Coat Hook

Sorry I haven't had enough time to update this in awhile but I got a new job and it has sort of been taking all of my time.

So here is the update - somehow I got a job and they gave me my very own office, with giant windows and one of those phones with enough buttons to ensure that I never completely understand it. They even trusted me enough to give me a door with a working lock - I feel like George Costanza when he got his job with the Yankees.

I make nearly twice what I was making at the paper and I get to lock the office door and pretend to be a stock broker. I completely walk around saying things like appointment and conference, just like a grown-up - I even wear a tie.

So today I left a meeting because I needed to use the bathroom. A little known fact about me is I hate to pee in a urinal next to a stranger when a nice private bathroom stall is available, so i went in a used it. I was in a hurry to get back to acting like an adult in the big people's room so I quickly finished and turned around grabbed the bathroom stall door and tried to push it open - of course what I didn't know was this was the type of door that opened inward rather then outward.

I ran face first into the door - hard - which would have been bad anyway but this particular door had a coat hook exactly at eye level. I would be half blind right now had I been standing a half inch to the left. That hook caught me right on the edge of my eye socket, and luckily had a little rubber piece on the end of it.

It still feels kind of bruised. Anyway the eye is fine and I made it back to the meeting just in time to bring up the term "synergy," and wow the rest of the office.

Sort of like mesh but slutty . . .

I went to the mall yesterday, because I needed some cloths and my wife told me about this thing called "clearance," that is suppose to make everything you buy cheaper. Of course the penalty for me saving all this money is that I would have to bring her along and she would drag me into a several stores looking for a dress that doesn't exist.

At first I had fun with it, like loudly asking her what a Kardashian was in the middle of a crowded store or saying loudly "So your trying to tell me that Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana are the same person?" It was really fun although it was less fun for my wife.

She paided off on her promise, I found a button down business shirt with a matching tie for only $3. She also taught me that I hate the future, cheap as it may be. Every store she took me to was playing some kind of bubble gum bop bullshit that made Hanson sound like Metallica. I get it, of course the music is going to be bad, these are stores primarily catering to 12 to 15 year old girls, a few that were 17, and one flirting with 30 that needed a new outfit to match the pair of cowboy boots her husband found at a garage sale. (Although to be fair I did kind of find it cute, sort of like when you buy a little kid a fireman's hat and they wear it all the time pretending to save kittens and making siren noises.)

"Look over there, clearance on all socks!!!"

She took me to a place called "The Body Shop," or like "Body Movements," - I can't remember exactly the name but it sounded kind of like a strip club and most of the cloths inside looked like something a young girl working her way though college might wear. There was a dress (I say "dress" because I don't know what else to call it) which stretched from the ceiling to the floor hanging on the back wall - I thought it was just a prop but when I turned around I saw several more of them on a rack. These things were like 8 feet long, so either I just didn't get it or this was club wear for WNBA players. There was another rack that had these silver pants that were sort of like mesh but slutty, they looked like something out of one of those really bad 1980's teen films - not the good ones with Molly Ringwall, but the bad ones like with Madonna.

This is what you are nostalgic for?

I felt dirty just being at the mall, all these little girls who couldn't even drive yet were there with their moms buying thongs and lots of belts, for some reason these people found the level of their pants waists to be very important.

The only glimmering moment of hope in all of this was the boys were all wearing jeans that were so tight that there was no way they will be able to reproduce.

What I have learned. . .

So I got a job, this time as the educational coordinator for a local college. Somehow.
This ends a six month unemployment adventure which has helped me to both become more enlightened and in touch with the universe in a zen sort of way and to finally explore the hellish nightmare of suburban life that can drive some people to pray to God for a knife to cut some haggard old divorcé in JC Pennys because of the way she looked at you while buying pants.

 I would like to take a few minutes to share some of the things that I have learned in the past few months.


No matter how much I would like for Sardines to taste like Vienna Sausages they don't, and no amount of hot sauce can change that.

Shoes and silverware are what separate us from the animals, if your day does not require you to use either of them you are doing something wrong.

Whether it's global economics, theoretical particle physics or ancient linguistics - Nothing is more complex or difficult to understand then the inner workings of a garage door opener.

Powdered sugar and confectioners' sugar are the same thing and neither one taste good in coffee.

Subway does not take checks.

There is a city permit for just about everything - but if your town is small enough you don't need one. You can just call city hall and tell them what you are going to do and they will say "Okay, but be careful." - You don't even have to actually be careful.

It is easier to put up a clothesline then it is to fix a dryer.

Anyone can grow mold on the dirty dishes in the sink, it takes real talent to grow tomatoes there.

Wait until you see the third turnip to attack the final boss in Super Mario Brothers 2.

90% of basic cable is infomericals at 3 a.m. and they are all bad.

I know we live in this puritanical society but I still don't think pants should be required if you are just checking the mail.

Phantom pains

I heard a story once about a man with one arm, he said that in his dreams he still had his arm. He said there were times when he would wake up and it felt like he had lost his arm all over again.

Because I have a job interview with a local college, I felt it was time to loose the ponytail and shave the beard to look more respectable and less like an effeminate deadhead.

I keep picking up stray rubber bands and reaching back to realize that there is no hair. Not that I have changed my mind about cutting my hair but it is kind of sad.

A brush with death, kind of. . .

So I was watching CNN 2 at about 5 a.m. after finishing a plate of homemade blueberry pancakes and I realized that my fingernails could use a quick trim.

Luckily the nail clippers were exactly where I had left them after my wife called me gross for cutting my toe nails  - on the coffee table in the living room.

About ten seconds into it I was already on my fourth finger - you can say what you want about my hygiene habits but I have always taken pride in my ability to speed through a fingernail cutting session in under 1 min 30 seconds. I don't know the world record I am pretty sure I would be in the running but to be honest I don't care because I don't do it to be competitive.

So it was at this time, while I was pondering possible sponsorship deals for my fingernail cutting skills, when I nearly died.

They would still loose.

There is a theory in physics, more like a theory that high school physics students talk about when they get stoned and drink Mt. Dew while listen to the Flamming Lips. It says that at the lowest form of matter, even the charge inside the atoms themselves are held together by smaller particles and they are held together by even smaller particles and smaller and smaller until you eventually get to tiny little "vibrations" between parts of parts of particles. This means that if you can find the right frequency, the right angle and the right timing then it would be possible for an object to pass through another object. Of course the possibility of all those vibrations lining up perfectly would be like several billion to one shot, per particle - but still technically possible - - - -Statistically speaking what happened to me at the coffee table was only slightly more likely to happen then all of the particles in my leg lining up and falling through the floor.

(science)

Somehow I clipped a nail and it flew through the air reaching speeds upwards of 200 miles an hour and ricocheting through the living room behaving like a cross between an epileptic toddler and the magic bullet that Oswald fired at Kennedy.

Somehow the tiny little fingernail  - - without even touching the rim - - shot right up my nose. It hit the hole so perfectly that it actually made it to the cusp between the inner area when the nose starts to stop being nose and starts to be the inside of your face. I panicked of course as most of you would when a large rouge fingernail lodges itself in your nasal passage.

I nearly choked and realized that if I inhale this thing is not stopping till it hits lung. I grabbed a napkin and blew my nose - It worked and thankfully I survived.

Wal-Mart Math

I went to wal-mart and noticed something. Now that it is getting hot outside there are a lot of people wearing shorts and girls wearing tank tops. After seeing what I saw today I have to explain something with math

This :

Plus this:

Does NOT equal this:

It equals this:

Thank you.

Aluminum Foil Sex Pervert

I am trying my hand at brewing my own beer - right now I am about halfway through my first batch. It is a learning process and I am not expecting this first batch to be the greatest but It has so far been fun and I am sure I will get better at it.

I just hope the neighbors don't think I am making meth.

Today I am bottling - which means cleaning and sterilizing old bottles. I think 90% of making beer is about cleaning. After doing my research it seems that you can sanitize the bottles by soaking them in bleach water or commercial sanitizer or by wrapping the bottles in aluminum foil then throwing them in the oven for an hour and a half. Seeing as how commercial sanitizer cost money and I don't want my beer to taste like bleach i opted to go for the oven method.

The problem is I only had enough aluminum foil for about 20 out of the 50 bottles I needed. So I climbed on my motorcycle and drove to the store to get another roll. Once I left the store I realized that there was no place to put this roll of aluminum foil except down my pants. I have no saddle bags on the bike and have to use both hands to drive so it was really my only option.

About two blocks away from the store it hit me that if I am in a wreck at this very moment and died my wife would never truly understand what was going on. She would find an oven half full of beer bottles and  the police report would mention paramedics finding a roll of aluminum foil stuffed down my pants. Knowing her I am sure she would tell herself that there was some sort of explanation that didn't make me out to be a weirdo but in the back of her mind she would always wonder.

Luckily I made it home ok and saved her from living the rest of her life with those questions.

Sword Play

I have to do the funeral thing tomorrow.
My uncle Chuck died this week, it was unrelated to the tornado, he had cancer, one of the bad kinds apparently and was about a year into his diagnosis.

He was my Mom's youngest of seven brothers and sisters, and his mother, who made it to 80 and change died last year. I never asked and it isn't something that comes up but if I had to guess I would say chuck might have made it to 50 - it was close, give or take five years.

I will relay my favorite memory of Chuck I guess, since that is what people do once you die.

After I graduated from high school I went to junior college for two years and I moved into my grandmothers house for a semester. I was working as a janitor at wal-mart and living in a small room in the back of the house. It was a room that use to be a garage and had been converted into a small space that both Chuck and all of his several siblings over the years had lived in for a period of time after various divorces, marriages, addictions and other poverty inducing milestones.
College is no less an excuse but while I was there my uncle chuck was staying in the spare bedroom in the house. It was the only time that I actually spend more then a few hours with him. He was well liked by all of his family members and surprisingly he was also well liked by my fathers side of the family - and few people made that cut after my parents divorce.

I returned from work one night after a late shift. I laid down on the mattress, on the floor and started to watch a DVD - which was a pretty new thing at the time - i had  been lucky enough to have found one after it had been hit by lightning then fixed it using a TV remote and a fuse I pulled out of my 1991 Pontiac Firebird.

I didn't know it at the time but Chuck was home and my grandmother was not -
My grandmother was staying in Georgia with her daughter for the week and Chuck thought it was necessary to kick in the door and swing a sword over his head to surprise me at one in the morning.

I was surprised.

Apparently he had made this sword and wanted to show it off, in doing so he reached back his sword to slice invisible enemies on the staircase as he charged towards me in a classic "Conan the Barbarian ," pose and accidentally stabbed a giant framed poster I had hung on the wall behind him.

That was my favorite memory of the guy - it was really funny, completely insane and somehow endearing because the expression on his face was that of complete cartoon anger - then shock - and complete humility as he apologized - all in a three second span.

Why a sword? Why he had no shirt at one in the morning and thought he should just kick the door in? Why he had no concept of the spatial relation between the wall and giant hunk of sharp metal he was tossing around his head? I don't know.

Anyway I will always think of that moment and know that the world is a worse place without you in it.