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two hours in each word


Established.
Demonstrated.
Exemplifies.
Critical.
Enabled.
Essential.
Successfully.
Consistently.
Engaged.
Willingness.
Confidence.
Desire.
Fostered.

I dare you, internet.

I dare you to become a manager-type at your sawmill, wait for annual review time to roll around, and extol the virtues of of those who toil ‘neath your iron fist without using the above words. Check me on it, even. This year, if your sawmill is the kind of place where you get an annual review (or where you write the reviews of others), check it for those words.

I’ll bet you those words are there, trying to neatly encapsulate, in paragraph form, some two-thousand hours of your work. Two-thousand hours crammed into a thousand words or less, two hours in each word. An entire year of phone calls and meetings and hallway conversations, a year of stressful nights where you can barely reclaim your own thoughts from your to-dos and deadlines, a year away from quality time spent with your family so you can have the means to spend more quality time with your family.

Throughout 2007, Dave successfully established a desire within himself to become less engaged with work in general. He consistently demonstrated a willingness to shirk critical duties, all the while fostering his peers’ confidence in his abilities by simply “faking it.” This technique enabled him to spend essential time with his family, which he loves dearly. In summary, Dave exemplifies the modern worker.

Goodnight drones.

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it’s going to be thin


It’s 11:30pm and I’m just sitting down to write. In fact, I only have about twelve more minutes to finish this thing. I’ll warn you now, it’s going to be thin.

Keaton’s third fevered day and the doc says she’s got an ear infection. She still acts like a million bucks, you’d only know she’s sick by the snots, coughs, and wheezes. Sharaun swung by the pharmacy after I got home from work to pick up her prescription, hopefully it’ll start her mending soon. I hate looking at her puffy eyes and red cheeks, it makes me sad even if it is contrasted with her spastic and joyous dancing around the room singing “Sunny day… sunny day… sunny day.” Seems that even sickness can’t suppress the Sesame Street within.

I used my 7am meeting, and my relatively light morning, as an excuse to phone it in pre-lunch. Sharaun was kind to me and tolerated no TV or music while I worked on the employee review documents I’ve been laboring over this week. And, compared to the cubicle-clustered environment at work, the sensory deprivation in the quiet of my living room allowed me to get a ton of solid work done. I still dread finalizing that annual review totem… does that mean I’m soft? I guess maybe it does, but I also think it makes me normal, and I’d rather be normal.

I’m sorry guys. This is it. I really just didn’t want to miss a day in what, is otherwise, shaping up to be a wall-to-wall month (New Year’s Day doesn’t count, by the way). Goodnight.

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the night is still mine


Happy Tuesday night friends. Today at work I took the liberty of blocking off the 10am-12pm slot on my calendar for the remainder of the week. I plan to use the daily two-hour escape to complete all the remaining work I have to do around our annual review processes. As someone who has to be responsible for ranking others, I hate this time of year; but as someone who himself gets ranked against others, I actually look forward to succeeding. But, I don’t want to talk about it now… because I came home from that awful place to get away from it, at least the night is still mine. For now…

About a year ago, I read on a friends’ blog that their daughter was into the show Backyardigans, which is a computer animated kids show on cable that has a bunch of friends use their imagination to have adventures Muppet Babies Rugrats kinda theme. The twist being that all the adventures the crew has are set to original music, each show tending to have a musical theme in addition to a storyline.

I liked it so much I started TiVoing episodes for Keaton, and it’s become on of her favorites. And, actually, I’ve really come to appreciate the music that goes along with each half-hour. The songs are well-written, enjoyable as “real” music, and often infectiously catchy. And, while I don’t think she’s ever actually sat through an entire show (she’s just not much for the television), we enjoy watching snatches of it together.

Well, today when I got home from work and Keaton asked to watch “Yaganins,” I saw the lightbulb flick alight above Sharaun’s head. “Oh,” she said, drawing out the word for emphasis, “I want to show you something that will blow your mind.” Firing up the TiVo and scrolling down to the Backyardigans, she highlighted a new episode called “Tale of the Mighty Knights.” Now, there’s a pretty finite number of these shows, and I’m fairly certain I know them all, so the title was new to me. Turns out it’s an hour-long special episode, done in the style of a 1970s prog-rock-opera. And since knights and dragons are the stereotypical storylines of epic rock music, it’s the perfect genre to accompany the story.

Anyway, I was curious, and with a little research and I’d uncovered the interesting backstory on the guy responsible for the show’s tunes, Evan Lurie. And… that linked article is the whole reason I wrote those previous two paragraphs. Hey, with heavily musical shows like the Backyardigans and Yo Gabba Gabba!, Keaton and I can both have a good time watching Nick Jr.

Goodnight, and act your age.

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keeping it dense


I like it when it rains because the paint on the buildings looks so much brighter and more uniform. The streets are all a darker black, like they just got a fresh layer of asphalt. The air smells cleaner and the trees look greener for the dust that’s washed off. It was only a quick one today. I missed it, in fact, while I was home for lunch. I ate my panfried Gardenburger unaware. I first noticed it on the street and grass leaving my house and heading back to work. And, instead of turning left, I went right. Right and then right again, towards downtown, away from work, past the more brightly uniformly painted strip malls, rolling over sleek black roads. To the local record store, where I walked the aisles a bit, admired the cute girl behind the counter, wondering what kind of stuff she might be into, maybe it was her who had put on the currently playing copy of Disraeli Gears. She had a longish buttoned-down overcoat on, it was tan with wide angled collars. She wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but she works at a non-chain record store and she smiled at me as I sung and hummed along to “SWLABR.” She easily topped that half-hour’s list. Still not feeling work I moved up a planned afternoon errand and moved towards the Post Office next. I hate the way the drying rain mottles the clean matte finishes it only minutes ago evoked. Now things look unfinished and patchy, the road spotted with sunbleached grey, paint on buildings dried in anemic streaks and spots, making them look sickly. After parking, I walk through the barely-falling rain and inside to stare at the locked doors and drawn blinds for a good thirty seconds before some kind stranger intones from over my shoulder, “It’s a holiday.” “Oh,” I say, “I knew that. Thanks.” I leave defeated, wishing I would’ve shipped that package Saturday when I instead did nothing, hoping it doesn’t mean negative feedback from my buyer. Then I feel guilty for not remembering it’s Martin Luther King day. The white man’s guilt. Work sucked for another few hours as I realized I’m going to be buried in annual-review work for the rest of the week; should be working on it right now, am not. The looming blocks of hyperbole I’d have to write are running after me in my head, a waking nightmare where I’m drowning in a sea of platitudes and sincerities. It haunts me even now. I took my 4pm from home, but gave up and put down the earpiece after Keaton woke from her afternoon nap with a 103° fever. You’d never know it from her attitude and wont for “play.” Sharaun was gone all night, cooking dinner for single-parent teenage moms up at church. She runs the show, like the boss of the teen moms thing, I admire her for the time and effort she puts into it. Came time for dinner and the supermarket deli people really should send undercover agents to surveil the chicken rotisserie-er people at Costco. So much more juicy and seasoned perfectly, and it doesn’t squeak in between your teeth as you chew, not to mention are at least a pound plus heavier and nearly cost-equivalent. It’s a win-win. Even Keaton enjoyed hers, along with the fresh green beans mom left dad to snap the ends off of, steam, salt, and accompany the bird. Played with Keaton, climbing couches and rolling on the carpet, bouncing her on tummy and hiding with her in blanket-roofed forts. Saved the day by replacing batteries in not only the stroked-out-sounding Chicken Dance Elmo but also the chopped-and-screwed hyphy rocking horse. Afterward, Keaton in comfy pajamas and safe in bed, Superdad watched the first part of the History Channel’s “Life After People,” before his loving wife made him turn it off in favor of the dreaded Friends reruns. It’s times like these when I turn to the internet, follow some dubious links and end up reading grotesque things I wish I hadn’t, yet being fascinated none the less. And thus ends another day, 738 words later. Goodnight friends and lovers, until tomorrow.

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the yes bus & my prog hard-on


Sunday night and I guess I did another one about music. I offer advanced apology to all you straights.

Had the afternoon pretty much to myself, used the time to do a whole lot of nothing but for washing dishes and tidying up here and there. With my time, I watched a 1958 movie called “The Brain Eaters,” about little fury parasitic creatures that bore their way up from the center of the Earth to attach to the back of human heads and eat their brains, controlling them “as if they were robuts,” of course, while doing so. It was just plain awesome. When Keaton woke up, we turned off the TV (it rots your brain, you know) and turned on some music instead. We read some books and I fed her dinner, and we played rocking-horse and blanket-fort until Mom got home.

Well, that’s enough lead-in, here’s what I wrote for today.

I always consider myself to have “grown up” or “come of age” during the years I spent in Florida. The town we lived in wasn’t really a “small” town, but it wasn’t a sprawling metropolis either. As I’ve mentioned before, sometime around the tender age of thirteen or so, I began throwing myself headlong into the music, ideas, and culture of a time two decades before the one I was presently teen-aging in. You’ll need these two bits of information together to appreciate the story of the “Yes bus,” which I’m writing to both plain-out tell the story and also as a nice segue into a piece on the band.

Seeing as, at the time, we (myself and the crew I ran with) were busy prototyping ourselves after the teenagers of twenty years past (making sure to temper with plenty of 90s-style teenage sneery-middle-finger-disdain), we were super sensitive to all things “summer of love.” And, in our town, there happened to be a fine rolling example of the nouveau-hippy never-let-go attitude: the Yes bus.

The Yes bus was, as you might expect, a Volkswagen bus (from the cherry pre-’68 T1 years) which had been (fairly skillfully) tricked-out with a full psychedelic paintjob. And, while the entire body of the vehicle was covered in multicolored swirls and flowers, the true “coolness” of the thing came from the two huge band logos decorating either of the broad sides.

One one side, it was the Doors logo, font-perfect down to the two-half Os and four-piece S; on the opposite side, the Yes logo, also skillfully copied in its familiar Roger Dean toothpaste-squirt glory. As self-proclaimed students of the 60s, we were of course drawn to this glorious machine like bees to honey (nevermind that we likely didn’t realize Yes’ career was nearly entirely 70s-based).

Surely the guys piloting this bus were some of the coolest people our midsized burg had to offer, we thought, as we tried to surreptitiously follow them around on our bikes to find out where they “crashed.” Maybe we were hoping to find a tucked-away Utopian society that never quite made the mental move off the muddy fields of Yasgur’s farm, and was still championing our storied image of the decade: free love, fun drugs, philanthropy, and the communal celebration of great, great music.

At the time, it was fairly chic to be “into” the Doors, as, for some reason, it is during those early sights-set-on-stoner teenage years. The band had recently been given the Hollywood treatment, and the girls we hung out with were requesting volumes of Morrison’s “poetry” for Christmas, convinced he was surely an overlooked-Laureate denied by a generation too square to “tune in.” Which, as an aside, is I think a big part of why I sometimes poo-poo the band’s output as having a not-insignificant element of novelty/frivolity to it… but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, the point is that The Doors were hot (well, amongst us proto-burnouts, at least). I always thought it was cool that these guys had put the Doors logo on the bus. The Yes logo, on the other hand, was something a little less familiar to me.

It would be at least another summer or so before I’d have my great prog-rock awakening, dabbling toes first with things like ELP’s “Lucky Man,” “Knife Edge”, moving onto the wonder of hearing Fragile for the first time, and finally even coming to appreciate the more hardcore stuff (ahem, Tarkus). (For whatever reason, I didn’t get into King Crimson until just some years ago, shame on me for not following that family tree back to its roots long ago.) I always thought it was a cool logo, I just kind of wondered why they hadn’t chosen a more “suitable” band to display opposite the Doors. And, at the time, I would’ve likely meant “suitable” as The Beatles.

Now then, over the past few years, I have become a complete nut for nearly every scrap and tear of Yes’ “classic period” output. I’ve come to be in awe of their post-Fragile catalog, up through about Relayer, and have decided they likely made some of the most ingenious and enjoyable music of the early 1970s. And now, looking back, I bet those Yes bus guys were even cooler than I figured them for. Yes is kind of like Rush, or maybe Dylan, in the super-binary love/hate dichotomous followings they inspire. Typically, you either hate Yes, or you love Yes (allowing, as any discerning fan must, for favoring one incarnation, period, or lineup over others). Me, I learned only recently that I’m a lover, not a hater.

So, Yes bus guys, I’m sorry I naively thought you’d chosen the wrong rockband logo to adorn your vehicle. In the end, I was wrong. In fact, were you erased from my memory and I saw you drive by for the first time tomorrow, I’d likely silently nod in approval at your decision to proclaim your identification with the difficultly dense Yes, while simultaneously chuckling inside at the obviousness of you’re being a Doors fan. What? You like Zeppelin and the Sex Pistols too? Man, you must be cool. Ahhh… how I’ve grown. Age truly does bring with it wisdom.

And, making for a nice transition from the above topic: Lately I’ve had a huge prog hard-on, and have been littering the still-has-so-much-room 160GB iPod with the likes of The Nice, Gentle Giant, Van der Graaf Generator, Harmonium, Atomic Rooter, and early Genesis (sitting alongside the “first run” bands that already had a home thereon, like ELP, Yes, and King Crimson). That’s one good thing about the new humongous iPods… you can really delve deep into the multi-fingered rock ‘n’ roll family tree, keeping genre-representative playlists all the way.

Was that OK? Took me a while to write, so I hope so.

Goodnight my friends, goodnight.

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the way to a man’s heart is through…


… that little 3ft x 3ft tile-floored, three-walled vestibule area just inside the front door.

Well, at least to this man’s heart, on this night, it is.

Keaton had a friend drop by for a few hours this evening. At one point, he was pulling around Chicken Dance Elmo in the little wagon while Keaton followed close on his heels wheeling her baby doll in the stroller. They’d circle their little procession around the living room room a few times and then head for the front room. On their way Keaton would shout, “Going to our house!,” and her friend would echo, “Our house!”

Their house, such as it was, was that little 3ft x 3ft tile-floored, three-walled vestibule area just inside the front door. They’d both cram in there with the wagon and stroller and baby doll and Chicken Dance Elmo, and be “home.” At first, Sharaun and I thought it was a fluke. But, after they did it several times, we decided they were really playing house. It was the coolest thing to watch. Where the heck do kids get this stuff?

Now I will tell a short story.

In fifth grade, our class went on a field trip to the town’s public pool. Somehow, a friend and I convinced one of the girls in our class to sneak a camera, which we provided, into the girls locker room. Her instructions, once inside, were to snap dirty pictures of a certain other girl in our class. I have no idea why she agreed to this, maybe she didn’t like the other girl. The boys and girls split and went to their respective rooms to change into swimsuits, and we were jumpy with anticipation. When she finally did return the camera, we hung on her every word. “Yeah, I took some,” she said passively, as if this weren’t the successful culmination of every fifth-grade boy’s best-laid plans. I don’t remember how we got the film developed without involving the folks, but we did. In the end, our mole only managed to take a single picture, which was extremely tame and unsatisfying, but which I still have to this day. Sorry Kristina, I was in fifth-grade-love with you, it’s what we did.

Goodnight.

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you’re all in my chest


Wednesday night kinda crept up on me this week. I’ll be honest up-front tonight and admit that I’m not really in much of a blogging mood. It’s the first night in a couple weeks that I hadn’t already picked and mentally half-written my next day’s topic before sitting down with the laptop. I guess that’s bad, because now I’m here writing about not knowing what to write again. But, I’ve got the house to myself (Keaton’s sleeping, Sharaun out) and the iPod is on shuffle… so maybe the words will come.

Speaking of the iPod, I have this new obsession with my “Unplayed” smart-playlist. That’s the playlist where any song that’s never been listened to (at least, not since have to reset all my play-counts to zero) goes. Right now, it’s sitting at eleven-thousand some-odd songs, and I listen to it every day to try and reduce the number. I want to get that sucker to zero unplayed tracks. Today, the thing played a trick on my by shuffling up the near thirty-minute version of “Dark Star” the Dead played at Woodstock in 1969. The Dead’s entire mega-historical Woodstock set has been around for along time on bootleg, I even bought one back in college, but the sources were always really poor audience tapes that sounded awful. So, when the actual soundboard-sourced recording leaked a few years back, I was totally excited. Thirty minutes per track, however, don’t make for quick work on zeroing that playlist…

Anyway, I won’t bore you with all that. I might as well get to what you’ve been waiting for anyway… the one-week update to my month-long Enzyte Challenge. First, before I get to the results (which you can probably already see on the screen below anyway), I wanted to document some of my initial impressions:

 

  1. These pills do nothing.

 

OK, that’s done. Let’s move onto the results:

(Learn how to interpret this chart here.)

Yeah, those little Daves are both exactly the same height (and width). I’m serious. Print it out and draw lines on it to prove it to yourself if you doubt me. That’s a one-week total change of zero in both dimensions, not even a single centimeter (which I’d have chalked up to noise anyway).

But folks, I’ve only been on the pills for nine days now, so it’s probably a little premature to be calling results already. In fact, when I made the call to Enzyte “nutraceuticals” headquarters the other day to ensure my free sample doesn’t conveniently auto-renew for another $60 month, they told me I was too early to cancel – that they wanted me to at least “experience the solution” for a couple weeks, and that my no-charge grace period actually lasts until such-and-such a date (I made a reminder on my phone so I’ll remember to call back).

As an aside, I’m fairly certain Enzyte-HQ call center (at least the “discontinue me” ward) is staffed by females only. It didn’t bother me, but I bet some men would have a hard time answering the “And may I ask why you’d like to discontinue use of the product, sir?” question with, “Uhhh… my wang is just as small as ever…” Good psychology Enzyte, bravo.

Anyway, I’m not gonna be too rough on this particular nutraceutical just yet. I’m willing to give it a fair thirty-day shake. So, stay tuned… and we’ll see. Hopefully this one-week update wasn’t too terribly anti-climactic.

Goodnight my friends, you’re all in my chest.