Category: general

Where I put something when I’m too lazy to categorize it.

Posted on

thanks for taking bullets

My bang is bigger than yours.
I was trying to explain what’s been bugging me lately… I have this open-ended feeling about work. I tried to explain it the other day when talking about how my perception of the post-vacation workload wasn’t quite accurate, but that’s just part of it. I have a lot to do at work, but I’ve been feeling kinda aimless. Last week’s vacation that wasn’t really “planned,” my non-travel this week (which was planned, and canned at my own hasty discretion), the March trip to Taiwan which, until today, wasn’t at all nailed down, etcetera etcetera. I dunno, nothing really tangible… I’ve just felt kinda “floaty” and undecided about things, and I guess I don’t like that. Today wasn’t a stellar day either, the morning started out crap… one of those stupid personal confrontation things I hate so much; lunch wasn’t any better… a mix-up left me stranded and eating a cheeseburger at my desk. Ugh. Whatever.

About a week ago, I got an e-mail from my old college roommate. It was unexpected, as we haven’t talked in a while. When I got the note, I immediately replied. I’d heard he’d gotten married, and I wanted to congratulate him, and mention how good it was to hear from him. After school, he joined the Army, went on to be a Ranger… y’know, the frontlines… the special ops… the intense stuff. Anyway, I know he’s done several stints in the Middle East… Afghanistan, probably Iraq, maybe other places… who knows. We kept in touch right after college, but after that I used to wonder where he was sometimes. Clearing caves in the mountains? Being the first on the ground during some critical mission? I kept up enough through other friends to know he was back safe, and had heard he’d got hitched. Anyway, he mentioned that he’s going back again… the 5th time. Hey Ton, I just wanted to say be safe man… take care and be safe. That you do what you do, is awesome to me… and not “awesome” like stoner-awesome, awesome like the worthy of “awe” kind. Thanks for it.

I alluded to it above, but my next trip to Taiwan has finally been finalized (“finally been finalized,” funny). I’ll be gone for three weeks in March, Sharaun won’t be able to go. I’m kinda bummed, as I was looking forward to taking her around. And although I actually am excited about being over there for that long – I’m again bummed to be away from Sharaun for that long. My two-week jaunt there was fine… but near the end I was more than ready to come home, I missed my wife, our house, and just good old normal American stuff. I’m hoping though, that I can make the most of the trip… experience-wise (work and personal). Some people I work with hate it over there… I don’t mind it much at all. The food is good, the people are nice enough, and I’ve made it abundantly clear in past entries that I feel “special” traveling on company money (it’s hard for me not to go back and edit that linked entry to sound less pretentious and self-important, ugh). Plus, if nothing else, it always makes for good posting.

I don’t even know what I’m doing up right now. I was so loth to get out of bed this morning, all because I stayed up late last night… for no reason. So why I’m here at half-past midnight… I don’t know. I think it has something to do with finally getting hooked on the narrative that is this Streets album. I wanted to hear the end of the story, wanted to hear about the girl and the money. I’m not much in the mood to write anything else. I wrote a huge thing, three paragraphs, about my confusion over telescopes looking back in time… only to realize I’d already written about it before. Crap.

Does anyone want my Gmail invites? Drop me a line and I’ll send ’em. Goodnight.

Posted on

my moby dick

It's a cam! Duh!!
A triumphant return to work… not at all like what I was expecting. While sitting at home on vacation, my vision of the tasks awaiting me upon my return was of a giant mountain. However, actually sitting down at my desk and taking stock, I’m not in completely bad shape. Albeit, I have a lot to do in the next few weeks – but I think I’ve situated myself in a pretty good position to get things done in time. I guess the guilt of not working made the view-from-vacation seem more dire than it actually was, which is good. Right now it just looks like a couple busy weeks before any lull is in sight, nothing I can’t handle.

Sometimes I get tired of the endless circle that is the debate about the war. If you make one move to criticize anything about the war, be ready for the triad of war defenses: “This is war, bad things happen.” “You’re just a pussy liberal hippy who can only put down this country because real men are out there protecting it.” And finally, “What about all the good that’s come of it?” If you’re a staunch Bushie neo-con, be prepared for some patchily-rank longhair to come at you with “This war is for oil, money, and US interests alone.” “Bush is a megalomaniac, cowboy, look-how-big-my-dick-is, wanna-be Satan bent on world domination.” “People are dying for no reason.” And of course, “Where are the WMD?” It goes around and around. You question the war, you’re an ungrateful hippy; you support the war, you’re a baby-killing, right-wing fanatic.

Can’t we have some middle ground? Where is common sense in it all? Sure war sucks. Good stuff is happening in Iraq, bad stuff is happening in Iraq. Shit, good stuff is happening in my bathroom; occasionally, so does bad stuff. Why does it have to be so black and white? I don’t like war, but I wouldn’t spit on our troops. Where are my common-sense people? People who can have an educated opinion that’s not lunatic rhetoric. Not gun-toting, hippies-would-rather-see-America-raped-by-Islam-than-stand-up-for-themselves conservatives; and not vegan, hybrid-driving, don’t-touch-anything-alive environmentalist liberals. Where are the people who think rationally? Is it just me, or does international media seem to present a lot less polarized or skewed viewpoint than most American media? Here we get 110% foaming-at-the-mouth patriotic God-forcefed imperialism or 110% limp-wristed simpering liberal whining. Yeah OK so I overstated my case a little for the sake of writing… whatever… journalistic license, I think they call it.

As much as I don’t want to recycle unoriginal links… I saw this via MF the other day (although I know BB had it too, and I’m sure other morning-zoo fodder sites like Fark/Fazed will pick it up soon) and it appealed to the voyeur in me or something. Someone noticed that certain webcams all have similar strings in their URLs, and made a simple Google search which pulls up hundreds of unsecured, broadcasting webcams from around the world. On most you can pan and zoom around, and some even have sound. Check it out. And, to add a completely unrelated sentence to this paragraph for the sole purpose of creating a uniform paragraph height that is pleasing to the eye: I only just now gave PF’s “best album of 2003” a shot… and Ben was right, it is damn fine.

I work in a cubicle of shoulder-high grey fabric walls. If the “entrance” (1/4-wall side) of the cube is due-south, my chair faces the north-west corner. On the west wall there is a cabinet where I keep random stuff, including some pictures I’ve taped to the grey metal exterior. A couple of my wife an I in various mountainous locales. Two of my dad in front of the Space Shuttle, those always elicit questions… hey dad, if you’ve got pix of you actually in the shuttle, send ’em my way OK? Three Andy Griffith fridge-magnets, which someone actually once mistook for family pictures. Adam Bomb from the Giant 1st Series, and a Post-It note with an arrow pointing to Adam Bomb from the Giant 1st Series and the words “This is dumb.” On the east wall is my whiteboard, which I try to keep filled with a jumble of math equations and engineering-themed drawings, and three show posters from gigs at the Fillmore (Death Cab, Modest Mouse, and someone I can’t remember right now). Due north (to the right of my monitor) is a shelf filled with books and a Sgt. Pepper standup cutout Kyle gave me back in middle school. Somewhere else there’s a coathook, a couple neon lights, a tangle of wires, spindles of loose burned CDs, and all sorts of crap. I dunno, just thought it might be interesting to paint a picture of where I spend my days. My coal mine, if you will.

In the self-serving statistics portion of today’s entry, I finally found a simple WordPress plugin that outputs the total wordcount for all entries. So far, not counting this entry, I’ve typed 224,278 words since starting this site. Compare that to the 211,763 words of Moby Dick… impressive. While I haven’t yet written my own Bible (1,029,084 words) I have managed to rival the bulk of a literary classic… which must mean my tome instantly qualifies as a literary classic, right? That’s what I thought! You can just mail my Newberry to work, I’ll hang it on my unadorned south 1/4-wall for the world to see. Thanks.

Sometimes I look over how much I write on this thing each day… and I can’t understand it. Where do I get the time? Hahahaha… and… goodnight.

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smoke and silence

Zealots need not apply.
As much as I love music, I sometimes crave silence. When it’s silent, you can hear sounds you normally don’t hear. The sound your spit makes as you work your mouth; skin rubbing skin as you wring your hands, your own breath in your throat. Smoking my pipe in silence has always been enjoyable to me, to be able to listen to nothing at all and watch the smoke waft from the bowl of the pipe. I can remember sitting on the back porch back in Florida smoking my pipe and reading the yellow-paged copy of The Fellowship of the Rings I bought from the used book joint. I liked to go out when it was raining… sit in the screened-in shelter and read and smoke in silence. Yeah… that’s what I’m writing about.

I’ve got to try and get to bed earlier tonight… this 1am thing is fine for vacation, but won’t work with a 7am rise-n-shine. One thing that staying up and sleeping late is good for is dreams. Over the past week I’ve had several memorable dreams, a strange occurence for me. My dreams always seem to mix old and new. Just this week, I was trying to protect a friend who hired another friend to kill an ex; was scuba diving with two acquaintances from college, and making a scale model of some geographical feature… an islet, or isthmus, or phalange or something. Whenever I wake up able to recall a dream, I wish I had one of those dream “interpretation” books, although I’ve looked at them and they’re about as specific as a horoscope most of the time. Still I would hate to miss the fact that dreams about scale models of fjords mean you’ll win the lottery if you only buy a ticket.

Something about the idea of a commune is totally appealing to me. Except, I wouldn’t call it a commune… I think the term “co-op” has a lot less Davidian connotation. Y’know, get some friends together… snag some cheap undeveloped land, and start communing on it. We could grow our own grub, build our own houses, generate our own power, maybe do some web-developing work for extra scratch (like the comet-cult), whatever. No job except tending the crops and animals, keeping the house, generating power, and fervently praying to the co-op’s chosen higher power. OK, we could skip the fervent prayer part… but I guess the “no job” thing is relative considering maintaining the cult… uh… co-op would be a full-time job anyway. Maybe I’ll just join the Rainbow and move to a national forest.

One the back-to-basics kick, I proposed a week-without-TV experiment to Sharaun tonight. I want to go one week without TV, seems like such an easy thing right? We could read more, talk more, maybe get out and walk around more or something (pre-surgery, of course). When it comes down to it I guess we “watch” a lot of TV. Even though I rarely “actively” watch, the TV is probably on every second we’re in the house… even if just in the background. Most of my killing-time time is spent on this computer, typing or surfing the web for nothing. I bet that’s not so uncommon nowadays… online time overtaking TV time as the dominant thoughtless activity. Anyway, I just wanted to see if we’d feel any great sense of “liberation” by cutting the cord and going TV-less for a week. I picked a bad time though, with her being laid up post-surgery and all. Although, she didn’t seem completely opposed to the idea in general… so maybe after she’s recovered a bit.

Ugh… every time I search through my old entries and find one of those strange WordPress-conversion artifacts (y’know, commas-turned-question-marks, letters with accent marks turned Chinese characters) I just cringe. I hate the fact that some of the older entries look crappy. Every time I find a post with artifacts, I try my best to fix it… but I know they still exist out there. Tell you what, if you see one… or find some ingenious way to search for them… lemme know and I promise I’ll fix every last one. OK? Thanks.

What a piecemeal entry… I’m sorry. It’s time to go to bed now, goodnight.

Posted on

mud and weeds

I'll cleave you in two.
Sharaun and I rented Garden State tonight, what an excellent movie. Made me think a lot about some of the times I go back home to Rockledge. Seeing old friends, seeing old places. It was a really, really good movie (at least, to me). I think that Scrubs-guy is my hero… writing and directing such an awesome movie. And great Lord in heaven… Natalie Portman is the single most attractive woman on the planet (both physically and a little bit because I think I could make her be in love with me). Seeing her in that movie only helped to cement her into that position atop my list of “best” women (non-attainable women, mind you). Maybe I liked it so much because it centers on people who are my age, going through what people who are my age go through when they “go home.” The scene with Simon & Garfunkel’s The Only Living Boy In New York nearly made me cry. So good.

A while ago, Sharaun got these neato print-your-own iron-on sheets to make t-shirts with. Today, since I’m taking full advantage of being on vacation and indulging in laziness, I decided to make a couple of shirts. I made one shirt full of alchemy imagery, and one full of Voynich Manuscript imagery. Sharaun said they’re “stupid” and “devil-worshipy.” Yeah, so maybe it’s kinda “dumb” to have t-shirts with stuff from old manuscripts and stuff… dumb indeed. Owell, it’s not the first time I’ve been dumb.

It has been raining on our little house for nearly two days straight, without so much as an hour break. Our half-done backyard is all mud and weeds… the little trees all bare for the winter. Because of the rain, I’ve been hold up inside a lot these past couple days… I actually like it. Back in high school, I’d sometimes get the urge to hide away in my room for an entire day and make “songs.” Fancying myself a brooding artist or something, I dunno, I’d purposely not shower… just wallow in grease and pluck a guitar with the tape running. My “songs” sucked. Most of them are sung in my I’m-afraid-of-singing, cartoony Adam Sandler voice. I made two tapes though… edited down into songs and everything… Sharaun still has one, and I have it on the headphones as I write this. So. Effing. Terrible.

I guess there are a limited number of way to approach a “blog.” You can write about what you did that day, like a running ticker at the bottom of CNN or something. You can write super-introspective, raw, personal-type stuff… riddled with bad poetry and a depressed, lonely air. You can be a political pundit or social activist. I guess, actually… there are probably an infinite number of ways to approach a blog. My way, I think, is haphazard… but the semi-permanent theme is always “make ’em laugh.” I guess that’s what I’m trying to do, overall. Tell stories, pontificate, make fun of myself, whatever.

When I was a kid and we used to take long trips in cars, I’d sometimes pretend I could shoot a laser beam from the tip of my index finger. The laser beam was molten-hot, or razor-sharp, or both, and whatever it fell upon was cut right in two. I’d sit in the seat and “aim” the beam out the window, slicing everything in the car’s moving path to the same horizontal plane. Trees, people, buildings, other cars, whatever… I could slice them right in two along the plane of the moving laser. An odd daydream.

If there’s one thing good about being up at 11:30pm on a Thursday, it’s that, on this particular Thursday, I don’t have to go to work on Friday. If there’s two things good about it, it’s that I don’t have to go to work, and that the garbage truck will come take away our garbage tomorrow morning while I sleep in.

Goodnight.

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

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!