Author: Dave

Posted on

no cuts, no butts

Splash.
More people than all those that died in the the Vietnam war have died as a result of this typhoon. I was thinking about that today as I was in line buying cat litter at Costco. The lines were ridiculously long, and one woman “excused me” past my cart and met her husband at the front of the line next to me with a couple last-minute items. As she pushed her cart between the two lines and unloaded her items onto the conveyor belt, an old man in a long coat and hat with a feather began to rumble. His voice was deep, gravelly, and surprisingly powerful given his age – I remember thinking it actually reminded me a lot of my own grandfather’s voice.

“Hey,” he bellowed, “What’s all this crowding at the front of the line?!” “Why does she get to go in front of all us?” The woman’s husband turned and said, “She’s my wife sir,” at the same time the woman was saying, “He’s my husband, we’re one family.” The old man kept hollering about “cutting in line” and “we’ll all be here for god-damned ever if they let everyone cut.” Finally, the woman’s husband turned in line and said, simply, “Merry Christmas, sir.” It was the perfect response to the situation, and it made me smile. The old man was furious, cursing and shaking his head, but he managed a more sheepish than powerful, “Happy New Year,” as an attempt at an equally witty response.

Prior to the exchange, I had been thinking about the typhoon… and the more than one-hundred thousand people that died. It just struck me how mad this old man was because the lines at the local warehouse food-store aplenty are too long and he’ll have to wait 10min to spend his money on gallon jugs of liquor, fresh-ground gourmet coffee, and 3lbs bags of luncheon meat. Not that I’m on the next Red Cross plane to Phuket to help with the relief efforts or anything, but hey anyone can talk big on the internet.

Last night it was rainy and windy in Northern California. I turned in around 1am, and listening to the wind blow the rain against the windows… I imagined I was on ship at sea. In the old times, mind you. Y’know… some kind of “galleon” or end-of-Goonies-lookin’ pirate ship. Perhaps under sail in the dark of night… headed towards some island to trade silk for molasses, or gold for salt, or something. Maybe running rum from the East Indies to the colonists who aren’t to prudent to party, or skirting the shoals of Southern Africa en-route to a spice dealer in India.

I didn’t write yesterday because I was at Anthony’s doing an all-day Lord of the Rings marathon. While I know it’s extremely D&D nerdy, we queued up all three extended edition DVD sets, which, at two discs and several hours each, put us firmly entrenched in the world of Middle Earth for eleven hours. We came up for air every three hours or something (and by air, I mean pizza), but other than that it was a solid loaf-a-thon. A good way to waste a day of vacation, and since it was raining I didn’t miss out on working in the yard (which was the real goal of this week off).

OK, done.

Posted on

down at the end

You'll get it after reading it.
12:53am on… I guess on Tuesday morning, although to me it’s still Monday night. Once again my fingers protest the amount of coordination required to type words. I have a full glass of water on the desk beside me, y’know, my garlic necklace, warding off the vampire that is hangover. I actually had a really abstract paragraph written earlier today, about how I like women… it was a good piece of writing… but I trashed it. I do that sometimes, trash stuff I think is good… because it’s not fit… not fit for the “blog,” or something. So go the perils of an “online” journal, I suppose.

There are some times in my life, not very many actually, that I can remember feeling… feeling alone. Not that I really was alone, but that I felt alone. Not without friends, just an in-the-moment loneliness. Something not quite like a true feeling of being alone – but more like feeling alone in that moment… mostly a welcomed kind of alone, not something uncomfortable or negative. I don’t even really know, I just thought of this theme as I was brushing my teeth – and in my slight drunkenness it seemed like a nice personal divergence from the boring slop I’ve been posting lately… somewhat of an entry in the true “journal” sense, like things used to be or something. I’m going to run with it now I think, since it’s on top.

I feel alone. I’m staying at my Uncle Tom’s place in California. My brother and I are here for a week. Uncle Tom and Aunt Judy live in small house here in Tepesque Canyon. They have goats, and chickens, and a satellite dish. In the morning, we throw feed to the goats and gather brown eggs from the hens for breakfast. Aunt Judy cooks the eggs while Frank and I watch the Monkees and You Can’t Do That On Television on some crazy satellite-only channel called Nickelodeon. Right now it doesn’t show much but Canadian programming for kids and some old, old reruns. I don’t know that at the time though. I remember helping paint a shed, and sitting on a porch swing with Tom and Judy’s dog. I remember a tree-swing’s apex that put you over a small cliff looking down on a field of tall grass. I remember masturbating for the first time, and associating the feeling with homesickness. Hey, I told you this was going to be personal.

My mom and my brother and I have just come home from our after-school place. My dad has beat us home today, sometimes that happens. Before Frank and I can get out of the car, my dad comes out of the house and greets my mom with a hug. Something is wrong, I can tell. I’m not sure what Frank was thinking, or even if it made that much of an impression on him at his age. But I know something is wrong, even through the silence of the car-window glass I can tell by the way my mom is reacting to whatever my dad is telling her. The house has been robbed, and vandalized. Many of our things are missing or ruined. It feels very personal, the “feeling” part of the word “violated” that can’t really be conveyed in a dictionary’s definition. I get on my bike and ride. I feel alone. I ride aimlessly, I don’t want to see the house anymore… don’t want to smell the soy sauce in the hallway carpet; don’t want to see the ketchup on the walls and ceiling; don’t want to wonder what they did to my cat that makes her walk funny; don’t want to think about the fact that they stole the spare keys. I ride to my school, and find my 4th grade teacher still in her classroom. As I cry on her shoulder, I feel alone.

I feel alone. I’m on a Greyhound bus to Texas. I left college only a few hours ago. I didn’t bring a book to read or anything. There is some humongous kid next to me, he got on the bus in a town called Defuniak Springs and he’s talking about going to football camp in Texas. I try to be as polite as possible, making him feel good by keying in on things he says and learning what makes him feel comfortable. I’m good at this. I feel like I can read people like books, judging within minutes what makes them feel most comfortable and using it to befriend them. Do they most enjoy talking about themselves?; listening to you talk?; strategic non-talking cues?; whatever it is – I’ll exploit it and make them comfortable. Emulate his posture, his demeanor, ally loosely with the things I presume he believes in and trusts. We talk for hours about things I could care less about. His folks are split up, one lives here, one lives there. Eventually he gets off the bus, and I’m alone again. No matter who sits down next to me, I’ll have this conversation with them. The couple going to Las Vegas, the girl who’s just leaving Florida. I don’t even smoke, but I’ll have cigarettes with you at the stopovers. As I retire from my game of dice with four guys in the Dallas Greyhound terminal, and curl up to sleep on my suitcase so it won’t get stolen, I feel alone.

I’m sitting on a stone bench outside a lecture hall at college. I feel alone. I watch as people ride by on bikes, heading to class. My class isn’t for another hour, but it’s easier to stay here than go home to my place. At least I found the right building, this campus is huge. I only have an hour to wait. Between classes the street is full of students making their way to whatever’s next. I’m waiting here for the 1st day of differential equations. Calc I and II were no sweat, but I had a hard time during some of the more abstract portions of calc III. I don’t really know what to expect from differential equations. I couldn’t know at the time that I’d strike an accord with the teacher, enjoy the class immensely, meet a couple friends, and go on to earn one of my post-community-college As. At the time all I could know was that I was feeling kinda lonely on that stone bench in the sun waiting for class to start. Watching all the other kids go by with such a sense of knowing where they were and where they were going. A long way from the here and now of writing this paragraph, a lot less confident, a lot less knowing.

I’m sitting in some cubicle. I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing, so I’m not really doing anything. I’ve got conflicting feelings of guilt and getting-away-with-something. I’ve been working here for a month or so, and my manager has changed twice already. No one even really knows I’m here, I can leave when I want. So I do. I come in late, and leave early. No one knows I’m here, I report to no one. I feel guilty sometimes, taking a paycheck for what I do during the day: listening to Kid A and researching alchemy online. Frequenting the Smashing Pumpkins message boards, engrossed in the mystery that is Machina and the symbology and double-meanings of it all. I do nothing to contribute to this company, I am collecting an engineer’s pay for nothing. God I feel alone up here, no one knows I exist and my requests for work seem to fall on deaf ears. Once, I got called into the lab to help record data… but it turned out to be idiot’s work, and I was back at my desk reading about Jung’s thoughts on the spiritual applications of traditional alchemy in no time. I have none of the knowledge required for this job. I am in over my head, but it’s OK because no one even knows I exist. Lonely.

Yeah, I feel good about this one. Tipsy or not, I like the writing. I like when paragraphs appear without effort, like they’ve written themselves or something. It’s that easy sometimes, when you’re “in the zone” or something. Words come out and start lining up to make sense, you don’t even need the full faculties that soberness affords… it just flows.

So, with my glass of water nearly empty and my eyes heavy in anticipation of dreams… I’m signing off. Goodnight to you all.

Posted on

the donner party got nuthin’ on us

Snowed in.
Well, we made it home… but it was no pleasant journey. Leaving Oregon around 10:30am, I pegged us to pull into the driveway at home sometime around 8pm-9pm that evening. Little did we know (no, really, we knew a little since we checked the website) that we’d be caught in a huge freakin’ snowstorm through the mountains into California. Fearing a bad trip in the snow, we stopped right before the mountains and ate a late lunch. We even stocked up on “provisions” (soda and chips) in case the trip over the passes was long. We hit the first hint of snow a mere 20min later somewhere south of Ashland.

Half an hour later we were at a dead stop on I5, in park on the freeway… nothing but taillights and headlights stretching to eternity in front of and behind us. We remained parked on the freeway for over an hour, watching the snow fall outside and watching Napoleon Dynamite on the laptop inside. When we finally started creeping along, it was a mess. The snow had erased the lanes on the road, so people were just following each other single-file, trying to stay in the established ruts from the cars before them. After an hour so so driving like this and debating whether or not to put on the snow chains… Ben and I broke down and did it. Although I’ve owned chains for several years now, I’ve never actually had to use them. So I was off to the side of the road, snow raining down onto my Bernie Mac raincoat, huddled around my taillight trying to read the instructions. After some head-scratching, we managed to get the chains attached and merge back into the 10mph single-lane traffic. Another mile or so and we hit the source of the delay, the chain-check, no one got through without chains or 4WD and snow tires.

After getting past the chain-check, it was every man for himself on the road. The traffic thinned out considerably and that meant the snow had more time to accumulate on the road with no cars to melt it down. Driving 30mph tops, I made my way through another 40 miles of blizzard-like conditions. Trying to keep the windshield from icing and trying to keep a safe distance from other vehicles, it was a stress-test for sure. We finally rolled out of the mountains (and snow) some five hours after we’d gone in. Exhausted and spent from driving, I handed the duties over to Ben after a midnight cheeseburger (animal style) at In-N-Out. Luckily, Ben ferried us home safely through the rain that the snow had turned into… and we finally collapsed into bed around 3:30am this morning. What a trip.

Now it’s Monday, and a gloomy and wet one at that. Sharaun and I rolled out of bed around 11:30am, readied for the day, and just got back from a nice lunch at the indian buffet. And while she decided to spend the day shopping, I’ve chosen to sit here on this couch and watch the accumulation of TiVo’d Twilight Zone episodes. I’m supposed to be taking the week off, at least that’s what I had planned. However, I feel really strange about this one… I dunno. I mean, I have this feeling like I should be there… like it’s not an “official” vacation or something. Work seems to be pulling me in, making me feel guilty for not being there. I think perhaps it’s because I did a poor job “advertising” that I’d be on vacation, like I usually do. So it makes me feel like I’m somehow shirking my duties or something. I’m hoping the feeling goes away…

Well now… until next time.

Posted on

can’t put brown down

Wisemen... not wiseguys.
Merry Chrimma all! It’s that time of year for family and wrapping paper and ham and making the universal mistake of buying sweet potatoes for the sweet potato casserole instead of the required yams. Actually, the term “sweet potato” in the casserole’s name is most accurate. If you do your research, the things that stores commonly sell as “yams” are really a type of sweet potato (there are two varieties, the whiter-fleshed kind which the stores accurately call “sweet potatoes,” and the orange-fleshed kind which stores wrongly label as “yams”). In fact, true yams aren’t potatoes at all, they’re roots. I think because so many people refer to the orange sweet potatoes as yams, the stores must do it too. Either way, Sharaun makes this awesome casserole every year – so we’ve learned the difference the hard way. However, since mom and dad did the shopping this year before we got here – we ended up with the wrong thing again. Damn you, you confusing sweet poyamoes, yamatoes, potams… Wait, can I say “damn” on Christmas?

The non-sweet potato part of Christmas went swimmingly though, the gifts were a’plenty, a’thoughtful, and pretty a’awesome. I got some clothes, new shoes, and even a laser-guided parking system so I can accurately park my truck in the garage to within inches. Not to mention a two-year subscription to Maxim, a razor, socks, underwear (yes, with iron-ons), and some of the little things I always enjoy: silly putty, a Duncan yo-yo (butterfly style, bitch), and a Wacky Wall Walker. Can I say “bitch” on Christmas? Damn. Sharaun seems to like her gifts a lot, I think I did a better-than-usual job of buying this year (thanks Kristi) – and the list she gave me was only part of the reason. Even mom and dad made out pretty well I think. We all had a fine time tearing into gifts and posing for pictures with the cast-aside bows on our heads. As a plus, my folks really seem to dig the copy of Brian Wilson’s SMiLE I got ’em… good music.

Around noon yesterday, while sitting on the couch at my folks house having just finished Christmasing up the blog, I spied a copy of The Da Vinci Code on my parents’ bookcase. Over the years, so many people have told me I would like this book – based on my existing interest in theology, alchemy, Masonry, Illuminati, and countless other things that end in the “ee” sound. With nothing much to do on Christmas eve, I decided to give it a go. Before I knew it, it was dinner time and I was already halfway through the book. Already being familiar with some of the history featured in the book (the Templars, the canonization of the Bible, the Gnostic gospels, etc.), I found it fascinating. Eventually, it was 11pm and I had under a 100 pages to go. I made the call to finish the book that night, and turned the last page around 12:30am. It was a good book, the religious history and theory and code-crap talk right to the guy in me who voraciously read The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

With the passing of Christmas day, our short vacation in Oregon is over – and we hit the road again tomorrow to head back down into sunny, and almost inconceivably less-liberal than here, California. Whereas the Gods smiled on our journey north and did not hamper us with snow, it seems we must have angered them over our short stay, and they plan to blanket the mountain passes with white stuff. I’m totally cool, I got the snow chains (never used ’em, and only the slightest idea how to put ’em on), and I’ve been practicing driving on ice. Not really, I’ve never driven in real snow or anything. Either way, I know tomorrow means another ten hours on the road… and perhaps even another buffet and embarrassingly-awful cabaret show, who knows.

Well folks, I think that’s my entry for the day – time to Christmarelax instead of writing. Suzy’s Christmas entries were particularly good today, I’d recommend them if you’re hard up for more blog-reading on this, the day of Christ’s birth. Since I don’t normally write on the weekend, I think I’ll take tomorrow off (convenient, since we’ll be on the road all day long). Until Monday, safe and back at home…

Merry Christmas!

Posted on

santa’s coming

I don't care what you celebrate.
Christmas Eve morning, I read President Bush’s Christmas message in the paper today… full of hope and the Lord and whatnot. I’m fresh and clean out of the shower, in some dark jeans that fit well but are of course too long in the leg and a brown sweater in response to the cold, gloomy Oregon weather. We’re waiting on some of my family’s Oregonian kin to roll by for some Christmas drinks and holiday cheer (around Christmas, we drink a drink called Tom ‘n’ Jerry in our family, have as long as I can remember). It should be fun, one of those family get-together things with stories and a few awkward silences. Ahhh… holidays.

I started out writing, but decided to do a Christmas-themed template for the blog instead… which took most of my time (holiday logo courtesy of the GIMP2.2). I wanted to add some snow-caps to the text boxes, but gave up because I suck at art. Owell, at least the red and green thing seem somewhat in the spirit. It’s the blog’s way of saying Merry Christmas to you, all its readers (even the closet readers).

Today we decided to do nothing. The main motivation, other than kinda just wanting to do nothing, was to stay out of the holiday traffic. The last thing I want to do right now is go out, the streets were bad enough yesterday. And besides, it’s nice and warm and quiet in here and I can see the grey skies from the windows, so I’m not missing much in the way of people and horns and cold air. Mom’s in the kitchen cooking, dad’s reading a book, and Sharaun went out to pick up some last-minute stocking stuffers. It’s nice because it smells like cooking in here, and I’m comfy on the couch drinking a beer.

I think I’m done writing for today… I mean, if I do write more, I’ll just make it tomorrow’s post. Until then, then.

Posted on

you say tomato

Family.
Christmas Eve eve y’all. I don’t know if any of you saw, but today the blog was flat-busted. Yup, something was wrong on the server-side and all my scripts weren’t working. I couldn’t even log into the blog, so I’m writing this in a text file (just like the olden days). Anyway, chatted with the live tech support and they’re working to fix the problem, but I made a local copy of the database just in case. (Yeah, I’m stealing some neighbor’s wireless connection here at my folks’ place.)

The nine hour drive yesterday wasn’t all that bad, although the majority of it was in the dark and a little foggy. We made good time, and even stopped at a casino for a buffet dinner and a really bad cabaret show. By the end of the trip, there wasn’t an album in the world that sounded good. We listened to everything, and got sick of everything. I nearly crashed several times trying to watch Ben play Altered Beast on his laptop in the passenger seat, MAME is just too distracting for front-seat play.

The day we left, Pitchfork posted their top 50 albums for 2004. I always look forward to PF’s toplist, and usually find a few good albums I may have missed during the year. This year, I wanted to see how my personal top 10 stacked up against PF’s list. And, the results are in… they don’t prove much, other than that Funeral really was, by leaps and bounds, the best album of the year. Anyway, it was fun to see if I could remember the HTML for a table from memory – so here goes:

Dave’s Top 10 Position on PF list
1. The Arcade Fire – Funeral #1, I was pretty sure about this one.
2. The Killers – Hot Fuss Didn’t chart, not surprising… this is pure retro-pop indulgence, but I love it.
3. Brian Wilson – SMiLE #5, not bad for a 37 year-old LP.
4. The Radio Dept. – Lesser Matters Didn’t chart, but don’t let that turn you off… it’s great.
5. Interpol – Antics #27, we agree, it’s the half-best album of 2004.
6. The Go! Team – Thunder, Lightning, Strike #8, go team, go.
7. Modest Mouse – Good News for People Who Love Bad News #23, not bad for a commercial sellout (OK, they still rock).
8. The Stills – Logic Will Break Your Heart Didn’t chart, again… commercialpop at it’s best and most addictive.
9. DJ Danger Mouse & Jay Z – The Grey Album Didn’t chart, which surprised me… bringing a whole genre to the masses.
10. Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand #26, we both be likin’ the Franz.

I’d like to type more, but I’m tired and my laptop says I only have 13% battery left (there seems to be an outlet behind the couch, but that seems like a lot of effort right now). Tonight we introduced my folks to Ben’s folks in a large spaghetti dinner at the farm. Ben’s folks cooked, and we had a nice dinner for eight. It was a good time, but now I’m ready for bed.

Goodnight.

Posted on

i don’t want to watch

Open road.
Vacation. Off to an “iffy” start though, as vacation’s defined at least. I’ve got two meetings to attend tomorrow (via cellphone, of course), so I won’t get that whole separation-from-work vibe until sometime well along the road north. It’s OK, I can deal with it I suppose. Tonight we got together to do another mini gift-exchange with friends, and when Ben ended up getting Napoleon Dynamite in said exchange – Suzy and he stayed over to watch it with the Mrs. and I. Man… what a great movie, right up my alley in terms of disjointed, sometimes squirmy, humor. I can’t wait to see it again. After that Sharaun and I were left to prepare for the trip: packing clothes, packing up gifts (we’re exchanging up there), and readying other bidness. This is the first chance I’ve had to write, and it’s nearly midnight…

The first real porno I ever saw was called I Want to Watch; I was in 9th or 10th grade. I was at a friend’s house hanging out on the weekend, and the subject came up. He said he had a real porno, that he’d borrowed from another kid we knew. Of course, once this info was out of the bag – there was nothing to do but watch the tape. There was no jacket, just an old VHS tape with a cheap white label. The video was old, at the time I pegged it for early 80s by the feathered hair and clothes strewn about the floor. The movie was light on plot (I guess that’s not really fair, considering it was porn). Anyway, the premise was that there were four sex scenes, and in each one there was someone “watching” but not participating. The watcher was always a female, and was perennially masturbating. Somehow, this tape was passed down to me. I kept it locked in a briefcase in my closet (why I had a briefcase, I have no idea). I don’t know where the tape is now. Perhaps, unbeknownst to me, the cycle began anew and some teenagers are getting their first look at the early 80s coke-fueled porn industry, and all the unkempt body hair it has to offer. I can only hope. Oh, and if you somehow have my tape – the 4th scene is the best.

Well, it’s Wednesday morning, my 8am meeting is over, and I’m officially on vacation. At least… until I have to call into my 10am meeting. Hoorah. I’m all packed and the bags are by the door, ready for Ben to come by and load up before we head out for a pre-road-trip breakfast. Then we run some small errands, and finally pick Sharaun up around 1pm. Then the tires hit I5 and don’t stop for 9hrs.

And with that, I’m done. I’ll write when I can.