March 2002

March 29, 2002

My guess is that when Satan had Jesus up on that mountain top or cliff or wherever (I seem to remember they were way up high somewhere. Mulholland Drive, or something.), he didn't tempt the Son of God with a Finagle a Bagle Super Cinnamon Raisin Bagel with Plain Cream Cheese Schmear. If he did, I think we'd be looking at "Bad Friday" today, and "Behead a Neighbor Day" on Sunday instead of Easter.

I've done my best to forgo carbs in the deep and abiding belief that they make you fat and very ugly, but today, I crumbled like so many stale low-carb bagel substitutes. Damn. If there is a god, why the hell did he make everything bad so damn good?

Pecker.

March 27, 2002

Random Minutiae Wednesday.

The red Lite-Brite™ LED scrolling ticker tape thingy at the train station read, "All... trains... are... on... or... near... schedule... time... March, 7... 2002..." Hoorah for those lucky passengers taking trains on the 7th.

I'm not going to tussle with Spitey Meat about how superior dogs are to cats, because frankly, he doesn't warrant the effort. However, something I saw on the train this morning made me think of my usual response when people ask me, "Why don't you like cats?" There was a really cool beagle on the train with a sort of 'doggie cape' that read, "Hearing Dog."

Oh, and as for my newly-revised response to the icky, "Why no like cats?" query:

• Seeing Eye Cat
• Police Cat
• Rescue Cat
• Bomb Sniffing Cat
• Hearing Cat

Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of good uses for cats. Ask any Korean chef.

Sean and Stumps seem to be all up in da conspiracy theories these dizays. Which is fine by me. I adore conspiracy theories. Love em. Although, I'm less interested in the possible explanations behind the effect of money on public policy and elections or the lack of jet-sized damage to the Pentagon than I am intrigued by the disappearance of Jennifer Connelly's breasts. Did her Oscar dress consume them? Did aliens replace them with microscopic tracking chips? Was some 'Hollywood shadow production house' contracted to digitally lessen their visual impact? Ya know - like how Michael Jackson's skin tone was magically darkened so that he would appear more 'natural' when onstage with his brothers during that self-congratulating tv special/abomination a while back.

Maybe nothing was removed, hidden or digitally altered. Maybe those were her actual, un-retouched, god-supplied breasts. Perhaps she just uses stunt breasts when filming... Hm.

March 26, 2002

It would be much easier to drink more water if my thimble-sized bladder didn't force me to run for the bathroom every 8 minutes. I fear I have become "that weird guy that has to pee all the time" at work.

March 25, 2002

Survived a weekend back home with some old friends. Like, kindergarten old. I don't know too many people who still consider the friends they made when they were knee-high as their best. Weird. One day, we're all running around the playground pushing down girls, and then, in the blink of an eye, we're all falling over drunk in a bar, pushing over girls as we hit the floor. How the hell did that happen?

Had the opportunity to tour some of our old hangouts. Such as: a grassy field. A grassy field with some cows on it. And the ever popular dirt road. (no, that's not a euphemism, although, my friends are really hot. HOO GAH.) How is it that I'm not sitting on a porch, plucking my banjo? (no, that's not a euphemism, although, my banjo is really hot. TA-WANG.) Looking at the neighborhood I grew up in.. I mean, this is the type of place you drive through and pray you don't blow a tire. Mad props to the Seebers - is that rusted out bathtub in the front yard meant to be ironic? Was it always like this? I don't feel white trash. Well, ok, I don't feel that white trash. I mean, I've learned how to use this 'lectric type writer, an' all. Plus, I still have most of my teef.

Whatever. The important thing is, I met Grey Goose head on this weekend. The bottle(s) is(are) empty and I'm still standing. Either I'm not as old as I thought, or I'm older than I thought.

March 21, 2002

Further evidence, as if any were required, that dogs are superior to cats:

When a dog needs more water in her little water dish, she'll likely nuzzle that cute, damp snout of hers into you, and gaze at you with eyes that say, "Pardon me. Ah-essscuzie. Sir, my good sir. I hesitate to intrude, as I know you are a good master with all good intentions, and this oversight bears no judgement on the value you ascribe to me as a doggie. My love for you is unconditional, and whether or not you refill my water dishy, I adore you for all eternity. After all, I fully understand that you just moved into this new abode, and, in addition, I fully understand how you may have overlooked my hydration needs momentarily, seeing as how your underwear is hidden somewhere among thirty boxes marked 'BEDROOM.'"

When a cat needs more water in her little water dish, she pees on your down-filled comforter. At five in the morning.

Anyone for kat-kebabs? Cat. It's what's for dinner.

March 19, 2002

I want to be a nice guy.

So I decided, whilst packing my clothing into boxes and bags in preparation for the big move, that I should donate the duds I haven't worn in some time to charity. Anything I hadn't worn in some time was heading to a Goodwill Donation Dumpster™. (I'm an artist. I paint with words. When I die, your monitor is going to be worth a lot of money.) Seemed like a painless way to benefit others (used clothing being better than no clothing) and myself (I wouldn't have to unpack said clothing). A win/win situation, as they say. Those ignorant bastards. Kidding! I love them. Tarts. Oop!

Of course, after sorting out the rejects, my next step was to locate the closest donation bin-thingy. I don't remember the days when I had to accomplish tasks (any tasks at all) without the benefit of a connection to the internet. It's all a hazy, foggy, pasty, brown-colored, festering, oozing... ah, it's hard to remember. I live and breathe by Google now. I'm all 'bout the Google. Got somepin you needs ta accomplish? Goto Google.

However, my hopes of quickly ascertaining precisely where to drop off my unwanteds were soon dashed. As if on a corral reef. All violent and jarring. Like that old Billy Joel song where he sings about getting sucked into the undertow. That always freaked me out. Ah, so after numerous searches for:

goodwill, donation, donations, charity, donate used clothing, salvation army, North Andover, Andover, for the love of all that is holy, throw me a bone here

I found all sorts of web sites that gave all kinds of information about donating goods except for an address where I could drop off my donation. Call me crazy, but I'm thinking this is, like, a main page, smack dab in the middle, kinda navigation item. Like, "WANT TO DONATE? CLICK HERE TO LOCATE A CENTER NEAR YOU." That might work.

Finally, I came up with this: an article titled, "Charity can be hard to find." You're not fucking kidding, Mac. The article mentions how difficult it is for people to find donation centers where their donations will go to actual charities, not for-profit companies that have set up bins pseudo-masquerading as non-profit, solely-charitable jobbies. In the article, there is a photo of a donation bin with the caption, "Maurice E. Pratt stands in front of a St. Vincent de Paul collection bin in North Andover. St. Vincent is losing money to for-profit companies that place clothing collection boxes next to nonprofit boxes, Mr. Pratt said." This very bin is no doubt steps from my former apartment, but the article (which is about how friggin difficult it is to get your friggin donation to the friggin people that friggin need it) fails to give an address for the location of any of these bins.

Luckily, I was able to find a dumpster nearby that would accept my donation. A big blue one in the back of my former parking lot.

I am a bad man.

March 18, 2002 (later)

I learned (relearned, in some cases) the following this past Saturday: Moving is ferociously tough. I never seem to remember for any length of time that moving is always ferociously tough. I get by with a ton of help from some stellar friends. Moving is no big deal.

March 18, 2002

I enjoy the works of Dante Alighieri:

• Paradiso
• Purgatorio
• Inferno
• Moving

March 15, 2002

I'm a moron.

I could live with this (so many do), if I didn't have illusions, from time to time, of mental grandeur.

We're moving. This Saturday is the big move. Last night, my job was to move a television and the pc down to the new place so that AT&T can blow us off today between 1 and 3 pm for cable TV and broadband internet installation.

So far, so good. Seems pretty simple. Put tv and computer in car. Drive car to new apartment. Unload tv and computer. Drive home. One of those monkeys with the mouse-moving computer chip in the brain could likely manage. Maybe even without the chip. Chimp sans chip, if you will.

See, the trouble always starts when I take something simple (as outlined above) and add myriad layers of complexity. (I don't like that use of the word myriad, but dictionary.com assures me it's entirely valid) (I didn't hotlink dictionary.com. Did you notice that? Copy and paste, I say. I'll be honest here, I'm not a big fan of links within a piece of content. That's right, the cornerstone of documents on the internet, and I don't like. At all. Remember all the early buzz? You're reading some article, and then a term within the article links to an entirely different article! Brilliant! You can just click on any linked term that strikes your fancy, and BOOM, off you go! Again and again and again! Leaving a stream of partially read articles behind you! Great, great. That's great for, say, a five year old, who doesn't have the attention span necessary to finish the article in the first place. But I don't think that's how most people over the age of five [or whatever, I'm not putting the smack down on five-year-olds here. I'm certain that most five-year-olds can run circles around me, as far as the noggin is concerned. I'm just saying, like... Ok, arbitrarily, let's say five-year-olds possess the qualities that I'm suggesting they do. Hey. My party. There's the door.] Anyway, back to hyperlinking [it's Bold Friday. DID YOU GET THE MEMO?]. I think the default behavior of links with a piece of content [I'm not talking about navigation here. Links, in terms of navigation, are entirely necessary, of course.] should be to open a new window. As soon as I figured out that I could SHIFT+CLICK to open a new window, I never looked back. To get back to my issue with the linking here... Can you imagine a magazine that, every few words, told you "Turn to page 23 for more on animal husbandry." Flipping back and forth, this page to that page. I mean, that's my biggest issue with newspapers. You find a nice, meaty story on the front page, they suck you in with their top-notch, Ivy League educated journalistic talents, and then... "Cont. on E-23" E-23??? Are you kidding me??? Why the hell did I bother with the Winnie the Poo books that laid out the content in a linear fashion, page after page after page??? WHAT KIND OF CRUEL HOAX IS THIS??? Where is that Poo bear? I'll bury his yellow pinhead in that honey pot. Christahmighty. Sure, reading on the web is different than reading a magazine or book, but regardless of the delivery system, nine times out of ten [closer to nine, actually], I'm reading the article or book for a reason [most likely because it interests me] and I want to finish the goddamn thing. Front to back. Beginning to end. Thank you.)

Where was I? Ok, back to the moving thing.

Last night, I'm getting ready to move this stuff, see? And my sister calls, and we chat, and she ends up offering her Caravan for the night, so I can actually see out the windows of the vehicle I'm driving, when moving this stuff. (I drive a Tercel. It rocks.) She needed the family-mobile back later in the evening, but I had enough time to comfortably pack, get down to the new place (around a forty-five minute trip), unload, and get back.

So, I'm all giddy! Wow. I can move a whole buncha stuff down now! I can fit some boxes, additional computer-related items, clothes, what have you. I can move a Caravan-full of stuff, which is vastly different than a Tercel-full of stuff. I packed that Caravan, I did. As a matter of fact, I sort of over did it. By the end, I was quite winded, tired, fatigued. So, fatigued was I, that I forgot to pack one key item. Pun intended.

I arrived at the new place. Carried the tv to the door, pulled out my keys... my keys... ah. Hm. Forgot to add a couple keys to my keychain, I see. Two keys. The two keys to the new apartment.

March 12, 2002

One accurate way of divining just how much value you place on individual material possessions is to move your place of residence and see what moves with you.

Case in point: I'm packing up my collection of DVD's and movies last night - a modest array by most standards, perhaps a bit excessive by some - and come across...

The Godfather, Part III

Hm. Ah. Huh. What to do, what to do. Surely, I will never watch it again. Certainly, I won't permit others to view Sophia Coppola acting in my new home. I really own it solely to complete the set. Really. Ok, Andy Garcia gives a decent performance... It is fun to watch Al Pacino morph into Marlon Brando. And, hey, it's about the mob, which is all the friggin rage. But viewing this effort in the context of the other two films... well. There you have it.

In packing terminology, this is what's known as GO TIME. You've got a lot to pack in not a lot of time. You pick something up, you give it an arbitrary value, it either goes in a cardboard box (life) or in a plastic bag (death). Make no mistake - you're playing God here. GO TIME. It's a time for tough calls, a time to shed any and all sentimental feelings, a time to cut loose the stranglers.

GO TIME. Bag it or box it. Bag it or box it.

It's in the box.

There is always the outside chance of a rainy Sunday Godfather marathon. I'll just use Sophia's screen time for bathroom breaks.

March 10, 2002

So, I was at Jiffy Lube this morning. You know, ah, getting an oil change. This particular Jiffy Lube recently installed a "listening station," much like you'd find in your finer purveyors of recorded music.

The female half of the couple that came in directly after me decided to take in a few tunes while she awaited her, uh, Jiffy Lube. This is all very fine, but what was somewhere between less-than-fine and hellish, was her decision to belt out a few verses of "Tainted Love."

Or, rather, as she intoned, "Tain-TED Love." Snap. Snap. (that would be the sound of her finger snapping.)

Of course, I commited the mistake of sitting next to the listening station after entering the waiting room, so I was sort of front and center to the offense.

I'll give her husband/boyfriend/whatever credit. He didn't thrust his head through the nearby plate glass window.

This may have been easier to take had it not been 9 am on a Sunday morning. This may not. All I know is that it was the un-Jiffiest Lube of my life.

March 8, 2002

Wow. I get really grumpy when Stumpy doesn't post, huh? Hoo. Hah.

So, a couple things to be happy about on a Friday:

• My little girl smiles a whole lot. How I made a happy baby, I'll never understand. Then again, the blood tests haven't come back yet, so...
• I work for a company that keeps a well-stocked fridge full of free beer. I may not have a beer today. I may not have a beer next week. But the point is, I work for a company that keeps a well-stocked fridge full of free beer.
• My fabulous co-worker Greg has hooked me up with roughly forty fabulous CD's of fabulous music to burn onto my Mac (aka "the shiny thing that sort of resembles a computer, but is actually just my own, personal mp3 server"), and I think I can don headphones and devote a good chunk of today to the following hot topics:
  • Actionscripting
  • Database Normalization

Okay, so maybe life isn't all bad. (this is obviously just the Friday talking)

March 7, 2002

March is the angry month.

We're expected to win a war against savages while behaving better than savages. We're somehow held to higher standards than the enemy we fight. People cry about the treatment of Taliban/al Qaeda detainees while our troops fall out of retreating helicopters and are executed minutes after capture by the enemy. That's executed. Not denied the right to wear hats made out of bedspreads, not denied the right to grow beards to their ankles. Executed. No shelter, no military tribunal, no three squares a day, no more breathing. I'm thinking the best way to beat savages is to out-savage them. It's like a vicious dog. A vicious dog doesn't understand reason, or bargaining, or compromise. A vicious dog understands when you establish yourself as the alpha dog. That's a nice way of saying that a vicious dog understands force and lots of it. And if it doesn't understand lots of force, put it down. I'd like our country to be the nice guy, but I'm getting the feeling more and more every day that maybe being the nice guy is analogous to the most painful and inefficient means of suicide. I'm becoming less and less tolerant as I get older. I'm surprised. I always thought the opposite would be true. When I was younger, I made an attempt to be accepting of every culture, attitude, school of thought, belief system that I came across. I believed something could be learned from everyone, regardless of race, nationality, creed, religion. Now I'm not so sure. I think we're nice guying ourselves to death. Political correctness has gone so far these days that you feel like a heel for making any type of judgement call. Terrorists shouldn't be called terrorists. Crazy people shouldn't be called crazy people. No one should pass judgement on anyone else for any reason. Guess what? That's exactly what we should be doing. People are evil. People are crazy. People should be called on being evil and crazy. We've become so gun shy about placing our values above others, that we've just about lost out values entirely. I've come to realize that everything is not gray.

There is black and white. There is right and wrong. There is good and evil.