Back in the day before I picked up the media weapon and fired it like a lethal weapon to the vast corners of cyber space, I was a ranting maniac on the email circuit. Emails were sexy once. Hotmail to be exact. Yeah, that email service that looks about as cool as MySpace right now was my home to unleash 3,000 worded long winded and epic rants about sports, film, personal stories and also “Fuck You” lists. Whatever I wanted. Anytime. Mostly once a week. No editor. No website. Just a need to impose my will without thinking twice.

Since I made the jump over to gmail as much, but I still keep the hotmail email like an old rifle stored in the closet gathering dust. Like Batman walking over to his old batcave, I stumble over there from time to time and check out the drafts, saved emails and volleys between friend when they responded. PJ, Derek, Jimmy, and others. You know who you are, you inglorious bastards. Today, I was hanging out there and thought I’d dip back into the drafts and legendary sent packages and compose a greatest hits section. Volume 1 because I sent over 1,000 rants before I picked up the Dose of Buffa WordPress in July, 2011. So, without much further bullshitting, I present the first batch. Now would be the time to click out of this.

BAD MOODS SUCK(8/22/2011).   The only thing worse than a bad mood is spreading it around so others can get a piece of it.  My idea is, if you are in a shitty mood and don’t feel like dealing with the outside world, find your personal cave, go there, and leave everyone alone.  People really fuck up when they try to tough it out and hang while pissed off.  Bad things don’t happen, friendships aren’t damaged, but a sting is left in place.  Another lesson when I was young from the old man.  My dad told me this precisely about 99 times, “If you are in a bad mood, go bang your head on a brick wall many times until you hurt, which will take away the mental pain for the time being.  Also, you will be the only one feeling this pain.”  He never followed his own advice.  I try to enforce it today.  If you are pissed off, go home.  Laughter isn’t the fucking medicine.

The Green Movement(10/1/2010). People, this is largely a pack of bullshit wrapped up into a phony batch of optimism. After a healthy chat with a close friend(whose name won’t be used but his input will), let me break it down for you.  Going green doesn’t help anything or won’t starve off global warming.   When you use electric cars, electricity is being used so natural energy is still being required.  Natural energy sources are still being depleted.  It’s a big joke to go hybrid unless you need a cheaper form of transportation.  You aren’t helping anyone. Instead of proceeding with this phony element, lets look into creating alternate forms of energy.  There’s your ticket.  Instead of remaining in connection with and leaning on Iraq’s oil supply, lets create different sources of energy to power our cars that doesn’t included gas and doesn’t suck up electricity.

Create alternate types of usable energy and stop draining our original sources. That’s the harder part no one wants to dip into.  It’s easier to pronounce green and run behind a fake brand.  Chris and I were giving Rachel, a recycling lady herself, a little hard time by examining the way water bottles are dispensed with. They are burned using Natural Heat, and that smoke goes into the air and pollutes the shit out of our living breathing area. There’s always a gain in revenue or commerce involved with the green movement. Corporations make tons of cash off of it. When Al Gore’s fat ass made the Inconvenient Truth(not the film about his three chins), he was looking out for himself as well. There’s no way to truly stop global warming.  The world is going to eventually come to an end and I will be there to take its biggest punch and won’t need a green environment to do so.   He made millions every time people bought phony carbon bonds.   Gore is a fraud who couldn’t beat a dumb hick for President, didn’t want to get a real job so he tackled global warming instead. Let me tell you something, Al Gore will be long gone from this world if it ever goes up in smoke. He doesn’t really care.

Going green is a phony brand of optimism. The only reason I recycle is to keep Rae off my back. Its one of those things we disagree on yet I toss my beer bottle in the special can just to get her to shut the fuck up. Here’s my hope that The Sawtooth bottle survives extermination and becomes the leader of a small beer bottle pack. Id pay to see that.   Organic food is something I don’t get too excited about either. Organic food tastes like shit and doesn’t give your body the nutrients it needs.  I can eat a lean steak, a piece of chicken or grilled fish and get plenty of protein and vitamins while sucking down a glass of regular 2 percent milk to get my calcium and eat real mac and cheese for the pure taste.   Organic, like going green, is just another phony brand of commercial power.

It reminds me of the early days where people made up the idea of GOD, and told the dumb people to live like this and only eat this.  It’s an attempt at getting more money and power.   A classic power play.   Whole Foods Market is the biggest rip off joint.  Charging 9 dollars for a piece of organic germ free chicken.   Selling specialized fruit drinks at ridiculous prices that doesn’t give you more than a simple glass of orange juice. The place to go for food(healthy, good tasting natural joy) is Sam’s.   Best bang for buck, especially if you eat a ton. You can go to Sams and buy a monster package of Bacon, pack of shredded cheddar cheese and a pack of water for under 15 dollars and be set for a month. There is nothing fucking organic about it.

So, yes, the green movement sucks and I wouldn’t mind jamming a bottle down one of these supreme optimists throats.  The Organic food raid is also a load of bullshit.

Bike Riding Mavericks(8/22/2011). Bike riders are a weird pack of self-centered jack-offs. While I appreciate a good ride, I don’t take my ass through rush hour traffic. The thing I hate the most are the fuckers who ride down a skinny two lane(one in each direction) road and force me to move into the opposing side of traffic to get around him to avoid clipping his sorry ass. I also hate when they stick out their hands like human blinkers. If my name was Machete, I would carry a long knife and lean out and hack their arm off every time they did it.   Bike riders feel they are entitled to the road when they need to realize the Moving Mass of Metal OWNS THE ROAD.   Cars own the road.  When I run at lunch or in the morning, I stay away from cars and feel like tripping up bike riders.  The ones that wear all the Tour De France gear are comical loonies as well. Hey, spaceman, since you have your suit on, why don’t you fondle my balls real quick before you ride down your path of righteous prickish activity.  Fuck bike riders who try to command a part of the road that doesn’t belong to them.  Run them off the road with any kind of automobile available.  Save the Dodge Challenger. Use a minivan and take out 3 at a time.

Politicians are Robots rant(11/05/2010). I like trying to break into a conversation you know nothing about just to see how people react.  I wish I could go to Washington, get into a congress meeting, and just start ranting about politicians and their thing with fucking ugly women.  Ask them about the reason they divide their groups into democrats and republicans, and ask them why they call them parties.  Ask them about corruption and mention loyalty.  Ask them about the reason they get dirty every time they walk into a meeting and act clean to the media.  Ask them about the world’s problems, and judge them by their appearance.  The same person described earlier, tried to tell me people aren’t hypocritical.   I told them we all are hypocritical in some way.  We all say one thing, and eventually do another.  We would trade spots if it got us a better parking space or free drink.  We talk behind people’s backs because we can’t tell things to people’s faces.  We scold the world we live in and then die defending it.  It’s a hypocritical world.  When the only news sources we have dish us news that isn’t the truth or the whole story, we are left to divide up the knowledge evenly amongst ourselves.  Which leads to saying one thing and doing another.  It’s the world we live in.  Accepting it only gets things moving quicker. 

How do you feel about the holidays?(12/30/2011)  Here’s is what I think.  I tell people they need to use these days to see family as a reminder that every visit is a gift.  We never know who is going to be around for a certain amount of time and when they will leave.   The world changes faster than we would like.  I like seeing my family, even if it were only 3 or 4 people.  Sports and life have more in common than we like to admit.

Every part of life has a time clock, and every individual moment has a two minute warning.   When will this end?  How much longer do we have?  Will we do this again?  I told my dad tonight to promise me this will happen again next year, the Christmas get together.  I get nervous about these kinds of things.  Mortality has it own plan and we only have a certain amount of time to get our work in.   The film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, examines the theory that nothing in life really lasts.  If you don’t take advantage of an opportunity, it might not come back to you.  Think about it before you dismiss this as random talk.  Think about the people you would hate to not see again.   I play a game sometimes called “How big will my funeral be?”  How many seats will they need?   How many people would get sad that I am gone?  It helps you put life in perspective.  Every time I hear a young person or even old person bitch and moan about going to see the family, I ask them to imagine life without holidays.  No dates to get everybody together.  Would they really like to not have to go to these things?  Or is it just cool to say it sucks?  Being a rebel means you have to ditch sanity on occasion.  Maybe I am wrong.

People will probably be here next year.   I could be wrong.  Or I could be right.  No one knows anything.  We all make it up minute by minute.  Walk around the room right now.  You are making shit up as you walk.  What would happen if everybody stayed home and didn’t move?  Remember, if you have family, go see them.  Holidays should make us want to see our families more often.   Yes, they fight all the time and some relatives make you feel like a prisoner instead of a loved guest, but this is what life is all about.  People get older and more pissed off.  Moods only darken.  Words keep coming.  Care decreases.  The meaning in life sleeps here.  Does being a certain age dictate how much the holidays mean to you?  No.  Everybody needs to be around family.

Being sick does really suck(10/22/2009).  It slows you down intentionally, and also increases your chances of taking care of those lost moments of getting to stare at a wall for minutes at a time.  You can’t move.  You don’t want to do anything.  Being active sounds as appealing as walking around naked in Times Square with a racial slur written on your back, facing the fact I am not John McClane. You focus on things you never did before.

There are parts of your house you begin to notice that you thought didn’t even look real before.  It’s weird.  And it sucks. I am not sick in the traditional sense of needing tissue and normal meds.  I have a physical ailment.  Something that is causing me to question my appearance.  And look towards another area except for the mirror.  No people, I am not disfigured, or have just walked away from a very nasty accident.

This is not being written from small crack house on Anderson Ave. near the Bellevue exit ramp on a rainy night across the riffing sounds of highway 70.  I am watching television in the only place I can call my own, which is of course home.   It’s mild and it’s slow moving.  I can’t help it, and only could try to contain it.  I am working ..ping it right now.  Please, don’t guess what I have.

Band of Horses and Washington University Rant(2/10/2008). I really want to know how a slowly exploding band of brilliance like Band of Horses got pulled into this rather shitty and very low key venue.  That’s the question.  How come some new growing rock band is playing in a room next to a cafeteria with three smelly smart asses juggling sticks in the air and cash boxes lying around?  There must be a catch somewhere.  And here’s my idea.  Somewhere on campus lays a “talker”.  A person who is pulled out of his stupor, showered and thrown into a phone booth to convince a group to play here instead of The Pageant or Scottrade.  This guy knows how to work people.  He does nothing else on this campus but talking.   He is a feeble fumbling second rate post senior class failure who was kept around to negotiate these deals.  That’s the only way.  Band of Horses doesn’t want to go too high at such a fast rate, so this guy sells them on the underground low key factor the Gargoyle holds.  Which makes me want to potentially start hating the indie way of life in the music business.  Bands flocking to shitty venues because other bands started the same way back in 1400 BC.   Humans believe anything.  Even when it sounds like wrapped up fresh hot smoky brown bullshit.

I will instead stay mad at Washington University.  There is so much to hate about a rich stuck up hating college who think of other people not blowing thousands of dollars on an education to be unfortunate fools with no brain.  I hope all their buildings burn to the ground tomorrow.  If you know someone who is there, tell them to leave.  I hope that place burns or a small crotch rash spreads around the buildings.  That is how pissed I am right now. I had some fun in my eventual and inevitable fall from grace though last night.

Before the wait, I had a chance to meet and talk with Band of Horses guitarist/solo artist Tyler Ramsey.  I spotted him sitting at a table early on and decided to shot some crap with him before I dealt with the high class pricks.  He was really cool and also very shy.  Guitarists usually are.  They aren’t paid to speak.  Ramsey made the night sort of worth the dangerous drive home on what I would call a highway ice rink on I-170.  If you think I am overreacting to this chain of events, first slam your head on something sharp and steady.  Then think about the risks I took to see this group.  I held off on driving home on top of the 2 inches of snow on the ground in order to instead tread back north on top of close to 5 inches later on.  I am fucking dedicated to seeing a plan through.  The next time we set a date to do anything, go ahead and count me the fuck in. I will be there.  Locked yet unloading.

Athletes are stupid sometimes(2010). The missing NFL football players made a big mistake when they went out onto the Gulf of Mexico with 15 foot waves and massive winds in a 21 foot boat.  What were they thinking?  Apparently not about getting lost at sea, which is what they officially are now that coast guard has stopped looking for them.   Putting yourself out in the middle of a body of water, unprotected, comes off to me as pure stupidity.  I hate to be cruel but just like people who get in a car and drive fast without a seat belt on or ride a motorcycle without a helmet, those men got themselves in that position by being careless and while its sad they aren’t coming back, it not surprising to find out what happened to them.   Playing it safe doesn’t always sound so bad.

The Wake up Blues(June/2010). I have a problem right now.  This is what happened.  I just woke up, maybe 30 minutes ago.  I was sleeping like a fucking baby, being jerked off like a stoned monkey in the space world, but then something made your personal cyber correspondent awaken from a very comfy dead zone.  The Cards game last night?  What the fuck happened?  It wasn’t like I was looking for a death toll.  Just the final score.

I spent my final wide eyed moment last night looking at my boy Izzy make a lot of a sad downtrodden and depressed lineup.  And I never saw the end.  So I was wondering?  What happened?  Well, I found out this morning.  And I am mad as fucking hell about it.  No milk for a bucket of cereal mad.   No tits for a morning suck off mad.  Parking ticket in 90 degree heat mad.  Blue balls with a supermodel mad.  GAS PRiCE MAD.  You ever been really jacked and ready to hack less than an hour after you come out of the space ship mode.  Right now,  I am not feeling to good. My stomach’s acting like a foulmouthed cousin while my throat has a line of liquids that can’t be passed down just yet.  It’s the morning sickness everybody gets.  Not just overweight expecting ladies who need to make out with a toilet.

Everybody gets it.  Nasty mouth.  Itchy balls or crotch.  Head contusions.  Mind problems.  Its natural and spreading.  Just because we didn’t let that big dude shoot a load up our assholes a while back, doesn’t mean the majority of us feel like rotten shit on a Saturday morning.  Sorry, was that too hard or real for you?  Do I need to step back and become a nicer person because some soft thin skinned little midget thinker can’t stand on a big court and dish.  That’s the idea here.  If you can’t handle it, there’s always television or the other million paid writers to fall back on.  I am unplugged, unlicensed, brutally honest, and ready to kill anyone with a few harsh words surrounded by periods.   Bloody prose is what I do best.  And right now, I am pretty pissed off.

…That’s what I used to write. Expect more Volumes in the coming weeks. If not, well you can always click to the next email from a work friend about what didn’t happen last night for a good reason.