Level 13

Depressing Friday Morning

2010-08-06T12:04:00.004-04:00

I stopped at Wawa this morning for coffee and cigarettes, and since I have a new car, parked near the back of the lot to avoid unnecessary dings to the beautiful piece of Japanese craftsmanship. While walking up the sidewalk to the front door I noticed a couple sitting in their old car, all windows down, watching me. Odd, but since I am such a compelling human being (yeah), it made a strange sort of sense.

When I came back they were still sitting in their car. I ignored them and went to mine, lit a cigarette and prepared to smoke it in the heat because, once again, I have a new car and will never smoke in it.

"Excuse me," a woman's voice said as I lit my smoke. I whirled around, startled, and the woman stepped back a pace. She was from the old car I noticed on my way in and out. "Is there any way you can spare some change?"

Normally, I ignore this kind of behavior as it comes from drug addicts and drunks; it also usually happens while I'm in Asbury Park, which, as nice as the business district and boardwalk have become, is still a shit hole. You can step out of the ritziest boutique or restaurant and get harangued by crackheads looking for a cigarette of money.

I didn't expect this in Bricktown. It's a suburban town. The homeless people live in the woods on the outskirts of town, as if hiding from the "good" folks who own homes and drive nice cars. They are also not drug addicts and drunks, although they might imbibe from time to time; rather, most are victims of New Jersey's mental health system, deinstitutionalized folks who were turned loose on a world that would rather forget them. I've met them before at the McDonald's near their settlement: one guy in particular who has a cute, mangy little mutt he cares for. I bought them both a bag full of burgers and fries one day, a soda for the guy and a bottle of water for the pup. He thanked me profusely and dug into the bag, feeding the dog first. I'm not ashamed to admit it - it made me bawl.

Anyway, this woman who approached me at the Wawa was a little worn around the edges, but not like the crackheads of Asbury fame, or the poor crazy guys out at the edge of town. I wasn't about to refuse her; she was painfully embarrassed to ask me for money. She must have watched at least fifteen other customers come and go from that store and settled on me for some reason.

"We spent all night in this parking lot," she continued. "We slept in the car. We have about seventy-five cents and no gas, and need to get to Whiting." Whiting is a crappy, piny town about twenty miles southwest of Brick, but hey, if they had a reason to go there, more power to them.

"Must have been hot, sleeping in the car all night," I said, digging into my pocket. My wife says I have expressive eyes, but I was wearing sunglasses. I smiled, just to let her know I was sympathetic.

"You have no idea," she said, smiling back.

I gave her the pile of change I had in my pocket, maybe about seventy cents total, and took my wallet from my back pocket. There were nine singles. I gave took them out, folded them and gave her the money. "Here you go. It's all I have."

Her smile widened and she took the cash. "Thank you so much, you've been such a help."

"It's okay. I've been in some bad situations myself, with no one to help. Take it easy."

She went back to her car and I had some of my coffee while I smoked. Their car started up behind me and I turned in time to see them drive by. The guy at the wheel offered a shy wave and said, "Thank you." I waved back.

I hoped nine dollars would get them to Whiting; it's only a little more than three gallons of gas

New Medal of Honor

2010-07-08T08:58:00.001-04:00

Wow. Last night I checked my email and, lo and behold, received a beta key to play the new Medal of Honor game. I feel so special. Eletronic Arts must have looked at all the shooters I've registered with them over the years (mainly the Battlefield franchise) and said, "Hey! This maniac must do nothing but play games all day." So now I'm testing a bad-ass game months before it hits the shelves.

And by the way, it's awesome.

Amazon can kiss my shiny metal ass!

2010-03-11T12:07:00.002-05:00

I purchased a Samsung 26" LCD HDTV for the bedroom and received it yesterday. It was fucked out of the box. When the power is off, the tv makes an annoying, high-pitched keening sound, akin to the sound a field mouse makes while one of my cats is playfully murdering it. Other than that, it's fine.

I sent an email to customer disservice at Amazon and received a fun reply: basically, fuck you. They told me to go to Samsung, it's not their problem now. Samsung said I need to get an RA, return it to them and wait for it to be fixed.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I buy something from a store and it's broken when I open the box, isn't it said store's responsibility to replace the merchandise or refund the money to me? I've spent thousands of dollars at Amazon in the last couple of years alone and I'm pissed.

This is the best part: at the end of their fuck you response email to me, it says this:

We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company.

Yeah, right.

Valentine's Day

2010-02-18T16:20:00.003-05:00

I think V-Day is a pile of garbage - a lame Hallmark Holiday, like Love Day on the Simpsons; however, since my wife is a stereotypical woman, I must observe it. One Valentine's Day, years ago, I was caught up in a really obnoxious project similar to coordinating the invasion of Normandy, and I forgot all about it.

She never let me forget it.

This year I bought her a pair of platinum earrings, candy, and a card with a Photoshopped, smiling kitten on the cover. I gave her everything Friday night so she could start the weekend happy. It worked.

We had no real plans on Sunday other than laying around the house and hanging out, but then our upstairs toilet broke. I spent Valentine's Day repairing a toilet.

How's that for romance?

The Animal Rescue Site

2010-01-14T11:36:00.002-05:00

The Animal Rescue Site relies on vistors to click the purple "Click Here to Give - It's Free!" button on their homepage. The more clicks they get, the more money corporate sponsors give to feed needy animals. Lately, page visits have dropped, so if you have time, drop by and press the big, purple button. It doesn't cost you anything and you can click as many times as you'd like.

An unexpected new cast member at work...

2010-01-13T16:36:00.003-05:00

I arrived at work today in my usual mood - irritated at the thought of another day in Hell - and was promptly introduced to a new member of the company: Boomer, from Battlestar Galactica. And I mean the new BSG, the good one. Athena, Sharon Valerii, Number 8, what have you.

No, Grace Park has not joined the glorious field of mail order merchandising, but this woman looks a lot like her. Wow. IMMD.

Anniversary

2010-01-07T10:13:00.004-05:00

Yesterday was my thirteenth wedding anniversary. It was also the eighteenth anniversary of when the wife and I first got together. I've had a rough time getting used to being at work again, after being off from work for a week and a half over the holidays, so I was in a pretty crappy mood when I got home last night. That changed when I stopped to think about things.

My mother and father just separated after forty years or marriage. My sister and brother in law are also in the process of calling it quits. A friend of mine is still single after divorcing her husband a few years ago, two other close friends are single and can't seem to find the right person.

I am truly blessed that I found my soul mate, and that we've managed to stay in love for close to two decades. That's all I had to say. Carry on.

Hamlet

2009-11-23T15:01:00.007-05:00

On Saturday, I had the pleasure of seeing Jude Law in Hamlet on Broadway. This is my absolute favorite play by Shakespeare and Jude Law is one of my favorite actors, so it was really cool. We were in the seventh row, orchestra, and through most of the play he was only about twenty feet from us. This was nice for my wife, too, because she has a heavy-duty crush on him.

It was amazing. The dude had to be the most intense Hamlet I've ever seen, and all of the other actors in the play were just superb.

This was all tempered by the fact that we had to go to New York City to see it. I hate that place. There are too many people in Manhattan. There are too many cars in Manhattan. The warren of streets makes me feel like I'm trapped in a maze. I just plain despise it.

We went with my mother because at 60 years old, she's suddenly obsessed with New York. She made lunch reservations at this little place called Rachel's on 9th because it's not "touristy." When we finished lunch we had an hour and a half to kill, so where does she want to go? Times Fucking Square. Because Times Square is not "touristy." At all. So we walked up 40th to 8th and found ourselves immersed in a cauldron of humanity. I had a full blown anxiety attack but kept quiet about it. As we walked my mother pointed at every single fucking thing she could. "Look, there's MTV! Look, that's where the Virgin Mega Store used to be! Look, there's the M&M Store!"

That was the highlight of the walk. She made us go into the M&M store. Two floors of M&M merchandising and teeming with scumbag people. I pushed myself back against the farthest wall and performed deep breathing exercises. It was a nightmare.

When the play ended we had to walk back through several blocks of theater foot traffic to the parking lot. I drove west and asked my mother to tell me where I needed to go to get back to the Lincoln Tunnel.

"I don't know. I always park at Port Authority. I don't know how to get back from this way."

Icing on the cake. I followed a long line of cars down 41st and eventually came to the tunnel. I hate the city.

More Writing

2009-11-12T15:10:00.009-05:00

Yesterday, my novel reached 222 pages and 63,802 words. I've been writing since March of this year, so I don't know if this is good or not.

Technically, I started this novel about twenty years ago, but as a 19 year old kid, my life experience was severely limited and thus the story turned out to be crap. Two hundred and some odd pages of hand-written crap. And no, not front and back. Thank Christ.

Pesky little things get in the way of writing: work, spending two + hours a day in the car driving to and from work (although this is my most productive thinking time), spending time with my wife after work and on weekends, and doing all that annoying crap at home that won't get done if I don't do it.

Wow, that was a redundant sentence.

Anyway, a person I know (friend no longer fits our relationship description; he is someone I'm forced to spend time with on occasion) is obsessed with word count. He used to go on and on about how many thousands of words he'd written so far and was generally impressed with himself. Then I read the bulk of the novel; my mother always told me if I had nothing nice to say...

During the period when I was actually friends with this person, I went to him for advice and ideas when I was stuck. He was usually helpful and helped aid my creative process. On occasion I gave him stories I was working on for critique, and he always sent them back to me with loads of constructive criticism. He was helpful.

Then something changed. He became a bitter person. He rarely had something nice to say about anything. He was unbearable to be around. Silly me, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and tried to be friendly. When my novel took off this summer, I sent him the first chapter and asked for a critique. "Keep in mind this is only a first draft," I told him. "I'd just like your input on the general story so far."

Months go by. During a period of writer's block in September, I edited Chapter 1 until it no longer resembled the original I sent him. Between snotty comments to me and my wife, he always assured me that he was still looking at it and would send a marked up version back right away. "Don't go nuts," I said, "it's just the first draft." Well, he did go nuts. He emailed it back to me a few weeks ago, just as I was getting back into the swing of working on this book again.

It was a nightmare. Rather than constructive criticism I received nasty, sarcastic comments. Reading it made me feel depressed, then angry, then murderous. This came from a person that was my friend for close to sixteen years! How could he be so rude, so mean? Listen, I've been critiqued before and I know how to take it. I've posted stories on different writing websites and dealt with some heavy criticism, and the critics were valid; but none of this person's so-called "input" made any sense!

I learned from that misadventure. In the future, I'll ask the Interweb for help if I'm desperate; the Interweb, a place where anonymous people are known for tearing others a new asshole without being asked to in the first place. I spend all of my time in the car listening to music that inspires me to think about this book and come up with ideas on my own; it was nice to have someone to bounce thoughts off of from time to time, but that's gone now. I'm the author of this damned novel anyway, so it's my responsibility to come up with ideas and write them.

It's just sad. We were friends for a long time, and this experience made me realize that's gone now. It reminds of that scene in The Shawshank Redemption, after Andy escapes and Red says, "I guess I just miss my friend." Shit happens.

Veteran's Day

2009-11-11T09:13:00.003-05:00

Growing up I was surrounded by veterans: both of my grandfathers served in the Navy during WWII, one uncle was in the Navy and another in the Marine Corps during Vietnam; all four of them chose to enlist and fight, none were drafted. When my time came I chose the Marine Corps, but certain events conspired against me and I never served. This is something I've spent my adult life regretting.

So, to those of you out there who have served or currently are in our great nation's armed forces, I say "Thank you."

The Watchmen and a New Dawn (Red, that is)

2009-11-09T16:40:00.003-05:00

I know, as usual I'm late to the party. Last night I rented The Watchmen on-demand and was so happy with the results. I've been waiting for this movie for decades and they did not let me down. It hit all of the salient points of the story and changed very little (if you consider the climax to be important, you may disagree with me. I always thought that weird "dropping a monster on NYC and killing a bunch of people with its psychic screams" idea to be a little off the wall. That's just me. A friend of mine is obsessed with the Black Ship-pirate story-whatever the hell you want to call it, but the movie would have been five hours long if it was included.

It looked just like the graphic novel. The characters were perfect. Jackie Earl Haley spoke the way I heard Rorschach's voice when I read it. Jeffrey Dean Morgan was the Comedian, and Malin Akerman was as sexy as Silk Specter. Absolutely amazing.

On the "Hollywood lost its imagination and has not an ounce of creativity left" front, they're remaking Red Dawn. And it takes place in Detroit. Because there are wolverines in Detroit, so the high school football team would have that name and it makes sense. What do I know, I grew up in a Jersey beach town and our mascot was a panther. Don't remember ever seeing panthers wandering the streets. Guess I'm just kinda pissed. I loved that movie.

I only have one thing to say

2009-11-05T10:20:00.001-05:00

Fucking Yankees.

2009 Elections

2009-11-04T09:53:00.005-05:00

Well, New Jersey has a new governor, but I don't feel all that great about it. The election reminded me a lot of the South Park school mascot elections: our only choices were a Giant Douche (Corzine) and a Turd Sandwich (Christie). Don't get me wrong - Chris Christie, aside from having a great first name - did some wonderful things here as Attorney General: he prosecuted and won 130 convictions against corrupt politicians, launched a huge investigation into fraud and political corruption, and went after the scumbag gang bangers in this state like an angry pit bull. Conversely, Christie was the top fundraiser for the 2000 Bush campaign, and as a result, Karl Rove passed his resume along through the George W. Bush good ole boy network to get him appointed as the US AG in New Jersey. Oh, and Christie is also related to Tino Fiumara, a high-ranking member of the New Jersey Genovese crime family. That's the mob, in case you're wondering. Hey, I know, blood relation doesn't mean anything; I'm related to my father but we get along like cats and dogs.

Let's see, what has Corzine done during his tenure as New Jersey's governor? Nothing. I didn't vote for him. He came into office in 2005 and planned to apply private sector business sense to the deficit issues here. Rather than lay off thousands of state employees occupying useless positions and collecting large, multiple salaries and pensions, he raised the sales tax by 1% and tried to increase tolls on the Garden State Parkway and New Jersey Turnpike by 800%. 800%! Fortunately, the toll hike failed, otherwise I might be working at MacDonald's right now. Corzine also suspended the property tax rebate, caused a government shutdown in 2006, and forced through legislation to build a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River to Manhattan. And nobody wants it but Corzine and his cronies. It will cost $8.7 billion dollars. That's billion, with a b. $3 billion will also come from federal funds, so not only is New Jersey paying for this, but taxpayers throughout the U.S. as well.

Chris Daggett, another guy with a great first name, ran on the independent ticket, but since this is not Minnesota and he's not a former actor and pro wrestler, he didn't figure into the fray too much. He campaigned to raise taxes. Really. Did he honestly think any sane New Jersey resident would vote for him?

I yearn for an election when I don't have to vote for the lesser of two evils. Will it ever happen? I'm not holding my breath.

Writing

2009-10-14T09:41:00.003-04:00

I have been writing like crazy lately, and god damn it feels good. Last night I worked for a solid two and a half hours and cranked out some great stuff; at least it felt good. When I edit it might all be crap, but for now I'm happy.

And to think, all it took was a new genre to break my decade-long writers block. For so many years I wrote speculative fiction, because, well, that's what I've always read and what influenced me. Maybe I found my true calling.

2009-10-08T10:20:00.004-04:00

How will I die? Your Result: You will be murdered. This doesn't guarantee pain and suffering, but it will be at the hands of another. Perhaps the vile deeds of a past life will attribute to this horrific demise. Do not fear murder. There is a rare epiphany that comes from this type of death. You will see it in the last moments.
You will die while having sex.
You will die in a car accident.
You will die in a nuclear holocaust.
You will die from a terminal illness.
You will die while saving someone's life.
You will die in your sleep.
You will die of boredom.
How will I die? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

I'm sure I've pissed off plenty of people over the past 39 years. But...murdered?

First runner up is the best, though. I'm thinking I'd rather die that way.

Thanks, Jim.

Wolfenstein 2009

2009-09-21T15:54:00.006-04:00

Got my copy of Wolfenstein on Saturday and played it all weekend. It totally rocks, and I love the fact that, seventeen years after playing Wolfenstein 3D, I'm still playing the franchise. It's like Grand Theft Auto 3 set in WWII Germany - minus the tricked out cars, and the Mafia, and the Chinese Triad, and the Yakuza, and the god cheat where you can go to the highest point on the map and pick off random people with your sniper rifle, then blow up the police cruisers and helicopters with the rocket launcher.

Am I the only person who felt guilty after doing that? I know they were only computer generated NPCs, but seriously, after watching the twentieth hooker's head explode, I always got this creepy feeling inside. Kinda like in the original Sims, when I'd lock my Sim in a room and start taking things away until they pissed on the floor and finally died. I swear, I never pulled the wings off of flies or fried ants with a magnifying glass as a child...

Okay, maybe it's not like Grand Theft Auto 3 set in WWII Germany, but it still kicks some serious ass. I swore I wouldn't play another WWII game because the genre is getting so stale; but come on, it's Wolfenstein!!!

Is this a bad thing?

2009-09-11T10:13:00.002-04:00

I've been working on this urban fantasy/hard-boiled novel for the past several months, and today, being the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, brought a question to mind.

In the universe of this novel, the attacks never happened. During a bizarre dream sequence the protagonist lives through our universe, where his life is completely normal and on September 11, 2001, he sees two planes crash into the Twin Towers and the chaos that follows.

Last night, Fox reran last season's finale of Fringe. In the end of the episode, Olivia unwittingly travels through a portal into a parallel dimension, and looks out the window of a skyscraper she's in, only to realize she is in one of the towers of the World Trade Center. This pissed off a lot of people I talked to after the episode first ran last season, but I didn't see the big deal. Maybe I'm just callous. I don't think so, since I live within spitting distance of Manhattan and was directly affected by the whole fucking thing.

My question is, does my story somehow desecrate the memory of 9/11/01 but erasing it from the universe, only to make it happen as some sort of bizarre dream to someone?

Comic Con 2009

2009-07-27T16:03:00.005-04:00

I've never been to a convention in my entire life, but only because I have no time and despise air travel. However, I do know for a fact the events like this are not news worthy to mainstream America. Comic book people just aren't a part of what most people would refer to as "normal society." I know. I am one of the outcasts. This year, I saw a lot of entertainment news coverage of Comic Con (no, I don't watch crap like E! News, but my wife does, so it seeps into my brain.) I'm blaming it all on this:

Apparently, doable women like Megan Fox are now appearing at Comic conventions, probably for some lame cross-promotion of crappy, Hollywood blockbusters. I guess this is great for the conventions because it brings more mainstream media focus to them, but at the same time it annoys me. Conventions are a geek thing, and it feels like the rest of the world is co-opting them from us. It reminds me of the late 80's, early 90's, when circuses like Lolapalooza brought alternative music to the mainstream, and suddenly every guido in Seaside Heights, NJ was listening to Jane's Addiction and Rollins Band. That was our music: the outcasts, the punks, the disenfranchised and disassociated freaks of the world.

This video hit close to home

2009-07-13T09:54:00.003-04:00

As an FPS addict I understand this all too well. Borrowed from John Scalzi.

I was hoping for better odds than this.

2009-07-07T11:37:00.004-04:00

61%

::SHUDDER::

2009-07-02T15:43:00.002-04:00

All the wrong people wear sheer clothing...

District 9

2009-06-11T10:43:00.006-04:00

Wow. Jim posted the trailer for District 9 yesterday and I couldn't believe how cool it looks. Better yet, a friend of mine sent me to the original short that inspired the film, Live in Joburg, directed by Neill Blomkamp. Check it out.

Non Sequitur

2009-06-10T11:22:00.016-04:00

I was originally planning to write about Edison, NJ, the town where I work. It's kind of a crappy town as far as I'm concerned, but then I thought about the history of the place. Right across the street from my building is Thomas Edison Park, where his original home and lab still stand. Hey, I work across the street from the birthplace of the electric light bulb. Pretty cool.

Also, where the park is today used to be the Nixon Nitratrion Works. My building is located on Nixon Lane. And the area of Edison I work in is referred to as Nixon. It turns out that the family of Louis Nixon, captain, 2nd Battalion, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne, owned the Nitration Works here, and Major Dick Winters came to work for him after the war. In case you never saw Band of Brothers, that's who these two gentlemen are (and in Nixon's case, were.) Not long after I started working here, I noticed that a new sign was added to the street sign for Nixon Lane. It says, "Dedicated to Major Richard Winters, 101st Airborne, US Army." Again, pretty cool. I've read Band of Brothers, Winter's version, Beyond the Band of Brothers, and watched the miniseries over and over again, so I was impressed.

Then Jim wrote this. Now I just feel stabby, or shooty, or plain old fucking nukie. I've barely eaten anything in the past 48 hours and my stomach feels like it's trying to consume itself. So far today, all I've consumed are two green tea extract pills, a shake consisting of 78 g protein, one tsp creatine, one and a half tsp l-glutamine, and a low-sugar yogurt. I can look forward to an apple and two servings of cashews in about fifteen minutes.

The point is, I have no fucking patience for Pastor Wiley Drake and his ilk right now. When I read this story I wanted to use "imprecatory prayer" to have God send some demon to anally rape this bastard with a red-hot fire poker while making him watch every piece of news footage regarding President Obama in existence. I'm done with these fundie scumbags and have reached the point where I wish bodily harm on all of them.

My philosophy on life is live and let live. Worship your God however you see fit, just don't infringe on any one's happiness or well-being in the process. Have all the crazy delusions you want about how people should be living their lives, just shut the fuck up about it. Don't praise you psychopath brethren for murdering an innocent doctor who was operating legally according to the laws of his state and this nation. And don't you dare threaten the life of the President of the United States. I don't give a fuck what your political or religious values are; don't wish for the deaths of people, and don't praise the murderers who commit these crimes. I'm sorry, but I don't believe in a God who condones this type of behavior, let alone carry out the orders from these maniacs.

The God I believe in just wants to us act right. He doesn't care if you're gay, watch porn, do drugs, or gamble. He doesn't care if you have impure thoughts, touch yourself or have sex outside the "sanctity" of marriage. And he doesn't send people to "Hell" when they've done something terrible. I believe they just come back and repeat it all over again. As a matter of fact, I don't think Hell even exists. I see God as the Great Teacher. Fuck up, and you get to repeat grade Life all over again until you get it right.

In closing, I guess my point is simply this: Pastor Wiley, go fuck yourself. And murdering asshole Scott Roeder, I hope you enjoy getting gang-raped on a regular basis in prison.

If there are any spelling or grammar mistakes in this, that's because I'm too hungry to spend the time proofing it. Sorry, I'm gonna go eat "lunch."

RIP David Carradine

2009-06-05T15:54:00.004-04:00

Caine, Bill, David Carradine died yesterday in Thailand. He was found hanging in his hotel room. It sucks when someone feels so miserable that they want to die; I just hope that's all this was. The alternative is just...well, embarassing.

Bubba Burgers

2009-05-26T09:43:00.005-04:00

I generally despise frozen hamburgers, but for some reason my wife insists on buying them every time we have a barbecue. For Memorial Day, I insisted that she let me get chop meat and make some decent hamburgers, and amazingly enough she relented. Then my sister-in-law called and said she was bringing frozen burgers.

Ugh.

Here's the thing. I eat like a bird during the week, so on weekends - especially barbecue-type weekends, I want to eat like a hog. Lame frozen burgers don't do it for me.

Enter Bubba Burgers. 1/3 lb of heavenly goodness. No thawing, no burger bowls, and they taste like real hamburgers. Keep it in mind for your next barbecue.

Reminiscing

2009-05-20T10:50:00.037-04:00

I'm listening to a play list of old school music on the IPod and it struck me how powerful music can be. Different songs pop up and each one causes a flood of memories into my mind; incredibly specific memories at that.

The Sun & the Moon - Peace in our Time
Such a strange, random memory: waking up on a spring morning in 1988 and debating whether or not I should go to school. I was a senior in high school and most of the year was over, so motivation to go was low on my list of priorities. Then this song comes on the radio. "Holy crap! The Chameleons have a new album!" The song ended and the DJ announced that it was Mark Burgess from the Chameleons and this was his new band. I had no idea the Chameleons broke up, and this was back before the Interweb made such useless info so readily available. So I blew off school, went out and bought the album.

Dumptruck - Back Where I Belong
I was fifteen years old and my parents were away for the weekend. Instead of partying like a normal kid I discovered my mother's collection of Vonnegut novels from college. I picked up Cat's Cradle and read it cover to cover in one cold, winter afternoon, listening to the radio. This song came on toward the end, when the world is turning to crystal or whatever it was that ended the world. It's been a long time so I don't remember Vonnegut's usual, ludicrous ending too well.

The Pixies - Monkey Gone to Heaven
The Cure toured in the summer of 1989 for Disintegration and two bands opened for them at Giants Stadium: The Pixies and Love and Rockets. I went to the show with my first openly gay friend, Chris, and we drove up in his neon orange VW Karman Gia, passing a bottle of blackberry brandy back and forth the whole time. I'd never heard of The Pixies but I'll always remember sitting in the nosebleed section at the exact opposite side of the stage, looking at the crowd on the floor with a pair of field glasses when they played this song. Out of thousands of people on the field, I spotted my best friend, David, right away. Serendipity.

The Cure - The Perfect Girl
August, 1987, Madison Square Garden. They were touring for Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. On the train ride into the city I saw this blond girl with some friends and I fixated on her, at the expense of Michelle, the girl I was supposed to be hooking up with that night. I saw the blond in Penn Station again, and then during the show she was only a few seats away from us. We made eye contact several times but I didn't have the balls to talk to her. When they played The Perfect Girl she looked back at me and smiled. When the encores ended and the lights came up, I waited for her before I stepped out onto the stairs and walked along side her. "Hi," I said. "Hi." Lame, I know. Seventeen years old, what can I say. "My name's Chris." She smiled. "I'm Sue." As we stepped out into the concourse I said, "You're such a strange girl the way you look like you do. You're such a strange girl I want to be with you." She laughed. We were together for about a month but stayed close friends for years.

Ministry - Everyday is Halloween
Halloween night, 1984, this song came on the radio and it became my anthem: "Well any time, any place, anywhere that I go all the people seem to stop and stare they say 'Why are you dressed like it's Halloween? you look so absurd, you look so obscene'" After that night, when some asshole asked me why I looked like a freak, my response was, "Every day is Halloween."

Siouxsie and the Banshees - Song from the Edge of the World
Once again, summer of 1987. They released this single on its own and used it to support a summer tour, much like New Order did that same summer with True Faith/1963. Siouxsie came to what was then called the Paramount Theater, beneath Madison Square Garden, so my friend Bill and I got up at four in the morning to get tickets the day they went on sale. No one else was waiting for them. The tickets went on sale at eight a.m., so we were there four over four hours. When the guy finally showed up and we gave him our cash for the tickets, I asked him how close we could get to the stage. He laughed and told us the Paramount was general admission. Talk about crestfallen. On our way back up the Garden State Parkway a tire on my car blew out and we had to hitchhike to the next exit so I could call a friend of mine to come out with a pipe. The lug nuts were so rusty that I needed leverage to get them off the wheel. Ah, beat up old cars...

Peter Himmelman - Waning Moon
The guitar solo at the end of this song breaks my heart every time I hear it, even to this day. Her name was Shannon. Enough said.

Wiseass Behavior

2009-05-12T15:24:00.004-04:00

I was walking down the hall at work a little while ago and the insane traffic coordinator stopped me. She's an ultra-neocon and devoutly religious (that's not the crazy part, I just don't agree with it.)

ITC: What's this? (motioning at my arm.)
Me: It's my arm.
ITC: No, that...thing. What does it mean?
Me: Do you mean the tattoo? I used to be in a biker gang.
ITC: No, really...
Me: Really. It was a Satanic biker gang. A Satanic, left-wing biker gang.
ITC: Okay...
Me: A Satanic, left-wing biker gang that supports socialized medicine. We worship Barack Obama.
(ITC is walking away at this point.)
Me: (Loud enough for most of the office to hear.) A Satanic, left-wing biker gang that supports socialized medicine, worships Barack Obama, and we killed and ate small children.
My Cubicle Neighbor: You didn't hurt cats, did you?
Me: Of course not! What kind of Satanic, left-wing biker gang that supports socialized medicine, worships Barack Obama, and kills and eats small children would hurt cats?!

Darkness

2009-04-29T12:41:00.002-04:00

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires--and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings--the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,
And men were gather'd round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash--and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twin'd themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless--they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought--and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails--men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress--he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,
And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died--
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless--
A lump of death--a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge--
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them--She was the Universe.

-Lord Byron

Things that annoy me to no end

2009-04-08T16:14:00.003-04:00

People who return my emails with a phone call. If I wanted to talk to you, I would have called you in the first place.

I have a vendor who does this to me every time I email him, and then I have to write furious notes while he babbles away. If he just returned my emails, I could take my time and deal with the issues at my leisure. In addition to this annoying habit, the guy calls me on and off all day to complain about all the bullshit in his life, other people at my company, etc. Like I have time for that.

I already have a wife who puts me through this every day. I don't need another wife, especially a sixty-something year old male wife.

I'm thankful I have a job, but...do I have to like it?

2009-04-06T15:06:00.015-04:00

Ten years ago I was smack in the middle of my first foray into the business world, working for one of the early ecommerce companies on the Interweb (no, not Amazon.) Before that, I spent about five years working in a dim projection booth for Loews Theaters in blissful solitude, alone save for the sound of eight Simplex projector heads and the rattle of 35 mm film as it ran through them. Most of those five years I was in college, so I spent the majority of days and nights in the booth doing schoolwork, reading or writing. During the milder months I'd go up onto the roof with a pair of binoculars and watch the harness races across the mall parking lot at Freehold Raceway, or just hang out, smoke cigarettes and enjoy the weather. If the pay and hours were better I would have never left.

When I left that place and went to work for the ecommerce company, it was a rude awakening. Instead of having a giant projection booth all to myself, I was crammed into an office with two other people. They were two of the nicest guys I've ever had the pleasure to work with, but still. I could only take breaks when someone told me to, and I had to stick to a timetable. And there was no way in Hell I could read all day long. I actually had to work. Do you believe that shit?

As for hanging out on the roof, it probably goes without saying that they would've fire me, had I tried.

Still, I was making more money, had paid vacations and holidays, and health insurance. That was a relief. I did not have any insurance from the time I was eighteen until twenty-six or so. I no longer had to fear getting into a car accident on my way to work, because now someone else would pay for it! Well, most of it, anyway.

It sucked. Eight and a half hours a day under pallid, florescent lights, packed like sardines into an office with two other people. Frank, an older guy in my office, used to claim that "people aren't meant to live like this! Stuck in an office with this horrible lighting, asking the Wicked Witch 'How high?' when she tells us to jump. It's just wrong!"

The "Wicked Witch" was our whirling bitch of a boss, Eileen. Man, I hated her. She'd been a stewardess...sorry, flight attendant throughout most of her adult life and was fired when she got too old. How she became the manager of a purchasing department was beyond me. This was around the time that Office Space came out in theaters. I remember sitting there, watching the movie and laughing one moment and fuming the next. It was too real for me.

Over the next couple of years my friends and I came up with all manner of ridiculous plans to avoid working for someone else. We wanted to start our own company. It was the .com boom and we figured there was lots of money to be made. One guy wanted to start a series of websites that sold only one thing, like whiteoxfordshirts.com or some other crap. Others wanted to start pr0n sites but all were ignorant of the laws regarding pr0n around the country. I started designing websites and doing back-end programming, and left the ecommerce company for a marketing company.

Once again, eight and a half hours a day (usually more) under florescent lights, this time in a cubicle. The work was fun and it was one of those companies where idiots rode scooters around in the halls and people played frisbee in the parking lot. I took up golf because I would go to the range down the street and hit a bucket full of balls on my lunch hour, imagining my asshole boss' face on each and every one. I developed a great long game.

The .com boom stopped booming and my whole department was laid off in August, 2001. Two weeks later was 9/11/01 and there was no work to be found for many months afterward, so I spent a year on unemployment.

It was one of the best years of my life.

I worked on our new house, on the yard, and spent hours every day at the computer, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and playing video games. It's been my life's ambition since to find someone, other than the State of New Jersey, to pay me to do that for a living. No luck so far. In September, 2002 I found an importing job for a small company, did that for almost two years, and now work as an importer for a much larger company. It's been five years now. It's mind-numbingly boring. I stare at reports all day and answer irritating questions from the people under me.

It's a paycheck so theoretically, I have no right to complain. Like when I was a kid and my mother told me to stop complaining, people are starving in ____ (use whatever third world hellhole from the '70s and '80s you prefer; I didn't care then and don't care now.) But I will complain, whenever I feel like it, because this is such a lame existence. There is a different person in my office for every pet peeve I have: a loud typer, someone who talks to himself, someone who talks too loud, too ofter and laughs far too much; hell, these fuckers talk all the goddamned time and I have to listen to my Ipod all day.

One woman asks obvious questions whenever I do something. "Are you making coffee?" No, I'm skinning bodies to make lampshades you fuckwit! Of course I'm making coffee!

I guess it beats some of the alternatives. Like crackwhore. Or assistant to crackwhore.

Introducing CADIE

2009-04-01T09:36:00.003-04:00

"...the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions."

I'm assuming this is Google's April Fools Day prank for 2009; otherwise we should brace ourselves. The world's first AI is female and likes "cmputrs (duh) sunsets rainbows ponies and after 1 netwide image search PANDAS PANDAS PANDAS ther SO CUTE!!! omg!"

I'm scared...

horses are better dressed than most knights...

2009-03-27T15:00:00.002-04:00

Anticrisis Useful Inexpensive Tabs‏

horses are better dressed than most knights. A man that rich should have no problem finding gold

Vi ch agra $ 1. 2 Ci wf alias $2 . 05

A woman. He moved closer. And beautiful. And of course a knight of the Kingsguard must accompany the little queen, and of course it is the that holy place when the moon has drowned and come again we shall make ourselves a worthy king

I don't what any of this prose has to do with selling ED drugs, but the repeated us of the phrase "And of course..." is intriguing.

The 5 Stages of Grief

2009-03-13T16:47:00.002-04:00

I've been writing like crazy the last few weeks, but last night I realized that I lost all the work that I'd done in the past couple of days. Fortunately, I have everything backed up in three different places, but the stuff I wrote yesterday and the day before was really good.

Denial:
Last night. "No, it has to be somewhere." Checked the pen drive, the external hard drive, the notebook, attachments to emails. Nothing.

Anger:
Sitting in bed watching House reruns, finding no humor at all in his sarcastic remarks. My ears were bright red. I was pissed.

Bargaining:
"Fuck. God, please let the files be on my hard drive at work. Please, please..." Nope. Nothing.

Depression:
Pouting at my desk this morning when I realized all hope was lost. I almost felt like crying.

Acceptance:
Came about five minutes ago. There's not a fucking thing I can do about it, and I'm happy with everything I've written previous to this loss. Oh well. I'll go out and get drunk tonight.

Stupid Memes...

2009-02-25T15:02:00.005-05:00

Jim at Stonekettle Station posted this and I fell for it:

"Create a random album cover for your new fictional band.
Go to “Wikipedia.” Hit "random" and the first article you get is the name of your band. Then go to "Random Quotations" and the last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. Then, go to Flickr and click on "Explore the Last Seven Days" and the third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
Arrange the pieces using the image editor of your choice."

I thought this actually came out cool; very indie rock. If only I had Photoshop at work, I could have made a much better cover.

Oh, the irony

2009-02-16T11:23:00.005-05:00

Last week, from out of nowhere it appears I sprained my left wrist. I have no recollection as to how it happened, but Tuesday night I was in bed and when I stretched, my wrist suddenly screamed "What the fuck are you doing?!" My best guess is that it's a result of lifting at the gym and waited until I was home in bed that night before making itself know to me.

The bitch of it is my creative juices, so to speak, decided to make an unannounced appearance last week, and all I've wanted to do since then is write. Which hurts. I spent $24 on a wrist brace on Wednesday morning and it helps, a little.

I've always felt that writing hurts; just not physically and not this bad.

The End of an Era

2009-01-21T14:43:00.010-05:00

On January 19, 2009, the only altrock station on the Jersey Shore, 106.3, changed its format to Top 40 trash. My wife called me and told me to listen to it. She was hoping her radio was fucked up and she was actually on the wrong station. When I tuned in on Monday night, driving the Garden State Parkway after a long day at work, I was greeted with Ludicris.

Ludicris. For fuck's sake.

In 1984, I was 14 years old and spinning the dial through the FM band, desperately searching for something that was not Classic Rock or MTV crap, and I stumbled upon 106.3, WHTG. I do believe the song playing was The Cure, "Killing an Arab." I was hooked. That station changed the way I listened to music. Many a night I sat in my room over the next few years, taping songs off the radio from bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Killing Joke, Big Country, and Depeche Mode, just to name a few. I spent all of my money buying albums (yes, vinyl) from stores like Galaxy Records and Silvertunes, usually from the import section because most punk and post-punk was considered "import" for some reason. On the counters at these stores was a constant supply of FM 106.3 WHTG stickers, in black, red and white. I wanted a car so bad, just so I could put a 106.3 sticker on the bumper.

In the early 90s, I got the know many of the DJs. They made their money working at local clubs most nights of the week. Over the years I won concert tickets and miscellaneous stuff from call-in contests. In 2001 they went through a minor format change that incorporated more mainstream "alt" music, but you could still count on them to play good music. My wife and I always listened to "The Saturday Morning Breakfast Club" when we went shopping every weekend.

When I got home Monday night, I went to the 106.3 website. There is only a placeholder now, with a picture of 50 Cent, Pink, Justin Timberlake and some loser from Fallout Boy. And the name has been changed to "Hit 106."

Yeah. I'd like to hit 106. Or whomever is responsible for this travesty.

When I checked my email a few minutes later I had an invitation to the Class of 1988 twenty-one year reunion. What happened to twenty years? And the dopes don't even know where it will be yet!

Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T11:23:00.006-05:00

Well, here it is. At 12:01 pm EST, the world will change. The snow will melt, it will be perpetually 78 degrees outside, and all the flowers will bloom. George Jr. will be on his way back to Texas and a New Day will dawn on the United States of America. The economy will be fixed, Israelis and Palestinians will shake hands and hug in Gaza; terrorists around the world will pack it up and Iraq will suddenly be able to govern itself. Dogs and cats will be friends. Peace and Harmony and all that bullshit.

Yeah, I know - after 8 years of the Bush administration, it is a new day. When you have an abusive father, you're happy when he leaves and your cold, distant mother is there. At least she's not beating the fuck out of you.

Historically it's a big deal; he's technically black, half black at least, and that is a first for an American president. Realistically it changes nothing. He's just another politician, like all of those who came before him, and the only difference is his skin is darker. Obama is not a miracle worker. The Democratic legislature are not miracle workers and they are the ones with the true power to create and change law.

Hey, I admit it: I voted for the guy. I just don't see the big deal.

Happy Holidays

2008-12-23T16:02:00.002-05:00

I'm out of here in one hour, and I promised myself that the only thing I will do on the computer until I go back to work is play my new video games, so...

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous(?) Kwanzaa, and a Happy New Year to all!

If I forgot any holidays, please accept my apologies. Be safe everyone.

Are Labor Unions Obsolete?

2008-12-22T13:41:00.013-05:00

I think so.

Frankly, I don't see a use for them in this day and age. We no longer live in the era of Robber Barons; every state has a department of labor to deal with employers treating employees unfairly. We don't need unions to look out for the workers any more. Get over it.

The Big 3 automotive companies in the US are paying members of the UAW something along the lines of $70/hour to drive cars off the line and park them, or better yet, to sit in union halls or in their living rooms watching Jerry Springer. Now the Big 3 are failing and demand handouts from you and me, the taxpayers. So for making stupid decisions, overpaying their union employees and manufacturing an inferior product, they are given a pat on the back. That's fucking rich.

Honda, Toyota and BMW, some of the best quality cars in the world, pay their non-union employees approximately $35/hour. Those workers pay into their benefits, the way just about everyone I know gets their benefits. These companies are all suffering right now, but they are still getting by and not asking the Feds for money. Now, I don't pretend to be an economist, but it seems to me that these guys might be on to something.

Can someone give me a compelling reason as to why we need labor unions anymore? I can't think of one. I get a raise every year because I work for it. If I do not work for it, then I'm fucked. I pay something along lines of $200/month for medical and dental, just like most people I know. If my company decides to replace me with a robot, then I lose my job; I don't get paid 95% of my salary to sit at home and do nothing. If I'm not happy with the way my company is treating me, then I either fuck off and deal with it, or I look for another job - I don't "strike". My father belonged to a union until he retired a few years ago. When I was in high school, the gangsters that ran his local decided they needed to further line the coffers at the union hall, and announced a strike. This happened right before Thanksgiving. Great time, by the way. It did not end until after Christmas, and I ditched school most days in December so I could work double shifts and give my mother money to have Christmas that year for my little sister. That's a great system you guys have there, let me tell you.

My wife worked for the biggest state university in New Jersey several years ago. She was and still is a scientist. She had to leave for the private sector because, well, working for the state means you eventually deal with a union of some sort. Before she left, a union was pushing for the school's employees to become part of their union. It was put to a vote. The union lost. They then went around the university harassing people into voting "yes", and there was another vote. Again, they lost. When she was leaving there was a third vote coming down the pike, but she'd had enough.

I'm sorry, the day of the union has come and gone. That's my opinion. If it makes you unhappy, deal with it.

I'm not a stupid as I think I am

2008-12-16T14:11:00.003-05:00

Grade 5 TAKS Science - Administered Spring 2003

Score report for

Item	Objective	Student	Correct	Student's
Number	Measured	Expectations	Answer	Answer

1	01	5.1 (A)	D	+
2	03	5.8 (C)	H	+
3	04	4.11 (A)	B	+
4	01	5.4 (A)	J	+
5	01	5.3 (B)	C	+
6	02	5.9 (B)	F	+
7	01	5.2 (B)	B	+
8	03	5.5 (B)	F	+
9	01	5.4 (A)	B	+
10	02	5.9 (A)	F	+
11	02	3.8 (B)	C	+
12	04	5.12 (A)	J	+
13	04	3.11 (C)	D	+
14	01	5.2 (A)	H	+
15	02	2.9 (B)	D	+
16	03	5.8 (B)	F	G
17	01	5.2 (C)	D	+
18	02	3.8 (C)	G	+
19	04	5.6 (B)	A	+
20	01	5.2 (C)	2	+
21	03	5.7 (B)	A	+
22	04	3.11 (D)	H	+
23	02	5.10 (B)	A	+
24	04	5.11 (A)	G	F
25	01	5.2 (A)	B	+
26	04	3.11 (C)	H	+
27	03	3.6 (A)	C	+
28	02	5.9 (A)	G	+
29	01	5.2 (E)	A	+
30	04	3.11 (D)	G	+
31	02	5.5 (A)	B	C
32	02	5.9 (C)	F	+
33	01	5.2 (D)	A	+
34	03	5.7 (A)	G	+
35	04	4.6 (A)	A	+
36	03	5.8 (D)	F	+
37	01	5.2 (A)	B	+
38	03	5.7 (A)	H	F
39	01	5.2 (B)	B	+
40	03	5.7 (D)	G	J

+	=	student's answer correct
NR	=	no response, student did not answer

Your total number of items correct by objective:
Objective 1:	The student will demonstrate an understanding of the nature of science.	13/13
Objective 2:	The student will demonstrate an understanding of the life sciences.	8/9
Objective 3:	The student will demonstrate an understanding of the physical sciences.	6/9
Objective 4:	The student will demonstrate an understanding of the earth sciences.	8/9
		____
Total:		35/40

Your total score would correspond to a Scale Score: 2284.

------------------------------------------------------------------

While I may have answered 35/40 questions correct, I'm suddenly an idiot when it comes to PCs. Last night I sat down to goof off on the Interweb for a while, and suddenly all of these windows started opening. My computer has more trojans and viruses than a Vegas hooker during the AVN convention.

Yes, that was a horrible metaphor, but I'm in a pretty shitty mood right now.

After all this work, the box is still sick, so I'm thinking it's time to format. Again. And this time I might go with Linux, because Linux boxes don't seem to get too sick and apparently you can play Fallout 3 via Wine.

Stolen Book Survey

2008-11-24T10:43:00.016-05:00

I stole this from everyone:

What was the last book you bought?
Two of the Repairman Jack novels by F. Paul Wilson. I can't remember the names off the top of my head.

Name a book you have read MORE than once?
Far too many to name them all...Starship Troopers, easily twenty times. Altered Carbon and Market Forces, Old Man's War, Ghost Brigades. Time Enough for Love, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Past Through Tomorrow, This Perfect Day, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, The Rum Diaries.

Has a book ever fundamentally changed the way you see life?
Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and This Perfect Day. I had this fantastic English Lit teacher, Mrs. DeBarry. She saw that I was a total freak and dealt with a lot of bullshit from the "normal" people in high school, i.e. jocks, preppies, etc. At the beginning of junior year she assigned me these three books, while the remainder of the class all read the same book, probably Catcher in the Rye or something. I guess she was trying to point out that individuality is a great thing, no matter how difficult it seemed at the time. She was the best teacher I ever had in school.

How do you choose a book? (E.g. by cover design and summary, recommendations or reviews?)
Recommendations from people online, or recommendations from Amazon.

Do you prefer Fiction or Non-Fiction?
Mostly fiction. It's what I like and what I write, but there have been some fantastic non-fiction books I've read over the years, usually relating to history: Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose, and Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick. I also loved all of the Norton books by Peter Gethers. I'll admit it, I bawled like a baby while reading The Cat Who'll Live Forever.

What’s more important in a novel, beautiful writing or a gripping plot?
Preferably both, but I suppose a gripping plot might be more important than beautiful writing. Turtledove's Worldwar and Colonization series had great plots and story lines, but the writing was bland. Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea was beautifully written but had the most boring plot ever.

Most loved/memorable character (character/book)
Takeshi Kovacs, Lazarus Long, Jake Barnes.

Which book or books can be found on your nightstand at the moment?
None, I don't read in bed.

What was the last book you’ve read, and when was it?
Ghost Brigades, and I'm still re-reading it.

Have you ever given up on a book half way in?
Naked Lunch, at about 80 pages; Slant, after two chapters, and Accerlando, after maybe 50 pages.

Pet Peeves, Part 1

2008-11-20T12:49:00.002-05:00

People who drive like they have nowhere to go, in rush hour no less. Seriously, if you're on the road at 7:30 in the morning, are you just joyriding? Wtf?!

Convervative Dog is unhappy about the election results...

2008-11-07T11:58:00.002-05:00

Can you blame him? Animals usually have good instincts about people, and they guy he took a chunck out of was a journalist.

It is Done.

2008-11-05T12:57:00.003-05:00

Last night I received my brand-spanking-new copy of Fallout 3. It took about two hours to load on my PC for some reason, so I started playing at around nine p.m. By a little after eleven I finally stopped playing and realized that the election returns should be in and everyone was probably talking about where they demanded recounts, etc. I opened Internet Explorer to look up results and...

Someone broke the Interweb. I swear to Christ, it was broken. I could not load a single site. Even Myspace and Facebook weren't loading. The day had come when the Interweb finally broke.

Nah, it was just high traffic due to the election, so I turned on the idiot box just in time to see McCain's concession speech. I tried to watch Obama's speech, but his people had other people singing, showing music videos on a giant plasma TV and other such nonsense. I'll watch it later when the Interweb is NOT broken.

Congrats, Obama. Now I can say that I have family in the White House. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Vote or Die...or just Vote

2008-11-04T12:47:00.002-05:00

I voted today. Anyone else?

It's been a long time since I voted in a general election (do the names "Clinton" and "Bush Sr." ring any bells?) I was a little confused in the voting machine, and one of the old ladies outside actually asked me if I was okay in there. Yes, I was in there that long.

I resisted the urge to answer, "I'm just trying to figure out how to flush this thing."

Everyone else is doing it...

2008-10-06T13:25:00.002-04:00

Dreams and Television

2008-09-29T09:47:00.002-04:00

I finally got around to watching last week's Fringe last night. Man, that show kicks ass. Anna Torv looks like a younger, hotter Kate Blanchet with a pistol, and Joshua Jackson and John Noble provide some excellent comic relief. This is only the third episode, but so far, it looks pretty good.

For the past several years I've had this recurring nightmare: I'm in college again, and I haven't been to class all semester. In the dream I'm just realizing this and that finals are about to start, so I will fail all of my classes. It's basically the same every dream every time. I'm always younger, my wife (girlfriend at the time) is nowhere to be found and I'm absolutely panicking. This time, I remember that I haven't been to any of my classes in three months. I receive a course catalog in the mail for the next semester (there was no online registration back then, the interweb being very limited at the time.) I'm in my car and I look to my left and there's Carrie. We're both at our current ages, i.e. now. I say to her, "Do I even need to be in college anymore?" She says, "No, you graduated like fifteen years ago." And I say "Thank Christ!"

I'm hoping this dream was my subconscious' way of telling me I should be over whatever anxiety causes these stupid dreams, and this is the last one.

Office Annoyance

2008-09-23T09:51:00.002-04:00

Okay, for those of you out there who are too dense to realize this on your own, let me lay it out for you:

Metal bangle bracelets are NOT cool in the workplace.

A woman wore about 5000 of them today, and all I've heard since 8:50 a.m. is "CLANK CLANK CLANK FUCKING CLANK." Think before you wear something stupid like this to work.

September 11, 2001

2008-09-11T16:28:00.006-04:00

I'm sure just about everyone and his or her mother is writing something like this today, but whatever. I feel like writing about it, and goddammit, I will.

I lost my job two weeks before 9/11/01. We had just bought our house and a brand new car, so the timing was perfect. We came home from a vacation and a friend at work called me: "Chris, I need you to stay calm. They just fired the whole programming department." Two days later, we got into an accident while bringing two of our cats home from being neutered at the vet (not in the new car, thank God.) I trudged through the next week in a fog, doing much-needed landscaping work on the yard. I had just finished planting my last arborvitae in the front yard when four fighters screamed by overhead, followed by the loud "BOOOOOM!" from breaking the sound barrier. "That's odd," I thought, and went to work cleaning up my mess. A few minutes later, my neighbors, two sisters, came back from walking their dogs. One said to me, "Go inside and turn on the TV! We've just been attacked by terrorists!"

I did as I was told, and turned on the tube just in time to see the second tower falling. Then a replay of the first tower falling, then a replay of the second tower falling. I stood there in shock, trying to figure out why the world was ending at this very moment. I called Carrie but couldn't get through. I live about sixty miles from Manhattan, as the crow flies, so every single person in New Jersey was trying to call someone they knew in the city and make sure if they were okay. Carrie was working in a lab at Rutgers at the time, but that was too close to an urban area for my comfort. I wanted to her home that instant.

The television showed the smoking Pentagon, then the ruins in a field in Pennsylvania. Then it was the towers all over again. And again. And again. It was like that nightmare where you keep seeing something terrible happening, know it's going to happen and you're powerless to stop it.

Carrie got home two hours later and we watched the same thing, all day and all night. After dark I heard horns honking up the street. I grabbed a smoke and walked up to the main road. There was a group of about fifteen people holding a candlelight vigil outside an auto body shop and every single driver that went by honked their horn at them. I watched until my cigarette was done, went home and got back into bed. I watched the news footage over and over again until finally passing out.

It's not much of a story, but that is what I remember from 9/11/01.

Why Most of the World Hates Us?

2008-09-04T14:33:00.014-04:00

I came to a startling realization today when I place an order with a Chinese vendor for a new item - the "Delicates Laundry Bag." As you probably figured, this is a bag that allows the ladies to wash their underwear and keep them from getting destroyed in the washing machine. Useful to some, right? Useless to me. Just more cheap trash to order from China.

However, a huge portion of the world's population live in the Third World. People who cannot afford to buy a washing machine, let alone delicates and a "Delicates Laundry Bag." People who wash their clothes in the river and dry them on rocks in the sun.

I also purchase an electronic pest repeller. I won't give you the actual name because it's advertised on television and I have no desire to advertise further for these scumbags. It's a piece of crap that doesn't work, but people waste $20 hoping the electronic "impulses" will drive away household pests. We actually sell several different versions of this thing, so people can waste their money on another one if the first one doesn't work

Again, there are lots of people in the world who don't even have electricity in their "villages," and they share a bed with all manner of vermin. The only way they can get rid of a rat is when it bites them and they become aware of its existence, and even then they have to beat it to death with whatever weapon is handy.

So this got me thinking: is this why the terrorists actually hate us? Yeah, I know assholes like bin Laden are out there, supplying the "ideology," but when people see all that we have, all that we waste, does it come down to simple jealousy? People do terrible things in the name of envy: insults, destruction of property, and violence. Can it really be as simple as this? I've met plenty of Muslims in recent years and they were reasonable, sane and gentle people; but they live here, in the United States. They don't live in a place where they can just buy new clothes when the old ones wear out. They live in a place where people die because of vermin. So yeah, maybe it's possible that Osama riles them up with Islamic rhetoric; but you really gotta wonder if that's all there is.

The Perception Personality Image Test ...

2008-08-20T12:34:00.003-04:00

I stole this idea from Michelle:

Your result for The Perception Personality Image Test...

NBDS - The Trailblazer

You perceive the world with particular attention to nature. You focus on the hidden treasures of life (the background) and how that is affected by the details of life. You are also particularly drawn towards the shapes around you. Because of the value you place on nature, you tend to find comfort in more subdued settings and find energy in solitude. You like to ponder ideas and imagine the many possibilities of your life without worrying about the details or specifics. You are highly focused on specific goals or tasks and find meaning in life by pursuing those goals. You prefer a structured environment within which to live and you like things to be predictable.

The Perception Personality Types:

Adventures in Exercise

2008-08-07T10:49:00.006-04:00

So Sunday night rolls around and I realized that my gym, Work Out World, should be open for business again after their arson mishap from the week prior. Rather than drive over there at 5:30 a.m. on a Monday morning, I figured I'd call ahead of time and make sure they were opening. Good thing I did...

I was simultaneously reading their website while listening to their voicemail message:

Update Regarding The Brick Location:
As a result of a fire, WOW Brick will be temporarily closed for approximately 90 to 120 days.

My first reaction was, great, they'll keep charging me every month and tell me I can go to one of their other locations. Well, the closest gym to my town is about twenty miles away. Sure, it's on the way to work and I could shower and get dressed there, but that's just gross. You don't feel clean after showering at a health club. Maybe it's the fact that you have to wear flip flops in the shower and be around all those other naked people. I don't know.

All this was going through my mind when I realized there was a link further down on the page for more information. I clicked it.

Thank You for being a member with us at WOW Brick and Thank You for all the support you have shown us after the fire that occurred in our club on Saturday, July 26th, 2008.

We know that WOW Brick is much more than just a place to grab your workout. It’s a community, it´s a family, and it’s a place where we all connect, socialize, have fun, & stay healthy. That’s why we’re working as hard and as fast as we can to get your club back up and running again, better than ever!

Okay, so where is this going? "We value you as customer, but fuck you, we'll keep taking your monthly dues because you're in a one-year contract."

Actually, that's not where it went. From August 1 until they reopen, Work Out World will not charge me my monthly fee. I can work out at any of the other locations free. So I was happy, I won't be paying for nothing, and if I'm really desperate I can go to the gym on my way work in the morning. But it gets even better.

Work Out World has arranged for all of their members from the Brick gym to use two competing gyms, for FREE. I could not believe that. So now I can go to another place in Brick, equidistant from my house, and I won't have to pay a dime to work out until the new gym opens up.

All I can say is, Work Out World, you rock!

This new place I'm going to is the third gym I've been to in a few years, and I noticed a trend:

1. Guys who are way into their work out. They get all red and practically scream when they lift. Very strange.

2. The anorexic girl. She spends an hour running on the treadmill or elliptical and she's ninety pounds soaking wet. Eat something.

3. The naked guys. Yes, there are always a few of them hanging around the locker room (literally hanging around), naked as the day they were born. I don't care if you're in great shape or not. Put some clothes on when you're done showering. At the very least, a towel. Ew.

This Week's Jerkoff of the Week at Stonekettle Station

2008-08-01T11:41:00.002-04:00

Just in case anyone is actually reading this blog, and you haven't already seen Jim's "Jerkoff of the Week," check it out.

I won't go into the details because Jim already did that for us. The gist of it is that Downey Savings and Loan basically fucked a family out of government funds provided for funeral expenses for the death of their son, a US Navy medic who gave up his life to help other soldiers in Afghanistan. Some flaming douchebag from Downey took offense to Jim's blog and found that he/she was woefully unprepared to take everyone on. Let's drive as much traffic over there and help piss off the people at Downey a little more.

Things that Irritate Me

2008-07-30T15:23:00.006-04:00

Well, everyone else is doing it, so why don't I? Good thing they're not all jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge...

Work
1. Vendors: When I call or email you with a question, I expect to have it answered in a timely manner. Since most of you are in India, Pakistan, China or Indonesia, I'll give you 24 hours before I get pissed off. I am your customer. Treat me with some respect or I'll find some other third-world factory to make the crap and take that money out of your pocket. And American vendors - I'll give you 24 hours too, just because I know you're all a bunch lazy bastards, or you need to get the information from other lazy bastards. You all probably use Microsoft Outlook; put a reminder in there for the next day and get back to me. If you don't have it, then put a fucking post-it on you cubicle wall somewhere.

2. Fellow employees: don't have a party in the middle of a narrow hallway. It is inconsiderate to those of us who actually work when we come in every day. Please also refrain from having parties in the aisle outside of my cubicle. Again, some of us came here to earn a paycheck, not socialize. If you hearing me screaming at a vendor on the phone, don't come over and ask a stupid question like, "Having a bad day?" Yes, there is such a thing as a stupid question, and you're full of them. I might also verbally tear your head off, and I don't want to get fired. So don't temp me.

Home
Pretty simple rule actually. Stay the hell out of my way or you might end up with the muzzle of a tactical shotgun in your mouth. Sorry. My house, my rules.

If my gym burns down, does that mean I don't have to exercise anymore?

2008-07-28T11:34:00.008-04:00

My mother's birthday was Saturday, so we went over there to see her and hang out for a little while early in the afternoon before she went out with her friends. After she broke the news about our relations to the Obama Clan, from out of nowhere she decides it's time to start mending fences in terms of old wounds.

Not exactly what I wanted on a hot, summer afternoon at my parents' house.

Almost twenty years ago, I was a freak. I went through a lot of psychiatric and emotional issues and I used drugs and booze as a way to combat it all (since legal, prescribed drugs weren't doing the trick.) My parents found out about all of my "youthful indiscretions" and my father decided it was time to throw me out of the house. Frankly, it was probably one of the smarter choices he's made in his life. After a couple of years I was going to college and getting my life in gear. At the time, however, there were many angry words and tears shed on my mother's part. We kept a tense relationship over the next two or three years, and then I exploded and all but told them to go fuck themselves. We didn't speak again for almost five years.

In February of 1998 I ran into my father at a local bakery and agreed to get together. We were all very happy and carried on with a relationship again. The only problem is that my father belongs to this "program," whose members all agree to remain "anonymous," and he has this issue about resolving past problems, talking about them as so on. Not me. I choose to ignore these things and just go about my life. Yeah, I'm sure it's all very unhealthy but I really don't fucking care. If there is something unpleasant going on that I can get away with ignoring it, I ignore away. This is what we did for almost ten years after we resumed our relationship again. As my mother said on Saturday, it's been "...the elephant in the room that we all chose to ignore."

It's a good thing Carrie was there to speak on my behalf at certain points; otherwise I might have just told them "I can't talk about this" and left. That wouldn't have been fair to them. We were carrying on with a very casual conversation when my mother suddenly tells me that her therapist suggested she apologize for throwing me out when they did. I was like, "What?!" Who cares at this point? Turns out my mother was distraught over my dad throwing me out and she's been miserable about it for years. I was getting annoyed by this whole turn of events but kept it to myself. Then my father started in about how bad he's always felt about it and the afternoon deteriorated into a sobbing "Let's talk about our feelings" fest.

Thing is, they have a right to talk about it and get this shit off their chests, despite what I want. I indulged them and made my own amends for everything that happened between us, and a few cigarettes later the conversation steered back toward calmer waters. We left and I felt like crap thinking about all this old garbage. On the way home Carrie kept trying to talk to me about it and I realized suddenly it got very hazy out. We passed through a big intersection slowly in the traffic and she said, "Some thing's on fire." I looked up the street we were passing and saw two ladder trucks hosing down my gym.

This morning, I got up at 5:15, did my usual thing and went to the gym. Oops! Forgot about the fire. It was closed and there were bright pink signs on all the doors that said "Fire Hazard - Do Not Enter." Oh well, they'll probably open up again soon, I just hope no one was hurt.

Interesting Fact

2008-07-27T00:07:00.002-04:00

Apparently I'm related to Barack Obama. Eleventh cousin on his mother's side. I think this is the first time in my life that I've been related to a presidential candidate. It could be worse - I could be related to Bush.

Music Review

2008-07-24T15:34:00.005-04:00

It's been a while since I actually purchased any new music, and since Carrie has been feeling so miserable lately I figured I buy her some chocolate and CD's.

Flyleaf - Flyleaf
Three words: holy fucking crap! I had no idea these kids were so good. There are a few duds on the disc, but I rarely expect to love every single track, so this wasn't a disappointment. The goods songs, however, are fantastic. Of course, after the fact I find out that they are a "Christian" band, but from the lyrics and what I've read they don't inject it into their music, so I can put that aside. The last thing I want to do is spend $13 on a CD and be preached at. If I want that I can open the door the next time Watchtower freaks come a-knocking. Anyway, look at Lacey Mosley when you get a chance: she looks about sixteen years old, a little waif of a thing, but she can really belt out the screams. Perfect, I'm So Sick, Fully Alive, Cassie, Sorrow, Red Sam, and Breathe Today are all amazing songs with powerful music and lyrics. Shit, I guess that's most of the album, so there are only a couple of songs that kinda suck. It also comes with five acoustic bonus songs if you're into that sort of thing. There was a second disc in the jewel case, too, identical to the first one. Maybe they'd rather you gave it so someone who would otherwise download the songs. I don't know.

Death Cab for Cutie - Narrow Stairs
I have yet to be disappointed by these guys. Plans is my absolute favorite album. It was so much darker than anything they'd done before, so I had high hopes for the new one. Not as good, but still surprising. For "alt/folk" or "indie rock" or "low-fi", there is some hard shit on this one. The first song, Bixby Canyon Bridge starts off slow and sweet and then breaks into this hard, pounding guitar riff that jams through the second half of the song. I Will Possess Your Heart sounds like it should be one of their typically bouncy, sweet-sounding songs, but instead starts with a bass line that sounds close to Jane's Addictions' Mountain Song. This song just jams along for four and a half minutes before Ben Gibbard actually starts to sing. Pity and Fear is another great song, much faster than normal, and the rest of the disc sounds a lot like We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes or Transatlanticism. If you're a fan of the band you'll probably like it.

Ghirardelli Chocolate - Sampler
Hey, it's mint, caramel and milk chocolate. How can you go wrong?

Why is the governor of NJ in Israel?

2008-07-23T11:14:00.005-04:00

"Corzine praises bravery of citizens in rocket-scarred Israeli town"

I saw this headline today and thought, "Now why the fuck would any one Israeli care about his praise?" Then, more importantly, I wanted to know why we, the taxpayers of NJ, are paying for this jerk to go there in the first place. Well, here's the reason:

"The Democratic governor has used some of his time with Israeli political, academic and economic leaders this week to talk up Obama's potential. "

So, New Jersey is so pivotal in terms of the world stage that our governor needs to waste time in Israel, to "talk up" Obama? And why would anyone need to talk up Obama in another country? Maybe absentee voters, but who the hell cares. We have a three billion dollar budget deficit at the moment. Obama better be footing the bill for this little junket, because the New Jersey tax payers sure as hell don't want to. Corzine came from the private sector with what we all thought was a clue about how to solve money issues. That was a big part of his platform. So far, all he's done is alienate the average citizen ignore the political corruption; hell, he's gone beyond ignoring it, he almost openly condones the gumbas who run the show in this state. There are thousands of state employees with six-digit salaries that are collecting state pensions from old positions they retired from, while driving their gas-guzzling, government SUVs. This, at a time when gas prices have exceeded $4 per gallon.

And people wonder why I refuse to vote. All we do is trade one scumbag for another. As always, my motto remains "When the time comes, I'll vote with the muzzle of a gun."

Thanks Corzine, keep up the good work.

Monday Music

2008-07-21T15:58:00.000-04:00

Weekend Movie Review

2008-07-14T11:16:00.006-04:00

Had a really bad weekend, short of anyone dying. It stared pretty much the moment I walked in the front door on Friday afternoon. When the dust settled Saturday we decided to rent some DVDs, something we haven't done in ages.

Jumper. Fun movie. I heard mixed reviews about it but I really wanted to see Hayden Christiansen in a role that was not Anakin Skywalker. He has this smart-ass look on his face almost the entire time and I think he's proven that he doesn't have much in the way of acting range, but fuck it. It was cool. My only problem is that too many people were left walking who should have been killed, but I didn't write the script. Whoever did write it must have read The Stars, My Destination by Alfred Bester.

Cloverfield. Rocked! Oh my God, did it rock. And I am so glad they chose unknown talent for this flick, otherwise bigger names might have tried to steal the show from the big, scary freakin' monster. I saw someone write somewhere when this first came out that they couldn't wait for the DVD so they could freeze it to see the monster. Don't know what they were talking about. There were several scenes toward the end where you got a great look at the thing. Killer movie.

Stop-Loss. Great idea for a movie in theory, didn't really pan out in practice. Maybe if it had a better director, or if Ryan Phillippe didn't try so hard to sound like a Texan (terrible accent), i don't know. I did enjoy it to some extent. The only thing that left me with a bad taste was the lack of slant. What side where the creators taking? The movie was filled with ambiguity; just pick a side and commit!

Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs. They had me at the title. First of all, I've seen every single Futurama episode about 500 times, so I was ecstatic to see a movie! Apparently there was another movie made before it, so I will be picking that up too. If you liked the show, then check it out, it was hysterical.

That's the weekend movie wrap-up. Told you it's been a while since I watched a movie...

-------------------------

Writing

2008-07-10T14:20:00.008-04:00

I've been working on this new story for the past 4-6 weeks, and this is great because I have not actually written anything for quite some time before this. This is great, but it's also a mixed blessing.

I have a few stories that I imagine making up one book. Each story is interrelated through characters, but that's about as far as it goes. Winter Lightning, the story the precedes the most recent one, I inserted avatars for me and my wife, just as a little goof so if anyone ever read it, they'd know right away who these people were (all of the stories have a mix of fictional and true-life people in them, mostly old friends and some coworkers.) Well, after I finished Winter Lightning, I had this terrible afternoon where I couldn't get my wife on the phone and my vivid (and morbid) imagination got the better of me. I spent the ride home for work that day imagining what I would do if she died.

It's morbid. I don't know if other people ever do this, but it happens to me frequently and frankly scares the shit out of me. What would I do if she died? So I tackled this by writing a new story for our avatars. Then I realized after ten to fifteen pages that this was far too depressing and shelved it for a couple of years.

Well, this new story popped into my head about a guy that gets involved with his coworker, a slightly older woman who lost her husband of twenty years recently. I made the connection with my avatar and that old story that went nowhere, and suddenly I'd written thirty pages or so. And it's a totally new story, being told by "my" best friend (a fictional character,) mixed with blog entries written by my avatar, letters that he's writing to his dead wife. It sounded like a good idea in theory.

The story told my Ian, the fictional character, is moving along at a great pace; but my avatar's letters are coming a bit slower, and frankly, I think they suck. Probably because I am actually writing the way I think I would feel if my wife died. I'm writing about real memories and true feelings, and when I stop to think about it, I can't write anymore of it.

So I wrote about twenty pages of the beginning, maybe five or six pages of the blog entries, and then ten pages for an ending. And I'm totally stuck now. Call it a total forty pages, and I have no idea where to go with it anymore. This sucks because I had such high hopes for it. The worst part is that I used to write like crazy; in college I was a security guard for a while, and I wrote over two hundred pages of one novel, and almost that much of another novel over the span of a year and a half. Now, I'm lucky if I can crank out ten pages at a stretch. Fuck, getting old sucks.

2008-07-03T13:05:00.006-04:00

Steeltown is one of the best and most underrated albums of the '80s, certainly better then The Crossing. Last year I met up with an old friend and he asked me what music I'd been listening to lately, and when I told him Big Country, he laughed. "You mean 'Big Country', from the '80s?" What can I say, I'm old...

Lameness

2008-07-03T10:01:00.005-04:00

On Tuesday night, my mother called to remind me about my father's upcoming back surgery on Wednesday. It's a pretty routine procedure, Lumbar Decompression, but any surgery has its risks. I want to sleep that night and proceeded to have a nightmare about my father dying from complications. When I woke up yesterday morning I was pretty much fucked and couldn't get it out of my head for the rest of the day. I called my mother at 2 pm and he was still in recovery. I called again at 4:30 and she was waiting for them to bring him up to his room.

So all was right in the world. I went home, had dinner and played Battlefield 2142 for a while, and just as I got into bed to settle down for the night, the phone rang. It was my sister.

"Have you talked to mom? What's going on with dad?" She lives way the hell out there in Upstate New York so I figured she was out of the loop for some reason. I told everything I learned over the course of the day.

"No, mom called me at 7:00 tonight, there were complications." The dream came back to me.

I called my mother and found out that there were some complications, he was still in recovery, eight fucking hours after he went under anesthesia (and yes, I did need to Google that word, I can never spell it right). So the wife and I got dressed and hauled ass up to Red Bank, about a half-hour away from our place in Brick. We find out he was having trouble coming out of it, his heart rate was sky-high and they were giving him oxygen because he couldn't breathe. Instead of admitting him to a regular room, he was going into the critical care unit. We were there for an hour and a half before I started to lose my cool, so I went to the CCU desk to rip somebody a new one when they brought him in.

The anesthesiologist told us that he had a drug interaction between the multiple antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, pain killers and the anesthesia, but he would probably be okay, they were only keeping him in CCU so he could be monitored.

Looks like my old man dodged a bullet.

My issue with this whole thing is: why the fuck did the surgeon clear him for surgery while he was on so many different drugs?! Sure, maybe I'm just some dumbass with a history degree, but I watch enough Discovery Health to know that this was an idiotic mistake! The man is 60 years old, diabetic, has high blood pressure and is on just about every goddamned "anti" drug known the mankind. Didn't the neurosurgeon, and man with quadruple my education, think that there might be an issue here?! What the hell do I know, at least the poor guy's okay.

Chinglish

2008-07-02T11:37:00.003-04:00

It's a good thing I have an advanced degree in Chinglish, otherwise I might never understand what any of my Chinese vendors are trying to tell me:

We have push the factory again. Very high metal material for this item. They reliable current can best low $1.45 for this item of order. Please understand

Ha! "Please understand." That's a tall order. The sad thing is, most Chinese take the trouble to learn our language. They spend all their time working with businesses from the West, so it behooves them to do so. My neighbors, on the other hand, don't speak word one of the English Language, but that's okay. We'll put signs up all around town in their language so they don't have to. Whatever....

Top Sci-Fi Books of All Time

2008-07-02T09:51:00.008-04:00

I noticed a few sites today where bloggers are listing their Top 10, Top 15 greatest sci-fi/speculative fiction books of all time. Since this genre is practically all I read, I decided to post my own. Without further ado (drumroll please....DRUMROLL!):

(In no apparent order)
1. Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love, Robert Heinlein
2. Armor, John Steakly
3. Altered Carbon and Market Forces, Richard Morgan
4. Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades, John Scalzi
5. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
6. Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind, Walter Jon Williams
7. The entire Riverworld Series, Philip Jose Farmer
8. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
9. Neuromancer, William Gibson
10. Polaris, Jack McDevitt
11. Y: Last Man Standing series, Brian Vaughn (comic)
12. Forever War and Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman
13. Snowcrash and The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
14. This Perfect Day, Ira Levin
15. Prelude to Foundation, Forward the Foundation, Foundation and Foundation and Empire, Asimov
16. The Weapon, Michael Z. Williamson
17. V for Vendetta, Alan Moore and David Lloyd

On the other end of the spectrum, books to avoid like they are the plague:

1. Slant, Greg Baer
2. Accelerando, Charles Stross

Yeah, I know, people have their own personal tastes and might hate my good books and love my bad books, but this is my list so I get to choose. Deal with it.

Thread Killer

2008-07-01T16:34:00.004-04:00

Yes, I've come to the startling realization that I am a thread killer. I noticed it a few weeks ago at the particular forum I go to. People start a conversation, and it seems like whenever I respond, the thread stops - and I mean stops dead. It's not that I say anything all that inappropriate, rude, or vulgar. But I just stop conversations in their tracks. And this is giving me a complex for some reason.

The only exception is flame wars. If I get involved in a really nasty argument with people, they tend to respond and I'll keep the war going until I get the last word. I'm weird like that, I need to have the last word in an argument, even if it's something as trivial as "Bullshit!"

Well, here I am. My name is Chris, and I'm a thread killer.

"Hi Chris!"

Zombies Everywhere

2008-06-13T13:23:00.010-04:00

BLITEOTWO8

Thank God I bought the tactical shotgun, although I realized early this morning that I was woefully low on ammo. By nine a.m. I was down to only two boxes of buckshot and from everything I'd experienced by that point, I would be dead inside an hour if I didn't get more. Fuck it, time to take a road trip.

The wife is safe; she works for a pharmaceutical company that has top-notch, armed security, and when she last called told me they were holding the hordes off at the compound's gates. At least she safe, but I wish I was with her. With the cats all safely locked down in the basement I saddled up, started my truck in the garage and opened the garage door. Their feet were visible in that first crack of sunlight appeared and I could hear them banding their hands against the enameled door. When it clears I leaned out the driver's side window and pump several rounds into the mass, knocking down ten of the bastards. I gunned the engine and plowed through the remainder, making zombie paste of the driveway.

Once I was out in the street I slowed down and waited for them to follow, about ten or fifteen more that were loitering on the front lawn. When I was certain none had were in the garage I closed the door with my remote and took off.

The streets were deserted; people were either staying in our had already become dinner for the zombies. "Zombies." How the hell did this happen? Was it a chemical or biological agent? The news was talking about a terror attack, but I doubt those religious morons have the means for something of this magnitude. I'm thinking the government. It's paranoid, I know. It's the way I'm wired. Deal with it. I made it over to the next town in about five minutes, impossible on any other day, with only a few detours around some car wrecks and infestations at bigger intersections. Whenever I slowed the sound of distant small arms fire was obvious. The shotgun was on the passenger seat now and I had the Ruger .40 in my lap, easier to fire with one hand while driving.

The sporting goods store was ransacked, to be expected, but people were looking mainly for weapons and took only what they could see in the display cases. In the store room I found cases of 12-gauge buckshot and .40. After a few trips the cargo comparment of the truck was full and I was tearing back toward home. On the way I passed a Home Depot and my mind started working...

The Ditch Witch is a great tool. I never owned one but rented one when I put our pool in a few years ago, and I made a two-foot deep trench, about twenty-five feet long, in about thirty minutes to run the electrical. What I had in mind took longer. The braineaters were gone from the neighborhood for the time being, and in two hours I had a one-foot ditch surrounding the entire property. I went back up to the roof, this time with the Remington 700 and waited.

The noise must have attracted them. They came lurching down the street from both directions in that trademark, stumbling gait. Fifty, maybe sixty this time. Were the organizing? Couldn't be; the only thing they thought about was eating people. I allowed them to get as close as the ditch and fired a flaming arrow down into it. The gasoline soaked wood inside lit up immediately and within seconds, the yard was surrounded by a ring of fire. A good twenty or thirty of them were in the ditch or near enough when it happened and all went up in flames. The street was filled with angry screams and the stench of burning flesh. I saw Mrs. Taylor peeking out from her porch window across the street. I gave her a wave and sighted the closest zombie in my scope. Her head burst like a rotten melon. Like fish in a barrel.

After a few hours of restless sleep I emerged cautiously from the basement, refueled the fire trench and went back to the roof. A police helicopter passed overhead and a cop asked over the PA if I needed help. I waved him off and kept my vigil as dark settled. The wife called while I was up there and assured me everything was all right with her, but security wasn't letting anyone leave. So I'm on my own now, until this thing ends, if it ever does. I'm down in the basement now with the cats and my laptop. The electricity's still working, so that's something. I have everything I need for now, and if those fuckers get through that door, I'll take as many of them down and die fighting.

People never cease to disgust me...

2008-04-30T11:47:00.003-04:00

We were having a little going-away party for someone in the department yesterday and all the idiots were sitting around, flapping their lips and generally hooting and hollering like a bunch of fucking monkeys (as usual), when someone decided it was time to tell stories about people who used to work for the company. Fine, whatever, odds are I have no idea who they are and could care less.

They name this person who was so "weird", and apparently what made her weird was that she rescued animals. One monkey is slapping the arm of her chair and laughing about the time this person rescued a wounded bird and had to bring it into the office in a box. I guess that was her mistake, bringing it in where other people could see it. I would have brought it to my car and then taken the rest of the day off to bring the animal somewhere it could be helped. I wouldn't do this because I have no wish to be ridiculed - hey, I'm an asshole and I know it, I expect people to talk about me behing my back; but if someone was running me down for saving an animal, well, I would probably lose it and rip said person an entirely new asshole. That would get me fired, and as much as I hate working, I can use the job.

There was also another time when this "weird" person was out trying to trap a stray cat in the parking lot. She was a real "maniac" for doing this. Since I've rescued eight different cats and two rabbits, I guess I'm a real lunatic, huh?

After hearing this for a few minutes I realized that my poker face was pretty much shot and I was getting pretty livid. I took as much of it as I could, got up and walked out. It was either that or give these complete fucking assholes a piece of my mind; and like I said earlier, I like my paycheck.

I really need to know what makes me so "strange," why I can't stand by and ignore a creature's pain while other people find it so bizarre to want to help that creature. People don't really give a damn about other people, so I guess it's obvious that they could care less about animals.

Albert Hofmann, father of drug LSD, dies in Switzerland

2008-04-30T11:44:00.002-04:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080430/ap_on_re_eu/obit_hofmann

'He became the first human guinea pig of the drug when a tiny amount of the substance seeped onto his finger during a laboratory experiment on April 16, 1943.

"I had to leave work for home because I was suddenly hit by a sudden feeling of unease and mild dizziness," he subsequently wrote in a memo to company bosses.

"Everything I saw was distorted as in a warped mirror," he said, describing his bicycle ride home. "I had the impression I was rooted to the spot. But my assistant told me we were actually going very fast."

Upon reaching home, Hofmann began experiencing what he called "wonderful visions."
Three days later, Hofmann experimented with a larger dose. The result was the world's first scientifically documented bad trip.

"The substance which I wanted to experiment with took over me. I was filled with an overwhelming fear that I would go crazy. I was transported to a different world, a different time," Hofmann wrote.'

Ah, the early 90's...

Oscar Pool

2008-02-25T15:43:00.002-05:00

Wow, big day for me today. I won an Oscar Pool!!!

Let's start by stating that I have not seen a single movie that premiered in 2007. I also do not watch the Oscars. What I do watch, thanks to my wife, are too many stupid goddamned entertainment shows. All the Oscar talk must have seeped into my subconscious and stayed long enough for me to fill out the questionaire. Of course, I only got 11 out of 20 correct, but apparently that was enough.

Yay me!

2004-05-03T11:24:00.000-04:00

when i started this stupid blog thing, i thought i might actually have something to say; so far, there was a minor tirade about the government and a rant about working. not very exciting. i guess i don't have much to say, which is really pathetic considering i'm a writer.

which brings me to another problem. i've been writing since i was 12-13 years old. granted, most of what i wrote up until my mid- to late-twenties was complete garbage, but there were some gems in there. most importantly, i've been working on a novel since about 1990 or so. i've never been published because that would take effort (or maybe it's that fear of failure bullshit, though i doubt it; i've failed plenty in my life and never consciously been afraid of it). anyway, last summer, a friend of mine who shall remain nameless tells me that he's been writing. never wrote fiction before, and he starts writing a buffy the vampire slayer fanfiction story. this doesn't bother me because i think fanfiction is for the nerds (nerd-alert: i had been writing a btvs fanfic about a year before). so we start talking about our stupid fanfics, and he gives me a copy of his to read. not bad, considering it's a fanfic and his first story. he reads mine and loves it, tells me what a great writer i am, which makes me feel good.

over the next few months he starts writing an original story. again, it's not bad. soon, it's no longer a story, but a novel, and he's cranking away at this thing like there's no tomorrow. he never seems to run out of ideas, and he never gets writer's block. i'm lucky if i can knock off 20 pages before i run out of steam, and then it's weeks before i can get even a single paragraph out. i never run out of ideas, but i get wicked writer's block so when i sit down at the computer, i just end up downloading porn or playing games.

every time i see this guy, all he talks about is writing; it should inspire me, considering it's been years since i've had someone to talk about writing with. instead, it makes me jealous. i don't feel inferior to him as a writer. he's not a bad writer, but i think i'm better than him. i'm just pissed off that he's almost finished an entire novel, in only a few months, whereas my novel has been in the works for more than a decade. fuck, my short stories blow away his novel, but most of them don't even have an ending.

so what right do i have to be jealous or angry? i should be pissed off at myself, which maybe i am. i just pray that he doesn't get this book published, or if he does, that it's a publisher that pumps out crap so that i won't be jealous. christ, i'm such a bad person it makes me sick sometimes.

2004-04-29T14:27:00.000-04:00

is it just me, or is anyone else out there afraid at what's happening in the US? i don't want to sound crass - christ, on 9/11, i was pretty upset - but it seems to me that good ol' George W. and our wonderful government found an excuse to throw a legislative orgy rivaling Caligula.

"The USA Patriot Act is homage to George Orwell. The Department of Homeland Security is Franz Kafka's newest castle. The Department of Justice is run by a dangerously sober Elmer Gantry. Guantanamo Bay is a tropical one-stop of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Siberian gulag. And whatever goes on in the White House is a cross between Dr. Strangelove and 'Groundhog Day.' " (Pierre Tristam, Daytona Beach News-Journal, quoted in John Dean essay) .

yeah, i'm being paranoid; but there's nothing wrong with paranoia. it keeps you on your toes. what is it about people that makes them believe that tying fifteen flags to their ford explorer makes them patriotic? it takes the destruction of a symbol of our economic system, and the death of 2000 or more people to make people realize that they are americans and they should be proud of it. what a pile of crap.

these same ignorant americans will call you "unamerican" for criticizing the war in iraq, when all you're doing is exercising your first amendment right; you will be considered "unpatriotic" for criticizing the quietly oppresive measures being undertaken to remove our freedom, all in the name of freedom. it's not that i'm against retaliation for 9/11, or any future attacks against americans: far from it. i just think we're going about it wrong.

on 9/12/01, every single long-range bomber in the US air force and navy should have been mobilized and sent to carpet bomb mecca. as it was happening, George W. would have appeared on television and said " Try it again. I dare you." if the fuckers had the stones to do something else, then we would bomb a city in every middle eastern country until nothing was left but ashes. it's called reciprocity, retribution, or more commonly, revenge.

i'm thinking of moving out to the midwest, somewhere in the country were i can have a big piece of property and a good field of fire when things start to go bad. new jersey is not the place to be when nukes start going off and when the mobs start rioting.