OK, so I finally have the news about my job status. It seems that while there is a miniscule chance that I might get a job in Duluth, it is highly, highly unlikely.

So, should I desire to move, the USPS is willing to set me up with employment in one of these fine locations. Hoo. Ray. I think I'll move to Warroad. After all, this site says there is at least one place for nightlife -- any camping spot. "Insect repellent is about the only required attire." Racy.

West Fargo, ND
Warroad, MN
Stillwater, MN
Willmar, MN
Fairmont, MN
Grand Marais, MN
Lakefield, MN
Lakeland, MN
Madison, MN
Mankato, MN
Mound, MN
Oronoco, MN
Maple Grove, MN
Park Rapids, MN
Rochester, MN
Saint Cloud, MN
Saint Peter, MN
Sartell, MN
Sauk Centre, MN
Bemidji, MN
Benson, MN
Chanhassen, MN
Eau Claire, WI
Galesville, WI
River Falls, WI
Shell Lake, WI
Spooner, WI
Tomah, WI
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Back when I was a poor college student, I couldn't afford a computer, and I hated writing my papers in the computer lab. So, I scraped together what money I could and bought a Brother word processor. It was on this clunky machine that I wrote all of my college papers, as well as my own recreational crap, and even some of the first articles published in newspapers after college.

I still have the machine as well as a stack of floppy disks full of stuff I wrote back then. I pulled the whole works out today and did some reading. Wow. I don't remember writing any of this stuff.

I used to do this thing where I would just sit down and start writing, with very little as far as a plan. There was no point to this, it was sort of a brainstorming exercise to see what weird BS I could come up with if I let my mind run free. Check this out:

Father Knows Best

I always wanted a father like the fathers on TV: Ward Cleaver, Mike Brady. I wanted a father who wore a tie and carried a briefcase and went to the office. I wanted a father who called "family meetings" and talked to me "man-to-man."

But my old man was different. He came home at five fifteen with sawdust in his hair. By five twenty-five he was asleep. At five forty-five I'd wake him. He'd take off his coveralls and we'd eat.

His hands were greasy and tipped with thick yellow nails. They looked like a mass of molten black iron and glass: something found in the ruins of a burnt house.

In spite of all this, I tried to act like a TV kid. "Did you bring me anything?" I'd ask. He looked at me as if I were naked.

It occurred to me one day, "Charles Ingalls works with his hands. Maybe he can be like Charles Ingalls."

"That jackass," my old man said.

I stopped my dreaming one Sunday when my old man called from the basement. "Hey junior," he said. "Come down here and help me with this."

He had built this weird looking thing out of a lantern battery, a black metal cylinder, and a mass of copper wire. The whole thing was mounted on a sheet of plywood. "Here, hold this wire," he told me. I did. What did I know? I was ten.

He picked up another wire and grabbed my free hand. The shock hit me like a medicine ball.

Before the electricity left my body, I started to imagine the potential this new toy held. Almost immediately, I was calling for my brother, my mom, the cat.

I wanted to shock the world. Put the fear of Frankenstein into every man and beast. Most of all, I wanted to jold Ward Cleaver, Mike Brady, Charles Ingalls.

"That jackass," my old man said.

I think I will post some more of these in the coming days. I do remember this one, since it is a true story, but there are so many that are completely new to me, as if they were written by someone else.

This is fun.

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"I'm sorry," the drunk guy at the bar said to his friends as the Kid Rock song came on the jukebox for the second, perhaps third time that night. "I just love this song so much. I can't help it." Then he stared off into space with a look of sheer ecstacy on his face as Kid Rock did whatever it is that Kid Rock does.

This really struck me, because I think Kid Rock is pretty stupid. I started to think about how even though he does nothing for me, people obviously like something about him, because they consume his albums like crazy. The same goes for so many others.

I've come to the conclusion that a person's chances of liking a particular song or not depend on two things: 1) the person's life experience, and 2) the person's previous exposure to, and appreciation of, other songs up until that very point in time. The variables and elements in this equation are too complex to pin down, exactly. I ask myself, why do I love Gary Jules' cover of the Tears for Fears song, "Mad World" so much? Part of it has to do with the excellent movie Donnie Darko (the Director's Cut was released today on DVD--mine is on the way!) and the scene at the end where that song appears. But I'd go nuts over the song anyway. Why? I have no idea.

I want to make a mix CD consisting of songs that completely grabbed me the first time I heard them, and continue to grab me throughout the years. Hm. This sounds like fun.
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Here is the post where I'm supposed to brag about what a great weekend I had, all the stuff I did, yadda yadda yadda.

My god did it kick ass. Still, I don't really feel like writing about it, because words can't do it justice.

Video, however, can describe it very well. It pretty much went a lot like this. [WMV, 283Kb]
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Man, am I ever gleeful today. Today is the first day in my four-day/three-night vacation, which I began last night when I got off work a full two hours early and went immediately to sleep after coming home. I sprang out of bed at the bright and early hour of 10am, and I've been tossing back the caffiene and slacking about ever since.

One of the things I impulsively did today was to wander into Central Sales. I love that store. I don't think I've ever purchased anything there, but holy crap they have a lot of crap there, and luckily I had my camera in tow. Check my Flickr photostream, man. Cherubs playing basketball. 'Nuff said.

In case you missed the overwhelming amount of press coverage, you all need to get yourselves down to the Play Ground (brand spankin' new joint located in the Technology Village) on Friday night at 10pm for the Duluth premiere of Blogumentary a film by my close, personal, warm, fuzzy friend Chuck Olsen. If you're reading this, well, you have an interest in the subject matter, so you need to, like, go and stuff.

AND THEN. I have decided to venture to the Shitties on Saturday night to see Low w/Pedro the Lion at First Avenue. It seems that mucho Duluthians are herding down there, which should be fun.

But as for tonight, I'm headed to Starfire Lounge, where I will play a limited selection of songs, I believe, though Master Lumpy G will be cranking the wheels and punching the knobs for the majority of the night. Come down and join in.

Boy, this not working thing is great. If only I didn't have a job anymore. Oh, wait...
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I have no idea when and if this will run in print, since The Ripsaw is having a little trouble at the moment.

What I want to know is, when writing this story, why did the Trib decide to interview the publishers of Milk, a zine that has no advertisments and has had only one issue? Does the paper really place The Ripsaw in that category? Is all alternative media the same thing? At what level do the two publications compete?

And why not mention The Wave?

I'm so inquisitive.
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Excuse the blurriness. I'm learning this new image program.
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On Sunday morning I woke up at an ungodly hour and couldn't get back to sleep. So naturally, I wandered the streets of downtown Superior, Wisconsin.

Like most Duluthians, I rarely see Suptown in the light of day. Or sober for that matter.

Here is the obligatory video. [WMV, 4Mb]

Sweet, gentle lord. Look what we've done to this city.
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Ok. First things first: I almost got killed.

So I'm standing in my kitchen, kind of groggy because I haven't been awake for very long. I'm sipping some good coffee, waiting for a friend to pick me up, peering out my side door now and then. I can't actually leave the house that way at this time of year, because the steps are trecherous. But the window is convenient to peer out of. It's warm outside, so I think for a second about hanging out on the side deck to wait, but for some reason I decide against it.

Just then, there is a sound like the world is ending. The house literally shakes, and I go immediately into panic mode because ... well, what IS this? An earthquake? I'm darting around in circles not knowing what to do.

It takes a few seconds for me to realize what has happened: the gigantic ice dam on the roof has slid off onto the deck where I was just going to stand. Not only that, but a lot of it has also slid across the deck and down the stairs, since the whole works is glazed with ice. We're talking a whole effing lot of ice here, folks. Ice that almost decapitated me, or at the least, knocked me down the ice-glazed, ladder-like staircase.

I'm sure my new neighbors heard it and thought, what the hell is that guy upstairs doing? Yeah, that's right, I have new neighbors living downstairs -- the landlord actually rented the place out immediately after the remodeling was done, which is outrageous considering the inflated price he was asking. Maybe they talked him down, I don't know. I haven't even laid eyes on the people, and didn't even know there was anyone living there until the landlord called yesterday and said, "Uh, there are people living downstairs now. Why don't you limit the shoes you leave in the front hall to like, three pairs."

I suppose they're good neighbors, since I didn't even hear them move in and haven't heard anything more from them than an occasional door closing. The trouble is, they smoke, and now the whole place reeks like cigarettes.

It's really weird. I've been living here without neighbors for a year and a half; most of that time, I've lived completely alone. Now suddenly there are these strange people living here with me.

I don't like entering into relationships that I haven't chosen. You chose the people you want to have as friends, and hang around them only when you want to. You chose your romantic partner, too. But when you rent, you normally have no power over who lives next to you or beneath you. Fate has chosen what kind of person has sex four feet from where you eat breakfast.

You don't choose your family, either, but that's a lot different. I'm reminded of this Kurt Vonnegut novel, Slapstick, which is about a set of genius twins who are so smart that they discover as toddlers that their lives will turn out much better if they pretend to be drooling idiots who can't even feed themselves.

Anyway, these twins invent all kinds of things that make the world better, and one of their ideas is a smashing success. One of the twins becomes president, and has everyone in the US assigned a random middle name. After that, everyone who has the same middle name is officially related according to the government, so now everyone has a large extended family that they can call upon wherever they go.

Someone brings up a good point. What if people keep coming to you and making demands on you, and they're crazy? Or what if you just don't want to help them? The president simply points out that these people are family, and under such circumstances you should do what people in traditional families do: "Tell them to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. Tell them to take a flying fuck at the MOOOOOOOON!"

So all I'm saying is, I'd be a lot happier in this situation if my neighbors would go on the patch. And I'd be a lot happier in general if I could reserve my flying-fuck rights as well.
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Literally. I have almost always done this. I sit in the computer room/office/man-den, and the only light in the room comes from the screen. It's as if the rest of the room, or even the world, doesn't exist and whatever I am typing is confidential, just between me and the blog, with no one else involved. I suppose it's the same concept as the psychiatrist's couch.

Somewhere off to my left is a cup of tea. The optical mouse has a faint red glow to my right. Everything else is dark, especially after I've been staring at the bright screen for awhile. Eventually the room ceases to exist and I become the Internet. This is when the magic happens, for me at least.

Now and then, however, I'm forced to turn on the big overhead light or enter this room during the day. It is at these times when I look around the room, my eyes exploring all the random objects, and realize that this room is a total fucken pigsty.
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So, what happened was, after I got my big cable upgrade, my Internet connection didn't seem fast enough. Not that it was slow. It just wasn't the lightning-speed connection I was promised. As is my wont, I delayed any kind of complaint. I just wasn't ready to hear the inevitable: That's as fast as it gets, hon.

Anyway, this morning I called the demon cable company and complained. The woman who answered was all like, "Did you do blah blah blah?" And I was like, "No." And she was like, "Well, you do bliddy blip, and I'm gonna skip dee skizzy do, and we'll see if that works."

Long story short, my connection is now so fricken fast I have to wear a seat belt. I'm searching for all kinds of junk to download now, just so I can watch the green progress bar zip from left to right. God bless Starfire for continuing to vlog, is all I have to say.
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At risk of belaboring a point, here are some things I've learned during my vampiric winter:

- When you sleep in the day, it's really difficult to keep track of time. I think that the variations in light during the day help us remember which day is which and what happened when. In other words, if Tuesday is cloudy and Saturday is really sunny, it's easier to hold those days individually in your mind than if you always are asleep during sunlight hours. Nights always look the same, unless you're really into stargazing or something. When you combine this with the fact that I work six days a week, I really can't keep track of time at all. Ask me what I did on the weekend, and I'm like, "Uh. Um. When was the weekened again? Oh. Uh. OK."

- There is a strange sleep/wake window at certain times of the day. In other words, if you stay awake until it's fully daytime, like after 9:30am or so, your body then believes that it is DAYTIME, and you should NOT BE SLEEPING. Likewise, if you sleep past dusk, it becomes very difficult to get up even if you've had 10 hours of sleep. Sometime I'd like to do an experiment where I wake up at 6pm, then just allow myself to go back to sleep and see how many hours I can remain unconcious. I suspect it's around 14.

- Lately, I've been experiencing something I like to call "Daylight Cravings Time." It works like this. I go to sleep at my normal time, around 7-8am. I wake up around 9-10am, and I am WIDE AWAKE. I feel fully rested and ready to start my day. I force myself to go back to sleep only to wake up again, feeling wide awake again, around noon. After some struggle, I go to sleep again, then wake up in the late afternoon with daylight either gone entirely or rapidly waning, and I feel like I haven't slept at all. I'm tired all night until dawn approaches, at which time I am filled with energy.

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So a mere 12 hours after I get into a conversation about whether or not men can, in fact, breastfeed, good ol' cable TV comes to the rescue with the Discovery Health program, Men With Breasts. Yes, it turns out. Some men under some circumstances can indeed lactate.

Discovery Health is the weirdest fricken channel on the dial by far. Tonight, for example, there's a big double feature: You Swallowed What? followed by When Surgical Tools Get Left Behind.

No wonder I can't sleep.
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I am completely hooked on podcasts. Completely. Obsessed. Hooked. Infatuated.

If you're unfamiliar, here's the skinny: Invented by former MTV VJ Adam Curry, podcasts are basically radio shows recorded at home by amateurs and posted on the Internet, blog-style. You can go to each site and individually download each podcast and listen to it on your computer, but the best way to listen to them is to get an aggregator such as iPodder, which automatically downloads all of your favorite podcasts for you whenever it's convenient. I set mine to do it while I'm sleeping. I wake up, update my iPod, and now I have hours of shows to take with me.

See, I am the ultimate podcast audience, since I listen to headphones for 5-7 hours a day, 6 days a week. I'm always needing new content, and podcasting provides it for me, with no financial or time investment on my part.

Anyway. Here are some of the podcasts I've been listening to. I'll probably end up posting more in the future.

The Dawn & Drew Show (website | feed)
The A-1, most popular podcast in the world, with good reason. It's funny as all hell, and I could listen to it all night. Drew Domkus of Wisconsin was one of the first geeks to do a podcast, but the problem was, it was really boring. Then his wife, Dawn Miceli, stepped in and turned everything around. The show consists of the two of them sitting on their living room floor and talking about whatever, and it's always hilarious and usually raunchy and juvenile. As they describe it, the show is just how they talk all the time. Sometimes they have guests, like the time they called up a friend of theirs to describe the time she did crack. But mainly it's jokes about leprachauns, Coca-cola, and blowjobs.

Daily Source Code (website | feed)
This is Adam Curry's podcast, which deals mainly with the subject of podcasting. There's lots of techy, geeky talk about gear and software, but there's also a lot of suggestions about other podcasts to listen to, which is the best part. It has a professional feel, mainly because of Adam's VJ voice, but you get the real podcast feel too when he starts yelling at his dogs or has to stop recording to answer his phone.

Tracks Up The Tree (website | feed)
Funtime Ben and his buddy Josiah play indie music and jabber on endlessly. It's sort of funny, but what this show is lacking is any kind of serious discussion of the bands that are played. Since this is all "podsafe" music, the bands are all people you've never heard of. I'd like to know some more background stuff about the bands, and why they are chosen, since if all I wanted was to find anonymous indie music, I could just surf around on the web and find it myself.

Coverville (website | feed)
At first I was a bit put off by the amateurishness of this show. Brian the host is sort of a nerd, but he really knows his stuff. Each show features about 5-6 cover songs, many of which are played by request. I like this show and now it doesn't seem amateurish at all.

What They Sang To Me (website | feed)
This podcast is a good idea, but very poorly executed. The host David Johnson chooses one song, describes what he likes about it, then plays the song. The best part is when the description is really personal, like when he tells an anecdote about the first time he heard the song, or something like that. Trouble is, these descriptions are rare. Usually, he just tells the "story" of the lyrics, and talks about how cool the guitar part is. But the worst part is that when he plays the song, he talks over it. "OK. OK. Here's where the drums come in...YEAH! OK. Now this is that one part I told you about, where his girlfriend dies... OK. OK. Check out these background singers..." I've stopped listening to this show, but I'd like to see a podcast similar to the "My Life In Music" blog posts that I and a bunch of other bloggers did a few months back.

The Daily Download (website | feed)
Host Chris Rockwell is a great multi-tasker who makes efficient use of his time. The gimmick here is that every day, he records a show while going #2. (His goal is to get a sponsor to give him a year's supply of TP--the really soft kind.) There's the inevitable poop and ass jokes, but there's also telephone interviews, sometimes interrupted by Chris saying something along the lines of, "Hang on a second, I gotta push." God bless the Internet.
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But I won't leave you empty handed.

Go here.

Then come back and thank me very much.
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Microsoft Word comes with a speech recognition component, which must be "trained" to recognize your voice. It also helps a lot if you use a good microphone. However, after some experimenting, I've found that when you speak into an old set of headphones and don't train it at all, MS Word makes its own poetry through not understanding a single word you're saying.

Here's the result from reciting Shakespeare's Sonnet 48 into speech recoginition. [Tip for schoolkids: This isn't even plagerism!]

- - -

Sonnet 48 ("Translated")

So here was winning
Each tried to install and
Then to mine use in mind: They
Prone a N. pearl Olson The issue were words of trust
But now to my age and tried all are
Most were indeed prowl my greatest.
The best of his pen mine only two years
Part (a very remote. The Then revolve. He
The headline not locked up any chance of
They were found not part of the fuel I feel the of
They came again so low assurance]
Phone when south placer No means, and Before
Any even then Bill will he still live here
For truth proves the bench for a broad and so you your problem
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God bless Russ Stewart. Apparently, he is going to begin an effort to remove the stupid laws from the books, beginning with Duluth's controversial anti-loitering ordinance, which so many people fought so hard to pass, but no one has ever seen the need to enforce.

The anti-loitering ordinance is one example of the misguided attempt of some of our citizens and leaders to mandate civility. See, there are a lot of things that people do that are more or less harmless, but can be somewhat annoying. Instead of responding to these folks by simply behaving as a shining example of kindness and good citizenship, some people respond by getting angry and passing laws to force them to be nice. They're kind of like the father who says "We're going to have a nice family evening together whether you like it or not."

The Trib is sort of spearheading its own forced civility campaign with its series, "The Unshoveled Truth," wherein it invites citizens to submit photographs of their neighborhood's illegally unshoveled sidewalks, which it will publish so to humiliate the neighbors into complying with Duluth's 24-hour shoveling ordinance.

Now, I'm a decent and timely shoveler. Just last night, for example, I brought out the heavy-duty coal shovel to chip a wide path through the 4-foot-high, 6-foot-wide concrete-like mountain left on my boulevard by the snowplow. I'm not legally bound to do this, but I did it just to be nice to the people who visit me, and to myself for that matter.

However, this move by the DNT is insane. Sure, it gives some satisfaction to the shovel-happy nuts in our community, but how many people can that be? And who the hell cares about people who are that mean? Old Lady Anderson down the street hasn't shoveled her sidewalk, and it's been TWO DAYS since the snowfall! What? I don't care if she's 80 years old and has artificial hips! Burn that bitch at the stake! Yeah, let's give that guy some satisfaction.

But then again, I start to think about Super One Foods in West Duluth, and its refusal to clear the sidewalk that runs along the side of its building. This refusal forces me to walk out in the street every day to and from work, with cars whizzing past me, honking and splashing sludge on my Fluevogs. Sure, I could use a different, safer route with clear sidewalks, but I should be able to use the fast route and the sidewalk that is currently buried under four feet of impacted snow. And if that isn't bad enough, whenever I shop there I end up ditching my cart just outside their door and carrying my groceries two blocks home, instead of pushing the cart all the way down the sidewalk and ditching it in the snowbank a mere half-block from my house. They need to accommodate this habit, dammit! One of those bags could easily break, spilling my 18 cans of Chunky Soup all over the street.

Listen, Super One, you are not allowed to make me spill my Chunky Soup all over the street. That's the job of the Rustic Bar.

Fucken A, man. Now I'm upset. To hell with these ideals. I'm reporting the Super One to the DNT, just you watch. And the rest of you lazy bastards in this town better get moving. There's a storm approaching tonight, and I have rather effective digital camera and a big ol' chip on my shoulder. Old Lady Anderson -- I am talking about you.

In the meantime, if anybody needs me, I'll be at the Rustic.
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- I found this thing recently, and I've been testing it out in a combination of annoyance and fascination. I think it's the interface that I don't like, as it reminds me of awful javascript-based websites, animated GIFs, etc. Why is it so irritating when things move around on a web page? But I like the idea, and I would like to see something similar for movies and books.

- I started listening to Podcasts last night at work, and now I have a whole other thing to get hooked on. I only had time to find and download one podcast, so I chose Coverville which I thought was potentially pretty cool, considering my love of good cover songs. If anyone knows of any other good podcasts, I'd like to hear about them, because I have, like, hours and hours of listening time every night.

- It appears that Spacewaitress has dismantled her blog after some serious reflection. I'd say I'm disappointed, but I completely understand the desire to do that. Plus, my opinion doesn't count for much, being as I just linked to a 404 on purpose.
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Hey! Remember back when my computer fouled up and I almost completely lost everything?

The thing I was worried about most was my vast, vast music collection. So what I did was, I backed the whole thing up on DVDs. What I didn't report, because I was so sick of posting lousy news, was that after everything was taken care of virus-wise, half of the DVDs didn't work.

HOWEVER. I had a backup backup plan. Only I didn't want to implement it for fear that that, too, wouldn't work. I am ecstatic to say that as of this morning, all music has been restored, along with some new, amazing functionality heretofore unseen.

This morning, I went to this site and downloaded a program called XPlay 2, which is simply awesome.

See, the problem with iPods is that normally you can only move music from the computer to the iPod. However, with XPlay 2 installed, you can move music in the opposite direction as well. Luckily, I was smart enough to keep my iPod intact.

Another great thing (some would say) is that I can now transfer music from ANY iPod to my computer, and from my computer to ANY iPod. Not that I would do such a thing. Oh, no, never.

Uh, call me.

[note: a similar program -- iPod Access -- is available for Macs at www.findleydesigns.com]

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Burnin' Down the House
Originally uploaded by Barrett.

For years, whenever I've seen my living quarters from the freeway (no matter where those quarters might be) I've always imagined smoke and fire pouring out of the window.

So anyway, this morning as I was walking home from work, there was smoke everywhere. This is no big deal usually, because the Stora Enso Paper Mill is right by my house, and huge amounts of steam billow out of it constantly, especially in cold weather. But this was different. This stuff was right next to the ground. Cars on the street had to nearly stop as visibility was nonexistent.

Then I noticed that it was concentrated around my block, and that there were flashing lights there, too. I ran. I sprinted. In the subzero cold. My iPod still blaring. I couldn't help but think I had left the stove on when I prepared my prework meal.

But I am just paranoid. The smoke turned out to be just the usual paper-mill steam, which had momentarily drifted down to street level. The flashing lights were from a snow plow. I arrived at home a minute or so early, with a numb face and raspy, icy lungs.

It ain't easy bein' me.
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Man, it feels good when you look out the window to see about a million feet of snow, then realize you have a snowblower. You fire that bastard up, crank the controls all the way from turtle to rabbit, pop it in gear and you're fricken rolling, baby. It's 6am and the snow in the street is still up to my eyeballs, but my sidewalks are clean, clean, clean. And I stink like a gas-huffer.

And hey, speaking of shoveling, my brother-in-law Paul is a good citizen who shovels with pride.

Now it's going to be -30° to -50° for the next couple of days. When this winter BS first started, I was kind of grumbly about it, but now that it's extreme, I think it's pretty awesome. So stay in and keep yourself warm with the new Low video, Death of a Salesman, which is world premiering on Perfect Duluth Day. (Tell your friends.)
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portion of a handbill received with my paystub
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Well, the good news is I am told that I will have a job of some sort when all is said and done.

The bad news is that the location of that job will probably not be in Duluth.

2004, I thought I was through with you.

Details here: Postal Facility to Close
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So with all this talk about vlogs lately, I started thinking about starting my own, and then realized that the danger of starting a vlog is the risk of turning into the next Colleen Shannon.

For the uninitiated, Colleen Shannon had a public access TV show here in the Twin Ports back in the early '90s called "In My Room." In it, she would just sit in front of the camera and talk candidly for an ENTIRE HOUR. New shows aired weekly, I believe, but the episodes aired many times, so it seemed like she was always on the television.

I was sort of addicted to "In My Room." It was very rambling and disjointed. Most of the monologues had to do with politics. Colleen was very upset with the world, and in her rants she would often break down and cry. Every episode began and ended with music played on her stereo.

Toward the end of her stint on public access, she reached out and invited the public to join her. She wanted others to come on the air and talk about whatever it was they wanted to talk about. No one took her up on it, except a couple of punk kids who made their own version of Colleen's show called "In My Glass Of Puke."

In her way, Colleen Shannon was a pioneer vlogger, and I wonder if she's online. I used to see her around downtown every now and then, but I haven't for several years.

I have to hand it to her for being courageous, though. It doesn't seem that hard to put yourself on the Web, but doing the same thing on television is a whole other story. Especially when what you're doing is describing how you make reusable sanitary-pads out of sponges from Hardware Hank.

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So I'm reading this book I Hate Bush and So Do You by Reader Weekly columnist Jason Johnson, who happens to be my co-worker (or, to use Jason's word, fellow "postman"). The book is a compilation of Johnson's columns from 1999-2003, and I had no idea it existed until I accidentally came across it at the library.

My favorite parts of the book occur when the subject strays from politics and into a more personal realm, namely that of Jason's job, which is the same as my job. Here's an excellent example from his May 31, 2001 article, "The Decline and Fall of the Midwestern Work Ethic" in which he discusses his award for perfect attendance (an award which I received in 1999, incidentally):

Then, earlier this year, I was given an award for my perfect attendence for the year of 2000. I was told to stand and receive applause from my co-workers for this award. It was a touching, humbling experience until I realized that I got this award for literally just showing up. Ever hear of contests that give awards for crossing the finish line within the lifetime of an elm tree? This is that award!

I wasn't asked to give a speech, or it would have gone like this: "I'd like to thank my co-workers for having some kind of life outside work, thereby rewarding me for my limited obligations. I'd particularly like to thank my female co-workers; if any of you had actually gone out with me, I might not have been free to work all those weekends. And I'd like to thank the rest of you for catching my flu, which I brought to work with me because I couldn't afford an unscheduled absence." I would then eat lunch in the cafeteria alone.

That is gold, Jason Johnson. Gold.

I especially like that last line, because although Jason works in the same place as I do, doing the same things, at the same time of day, often even sitting right next to me, I have never spoken to him in my life. I have never said hello, and I have never even said something as impersonal as "excuse me." I would feel pretty comfortable wagering that we have never even made direct eye contact. Yet we are not merely co-workers, we are both writers of smart-aleck journalism, and we have both been published in The Cheerleader magazine. What are the chances?

Last night I was thinking about this fact and planning to write this post. Then, I went to sleep and dreamed that Jason Johnson came up to me and introduced himself. I got really mad and screamed at him, "What the hell do you think you're doing?! We had a great streak going on here and you just blew it by talking to me! We are NOT SUPPOSED TO ACKNOWLEDGE EACH OTHER'S EXISTENCE!" My rage was exquisite.

I also eat lunch alone in the cafeteria every day. I do this by choice and by habit, and because it is part of the culture of the place. Since talking is prohibited on the workroom floor, you don't generally interact with your co-workers in the lunchroom either unless one or more of the following is true: 1) you are both extremely extroverted, 2) you know each other through some means other than work, 3) you are a smoker, or 4) you are a middle-aged woman who likes to get to work early and drink coffee and eat cake.

Maybe someday I will run into Jason Johnson outside of the workplace and we will have a conversation of some kind. But there's no way in hell I'm going to initiate one on the clock. I have my bubble of isolation to think of.

I'm done.
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- During the guitar solo, it is important for the lead singer to upstage the guitar player. But it is important to do it right. DO: Bug out your eyes, lean over the guitar player's shoulder and make squiggly finger motions. DON'T: Turn around facing the drums and wiggle your girlish butt.

- Also during the guitar solo it is important for all nonplayer characters to remember that a lead guitarist slowly walking down a darkened hallway is the scariest thing in the world.

- Y'know, in retrospect, that dude from Anthrax can't rap for shit.

- I want to write a short story where the protagonist is the son of that babe who lifted her shirt in Mötley Crüe's "Home Sweet Home" video.

- After World War III, supplies will be short, forcing women to wear ripped fishnet stockings. But thankfully there will still be plenty of rouge and Aqua Net.

- Dio, man. Ronnie James Dio.
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I did this last year with some success. But this year, I have a lot more photographic experience, plus a Flickr account.

Check 'em out here. Hints: Choose the Slideshow option if you please, or just use your mouse. If you choose the latter, you can leave comments on the individual picture.

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So this year, for the first time in my life, I will ring in the new year at work. And to tell you the truth, I'm kind of looking forward to it.

I think New Year's Eve is my least-favorite holiday. I've had very few positive New Year's experiences. Last year at Starfire's house was fun, up until the point where the party (or at least some of the party) moved to Luce, at which time it was definitely necessary to give up and go home. I'm not going to explain in detail all the reasons why I hate ringing in the New Year, but in general it has to do with two things.

The lesser of these is that New Year's Eve, like St. Patrick's Day, is Amateur Night at the bars. The world is filled with people who normally do not drink often and do not know have the slightest knowledge of drunk ettiquette. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've had 8 martinis and you're the king of the world. Ok. But this isn't so bad, because there's always one or two of these in any establishment on any given weekend night.

The worst is the feeling of desperation among the partygoers. That facial expression, where you can just read the secret, dark, thoughts: I have to have a good time tonight. I must have fun. Am I a fun person? How can I have fun? Oh, God, let me please be a fun person tonight.

I think the ideal New Year's party, for me, would have a cast of about 12-15. None of the desperate, lameoids would be invited, only fun people, like you for instance. And there would be a sworn oath to never give up the ship and go to a bar. And no one would drive home drunk.

Another reason I'm looking forward to working the New Year's shift is that I take perverse pleasure in doing something productive and wholesome when most people are out getting hammered and participating in debaucherous behavior. Even last year, I didn't drink much at all, and felt great when I sprang out of bed the next morning with the knowledge that most of the world was nursing a vicious hangover and nauseating sexual regrets. It's sick, I know, but it makes me feel like a good citizen. Besides, drinking gallons and losing all your morals is much more fun, like, say, on a random Wednesday in August.

This year, I will briefly look up from my computer screen to holler Happy New Year. There is no one at my job I would like to kiss, and if I did I would probably be fired, so that's not a problem, either. Then at 5, I'll finish my shift, come home, drink 0-3 celebratory cocktails, and bask in my sick pleasure, knowing that somewhere out there at that very moment, a naked stranger is puking in your hamper. Meanwhile, I'm safe and happy at home, watching the fucken Smurfs.

I need help.
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Oh the year was seventeen seventy eight
I wish I were in Sherbrooke now!
A letter of marque came from the King
To the scummiest vessel I've ever seen
God Damn them all! I was told
We'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns, shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's privateers.

[the rest]
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I found out today that my nephew Joe has a blog. Joe is a major drunkard and a major computer geek and I took this picture of him at my parents' kitchen table, through one of my mom's curlers.

Check him out. He's the Gootch Monkey.
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Finally captured on a photograph -- yes, this, my friends, is the infamous "moon pudding" which has been a tradition in my family for generations. I've described this stuff to practically everyone I've ever met, an no one can quite picture it in mind, so here it is in all its glory.

This English dessert looks like some kind of cake or fudge, sure. But keep in mind this is a traditional ENGLISH (read, "kinda disgusting") dessert. It isn't made like cake at all.

The primary ingredient in moon pudding is suet. Yes, suet. Just like the stuff you feed the birds, sans the birdseed. This suet is ground and mixed with flour and raisens. The fatty blob is then plopped on a towel, which is wrapped up and tied at the top. The towel is then put onto a plate, and the whole works is then submerged in boiling water, where it cooks for literally something like two days.

Traditionally, I am told, there is a hard sugar sauce made with apple juice which is supposed to go on top of the moon pudding. But this tradition has been lost in my family. Instead, everyone has developed their own style of eating moon. Most eat it plain. Newcomers generally do not think of it as a dessert as it is greasy and not very sweet by American standards, and so they eat it with gravy. Some wait until the next day and fry it in butter. Some eat it with powedered sugar or Reddi Whip.

The horrific story that goes with moon is that one year my mom was transferring the boiling-hot towel blob to a different pan, and the towel suddenly split open, spilling scalding grease all over the dog's back. Let me tell you, hot uncooked moon pudding is a lot like napalm. It sticks and burns and there's not much you can do about it. It burned the dog pretty badly and the dog lived for about another 10 or 12 years with a bald back.

As for me, I rather like moon. I mean, a cannonball-sized chunk of low-grade fat, complete with raisens? Shaw. How can you go wrong?
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- WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
- Mom said to take this turkey out for tomorrow and clean it.
- DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING?
- No. I've never done it before.
- LET ME DO IT. I KNOW EXACTLY HOW TO DO IT.

[20 Minutes Later]

- WHAT THE HELL? WHERE ARE THE GIBLETS?
- You probably left them inside.
- NO. I HAD THEM ON THE COUNTER WITH THE NECK. WHERE THE HELL ARE THEY?
- Well, here's the neck.
- YEAH, BUT WHERE'S THE FUCKEN GIBLETS?
- Maybe you threw them away.
- NO. THERE'S THE BAG IN THE GARBAGE. THEY WERE IN THAT BAG. I TOOK THEM OUT AND PUT THEM ... SOMEWHERE
- What's this?
- THAT'S THE ASS.
- You cut off the ass? Aren't you supposed to leave that on?
- HELL NO. I ALWAYS CUT OFF THE ASS.
- Mom, what do you do with the ass of the turkey? On or off?
- It depends. If anyone wants to eat it, leave it on.
- My grandma said it was the best part. It's all fat.
- YEAH, YEAH. "IT'S GOOD FOR WHAT AILS YOU."
- No one here is old enought to want to eat the turkey's ass.
- ARRGGGHH! WHERE ARE THE GODDAMN GIBLETS?!
- Oh, hey. I bet I know. [Points at the dogs, who immediately look guilty]
- Yee. Haw. Dogs eating raw giblets. We're gonna have an adventure tonight. Hope you got a lot of paper towels.
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This year, my family has decided not to exchange Christmas presents. I think this is a great idea. We all have too much stuff anyway, expecially my parents, who certainly do not need any more Jesus-oriented wall hangings or porcelain knick-knacks.

But I have decided to extend this spirit of ungiving to everyone I know. Yeah, I realize that last year I got all sappy about wanting to give presents to everyone in the world. But this year I feel like it's not even Christmas, really.

Still, I've decided to give a little gift to myself: Cable TV, baby. I figure since I'm 90% less interested in the expensive habit of intoxicating myself, I can afford some deluxe boob tube action. I haven't had cable since I moved out of my parents' house, and that was back in the analog days. Back in my day, sonny, we had only one HBO. And we liked it, dammit.

I plan on having 12 HBOs plus the Independent Film Channel, Sundance, and Cartoon Network. I'm sure there's a couple hundred other decent channels in there (along with about a thousand channels that show nothing but nuns selling cutlery) but those are the ones I plan on watching a lot of.

So come on over and let's watch TV. I'll provide the beverages. You provide your own drool towel and Depend Undergarment.

And yeah, I'm not stupid. I know the introductory price, which is guarateed through 2005, will be jacked up by prolly about 50 bucks a month as soon as the offer's over. But despite Charter Cable's slogan ("Get Hooked"), I'm hoping this adventure will be like joining the Columbia Record Club, and not like establishing a healthy smack habit.

Merry Christmas, Earth People.
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So, on Saturday night, Paulie Boy and I hosted the Birtday Rally in Spirit Valley. As usual, a good time was had by most.

Here, the brothers Lundgren perform "Come Sail Away." Meanwhile, V-Nick looks on as Maria's face melts.

Karaoke masters line up to dispute Larry Holmes' so-called "Championship." At a nearby table, however, an historic event takes place: sushi is consumed in the Rustic Bar.

Gartman leads a rousing rendition of "Livin' on a Prayer." Paul begins to get creepy.

I suppose this would be a good place to hide the Drunkest Picture of Me Ever Taken.

Rustic karaoke shut down at midnight, which lead to the inevitable plan: more karaoke at the Keyport.

And so the evening ended, as all good birthday parties should, with a nice game of Pin the Tongue on Gene Simmons.
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...I have this major, major cold sore system working on the right corner of my mouth. It really is prodigious. Seriously, you people are lucky that the batteries in my camera are worn out.

So noticing that I'm out of Ambesol or Campho-phenique or whatever, and being a geek, I casually hopped online to try and discover which brand works the best before going out and buying some. Here's what happened next.

1. Every reputable site I visited said that that stuff doesn't work.

2. Every reputable site I visited warned emphatically that a person with a cold sore should be EXTREMELY careful when touching their eyes or genitals, because it is easy to get ocular or genital herpes from a cold sore.

Great. Like I need this worry. I am a paranoid person to begin with, and among my many frets is the fear that I will do something like this. That I will touch my cold sore, my eyes, and my ... self, and then while the cold sore will run its course, I will be blind and will never have sex again.

Such is the mind I live in. I'm going to the pharmacy.
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So on Sunday night, the night of my birthday, I realized I was coming down with something. My throat felt a little painful, and I could feel a headache coming on. I also felt pretty tired, but I hadn't slept very well for a few days, so I chalked it all up to that.

I went to work at 12:15am, and by the time I got home at 5:30, I was dizzy and had the chills, and I was very, very tired. So I went to bed and was out by 6.

I didn't get out of bed until I had to, which was at 7:30 the next night. Sure, during that time, I woke up to get water, go to the loo, answer the phone, etc., but for almost that whole time -- 13.5 hours -- I was asleep.

But wait. It gets better. I miserably dragged myself to work at 8:30pm feeling like hell. I put in for an early out, and they let me go home at 1am. By 2:30, I was asleep. I woke up at 4pm.

I've decided that until this goes away, I will be sleeping at all times, unless there is something important I need to do instead of sleeping.

Like blogging.
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Tomorrow (Sunday) is my birthday. I will be 32.

The party is next weekend, and everyone reading this is invited.

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When you take a 10-minute shower and the mirror doesn't even fog up...

When a slice of apple on the table turns to leather before it turns brown...

When your knuckles begin to resemble the Alps...

There is no choice but to make soup.
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One of the joys of working at night is being able to tune in nightly to Coast to Coast AM with George Noory and stay informed on all the latest Bigfoot and poltergeist happenings out there. But about a week ago, I turned my radio on a little early and discovered my latest guilty pleasure: The Phil Hendrie Show.

OK, OK. I'm sure there are some of my fellow Democrats out there who probably know about Phil Hendrie and his infamous pro-Bush rants. But let's just set that aside right now, as personally I've never heard any of that. From what I've heard recently, The Phil Hendrie Show is a work of genius.

For the uninitiated, I'll explain. The show is much like any other AM talk-radio show. It's offensive. The guests are idiots and there is a lot of arguing. But here's where the genius comes in: all of the "guests" are portrayed by Hendrie himself. He's fairly open about that fact on the show, but still, every night people tune into the show and are completely duped. They call as if the guests are real (callers are screened so only the duped callers get through) and scream and yell about how idiotic the "guest" is. The more they scream, the more offensive the guest becomes, until Hendrie intervenes, "hangs up" on the guest, and then apologizes to the audience. It's awesome.

Hendrie has about 40 characters that he keeps in rotation. Recently, I've heard Hendrie portray a man who loaned someone $1,000, only to have the guy join the military and get killed in Iraq--so he's suing the guy's family. The angry calls poured in, meanwhile in the background, you could hear the "guest" adjusting his hot tub. What's wrong...can't a man be interviewed in a hot tub? What the hell country is this?

This article explains the show much better than I can, and lists some of Hendrie's characters. But maybe this article from the LA Weekly says it most eloquently:

"Hendrie has said he is not worried that exposure might ruin the show by tipping off potential callers — he believes you cannot overestimate the stupidity of the AM-radio audience, and his work is enduring testament to that fact. But his point is not to expose simple stupidity. His “guests” are sophisticated parodies designed to incite the easy anger of the self-righteous, whom he expertly lures by creating characters who run roughshod over their pieties — the sanctity and safety of American children, the meaning of patriotism, kindness to animals. He likes to create characters who have thinly veiled ulterior motives, which he reveals little by little, as if in a well-constructed one-act play.

Listening to Phil Hendrie combines the pure, illegitimate pleasure of making prank phone calls with an intense, stoned reading of Marshall McLuhan. Hendrie’s show is a scathing and wholly original critique of what passes as dialogue and debate in vast portions of our culture. He uses the AM-radio call-in audience as “found objects” to reveal their own prejudices and susceptibility to manipulation, and he in a sense bestows on them an eloquence they themselves do not possess. Hendrie takes the average, depressing predictability of the average American psyche and somehow makes it into joyful comedy."
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Earlier this evening, the old man who lives across the street came over with a shoebox full of ornaments for me via Predicate Nominative. Then, like 30 minutes later, Ms. Nominative herself showed up with an additional paper bag full -- FULL -- of stuff ranging from antiquey breaky things to cutesy wooden stuff to creepy yarny wonders, all to adorn my tree. Let's hear it for PN!

I'm setting all this stuff up this weekend. And making a diorama. And exploding from excitement.

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I've become obsessed with anagrams recently, and I would like everyone to know my new name is Abe Hartcrest.

Also, if I ever start a band, I could call it:

Crab's Theater
Teacart Herbs
Rehab Scatter
Breast Rachet
Charter Beats
Catheter's Bar
Cheater Brats
Saber Chatter
The Arab Crest
The Rarest Cab
The Bear Carts
The Bar Reacts
The Brat's Acre

I encourage everyone to find their own anagrams. You might find out your new name is:

Dr. Neal Unplug
Eli Cheetah
Jam Reseller
Drama Nazi
Cheney Zoo
Milk Canon
Neutral First
Weighted Moods

or my personal favorite:

Regis Barleycorn

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There were about three or four times when I had this thought as a youngster. I remember being about 13 or 14 and laying in bed thinking about how old I would be in the year 2000, and about some kind of stereotypical Jetsons-like future that involved jetpacks and moving sidewalks and all kinds of fun stuff like that. I figured that maybe, at some point during my life, time travel would become possible.

I figured there was an easy way to find out immediately if I would ever get to travel through time. I made myself a promise that if I ever got the chance to use a time machine, I would travel to that exact moment. I made a point of thinking about the year, date, and time of day, and then I waited. Nothing happened. I never showed up.

The thing is, as an adult, I don't remember those dates and times. I'm not even sure how old I was. I think I was 13 or 14, as I said, but I could have been 17. I have no idea. I let myself down.

So, here I at the end of my 31st year, thinking about this again, and writing it down on the Internet for my future self to find. Here it is, with the date and time and everything right there for you. So c'mon, future self. Go ahead and hop in that machine. I'm right here.

If there were a knock at the door right now, I would literally collapse from an aneurysm.

Waiting...

Oh, god. I gotta go.
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Oooo. This is the year that just keeps on giving. It's been a banner year here at the ol' Chase residence. Oh, yes. Let's look back on it, shall we? On second thought, let's not. At various points on this blog, I've already recounted a good 25% of all the horrific shit that went down this year so there's no need to relive it.

Nonetheless, 2004 just keeps rolling on with all its wonder, and I've been thinking a lot about it lately. It's not that nothing good happened to me this year--a lot of great things happened, in fact, mainly having to do with the people around me and how great they are--but 2004 ate, there's no doubt about that.

I have written several times about how in the mid-late 1990s, I was a very unhappy person. My plans to actually use my major had fallen through (this is a story of its own, one I'll tell some time) and I was poor and underemployed. I felt like I was in a holding pattern, frozen there not knowing what to do. Back then, my "workdays" would usually last anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. The rest of my time I'd spend reading, listening to music and fretting. Oh, and doing housework. I'd prepare two healthy homecooked meals every day, and the apartment was always immaculate. The books I read were always very thick and very difficult. And almost every day, I'd listen to Jerree Small's Sleeping Giant album, not that I even knew who Jerree Small was, only that she was originally from Duluth but didn't live here anymore.

Recently, I was laying on a chaise (ironically, the kind of couch you see in psychiatrists' offices, at least in the comics) in a room lit by only one candle. A few feet away, Jerree practiced for an upcoming show. I didn't say much; I just laid there listening and enjoying the music. Every now and then, I'd make an unorthodox request, not for a title, but for a subject. I'd ask if she would play a song about ice cream, for example. "Well, none of my songs are about ice cream," she'd say, "but I have this song that mentions..." And so on.

"Could you play a song about a foreign country?" I asked. It had been years since I had listened to Sleeping Giant, so I had completely forgotten about the song "Romania." As soon as I heard it, I was instantly transported back to that unhappy time, and the difference between my life in 1998 and 2004 was practically enough to unravel my mind. It's unbelievable to me how different my thinking about the world was back then, and how it worked to my detriment. If I had those fears and concerns now, I wouldn't be able to get out of bed.

...I am trying to forget where I'm from
But all around me are familiar sounds...

The oddest part is how now that I have been facing real issues as opposed to mid-20s life-crisis bullshit, I seem to have summoned a reserve strength that I didn't know I had. My two concerns now as I watch the sun set on this year are 1) whether or not this year has still more in store for me and mine, and 2) whether it is truly the curse of 2004, or if this year is just the warmup for 2005.

I guess we'll see, won't we? And I guess I'll most likely tell you all about it. Now that my computer is back up and running.

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Right now, my computer has the worst infection I have ever seen. I've dealt with viruses and spyware a few times before, and some of those times were bad. But this...oh my God listen to this.

The START MENU doesn't work. Also, "Run" is missing from the Start Menu as is "Find." "My Computer" is now called "Folder." None of the icons on the desktop work. Internet Explorer does not work. Norton Antivirus seems to have been partially deleted.

The only way I can use any program is to go into My Computer and find the program in Program Files. I can get online with Mozilla, but I cannot run any online virus scans, because they all require Internet Explorer.

Cachee actually went out and bought a copy of McAfee Antivirus, but I can't install it until all Norton Antivirus garbage is removed from the registry. Seemingly, I can't remove that without the help of Norton, and they charge something like $60 for support of any kind.

I can't reinstall Norton, because it came with the computer and I never got a disc of any kind.

I have four anti-spyware programs installed. I can scan and scan over and over all night, and they will keep finding and removing the same things over and over. I think the source of the problem is probably a trojan horse, or many of them. But how should I know?

Do other people encounter these problems, to a greater or lesser degree? I have heard complaints in the past from people but none of the details. Is there anyone out there who can help me in any way?

Right now I am doing something I should have done long ago: backing up my MP3s. 25 gigs worth. This is going to take forever.

Meanwhile, I'm going to watch Gremlins. It seems appropriate.
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Too many users? It's 2 a.m. on a SUNDAY.
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Last night Sarah Heimer invited me to participate in her Diorama Art Show and I'm really excited. I don't think I've ever made a diorama, and I really want to. Here are some thoughts I've had so far on the subject.

1. I won't be making a "diarrhea diorama." This was my first response to the invitation, which Heimer met not with disgust, but with palpable impatience. "Do you know how many times I've heard that?" she said. I know, I know. I just had to get it out of my system. Sorry.

2. It is currently my opinion that I won't be using any action figures, Legos, or anything else of that nature. Everything is going to be from scratch, baby. At least that's my goal right now.

3. Though the subject of my diorama is currently undecided, I think perhaps all of the characters in the diorama are going to be drunk. A diorama of the Pizza Lucé bar complete with illuminated "LIQUOR" sign would be beautiful, but I think I can come up with something better than that.

4. FUN!
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I think I could photograph this scene every day, as it's always different. In the spring, the smaller tree that's in front of the streetlight blooms with the most amazing flowers. Followers of this blog will remember the picture of the Northern Lights from last week.

This would have to be a video, but often a girl of about age nine zips down this street at about 30mph on a homemade motor scooter, with another girl of about age four behind her, hanging on for dear life. That is just bitchen.

About a month ago, I saw a parade of five adults marching down the street dressed as clowns, blowing noisemakers. If only I could have grabbed my camera in time.

I think I need to set up a webcam.
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Well, in keeping with a wonderful history of rocket-scientist behavior, it appears that my landlord sold all of our Christmas decorations in his rummage sale. Ornaments I made in kindergarten? Gone. Engraved ornaments from the first Christmas Cachee and I spent together? Gone. Ornaments given as gifts or handed down from previous generations? Gone, daddy, gone.

Sure, he's going to pay for this, yadda yadda yadda. But in the meantime, I'd like to make the most of it, which is where you come in.

If you have any ornaments you feel like shoving my way as the decorating season begins to unfold, I would like that. Ms. Small is starting things off with this ornament and lovely diorama. In this scene it appears that Santa Claus is holding a baby in one hand and a stick in the other. What he plans on doing is unclear. An ominous rabbit oversees the action from a shelf, while a cherub prances around the room on a horse. You can't see it very well in this picture, but there is a bucket near Santa's chair, the purpose of which is also unclear. Whatever is happening, all the characters feel safe and secure, guarded by the ornament of a Keystone Kop wearing a dress.

But don't be intimidated. Not all ornaments need to be this fantastic. They will all have a special place in my heart, as well as on this weblog--as if there's a difference.

[Oh! And don't forget Cachee. She needs ornaments, too.]
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So I bought this new Handsome Boy Modeling School album, White People, and my assessment is that it's the muvvafukkin business. Of course, you could say that about any album that includes the words "featuring Father Guido Sarducci," but this album has one song that leaps off the plastic and knocks you out with a Taser, and that song is "I've Been Thinking" featuring none other than Cat Power.

This song is way too sexy to even exist, and not just because of the smooth beat. To hear Cat Power sing, "You can slide, slide, slippity slide, you can hip hop and don't stop" ... how am I supposed to take that?

Plus there's the usual HBMS skits, including some takes on The Dating Game and some etiquette advice from Chest Rockwell ("You gotta fart, you wait until after the date is over when you go home. That is when you do your fartin'."), and some sweet hip hop action. So I got this baby off the Internet (I actually bought it) and went to work.

On my way to work, I stopped by the supermarket to get something for lunch, because I really didn't feel like eating a lunch consisting exclusively of foods in bar form. On my way out, I noticed a piece of paper tacked to the bulletin board near the exit. The ad said this:

Chest freezer
grate for deer

I prefer to think these are two different items, and that the first item is some sort of ray gun.

When I got to work, the first thing I did was pick up my check. The second thing I did was look at it, and the third thing I did was practically faint. See, this is the first check I've received since doing the full-on night-shift action. And it's huge! Well, not huge, but it looks like this month I can actually pay my bills AND eat! And that's something! Let's hear it for money.

I also believe I've saved a lot of money lately because, suddenly, it's like I don't drink anymore. Working nights has a lot to do with it. It isn't very much fun to drink at 5am, because, among other things, when you wake up at noon to pee, the sun is screaming in the windows and every cell in your body is telling you it's daytime, stupid, and you'll never get back to sleep. So it's been almost two weeks since I imbibed, and that was only because I was hanging out with Buck Satan.

The funny thing is, I don't even miss it. And maybe I'll lose a bunch of weight. That is, if I can manage to stay away from food that's in bar form.

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Bam! Just as I was about to run out of storage space, my hosting company quintupled the storage space in my contract. So now I can once again post photos with impunity. Sweet, sweet, sweet. I don't even know what impunity means.

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Whenever I get a little bit dissatisfied with my living conditions, I start to fantasize about the ultimate dream house. And every time I do this, the house is different. My ideals are always changing.

Right now I'm thinking of a dream house hobbled together from all the houses on classic TV. It's one spectacular goddamn house.

The kitchen is from The Brady Bunch. Aside from the extensive food preparation area, this baby had two ovens. Two. It's a given that Alice comes with the kitchen to serve up hotdish and witty comments.

The living room is from The Dick Van Dyke Show. A sunken seating area, open to the dining area, is excellent for entertaining. There is a sliding panel to the kitchen, which is opened for serving a buffet-style meal, and is closed for hushed, private discussions when wacky trouble insues. Be careful of the ottoman.

The den is from Leave it to Beaver. Ever since I watched this show as a kid, I wanted to grow up and have a den like Ward's. I don't even know what the hell a den is, or what you do in it. I know it's a man's room, so I assume Ward pretended to do some kind of manly paperwork, but in reality he had a little locked drawer in his desk where he kept a bottle of Johnny Walker Red and a stack of bondage mags. That is so cool.

The bedroom is the room inside the genie bottle on I Dream of Jeannie. That room might just be the greatest room ever devised by humankind. Talk about a freakin' opium den. I don't think I'd ever leave.
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But the idiot crew doing the remodeling downstairs is keeping me awake. They're not sawing or hammering. They're just talking. One problem with that is that the walls and floors of this place are paper thin, and I can hear every word they say. The other problem is that, as I said, they're idiots. It's bad enough to hear them at all, but it's even worse to hear them go on about "fucken fuck detox fucken squad fucken bitch fucken serves her right fucken divorce fucken fuckity fuck shit pack a smokes."

Right now I am considering the following options.

1) Staying awake and cranking some LOUD-ass hip-hop. I know this type of idiot. They HATE hip-hop. Logic: If I'm gonna be miserable, they're gonna be miserable. Problem: I still don't get my much-needed rest.

2) Popping some sleeping pills and cranking up the iPod. Logic: This might work. Problems: a. Lack of vengeance. b. If it doesn't work, I'll be doubly tired.

I think I'm gonna go with #2. But I'll be back online if it doesn't work. In that case, I'll need some suggestions.

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My sisters gleefully informed me yesterday afternoon that if the Chase name is to be passed on to future generations, it is solidly my responsibility.

I have five siblings, three of whom have reproduced. The sisters had almost all boys, but my brother had all girls. As for the remaining two siblings, reproduction for one would be impossible and for the other would be not bloody likely. And if you're thinking maybe one of my neices might squeeze one out and give it her name, well, let's just not go there, 'K?

Plus, all my siblings are over 40.

I responded to this in completely the wrong way. I said, "Well, can I at least first get my life into something that resembles order?" They were overjoyed, and not in a teasing way. "He didn't say no!"

Chase is the 508th most common name in the U.S. One in every 1,000 Minnesota residents is named Chase.

I think we have enough.
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I must have walked past this 10,000 times, but tonight on my way home from work, I walked past "The Gentle Dentist" and noticed the sign on the door that says "We shoot every third salesman, and the other two just left."

Gentle dentist, my ass.

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I want to start a magazine called Nap.

All the latest trends in napping. Advice on how to shut sunlight out of your bedroom. Which pillow is the best--we test drive the top five selling models.

Think about it. I've got a huge success on my hands.
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I promised myself I'd stop posting so many pictures, since I'm quickly running out of storage space. But this shot of tonight's Aurora Borealis over Jimmy's Nuts & Bolts was just too sweet to keep to myself.
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The first time I heard Ministry, I was 17 years old. I just got home from Perkin's, which for some reason was a place to hang out in high school. Lundgren (of course) knocked on my door and said "Jeff needs help." Jeff being Jeff Anderson, which lends a certain flavor if you know who I'm talking about. Jeff's car, a ratty old Chevette, was stuck in the snow behind Kmart. I got some shovels and went back to help dig out the car.

Jeff didn't have a tape deck. He didn't even have floorboards. But he did have a boombox on the passenger seat, and in that boombox was Ministry's "A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste."

We dug out the car while listening to that album, and then proceeded, in the most juvenile, high school manner, to ram the car into the snowbank again and again, all the time listening to that album. It was terrific. After that, I thought Ministry was incredible. I devoured everything Al Jourgensen had to offer, from Ministry to Revolting Cocks to Pigface to Lard. Then I got into Nine Inch Nails, who would not exist if not for Al Jourgensen.

So, all those years ago, I never would have thought that I'd find myself at the entrance of the Norshor Theatre, staring down at the words, "Chase, Barrett ... Guest of Al."

How did it happen? It's a friend-of-a-friend thing. My good friend Jed is a friend of Al's. And thus, I got to spend a few hours on the tour bus with Al Jourgensen and Ministry. All of whom are cool guys, I might say. I was sort of concerned about what might happen, (what if I think they're utter cocks?!) but we just listened to some ZZ Top and some awesome accordion-driven Tex Mex music, discussed our hatred of George W. Bush, and even connected a bit regarding the finer albums of Wanda Jackson.

The whole experience, I think, was a lesson in rockstardom. Al kept talking about how great it was to hang out with real people, and about how of all the hundreds of people he meets on tour, there are really only four or five people that he meets, over and over again. They're all the same. He told the tour manager, "Set these two up with everything, everything you can. They're sweethearts, they're not Sponge Bobs. You'll never meet better people. They're not like the rest."

Then he poured us some homemade wine and went to the back of the bus to cut the sleeves off his "Fuck Bush" T-shirt.

Everyone else in Ministry was cool, too. I hadn't seen them live since 1993. And it was really weird to meet all of them, hang out with them for awhile and speak to them as real human beings, and then suddenly see them on stage doing their schtick. I was like, "What the fuck are you guys doing? Why are you wearing makeup?"

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Last night I made chicken for dinner. After thawing the chicken in the microwave, I put black pepper on top along with Cajun hot sauce and then ground up some dried red peppers in my hand and sprinkled them on top. Then I put the chicken in the oven.

About a half hour later, my eye itched, so I rubbed it.

Holy mother of god.

Rule #1 of crushing dried red pepper in your hand: wash your hands afterward. Thoroughly.

At least now I know what it feels like to be maced. Yeah, it'll put you on your knees, shrieking and blubbering.

I don't know why I tell you guys this stuff.
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Man, the world is full of idiots. Check out this letter to Dear Abby:

Dear Abby

Eugene B., Clifton, N.J.

OK. Um, I got 25 spams today. First off, I think I'll actually read them all. Second, I think I'll sort of give them my bank account number, but it's OK because there's not much in there anyway (WHY?! On the off chance that it ISN'T a scam?). Third, I think I'll call up the Secret Service and "explain it all" to them, but only after I find out that I'm not actually getting my $12.5 million.

Software companies can spend billions of dollars coming up with anti-spam devices, but it doesn't matter. Spam wouldn't even exist if people weren't dumb enough to fall for it. And it's UNBELIEVABLE that people fall for it. But they do all the time.
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So. Bush was re-elected. And yes, we are all outraged. But at this troubling time, I think it is important to remember what the real problem is. The real problem is not that George W. Bush is back in the Oval Office.

The real problem is that half, yes half, of our voting population is actually gullible enough to think that George Walker Bush is doing a great job flushing our beautiful country down the toilet, and should continue to flush our beautiful country down the toilet for the next four years.

Think about that. And realize that when I say "half" I'm rounding down. It's actually more than half, since 51% voted for this retard. That means if you're in a room with one other person, chances are better than not that that other person is a complete idiot.

So while it's utterly horrible that this figurehead and his evil cronies are still in charge of our lives, it's even worse that a majority of voting Americans chose of their own free will to put him there.

Since we as a country are apparently more than willing to give up our civil liberties, I'd like to do a little experiment. Let's get out the polygraph machines and the sodium pentathol, and ask a question of our Bush supporters. I want to know, very concisely but also specifically, and most of all truthfully, what was the one issue that made you decide to vote for Bush?

My guess is that in most cases, people voted for Bush for some stupid reason that they connect with "morality." My guess is that most of the time, you'd hear the stuff about gay marriage, or prayer in schools, or some other such nonsense. Which, in my humble opinion are absolutely asinine reasons for voting for or against any candidate. Oh, sure, you lost your job and your son has been killed in Iraq, but hey, at least those homos won't be able to visit their lifelong partners in the hospital when they get sick. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense buddy.

The other reason I'd expect to hear from people is the admission that they subscribe to that selfish "I got mine, you get yours" brand of suburban conservatism. Well, that is not only stupid but gross, and I'd rather not discuss it. The only hope I have regarding these people is that Bush is gradually weakening and destroying the middle class, so maybe these people will disappear when their jobs get outsourced to India.

Also, to be fair, I'm sure there are some people who have legitimate reasons for voting Bush. I'd like to know what these reasons are, too. Because I've never heard one. And because if such reasons existed, it would give me hope.

As things stand, however, I continue to be cynical.

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For some time now, I've been moping about the realization that due to certain modern-day inventions like, say, window screens, I will probably never get the chance to steal a pie off of someone's windowsill and eat it with my hands down by the river.

I have come to terms with this. It simply will not happen, unless somehow it is "arranged," and what good is that? Not much.

Today, however, I realized another thing I will probably never do. I will probably never shave off my beard and cut and bleach my own hair at a highway rest-stop sink while being on the run.

You'll notice that I used the word "probably." That word gives me hope.
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If you haven't seen the new Election Day video by Eminem, I suggest you check it out. Then get out your black hoodie, and head to the building with the little old lady, en masse.
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Friday
Ok, so we got to watch Children of the Corn, and that's always good. But the trip to the corn maze was derailed by the fact that, when we opened the door to leave my apartment, there was white wall of water just outside the door. Holy crap was it pouring. So, faced with this dilemma, we did the natural thing. We charged through the monsoon and headed to the North Pole Bar, where we drank large quantities and drew pictures.

Ok, so you can't stay the whole night at the Pole. You have to move on, especially when the talk turns to karaoke, and the fact that a certain karaoke king was slated to appear at the Keyport Lounge, and that we could easily cross the bridge (it's just a bridge, get over it) to witness/participate in the karaoke mayhem.

I sung "Rock the Casbah." And I had my camera and huge memory card with, so we also set about the task of taking 246 pictures in one night. Mission ... accomplished.

This is my favorite of the bunch. Notice how the Summit sign makes an ominous cross shape. This could be the cover of a great horror movie that went straight to video.

Saturday

I was supposed to get my hair cut that day, but instead I slept until about 3:30pm, as is my usual waking time. I frittered away the evening, enjoying some rare time off, but then, around 11:30, I got a call from my favorite late-night partner in crime, Ms. Small, who brought over...

...the Midnight Indoor Sushi Picnic. OK, I provided the snazzy beach towel, but holy Christ, what do I do to deserve this treatment?

Then we watched They Shoot Horses, Don't They? which we enjoyed, despite its rather depressing themes.

Sunday

Another late rise, with a Pizza Luce brunch, and some lazing around in the evening, once again. I had to work at 12:15am, so I had no plans to attend C-Freak & Foggy's Halloween Bash, but once again, the Yippee Ki-yi-yay Small came forward and interrupted my plans for the evening, which originally involved watching things on PBS that I really wasn't all that interested in seeing. "I'm dressed like a cowgirl and we're going dancing," she said.

I said, "Uh ... no. I have to work. And I don't have a costume."

"There's a costume in your house somewhere," she said. I'll spare you the next 20 minutes of discussing whether or not I had a costume, and what that costume might be. Finally I was convinced realized that I did in fact have a mustard-colored T-shirt, and I did in fact have a Sharpie marker. I could, in fact, be Charlie Brown. I could go to the party for two hours before going to work.

Ah, the decision. Stay home and later hear about what happened at the party, or go to the party, see all the fun, and then leave to go to work?

Shit, man, you know me. I chose to go. Stay home? What was I thinking?

It was fun, and sure enough, I had to leave right when everyone was dancing to Michael Jackson's Bad album. Batman and Robin were hosting the party. Medusa and her son were there, seperately of course. The Ten Commandments monument was there. The Freedom Tickler was there. Ca-chee and Holden were there, both as real people and as characters. It's always a good costume party when you have to ask someone who they are dressed as, and they respond, "My brother."

And Charlie Brown is a great costume for when you have to leave the party mid-fun and go to work. It allows you to look at your watch and sigh a lot. When people ask you why you're not getting drunk and bouncing off the walls, all you have to do is say, "I went trick-or-treating and all I got was a bag full of rocks."

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Who: Friends, snobbits, countrymen.
What: A pre-Halloween, pre-Election Day spookfest featuring (hopefully) a screening of the horrific horror classic, Children of the Corn, followed by a trip to "Flashlight Friday" at the Silver Brook Corn Maze.

Where: My house, then to Wrenshall, Minnesota.
When: Tonight (Friday). We'll begin in the very early evening, so as to cram all this in before the maze closes at 10pm.
Cost: $5/person at the maze, unless we have more than 10 people, in which case it'll be $4. (Cash only)
Other: Dress warm. Bring a flashlight. Bring whatever else you need. I have a Race Case of Molson Canadian.

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With the chilly months coming and all, I thought I'd share with you the greatest socks in the world. They're a bit ragged, and a bit irregular, but I've had them since I was about 13 and they've never done me wrong.

Don't mess with me when I'm wearing these babies, or you will feel the sting, sting, STING! Plus, the "tread" effect done with black yarn on the bottom makes me too fast to comprehend.

Hall of Justice, here I come.

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It doesn't matter what his real name is. Let's call him Andy. Andy went to my elementary school and to my junior high, and maybe to my high school as well, but I'm not sure about that. I am sure, however, that I never said one word to Andy in my entire life. I'm also sure that Andy had few if any friends, was always physically dirty, and did poorly in school.

I've never given Andy much thought. I know his name, what he used to look like, and that is about it. But in the past week, I've come across two different people who may or may not have been him. One was an exquisitely obese man driving a nightmare of a minivan. The other was a down-and-out guy with long hair and a beard smoking in front of the Holiday Center.

Both times I had the same thought: "So that's what became of Andy. Well, that's about right."

Most of us are disadvantaged in one way or another. But some of us are just doomed from the start.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I had a lot of advantages. I was born into a house filled with three generations of relatives, not to mention the occasional foriegn exchange student. During my formative years, there was always plenty of people to pay attention to me and teach me things. I always had nutritious food to eat, clean clothes, and plenty of books. My parents never hit me once. When I reached age nine or so, the house emptied out and I had the run of the place, so was able to develop my independence. Plus all the money that was spread thin on feeding nine or ten people suddenly went to just three of us. I think I turned out fairly well-adjusted as a result of these things.

But there were limitations, too. For one example, even if I never contracted Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and effed up my GPA, I probably would never have been able to go to a really good, exclusive university simply because I never encountered anyone who knew how to prepare for such a thing, financially or academically. The only way that might have happened was in some bass-ackwards Tobias Wolff sort of way that involved an extreme personal motivation, luck, and a lot of cheating.

Yeah, I know: Boo-hoo. And yeah, I know: That kind of thing has as much to do with happiness as the number of molecules in Leonard Nimoy's butt.

But my point is that so much of who we turn out to be is determined by the people who surround us, their influence. Sure, once you get to a certain point in life, you can alter your course at will, but by how much?

And then there are people like Andy. Just doomed. As doomed today as they were in first grade. In fact, I think I see the doomed sort more often than any of the other sorts from my past. Or maybe I just notice them more. I see them in filthy jackets that advertise cigarettes or football teams, pushing rickety strollers or dragging obese toddlers. Or maybe they are alone, carrying that way about them that suggests they don't even know how to begin to dig their way out of this mess they're in. Sure, I might be wrong; they might be happy. But I don't think so.

For most of us, however, it is not a bad thing, provided that you acknowledge it. Where you are determines where you are going. And it doesn't matter what anyone else says or thinks about it, because no one else is travelling that same road. The only thing that matters is that you are travelling actively, and paying attention, and making some effort to steer. Because life will move you forward whether you have your eyes open or not.
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Mom update. First things first. So, I woke up this evening and headed straight to the hospital, because it has been a full week since I had seen my mom. I walked into her room and was utterly shocked. She wasn't in her bed ... she was sitting in a chair. "Hey, it's Barrett!" she said. It was the first time I'd heard her voice in a month and a half. She is beginning to walk, she is eating actual food (well, hospital food at least), and is getting stronger every day. There is a good chance that tomorrow she will leave the ICU and go to the rehab floor. She said she's excited about talking to a variety of people and being able to look out a window. I know that things like walking and eating probably don't seem like much, but after six weeks of being mostly unconscious, they are outstanding strides. Just to be see her sitting up and watching the ball game was incredible.

"People need to be as self-sufficient as possible," she said. "I'm not bragging, but I am the backbone of this family. But everyone has to take care of themselves now because I can't do it. I can't even take care of myself. Hopefully now that I'm getting better, the family can get back to normal, only more self-sufficient."

I told her that this is something we've been discussing for almost two months now. It's weird to have to look out for/worry about my mom. She always was the one to on top of everything, which is probably why she won the chess game with the reaper, this time at least. The doctors say it's a miracle.

I didn't do a whole lot. On my two days off I mean. I meant to go out Saturday night, because plenty was going on. Mike Nicolai played the Brewhouse and I wanted to see that. Sloe Loris played at Beaner's, a mere three blocks from my apartment. The freaking Dames played Luce, which I have sworn to avoid, but I would have liked to see the Dames. For certain undescribable reasons, I did none of these things. But -- I did get to hang out with Space Waitress who made an impromptu visit to Duluth for a little while on Saturday afternoon. We ate dinner and she shivered in my freezing apartment. Meanwhile, I ran around closing windows. Duluth is a cool city, SW. just like the T-shirt says.

FYI. When you're working the graveyard shift for the USPS, which is awesome by the way, the greatest song in the universe is "Sleeping In" by the Postal Service. Not that the whole album isn't fantastic.

Heads-up for next weekend. If you're looking for something to do Friday, and you consider yourself a friend of mine, I'm inviting you join me and mine for CORN TO THE CORE, baby. That's right, a pre-Halloween fiasco beginning at my apartment and extending out into the further reaches of greater Wrenshall.

Things start out in the early evening at my place with a screening of the horrible horror flick Children of the Corn. Then, all hopped up on corn and whatever, we head out for "Flashlight Friday" at the Silver Brook Corn Maze.

Now, however. I got home from the hospital, realized I had no booze in the house, and then realized I had a rare opportunity to steal some (don't ask). My plan is to drink it and watch both volumes of Kill Bill, back to back. Wakey, wakey ... eggs and bakey.

And yes. That is me in the picture. Notice the small eye-holes. I'm a year old or so, a blogger in the making already with pencil in hand. I look at this photo and think, god I want those chairs, those curtains. Those pants. I want everything 1974, except the computers. Well, not everything ... if you think the corn party is going to be a key party, you can just stay home. It's going to be good clean fun. Well, relatively clean. But please check your suburban desperation at the door.

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Halloween is coming up soon, and that's the second-best reason to run out and rent Motel Hell immediately. The best reason, of course, is that this movie is so awesome I can hardly contain myself. I came home from work at 5am and threw this DVD in for some pre-dawn relaxation. Little did I know I would be in hysterics for the next hour and a half.

The first of the big belly laughs comes about 5 seconds into the movie. Even the credits are funny.

Rory Calhoun is old dude who was in about a million cheap westerns back when they made such things. Nancy Parsons is best known as Ms. Ballbricker from Porky's. Wolfman Jack is Wolfman Jack, and apparantly was such a star in 1980 that he gets top billing, even though he only has a cameo.

The plot is both familiar and ridiculous. Farmer Vincent (Calhoun) lives in the country with his sister Ida (Parsons), where they run a farm with a couple of sideline businesses. First is the ominous Motel Hello, with its flickering neon sign. Second is Farmer Vincent's Smoked Meats, which are best smoked meats in the world.

I think you know where this is going.

The secret recipe, of course, uses human flesh mixed in with the pork to spice things up. "It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent's Fritters." The humans (or "animals" as Vincent calls them) are kept buried alive up to their chins in the "secret garden" with sacks over their heads. When Vincent and Ida "plant" them, they cut their vocal cords to keep them quiet. Vincent is kind enough to play 8-tracks for them so they don't get bored.

But none of this even matters. What matters is they way this stupid scenario is delivered. This movie is a study in how to make a B-movie, and everything is executed perfectly.

The unhidden, unforgiving backbends that the movie takes purely for the inclusion of nudity is a prime example. Why the hell does the sheriff take this girl to lover's lane so they can watch a drive-in movie with binoculars? Well, so that when the squad car pulls up to the make-out spot, the naked people in the cars will panic and do the natural thing, which is jump out of their vehicles and run around frantically jiggling. Of course. Who wouldn't do that?

Other scenes are just shockingly lurid. For instance, there's a scene with a kinky couple who show up at the motel with a tacky little pamphlet, wanting to know if the place is "cool." I can't and wouldn't even describe what happens next. It's too outrageous and too funny. You need to see it for yourself.

Also, there is the sympathetic attitude toward Farmer Vincent. He's not a bad guy. He prays to Jesus every day. He refuses to have premarital sex. Even the canniabalism, he does out of social concern: "There's too many people in the world and not enough food," he says. "Now this takes care of both problems at the same time."

Really, Farmer Vincent has only committed one sin in his entire life, which he reveals at the end. It's the punchline of the movie, really. Don't miss it.

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Man. No sooner do I completely fall in love with Wanda Jackson than Bloodshot announces the upcoming release of Hard-Headed Woman: A Tribute To Wanda Jackson, featuring Neko Case, Trailer Bride, Robbie Fulks and the whole Bloodshot gang.

Says Bloodshot: "Known to many as the Queen of Rockabilly, Wanda Jackson is a maverick performer whose influence has reached far beyond the genre and cast a long shadow on the history of music---both sonically and in her performance style: She is one of Rock and Roll's original bad-asses. Wanda helped stake out a direct route from the feral origins of rock to the punks, riot grrrls and psychobilly boundary-busters 50 years later."

The CD is due out either Tuesday, October 26 or Thursday, October 28 (depending which part of the website you're reading). The full track listing can be found here.
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That's what I've been makin'. If anyone wants to trade, drop me an email.
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There's a lot of people on the street at 5am. Well, more that you would think, anyway. I must have seen ten or twelve of them on my 4-block stroll home from work this morning. The slackers smoking in front of the gas station. The stockers filing out of the supermarket. The errant troublemakers roaring down Grand Avenue at 60 mph.

It kind of reminded me of when I was an errant troublemaker, during the summer in between high school and college. I had no job. I had no girlfriend. What I did have was an addiction to Jolt cola and a handful of similarly disinclined friends.

"I don't have a life," I'd complain, chuckling for some reason.

"Yeah, but you don't have any responsibilities either," was the inevitable reply. This was true. The most pressing decision of any day that summer was whether to swim in the lake or in Lester River.

The clock, like just about everything else, meant nothing. Hanging out could easily begin at midnight and end at noon the next day. Far too often, these hours were eaten up by endless games of Risk, interspersed with caffeine-induced arguments. Other nights we'd drive back and forth down Skyline, "surfing" on the outside of the car, stopping occasionally to shoot at stuff with BB guns. Youth, as they say, is wasted on the young.

For so many people, the day follows a regular schedule. Wake in the morning. Eat breakfast. Get to work at 9. Work. Get home at 6. Eat dinner. Watch TV. Sleep. Repeat. The TV news caters to people with this schedule, especially the weather report. They're always talking about "On your drive to work tomorrow morning," and "your weekend weather." I'm offended because sometimes my weekend occurs in the middle of the week. And as of today, morning is when I can either choose to go to sleep or choose to get drunk.

There is a whole segment of society that lives at night, some by choice and some not by choice. But by and large, we don't think about that. And we still equate rising early with virtue, and sleeping in the day as vice. It's silly, really.

In 9th grade, I got in an argument with my English teacher because she said, "Nothing good ever happens after midnight." Well, I lost the argument because I was only 14 years old and my defense was that her statement was too absolute. Yadda yadda yadda. But I'm 31 now, Mrs. Klun, and I can guarantee you that in my lifetime I've been ridden to the point of near insanity many, many times in the wee hours, and that is a very, very good thing. Case closed.

When you live life according to the schedule of the majority, life is a lot easier. When you tell people you're working the graveyard shift, they wince and feel sorry for you. But I'm not feeling sorry for myself right now. I'm feeling pretty good. And so many of the people I work with at night are happy with their schedule. They earn more money. They get shift differential, and they get more hours. And as my new supervisor said several times tonight, they have more fun. It's hard to describe, and I don't quite understand it yet, but the "vibe" is a lot more relaxed at night. It is more fun. Somehow.

I'm going to take these good things and run with them. I'm going to take these lemons and make lemonade. And being as that it's 6am, I'll dump a little Bacardi in that lemonade and think of you as your alarm is jolting you awake. Have fun at work, friends. I'm gonna watch some cartoons.
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The Destruction Crew The crew started remodling the downstairs apartment on the very day I was supposed to have switched to the night shift last time. And by "remodeling" I mean doing stuff that sounds like they're digging a coal mine, and doing it with the windows open so that the thermostat gets all confused and turns my apartment into an oven. A very noisy oven. Anyway, they apparantly found out that I was not working the night shift, and so postponed the project until this morning. This, my friend, is clearly a case of street theater.

Martha Stewart I simply do not understand the purpose of "sheer" curtains, or even worse than that, those curtains that are just a ruffly bit of fabric across the top of the window. Curtains have two very specific purposes: 1) to block out the evil, devil sun, and 2) to keep the guys at the auto shop next door from seeing my weiner. In order to accomplish these two objectives, curtains need to cover the entire window and be as opaque as the average sleeping bag. Yeah, I know you have two or three "maximum privacy" styles hidden over on the bottom shelf, but please. I have no interest in "filtering light" or "accenting" my room. And while I appreciate your efforts to encourage suburban women to turn their homes into fish bowls, I need a functional item here, and you have failed to provide it. No wonder you're in prison.
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You figure it out. I'm gonna go watch Returner.
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So far, my preparations for my new night schedule are going as well as can be expected. I stayed up until almost 4 last night, and slept all day. Tonight, I am attempting to make my bedroom as comfortable as I can. I've removed most of the clutter, washed the sheets, and, most importantly, dismantled the bed frame and put the mattress and box spring on the floor.

As any of the Scandinavian supermodels ... teenage strippers ... women ... people who've spent the night in ... laid down on ... sat on ... heard me complain about my bed can tell you, my bed frame creaks. And I'm not saying that it creaks during the throes of passion. It creaks when you even consider rolling over. It creaks when you just move your hand. This is not an exaggeration: it creaks when you walk near it. And it creaks very, very loudly.

I don't really like the idea of sleeping on a bed without a frame. There's something so, oh I don't know, collegiate about it. But believe me, it's much, much better this way, because the bed itself is great and doesn't make any noise at all. Also, this is a lot easier and cheaper than actually going out and purchasing a creakless frame. Which I do plan on doing. Eventually.

Now, I must acquire and install curtains to block out the evil sunlight. If nothing else, this new job situation is forcing me to upgrade my apartment. Not that the leopard-print blanket attached to the windowframe with a pair of vice grips doesn't do the trick, but I can do better than that. I just never had an interest.

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So, Friday afternoon, management told me to come into the office for a talk. I thought for sure that I was going to be reamed for inefficiency or taking extra-long breaks or something along those lines. But when I noticed several other people walking into the office ahead of me, I knew what it was all about and my stomach sank.

Yes. My schedule has been changed. I now start work at 10:30pm.

Since I can do absolutely nothing about this, I have decided to really get into it and enjoy it to the best of my abilities. First of all, I'm very happy that I'll be earning an additional $1.17/hour for having such a crappy schedule (and this combined with the $1.05 raise I just got -- woo-hoo!). Second, I appreciate the fact that no matter what, I will always have Saturday nights off, since Saturday nights are technically Sundays, and on Sundays I would have to be paid far more than they can afford.

But most of all, I'm gonna get into the weirdness of it. When I get used to it, I might do odd things like walk around at dawn taking photos, eat at the Sunshine Cafe when it opens at 6, and drink more liquor before 8am than most people drink all day.

Plus, I'm treating myself to some actual curtains to shut out the light in my bedroom, and maybe I'll even pony up for a new bedframe -- you know, one that doesn't creak and groan every time I so much as move my pinky finger.

I have a fond memory of this one time when I worked graveyards back when I lived with my parents. Lundgren woke me up at about 3 or 4pm and we headed to the Sunshine to grab something before it closed. This was before the Sunshine started looking out for its patrons' health. Not only was there smoking allowed, but the omelets were about the size of my thigh. We polished off a couple of those babies along with some complimentary soup, then went back to my parents', where we were joined by Cachee. The three of us laid around in sleeping bags in the dark and listened to Tom Waits albums for hours, saying nothing. Now and then my mom would walk in the room, shake her head, and leave. I don't know how the others felt about it, but I thought it was awesome.

So, this is going to be my new thing, and I've decided to love it as much as possible for as long as it lasts. If you want to come over and nap on the floor in the afternoon, well, I'd be glad to have you. If you want to open the North Pole bar with me for the $5 eggs/bloody mary combo, by all means give me a call. Just don't make my phone ring before 1pm. I'll be edgy as it is.
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Recently, I've had to go to extreme measures to sustain a certain level of happiness. Some would say I've become a recluse. I would have to agree. In the words of the immortal Postal Service (the band, not the place where I work) "I've got a cupboard with cans of food, filtered water and pictures of you, and I'm not coming out until this is all over."

Seriously, though, I've been pretty happy. Yes, it helps that my mom is doing a whole lot better, though she's still not out of the ICU (five weeks as of today). But in the meantime, I've been spending much of my time selfishly looking out for numero uno.

This has been the formula I've been following, to great success:

- Lay off the goddamn sauce. In the words of the immortal Kurt Vonnegut, "Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise." So far, I've had alcohol twice since Oct. 1. Once was a full-on Anchor Bar experience, the other time I just had one glass of wine at the Sloe Lorus show. Clarity can become an addiction, too, and it's one I intend to foster, if just for the energy that accompanies it.

- Get eight hours of sleep every night, eat well-balanced meals, and drink a gallon of water a day. It is amazing how happy this can make you. You wake up every day actually feeling good. It is also amazing how, for some reason, it's easy to ignore these fundamental things.

- In the words of the immortal William S. Burroughs: If, after having been exposed to someone's presence, you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.
In my case, it's usually not a particular person's presence, but a general presence that accompanies certain scenarios. For some reason, the epicenter of that presence is Pizza Luce, which I will be avoiding at all costs unless there is an extremely good show or unless I want to eat their food.

- Watch season one of Northern Exposure on DVD. Thank you, thank you, thank you to my favorite library lady for snagging this baby. The pilot alone might just be the greatest episode of anything ever to be on TV. But then again, I haven't gotten very far through the rest of it.

- Have something to look forward to. Right now, I'm looking forward to possibly visiting certain friends over a certain mad weekend, where I will most likely grind the first two of the above guidelines to dust.
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So, there's some discussion going on over at Perfect Duluth Day regarding your rights to smoke and drink in public.

I'm sick to death of the smoking issue, but I'd like to weigh in on the drinking issue because the Duluth News Tribune editorial on the subject is just about one of the dumbest things I've ever read in this great community of ours.

To quote the DNT editorial:

"Few things are more threatening to pedestrians than to encounter a pair or group of loiterers openly drinking alcohol in public areas such as sidewalks."

Get that? Few things are more threatening. OK, here's another one:

"Nothing implies lawlessness more than the scene described above: Pairs or groups of individuals, some in an inebriated state, openly drinking in the light of day."

Nothing implies lawlessness more. Nothing. NOTHING.

What gets me is that the point of all of this overblown language is attacking carrying an open container of alcohol in public. Not drunk-and-disorderly behavior. Not actually threatening people. Not public urination. Just having an open container.

This is an indiscriminate law. It equates the family man taking a PBR out of a cooler at the park with guttersnipes downtown swigging out of a 40 and punching tourists in the neck. But according to the DNT, there is apparantly no way to drink responsibly, especially in public:

"Drinking in public might be against the law, but what causes it -- the disease of alcoholism -- is a serious and tragic malady that destroys lives."

I don't even want to get started on that one.

We already have laws against all the bad stuff relating to alcoholism and vagrancy. And yes, I too have been harrassed, panhandled and threatened by drunks and paint-huffers more times than I can count. It is a problem here. But to use phrases like "openly drinking in the light of day" is just plain laughable. It seems that "openly drinking" is bad, and that it is a lot healthier, mentally, to be doing it secretly -- and in the dark, certainly not "in the light of day."

Having a few drinks is nothing to be ashamed of. Hell, being an alcoholic is nothing to be ashamed of. If you are an alcoholic, you definitely need to address that as soon as possible. But this whole community is filled with alcoholics, and you are no different. Addictions, especially unhealthy ones, need to be broken and dealt with. Shame has no place in that process, in my opinion. It only serves to drive the addicted person deeper into the disease.

Neither does image. Despite the fact that smoking is far worse than booze, you will never read the phrase, "openly smoking in the light of day." You just won't. Why is that?

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This movie is grouped with The Hollywood Knights in my mind, because both came out in 1979, both take place in the early 1960s, and both involve groups of high school kids who wear matching jackets. But whereas The Hollywood Knights is about a "car club" on the West Coast, The Wanderers is about a street gang in the Bronx.

I watched this movie over and over during the summer between second and third grade. Back then, I thought it was tough, but there was something definitely "off" about it. I didn't know what it was back then, but boy oh boy do I ever know what it is now.

The Wanderers is totally fricken HOMO.

The movie opens with Richie, a blue-eyed Italian who looks like he just stepped out of Teen Beat, deflowering his girlfriend. At the very moment of climax, he hears a whistle outside signaling trouble for his fellow Wanderers. Since he has his priorities straight, he leaps up and runs out to join the boys.

The Wanderers are being chased by the Baldies, a rival gang led by a huge 400-pound behemoth named Terror (you might remember this actor, Erland van Lidth de Jeude, from such memorable roles as Dynamo in The Running Man). Terror has a girlfriend named Pew Wee, who is probably 4'5" and 60 pounds. Pee Wee looks and dresses like a 10-year-old boy, so it's quite something to see Terror pick her up, cradle her in his arms, and make out with her. This oddity is compounded by the fact that Terror speaks in a very smooth and effeminate manner.

Anyway, back to the plot. Richie and his Wanderers are rescued by the new kid in town, Perry (played by Tony Ganios, whom you might remember from such memorable roles as Meat in Porky's). They want Perry to join the Wanderers, since he is Italian, too, and all the gangs are segregated by race, creed, and color. Perry is noncommittal.

For some reason, there are no girls at this school in the Bronx, even though this is obviously a public school. (All the kids are just too poor for private school.) This adds to the utterly homo feel of the movie, too. And it makes it easier for the kids to harmonize as the randomly break out into spontaneous doo-wop. (Gay, gay, gay!)

Trouble starts when the boys go out for an afternoon of "elbow-tittin'" (bumping into women as a ruse for copping a feel) and meet Nina (played by Karen Allen, whom you might remember from such memorable roles as Marion, the gal who can drink anyone under the table in Raiders of the Lost Ark). Despite the fumbled and obvious attempt at elbow-tittin', Nina obviously has the hots for Richie, and vice-versa. This is bad news, since the girl he just deflowered is the daughter of a local Mafioso.

There's a bunch of other boloney about an upcoming rumble with the black gangs which somehow turns into a football game, and then there's some weird Irish gang that lurks in the fog and makes everything turn surreal when they come out swinging their shillelaghs. Plus Richie knocks up the Mafioso's daughter, we find out that Meat's mom is an alkie, and Dynamo leads his Baldies to get drunk and accidentally join the Marines. The movie ends when Meat and John Ruvelson drive off to California, Teen Beat Richie chases Marion to the folkie coffeehouse and realizes he's no match for Bob Dylan, and Pee Wee parties down at the mafia shotgun wedding.

I think there's some deleted scenes on the DVD that feature a gay orgy, but I'm not sure.

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All right, enough of my woe. Do yourself a favor. Navigate through and watch the "sexy vids" from Goldie Lookin Chain. This can turn your day right around.

I am a robot. I am interfaced with my spectrum. Behold.

[via Mass Distraction]
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This is the second in a series of reviews of movies I liked as a kid, and have not watched since.

Truthfully, I was a little scared about revisiting The Hollywood Knights for two reasons. The first was that I suspected that the movie just wouldn't be any good. The second was that when I first started discussing the idea of rewatching these movies, someone commented that in this film, you get to see Fran Drescher's boobies -- a frightening prospect. Nonetheless, I forged ahead in the name of art and science and all that is and is not holy.

The Hollywood Knights sucks. I'm saying this as an adult. With that in mind, I can see exactly why I liked the movie so much when I was 12. I liked it because of two things: 1) It has a lot of nudity. 2) It has a lot of jokes about poop, farts, and butts.

This sort of thing really flies when you're 12, but it doesn't age very well at all.

The story, if you can call it that, takes place in Los Angeles on Halloween night of 1965. There's a "car club" called the Hollywood Knights, consisting of teenagers who all wear matching jackets and drive hot rods. They hang out at a drive-in called Tubby's (Home of the Big One) and race hot rods and play pranks -- lots of pranks. The community wants to see them gone, so Tubby's is being demolished in the morning. Their head honcho, Newbomb Turk (played by Robert Wahl) makes sure their last night is a doozy. He leads them through adventures that involve farting along to "Volare," pissing in a punchbowl at the country club (one woman exclaims "I've had this taste in my mouth before..."), mooning people, and doing the old flaming-bag-of-dog-poop trick.

There's also a side story about Tony Danza being all mopey because Michelle Pfieffer has a screen test in the morning, and he thinks if she makes it big then he won't be good enough for her anymore. There's some other story about one of the Knights going off to Vietnam, but it's hardly worth mentioning.

The worst part is, unless I blinked at the wrong moment or something, you don't even get to see Fran Drescher's boobies. Her friends' boobies, yes. Fran's, no. I was actually a little let down about that, because in 1979, Fran Drescher was kinda hot.
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You have my sympathy regarding your relative who "was fucken blitzed and went through the windshield." However, I have been in this waiting room for a month now, and I've learned a lot about how things operate around here. Here are a few bullet points that might help you and everyone else in the vicinity while you are waiting.

+ There is free coffee and cocoa for the people waiting. This does not mean, however, that you should take 50 packets of cocoa and stuff them into your backpack. Sure they are free; sure they are replenished. But this is a HOSPITAL, and the cocoa is there for the GRIEVING.

+ Wear a shirt. That's my final opinion on the subject. Your shirt is in your hand. There is no reason for you, as a person waiting in a hospital, to be shirtless. You are indoors, there is no possiblity of getting a suntan. People are crying, grieving, making arrangements for their recently deceased loved ones. Put on your goddamn shirt.

+ Let's have no happy memories of "that time you got in that fight and they had to dig out all them bone chips and then I came and seen you after I got outta Detox across the street and then we all went to the fucken Twins Bar and got hammered." Or at least, keep the volume down during such discussion. It's nice to know that while good, innocent people are suffering and struggling to hang onto their lives, that you are voluntarily flushing your life down the toilet.
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One of the great things about my job is that when the volume of mail is low, I can request to leave early. I do this by filling out a form, and then waiting for the supervisor to approve the early out and tell me I can leave. Most of the time when I submit an early out, I still end up working the full shift. But it's always worth a try, epecially on nice days or on days when I have a lot to do.

Lately, I've noticed a voice in my head every time I submit an early out. It's a little bit of one-sided dialog, which is quite entertaining. And while I recreate that dialog for you now, let's just say that supervisors' names are, oh, I don't know, Joan and Lindsey. It doesn't really matter; the dialog is the same no matter what supervisors are on duty, because the whole thing is in my head.

OK, Joan. Now's the time of day when you sign that form and let me outta here. I can see you looking over in that general direction, because you're thinking about how that form is there, and how you plan to walk over and sign it. Go ahead. It's time ... YES! YES! Right over there! Now walk over, and ... YES! IT'S RIGHT IN THAT BOX. Now just take it out and ...

All right, here we ... hey. Joan, what are you ... checking the stats again? And Lindsey! Put down those freaking edits! We're burning daylight, here!

OK. You get the idea. This goes on for hours, until finally, I go home at my normal quitting time.

Finis.
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This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of reviews of B-movies I loved as a kid. The idea is to re-watch said movies and discover whether they are truly entertaining, or whether they have lost their charm during my whole growing-up process. The first of these little gems is a racing flick from 1975, which I saw on Showtime some years after that. If you think you might actually want to watch Death Race 2000, beware: there are spoilers ahead.

Before I begin, I just have to say that it took me about one minute after pressing "play" to realize that this movie kicks serious ass. It's that ... good.

Death Race 2000 tells the story of how, in the year 2000, after the Great Collapse, our great nation is held together by a cross-country auto race in which racers score points by running over pedestrians. Different types of pedestrians are worth different amounts. Senior citizens, for example, are worth 100 points. Teenagers are worth 40 points. Toddlers are worth 70. As race wisdom would have it, "If everyone scatters, go for the baby and mother."

The racers are a flamboyant lot, with character gimmicks much like pro wrestlers. There's Calamity Jane, with her bull-shaped car. There's Nazi-esque Mathilda the Hun (from Milwaukee), and her nerdy navigator, Herman the German. There's Nero the Hero. But the man to beat is Frankenstein, played by David Carradine. Frankie got his name because he's been in so many wrecks. He "lost a leg in '98, an arm in '99 ... With half a face and half a chest, and all the guts in the world, he's back!" The only real competition Frankenstein faces is Sylvester Stallone's character, Machine Gun Joe, who dresses as a '20s gangster and totes a Tommy gun.

Each of the drivers has a navigator of the opposite sex, because the relationship between driver and navigator is not only professional, but sexual. All the navigators are hot, except for Herman the German who is a real Poindexter. In a gloriously orchestrated plot complication, we learn that there is a rebel group who opposes the race (and the nation's leader, known only as "Mr. President," who heavily supports the race). The rebels have infiltrated the race and placed one of their own, Annie, as Frankenstein's navigator. Annie must somehow thwart the race from within, while not getting blown up and killed by one of her own group's saboteurs.

For me, the best part of the movie occurs early on, when the racers are lining up at the starting line. Many of the fans are cheering for Frankenstein, which angers Machine Gun Joe, whom the fans generally despise. Joe stands up in his car, grabs his machine gun and screams in true Stallone style, "You want Frankenstein? I'll give you Frankenstein!!" then proceeds to randomly fire his machine gun into the crowd.

But not only is there plenty of senseless and gratuitous violence, there's senseless and gratuitous nudity as well. At the first pit stop, all the drivers and navigators get "rub downs" from extremely buff and attractive members of the opposite sex. The nudity and sex is just as hilarious as the violence. You haven't lived until you've seen David Carradine seductively unzip his jumpsuit.

The whole movie is hilarious, really. I mean, for Christ's sake, one of the jokes is blatantly lifted from The Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Show. Watch for it--it's a classic.

It's an obvious statement that Death Race 2000, like all good science fiction and all good satire, predicted the future somewhat accurately. The connection between the Race and reality TV ("You can't call off the race! The American people won't stand for it! The race is a symbol of everything we hold dear! Our American way of life! Sure it's violent! That's the way we love it! VIOLENT! VIOLENT! VIOLENT!!!") is the first to come to mind, but there is also the spin the government puts on the race, and the terrorist organization, led by Thomasina Paine, that wants to stop the Race and restore the "United Provences of America" back into the United States. Rather than admit that some people think the status quo is wrong, Mr. President goes on air and blames the "the treacherous French." He raves, "It is no coincidence, my dear children, that the word sabotage was invented by the French!"

Hmm...

But who cares about high-falutin' interpretations, anyway? You get to see a fistfight between Kung Fu and Rocky. And that's what really matters.

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As of today, my mom has been in the ICU for three weeks. Right now I am in a state where I just want to say everything, so I am going to. Please do not leave comments. I don't want any of that. I just want to get this stuff out of my head, through my fingers and out into the world.

Three weeks ago, she went into the hospital for what is known as a 'stress test.' She had been having trouble with extreme fatigue and chronic bronchitis for a long time. After lots of other theories, her doctor thought that perhaps she had a heart problem, hence the test. During the test, they make you walk on a treadmill while connected to an EKG. The idea is to monitor your heart while it is working hard. After three minutes, her heart rate shot up to 260. If that means nothing to you, realize that at that rate, the heart is beating over 4 times per second. Luckily, this happened in a hospital, while being monitored.

An angiogram discovered three blocked vessels in her heart. They tried angioplasty--where they go in with a balloon and attempt to expand the vessels without surgery, but no dice. She needed a bypass.

The bypass went fine. However, there were two complications. 1) It did not fix the excessive heart rate--this was due to an additional problem. 2) She developed severe pneumonia.

The pneumonia was/is resistant to antibiotics. On top of that, she developed a very serious staph infection. For all this time, she has not been able to breathe on her own. Which means she has a tube down her throat, which means she can't talk. It is very uncomfortable, so she has been heavily drugged.

When they did the bypass, they used arteries from her chest to reroute the vessels in her heart. This caused a complication which happens with about 10% of bypass surgeries. See, when they do a bypass, they have to cut through a lot of bone. That bone has to be wired back together. Well, the arteries they use for the bypass feed those bones with blood. But since the arteries aren't there, the bones weaken. Sometimes they die. The dead bones, combined with the constant coughing from the pneumonia, caused the wires to rip though the bones, shredding them and exposing her heart below. Literally, it was wound, nothing, heart. Here's the understatement of the century: That is very dangerous, not to mention painful. So, she had to have another surgery to remove the dead bone, and take muscles from her chest and relocate them across the wound so there was something between her heart and the open air besides loosely stitched skin. This happened Monday. And all of this does not even take into account the fact that she will have to have another surgery to implant a device to regulate her heart. Sometime in the future, after recovery from this surgery and the pneumonia and staph infection.

There are many people I really care about who read this site, and some of those people smoke. I know. I know. This is "uncool" and I hate to sound like a public service announcement, but I beg you to stop. My mom quit seven years ago, but it seems that that only bought her a few years of health. This bed, these tubes, this extreme pain--this is where you are headed, and I don't want to see you in a bed suffering like this. Not that I will even be allowed in the vicinity; in most of the cases, as you are not my immediate family. Let's hope you have people like my sisters who will be there constantly for you, otherwise, you will lay there alone, in pain, terrified. This is what my mom does anyway, but she does have people coming in to comfort her, at least.

So. This brings us to yesterday. Yesterday I visited in the morning, and everything was fine. I left around noon, with a plan. Today I had the day off from work, and my plan was to do absolutely nothing. I wanted to enjoy not working, and to avoid the hospital and all its bleak news. I wanted to surf the internet, work in my yard, and watch junk TV. All of which I did. Then I got a phone call.

It seems that after I left yesterday, they attempted some kind of procedure. I don't know what it was, some readjustment of one of the multitude of tubes running into her body. Anyhow, my dad went in afterwards and found no one in sight. Not only that, but there was blood all over the floor, dirty rags and dirty hospital gowns strewn about. It smelled. The tape securing the tube to my mom's mouth was filthy, covered with blood and crust. They had apparently spilled some of her "food" (which is injected through a tube that runs into her stomach through her nose) and that was not cleaned up either.

My dad was enraged. He got my aunt and they complained. They were told that it would be cleaned up soon. It wasn't.

They filed a formal complaint, and got the attention of *someone* I am not sure who. There has been a lot to complain about. The doctors almost never tell us what they are doing. We sit in the waiting room all day every day, and sometimes we are told that one of the doctors is going to come to speak with us, and sometimes they actually do this, but sometimes they just never appear. Sometimes we hear rumors about possible procedures, repeated as though they are a done deal. There is a lot of misinformation. Most of the nurses are absolute saints, but one or two of them obviously (and when I say obviously, I mean obviously) view this as simply a job.

I think it's a bad sign when her regular doctor, the person who assigned the stress test to begin with, has been pretty much completely absent as far as family contact is concerned. After all, it's not like my mom is capable of making decisions right now. She's been pumped full of morphine for three weeks. She admitted to me after the first week that she didn't remember any of it.

So tomorrow morning, we are having a conference with the staff to find out exactly what is going on. We have been advised not to allow them to leave until we understand absolutely everything.

What gets me is that whenever I think it is finally OK to just breathe easy a little bit, there is yet another setback. For the first two weeks, I felt so anxious it was like my throat was closing. Then I just got depressed. Now I am angry. I am so sick of this I want to scream.

The thing is, what do I have to complain about, really? I'm not laying in there suffering. The only part I have to play in all this is to worry and hope.

Once again, please don't comment. I'm not looking for sympathy. I just want to dump this stuff on the world in general, being as that I've dumped too much on the people who mean the most to me.

Y'know ... no one ever talks about this really. You don't see this stuff on TV or in movies. It's all really easy and/or dramatic in the media. But (and I hate to say this) this is what happens to people. It's too awful to even discuss, apparently.
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Sometimes, when I am just walking leisurely down the street or laying in bed or hanging out in my yard, I stop for a second and realize that everything is going well.

It's a good thing to do, because you often don't realize that everything is going well. You only realize the extremes.

When I was working 60 hours a week, I'd be traveling between jobs and see people -- sometimes people I knew, sometimes not -- just taking a few moments out to talk to each other on Superior Street or to eat a sandwich while sitting on a fountain. I'd be so envious. I barely had enough time to eat lunch at all, and I had no time to enjoy the outdoors or to take it easy during the day.

The same thing happened to me while I was walking down First Street last week to see my mom in the hospital. It was a gorgeous morning, and people were out walking their dogs or just walking down to the bakery for scones. I wished that I was doing something like that, instead of visiting my mom in the ICU.

This morning reminds me a lot of a day like this almost a year ago. It was another beautiful autumn morning, and I woke up and blogged and drank strong coffee. I had a blast just taking it easy and doing nothing. I had that incredible feeling of being free, with nothing weighing on my mind. That night, I went to a going-away party and then to a bar, and had a lot of fun. At 4am, I received a call; Starfire had been attacked in downtown Minneapolis and was in the hospital with a broken jaw.

The point is this. These bad things that happen in life are often sudden and terrible. But the good things, more often than not, are quiet. And you have to be alert to tune into them and enjoy them while they're occurring. But we rarely do that unless it's obvious. We take all the good things for granted, because they are so quiet. There's no dramatic crescendo and creative camera angles to show us that it's an important moment. It just happens like the rest of life.

Stand By Me is not one of my favorite movies, but there is one scene that is just brilliant. The boys are in the junkyard, talking about Annette's tits on The Mickey Mouse Club, and Vern suddenly says, "This is a really good time."

The narrator explains, "Vern didn't just mean being off-limits inside the junkyard, or fudging on our folks, or going on a hike up the railroad tracks to Harlow. He meant those things, but it seems to me now it was more, and we all knew it. Everything was there and around us. We knew exactly who we were, and exactly where we were going. It was grand."

Then they flip to see who has to go to the store, they come up with a "goocher" and everything goes to hell from that moment on.

That is life. That's exactly it.
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If I owned a bar, I would have mudwrestling on Election Night. The main event, of course, would feature two women in bikinis wearing rubber Kerry & Bush masks. But leading up to the main event, we would see important presidential bouts from history, such as Nixon/Kennedy and Lincoln/Douglas. For those who prefer a slaughter, we'd have Reagan/Mondale, but for those who prefer tighter competetion, we'd have Truman/Dewey.

Did I mention I'm a fricken genius?
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So, after some unfortunate incidents I don't care to describe, tonight I found myself standing in the pouring rain about three blocks from my house, staring directly into the eyes of a deer. When I say directly into the eyes I mean that I was walking along, eyes to the ground, when suddenly I saw something move just in front of me -- like 10 feet in front of me. I looked up and saw that it was a deer, looking back at me.

I just stood there, very still. It, well, she, as it was a doe, stared back at me for a few seconds, then continued to eat grass or whatever alongside the sidewalk. I kept standing still and watched for a long time. Finally, a car spooked her a little bit, and I decided to get on home.

When I got home, I found that I was way too sober to go to bed. So I ventured back out into the rain and headed to the Rustic, my favorite the closest neighborhood bar.

Usually, when I go to the Rustic by myself, I am able to insinuate myself into some kind of conversation. Once, I talked for about two hours with a 21-year-old homeless girl, who was very interested in advertising. But this time, it was all groups and couples. So I just sat alone and watched the fights. Toney vs. Booker. Hot damn.

Most of the people in the bar were pretty sedate, but there was this one couple -- a black dude and his hottie girl who kinda looked like a younger Debbie Harry -- they were really into the fight.

I mention these folks because the guy said something that rang true with me. She asked him why he liked boxing so much. He said, "Because it's the only fucken sport there is."

Man, that is so true. Nothing else holds my interests, that's for sure.

So, Toney's career was certainly not in any jeopardy. Booker looked like a big bag of meat out there as Toney clobbered his ass. They flashed back to the Toney-Holyfield fight from last October, where Toney gave Holyfield the big TKO action, and that was awesome. I'll give Booker this, he sure can hang in there and get the hell beat out of him. The fat bastard (My favorite part of the above link is the last line: "Toney, from Ann Arbor, Mich., weighed 227 pounds. Booker, flabby around his waist, weighed 220.") He hung on and draped himself across his opponent until the bitter end.

After I had consumed one beer (34-oz, given to me at the discount price of only 10 cents per ounce) I stumbled out the door and thought for one brief second about hitting the Gopher for one more. I looked inside, and was instantly disgusted by alcohol. So I meandered home, where I blogged. And now you are all caught up on my evening.
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OK. A few days ago, I was in the intensive care waiting room, which was filled mostly with my family. In fact, there was only one non-Chase in the room. So at one point, this person drags a chair over to the TV (like a foot and a half fromt the screen) and turns it on. This would be fine, except she chose to watch CNN.

Let me tell you, when a loved one is in seriously bad condition, the last thing you need to hear is people loudly yammering over Kerry's war record. For hours. Plus, there is the heated emotional environment in the waiting room, and the fact that various members of my family are polarized when it comes to politics, and there is so much potential for things to get ugly, should a political discussion emerge.

Anyway, that was bad enough. Rest assured that no political argument happened, everyone was too mature for that. But then, oh, god, here comes the interview with the mother of Laci Peterson, the woman who was murdered in California by her own husband.

Now, someone whose daughter was murdered by her own husband has all of my sympathy. But Christ, she's on CNN, all blubber blubber blubber with what should be private, while just down the hall from where I'm at, people are suffering and dying far worse deaths than her daughter ever dreamed of. Trust me.

Still, that's not what my problem is.

My problem is (and while I admittedly have not been following this case, and while I was admittedly trying to ignore the interview, here we go) she made the following remark. I'm paraphrasing this, but it is true:

Deep down, I actually am somewhat grateful, because she is dead now, and therefore she won't ever have to worry about being in a terrorist attack.

DOUBLE. YOU. TEE. EFF.

MAY I REPEAT: EXCUUUUSE ME?

Are we so afraid of terrorists that it is actually better to be murdered by someone you love gone berserk than by some stranger? Uh, I can't even imagine why this would OCCUR to someone, let alone why someone would think it's a good thing to say on national TV.

Today, golf was on in the ICU. I have never wanted to watch golf in my life, which made me think it was perfect ICU material. Because nothing is easier to ignore. Amen.
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There aren't many variables to my job, and thus, when people ask "How was your day at work?" I'm usually baffled. "Uh. It was a day at work. Just like yesterday. Just like a year ago. Just like always."

Sometimes I have to stay late, and sometimes I get to go home early. Sometimes I get in trouble for something, and sometimes I am praised. Rarely, everything breaks down and we have to wait, or there is a tornado warning and we have to stand by the wall, or someone burns something in the microwave and we have to go outside and wait for the fire department to shut off the alarms.

But most of the time, it's the same.

Really, there are only two major components to my job -- sitting and typing -- and it is a rare occasion indeed when something happens to affect one of those major components. Well, this week we got a whole bunch of new chairs, which is a huge event in the world of sitting and typing.

Let's start with a little chair history, shall we? At first, there were the red chairs. Everyone loved the red chairs*. They were so easy and so comfortable. The backrest adjusted for tilt and for height. The seat adjusted up and down. They swiveled and rolled.

Then some of those wore out, so we got some new chairs -- the blue chairs. Everyone hated the blue chairs, mainly because of one feature: the backrest reclined when you leaned on it. But here's the clincher. There was a switch at the bottom to lock the backrest in place. Because people hate change, nearly everyone assumed that the new chairs just plain sucked, and you'd see people panic when they came in to find a blue chair in their usual cubicle. They freak out, and dump the blue chair somewhere else, exchanging it for one of the older, more familiar red chairs.

For the record, I thought the blue chairs were just fine. But I was one of the few (and I do mean few) who knew the secret of the switch.

Now, we have these new, ultra-super, space-age babies. These sassy little darlings have arm rests**, which are individually adjustable. The "seat pan" adjusts for maximum comfort. The backrest raises and lowers, and adjusts to any angle a healthy person would want. In combination with a footrest, it is possible to turn one of these chairs into a chaise that feels like the cockpit of a rocketship to Venus. Bravo, US Postal Service! Your new chairs rock!

I'm interested, however, to find out whether people will be willing to figure them out on their own, or if we will have to have a training session to learn how to use them. Today I saw someone actually switching the old red chairs around. Rather than simply adjusting the chair to meet their needs, this person was wandering around trying to find one that was already adjusted that way.

Government workers. *Sigh* This is my life.

* This reminds me of the episode of Friends where they describe their La-Z-Boys as "the chair that Sit magazine called Chair of the Year." OK, say what you want about the show, (no, go ahead, please) but that line fricken cracks me up.

** Which hopefully will put an end to the arm-rest torture devices that some people insist on using at my workplace. These look frighteningly like the stirrups on a gynecologist's examination table. They clamp to the desk, not the chair, and are stored in a huge cardboard box. When the people who use them arrive at work, they dig through the box to get their favorites (this sounds something like someone dropping a silverware drawer down a flight of stairs) and then put them on their desks, a seemingly 10-minute process. The people who use these things are very, very passionate on the subject, and you don't want to cross them. The arm-stirrups are their heroin.
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On a street near my house, there is a huge lake of a puddle, like maybe fifteen or twenty feet across. But even though it has a large surface area, it's pretty shallow. Yesterday, I was walking nearby and noticed a disturbance in the puddle. Well, the disturbance turned out to be a mouse, which suddenly shot across the puddle and then across the rest of the street. You kind of had to be there, but it was sweet. You could have waterskied behind that little bastard.

This morning, I put on a T-shirt and then realized it had the words "I'm with stupid" scrawled across the front in Sharpie marker. There is a corresponding arrow pointing to the right. I momentarily paused, thought, "Hm." Then carried on about my business.

I used to think a good shirt idea was "I'm with stupid," with the arrow pointing straight down. Then, in a catalog, I saw a shirt that said "I'm with stupid's wife." You can't beat that.

Speaking of good inventions, everyone hates the lo-flo toilets. That is a certainty. But in some parts of the world, they conserve water by using dual-action toilets. These babies have two flushers: a #1 flusher and a #2 flusher, so to speak. #1 uses just a little water, while #2 gives you the big flood we all know and love. When I first heard about that, I thought it was ingenious. But it's not ingenious, it's obvious. How many other products are this inefficient?
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My left brain is completely useless these days. I got nuthin'. I think if my camera were back from the shop, I'd be able to come up with sumthin', but it's not, so I got nuthin'.

Still.

My good friend Maria called me today and said, "Barrett Chase," (she always calls me that) "you once told me the best idea for a party I ever heard. And right now, you could use some cheering up so I think you should follow through. It would be good for you. It would be like a rain dance, only for your mind."

Let's see ... holy shit, that would be a good thing!

Anyway, here's my idea. It's called "BC's BYOBC Party." (The "c" stands for chips.) It's basically a run-of-the-mill party, except that I want to get one of those huge cans of fake nacho cheese from the industrial food aisle as Super One. I'm gonna take the label off and stick the whole works in the oven to warm it. Maybe I will or maybe I won't dump a jar of jalapeno peppers in there. Then we all get squiffy and eat chips and have ourselves a good ol' time, yessir.

The question is whether to have it soon (for immediate relief) or to wait a week or so (so that I can acquire season 2 of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Death Race 2000 from Netflix).
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OK, this blog is still too serious. It's time for some escape. Despite the cheesiness of quizzes, I think this one has some definite merit. (via Briantology)

Take the quiz here and then Check out the Scoreboard

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And right now, I have a cold and about a million zits. I have no immune system left.

Anyhow, there is not much to say, and really nothing anyone can do. So let's bring this blog back to its original purpose: general fuckheadery.

One of the interesting things about spending hours upon hours in a waiting room is that you exchange lots of weird stories with your family. Stories you've never heard before.

Yesterday, my sister was telling me about how bad her kids were when they were little (they're in their mid-late 20s now). "One day I came home," she said, "and I went into the backyard, and what do you think I found hanging from the clothesline? FROGS! Live frogs! Clipped to the line by their hind feet with clothespins!"

I haven't been able to get that image out of my head since.
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I feel stupid writing this, because this is a goofy weblog, and it lends itself mainly to cheesy humor and sarcasm, but anyway...but anyway. I feel there is some sort of release to be gained by doing it, so I will.

My mom is not doing well at all. I don't even know where to begin to decribe my feelings. In fact, I don't even want to.

Her bypass surgery, though necessary, did not solve her problem. She is in a very bad state, and will be into the near future.

I remain optimistic, but obviously it is difficult to see her in so much pain, and so terrified, unable to speak, unable to move, unable to breathe on her own. She is supposed to take care of me, right? When I am looking at her, my first impulse is to go to her house and talk to her about it, which is the ultimate paradox.

Compared to this, everything else is easy. Everything else.

There is no more fucking around. I have plans, and I will cool down and think before I act on them, but life is short as they say. There is no more fucking around.

But first, I have to ride out this horrible nightmare. It is the worst I've ever had.
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This evening, my mother was sent to intensive care due to heart problems.

I have no desire to use my left brain at all. I am dealing with this with a combination of red wine, the Talking Heads, and the colorization of old Occam's Razor comics. It is working remarkably well.

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When I was in my teens, my mom had this awesome thing she'd do with leftover mashed potatoes. She'd make them into these sort of patties and fry them up. They weren't latkes, which are thinner. These were big, thick bastards, well-browned and cripy on the outside.

But the real magic happened when these patties became leftovers. Whew. I can barely type this remembering it.

See, when you're 15 years old, you like to eat more than anything else. You have to eat like a lunatic. I'd eat a whole box of Cap'n Crunch in one sitting back then. It was the greatest.

Anyway, what I'd do is take one of them patties cold out of the refrigerator along with a thick slice of cold, leftover meatloaf and make a sandwich on gooey white bread, just drowned in ketchup. God, that was good.

The best part is, whether you're a vegetarian or a carb-counter, there's something in there to horrify everyone.
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It's been a long time. But I'm right there, baby.

1. 138
2. 106
3. 157

P.S. Check out Nixon's foot in the above photo: Over the line, Smokey! Mark it a zero.
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Here's a drawing from the October edition of Occam's Razor. I'm isolating it right now because it's one of my favorite frames of all time. I had so much fun drawing it. The image of two guys playing checkers in a general store has always captivated me, and I'm glad I finally got to use it in a comic.
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This really takes the cake. I am simultaneously fascinated and repulsed. And yes, I downloaded the song to match the sheet music.

Of course.

Duh.
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As you most certainly have realized, barrettchase.com has been ignored for the past few days. It will return to its regularly scheduled blabber very shortly. Until then, please enjoy this image of Ken Curtis, aka Festus from TV's Gunsmoke.

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A while back, I wrote about the 300-350 records I got from the house of a deceased recluse named Eleanor. I haven't even listened to a fraction of these records, but here are my five favorites, so far.

1. Right or Wrong by Wanda Jackson. Wanda Jackson is "The Queen of Rockabilly," and on this album, she "pours sugar over six ballads and rocks around six big beat tunes," according to the sleeve. There is no better way to describe this album. And aside from being utterly hot (see above picture) she was also the first female rockabilly singer to design her own swanky, stylish clothes (on the sleeve, she's wearing a bustier) rather than get duded up in the cheesy, fringy outfits of the day. It doesn't hurt that her singing is outstanding.

2. I Walk Alone by Don Gibson. Don Gibson wrote all kinds of incredible country songs such as "Sweet Dreams" and "Oh Lonesome Me." I have several of his albums, but this one is by far the best. It's slow, sad, and sweet, with a funky groove that runs throughout. I imagine that under the right circumstances, it would be a good makeout album.

3. Night Life by Ray Price. This album is utterly debauched. The chorus in the title track is so hardcore I can hardly stand it: "Oh, the night life ain't no good life, but it's my life." But that's nothing compared to the song "The Wild Side of Life," which is about a guy who married a party girl, much to his dismay: "The glimmer of the gay nightlife has lured you/to the places where the wine and liquor flow/where you wait to be anybody's baby/and forget the truest love you'd ever know." This is immediately followed by a song about a guy who can't stop drinking and fighting. Awesome.

4. Devil Woman by Marty Robbins. OK, I admit the sleeve has a lot to do with why I love this album. But I think the title track is one of the best Marty Robbins songs, plus the album wraps up with "The Wine Flowed Freely," which is just tremendous.

5. Jackson Ain't a Very Big Town by Norma Jean. Norma Jean looks so innocent but she isn't, and that's part of her appeal. Her song "From the Church to the Bar Room" tells about her downward spiral, from being a respectable girl to being a barfly having an affair with a married man, is probably the best track on the album. Then there's "Now it's Every Night," with its refrain, "It started out as once a week, but now it's every night."

I think we all know what that means.
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I coulda had a spontaneous adventure. So I'm riding my bike down Grand Avenue this morning, when what should I see but a carload of Snobbits tooling down the street. "We're going to the fair!" they said. "Quick, chain your bike to that pole and get in!" But ... I had to go to work. Despite how they insisted that I call in sick, I did the right and boring thing. It's been a long time since I just hopped into a car and left town unannounced for a couple days; that would have been cool.

I coulda got mad, like this one guy. The reason I was on my bike in the first place is that I was going to the bank, which is in a new location. When I got there, I discovered that the new place only has drive-through service on Saturdays. So as I was inside the lobby, filling out a deposit slip, a guy came in and got totally enraged. "What they're saying by this is that if you don't have a car, you are a second-class citizen! That is clearly their philosophy. And I suppose if I stand here by this commercial window, no one will come to help me." I said I'd been there for about five minutes, signing my checks and filling out my forms, and no one had come over. "Maybe there's a bell," I suggested.

"Yeah, there's a fucken bell," he said, indicating the fire alarm. "It's right here!"

I coulda got me some mink fur. Seriously. I probably still could. There's a squashed mink on the side of the road less than a block from my house. It's there for you if you want it. I've never actually seen a mink around here, only martens, and they are pretty skittish, too. Mink.

Mink.
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Chocolate. It's not that I hate chocolate. I'll eat a chocolate-chip cookie now and then. A few Hershey's Kisses about once a year. A mocha java on occasion. I just don't understand why people love it so much. It's nothing special, and cheaper varieties are downright gross. In ice cream, however, I think it is disgusting. There are so many other toppings that are so much better (there's caramel, for crying out loud). And chocolate ice cream itself tastes like wax -- why the hell would someone ruin perfectly good ice cream? Ugh.

And don't even think about that whole "chocolate as a substitute for sex" thing. If that's your way of thinking, you might as well just give up. Just get yourself some reading material and spend the rest of your life tucked away in your apartment with your little friends.

Reggae. OK, here's something I really do hate. With a fricken passion. There aren't very many human-made sounds that are more irritating. There's a great scene in the movie Ghost World where Enid says something like, "This place is full of idiots," then this frat boy walks by and says, "Dude, let's go hear some reggae." Enid motions to him as if to say, "Case in point."

Natural Hygiene Products. I'm sorry about this one, but it's true. I wish these products actually worked, but they seem to be a scam perpetrated against people who want to protect the environment from harm and their own bodies from cancer. The fact is, I get better results wearing no deodorant that I do with that Tom's crap. And if you ask me to brush my teeth with little more than baking soda, you'd better start looking for a new friend.

Monty Python Movies. Yeah, they're funny. And yes, the cast is incredibly talented. But you know what? I've seen them, and I have no desire to see them again and again.
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Of course, everyone wonders what it's like to spend so much time so far above the ground. I have to say that it rocked, at least after I got used to it. And I never felt like I was in any kind of danger. Well, almost.

There was one time when I was on the piddly ladder -- the 16-footer -- which only reached to the second storey. I was doing a normal-sized house in Superior, I remember, whose yard was very hilly, with wet grass that hadn't been mowed in a long time. For some reason, the slant of the yard combined with a wrong move on my part made the ladder suddenly tilt backward, away from the house.

I did the only thing I could -- I thrust out one leg and one arm in an attempt to balance myself on the ladder, which was not leaning against anything but just standing straight up in the air. It worked. Then I leaned forward so that the ladder would smack back onto the side of the house again. This worked too.

And then, I just continued washing the windows, thinking about how I could probably make a lot more money in the circus.
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So I'm working on a post when suddenly this thing arrives via email. What use is the written word now?
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One of the nicest houses I ever worked at was just off of Skyline Drive in the West End. This place was an absolutely huge house, and was brand new. I chose to clean inside while my partner took the outside. In general, he preferred not to interact with the customers. I preferred not to dangle from the eaves like a monkey.

So this house. When you walked in, you were in a foyer with a skylight two stories above you. To your right was a spiral staircase with several landings. Straight ahead was the kitchen.

If you walked halfway up the staircase, you got to the living room, which was huge and surrounded by windows. There was a fireplace, several couches, and a great entertainment center. I remember that these windows were so new that they still had the stickers on them, and I had to scrape them off with a razor blade. It's pretty standard and easy, if you know what you are doing, but the woman of the house was kind of distraught about it and gave my the typical million apologies I'd become accustomed to as a window washer.

The woman of the house. She was very beautiful and blonde and meek, and she had a baby. She was also very quiet and very sad. About halfway through the job, her husband came home and I saw why she was so depressed. He was about 35, dressed in a suit with his hair slicked back. She handed him coffee when he came in, and went into the kitchen. Soon, the shouting began.

"Where the FUCK is my paper? Your job is NOT very hard. I work and I work and I work and it is not in my fucking job description to search the fucking house for the paper. It is supposed to be on the kitchen table. Is that so DIFFICULT for you to do? To put the PAPER on the TABLE?"

Ugh.

I retreated to the third floor, where the bedrooms were, and tried not to listen. The master bedroom had a king-size bed in the middle of the room, directly beneath a skylight in the 15-foot ceiling. The master bath had a sunken bathtub big enough for two, plus a separate shower and a deck overlooking the back yard. I was young, poor, and newly in love, and my mind alternated between how I would like to use these rooms, and how this asshole undoubtedly defiled his pretty, shy wife in this very bed and bathtub on a routine basis.

There was one window I could not clean, which was the sliding glass door in the kitchen. I wanted to address the guy personally about this, because I knew if I talked to the woman, the guy would throw a shitfit at her when he saw that it was still dirty. I told him it would never come clean because his dog had scratched it up, and there was dirt embedded in the glass. He started to complain, and I just said, "Look." I rubbed the squeegee across the inside pane, and on the outside the dog started chasing the squeegee and pawing at the glass with his extremely muddy feet. The guy defused right away, and seemed to calm down in general.

I don't think he even knew I was there when he was yelling at his wife, and I gathered that the screaming fits were generally a private thing. The baby would probably be 11 years old now. I wonder how the little family is doing?
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Several months ago, I made a couple posts about movies I enjoyed when I was a kid, and would like to see again. Mainly, I just want to see how ridiculous they are, and how they hold up over time.

Well, I was looking through the DVDs at the library the other day, and I found a movie of this type that wasn't on either of my lists. Naturally, I snatched it up and took it home.

The movie is Time After Time, starring Malcom McDowell, and for some reason, I really liked this movie as a kid. The premise is that H.G. Wells actually built a time machine before he wrote any books. He is discussing the machine with some of his associates when the boys from Scotland Yard come to the door. It seems that one of H.G.'s friends is actually Jack the Ripper! The Ripper escapes by using the time machine to go to 1979 San Francisco. Of course, H.G. chases him into the future, where he falls in love with Mary Steenburgen.

But before he leaves, we learn that H.G. has the idea that the future will be a utopia, and that everyone will get along beautifully. Jack the Ripper thinks the opposite is true. Of course, the Ripper thinks 1979 is incredible. "I'm an amatuer here," he exclaims. Wells is shocked and disgusted.

The movie is cute and funny, with utterly terrible special effects. I think the thing I liked best is that there are several details that later ended up being referenced in Back to the Future. To a certain extent the inside of the time machine looks very similar to the one in BTTF. The time circuits are laid out the same way. And the time travelers go from Nov. 5, 1893 to Nov. 5, 1979, just as in BTTF, Marty McFly travels from Nov. 5 1985 to Nov. 5, 1955.

Anyway, the experience inspired me to throw some of my old favorites into my Netflix queue. If anyone wants to watch Death Race 2000 with me, give me a shout and I'll let you know when it comes in.

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The air is getting crisp, the squirrels are turning grey, and once again, it's time for the kids to prepare for another school year. All students have to take certain mandatory courses, but what electives will prepare little Jimmy for the real world? Well, I'm glad you asked. Here are some of the options available, and my assessment of them.

Marketing. In marketing, you will learn important concepts such as latent needs, wherein you make the consumer realize they have a need for something they previously didn't even know about. You will learn about the most important rule of sales: ABC -- Always Be Closing. Most importantly, you will lean about AIDA -- generating Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action to sell your product and/or service.

These concepts are completely useless in the business world, of course. But when properly implemented in social settings, they will get you laid every time.

Higher Math. Math is mandatory to a certain level, and after that, it is elective. You will never need to know math higher than geometry, and you will only need that to find your way home when it is 3 o'clock in the morning, you are flat broke, and you are triangularly drunk.

Photography. During my stint in high school the great genius economics teacher Richard Gastler often explained to us the importance of taking a photography class. "That way," he said, "you can ask that special someone to 'come into the darkroom and see what develops.'" Gastler.

Wood Shop/Home Economics. Don't ever take these classes. They're for stupid kids, and they're beneath you. You will never need to know how to varnish wood or cook eggs. Obviously, you will have servants to do that for you.

Anatomy & Physiology. I can only speak from personal experience when it comes to A&P. I took this class on the pretense that I was thinking of going into a career in the sciences. In retrospect, my career in the sciences didn't pan out, but I did gain a terrific appreciation for dismantling cats with a scalpel and a bone saw, and taking 6 weeks to do it.
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Recently, I acquired a kickass bookshelf from my parents, on the condition that I get rid of all my crap that was inside it. When I did this, my parents informed me that I also had a lot of junk left in my old room, and that I should get rid of that sometime soon as well. So, having the day off today, I went over and took a peek at what I left behind many years ago.

OK, the Kojak book pretty much rocks on its own, since it's a UK import that originally went for 50p. But what's even better is that I found this little morsel tucked away inside it. Wow. That's almost too much mint for me to take.

Some other items in the general morass of my old closet include:

- About 50 Mad paperbacks.
- A Kool-Aid promotional comic book, in which Kool-Aid Man battles the Thirsties.
- A 110 camera, with six mysterious pictures on the roll of film inside.
- An unopened bottle of Leinie's Honey Weiss, circa 1995.
- Two Casio keyboards.
- Tons of Dungeons & Dragons books.
- Four quarters in a sealed envelope. (?)
- Lots and lots of cassette tapes.
- My 7th grade yearbook, complete with witty commentary regarding the assistant principal.

There is oh, so much more to go through.
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One morning, my boss called me early and said that the job for that day was in Two Harbors, and that he had to go to Two Harbors for some other business, so he'd appreciate it if I rode with him instead of my partner. Confused, I said OK.

As soon as we got on the road, he handed me a pamphlet titled something like "Dealing Politely with Customers." He asked me to read it, so I did.

When I was finished he said, "I suppose you know what this is about." I was baffled. "We've had some complaints about you, and I want you to know I'm taking them very seriously."

"What kind of complaints?"

"Well, the woman out in the East End, the one with the dogs. She said that you were very rude to her, and that you took too long to clean the windows. She said you were lazy, and that the job you did was unsatisfactory in the end."

Now, this didn't TOTALLY surprise me, because while most customers ran around frantically, embarrassed by the state of their windows and apologizing for not being able to clean them themselves, sometimes customers were Horrible Assholes Who Should Go Straight to Hell, and these people would complain about the slightest little thing. Still, I didn't remember any dogs.

"It was a huge green house. And you had to be very careful around the dogs. There were three huge dogs, and they were all very vicious."

This I would have remembered. But I had no recollection of the place.

"She said you scratched up the side of her house with the ladders. She said your partner did all the work, and that for the most part you just stood around in the backyard smoking. When she confronted you, she said you used profanity and you were very rude."

OK. This is just plain wrong. First of all, I wasn't even there. Second, I don't even smoke. I told my boss this, and he was skeptical. I told him to ask my partner Andy about it if he didn't believe me. Andy wasn't there either.

Eventually, it came out that one of the other window washers, Bruce, was the culprit. Bruce who lived in a van. Bruce who had been given the job as a favor to someone my boss knew. Bruce who, when confronted by an angry housewife, told her 1) to go fuck herself, and 2) that his name was Barrett Chase.

The next day my boss apologized, and said that I was a good man. I was just a kid then, so I brushed the whole thing off. I think if someone did something like that to me now, I'd hunt them down and remove their eyeballs.
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When I was in college, I had a job as a window washer that I liked quite a bit. It was a dangerous job and the pay was awful, but it was cool to go into different places every day and see how other people lived. I made 40% commission, which I had to split with my partner, which ended up being something like minimum wage. We couldn't work on days when it rained, and we spent much of our time climbing up and down 40-foot-tall extension ladders. You read that right: 40 feet. That sumbitch was both scary and heavy. But after awhile it was also kind of cool. I didn't work there long enough to be able to do a "jump," where you rappel down the side of a building using rock-climbing gear. Our outfit wasn't classy enough to have stuff like scaffolds or cherry pickers.

Anyway. On to the first story.

My partner's name was Andy. Andy was a cool guy, but also kind of strange. He was a pastor, so he talked about Jesus a lot. Also, he seemed to really get into being a window washer. He even went as far as to paint his Honda station wagon with yellow house paint, so that it would look more like a service vehicle.

One day, a guy from Andy's church spotted us as we were working at the UMD Medical School. This guy was pretty damn weird. He was scruffy looking, a little dirty, with extremely unkempt hair and thick glasses. He came up to Andy, and asked him, as his pastor, to give him some advice. The two of them walked away a few steps so they could get some privacy, and I did my best to ignore them, which proved to be impossible.

All I know is that Andy appeared to be very uncomfortable after he learned what the guy wanted advice about. The guy didn't take this discomfort very well. Things got a bit heated and voices were raised. But all I heard was Andy saying something like, "You've got to just trust in Jesus," while the guy yelled, "I wouldn't have this problem if I could just get a wife!" Andy said he would pray for him.

I would like to think that the problem might have been a non-problem, like maybe the guy just felt guilty for taking too many solo flights or something. Or maybe he was just into porn. But his creepiness makes me fear that something it was something more depraved than that. I hope not, because you can pray on that kind of shit all day long, but some people just need to be isolated.
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All my recent debacles with my job, in addition to all the recent talk about moving away, has got me thinking about fleeing this town. Not that I'm going to do it. I'm just thinking about it. Imagining it, so to speak. See, one of the great things about working for the USPS is that you can transfer anywhere. There are Post Offices in every city in the nation, and a lot of them are hiring. So anyway, I've been thinking about my possible options. It's very liberating. Here they are:

The obvious. I've always had a prejudice about Minneapolis. But the thing is, there are a lot of ways to live in the Cities, and there is a lot to do and experience there. I feel pretty confident that I could make a life for myself there that doesn't involve some suburban nightmare complete with SUV and Mosquito Magnet. The problem here is that my confidence might be misguided.

One of those cities you never even think of. It gives me great pleasure to know that there are certain cities I forget about, for years at a time. Indianapolis, for example, enters my consciousness about once every five years. There are a whole host of cities like this, and it would be kind of fun/stupid to move to a city I know absolutely nothing about. The problem here is obvious -- I'd end up living in Cleveland.

Some small town in the middle of nowhere. Another great thing about the USPS is that (I'm not quite sure if this is true, but I'm 85% positive) a job is a job is a job, as far as salary goes. What I'm saying is that a clerk gets the same pay no matter where they live. A clerk in Manhattan would probably find things a little tight, at least at first, but a clerk in Buttmunch, Michigan might live high off the hog. It would be cool to get a job no one wants, because it's in a remote location. That way, you'd have lots of extra income to spend on a swank house and cool stuff to fill it with. The problem here is that, social opportunites being few, I'd probably end up screwing someone's wife, which is not really an avenue I want to explore, no matter how much fun John Redcorn makes it seem.

A city that's prolly a'ight. There are several of these that seem obvious to me. Denver, Seattle, Albequerque, etc. There are a dozen more that aren't even coming to mind. Both the upside and the downside of these cities are vague and probably to be discovered immediately upon arrival. Or maybe two weeks after arrival.

Some place near Duluth, that seems like Duluth in some ways, but isn't. Yeah, but what's the point?

Tulsa. Dear God. Could my liver even take it? I am from Duluth. If it can make it here, it can make it anywhere.
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So, after all my effort to change around my sleeping habits for the new job, and after filling out a stack of forms, and after everything was sent to the Cities for processing and approval, and after everything was prepared and ready and all that, I got a call this morning from management.

My services at the new place are no longer required. I am to report to my regular job today.

This is why my job classification is "Flexible."
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Well.

Right now I can hardly keep my eyes open, even though at this time tomorrow, I'll be halfway (read that again, halfway) through my shift at the main post office. It's a good thing that the job is both physical and complicated, or so I've been told. I'm sure that come 6-7am, I will officially be the Sharpest Knife in the Drawer™.

Have you ever been so tired you feel like you're going to throw up? It's really an experience.

Anyway. I'm trying to think of ways to keep myself awake for a few more hours at least. I already drank a lot of coffee, and now I'm working the Coke. It helps to be wearing headphones, with Devendra Banhart screaming "We certainly are nice peeeeopllllllle" directly into your medulla oblongata.

TV is horrible. Coast to Coast AM is awful. I'd read, but then I might as well take a handful of Xanax.

Anyone out there want to come over here and slap me around for awhile? Uh, nevermind. I think I know the answer to that. I recant.

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Recently, I realized that before a certain point in my life, I don't have many pictures. I think I realized this while reading Mass Distraction and thought about just how many pictures of Sharyn's son there are on that site, which is fantastic. When I was a kid, there were not many pictures taken in my house, probably because everyone in my immediate family is terminally shy when it comes to cameras, etc. (Which is funny, because they are all so loud.) They also don't like to be touched by other human beings. I am the exact opposite.

I have some pictures of myself as a very young child. But I would be surprised to learn that any pictures of me exist between ages 8-12, except for the prerequisite school pictures, which are like driver's license pictures for kids.

As a teenager, my friends started taking pictures and they most certainly have many, many pictures of me with bad clothes and worse hair. Somewhere I have a box filled exclusively with bad pictures -- pictures that are either just lousy, or purposely confusing, or oddly hilarious. I taped a shoe box shut sometime when I was about 17, and cut a slit in the side big enough to slide pictures into. It's like a piggy bank for bad photos. Someday I'll tear it open and post some of them.

What really jerks my frog is that there are hardly any pictures of me from my angry, skinny years. I looked better at that time then any other time of my life. Damn narcissism.

After none of my photos turned out from Geek Prom 2: the Geekquel, I decided to buy a digital camera. Which was great until it broke. Then I got another one, which was great until that one broke. Now I'm addicted to photographs. I want to see them instantly, and I want to be able to carry 1,000 of them around in my pocket at all times.

I'm sending my camera in for repairs, which is supposed to be free because the thing is still under warranty. We'll see. Until then, expect a very texty blog.
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1. Very soon, I will become adjusted to being awake and active all night. Yes, as soon as I begin working as a mail processor down at the main PO, I'm going to become a night owl.

2. No one is going to be staying downstairs for a long time. The renovation is going to begin soon, which means no neighbors for awhile.

3. One plus two equals party.

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There is a fourth, unforeseen realization: Soon I will be attempting to sleep during the day, when there is construction work going on right beneath my head.

There's a fifth, unforeseen realization, too: I need to find me some neighbors. My landlord requests that, if possible, I should be the one to choose who rents the downstairs apartment when it is finished. "You're the one who has to live with them," he said. This makes sense. So if anyone out there wants to live in a duplex in West Duluth with a great yard and garden, OSP, on a dead end, three blocks from Beaner's Central and one block from the grocery store, give me a shout. You could do a lot worse, and believe me, I have.
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A couple of unpleasant things happened to me over the weekend, but all in all it's been awesome. I've been rolling with the punches and getting to what's real.

Victories

- Ever since I got my iPod, I've had a problem with it: The screen is very dim. I've compared it to my friends' iPods, and theirs are much easier to read. One person I know strongly advised me to send it back. "How much did this COST?!" he said. "Did you pay FULL PRICE for this?!" I lived with it for a long time, but recently I made up my mind to send it in to be fixed. But then, last night ...

Last night I was fooling around with all the options I'd never bothered to check out before -- the alarm clock, the calendar, the game where you shoot down the paratroopers. That was when I realized, "Oh. There's a contrast setting." In literally less than a second, I solved the problem. I can't remember the last time I felt so good and so stupid at the same time.

But anyway, it's like I have a new iPod now.

Fun and Games

- I bowled for the first time in a long while. The Pansy Folk Singer and I decided to check out the newly surfaced lanes at Stadium, and I wound up with a 131 and a 150 even though I was tired and sober. Awesome.

- Ca-chee came over with fixings for Sunday breakfast. Omelets with toast and cream cheese, along with strong coffee and grapefruit juice, just put me in the perfect mood this morning. The peppers and basil for the omelets came from my garden.

Acquisitions

- While visiting my parents, I mentioned that I have been having a lot of trouble finding a suitable shelf unit for my LPs. So then, my mom just offhandedly said, "Why don't you take the one in the upstairs hallway?" Wow. The shelf in the upstairs hallway ain't no particle-board crap, let me tell you. It's a real wood affair, in great condition, probably from the 1930s or 40s. My grandpa got it from some building downtown way before I was born. I had that sumbitch home in a matter of minutes.

Now where I once had junk all over the floor, I have this great shelf with two rows of records on the bottom, comic books in the middle, and CDs on the top. I put a great lamp and my puzzle box on the very top. It's fricken swank.

- I boldly stepped into the 1970s with the purchase of a microwave oven. Ten bucks at the rummage sale downstairs bought me a fake-wood-grain Magic Chef with a rotating thing on the inside for even distribution of fake heat. Now I can cook frozen burritos in two minutes instead of 50, which is probably not too good, because that was basically the only thing keeping me from buying awful processed food like frozen burritos.

The Bad Stuff

- Sure, I got a microwave and that's fine. The JFK picture from downstairs, however, was a big ol' NFS. Part of me is thinking oh well, and part of me is thinking I shoulda stole that Catholic womanizer when I had the chance. I think I'll be able to go on, though.

- After the Spirit Valley Days Street Dance, my camera crapped out ... again. Now when I turn it on, it just beeps and says "E18." I looked this problem up online and found a lot of people ranting about the Canon PowerShot, and "the dreaded E18 error," which is apparently a known issue with this camera. I wish it had been a known issue to me before I bought it ... twice. I guess I'm supposed to call the help line "during regular business hours," a phrase which makes me roll my eyes and give a Bronx cheer, because I am one of those people who keeps "irregular" business hours, apparently.

- Someone stole the woodchuck trap. During the rummage sale, I am told, several people inquired about the trap and whether they might buy it. (It was set up in the garden, ready to SPRING, muthafukka!) And apparently, one of these people decided that if they couldn't buy it, they would steal it, and came back for a little midnight visit. The thing that pisses me off the most is that they knocked over one of my tomato plants in the process, and if it dies, I am going to swallow my own tongue. Well, not really. I think I'll be able to go on, once again, because now I have the perfect excuse to get rid of them some other way ... heh, heh, heh.

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Click the pics to see 'em big. Also look for the video at Perfect Duluth Day.

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I think I'm going to take this new temporary/voluntary assignment at the post office, where I will be working at the main P.O. as a mail processor, filling in for people on vacation. This should really mess up my life, because ... well ... it's an overnight shift. Why would I do such a thing, you ask? Here's why:

1. A higher rate of pay + night differential + possible overtime = mucho dinero.
2. I have a general need to shake things up a bit.
3. It's a more physical job than my current one, which would do me good. Of course, laying on the couch, eating Corn Nuts and watching Totally Outrageous Behavior Caught On Tape is a more physical job than my current one, but hey.

Speaking of TV, last night I turned on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and the first thing I heard was this dialog:

Cop: "And what did you do when you started to have these thoughts?"
Perp: "I started a blog."

The crazy part was, that was the end of it. Just "I started a blog," not "I started a blog, or weblog--a frequently updated online journal with daily posts listed in reverse chronological order." Hm. Maybe we all know what it is, finally.

And speaking of finally, The Simpsons came on after that, and I can't believe it took until now for someone to make this joke:

Marge: "Quick! Someone perform CPR!"
Homer: "I see a bad moon risin'...I see trouble on the way..."

Then I shut off the TV and watched Barry Pirkola play lap steel guitar without his shirt on.

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...I am currently working on what may be the dumbest Occam's Razor comic ever. It came to me in a dream. When I woke up from the dream, I thought, "That's BRILLIANT!" Now I'm just baffled by how stupid it is. Still, I rather like it, though.

If you are in need of entertainment, hop on over to slimgoodbuzz.com and check out the X106 audio archive. Currently, there are three of Slim's appearances on X106 for your listening pleasure.

Or if you haven't already, you could go read what's happening at Complicated Fun. Peter is scanning/transcribing all the notes he received from his 8th-9th grade girlfriend, Wanda. Let me tell you, I didn't know any girls like Wanda when I was that age. Sigh.

Well, off to draw my weird subconscious.

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On a whim, I recently ordered a 45 from my friends Greater California. I met Terry and Kari Prine a few years back at the Norshor Theatre, and I believe it was the day after Thanksgiving. From the Shor, we went on a weird and wild and debaucherous adventure that involved barhopping and lap dances and drunken revelry. The next day, they went off home to Long Beach, and I ate a huge omelet to sober up at 10am.

Since then, we've exchanged e-mails, and they sent me their two albums, The Little Pacific and Somber Wurlitzer, which are absolutely beautiful. Their sound is very soft; Kari plays the Hammond and the electric piano, while Terry sings and plays guitar and trumpet. It's a '60s sound, and is very warm and soothing.

Anyway, the record arrived today, and these awesome folks not only sent the 45, but also a T-Shirt and a $5 bill! I don't exactly know what kind of impression I made on them that one night, but it was lots of fun, and I'm glad I know them. A few weeks ago, they played with Calexico, and I would have loved to see that.

Well, what the hell am I doing blogging? I got $5 to spend!

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So I'm sittin' here bloggin', gettin' hungry, thinkin' about how there's almost nothin' left in my fridge, and I decide, hey, I'm gonna order a pizza.

It's been awhile since I ordered one, so when I reached over and grabbed the new phone book, I was surprised to find Web sites listed with the phone numbers. My mind immediately brought up the only entertaining Sandra Bullock movie ever made, The Net, which was released in 1995 and begins with her ordering a pizza online. Things go predictably downhill from there, when she realizes the consequences of our entire lives being on the Web. Duh. You should try living in 2004, Sandra, when everyone has a blog.

Thinking about how it took 9 years to get from The Net to my actual life, I went to rsvpizza.com, which belongs to Pizza Hut, where I chose my toppings and made my order. Thirty mintues later...BAM! Pizza at my door. And I didn't have to talk to the crabby phone guy.

Delivery guy was cool and he informed me in a very by-the-book manner about my chance to win free pizza for a year. Which for me, means like 4 or 5 pizzas.

Anyway, the pizza was good and I geeked out.  It made my rum taste shitty, so I quit drinking. Now I'm gonna watch a Japanese horror movie.

Once again, this is my life.

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I think the Hello BloggerBot is cool. A bit difficult to use, and certainly buggy, but cool. I can see definite potential here, and I wish I had more new pictures to post. Ha. I have a goal. Goals make me feel all tingly.

++++++

I can't stop listening to this new Eleni Mandell album. I mean, I've always had a thing for Eleni, but I just got her new album, Afternoon, and I'm hooked again. After her forays into jazz and country, she's back with the low-down groovy groans and stand-up bass sound she had on her previous albums, only better. My God, the second-to-last song, "Dangerous," is about sex and longing. She's singing about a guy she can't wait to get with, and when she says "You are so, so, so disgusting!" like it's a good thing, I just about wig out. It's a shame I missed her in Minneapolis on July 1.

In addition to the CD, I got two 45s with the latest shipment, one of which might turn out to be my favorite Eleni song of all time: "Turn on the Lights." Seriously. I'm gonna wear this somebitch out. "Dear love, can you explain to me how such a simpleminded girl could catch your eye? Did she lure you close with booze and mystery? Oh, how regretful you are gonna be." This song is right up there with "Pauline" in my book. There are four songs you can listen to on her site, so go check 'em out.

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My landlady is having an estate sale, so every day there are people crawling around downstairs, hauling stuff out and messing up my (my!) garage. It's odd when you technically have neighbors, but you never see them. Then suddenly, they're there, and walking around like the own the place. Which, of course, they do. But I like to pretend this place is all mine.

++++++

Just let me pretend. Please.

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Whew. Tonight begins the recovery period for my semi-lost weekend on Madeline Island with Paul and Maria. Oh, and yes, in case you were wondering, being stuck on an island with such hotties is everything it is cracked up to be.

Seriously, the weekend was exactly what I needed: 50 hours filled with sarcasm, outdoor adventures, singing Calvin Johnson songs, 40-ouncers of Mickey's Malt Liquor, extra heavy-duty barroom drinking, beach shenanigans, hummus wraps, a million jokes about shitting, and overutilization of the F-word, if such a thing is even fucken possible.

Here's what I learned:

+ "Ferry out" does not mean the same thing as "fairy out."

+ Paul Lundgren will drink hot cocoa on a sunny summer day, and put cream in it. This is absolutely insane!

+ I like crap made out of iron.

+ Beach Club bartender Ben Small will pour 'em tall.

+ This guy will pour 'em even taller.

+ The best cure for a hangover is waking up, immediately taking down tents in the glaring sunlight, and then getting on a boat. I am being facetious.

I probably learned a lot more, too. But I'm going to bed now.

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So I'm scrolling through the photos on my digital camera, and suddenly there's this: 

After freaking out for a few minutes, I looked at the surrounding images and realized I had drunkenly photographed the pictures on the menu at Papa Don's. I have issues.

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Have you ever attempted to pull a really tight cap off a pen, only to punch yourself in the face?
Uh. Um. I'm just curious. Really.

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My mom is always wondering how I cope with the boredom of living alone. She asks questions like, "What do you do over there?" and seems to have the impression that living alone equals moping, sighing, and never leaving the house. "Oh, well," she says, "I suppose you could read." I don't know what to say to this, because the truth is I rarely get bored.
 
Aside from a full and rewarding social life, I spend a lot of time wasting time. It's not so much doing nothing as it is a state of freedom within my own mind.  This, for me, is a necessity and it always has been. I need to have some time set aside each day to let my mind roam exactly how it wants to, and if I am deprived of this, I flip out, stop showering, and start whipping ninja stars at people in the Super One canned goods aisle.

 
Wow -- flashback! I just remembered that when I was a kid, I once made ninja stars from soup can lids. You take a soup can and open it all the way around with that triangular kind of can opener you use to punch open tomato juice or Hi-C cans. Voila! Instant stealthy death right out of your kitchen! Note to self: if ever caught in the need of ninja stars while at Super One, improvise.
 
Remember that ninja commercial that used to be on TBS in the '80s? I can't remember what it was for exactly, whether it was a full-fledged ninja training course, ninja outfits and paraphernalia, or all of the above. I just remember the commercial enticing you to "practice the art of stealth and secrecy." What the hell was that all about? It was almost certainly a brainchild of the infamous Ron Popeil.
 
Ron Popeil. Ronco. I don't think I own a single Ronco item. You know how some people outfit their whole apartments with IKEA? I think I'm gonna do that with Ronco. I'll start out with the flavor injector and work my way up. Maybe I'll have the spray-on hair by Christmastime.
 
First I'll become a ninja.
 
Right now, however, I'm just gonna go to work. 

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RRRR. Gmail is down. Still. It has been down for days. I've been getting the "Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes" message for 48 hours. I am about to go insane.
 
By the way, speaking of Gmail, if you have some Gmail invites and you want some chocolate-covered cicadas, a Commodore 64, your picture in a window at the Empire State Building, or just to watch a guy staple his own thumb, go to gmailswap.com where you can hook up with people willing to trade interesting things for Gmail invites.

Well, back to the Hotmail ghetto.

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Wow. It seems I've managed to fall ass-backward into a four-day weekend. (Which is how I fall into all my weekends. Or rather how I fall out of them. Um...never mind.) Two normal days off plus a vacation day plus delayed Reagan day equals a mighty load of nothing to do, and the first PBR is going to crack ... now!

Seriously, though, this mini-vacation is going to involve a ton of musical endeavors. First is the ever-enjoyable Recliner Sessions, during which Starfire and I will switch off playing one song apiece for a few hours at Starfire Lounge. Then the Green Man Festival begins on Friday. I've never been too much into the Green Man scene, but this year is going to rock, even without Willie Nelson. I'm especially excited to see Califone. I'll be dispensing music more music from my collection on Random Radio, 93.5 FM from 6-9 on Friday and Saturday, for those of you within earshot.

All of that said, let me conclude by officially announcing that I hate Perfect Duluth Day. That blog has a disease and I'm staying out until it's run its course.
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Here are the June and July editions of Occam's Razor for your reading enjoyment. Check the Ripsaw stands in the near future for the August edition. Or, wait for me to post it, if it suits you.

Gracias.
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It's gonna be outdoors this time. Sweet, sweet, sweet.
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Not so long ago, I was sitting in a bar with a few friends watching professional wrestling with the sound off, and discussing how in the year 2004, muted professional wrestling looks as though it could turn into porn at any minute. During a lull in the conversation, one of my friends asked me who my favorite professional wrestler was. I immediately answered Abdullah the Butcher.

My answer was sort of facetious. I mean, sure, Abdullah was the Madman from Sudan. Sure, he weighed over 400 pounds. Sure, he'd often tear up his opponent's face with a fork wrapped up in white tape. Sure, his "trunks" were genie pants pulled up to his armpits. Sure, his boots curled up at the toe. Sure, he'd run/waddle down the aisle to his matches with an insane look on his face, appearing to have just been let out of a cage.

However.

Chubdullah the Butcher was difficult to look at. For one thing, he had piles and piles of scar tissue on his forehead that would burst open at the slightest nudge. And then there were the man-boobs that looked like he was carrying a couple of manta rays under his arms.

Recently, I got to thinking about good ol' Abdullah, and what he might be up to. A quick Web search revealed an unbelievable fact: He now owns a place in Atlanta, Georgia called Abdullah the Butcher's House of Ribs and Chinese Food.

While most of the readers of this blog are now waiting for the point, I know there's about four or five of you who have just fallen out of your chairs and are now flailing around in fake epileptic spasms on the floor.

Let me repeat: Abdullah the Butcher's House of Ribs and Chinese Food.

Let me repeat: Abdullah the Butcher.

Let me repeat:

Call (404) 629-2332 for reservations.
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So, yesterday my grandfather would have been 100. He was born July 10, 1904 and died at the age of 95.

Anyhow, one of the great things about him was that he always used to sing the traditional song, "Moonshiner." So it was a great coincidence last night when Haley Bonar chose that song to end her set at Washington Studios.

There are many, many versions of that song out there, but I've never actually heard anyone sing the one gramps was fond of. Most people sing it in a mournful way, but his was more jovial. The line that usually goes something like, "Let me eat when I'm hungry, let me drink when I'm dry. Two dollars when I'm hard up, religion when I die," he'd sing "Eat when you're hungry and drink when you're dry. Whiskey won't kill me, I'll drink 'til I die."

Way to go, gramps. Happy birthday. And thanks, Haley--coincidence or not.
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Look what I found in my basement!

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My grandfather was just about the coolest person I ever met. He died just before his 95th birthday, and had he lived to see this Saturday, he would have been 100. I know it's uncool to post lyrics on your blog, but just this once (OK, and tomorrow, too, maybe) I would like to post some, in his honor.

This is a familiar song you've probably heard before, which happened to be my grandfather's favorite. I heard this song my whole life, but my greatest memory is from a Christmas toward the end of his life, when my sister gave him a sort of music-box thingy that played this song. I remember that he stayed up very late that night, and when just he and I were in the kitchen, he wound it up and played it, and for the first time in my life, I saw him cry. Someday, I will listen to this song, and I know now that if I keep living the life I'm living, it will mean that much to me, too.

The song is "Those Were The Days," and it goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a tavern
Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours
And think of all the great things we would do
Then the busy years went rushing by us
We lost our starry notions on the way
If by chance I'd see you in the tavern
We'd smile at one another and we'd say

Those were the days my friend we thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose, we'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way

Just tonight I stood before the tavern
Nothing seemed the way it used to be
In the glass I saw a strange reflection
Oh was that lonely person really me
Through the door there came familiar laughter
I saw your face and heard you call my name
Oh my friend we're older but no wiser
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same

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These things are making me very happy:

- Erin has a crush on me. (It's so, so mutual.)

- Lorika posted an mp3 of one of my favorite songs.

- Spacewaitress is adopting my philosophy.

- Many expatriates of cities like Detroit, Chicago and New York take with them fond memories of eating the diminutive hamburgers in the wee hours of the morning.

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So yesterday, Ca-chee told me about something she learned from this book about human cadavers. She said that when people get shot and they immediately fall down, it is all in their head. Unless your central nervous system has been damaged, there is no reason for you to fall down right away when you get shot. Take a look at animals: when you shoot them, they don't fall right down -- they run.

The thing to remember, she said, is that when somebody shoots you, you should at least try to run away. What do you have to lose? You might not be wounded that bad, and you might be able to make it to help and save your life. But if you fall right down, you're dead. No doubt about it.

Anyway, I have this new philosophy based on that idea. I am going to refuse to "fall down" when I am psychologically wounded. When that happens, I am going to gather all my energy and haul ass.

I think it's a good plan.
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So, about a week ago, I happened to see this monstrosity barrelling down the road, and I just about had an aneurysm. I mean, OK, I can see the appeal of an RV, don't get me wrong. But the "Intruder"? Please. Who is this thing marketed to? Are there people out there who actually want to be considered an intrusion? Apparently so.

Wait. I know who this is marketed to. This thing reminds me of a canoe trip I once took. It was just an overnighter: We got there in the morning, canoed all day, and then set up camp in the regular campground. This was a mistake, however, as there was an RV in the campground, and the people in it were dead set on "intruding." They had their generator running all hours of the night, and a radio going, plus they had bright spotlights shining down on the picnic table outside their RV. It was like a fancy little suburban nightmare right there in the north woods.

"No one ever goes hungry on my camping trips," the main guy announced, over and over again. The most irritating part was that when he talked, he talked like this: "The soup is ready ... it's right over there ... it's all cooked and ready to go ... so just go on over ... get yourself a bowl ... the bowls are there too ... grab the ladel ... ladel yourself some soup ... get a spoon off the table ... there are napkins there too ... and just get your soup and your crackers ... bread if you want it ... and ... y'know ... enjoy."

Sure, it doesn't sound absolutely horrible, but this followed a terrific day of canoeing on silent lakes, seeing few if any people but plenty of bald eagles, loons and moose.

Then we had to try to sleep while being intruded upon by, uh, a bunch of loons and a moose. Intruders. Indeed.

UPDATE: This just in ... the Intruder's still in town

[photo courtesy of Concublogger]
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All right people, I got nuthin'. Well, nuthin' 'cept fer this:

"At the [Lincoln Park] zoo's new Regenstein Center for African Apes, chimpanzees can touch a panel hidden from public view that will shoot harmless bursts of air at unsuspecting visitors.

'You often hear about chimps spitting or throwing,' said Steve Ross, a behaviorist at the zoo. 'They do that to get a rise out of the public. This gives them that opportunity but in a safe way.'"

Read all about it.

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If anyone knows a good surgeon, I've decided to have all the extraneous body parts removed. When I was 15, I had my tonsils ripped out, only to have them grow back. I'll start with those, even though a tonsilectomy is just about the most uncomfortable experience I can think of.

Then I'll move on to the appendix, a common enough surgery. I still have three wisdom teeth that could also be easily yanked. After that, things begin to get difficult.

I suppose a plastic surgeon is the best person to see if you want to have your nipples removed. And anyone who does electrolysis could take care of my body hair. But as far as what kind of specialist is capable of removing the mechanism that makes goosebumps, I have no idea.

I don't know the name or location of the six or seven muscles that are only good if you walk on all fours, but I know they're in there and I want them out. Likewise, my tailbone has to go, and so do the muscles that allow me to move my ears, even though I can't control them for the life of me. The little remnant of the "third eyelid" in the corner of my eye is another disturbing reminder of my evolutionary origins. Yank it.

Most distrubing are the body parts that I'm not sure I even have. A certain percentage of the population has a fold of tissue inside the abdomen that would become a pouch if that person were a marsupial.

Sinuses will probably present the biggest problem, since they are not a part that can be cut off, but a part that must be filled up. I'll leave that to the experts.

However, I think I'll remove my pinky toes myself. Now where'd I put them tin snips?
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By now, I am sure the media has informed you all about Easily Intimidated's crushing victory in the 2nd Duluth Citywide Scavenger Hunt--a 1,200-point margin between us and the rest of the pack.

And while the $400 will certainly come in handy, we were quite upset at missing out on the last-place prize: free drinks for the rest of the night. We were almost up for a trade before we eventually came to our senses and grabbed the cash.

My advice to all you youngsters out there is this: when the scavenger-hunt bigwigs demand a clean bill of health from a doctor, realize that there's nothing in the rulebook that says it can't be for a horse.

Amen.
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So last night, we went out to the gravel pits to look for agates. Personally, my plan was to find one of those huge mofos that you can sell for $500. But all we found was a handful of the typical pebble-sized agates. But while I was looking (or as I like to call it, prospectin'), I thought about what I'd do if I suddenly had $500 via agate.

When you come across a surpise windfall like that, it's important to share the wealth, so the first thing I'd do is have a kickass party. Five hundred bucks can buy a lot of party, especially if it's a BYOB party. I think I'd rent a hot tub and hire a guy to spit fire. Then take everyone to Taco John's.

Or maybe I'd take a different route. Maybe I'd go on a trip. Vegas, baby, Vegas ... for maybe two nights. I'd stay in a suite, dress like a jerk, and I'd have a secret compartment in my suitcase for my coke and my 9mm. Wacky shenanigans would ensue, and I'd end up driving a vintage Mustang through the front doors of the Luxor.

Finally, I'd probably quit my job and move to Tokyo. I'd move into one of those capsule hotels, and I'd date a supercute girl with a gigantic Hello Kitty collection and the best cell phone in the world. My life would become a miasma of sushi, karaoke, manga, weird-ass TV and incomprehensible punk rock. I'd ... I'd ...

Whoa. Things got away from me a bit there. Five hundred, Barrett. Just five hundred.

Or as it turned out, none.
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1. Sleeping. Oh, sweet blissful sleep. 10 hours, 2 nights in a row. This is heaven. I believe I am finally caught up, for the time being.

2. Watching this Gene Simmons video, marveling at how many rock stars try to do THAT and do a pretty good job doing THAT, but how Gene, who is an old man, is still the best at doing THAT.

3. Screaming (via e-mail) at the punk-ass who sold me a turntable on eBay, who is insisting that I didn't pay, even though I'm looking at the screen that says I did.

4. Looking at my 350 LPs that I can't play. Repeating #3.

5. Fooling around with my new coffee maker:

See, when I get something new, I MUST use it immediately. Always. Yesterday I purchased some deodorant, and came home and put it on. This is why it especially irks me that the dude hasn't sent me my turntable. Oh, well. At least I have immense amounts of caffiene in two shiny mugs to tide me over.
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Recently, someone asked me about the things that make me happy. What are the things that always bring me joy, no matter what? I've been thinking a lot about this question, and of course I've come up with a list, and of course I'm going to share it with you now.

- Sleep. This has always been at the top of my list of things that never, ever let me down. Ever. Lately, however, the Sandman hates me. He never comes over anymore, and he won't return my e-mails. When his goddamn machine picks up, I know he's there screening. Bitch. It just makes me want him all the more.

- Coffee. I love this because I am an addict, and according to our society it is completely OK to be an addict when it comes to coffee. I love the taste of coffee, the smell of coffee, and the sound of coffee. It always makes me happy. I once read a book about coffee and coffee rituals and it just blew my mind. It made me want to play chess, even though I hate chess.

- Writing. OK, that sounds pretentious. But it's true. There's nothing better than sitting down at the old 'puter and cooking up some ridiculous BS. I go right out to lunch.

- B-grade movies. Popping in Spider Baby is just about the best cure for the blues I can think of.

- This is just speculation on my part, but I'm beginning to suspect it would be intensely pleasurable to kill a woodchuck with my bare hands.

- My First Band (by Mattell®). Come see us tonight at the MAC.

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Clear your calenders for June, 21 2004. Not only is Found Magazine coming to Duluth, but the Twin Ports' hottest new musical sensation, Toxic Tuesday, is on the card. Monday night at the MAC, baby.

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I don't have much to say today, because I'm turning dumb. This happens to me in times of stress, and this is a time of stress and change. I turn dumb, make lots of errors at work, can't spell for the life of me and have no sense of focus.

I promise to sleep more, and make it up to you, dear sweet Internet.

However, I'm not going to leave you high and dry today. I normally don't get political, but if you want to have your mind blown with irony, check out this site, which is devoted to encouraging people to pray for George W. Bush.

Yeah, I know.

My favorite part is this: "Pray for our financial markets, not only that they would continue to recover, but that people's focus upon them will be adjusted to the point that the economy is not the number one priority for them..."

And what is it about me that, when I read the words "lift up President Bush in prayer," I immediately imagine some sort of professional wrestling maneuver?
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OK, here we go.

1. That commercial for Western Union with the beautiful, optimistic young woman who has just arrived in Hollywood with dreams of being a movie star ... is it just me, or does everyone else get the idea that the Western Union shop is a front for a porn studio? Especially when Western Union guy says "you can always count on a happy ending."

2. Recently, I've had a few opportunities to watch cable, and this taught me something. If you have cable, and if at any point during the day or night you have the urge to see Jessica Simpson, you can.

3. I'd like to publicly announce that from now on, I'm going to eat all my meals while nodding and looking at my food, just like Mark McGuire eats that Thickburger on the Hardee's commerical. I'm also going to grow a goatee and wear a XXL muscle shirt. I think that'll work out nicely for me.
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I just acquired a huge pile of records, for free! But first, this story:

When I was growing up, there was a lady who lived next door named Eleanor. Eleanor was morbidly obese, and a recluse. She rarely, if ever, left her house, and then she only went out onto the porch.

Eleanor had no electricity, because she was afraid of it. So you would see her through her windows fumbling around at night, flashlight in hand. She had cats, but she was not a cat lady. My parents did her shopping for her.

When the whole Y2K thing happened, Eleanor was terrified. She made my parents buy stuff to hoard. She made them buy extra napkins and paper towels, and put them in separate plastic bags, so that she could swing them back and forth, and throw them on top of the many piles of junk in her house.

Eleanor was afraid to allow my dad inside her house. She was also afraid to leave it. Therefore, she never took out her garbage. It just kept piling up inside.

Eventually, she fell and had to be hospitalized. They put her in a nursing home, where she lived for several years until she died.

Her family did not want to deal with this house of hers, understandably. And so, when my sister inquired about buying it, they told her that if she wanted it, she could just have it. Free. Along with everything inside.

While most of the stuff inside was stuff no one would ever want -- bags upon bags of garbage, a refrigerator full of years-old meat, a urine-soaked couch -- there was cool stuff, too. A console TV from the '50s with a round screen, for example.

Or, better yet, a collection of pristine old-country records that look as if they have never been played. These, my sister told me, I could have. If I did not take them, they would go into the Dumpster. Needless to say, I got the hand truck out immediately. "I already threw some out," she said. I screamed. "Oh, they weren't very good anyway. It was all stuff like, 'Sing Along with Jeno Paulucci.'" I wanted to knock her unconscious.

Anyway. Getting the records required going into the house, and that, understandably, required vomiting. I was in there for probably 5 mintues, but I would never go into that place again without a respirator. It is, I gather, a lot cleaner that it was a few days ago. There is no garbage, no couch, no refrigerator. But still, it is moldy and smelly.

Oh,yeah ... my sister removed one box from the closet that she said was the worst smelling of all. She didn't dare open it. "I'm pretty sure it was Snowball," she said.

So now I have all these records, which smell a little bad, but in a normal way. They smell like St. Vincent de Paul -- dusty and a bit mildewy. But they are dry and clean.

I am sort of afraid to bring them into my house. Like maybe they're contaminated or something. Do you think this concern is valid?
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OK, so this didn't play out just like this, but here's my dramatic interpretation of management attempting to describe the bureaucratic nightmare that today's National Day of Rememberance caused in the timekeeping department. Let me preface this by saying I have the utmost respect for the people involved, and that I mean this in fun, and that I do not wish to get fired.

Management: We just realized we made a mistake when we told you you'd get Friday off for the National Day of Rememberance. It turns out we'd have to give you administrative leave, and you don't get administrative leave as a part of your benefits package. You have to earn your adminstrative leave, and the only way for you to do that is by working Friday.

Co-workers: So, uh, in order to get Friday off, we have to work Friday?

Management: Yes. You are now all scheduled to come in at 2:30. Then, sometime in the next 6 months, you can take the administrative leave you've earned.

Me: But what about me? Friday was supposed to be my day off, Reagan or no Reagan.

Management: OK, then you get it off.

Me: And what about earning the administrative leave?

Management: You don't need to. You'll just get it based on your average hours worked last week.

Co-workers: That's not fair! He gets it without having to earn it? What about us? We want Friday off!

Management: Then you can take Friday off without pay. Then it would be like you're not scheduled to work--just like him. Oh, by the way, Barrett, you also get a three-day weekend.

Me: Huh?

Management: Yes, your day off is always one day later than it was the previous week. And since we're now including Saturdays in your days off, you get Friday off this week and Saturday off next week. Remember that in the Postal Service, the week starts on Saturday.

Me: So what you're saying is, I get three days off this weekend, plus an additional day off that I don't have to earn?

Management: Yes.

Co-workers: And what is the point of all this?

Me: To recognize the death of the Great Communicator.

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a candid conversation with the blogosphere's hardest-working dillweed regarding the recently altered status of his lovelife.

Barrett Chase is known as the creator of Occam's Razor comics, the co-creator of Perfect Duluth Day, and the co-publisher of Perverse Verse. But to many, he is known as the romantic partner of everyone's favorite information scientist, Ca-chee. Barrettchase.com is sad to report that this uber-relationship has come to an end, after an unbelievable 12-year run. We caught up with Barrett to ask him what the fuck is going on.

BCDC: First off, I just have to ask the question that's on everybody's mind -- WHY?

CHASE: Like I know. There are a lot of factors. It's like asking why toast tastes better than bread.

BCDC: But dude, TWELVE YEARS!

CHASE: Yeah, I know. Believe me, I know better than you do. Back then, the first George Bush was president. Johnny Carson had just stepped down from the Tonight Show. It hadn't been that long since Hammer dropped the MC from his name. This relationship has been going on since the "2 Legit 2 Quit" era! I have these two friends now -- Nick and Maria -- when Ca-chee and I met, they had just turned 11 and 12, respectively. It's mind-boggling.

BCDC: A lot of people are saying that they kind of saw it coming. But why did you take so long to tell the blogosphere?

CHASE: The same reason I'm doing it right now with this dumbass interview. The Internet is where I go to escape this stuff. Plus, just because this is a blog doesn't mean it has to be all personal and weepy. When it comes to comedy, I try to put out whenever I can.

BCDC: So you are sad about the whole thing aren't you?

CHASE: Well, yeah. What do you think I am, a zombie? A robot?

BCDC: Zombie. Hee hee! Robot! Ha!

CHASE: Braaaaains! BRAAAAAAAAAINS!

BCDC: If you make an R2D2 noise right now, I'll piss my pants!

CHASE: (flailing arms about limply) Danger! Will Robinson! Danger! I'm a robot!

[the scene degenerates]

BCDC: (wiping away tears of joy) Is this just avoidance? I mean, does this indicate that you are actually torn up inside?

CHASE: Absolutely.

BCDC: Your audience is going to find you pathetic.

CHASE: Ah, fuck 'em. I'm trying to survive here.

BCDC: So what about the logistics of the whole thing? How's that going to work?

CHASE: Well, I'm staying here, and she has a new place of her own now. A little one-bedroom deal in the East Hillside. She's gonna do laundry here and we're still gonna hang out and stuff. We're just not boyfriend/girlfriend or whatever you want to call it.

BCDC: So it's pretty cordial?

CHASE: Totally cordial. The whole point is to save the friendship. You don't go through 12 years of everything with someone and just throw everything away. Or at least I don't.

BCDC: How have other people been responding?

CHASE: Pretty good. My mom is worried that I'll "start in on a heavy drinking program," which means she cares about me. It also means she's inadvertantly funny because she used the word "program." My friends have been supportive, which means they've been working hard to get me started on that program as soon as possible. But also, they've been helping out as much as possible.

BCDC: I hate to do this, but well, it's a natural progression. So, tell me, why was it you broke up again?

CHASE: I think the most prominent reason is that whole 12-year thing. See, if you meet someone in your teens, and fall in love and everything, you are basically going from the care of your parents into the care of your lover. You can try to get around that in every way possible -- and believe me, we have ... in every way possible -- but you're still never going to be truly independent. You need that in order to be a whole individual. If you don't get it, you crave it. You have to establish it. And you start to resent the person who stands in the way of it.

BCDC: I see.

CHASE: So it's like, we really want to be together, but we also really don't want to be together. We need to change. But most of all just not be together.

BCDC: And that's it?

CHASE: Hell no! This is just the Cliff Notes version. In fact, it's just one page of the Cliff Notes version. I'd write some more pages for you, but shit, I haven't even read the book yet.

BCDC: Typical English major.

CHASE: Yeah, whatever.
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Not that I can afford them, but I take great pleasure in my recent purchase of these babies. They're supposed to be "Satan Resistant." Let's hope so.

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I just have to ask these questions.
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So, in the past two days, I've lost four tomato plants to marmots. Groundhogs. Woodchucks, if you will. There are big ol' rodent tracks all over the garden, chewed-off stems, and woodchuck shit right next to my soon-to-be food.

Note that very important word, Mr. Woodchuck. MY food.

I've been trying to figure out how to deter these demons. There is a live trap in the garage, but I'm very reluctant to use it because A) woodchucks aren't the only animals that roam the yard--there are occasionally skunks, and you don't want to trap a skunk because, well, then what do you do, and B) a lot of the Web sites I've read insist that trapping will do no good because I apparently have a woodchuck-friendly environment.

Obviously, then, I'm supposed to create a woodchuck-unfriendly environment. OK, this sounds fun. But the sites out there don't have much to say about which is the best way to do it. Advice ranges from cruel (pipe car exhaust down their burrows) to tedious (surround your garden with a fence they can't burrow under or climb over) to commercial (buy our woodchuck repellant) to unhelpful (get a dog). There are also a handful of do-it-yourself repellants, but not much testimony about what really works.

The only book I have that remotely covers the subject of gardening is entitled Country Women. Subtitle: A Handbook for the New Farmer. Sub-subtitle: How to negotiate a land purchase, dig a well, grow vegetables organically, build a fence and shed, deliver a goat, skin a lamb, spin yarn and raise a flock of good egg-laying hens all at the least possible expense and with minimum reliance on outside and professional help.

Well, this should have something.

But, no. The book does not mention the woodchuck, probably because there are no woodchucks in wherever it is these people lived. There is mention of gophers, however. And the advice seems like it would probably work: dig a two-foot trench around your garden and fill it with "broken glass, tangled barbed wire and rusty tin can lids." Hm. Don't think I'll do that. Otherwise, the best method is to use traps--the killin' kind. It seems these women have three basic responses to garden pests: kill them, fence them out, or allow them to realize how much you care about the garden (apparently, this last one only works with deer, who are "reasonable creatures"). Oh, well. I guess I should expect as much from a 1976 lesbian farming manual.

At last I decided on making the funnest concoction I could find. I took a bunch of cayenne pepper and garlic powder, mixed it with water, and sprayed it all over the tomato plants. I also sprayed it on the peas, and dumped the remainder around the perimeter of the garden. At least for tonight, I can imagine the little motherfucker's reaction to getting a mouthful of hot pepper.

I hope they learn.
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1. Take Off Your (Dirty) Panties | Beck
2. She Took A Lot of Pills (And Died) | Robbie Fulks
3. Come to Duluth (If You Want to Be an Unemployed Alcoholic) | Vinnie & the Stardüsters
4. Pardon Me (I've Got Someone to Kill) | Johnny Paycheck
5. It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) | Bob Dylan
6. Nuclear War (On the Dance Floor) | Electric Six
7. 4:58 A.M. (Dunroamin, Duncarin, Dunlivin) | Roger Waters
8. Spare Parts I (A Nocturnal Emission) | Tom Waits

Any more? I'd like to make it an even 10.
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It's the first law of physics and cripes do I hate it. You know you're in trouble when someone starts listing the rules of the universe and right away--on the first one--you have to say, "Stop. Go back. That thing about bodies at rest and motion. I don't like it. Can we change it?" The answer, obviously, is a resounding NO.

Of course, I'm not really talking about physics here. Actually, I'm thankful for inertia as Newton saw it, and I'm pretty glad that my shoes, my books and my toilet tend to stay where I leave them. My disgust has to do with a more psychological type of inertia, namely my own.

You see, I am both incredibly tolerant and easily bored. Simultaneous, like. I have never been able to determine why certain attitudes of mine are "bodies at rest" and others are "bodies at motion," but it is true that there are aspects of my life that I would change every hour if I could, and others that could drag on for years unchanged, and would never change at all if some outside force didn't intervene.

Most of the time, on a case-by-case basis, it's OK to be completely scatterbrained about some things, while being anchored down by others. But in the long run, I think it is bad. Because sometimes even when I would like change, I do not move toward change. I'm too busy fixing what isn't broken.

This problem of mine, it has to change.

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1. 132
2. 103
3. 112

I'm not sure how I feel about the whole riding my bike home drunk thing. It seems really dangerous, but it's oh so fun. I raced with a teenager on a BMX who was going my way -- he won, but only slightly and only because I'm old and inebriated. Otherwise I woulda beat him fer sure.
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It's lookin' a little shabby around here. Better spruce things up with some pics of my home and garden.

George Carlin once said, "Life ... is a series of dogs." I tend to agree. I haven't owned a dog since I moved out of my parents' house, but here goes.

Pepper & Smackey

These are the two dogs that live in my house when I am born. They are already pretty old, and they can't be more different. Smackey is gentle and kind, and Pepper bites me every chance that she gets. Just my luck Smackey, dies when I am like, 2.

One day when I am about 5, everyone looks out the kitchen window, exclaiming. I want to see. I try to do my usual trick, climbing up on the sink, but they keep pushing me down. "You don't NEED to see," I am told. My grandpa puts on his coat and says, "I'm going to get the hose."

Several months later, Pepper is going to have puppies! There are three puppies. As follows.

Midnight, Boots, and Lady

Midnight is my favorite puppy. My brother says, "You can have this one," because he knows it will die. Midnight is the runt of the litter and is not allowed to interact with the other puppies. He sleeps on a heating pad, and I feed him with a tiny bottle. He lives for about a week. I must be prepped for this pretty well, because his death doesn't really bother me, except that I will miss him.

Boots chews everything and is prone to running away. My sister's boyfriend is in the Air Force, and Boots chews up his military-issue shoes. He marries my sister despite this, because he is a good man. Boots runs away many times, eventually forever.

Lady has black fur and wirey hair. She will live a long life, and will be my dog. She is afraid of fireworks and guns, but that's her only problem. Oh, and she tends to shit in obscure locations in the house sometimes. This gains her the nickname, "The Phantom Shitter."

Spanky

My sister acquires Spanky, whom she names after the Little Rascals character. She moves into an apartment, however, and can't keep her, so my brother takes her on, and my brother still lives at home. Spanky is a Chihuahua mix.

Something extremely funny and tragic happens to Spanky. My mom always makes the family recipe, "Moon Pudding," for Thanksgiving. This is a traditional English dessert made from raisens, flour, and suet (Don't laugh, it's actually quite good). The whole blob is wrapped up in a towel and boiled for like two days. Well, one fine Turkey Day, Mom is transferring the mess to another pot when the towel breaks open, spilling boiling fat onto Spanky's back. The dog must be rushed in an emergency trip to the vet, and there will forver be a large, hairless spot on her back. This becomes a conversation piece for years and years, since she lives about as long as a dog can. Thank god she leaves our house when my brother moves out.

Daisy

I have discussed Daisy before.

Killer

The younger of my two brothers realizes he wants a dog of his own. So he goes to the pet shop and buys one. The people at the pet shop tell him it's a Cocker Spaniel, but it obviously isn't. He thinks it will turn out into some kind of Cocker Spaniel mix, and thinks it will be funny to name it Killer. It turns out to be a huge, muscular Yellow Lab, and the name is nothing but appropriate.

Killer is smart. He is, above all else, a Frisbee dog. He will fetch anything. One day, I decide to see if he'll fetch a large chunk of firewood. He does, until his mouth is bloody. He has to be restrained so that he will not continue to fetch it.

He fights the other dogs in the neighborhood and always wins. I gain respect among the other neighborhood kids because Killer lives at my house.

Killer dies when he is hit by a car. Which leads us to our next dog.

Rheanna Sienna of Rhune

When my brother's boss hears about Killer, he gives him this dog; the name comes with it. Rheanna is cool. She's a full-blooded Afghan hound, which is like a greyhound with long, silky fur. She's the fastest dog you've ever seen, and also the laziest. If you are driving behind a car in which she is riding, you will think she is a beautiful woman. Then when you pass that car, you will feel like the biggest perv in the world.

My brother moves out and takes Rheanna with him. When he splits up with his girlfriend, she gets the dog. She lives to a ripe old age in wonderful comfort. (And so does the dog, hardy har har.)

Suzanna Majestic Sunshine

Ok, now we're going way too far in the name department. Suzie is named before we got her, again. People with AKC dogs name them weird. Anyway. Suzie is a collie, and belongs to my sister for a long time before she sells her. After about a week, my sister goes by the place where Suzie lives and realizes she's totally being abused. So Suzie (ahem) comes to live with us.

Suzie is probably smarter than any dog ever, except maybe (and I mean maybe) for Killer. She will do whatever you tell her to, even if it's not in that "I'm talking to a dog" voice, and even if it's complicated. But, she has been hit by a car, and has severe arthritis. Not to mention matting of the fur. Still, she lives a long time, until she starts having extremely disturbing seizures and must be put down.

Maggie

We haven't spoken of Lady for a long time, but she's been there the whole time. She is a good dog, who doesn't get hit by cars or move out or die. When Lady dies of old age, my parents get Maggie, which proves to me that I must move out. Maggie is annoying -- a real Cocker Spaniel, which I think is my least favorite breed. She whines and begs for treats constantly.

Recently when I was at my parents' house, Maggie started begging and I pushed her with my foot. She fell down, and could not get back up. I felt really bad. But not really.

Now my parents have a new dog, because they know that Maggie is not long for this world. The new dog rocks. Her name is Emma, and she's a weiner dog. Finally! A weiner dog!

You don't know how much I love typing that. "Finally! A weiner dog!"
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It was so much fun with music. Now we need some drinks.

Toddlerhood

I have four distinct memories about beverages as a young child. The first is being weaned from the bottle. Yes, I remember this, because it is a particularly traumatic event, and because it happens instantly. My teenage sister suddenly thinks that I should no longer be drinking from the bottle, and has a great idea to convince me to stop. She takes the bottle from me and smears the nipple around in a dirty ashtray. I refuse to even look at the bottle after that. My mom gets mad and gets me a new bottle with a clean nipple, but I will never drink from it again.

The second is when I develop a hatred for orange juice. Whenever I drink it, I get an orange juice moustache, which if left unwiped, burns into my skin. The third is vomiting after drinking a lot of Kool-Aid. I believe after that that I am allergic to Kool-Aid, and it takes a lot of reasoning to convince me otherwise. The fourth is that my sisters drink Tab, and there isn't a more vile liquid in the universe.

Childhood

I love the smell of the empty school cafeteria when I am sent down on milk duty. It is almost as good as being sent on eraser duty. I hate school lunch, though, so my mom packs a brown bag for me to bring to school. I have the most ghetto thermos in the world -- it is actually just a baby food jar full of Kool-Aid.

Eventually, I get a real lunchbox with a real thermos. It is a Star Trek lunchbox. I have a series of similar lunchboxes until I switch back to brown bags in 5th grade. My thermos gets broken on the first day of school, and I start bringing Coke for lunch.

In the summertime, I drink lots of Sunkist and play lots of video games. On special days, we get to make root beer floats. My brother's girlfriend tells me that Sunkist floats are even better. This is a revolutionary idea, so I try it. She's right. They taste like Dreamsicles. It's amazing.

Around age 12, I make what could be the biggest mistake of my life. I begin drinking 5-6 cans of Coke every day. Gradually, my scrawny physique begins to change, and I have no idea why. I wrongly attribute it to puberty. I switch from "slim" jeans to "regular" jeans. I never make it to "husky," thank God, but my metabolism is changed forever.

Junior High

In the hallway at school, there are two beverage machines: one with juice and one with soda. Every morning, I drink a can of juice. The rest of the day, I drink Coke. I have chronic fatigue syndrome, and I am always tired. I drink a lot of Coke to stay alert. It makes me even pudgier.

In 8th grade, the advanced English class gets to take a bus to Minneapolis to see a stage production of Dracula. My friend Jeff acquires several 2-liters of Bartles & Jaymes wine cooler. He dumps out several 2-liters of Mountain Dew, and fills them with up with booze. These, he brings onto the bus to Minneapolis. This is my first experience with alcohol. I am careful, and drink only enough to barely feel it. Everyone on the bus drinks it, and surprisingly no one pukes and no one gets caught. You can tell the teachers know something is going on, but they can't figure it out. It's too brazen of a plan for them to believe. When I get home, I feel really good, like something important happened.

In 9th grade, I start going to parties. These are the last of the colossal '80s parties thrown by high school kids. I never drink anything at these parties, but I go to watch. There is a lot of puking, a lot of fighting, and a lot of falling down. It is not glamorous. The sight of cheerleaders with their heads in the toilet puts things in perspective for me.

High School

I do not drink alcohol at all in high school. This makes me an anomoly. I do, however, have a taste for sugar. One night, I enter into the most historic giggle-fit of all time. This is brought on by Hi-C, Little Debbie cakes, and Kiss' Dynasty album (for non-veterans of the Kiss Army, Dynasty was the band's experiment with disco). I am on the floor hyperventilating. The next day, I am sore all over from laughing.

In my senior year, I try some Diet Coke, and decide that I like it. I switch over completely to diet. A few months later, someone asks me how I lost all that weight. I hadn't even thought of it -- but it turns out I have lost something like 30 pounds. I never drink regular soda again.

College/Early 20s

I begin drinking coffee. It is innocent enough at first -- a cappucino every now and then. Then I switch to regular coffee. The caffeine rush is amazing, and I find it difficult to believe that this drug is legal. Not only legal, but accepted. People are brewing it up in offices and places of business everywhere. Almost everyone you see is stoned out of their minds have the time on coffee.

I go to bars and drink beer. Beer, I learn, is ambrosia. I don't drink much of it, but enough. And any beer will do. The Palace has pitchers of Killian's for $3, which is right in my budget, so it's my favorite place. $2 pitchers at the Anchor on Philosophy Night. On weekends, it's Shark Tanks at Norm's. Everyone I know has a backseat full of rubber sharks and alligators.

One night, I realize that I have never been drunk. I mean really, really drunk. It's an experience I need to have. So my girlfriend and I pour some huge, huge vodka drinks. Together we consume almost a fifth of vodka. She points to the line between the couch cushions; "You are not allowed to cross this line," she explains. "If you cross this line, I will become pregnant." Then we begin vomiting. We are too sick to move for about 24 hours. As of the day I write this post, I will never be that drunk or that hungover again.

I learn the psychological power of alcohol when I go to a party that starts out normal enough, but at the end of the night everyone is naked. Well, except for the couple wrapped in cellophane.

Mid 20s

I get really into Scotch and cognac. Also martinis. This is really funny in bars, as I frequent the ones listed above. They're pretty cool about it at Norm's, but Bean from the Anchor really wants to kill me. When I order a martini, she rolls her eyes and gives me gin on the rocks with an olive in it. I love that place.

My love of straight liquor comes to an end in Murdo, South Dakota. After some travel setbacks involving accidentally filling the tank with diesel, I hit it hard at the local tavern down the road from the motel. I'm drinking Cutty Sark. Eventually, we become the local entertainment. Eventually, the drinks become free. And green. The next day I am extremely hung over, wandering through the Badlands. It will be a long time before I can drink anything brown.

Fitger's Brewhouse opens, and I get my first taste of microbrew. I realize immediately that it will be hard to go back to plain beer.

Late 20s/30s

Starfire Lounge begins, and I start going every Thursday, without fail. Eventually, of course, I will get to know Starfire and start playing music, too. But for years, I am content to drink beer and listen. The waitresses know what kind I want when I get there.

For awhile, I become extremely weight conscious and rarely drink anything other than water. During this time, I am in the best shape of my life, and use all my extra money to buy clothes. I eat no fat and am filled with hate.

I hit a turning point at my 10-year high school reunion. The day starts off at the Ripsaw office, where I meet some Ripsaw staff along with a couple of my fellow alumni. We go to tour the Lake Superior Brewery. There, they ply us with beer. "Sit down for awhile and have a pitcher," they say when we get there. "I'll be with you in awhile." We have more than a pitcher. Then we tour the brewery and drink straight from the taps on the floor. Then, we talk to the guy in charge, and drink more pitchers. This is somewhat more than a person should drink in a day.

After this, we head to the Hacienda, where we eat cheese and drink more beer. Then we go to the Norshor, where there is an art opening with free wine. Then, finally, it is time to go to the reunion. At the Tap Room.

At the reunion everyone gets 'faced. I win "Most Changed." The party goes on into the night, until someone announces, inevitably, that it is time to go to Superior. As a class, we hit the worst bars. Frankie's. CC Tap. Drinking, drinking, drinking. Eventually, we go to Louis' to eat. My friend who is a doctor takes one look at his food, and rushes out the door. I say, "If he had spent the past 10 years developing a tolerance instead of going to med school, he'd be fine."

Anyway, the next day, I wake up and feel terrific. From this point on, I can drink a lot more than ever before without having a hangover.

I still drink coffee every morning, and I still do not drink the sugar drinks. In fact I have developed an extreme aversion to sweets. If only I could develop an aversion to beer, I would be thin and I would have money.

No such luck.
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OK, so these fine people did it. That means I must do it as well. Because I follow all the trends. But check back again tomorrow, too, for I might just set a new trend. You never know.

The 1970s.

I am living in a three-bedroom house with my parents, my five brothers and sisters, and my grandfather. When it comes to music, there is a policy of "equal time," meaning no one gets to dominate the hi-fi.

My parents listen to Charley Pride, Conway Twitty, and Loretta Lynn. My older sisters listen to "devil music" such as Nazareth, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath. The rest of my siblings listen to John Denver, England Dan & John Ford Coley, and other forms of pansy music. My grandfather only listens to the constantly droning AM radio in the kitchen. He sings along to "Mrs. Robinson" by Simon & Garfunkel. Sometimes we get to hear his old 78s played on the Victrola, which you have to wind up by hand. These are special times.

I like all of this music. But equal time in my case means I get to play my Cat in the Hat album, which is kind of scary to me at the time.

My older sisters get married and move out, and my youngest sister discovers disco. My brother buys a kick-ass system. They start throwing parties, and, to keep me out of the way, they always let me be the DJ. I like the song "Ring My Bell" by Anita Ward, and I play it all the time even though my mom gets mad because it's "dirty." This is my first experience with rock-n-roll rebellion. I play nothing but disco until some guy informs me that disco sucks. Then I become obsessed with The Cars and Blondie. Deborah Harry's heavy rouge excites me. I play "Another One Bites the Dust" and some stoner explains the "meaning" to me. I think that's cool.

The Early 1980s

MTV is everything. I discover Van Halen, which is better than anything I've ever heard. My sister takes me to see Purple Rain in the theater, and to see Joan Jett in concert. I like Motley Crue, but not as much as my classmates. I hate Boy George, but secretly not as much as I let on. Michael Jackson's "Thriller," Duran Duran's "The Reflex," John Cougar, etc. Madonna. Good lord, Madonna.

My brother gets heavily into making mix tapes -- both on cassette and reel-to-reel. His record and tape collection becomes huge. Sometimes he gives me money and tells me to go buy him a record; any record will do. One day my insane cousin shows up with a giant stack of records. They play them so loud that it is literally painful to be in the house. Of the artists they play, I am very impressed by The Ramones and Willie Nelson. I play the resulting Ramones tapes all the time, and my mom actually agrees that they are cool. They remind her of the '50s. This embarrasses me, but makes my life easier.

Eventually, all my siblings move out, and so does my grandfather. I get a boom box to fill in the void of my brother's awesome stereo. I go to his house and transfer my favorite albums to cassette -- Van Halen's "1984," Blondie's "Autoamerican," and Eddie Murphy's first stand-up album. I make a mix tape of my favorite 45s -- "Our House" by Madness, "Jack & Diane" by John Cougar, and "She Bop" by Cyndi Lauper.

Whenever there is a top 100 countdown on KZIO, I tape the songs I like. It pisses me off that there are snippets of DJ talk at the beginning and end of every song, but there's nothing I can do about that.

I hear Weird Al Yankovic's "Eat It" for the first time, and my mind is blown. It is a blend of my two favorite things -- music and comedy. I ask around at school and find out about the Dr. Demento radio show, which is on Sunday nights from 10-12. I begin listening and taping religiously. I meet Lundgren, who is into the same stuff. We comb Young at Heart Records and Carlson Book looking for novelty music. I gradually forsake normal, popular music and start listening to the likes of Tom Lehrer, Allan Sherman, Barnes & Barnes, and Cab Calloway. I join the Demento Society, and start exchanging letters and tapes with other kids interested in the same music (plus one guy in New York who's like 30).

Sometimes I dig out my grandpa's 78s, because they now fit my musical tastes. Billy Jones & Ernie Hare.
-"What are you kids doing in that apple tree?"
-"Well, we might be playin' marbles but we ain't."

The Mid/Late 80s

Junior High is a nightmare. I still like novelty music, but not exclusively. I see Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" video on MTV, and instantly become a Dylan fan.

When Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me" comes out, everyone thinks it is the greatest song ever. Until MTV starts playing it every five minutes. Everyone loves "Parents Just Don't Understand" by DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. For some reason, George Michael escapes being called a faggot, and it's OK to like him. I agree with all this, but not with everyone's obsession with the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, or the movie Top Gun, for that matter.

I briefly believe that Michael Jackson sucks, until "Dirty Diana" comes out. This is something I can stand behind. Also, the "Bad" video is no "Thriller," but it is still good. I recite the opening dialogue along with everyone else. Even kids with nothing else in common enjoy the exchange, "Is that what they teach you at that little sissy school of yours?"

High school. The decline of western civilizaion: the metal years. At first, heavy metal is all I listen to. Mostly, I like classic metal such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. But Metallica is in there too -- I buy all the CDs. I see Metallica in concert. I am not above hair metal, and it figures prominently in my rotation. I watch Headbanger's Ball every weekend.

I pay a guy I know to steal CDs from Kmart. He gets busted on his second run.

Metal tapers off toward the end of high school. I hear Ministry's "A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste," and discover a whole new way to piss my parents off. I start admitting some things to myself that I never would before. I like U2, the B-52s, and REM. This is rough to admit, for some reason. Pink Floyd makes its first appearance in my collection, and it fits late adolescence perfectly.

The Early 90s

The whole Nirvana thing happens, of course. I see Tori Amos' "Silent All These Years" on MTV and start liking her as well. I go to college and meet people from Other Places who know Other Things. My soundtrack is Smashing Pumpkins, Jane's Addiction, Nine Inch Nails (Pretty Hate Machine), The Breeders, and Pink Floyd. I go to Lollapalooza II & IV, and see Ministry, The Breeders, Pearl Jam, Cypress Hill, A Tribe Called Quest, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, L7, Porno For Pyros, Smashing Pumpkins, Ice Cube, George Clinton, the Beastie Boys, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, et. al. On the drive down to Lollapalooza II, we have two tapes: the first Violent Femmes album, and a cassingle of "Jump Around" by House of Pain. This is just fine by us.

I get a summer job in a factory, where they play the radio all day. I hear the Chili Peppers' "Under the Bridge" approximately 10,000 times during those three months.

I am very poor. I wear clothes that I have found. I have one pair of jeans, which are hand-me-downs from my girlfriend. I joke about how I'm lucky that MY grunge period is coinciding with THE grunge period. This is funny.

At the end of college, I start going to bars. I go to RT Quinlan's every week for open mic night. There is not much live music in Duluth, but my favorite band to see is Puddle Wonderful, which is an early Hog Damage band.

The Mid 90s

Perhaps because I am too old for my years, I stop listening to popular music altogther. I do not have cable, so I do not have MTV. I am completely unaware of anything happening in music. Sometimes I ask people I know what is good now, and most of them say "nothing."

I start listening to jazz. My favorite is John Coltrane. I listen to Coltrane, drink a lot of coffee, and read fat Russian novels. I am unhappy. This is my life.

The Late 90s

Live music begins to take off in Duluth. The Norshor (the Stage Door Lounge) starts having live shows. The Brewhouse opens. Random Radio starts. The Northland Reader begins publication, followed by the Ripsaw. I write and draw for the Reader and start frequenting the Norshor and the Brewhouse regularly. I meet people who are Trying To Make Things Happen. My unhappy period ends.

Low is wonderful. I listen to "I Can Live in Hope" over and over. There is live music happening all the time, and I get in free to stuff most of the time.

I see Split Lip Rayfield at the Norshor and become infatuated with Bloodshot Records. I get into the Meat Purveyors, Trailer Bride, and the Sadies. I miss the Sadies' historic show at the Norshor, where only 4 or 5 people showed up, but I see them in their hometown of Toronto, where they blow away a packed house.

I intentionally start to get into the music I missed during my Coltrane period. I discover Portishead, and through them, trip hop. Suddenly all the music in my CD changer makes you want to have sex. Tricky, Mono, Air, and Alpha are my favorites.

The 00s

Two of the best shows I've seen locally happen around the Millenium. Low's "A Very Duluth Christmas" show -- when people actually danced to Low -- was the first. The Millenium party also rocked, simply because no one died.

I buy a computer, and eventually install a CD burner. I start downloading music illegally. I only have a dial-up connection, so I queue up about 15-20 songs every night before I go to bed, and in the morning I check to see if they worked. Eventually I give up downloading as I get tired of it.

I start borrowing CDs from people and burning them, and also buying CDs to trade in return. I acquire a lot of music this way. It turns out that I will listen to any kind of music. Music simply grabs me or it doesn't. I am not picky. I am not snobbish.

The trend continues, however, as my next computer has a huge hard drive, for the specific purpose of being my home jukebox. I install iTunes and plug into my stereo. I purchase an iPod, and inject this entire musical history directly into my brain.

Life is good.
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| Comments (5)

People Behind Me | This is my #1 hate. It's OK if the person behind me is someone I know. And it's OK if there are a lot of people behind me. But having a few people behind me makes me utterly uncomfortable. The place where it bothers me most is in the movie theater. Once again -- it's OK if the theater is packed, but if there are seats everywhere and someone chooses to sit right behind me, I have to move. One time someone behind me at the theater spilled a jumbo Coke all over the place, which might be where this hatred originated.

At one of my former jobs, my office was arranged so that my desk faced the wall opposite the door. I'd be working or screwing around or whatever, and people would come into my office and suddenly be right behind me. I'd wheel around with a coffee mug clenched in my fist, ready to defend my life. Worst. Feng Shui. Ever.

Plastic Shopping Carts | This is a sound issue. Regular metal shopping carts are fine. In fact, the sound they make is kind of pleasant. But plastic shopping carts like the ones at Target, Kmart, etc. make me want to pull out my own eyelashes. I have no idea why this is.

The Voices Of Some 4-Year-Old Girls | Another sound issue, which when combined with plastic carts, can make me flee Wal-Mart in a blind panic (which is ideally how one should always flee Wal-Mart). Again, I'm not talking about ALL 4-year-old girls -- not by a long shot. And to give them credit, they always grow out of this phase and become normal children, and eventually normal adults. But there are certain kids who for a certain period of their lives speak in a voice that is amazingly loud, screechy, and repetitive. Yes, Skyler, we know that your doll pisses herself. Now just be quiet for a time while I collect my eardrums from the floor.
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Ok, so a few weeks ago, I wrote about how I found this bike, and was bringing it home when the owners accosted me and demanded it back. Well, the day after that happened, I found the bike again, leaning against a tree, with a bike chain around it.

I didn't think much about it, until the next day, when I saw it there again. And the day after that. And the day after that. Then I went up and inspected the chain. There was no lock -- it was just draped around the bike to make it appear as though it was locked to the tree. Meanwhile, it was sitting out in the rain and elements, on public property, unused.

A week went by, and there it stood. I was very tempted to just take it. It was, through my way of thinking, abandoned. But the chain declared dibsies. Brain aneurysm!

You should be able to predict where this is going. Wednesday night I made up my mind to go take the damn thing. But then, well, I got a bit drunk and just went home to bed. The next morning, I walked by the place where it had been standing for two weeks and, of course, it was gone.

So let this be a lesson to you kids out there. When you have the chance to steal something, don't hem and haw about the morality of it. Just hork it.
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Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Bridget Riversmith's art show -- "Out There" -- at the Norshor. It was terrific. Her art really grabs you in a visceral way when you see it. Of particular note was a series of paintings depicting women outdoors in hospital gowns, with vacant expressions on their faces. I overheard lots of people commenting on one of these, in which the woman's tears were turning into birds.

Anyway, this art influenced my dreams last night, and I dreamed that Bridget and her husband Edgewood brought me home. Ca-chee, Starfire, and Nick were outside my house, and we all stood around talking. I mentioned that it would be cool to take pictures of this gigantic, run-down mansion in the woods a block from my house. (There is no such mansion in real life, nor are there woods.) They were reluctant, but I forced them.

The mansion was huge, about five stories tall. There was white paint peeling off the clapboards, and all the windows were gone. Suddenly, these incredibly beautiful young men and women came out of the house -- maybe six or seven of them. Somehow, something was very, very wrong with them.

Instantly I knew what was going on. These people were brothers and sisters, and would do anything their father told them to. They belonged to a bizarre religion where if anyone who wasn't a member of that religion got close to them, they'd kill that person. At that moment, they saw us and came after us. The old man, who was upstairs in the house, saw us too and started shooting out the window.

The scene changed at that time to a dark room where people were eating unhealthy food. The only thing I could think of was how I badly needed a haircut. Someone said they knew of a way I could get a haircut for free. I said sure.

The way I could get a haircut for free was to be part of this bizarre re-enactment of a murder, where a guy was killed with an axe while getting his hair cut. The axe was a big, brutal thing unlike any axe I've ever seen. I had to sit in this dark room, a woman cutting my hair, and the axe man would come in and do his thing. The worst part, I was told, was that there would be only one person watching -- a southern man sitting at a table in the room. His voice, I was told, was "real." I asked what that meant, but no one would say. They did tell me that other people who had done this re-enactment were scarred for life by his voice.

I also found out that this was the exact room where it happened and that was the real axe. After the re-enactment, the axe would be sold to the highest bidder.

Somehow I escaped from there, and ran outside to the ocean. There was ice on the ocean for a few hundred yards. It looked like it was about 1/4 inch thick, but I didn't care. I ran out across the ice to a small, rocky island. When I got there, I just looked out at the sea and realized there was no way I could go any further.

Then I woke up.
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1. 115
2. 90
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I have the day off today, and so far, it's shaping up to be one of those amazingly great days. I woke up early, drank a lot of strong coffee, and read blogs and e-mails. Then I mowed the lawn, and then I had a great lunch at Beaner's (Peter Piper wrap and terrific harvest grain soup).

The rest of the day has been spent on the garden. This garden is HUGE. I've divided it into several sections, which go as follows:

1. The Partially Shaded Section | This section is closest to the house and has lighter crops such as lettuce (which did not sprout -- I've reseeded), spinach, parsnips and radishes. I mixed carrot seeds in with the radishes, because I understand that's a smart thing to do.

2. Peppers, Onions and Peas | There's no actual reason for these to go next to each other -- they just are. I'm hoping that planting the onions next to the peas, etc. will help keep the rabbits out. But I'm not holding my breath. Basil also makes an appearance in this section.

3. Tomatoes | These have not gone in yet since I'm waiting for a shipment of seedlings from Ca-chee's friend Pamela, who grows 'em good.

4. The "Experimental" Section | This is my favorite section. It contains stuff that I've never seen growing in northern Minnesota. Eggplant and leeks appear in this section. I put rosemary in here, too, because whenever I've tried to grow it, it has died. Acorn squash is there, too, but that's just a matter of space.

This is just the vegetable garden. There is another huge flower garden in the front of the house (mainly perennials), along with about 7-9 tractor-tire gardens full of flowers. Plus rose bushes and a few more random flower zones throughout the yard. The people who lived here before were garden maniacs.

I'm trying not to become one myself.
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Someone in Brazil found this site by searching for "BITCHES CARTOONS BLOGS". Yeah, that's pretty much what barrettchase.com is all about, baby.
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What? Where did the blogs go? Perfect Duluth Day ... it's not there. Cannot find server, my ass. Where is it? ...

My blog? Gone, too! Holy cripes! Ok, ok. Don't panic. This is temporary. Maybe PDD is back online. Uh! (grasps midsection to quell intense longing) Where IS IT?

Oh, God. What if I'm the only one who can't see it? What if other people are posting and commenting right now? What if there's a huge, interesting conversation happening and I can't participate ... I CAN'T EVEN LURK! Oh, no. Where's the phone? I gotta make some calls.

Dammit, why isn't anyone answering. It's 10am, for chrissake. GET OUT OF BED! GET OFF THE CAN! This is an emergency!

Ok. Calm down. Think. Ok. The Homegrown site has the same host. Ugh, that one's down, too. And, um, Slim Goodbuzz. Down. Ok. So this is the host's problem. Ok.

God. Where are these servers again? Um, Vancouver. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're in Vancouver. Shit! What if there's been a natural disaster in Vancouver. Uhhhhhhhhh. Check ... CNN. Yeah. CNN. Ok, Bush .. Shrek ... boy born from 21 year old sperm ... floods in the Carribean? Are the servers in the Carribean? Oh, God.

Ok. Just relax. Take a shower. You need to take a shower anyway. Then come back and everything will be fine. But check one more time to see if they're back.

Oh, wow. There they are. All intact. Come to poppa.
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