Ice Cream Heart

I don't think my new girlfriend likes me very much. We hit it off pretty hot ( you know what I mean) in the storeroom at the Dairy Queen where we both worked ,but ever since I got fired for stealing a 5 lb. bag of crushed Oreos she's been sorta chilly towards me. Like, not nice at all.

It was a mistake, stealing those Oreos. I thought the expiration date said 11/01/05, not 11/01/08 and I was just trying to protect the customers and save DQ from a potential class-action lawsuit- I should have gotten a raise for being so thoughtful, but I got fired instead.

Who knew that crushed Oreos have such a long shelf life?

It's ignorance of little things like that that cause so many problems for me. I'm not a bad person, I just don't know sh!t about sundae toppings.

I was just trying to help.

So I tried to explain it to my girl.

"It's a mistake", I told her. "I was only trying to help."

"You are my mistake", is what she said. "I don't understand what I saw in you."

I think she'd appreciate me more if she understood me better, but she won't answer my calls or return my emails, so it's pretty hard to explain things to her.

The other day I saw a story about how a buncha guys were camping out at shopping malls in order to score Playstation 3's before X-mas, and it gave me an idea.
I wish I didn't have ideas.
Ideas always get me in trouble and this one was no exception.

My idea was to camp out next to my girlfriend's car overnight (she lives in a condo with an uptight security guard who won't let me in just because I don't live there) so that she would have to see me in the morning. Then we could patch things up and maybe I could borrow some money from her until I find a new job...but noooooooo.....

I thought that mixing Aristocrat Vodka with Full Throttle energy drinks would keep me awake all night and give me that little extra 'oomph' I need when I'm simultaneously hitting on a chick for sex and money, but I goofed up the mix with some pills I stole from my grandmother and I must have passed out sometime during my overnight vigil.

When I woke up, some big fat bald old guy was shaking me...he was pretty mad. He was using really bad language, mostly saying "...gonna kick your motherpluckin' @ss"- except he didn't say 'pluckin'.
My girlfriend was standing behind him and she didn't look very happy either.
Of course, I thought she was mad at the Other Guy for being mean to me, her boyfriend.

Man-0-man, I was wrong. You won't believe this-

She said, " This is that creepy guy from work that I told you about"

She said that to the Other Guy and she was talking about me. Ouch!

It really hurt my feelings- I mean, I thought we had something special, something real, something more romantic than dryhumps in the stockroom...but I was wrong.

I wanted to explain all this to her but the pills and vodka caught up to me and I puked on Mean Guy's New Balance sneakers instead.
Then he made it worse by calling me a pathetic p*ssy and a whole bunch of other stuff- words that look like #*^&#@! and *&$#%! when you see them in newspaper cartoons. He said I was lucky he was in a good mood, otherwise he'd f*ck me up.
What a bully! Couldn't he see I didn't feel so good?
If I hadn't been so sick I woulda beat him up.

It turns out that she thinks that Mean Old Guy is her boyfriend and she wouldn't even listen to me explain how sensitive I was and how she'd be better off with me than him-after all, he's old, probably at least 30- maybe 40 even...but she wasn't listening. She just got in her car-with the Mean Guy!- and kinda drove off. She kept accelerating and braking, start , stop, start, stop...I wanted to tell her that it seemed like her car was having transmission trouble but after the second start/stop I fell off the hood of her Taurus and landed on the asphalt.
I was only trying to give her some sound automotive advice, but she didn't listen- I coulda got hurt in the process!
She actually had the nerve to roll down the window and tell me that I was lucky she didn't run my @ss over- I already knew that- I could tell there was something wrong with her car just from the way it was acting.

But the window was down, so I made my move. As long as the Mean Guy had his seatbelt on, I figured I was safe.

So I popped my question.

She wouldn't even loan me twenty bucks! What a b*tch!

She told me I'd better talk to her boyfriend from now on.

Huh? Until this morning , I didn't even know she had a boyfriend. I thought I was her BF...she never mentioned the Mean Guy.

I think our relationship needs more honesty.

What Gives?

Something has to give.

What?

Enlarge Your Hard Drive

When I bought my PC in 2001, a 40GB hard drive was a lot.
It was the most I could afford.
It runs at 1.3 ghz, which was really fast in 2001.
It came with a whopping 96MB of RAM.
My very first DIY upgrade was to add 512 MB. It took under five minutes.
Then I replaced the graphics card- three minutes.

I saw huge improvement right away after doing these upgrades- and I learned that PC's aren't really an object at all, they are just a collection of components much like a stereo. Working on a PC reminds me of setting up stereo and PA gear, except instead of doing it in a living room or night club, you have to do it in the space of a shoebox. While grounded.

I do a fair amount of multi-track audio recording using a program which saves every take as a .wav file as default ( this way, you can compare two or more performances and pick the one you want in the mix- for example, the best guitar solo from amongst a dozen or so 'takes'); a single song can have dozens of takes, and broken into it's component tracks a four-minute pop song can easily use an entire gig on it's own before mix-down- let's say that a 4-minute song has 24 tracks - a four-minute song is actually using 96 minutes of space (24 x4 ) .
I was always running out of space and my PC was responding rather poorly- crashes, freezes, sluggish refresh and frame rates etc; I didn't even have enough free space to defrag my drive without backing up a half-dozen CD's worth of data...life was becoming a drag.

I purged every file of spyware, ran scan after obsessive virus scan, defragged-I was still getting crap performance.

So I bought me some gigabytes this weekend. 200 of them, neatly enclosed in a tiny metal rectangular box.
I had to largely deconstruct my PC just to gain access to the drivebay ( difficulty is an HP specialty, most towers are easier)- the drive bay swings out, but you have to remove the fan cover to get to do so- when I removed the cover, I saw why I should clean my PC's innards more often. I used compressed air and blew a visible cloud of dust out of my computer.
Yikes!
Tsk...maybe I'd better just take the whole fan out and clean it...OK, I feel better now...wait!

What's this?

After I removed the main fan assembly and the power supply, I saw a smaller, very dirty fan sitting on top of small square heat sink. It was so clogged with gunk that I am not sure if it even worked. It was blocking my egress to the spare drive bay, so I removed it too - guess what? Underneath all that lint, fuzz and cat dander was my computer's processor. The brainbone, in technical terms.

It looked like my cat had puked a hairball into the mechanism that keeps my CPU cool and left it there to dry for several years. I'm surprised my 'pooter hadn't combusted already, so I used a Q-tip and some anhydrous alcohol to clean the fan and heat sink before I replaced them.

When I put it all back together it booted perfectly, a rare occasion lately.

I fired up Cubase ( my studio program) and recorded a few sample tracks off one of my drum machines...perfect. No crashes, no *pips* and *pops*...yeah! 4 tracks recorded simultaneously without crashing to desktop.

I could get used to this. I've been plagued with tech malfunctions- they are conspicuous in their absence.

I moved a couple programs from my old 3200 rpm (?) Maxtor and onto my squeaky-clean 7200 rpm Seagate ...wow.
It's like having a new PC. I didn't know how badly my PC had been acting until it started running properly again- I thought it was just old.
I think my poor machine was spending more resources on not combusting than it was on my programs.

Now, instead of buying a whole new pooter, I'm gonna just buy me a new motherboard with one of them new-fangled duo-core thingies.

Then I'm gonna get me a fancy-pants video game or two and start calling in sick to work.

More Blogging Secrets

It's easy to make money blogging. First, find a job with an Infernal Blog Machine (IBM). An Infernal Blog Machine looks like this:

You probably have one like it at home, except the home versions will let you play video games and show you dirty movies. The kind at work usually don't let you do that sort of thing- they are pretty useless for much but blogging.
The only game mine has is some really bad text-based role-playing game (RPG) where you assume the persona of a legal document inside a box- you might be a real estate purchase contract, a deposition transcript or even a medical record. In the game, you move yourself from one virtual location to another and make a written note of when you do so. Sometimes an NPC will email you and ask you where you are and you get points for knowing the correct answer. If you give the wrong answer you lose and the game is over.
It's a really boring game but since I always answer the questions correctly , I can blog between RPG sessions. It's not much of an RPG, really. You get put in a box and sent to a warehouse and don't do anything for years. After seven years, your character gets shredded but that's OK. You have 6,500,001 other ones just like it.

To keep my wits sharp between gaming sessions, I like to read and drink coffee. I wish I could do both at the same time, but I can't.
I read books on the bus on the way to work, but you are not allowed to drink coffee on the bus.
I drink coffee at work but I am not allowed to read books on the clock.

In some ways, my commute is the best part of my day. I get to sit and read for two 30-minute periods each day, which I find simultaneously stimulating and relaxing. Lately I've read a great Kafka translation (seated below), a trio of Jim Thompson crime novels (Pop. 1280; The Killer Inside Me and Taking Texas by the Tail) and a deceptively brilliant novel of dark comedy , Damned If You Do, by Gordon Houghton. It's the only book I've read of his, it being a gift from a friend.


It's a sign that someone
knows you and cares about you when they give you books that you like, even if you've never heard of the author.
(Thank you to my lifelong pal 'Sco')





So you read a little , ingest some hot bean squeezins' , play a little bit of the RPG and take a break. While you are on break, you might as well blog. If you're like me, you probably hate it when your boss and co-workers read your blog over your shoulder; so I came up with a solution for the privacy problem. I build a wall.
These boxes are the 'real-life' equivalent of the document RPG that's installed on my BM at work. These boxes have just advanced from first to second level.

I didn't get much blogging done at work today. Instead, I went to a lunchtime anti-escalation demonstration at the State Capitol. Due to my vast fame and incredible good looks, I was placed behind the podium- I was all set to make a fiery extemporaneous denouncement of all things Dubya - don't think I can't- but I was just up there to make the pictures pretty for TV. Aw, shucks. They already had good speakers lined up, including one man with two sons in Iraq- multiple tours I think. I was behind him and the wind flapping the signs made it hard for me to hear everything.

After work, I engineered a live performance by In Fervor, a talented and very likable duo doing a Radio Tour- how cool is that! After that, we had a Music Director's meeting. It was short and sweet- major progress is being made at the station- there have been some bad things happen but we are correcting them- running a listener-supported all-volunteer FM station takes a lot of work,but we've been on-air for over two years now, something almost no one thought was possible and we are getting pretty good at what we do. It's a group effort.

So tonight I'm blogging for free, on my own time. I had planned on writing something depressing but I had such a good day I wrote this instead. Maybe next time.

What's the Story?

This is the view from my porch. My goal Saturday was to get to the mailboxes behind the yellow van and drop a number of envelopes into one of them. Pretty dull, eh?
Not for me.



First, I wondered if I was having an acid flashback - what's up with the stripes on the brick? That building doesn't usually look like that.
I went back inside to grab my camera...

And then I saw the car. The blue Volvo station wagon.
Actually, I could smell the car, but at first I thought it was the hospital across the street incinerating body parts and infectious medical waste again.
I was wrong.
It was the car.



Breathing as little as possible, I approached it. A bedraggled young man with a scruffy knapsack was standing a few yards away, waiting for the bus. The smell of cheap wine coming from him was staggering, even at that distance, and combined with the stench coming from the car, it was almost pukabley offensive. With the windows up.




I had to get a pic. This sort of thing isn't quite so unusual (or wasn't, back in my hobo days) in NYC ,San Francisco, the DC area and other places that are far too expensive for most humans- but this is Fallentown. It's getting bad, but rent is still pretty cheap here.
Our local homeless people don't own Volvos, they drive shopping carts.

The last time I saw a car like this , it was a battered old AMC Gremlin and it had luggage , furniture, clothes and other readily identifiable items neatly organized inside- it was clearly a 'domestic' vehicle.
Today's car was full of garbage-literally. Rotting offal.
It's been cold lately- what would this thing be like in summer?
Who drives this mess?
I looked around. No one nearby except the drunk on the corner.

"Don't take my picture," said the winey bus stop buzzard. He didn't seem especially drunk, but the smell was awful...oh, man it's bad when you can drink that much without showing it. I know.

I had no intention of taking wineman's photograph but I had to ask:

"Is this your car?"

"No. I'm waiting for the bus. That guy's fucked up or sumpin'.."

"Really?"

So I walked around the car, peering into the windows , trying to discern whether someone was living in it or if was simply full of refuse.
It was refuse alright, rotting remnants of fast-food meals and crumpled wads of disturbingly brown newspaper... but my question of inhabitation was unanswered.
There was a hairbrush and a desk fan on top of the junk in the driver's seat...why?

I didn't see how one could survive it, much less live in it; then again, there wasn't much at all I understood about this car. Curiosity piqued, I decided to sit on the wall and wait for the owner.
I figured I'd interview the driver and get their story; if they were in a bad way, there are places in town for different sorts of help and I know most of them, or people who do- but my motives weren't altogether altruistic- I was simply curious . Nosy, really. I like to know the story.

Speaking of nose...
Usually , one of my cats joins me when I sit outside, but neither one wanted to come close to the Stenchmobile. After a few minutes, the smell started to bother me. It smelled like a dead cow. Or a corpse. Or a corpse hidden in the hollowed-out body cavity of a dead cow.
Bad.

So I mailed my letters and went inside to see if the Dept. of Health and Sanitation was open on Saturday.
Hmmm...there's a number for abandoned vehicles, but this doesn't qualify. From the looks of it, the owner of this Volvo has abandoned everything but the car and it's contents.

Emergency? Given the freaked-out fear world we live in, I imagined the results of a call to the Hotline reporting a vehicle emitting a noxious odor - they'd probably evacuate the area until a CDC ABC team could scour the entire area, including my apartment.
I could find myself living in my own Volvo.
What do do? Nothing.

A few minutes later it was gone. I didn't hear the engine start or the door open and shut.

It was just gone.

The bricks had returned to normal.

1986- Not Such A Great Year

This is the cover of a calendar that my mother's boyfriend, Cal Sorenson, produced in 1985. That is my mother in the middle, Cal is the animal that isn't a horse.
He was a bizarre man and he took a lot of photographs before he vanished in the early Nineties; he's almost certainly dead by drink by now, I am sure.
My mother carried those photos with her for years after Cal left her; in fact, she carried them with her until she died.

I don't know why she did that.

Those photographs, slides and films became mine after Mom died.

Some I destroyed.

Some I kept.

I liked Cal when I met him, he was the only 'Mom BF' that showed any interest in being my friend. He taught me how to fire a rifle, even if it was only a .22...Cal had apparently been a Special Forces sniper operating in Cambodia during the 'Nam war and a biathlon athlete afterwards - I was never sure what to believe, but he could use a 30.06 to put a perfect star pattern on a target so far away I couldn't even see it without a scope. And he could throw knives, kicks and punches with equal precision, so I knew he'd been into something...just not sure what.
Cal also got paid to take pictures of balloons and rodeos , which I thought was a pretty cool way to make money.

But my mother never did have any luck with men, and Cal was no exception.
See this? These are the credits from the back of the calendar:
So what's the problem?
Well.
My mother spelled her name 'Janice' NOT "Janis." Cal, who she was living with, didn't even bother to make sure he spelled her name correctly even though he could not have finished the project without my mother's help and money.
This calendar sold several thousand copies in Park City, which was a much less-traveled destination back then- Peter Fonda bought one. Paul Anka got mom to sign his.
Those of you who remember when the Tonight Show was referred to as 'Carson' might recall bandleader Doc Severinsen's frequent laments about his ex-wife. Doc's ex-wife (see credits above) owned the bookstore that Mom worked at and she (and I) got to meet lots of celebrities as they visited Evonne's store.

To mom, having her picture on the front of a calendar that real-life famous people were buying was a big deal. Mom grew up poor and stayed that way most of her life, but during this brief period she was happy. The famous people liked her for the same reasons everyone else did- she was fun to be around. She was always doing new things, skiing, photography, drawing...trying to learn as much as she could about the world, despite having no real education.

It meant a lot to her that Cal used her as a model and I knew she expected him to propose marriage, he used to hint at it all the time - look at the freekin'pic-but he didn't have any intention of doing that.
He didn't even spell her name correctly.
He was living with her and he couldn't spell her name.
This hurt her a lot- an awful lot- but it took me years to understand that.

Years later, when I had my very first paid comic book story published, the publisher mis-spelled both my first and last names in the credits. I pointed this out to mom and she pulled out one of these old calendars.
Me too, she said.
Mom and I shared a bitter laugh at our own expense.

During this time, I was fairly happy too-I was 18, I had a place of my own and a really sexy girlfriend named Natalie, who just happened to sing and play piano. We were gonna form a band and be famous underground artists- it was inevitable. Fate.
I was nuts about that girl.

One day, when I was visiting Mom, Cal gave me a manila envelope. He asked me to give it to Natalie when I saw her next- sure, no problem.
What's in here?
Photos.
Ooo, cool. Let's look.

What. the. fuck.

That's Natalie on the left.

Tame by today's standards, but I was 18 and had only had two lovers in my life- and one of them was in this picture. I wasn't ready for that.

There were other photos, but I didn't see them all until much, much later.

I asked Cal what the hell was up with the naked graveyard pics of my girlfriend.

"She didn't tell you?"

He claimed that some semi-adult magazine had commissioned him to do some naked vampire shots...well, OK, he really was a pro photographer... but there's another man's penis in a photo with my girlfriend and I didn't much care for that.

So I took the pics to Natalie's...and it was pretty clear she hadn't planned on having me see them. She thought I wouldn't understand and she was right.

"How much did Cal pay you?"

"$100" (a lot back then)

"Did you fuck the naked guy?"

"No, he is gay. It was just pictures, is all."

I should have stopped right there, but I didn't.

"How about Cal? Did you fuck Cal?"

"Uh...."

"You fucked Cal! How cou..."

"Ah, no. I didn't fuck Cal. He asked me fuck myself with a lit candle though."

"....did...you...?"

"Yeah, sure. Why not? A hundred bucks is a hundred bucks..."

My mother's boyfriend was paying my girlfriend to masturbate while he took pictures of her.

I think I started pulling my records out of Natalie's collection and smashing them at this point. I don't remember much after that.

But it was over.

Treasures

By the end of my mother's nomadic and often estranged life she owned only what she could fit into her car.
Among those items were a handful of books, some of which I recall from childhood.

Knowing what little I do about my mother's missing years, it's remarkable that she was able to
keep anything at all. All I have are a few books , her journals and some photos, but to me they are treasures.

This (below) was published in 1965 and is a cautionary tale about the consequences of war for war's sake. For the Twin and I, this was a bedtime story. As I grew and began to understand the forces at work in the then-raging Viet Nam war, I looked back at this tiny tome and saw war as the tragic, fatal foolishness that it is. Today, it's just as relevant as ever, perhaps more so.




This book (below), again illustrated by the amazing Edward Gorey, explores how we learn and why we don't. We don't learn because we don't want to.
I didn't know what it was about when I was a child but I wanted to.





This (below) is more recent. It's a 1993 publication and I didn't read it until after my mother's death. Again, it's even more relevant now than it was then.

WE ARE ALL IN THE DUMPS
FOR DIAMONDS ARE TRUMPS
THE KITTENS ARE GONE TO ST. PAUL'S
THE BABY IS BIT
THE MOON'S IN A FIT
AND THE HOUSES ARE BUILT WITHOUT WALLS

It is very difficult for me to look through my mother's things. There are many treasures in there but there are some traps too.
That is why I didn't go to work today and I posted these scans instead.
I couldn't and I had too, respectively.

A Good Morning To You

You know what I like to do on Sunday mornings? I like to get up at 5:30 am, have some coffee, collect my LPs and CDs, drive to the radio station and play music that I like. Hopefully, the audience enjoys it too:

FUNKADELIC- THANK YOU CHOLLY STEVE HILLAGE - UNIDENTIFIED CAPTAIN BEEFHEART- TROPICAL HOT DOG NIGHT LARRY GRAHAM- HAIR FRANK ZAPPA -STINKFOOT SAVOY BROWN -TROUBLED BY THESE DAYS AND TIMES BE BOP DELUXE - SWAN SONG BOB MARLEY - CRAZY BALD HEAD PAUL SIMON- LATE IN THE EVENING BOB DYLAN- SARA LOREENA MCKENNITT- SACRED SHABBAT CLASH- CLAMPDOWN DAMIEN DEMPSEY-MARCHING SEASON NEIL YOUNG-LIVING WITH WAR ALAN PARSONS PROJECT- DON'T LET IT SHOW XTC- I AM THE AUDIENCE SWEETWATER- MOTHERLESS CHILD EMERSON,LAKE AND PALMER -FROM THE BEGINNING DIRE STRAITS- LADY WRITER KINKS- POWERMAN LOU REED- KILL YOUR SONS PRETTY THINGS- BITTER END IRON BUTTERFLY- ARE YOU HAPPY? GONG-CAN'T KILL ME ELENI MANDELL- I BELIEVE IN SPRING

You know what else I like? I like turning on the radio on Saturdays and hearing the DJs who I have scheduled for our local broadcast- River City Limits- doing bang-up, enthusiastic shows that tell our audience that we give a damn about them, the music that we play and the world around us.

You won't find that on any commercial FM station in this city but you can find it here.

Tell me how great I am.

Spamette

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Blind Kingdom

This morning I really didn't feel like going to work. No specific reason, I just felt a little anxious and depressed and was afraid it might get worse before it got better- no real cause for alarm, but I would rather not be in the office when my mood pinwheel starts spinning...there are drugs - legal and otherwise-I can take for this but I don't like to be stoned around people and the Xanax makes me clumsy, as if I were drunk.
Three straight nights of insomnia aren't helping me feel any better.

I was getting ready to call my Boss to tell him I wouldn't be in today but he called me first.
He is sick this morning.

I think he's playing Warcraft and doing bong hits but I don't care- he never asks me for reasons when I call in an absence, he knows that I have the occasional Bad Day- so I'm certainly not going to begrudge him some slack time- besides, I like working alone most of the time. It gives me time to do important things like blogging and posting personal ads on-line.

I'm on the clock right now, in fact.

Technically, I have a co-worker, but he rarely comes into work anymore. I'm surprised he hasn't been fired yet - when I was in management the one sure way to get fired was to not show up without calling, it's a huge peeve of mine- but Boss is nicer than me.

Normally, none of this would matter because it's unobserved by everyone else in the office- we are the Records Dept. and nobody really knows what we do or how we do it,
and that suits me fine. Today, however, there is a problem.

Work needs to be done and the Big Boss is looking for my Boss- who, of course, is not here. So BB comes to me.


"Where is everyone?" , he asks.

"Boss is sick- he called me this morning, and this one...," I gesture at my co-worker's empty chair and shrug.
What else can I do? I have no idea if he's coming to work or not.
It's 10:30 am and that's awful late to not have called.

BB would be turning red if he wasn't already black. He's not into absenteeism.

Watch out. This might get ugly. BB shuts the door so he can talk to me privately.

Instead of the outburst I'm expecting, he tells me what a great job I'm doing and how lucky they were to be able to hire me back. I did recently single-handedly manage a very difficult project from start to finish, but that's my job.
I really shouldn't get such praise simply for doing what I'm paid to do, but that's such a rare quality in today's workplace that my simple competence seems almost miraculous to my Bosses.

Still, I have an unlimited capacity for praise from the BB-and it's a great time to remind him that the company still hasn't adjusted my paycheck to reflect a raise I was given- after he finishes telling me how great I am he assures me I'll be compensated. I'll be 'grand-fathered' and should get a pretty large check in the near future.
I'll believe this when I cash it. I've had company issues before- it's one of the reasons I quit the first time.

While we are having this discussion, the phone rings. It's my absent co-worker's mother. She asks me if he's coming in today. I tell her I don't know, I've not seen nor heard from him.
Big Boss listens to this conversation and makes an important-looking note on his clipboard. I'm guessing it says "fire that guy."

We go over the details of new project and the phone rings again. It's the new Office Manager at an office out-of-town. She's calling me to ask me how to do her job. I put her on speakerphone , answer her questions and give her instructions...this, to me, is absurd. I'm almost as low on the company Totem Pole as one can get- I'm not even supposed to know the answers to her questions, but I do. Why she called me, I don't know, but she called the right place.

BB is stunned. He tells me again how great it is to have me back- that he had no idea how good I was at my job until I left- I provide him with the requisite rhetoric, we shake hands and he leaves me to bask in my own glory.

Whew!

Now where was I....?

I turn back to my computer and I remember what I was working on. Holy shit!

You see, that personal ad I mentioned has already gotten some hits.

In the text of my ad I mentioned that I am a FM DJ and that I like to play a lot of vinyl on my radio show. It seems that Fk_MeSilE, (23, F, bi) has misinterpreted my ad- specifically the part about playing vinyl. I wonder if FM DJ is a 'sex code' acronym for some sort of fetish or deviant specialty- maybe I should remove that info-or highlight it, depending on what it stands for.

At least I think she has misread it...otherwise she wouldn't have enclosed the picture of herself in a shiny rubber Catwoman suit. Not nude, but sexy as hell. One for the 'keeper' folder, heheheheh....
(Goddamn it, she lives in Miami, Florida- that's too far away, even for Catwoman sex.)

Anyway.

This pic was on my screen the entire time BB was lauding me with praise- he didn't even mention it. I wonder if he noticed? Sometimes I wonder if anyone notices anything- I seem to live in a strange parallel universe full of oddities, ironies and flat-out bizarre circumstances that almost nobody else can see.

Usually this works in my favor, so I've learned to sort of accept it...but at times it makes me wonder if I'm really here at all. It's possible that I don't even exist- that I've imagined myself and my surroundings...(note to self : no more Kafka at bedtime).

I just noticed something else- I feel pretty good.

My nerves are steady and I'm not contemplating suicide. Maybe it's the kind words from the Big Boss that have enlivened my spirits, but it's probably the Catwoman pic from Fuckme Silly.

I may be crazy, but I am realistic. Sometimes.

Now...where was I?

Hobbies and Lies

" Make a left here- the side street- now kill the lights."

"Kill the...why? Oh. Right."

I never was able to lie to Kathy- she was smarter than me and besides, she knew every trick- but this was different. Earlier that evening I had told her a story that would have caused most women to flee in justifiable panic- but not Kathy.

Her response was : " We can take my car."
I loved her.
I had lied to her.
Now we were in her car heading downhill through the darkness towards a quiet suburban cul-de-sac and that lie was on my mind as I gave her instructions. It's for her own good, I told myself.

"Let me out here- kill the engine and coast down to the circle. Turn the car around and park in front of one of the houses they aren't finished building yet...turn the motor on but keep the lights off and watch for me in the street."

"Watch for you? Are you planning on leaving in a hurry?"

"Yes."

"I'm unlocking the backdoor then. Don't waste time running to the passenger side, just bail in the back."

I loved her alright. She knew all the tricks.

A kiss for luck later and I was standing in front of a dimly- lit rancher, a much older house than most of the cookie-cutter prefabs that were encroaching on it.
Those newer dwellings were not here the last time I was in this neighborhood- they looked vacant, unfinished, unoccupied.
Good.
Neighbors might ruin my plan.

Not that I had much of a plan- Kathy was the planner and I couldn't tell her about this- I wanted her to be able to pass a polygraph if it came down to it, so she couldn't know what I was going to do. What I thought I was going to do, anyway.

From the front, the ranch house seemed empty and dark, but as I crept closer I could hear the noodling, vaporous notes of a Grateful Dead guitar solo, and as I rounded a carefully placed cluster of tall shrubbery I saw that the rear of the home was well-lit, illumination pouring out of the sliding glass kitchen doors and into the ill-kept backyard. It sounded like a small party was in progress-damn!- and there was a tall wooden fence that wasn't here last time.

Last time. That was supposed to be the final visit, but here I was again. Lies had brought me back.

The gate was locked.

I found a plastic trash can outside the garage and gently rolled it towards the backyard. The contents of the receptacle clattered and rattled as I inched it along and I was glad that the music inside house was so loud.
I placed the can next to the fence and climbed onto the sagging lid.

Crap. There were two hippie kids sitting at a wooden table on the back porch, one boy , one girl. The music was coming from a boom box on the table between them.

They looked to be a few years younger than myself, they probably should have been in High School. They hadn't seen me or heard my approach, the boy was engrossed in rolling a joint and the girl was talking - I couldn't make out the words, but she was speaking in vacant and reverential tones...probably extolling the virtues of Ralph, the man I was here to visit.

If I timed it right, I could probably drop onto the porch and sneak into the kitchen without either kid seeing me. I pushed myself up off the wobbly trash can and scrambled over the fence.

The momentum from my push was too much for the unsteady wastebin and it fell over backwards with a clatter, almost drowning out the loud thud I made when I landed on the wooden porch. The two kids turned around in stoned surprise.

"What's up?" , asked the boy.

"Are you OK?", the girl followed.

Jesus, I thought, I must look like one of them except I'm wearing all black and grey sneakers; not tie-dyes and barefeet like them , my shoulder-length hair is tied in a perfect Kathy-made ponytail much like the one the boy has- a few years ago and I could have been that kid. Not anymore. Things had changed since then.

Why are they so relaxed? I don't have a disguise- can't they tell what I am? Don't they know why I'm here?
I hadn't expected a calm response. I hadn't expected any response.

This wasn't supposed to be that sort of visit. I had murder on my mind and these dumb kids were asking me if I was OK, as if it were normal for other kids to appear from out of nowhere in the middle of the night.

Knowing Ralph's "hobbies", it probably was normal.

Still, I had come here to kill Ralph and it pissed me off that these Deadhead kids didn't find me threatening. They should be scared.
They should run.

The boy puffs up the joint, offers it to me.

"No thanks, I'm here to see Ralph."

"Oh. He's inside, upstairs."

"Upstairs? There is no upstairs in this house."

"Yeah, man. The attic, ya know?", the boy looks at me suspiciously, offers me the joint again. "You aren't a cop are you? You have to tell us if you are."

"Yeah, maaaaan", I answer, mocking his stoner drawl while I lie to him , "I am a cop. This place is getting raided in five minutes. You have 60 seconds to get away."

"Whoah..." says the boy.
"But our stuff is inside," protests the girl.

"45 seconds", I reply and they vanish into the night.
The backyard gate is now unlocked.
Good.

I enter into the kitchen- empty. I peer into the darkened living room- there are heavy blankets on the windows - for privacy, I'm sure; cocooned bodies slumber on the two sofas and most of the floor space, probably teenage runaways. The room smells unclean.

Like I said, Ralph has "hobbies".

Halfway down the adjoining hallway there's a pull-down trapdoor staircase leading up to the attic. Another tangle-haired hippie boy sits there, he's awake but he's just sitting there- I don't even know if he's aware that I'm watching him.

What the fuck is wrong with these kids? Have their lives been so full of fucked-up craziness that they don't even blink when a killer crosses their path? Is it so bad for them that they consider this house to be a 'safe place'?

I can't allow myself to worry about that right now.

When I approach him I notice the boy's wide pie-eyes. He's tripping really, really hard; no wonder he doesn't respond- I'm an hallucination.
He should be scared.
I'm terrified of myself. Why isn't anyone afraid of me?

I can't get upstairs without moving the hippie and I move him rather roughly.
I want him to be afraid.
I want him to be hurt, but all he does is roll on the scuffed wooden floor and look up at me with eyes that are larger than his universe.

"Oh man, what're you doin'...can't go up there... Ralph is busy...whoah..."

Oh hell. This pitiful kid is on sentry duty for Ralph. That means Ralph is probably fucking this kid's teenage girlfriend right now.

Hobbies.

Ralph is evil but he's not stupid. Halfway up the rickety folding stairs there's a hanging bead curtain with metal wind chimes tied to the beaded threads. It's going to be impossible to get through it without causing the chimes to ring.

So much for a surprise attack.

The kid on the floor starts yelling.

"Hey! Hey!..." , his voice trails off, I look back and see he's noticed something cosmic in the woodgrain of the floorboards and is staring intensely at nothing.

Nothing left to do but rush upstairs.

For a moment I'm lost. The upstairs grotto is a patchwork nightmare of every tacky piece of pseudo-counterculture trash I've ever seen: psychedelic paisley tapestries, Che; Mao; Lennon and blacklight Hendrix posters vie for room on the crowded walls, incense fills the air - and of course there's plenty of Ralph's paintings - stupidly, I find myself wondering how they are affixed to the sloping interior walls of the attic hideaway...
I barely notice the two naked girls on the mattress across the room and they don't seem to notice me either- but Ralph has seen me.

He's scared and naked, his eyes only need one glance to know why I'm here - he starts scanning the room for something...his clothes? A weapon?

Finally, someone who is afraid of me.

To the children in this house, Ralph is a savior; a messiah; a God; a Prophet; a Shepherd who loves his flock.
He is their Family.

To me, Ralph is a pedophile who can't find his pants.

To Ralph, I am The End.

There's nothing in the room to use as a weapon, this is a fuck-chamber of pillows and mattresses. I should have brought something with me.

If I hadn't lied to Kathy, she'd have known what to bring and what to do with it after I was finished, but I had lied to her and now it was just me, my bare hands and a naked Ralph.
I hadn't even worn gloves.
My fingerprints are all over the murder scene and the victim isn't even dead yet.

So much for plans.

Ralph starts telling me lies. He is really sorry. He didn't know. It was a mistake. Let him explain...after all, he's known me since I was little boy, he's my Mother's friend, he didn't mean to hurt her...Ralph has just said all the wrong things and he suddenly knows it. He knows.

He stops lying and the room is silent except for the muffled weeping coming from one of his teenage 'brides'.

I haven't thrown a punch in years- I am no warrior- but I get really lucky and knock Ralph down with one blow to the face.
He whimpers in unison with the girls he had been molesting.

His penis attempts to retreat into his greying pubic hair and I assist it with my right foot, wishing I'd worn my hiking boots and not my sneakers. More lousy planning. Kathy would have made sure I had boots, gloves and other proper tools for the job.
Why did I lie to her?

Frustrated, I kick Ralph in the balls. Something feels squishy under my foot and Ralph suddenly gets pale and sweaty- I'm almost certain that he's lost track of what is happening to him - it's hard to separate the sounds he makes from the noises the girls across the room are making- pure animal sounds of fear and suffering. Some are coming from me.

This is the fear that I wanted. This is the suffering that I felt.

Feel this, Ralph?

In the teeth. This is for my mother.

In the nose. This is for the girls up here.

In the ribs. This is for the children downstairs.

I grind the sole of my sneaker into his face and that one is for me.

I am done.

I've been here too long. Kathy will be worried. Again, I wish I hadn't lied to her.

I told her I was coming here to buy cocaine and she knows people sometimes get hurt in the course of such transactions- I don't want her coming in to see if I'm OK. She doesn't need to know about Ralph. She doesn't need to know this much about me.

Ralph is moving. He's shakily reaching for a wooden box and I think he's probably got a gun in it- I don't care anymore.
I am done. I need to move but I can't.

Ralph opens the box and reaches into it.

I brace myself for the inevitable impact.

Ralph's hands reach towards me. He's holding a wad of cash and a bundle of cocaine packages.

The bastard thinks this is about money. He thinks it's about the drugs. He thinks I'm robbing him.

He knows who I am and he knows what he has done and he still thinks this is a robbery.

He thinks it's about anything except what he is.

This isn't about money .
I scream this at him- or I try to, but I have no voice left. I am done.

I slap the contraband out of his hands and start towards the stairs when I remember the lie I told Kathy. I reach down and gather a handful of twist-tied cocaine bundles and place them in my jeans pocket before I leave. I don't touch the money.

Without thinking, I walk downstairs, past the broken tripping boy and exit through the front door- the lost children are stirring a little bit, but no one is awake or alert, probably drugged or drunk.

Kathy is waiting outside in her blue Mustang, the headlights off. I walk around to the passenger's side and get in.

"You get it OK?" , she asks.

"Yeah, sorry I took so long...you know how it goes with this stuff..."

"So long? You were only in there for a couple minutes."

"Oh. It seemed like a long time."

When we get home she asks me again how the deal went. Was it OK?

"Of course it was OK- check this shit out. It's pure rock."

" You are lying to me."

"No, I'm not. Everything's cool."

"Then why do you have blood on your shoes?"

That was the last time I lied to Kathy.

Great Gift Ideas

( New Note: This post is from last year and the year before and probably next year too...)


Christ, is it almost St. Valentine's day already? What a useless holiday. If you're in a happy relationship, you should be doing nice stuff for each other every fuckin' day without being forced to prove your affection by dropping Hallmark cards, chocolates and flowers on your lover's doorstep like a cat dragging home a dead mole to please the human.
Do any of you even know what Valentine's Day is about? Don't believe all that Catholic Claptrap about Romans and imprisoned martyrs and whatnot. As usual, count on the crackerjack Camelsback research staff for the real stories behind our false holidays.
Way back in ancient times, the evil American Sun Kings and Queens of Temperance declared that the rabble should sober up. This didn't sit well with the rabble, who quickly defected to more 'spirited' personality cults, led by charismatics like St. Bugs (Moran) and the legendary St. Alphonse (Capone). In the course of establishing the only religion honest enough to call itself Organized Crime, the two beatific bootleggers became fierce, bitter and violent rivals for the lucrative tithing of the parched and desperately sober masses.

Like any viable religion, Organized Crime soon sparked more than it's share of competition, internal conflict, warfare and corruption; and so, on Feb. 14, 1929, missionaries from the Capone Church, aided by Centurions on loan from the Chicago Police Legion , decided that the Bugs Boys needed some competition-stifling Reformation. They took a half-dozen or so Moran followers into a garage on Clark Street and nailed them to the wall with hundreds of .45 caliber Theses. We celebrate the gruesome deaths of these pioneering Mafia martyrs with roses and candlelight dinners. This makes poetic sense if your love life resembles mine; for your sake I hope that it doesn't.
If it does, I'm truly sorry. Maybe it'd help if I offered some priceless gift alternatives. By priceless, I mean worthless. Buy them for yourself, it's the only attention you'll get on the 14th. And no refunds.

THE CAMELSBACK SAINT VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE CATALOG FOR THE UNLOVED AND DEPRESSED:

EMOTIONAL TRAIN WRECK

No lights. No tunnel. Just derailment, gravity and inertia. You probably thought that you'd never need to wear a parachute on a train. You thought wrong.

A real bargain for only 76 cents!

EXPRESSIONS OF UNREQUITED LOVE

This could be that letter you wish that you'd torn up when you had the chance. Maybe it's that necklace you knew that she'd love-the one you purchased the day before she told you she wasn't looking for a relationship. Perhaps it's three weeks of unreturned phone calls. It might be a horribly embarrassing love poem or song that fell into the wrong hands.

Two lousy bucks.This item knows no limits , so don't be such a cheap-ass.

A LIFETIME TOGETHER

Well, you got what you wanted. Too bad it turned out to suck, but hey, there were some good times, weren't there? Weren't there? Live the same miserable day over and over for the rest of your pointless life while you brood about the way it could have been. Even your children will pity you.

If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

LONELY ALCOHOLIC MELANCHOLIA

He doesn't deserve you. Take another shot.

Buy yourself something nice. No one else will.

ENDLESS SEARCH FOR LOVE

Remember how your friends used to tell you that there was someone for everyone , and someday, somebody special will see you for the irresistibly sweet, kind and golden soul that you are?These days, they don't call you very often since they all got married and had kids. If they did , you'd call them liars.

Maybe throwing your money away will make you feel better.

BUY NOW!! TIME'S RUNNING OUT!

.

Space Valentine

Playlist :



Alan Parsons Project- I robot
Ray Manzarek- Begin The World Again
Eleni Mandell- Alien Eye
Atomic Rooster- Hold Your Fire
Loreena McKinnett - Hearts in Space
Hot Tuna -Embyronic Journey (live)
Pentangle - Light Flight
Emerson, Lake and Palmer - Still...
Kali Bahlu- Cosmic Telephone Call
Gary Numan- Praying to the Aliens
Hawkwind - Silver Machine
Bill Nelson- Better Home in the Phantom Zone
Steve Hillage- Light in the Sky
Gong- Heaven's Gate
Captain Beefheart- Observatory Crest
Mother Gong- I wanna be with you
Sweetwater- Crystal Spider
Nouvelle Vogue- In a Manner of Speaking
Jefferson Airplane- Greasy Heart
Grace Slick- Across The Board
Pretty Things- She's A Lover
Klaatu- Calling Occupants
Peru Ubu- Hollow Earth
Tom Waits - Blue Valentine

The Shortest Point

Stencils warning:
objects
in this distance
may be mirror
than they appear

Is this storming?
abstract
in this dance
concrete steps
helium depths

This is no place
to be
replace what
goes nowhere
when it
belongs there

The shortest point
two lines
between one meaning
strike the solid air
glass
no longer there

Object in hindsight later
no time now
forget calm reflection
this is present
and
accountable for

While Rome Burns

This is a start, but it's a little slow and it's a little late. And it contains a lot of unnecessary political timidity:

The White House is likely to face its most significant confrontation with Congress so far over its handling of the Iraq war after House Democrats agreed on Thursday on plans to debate a simple resolution next week that would oppose the escalation of the war but express support for funding the troops already on the ground

No rational person would interpret opposition of troop escalation as a lack of support for our troops, be they on the ground in Iraq, at home or elsewhere.
The argument that opposing the escalation is somehow 'unpatriotic' is absurd. It's a last desperate to defend the indefensible.
Listen to this bullshit:

However, John Boehner, House minority leader, attacked the coming debate as "nothing more than political theatre that means nothing. And I believe that it demoralises our troops in the field."

I would point out that sending our already tired soldiers and Marines back to Baghdad for a third or fourth deployment demoralises our troops.

Perhaps living in a state of kill or be killed for weeks and months on end in a strange and hostile land , bearing daily witness to carnage and brutality - while trying to do your duty for a President who gleefully proclaims: "you ain't coming home while I'm the Decider"- perhaps that is demoralising.

A case could be made that long, repeated deployments overseas can have terrible consequences at home.
.

" Since the 2003 invasion, divorce rates in the military have skyrocketed, with a 28 percent increase among enlisted, and almost 80 percent among officers, according to MSNBC. Experts estimate that there will be at least 100,000 war-related divorces by the time the war ends. The veterans and military families here today say that, for them, "It never will."

Divorce is demoralising.
PTSD is disturbing.
Orphans are a bummer.
And lets not talk about bombs or the nerve impulses of severed limbs.

-----
And lets not mention global warming.
There's still quite a few Republicans who claim that there's no man-made climate change.
They don't seem to understand that this is no joke.
To this delusional Congressman, our global crisis is little more than a fart joke:

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., an outspoken skeptic of global warming, questioned whether the temperature changes weren't cyclical.

"We don't know what the other cycles were caused by in the past," he said. "It could be dinosaur flatulence. Who knows?"

Haha. Very funny. Maybe it's cow farts. Maybe it's an old lady in West, Texas. Maybe building more coal plants will solve all our pollution problems:

The official treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions hasn't gone into effect yet and already three countries are planning to build nearly 850 new coal-fired plants, which would pump up to five times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce.

And if there is such a thing as global warming- which there isn't,of course- it's Nancy Pelosi's fault, according to an increasingly desperate sounding GOP who would rather talk about anything but the Iraq:

The jet that Pelosi has produces 10,000 pounds of carbon dioxide an hour, far more than the previous speaker used," said Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C. Pelosi's predecessor was Rep. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.

Flying in a large Air Force plane, Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., said, "appears to remove any spending controls from our operations and dramatically increases our impact on the environment especially climate change."

This attack was so absurd it caused the White House to issue a true statement to the media, setting a historical precedent for the Bush administration.

... presidential spokesman Tony Snow, "This is a silly story and I think it's been unfair to the speaker."

------

You know, if we could do this :

...(and include Cheney as an accomplice) then Nancy Pelosi would be President.

Then she could use Air Force One.

Winners and Loser

Wednesday we had a 'contest' post. It was based on information found on the Blooger dashboard telling us that we had published 1,000 posts.

Pretty simple, eh?

Nope. There were variables.

As if having a million furiously typing chimps wasn't enough to manage, I had to go and employ a human assistant that can't accomplish the most simple of tasks...count to one thousand, I ask him; write less about politics and more about sex and celebrities, I implore in a "constructive" manner; write something that'll require swimsuit pics, I suggest...bah!

I get variables.

Variables.

Christ-in-a-motherfuckin'-Cuisinart, even this seemingly simple enumeration was beyond my lackey's ken.

First: He forgot to account for all our unpublished drafts- I now know that I only publish 87.8% of what is written for Blooger- my rejects could fill several blogs. Several shitty blogs- you should see the crap that guy tries to foist off on me- a drunken chimpanzee could do better.
I should know, I wind up re-writing half the crap that does see publication.

Second: Some of those posts are re-runs. History repeats itself and so do we.

Third: A number were written by Susanne, who is an independent poster and isn't currently aware that there's a talking chimp calling the shots here. She may well have guessed the truth by now.

Lastly: I have no idea how many posts have been deleted. I'm guessing at least 100, but I don't trust my assistant. He writes god-awful drek , leaves it up just long enough to embarrass himself and then pulls it down....he thinks I don't know this.

So we have no idea what the correct answer is. Does it even matter?

It should be obvious to the web-savvy reader that there are no real Free Lunches or Big Prizes
on-line.
Click the Flashing Target to claim your Free Laptop!
uh huh.


Right, whatever...so who the fuck won?

That depends on your perspective:

If your glass if half-full, you can congratulate yourself. You are a winner! Depending on how the data is interpreted , all of the answers given are (were) correct. Even Sling's!

If your glass is half-empty....well, let's just say you didn't win. There's only room for one loser on this blog and that position has been filled since Post One.

If your glass is reduced to shiny smithereens and stored in a tattered Zip-Loc bag that leaks like a sieve- welcome to my world.


Would you spare us the bullshit and just get to the prize?

Well, all the entries were 'virtual', so the prize is likewise of a 'virtual' nature.

What's a virtual prize, you cheap bastard?

Use your imagination. Literally.


I am sorry that I have nothing more tangible to offer, but I feel like a winner every time you read this blog.

Thanks for that feeling.

Many Happy Returns,

Pissy the Chimp
Editor/Publisher, Camelsbackandforth

Contest # 1,000

Here's a contest: Be the first to guess how many posts have been published on this blog.

What you win depends on how you play.

Runners-up can print their own consolation prizes from the handy template above.

Can't See the Forest

Cool. A NYT travelogue of Flannery O'Connor landmarks. I love her stories but I don't think I've read her correspondence - for instance , I didn't know she was nearly incapacitated with illness, or that she wrote for three hours each day...interesting stuff.

This is a good description of notable O'Connor characters ( I have helpfully added the story titles w/ links) :

O’Connor’s characters shimmer between heaven and hell, acting out allegorical dramas of sin and redemption. There’s Hazel Motes('Wiseblood'), the sunken-eyed Army veteran who tries to reject God by preaching “the Church of Christ Without Christ, where the blind don’t see, the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” Hulga Hopewell ('Good Country People'), the deluded intellectual who loses her wooden leg to a thieving Bible salesman she had assumed was as dumb as a stump. The pious Mrs. Turpin('Revelation'), whose heart pours out thank-yous to Jesus for not having made her black or white trash or ugly. Mrs. Freeman, the universal busybody: “Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings.”
( Also GCP, here's the entire short story-ed.)

The writer of the article lacks O'Connor's eye. The next paragraph continues with this:

People like these can’t be real, and yet they breathe on the page.

Later, the writer is describing his own travels through the 'modern' American South-(emphasis mine):

Strip malls have long since filled the gap between town and farm, and you now find Andalusia by driving past a Wal-Mart, a Chik-fil-A and a Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, where a man shot his wife and killed himself a few days before I arrived. You pass a billboard for Sister Nina, a fortune teller who reads palms in a home office cluttered with votive candles and pictures of Catholic saints. (To judge from one consultation, she is capable of divining that a visitor is a bearer of dark sorrows, but not exactly skilled at pinpointing what those sorrows might be.)

These are the kind of characters and stories that O'Connor wrote about- the author of the travelogue denies their existence in one paragraph and describes them in the next.
He's surrounded by the modern version of O'Connor's world and he doesn't recognize it.

People like that can be real- they are real- and they are all around you: at work; in stores; at school; in mirrors- they are everywhere- if you know how to look.

Frustration

NOTE: This is not addressed to ALL dudes. Sadly, you DON'T know who you are. You should.

Dudes. Listen up.

Your girlfriends and wives are not happy. Do you not notice this?
You aren't giving them the attention they deserve.
Are you taking your woman for granted? That is a mistake.

I'm single and have been involuntarily celibate for about ten gazillion years and it drives me crazy when your women complain to me about your lack of enthusiasm and imagination. They tell me how dull you are and I start having detailed fantasies- sometimes I share these ideas with your unsatisfied lover and this is what your wife/GF tells me:
" My man wouldn't do that."

Well, I would.

And I wouldn't stop until your wife begged me - and even then I'd draw it out for a loooong time.... The only thing stopping me is a vow I made to myself to never sleep with a married/attached woman again.
Ever.
For five drunken years, the only women I slept with were sexually frustrated married/engaged women that I met at work. All that repressed sexual energy had to go somewhere- and sometimes it came to me.

For some reason, they felt comfortable telling me how much you suck in bed.

Doesn't that feel nice? Your wife told the file clerk about your "problem"...then she took him to a Motel 6 and used your money to pay for the room. I was siting right next to her while she lied to you on her cellphone. That rattling sound was me fixing her a drink.
Nice, huh?

Nowadays, the file clerk doesn't drink and he doesn't have affairs.

The file clerk is adamant about the drinking, but if he keeps hearing these complaints, he might have to change his mind about that adultery vow.

Better get busy unless you want your wife moaning the file clerk's name in her sleep.

Filler Up

This post makes my last one obsolete.

Filler

This is the the most useful thing I've ever posted.

Local Celebrity

"But it appears her 15 minutes of fame are not over: Today, her body was
put aboard a truck headed to a New York taxidermist who will prepare her for
display in one of the Ripley's Believe It or Not museums..."

Shame

Note the profits "surge" in 2003.

That is the year of "mission accomplished".

That statement was true. This was the mission.

This is what we are fighting for.

Plug

I'm hosting Songs From The Big Hair , our 1980's show, today at 3pm EST . Listen and then and send me emails telling me how great I am.
I love getting those.

Second Birthday

Grab snacks before the doors open...
Last night was our radio station's second birthday party- it was huge. Last year we had 800 people, this year I'd guess 1,000.

Thank Godzilla I didn't have to do live sound this year. I was given a budget, so I hired a sound company. After talking with their engineer, he offered me a job, but my day job pays better and doesn't include working weekend nights.
(I did sound for years at various local clubs- those days are over; these days the only clubs I like are cudgels)

If they had seen me struggling to fix the DJ system in the other room- it had gone fritzy- they might have changed their minds about the offer- I had to crawl under a table in the dark and fuck with wires I couldn't see...I started smelling a weird burning smell and thought an amplifier had fried- but no...I had flipped the table cloth up onto a lit candle and was about thirty seconds from setting the whole DJ booth aflame.

Remarkably, nobody saw me do this.

This is the band room before the party:


By the time local 'band' The Gaskets went on, the room was nearly full:



To me, the Gaskets sound like two kids on Ritalin and weed, hanging out in their parent's basement and doing 80's karaoke with a Casio keyboard- but they are really popular around here. I think they're kinda boring, but I'm an old fart. The kids were dancin', so more power to 'em.




Wallflower:



With KTF, she hosts Inter-Tribal,a weekly Native American show, every Saturday at 6AM- my show is Sundays at 7AM- tonight she told me she's a 'night owl' but manages to get up early because she loves her show. I can relate.


This is a blurry pic of Liza Kate, a local singer-songwriter, she's got a good voice- I think she was having some tech problems but she didn't get flustered by them and after a couple songs she was joined by Josh Smalls , another local S/S, also a good singer:



They were folky and down-tempo, but I liked them more than the Gaskets, I'd had a long day and some quiet music was nice.
Good night