busy day to read a thousand words that, in the end, equated to absolutely nothing of significance. If you liked what you saw here, stop by often, as I’ll be updating this as frequently as necessary.
