Oh, Fuck this Tammi Rae Shit!

The struggle to explain her existence and subsequent non-existence in a way that was as awe-inspiring to you reading it as it was to me experiencing it was so overwhelming and virtually impossible to do it kept me from even wanting to turn my pc on, let alone log into interweb world. (Ok, plus we couldn't pay our cable/internet bill this month because the old man has serious prostate pains and had to spend serious moola to see a doc, that's not code for anything, that's the real shmeal, anyway, he's better for now, so moving on) Nothing I thought of to write about her ever turned out to be what I originally wanted to portray to you people, but this, as it turned out, was the final point in Tammi Rae's short life.

If you haven't figured it out yet, Tammi Rae was a fictional character created by this artist, Vanessa VanAlstyne and this is where she explains her experimentation with Tammi Rae. There were a few good reasons for me to be inspired by this story, as it was being told, and the main one is its common theme of basic human nature. The internet has done wonders in showing me that people, the world over, completely suck! Furthermore, there is absolutely no one who is exempt from this appraisal. All. People. Suck. Even the people who act like they don't suck, actually really do suck the worst. (They suck almost as badly as this post!)

I was raised, religiously speaking, as some sort of buddhist and what I got out of the sparse sprinkles of buddhistic* knowledge is basically that all people are a burden on this earth and all its inhabitants, even each other, and to acknowledge this is to be self-aware (I know I got it all wrong, but I don't care). It actually takes a concerted effort to lessen your contribution to the human burden factor and I would estimate that approximately only 5-7% of the world's population realizes this. I believe the internet is the greatest tool history has ever seen in exposing the ugly truth about humans. This exposure isn't bad though. Its supposed to serve as a mirror to aid the viewer in a journey of self-awareness, because once you are self-aware, the better able you are to lessen your burden on the living beings around you, physically, or virtually.

Now I'll wrap up how this view of mine relates to Tammi Rae and her creator, Vanessa. Vanessa knows that all people suck and she is quite the humanitarian in her efforts to help us see that. Her somewhat sacrificial efforts landed her on April Winchell's fantastic new website Regretsy, for some excellent (probably too excellent) exposure. The suckage of humanity was also exposed on that day when people looked down their nose at their keyboards and told Tammi Rae just what an ignorant asshole she was for her beliefs. I guess the old adage, favored mostly by those under 12, "it takes one to know one" fits well here. In this case, it took one to expose many. Bravo, Vanessa!! Bravo!

*Its a word, because I said so!