I’m a huge fan of evolution. The fact that I don’t go to church anymore is not because I’m mad at my parents or was touched in my special place by a bishop (or something like that) but because church could never explain to me where dinosaurs came from … but evolution could. It also solidifies my belief that God and Jesus were made up by capitalists. I don’t care if other people believe in god or aliens or other shit that I can’t see, but if there is a god I just have a picture in my head of some weird old dude taking bong rips and making shit like platypuses and the Gaza Strip just to keep himself entertained all day.


Illustration by Tim Odland

As far as humanity goes, I personally feel that humanity is evolving at an astonishingly fast rate. I feel this is mostly due to technology; thanks, nerds. It wasn’t that long ago that cell phones were only for doctors, drug dealers and assholes in movie theaters. Before that, it was pagers. Remember pagers? Now there is no difference between a pager and an eight track. I could totally show a sixth grade classroom how a pager worked and they would be blown away in the same manner of when I was in sixth grade and some old lady came to our class and showed us how to churn butter.

So what do I think we are evolving into? Mostly a bunch of fucking pussies afraid of hugging. Granted I’ve always been weird about hugs, I don’t know why, but I hate it when someone I don’t really know hugs me. My personal bubble is very sturdy. So if you ever get a hug from me, you’d better appreciate it because I don’t do that shit very often.

How do I think this weird form of evolution happened? Two things mostly: Myspace and text messages. I’ll go into the two separately. (While I was wrighting this very paragraph the SLUG editor sent me an IM asking me what my article was about and when I told her she IMed me back saying, “what about ichat? You love ichat!” I told her that it was totally different. Why is it different? I’ll get to that later you impatient fucker, read the rest of the article.)

My only real experience with Myspace was when I started covering the skateboard shit for SLUG. I felt at the time that the local skate scene was getting a little soft and boring and needed some life breathed into the zombie fest. So, I decided that I should start a fake Myspace page and a fake column to go along with it under the alias Brodie Hammers. The Brodie Hammers section of my column was strictly for shit-talking and rumors. My idea was that kids could be Brodie’s friend and inform him of lies and stupid shit that their buddies did. Any skater could post on Brodie’s Myspace page something like, “My friend so-and-so switchflipped the perfect 8 first try and then he pooped in the shower.”

I also incorporated a handful of skaters who shall forever remain nameless, to inform me of different local skateboard rumors. So many people thought Brodie was cool but he caused quite a bit of controversy and it seemed best to end it before the SLUG office got fire bombed.