Bye, George.

We've lost one of the greats today.

The one guy who blended jokes about pulling scabs off your head and putting them on contrasting surfaces and jokes about how our country is blindly run.

The one guy who dared say the seven words you can't say on TV.

We've lost, after 71 years on this planet, George Carlin. The man is a legend. He made you laugh and think at the same time. He made you angry about things we should be angry about. He made us scratch our heads about things we should've been scratching out heads about years ago. But most importantly, he made us laugh about things we should've been laughing about.

A common theme in many of my posts is about how we all need to loosen up and laugh about the stuff that makes everyone so uptight. Sure, George was wound up a little tight at times, but he unwound so easily and so quickly you never saw it coming. But George did just that—he made us think and he made us laugh about stuff we were told wasn't funny EVER.

He was a man that, while he routinely pointed out flaws in our country and society, loved America with the deepest parts of his heart.

I usually don't get somber and depressed when celebrities die. It's not because I don't care, but it's because I don't know any of these people. To me, it'd be no different than if a cartoon character was never drawn again. And while I've never known George in any sense of the word, I feel like one of the few guys in the world who actuallygot itis now no longer with us. The one guy we really kind of need in this screwed up time in America with the economy, lackluster Presidential candidates, and a baseless war isn't here to make us laugh or question why we let ourselves get into this mess in the first place. He isn't here to make the majority of people who NEVER think about our country or its situation other than gas and grande Frappuccinos cost more think about the important things in our lives, if even for 30 seconds and masqueraded as a fart joke. He still accomplished his goal. And it's for those reasons that I am actually upset about losing George.

Plus, he taught me how to hitchhike like nobody else.