dreadcrumbs

Moving Day

2005-11-17T00:10:00.000-08:00

As in everything, I am piggybacking on the plans of those with more gumption than I. My beloved wife has plans to move from the baling wire and twine web logging system I built for her site to a more full-featured blog, and I am taking advantage of her table scraps.

Thus, this blog will be moving to the roomy and sumptuous loft at www.dreadcrumbs.com.

I'll be keeping this site alive for awhile, since the new pad won't have all the old comments, and I don't want those of you who visit fortnightly to miss this transition message.

All new posts will be at the new location, though.

The Sight Eater

2005-11-16T11:30:00.000-08:00

My vision is fading. My physical vision, I mean. My vision of a future where man and beast work side by side under the steady hand of a benevolent insect overlord is as clear as crystal.

The human race's glorius destiny aside, I've been able to increase the acuity of my eyesight with glasses ever since I was about 17. I hesitate to say "I've worn glasses since I was 17" because, well, I really haven't regularly worn them until the last five years or so. Up until about age 28, I could get away with having bare eyeballs without any noticeable life-enjoyment penalty. I now wear them much more often, usually when driving or seeing a movie. Or if I care to see people's faces with any clarity. It hasn't really been a problem. I take them off (I have them off right now, for example) when doing "close" work.

But in the last several months, alas, I have noticed the characters on my computer screen begin to get blurry. At first I ignored it, explaining it away to my imagination or the sudden appearance of a strange ambient fog inside my office building. But the blurriness persisted, so I started doing experiments. I put on my glasses. Still blurry. I moved my head closer to the screen. Maybe clearer, but probably only because everything was subjectively huge. The edges were still blurry.

So I was confused as to what exactly was happening to my eyeballs, and was about to go back to the imagination/ambient fog theory when I suddenly sneezed. And everything became perfectly clear. And I still mean physically. No epiphanies, just clear vision. Every character on the screen was clearer than I think I had ever seen. I blinked. Still clear. I rubbed my eyes. Blurry again. And it stayed that way, no matter how much blinking or rubbing I did, until I sneezed again. After which, I enjoyed another oh-so-brief moment of clarity.

If anyone out there is a doctor or an ophthalmologist, I am soliciting theories as to why a nose explosion would clear up my vision. I'm thinking maybe a ghost lives in the vitreous fluids of my eye, and the sneeze scares it away for a while. Of course we all know that's ridiculous, since a ghost would live in our brain or sinus cavity, if it was going to live anywhere. Hence the theory solicitation. Because I just don't get it.

Desperate Cuisine

2005-11-15T11:49:00.000-08:00

Like many civic minded corporations, my company is having a "food drive" this season. There are five bins outside our lunchroom where people are encouraged to deposit foodstuffs. The collected food will then be given to the homeless as tribute to keep them from eating us for one more year.

No guidelines have been posted as to what types of food should be put in the bins, but I think most people assume canned and dry goods are expected. Cabbage and ground beef, as tasty as they are, would not last long in an unrefrigerated bin. I have as yet not contributed to the bin, mostly because the people who donate the most food have been threatened with a free lunch...with senior management. It shames me to say it, but the prospect of sharing fries with the Executive In Charge Of Red Tape is a greater Evil in my mind than freeing the huddled masses yearning to be full. Perhaps I will don a mask and cape and donate anonymously just when the need is greatest, thereby assuaging guilt and avoiding lunchtime horror at once.

Anyway...the reason I bring up the food bins is that I swear I saw a guy drop a 7-Layer Burrito in there. I was getting some water from the lunch room, and I am certain I saw a 40-something man walk up to the bins with a Taco Bell bag, pull out a burrito-shaped package, and place it in one of the bins.

Now we all know the burrito won't keep. It felt like it was my duty to retrieve it (and yes, eat it) before it spoiled.

However, just as I was getting up the guts to "steal" from the donation pool, one of our security guys walked up to the bin, extracted the burrito, and threw it in a nearby garbage can.

Dismissing how disturbed and confused I was already at the idea of someone actually thinking a Taco Bell burrito would be the perfect addition to a food drive, I was now grappling with a more existential angst over whether to retrieve said burrito from the garbage or not.

Long story short, I didn't. But I had already had lunch. If I'm hungry, I'm capable of anything. I'll have to tell you about the half-eaten pizza in the zoo garbage sometime. Or the gas station hot dog in Thailand. Or what really happened to my dog Brownie.

Microstory Monday

2005-11-14T11:30:00.000-08:00

"Where the Keys Went," or The High Fiber Diet Continues

I lean back from over the bowl, and slump against the bathroom wall.
Resisting the urge to wipe my brow, I smear my hands on the already dirty towel I have on my lap.
"Still nothing," I call out to my wife. "I didn't pass them."

Free Power

2005-11-11T11:00:00.000-08:00

Being made up of two parts geek and one part cheapskate, I am naturally fond of solar energy. Free electricity beamed at you from outer space! How cool is that? I thought it was a great idea even when I didn't have to pay for energy myself, and mooched off my Mom. Now, though, when I get those exorbitant $32 bills from the electric company, I long to harness the boundless fire of Father Sun.

It's too bad it costs so much to install solar panels in your home, though. I heard it takes like ten years to make your money back in savings. So if I want to power my house completely with free electricity, I'm going to have to build a windmill farm in my backyard, too. And how much are those windmills going to cost me? (I mean in dollars, not in respect.)

Bah. You have to spend too much money to get free stuff.

For my electricity needs, I guess I'll have to stick with the army of orphans I have in my basement strapped to stationary bikes. They work okay, but you have to feed them, and the smell is terrible.

The Dreadful Apostrophe Virus

2005-11-10T11:20:00.000-08:00

My department at work has daily morning meetings where we discuss tasks in process, relevant business news, issues & crises, and so on. You know, normal "business" stuff. The facilitator for the meeting usually rolls in a portable white board with the issues to be discussed pre-written. Now, since we build software, we also track high-priority defects in this meeting. Today, the white board had a tally of what I assume from context to be the number of highest priority defects currently open, but the actual text was "Level One's 9."

Now, if we had been referring to some elite strike force in British Intelligence, I probably wouldn't have had a problem with this. But, as I have mentioned in the past, I hate apostrophes. Not in principle, necessarily, but in application.

Let us take alcohol as a comparative example. It can be very useful in cleansing open head wounds and powering clean-burning engines, yet it is hated by many because it is consumed to stupify the brain and free oneself from the oh-so-crushing pressures of moral responsibility. It can also be used to light people and objects on fire.

I am like those alcohol-haters, except with the apostrophe. The use I applaud, the misuse I abhor. If, instead of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, an organization like Mothers Against Apostrophe Misuse existed, I would put on a dress and shoulder the maternal burden to become a member. Yes Ma'am, I would.

And so I'm trying to think of ways to clandestinely alter the white board message so it makes sense.
Little Level One's 9 years old today!
Beware Level One's 9 rabid weasels.
Mama Levelione's 9-cheese pizza.
How to Level One's 9 acre home in 6 easy steps!

Or I guess I could just erase the apostrophe. Maybe add a colon after "Ones." I don't know. Whatever. I'm not picky.

Apocalyptic Obsolescence

2005-11-09T11:30:00.000-08:00

My wife and I decided a few weeks ago to replace the polyvinyl chloride laying on our kitchen floor and door entry with slate tile. As I left my house today, the guys we hired to lay our tile were arriving, and it got me to thinking. Should I have installed the tile? Am I emasculating myself by letting another man do typically male household labor?

I mean, I don't want to do it. I don't even think I'd do a good job. But do I really want the rumor getting out that I'm incapable of doing simple masculine tasks? Because I'm not. No, really. I'm not. I did install the shelves in our garage, after all, and they haven't even fallen down yet.

And yet, it makes me wonder if I shouldn't have kept with the construction job I had in college, rather than do all this computer stuff. Sure, I jumped at the prospect of having a career where I could sit on my butt all day pushing buttons. But it makes you soft. And dependent on the fickle mistress that is Technology.

There's always the chance that the Earth will be hit by an asteroid, mammoth earthquake, or alien doomsday weapon. We'll watch in horror as the electrical grid collapses, society disintegrates, and the streets are overrun with mad dogs and Englishmen. How useful will my mad skillz in Photoshop be then? Not very. My family will need someone who can rebuild walls and fight off marauding mutants with a nail gun and crowbar.

Crap. All this could happen at any moment. I've got to find out how to filter urine into drinkable water right now. You never know when everything could go down the drain.

So to speak.

The Man With The Screaming Brain

2005-11-08T00:21:00.000-08:00

Where I come from, pain is supposed to mean something. Physical pain, I mean. That crushing despair we all feel when we wake up in the morning of course means nothing.

But when you feel a searing pain on your abdomen, it's usually because a hot poker (or some other really hot thing) has fallen on it. A dull ache in your wrist either means you have carpal tunnel or that your hand has recently been severed from your arm. And so on. Pain is there to tell us something our standard senses haven't noticed. Or that our brains are too screwed up to recognize as damaging. Maybe one of your most cherished memories is when you were a child and your mother was cooking soup on the kitchen range. So today, it seems to you that it would be very comforting to rest your head on one of the heating coils. Of course, those sane members of us in the audience know such a desire is ridiculous, but Pain is there to convince you of it.

Thus it is very disconcerting when we experience pain for no visible reason. If you have that same searing pain in your abdomen, but there is nary a hot poker in evidence, well, it can be troubling. Doctors can sometimes tell you what phantom actually caused the pain (usually it's an organ that has burst), but not always.

And so we are led, inevitably, to my head. Which, if I am to listen to my pain, is about to explode. But there is no vice crushing my skull. I'm not wearing a microwave helmet, or carrying an icepick in my eye. There isn't even a creepy looking telepath nearby with his eyes fixed on me.

Which means one of two things. Either:

1) Pain is meaningless, and is just a joke evolution has played on us.
or
2) Some pain is transmitted to us from the realm of the invisible, probably by alien puppet-masters.

So my next step is to fashion a tinfoil skullcap for myself. I hear those work well against the Orbital Mind Control Lasers, so it may help with my Headaches of Supernatural Origin.

Microstory Monday

2005-11-07T11:35:00.000-08:00

Budding

The hardest part wasn't going to bed with a headache. I've done that before.

It wasn't even when I woke to find my pillow stuck to the side of my head with matted blood.

The worst was finding that the pillowcase was held to my temple not simply by the blood of a new head wound, but by the clenched teeth of a tiny mouth inside it.

Scraps of Doom

2005-11-04T13:15:00.000-08:00

My wife is going on a "scrapbooking weekend" this, well, this weekend. At least this is the story she is telling me. As best I can determine, this is a gathering (at a hotel, I think) of between 4 and 24 women, who come together to wield razors and glue. As a group. Right.

Now scrapbooking itself is a little baffling to me, and I have found if I try too hard to figure it out I start to gibber and grasp at invisible air-weasels. The only way I can assimilate it into the rational panoply of human existence is to think of it simply as "archiving." And then I have to ignore it.

But my wife is forcing me to consider the concept again, because combining the already unintelligible with a completely incongruous situation/venue that already smacks of bewilderment, is, well, UNHOLY. I don't understand it, so, you know, it must be Witchery.

However, regardless of my psuedo-moral judgements about scrapbooking and weekend gatherings in general (can't you feel the wrongness of it?), the whole premise seems a little, I don't know, suspect.

I mean, I can stretch my understanding enough to see why scrapbooking with other people might be more fun, and even more productive for a certain breed of people. But in a hotel an hour's drive away? All weekend? Does this make sense to anyone?

And just how wise is it to give cutting tools to a dozen women who are giddy with a cocktail of diet coke and adhesive fumes? Add to that a lack of sleep and the sweet, sweet nectar of freedom, and, well, it's a recipe for disaster.

That's why I think it's all an elaborate lie. I think they're really going, as a coven, to celebrate The Feast of Qudrat by dining on the entrails of lemurs.

It certainly makes more sense.

Why I Live in a Cave

2005-11-03T00:05:00.000-08:00

I have a brain disability.

Well, I probably have several, but the one troubling me currently has to do with cognitive thought and decision making. I consider myself a pretty clear thinker and efficient decision maker, but the evidence does not appear to bear this out.

If I am ever grudgingly stuck in a meeting, or an assembly of any kind, I usually let other people talk and defer any decision making to others. The sad truth is, in groups, my brain works at about 20% of normal capacity. The sadder truth is, most people tend to think better by discussing things with other people. I just don't.

One of my coworkers here often consults me about strange scripting (in the computer sense) dilemmas he has, and as I'm sitting there talking to him about it, I can offer absolutely no suggestions. Once I come back to my desk, alone, I come up with something almost immediately.

And so I get tagged as either an egotist or an antisocial bum, because I avoid groups at all costs, and when I do get trapped, I have nothing to offer. The other members of the group think I'm holding back, and because they're fairly sure I'm not retarded, I am deemed not to be a team player. Which is true, in its strictest sense. But it isn't because I don't want to be. It's because my brain slows to a stupor when other people are around.

It's like (since I haven't done an absurd metaphor in a while) living in a society where all business is done while eating the flesh of goats. The more goatflesh you eat, the more you are considered a useful member of society. But alas, I am allergic to goat meat. I can eat it, but it makes me sick, so I eat very little.

And so I am branded an outcast, and exiled by the town council to wander the waste places south of my village. One day I will be killed by scorpions in the deep desert, and no one will know to mourn my passing.

Oh no. People are coming to my desk.

Not think good no more. Bye.

ZP ME

2005-11-02T11:00:00.000-08:00

I have long wondered why the metal detectors at airports beep at me. I used to have these boots with metal loops for the laces that I was convinced set the things off, but my recent trip to England clad only in leather slipons (plus pants and shirt) disproved that theory. Every security "portal" I went through beeped. Every one. I joked with the officers that arrived to prod me with detection wands that I just have high iron content in my blood...but really, what the heck is it? A metal plate from a war wound I don't remember? A microchip in my head? Nanotech in my bloodstream? I don't get it. It's weird.

But I'm developing a new theory. I've noticed that whenever I get up from my desk, I habitually touch non-electronic metal surfaces to discharge excess electricity. To discharge excess electricity. I never thought anything about it, but who does that? How can a person build up a personal electric charge without even moving? I mean sure, I can understand static electricity buildup when you've got rubber-soled feet (or a balloon suit) and
you're walking on the carpet (or rolling in cat fur). But I'm not doing those things.

So here's the truth of it. I'm a Zero Point Energy conduit. I'm unconsciously pulling "free" electricity from ambient electromagnetic fields into my body. That, in turn, wreaks havoc with metal detectors and causes me to have to discharge electricity into nearby metal to avoid electrocuting my neighbors.

It's the only plausible explanation.

I do hesitate to announce it publicly for fear some shadowy agency will abduct me and use my uncanny ability to power some nefarious doomsday device, so if anyone asks, I'm joking.

Rational Thought Makes My Brain Hurt

2005-11-01T11:05:00.000-08:00

I've often heard my wife (the famous author) and others of her profession remark on the complexity of human beings. That if they tried to make characters in their books exactly like people they knew, the characters would seem unbelievable, erratic, and less-than-empathetic.

I'm thinking that it's too hard, really, to accurately represent an entire human being in all their "glory." It's hard even to think about them. Our brains have to simplify and generalize people, and groups of people, to feel comfortable. That's why we get overbroad declarations like "short people are creepy" and "The Swiss eat the souls of men."

I mean, some short people might be creepy, but they all certainly aren't. My wife Shannon has several little friends who aren't creepy at all. Not really.

Which isn't to say I don't enjoy caricatures of people. Not the sketches with big heads, but the people that really own some trait of theirs. I like it when really big people ponderously saunter and grumble like ogres, or when short folk scamper about, troll-like. It's pleasant to see dangerous looking Harley riders with big beards, or to share a meal with the jolly obese. It briefly tricks you into thinking that the world actually makes sense, and everything and everyone can be easily categorized.

But alas, they can't. And really, it's that comfortable, lazy thinking that drives all of those nasty -isms that cause so much trouble in the world. I mean, if I really believed what everyone says about the Swiss, I wouldn't eat their cheese.

And what a loss that would be. It's delicious.

Halloween Extra

2005-10-31T13:55:00.000-08:00

As a lazy but ardent fan of Halloween, I am always looking for costumes that allow me to participate in the holiday without the tedious process of buying, making, or actually dressing up in anything. I thought I might help some like-minded individuals with a list of things you can tell people you're dressed up as without actually having to change anything about your wardrobe.

The (always popular) Psychotic Killer
Infectious [Insert Nasty Virus Here] Carrier
Android
Werewolf (only works during the day, or non-full-moon evenings)
Clone (or Evil Twin)
Cannibal
Sports Fan
Undercover Cop
Eukaryote (Ah! I knew I took AP Biology for some reason...)
Soylent Green
Hallucination

Also, if you happen to have dandruff, acne, or some other non-fatal skin disease, you might be able to get away with:
Zombie
Plague Victim
Leper

The list could go on, I'm sure. Feel free to comment with your own suggestions.

Microstory Monday

2005-10-31T00:16:00.000-08:00

A 3:00 AM Telephone Call

"911 Emergency."
"There's someone in my shower. I just came home and there's something..."
"Ma'am, do you have an intruder?"
"I saw the shadow behind the curtain. It was hunched over...and...and it was eating, I think."
"Ma'am, what is your address, please?"
"No! I heard the curtain open! It can hear me! He's running! Please! Hel..."

The Secret Lives of Accountants

2005-10-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

Our workplace security staff (meaning the people that keep corporate spies out of our building, not the ones that keep us from leaving) occasionally send email to the entire building notifying us of personal items that they have found in their securing rounds. Usually cellphones. Sometimes a notebook or a wallet. This morning, though, I received three, nearly in a row, that paint a picture of bizarre overnight "goings-on." Here's what I got:

7:30
If anyone in the Bldg. lost a pair of shoes, please contact Security @ 23911 with a brief description. They were found in the North Side of the second floor.

7:35
If anyone in the Bldg. is missing a set of keys, please contact Security @ 23911 with a brief description. They were found on the second floor.

7:37
If anyone in the Bldg. is missing a single earring, please contact Security @ 23911 with a brief description. It was found in the stairwell.

What I think happened is this - Joe developer had been working late in his cubicle on the second floor, and decided to go home. As he heads out, he is surprised in the darkened hallway to the stairwell by Edna, the
Accounting Supervisor. She is holding a pair of keys, one large key pinched between two fingers, claw-like.

Joe: "Um, Hi Edna. Working late?"
Edna: "Hmm. Nice shoes you got there."
Joe: "Oh. You like them? They're made of gator. I got 'em in Florida."
Edna: "I want them."
Joe: "I can give you the name of the store where..."
Edna: "No. I want those."
Joe: "They're, uh, they're not for sale."
Edna: "Give them to me!"
Joe: "No!"
Edna: "Give me your shoes, B**ch!"

Taken aback and a little frightened by Edna, Joe takes off his shoes, and as Edna approaches to take them, he rams his head into her gut, knocking them both to the ground. Edna gouges Joe's face with her key, and he grabs her hand, slamming it against the floor until she drops the keys. They struggle through the open door to the stairwell and tumble down, still fighting. Joe rips an earring from Edna's ear and Edna bites off the tip of Joe's nose.

But what happened from there is anyone's guess, since we don't have further evidence. Perhaps they continued their brawl out the doors and into the night rain. I cannot say.

Sure, I know it sounds ridiculous, but the only other explanation is spontaneous human combustion, and security didn't say anything about finding large piles of greasy ash.

I mean, if they did, I might have tried to claim them. You never know when greasy ash can come in handy.

I might want to make soap or something.

Photos and Nothingness

2005-10-27T00:50:00.000-07:00

I think I might hate photography. This saddens me, as I consider myself a "Digital Imaging Professional," but I suppose I must face facts. How else can I explain the antipathy I feel when I see people holding their camera phones in front of them like tricorders, gleefully snapping images of the inane? And while generally (though she might have you believe otherwise) I try to cater to my wife's every whim, when she wants me to take a picture of something or have a photo taken of me, I get grumpy and uncooperative.

In fact, I would estimate that only about ten pictures of me, as an adult, actually exist. That's how uncooperative I am. Which is really too bad, because a photo of me when I uprooted a tree with my bare hands would really help my case to the Justice League membership committee.

It goes beyond photos of me, though. Like I said, I'm just as uncooperative when it comes to pictures of things besides myself. Just a minute ago, I followed a link to a software developer's website, and when I saw the big photograph in the top right corner of the author posing on the deck of some kind of boat, I immediately closed the browser. I somehow felt that, because the photo was there, that this person was obviously retarded and could offer nothing of value.

Now here's where I try to justify this ridiculous and extreme personal neurosis through philosophical babbling:

Every single photo is of something that doesn't exist. "Things" exist not only by virtue of the space they take or the light that is reflected off of them, but by the area they take in the timestream. Exerything that exists, people, trees, rivers, whatever, is a continuum unto itself. And cameras can't take pictures of a continuum. Nothing can. Nothing, except your own brain. Photographs bastardize the element represented by plucking it out of context, stealing its "soul." This reinforces the flawed perception of time and existence as a series of moments, and cripples the brain in its ability to see and remember people and things as they truly are.

So there. It's either that, or I just hate photos because they debunk the lies I tell legends I create about my own past. And because I look fat in them.

Except I really did uproot a tree with my bare hands. That's true. I have witnesses.

My Smell Can Kick Your Smell's Butt

2005-10-26T11:56:00.000-07:00

Odors should not be combatted with stronger odors. I'm thinking this should be one of those things that people just know. Like knowing that open wounds are not best treated with a cheese grater or a fecal compress. It just isn't done.

Alas, this is not the case. People will continue to slather on perfumes and colognes to quickly deal with an augmenting body odor problem or other, more personal, self-image issues. I've talked about this before.

Moreover, some people (myself included) have been known to spray great quantities of air "freshener" about their dwellings in a vain attempt to mask the stench potpourri of Burger King, stale sweat, unwashed clothing, and proto-sentient carpet lice.

I don't know why I did it. I suppose I just thought it was simpler to buy a can of air freshener than to eat right, take showers, wash my clothes, and vacuum once in a while.

Anyway, I am brought to this line of thinking because the fans in my workplace bathroom have stopped working, and instead of fixing/replacing them, They have opted to install an automatic odor-sprayer, and fight stench with stench. Perhaps, like the 21-year-old me, it just seems simpler to Them.

The truly odd thing, though, is that They seem to be experimenting with the particular scent used in the combat. It started with something truly headache-inspiring that was vaguely Elizabeth Arden, then briefly moved to "Freshly Slain Pine", spent way too long with EXTREME! FRUIT!, and now seems to have settled on Play-Doh. Yes, I swear that's what it is. Essence of Play-Doh.

It actually seems to be doing a pretty good job hiding the Waste Odors of Man, but the psychological effect is disturbing. It reminds one of childhood, and of the joy of handling squishy, semi-solid masses. I'm afraid the recollection may cause some of the more "at-risk" members of the staff to break.

I just don't relish the thought of one day discovering our Marketing Director sitting on the bathroom floor shaping The Unthinkable into a small brown dog.

Fatherhood and the Fear Campaign

2005-10-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

My 22 month old son Max and I were finishing up dinner the other day (or rather, he was threatening to throw handfuls of stew on the carpet while I was frantically trying to finish my meal so I could defuse the human bomb), and my wife had moved to the kitchen. She was putting something (I'm actually not sure what) down the sink disposal, and it was pretty grindy-noisy.

Anyway, the noise was obviously freaking Max out, and he was looking at me with wide eyes and a little fear. I think he was looking to me to know if everything was okay, or what the appropriate reaction to such a sound was.

Here's how it played out, roughly:

Max: (Looks concerned/afraid)
Papa: It's okay, bud. It's just Mom.
Max: (Eyes look to the kitchen, then back at Papa. Now less afraid, more confused)
Papa: She's just grinding up bones.
Max: (Eyes widen)
Papa: Baby bones.
Max: (Stares. A large brown drop falls from his handful of stew and onto his tray)
Papa: Yup. Mom's grinding up your brother, because he was naughty.
Max: (Still staring at Papa) Mum?
Papa: He whined a lot. Threw food. We decided he was just too much trouble.
(The grinding stops. Mom comes back into the room with us)
Mama: Hi Bud!
Max: (Slowly turns from Papa to look at Mom. Silently wipes the remaining stew from his hands and gives the "all done" sign.)

Now, I never planned to subscribe to a Machiavellian parenting style. I mean, I don't think I really believe that it is better to be feared than loved. I think I'd rather be loved. But here I am, telling my son that we stuffed his heretofore unknown brother into a grinder because he was naughty.

Oh well. I will console myself with the thought that he didn't really understand what I was saying. That should work, at least until he starts trying to stuff unwanted toys and pets down the disposal.

Microstory Monday

2005-10-24T11:22:00.000-07:00

In the Land of the Limbless, the One-Armed Man is King

After the crash, we waited for rescue, drawing lots to see whose leg we would eat next.
I was lucky, and after four weeks, I decided we would stop drawing lots.

The Last One, I Promise: Part Four

2005-10-21T00:11:00.000-07:00

A Dearth of Clocks

I think my last two entries were too long (and I have an obscene amount of meetings at work today), so I'll keep this one short.

There are no clocks, alarm or otherwise, in the hotels in Great Britain.

Why this might be is anyone's guess.

For once, I don't think it has anything to do with the Swiss. It's time to stop blaming the Swiss and their ridiculous haircuts for everything.

I'm betting it's actually some kind of Nazi plot. It usually is.

Stupid Nazis.

Essentially A Travelogue, Part Three

2005-10-20T11:17:00.000-07:00

Tele-vision

My TV and I have and a rockier than usual relationship lately. I got it a new DVD player, but it refuses to make use of the progressive-scan technology in it. I got it a Tivo, but there isn't really anything good on for it to record. I mean, a man cannot live on Justice League cartoons alone, even as terrific as they are.

But really, it's a time thing. My wife and I used to spend a few hours every night in front of the electron gun, but now that our lives are so absorbed with our two-legged spawn, the time we have for "everything else" is filled with, well, everything else. Except TV. I have like three episodes of Lost on Tivo I haven't even watched yet.

So I was thinking while we were in England, sans our beloved dwarf, I might be able to bow out of one of Shannon's Fancy Author Dinners™ and just watch TV in the hotel. I had previously done a bit of research on some of the hotels we would be in, and most advertised "Satellite TV." Now, I have satellite TV here in the US, so I had some assumptions about the channel selection. Assumptions that proved to be quite wrong.

I'm speaking from a the point of view of a UK novice, mind you, and someone beholden to hotel quirks, but it appears, from that point of view, that "Regular TV" in the UK consists of about 4 channels, and "Satellite" gives you a grand total of 8. Three of which are sports channels. I'm not a sports fan in general, and while I might have been tempted by particularly bizarre or exotic sports, all that ever seemed to be broadcast that was even remotely different from standard US fare was football and snooker. Which is to say, soccer and pool. So not that special.

And everything else always seemed to be reruns of either "Friends," "Frasier," "The Simpsons," or the British Soap Juggernaut "HollyOaks." I don't know what I was expecting, but I recall BBC America on US Satellite being more entertaining. Frankly, I would have been happy with a "Changing Rooms" marathon over the painful two hours that was the 1990 Jim Belushi vehicle, "Mr. Destiny."

Oh well. I guess I'll always have books.

Or at least I will until 2025. I think that's about when the Firemen are supposed start burning them.

T.A.R, Part Two

2005-10-19T10:58:00.000-07:00

Shower Engineering

My experience with hotel showers worldwide is not a particularly good one. The heating apparatus (when there was one) for my showers in Central America was basically an electrical appliance strapped to the shower pipe that simply got really hot when you turned it on, relying on the second law of thermodynamics to actually do the water-heating. It did work fairly well, though whenever I bumped against the shower head I was treated to a mild electric shock. Frankly, I am surprised more people aren't electrocuted outright.

On the North American side, my current theory is that the majority of hotel construction in the United States (or at least Hotel Bathroom Shower Construction) is dominated by a shadowy syndicate of dwarves. I swear, no one over five feet tall can go into a hotel shower and expect to get their hair wet without extreme squatting. Not that I have anything against squatting in principle. It's just not something I like to do while naked and wet. It's unseemly.

And so we come to the United Kingdom, where I would have expected showers to have the same "lowness" problem, since most of the doorways I walked through were designed for the average pint-sized Englishman of 1620. But no. I actually had very little need to squat, once I actually got the shower working.

And that's the thing. You don't normally think of a shower as having a "user interface," but these did. You expect something vaguely analogous to the sink controls, a knob controlling hot or cold, and maybe a lever to switch from tub faucet to shower spray. Nope. The showers I used (when they actually were showers and not some kind of bathtub/hose hack) offered a control mechanism consisting of no less than four knobs, two levers, a pull chain, and a toggle switch. And often more than that.

What's worse, there appear to be competing factions of shower control apparatus manufacturers, so what one lever does in one shower might not do the same thing in another. And then I have the singularly idiotic habit of disrobing completely and standing in the path of the water before I even begin the process of puzzling through the thing's operation. It made for some exhilirating mornings.

I would detail to you what each knob and lever did, if I had ever figured it out. I just turned and flicked and pulled and switched until the shower and I came to a compromise.

What I still can't shake, though, is the impression that if I had figured out the right sequence of knobs and switches, I might have been able to open a secret doorway to the labs of MI6.

Or Narnia, at the very least.

The Asynchronicity Review, Part One

2005-10-18T10:35:00.000-07:00

Over the next several days I'm going to try to outline the weirdness I did not expect to discover in Britain. You know, like I would have, had I been diligent with the blog while I was over there.

So let us begin with the horrors of...

Sink faucetry!

I am accustomed to the mono-faucet sink, where I can, through judicious use of a single control dial or lever, create one stream of pleasantly warm water. Alas, twelve of the fourteen bathroom sinks I dealt with in the UK, from hotel to residence to public lavatory, were of the two-faucet variety. The burnt-left-hand, frozen-right-hand variety. But that's okay. Two-faucet sinks are still occasionally found in the US, so I already had behavior modifications in place, like only using cold water, or trying to wash my hands fast enough in the hot before it became truly scalding. So, fine. No real problem.

But the truly odd thing was the distance that the faucets extended themselves out from their roosting spot over the expanse of the sink itself. Or, rather, the absence of distance. I am used to being able to stick my hands underneath a faucet and have the water hit the palms of my hands in some fashion. But those British faucets barely cleared the basin at all, and allowed a liberal dousing of fingertips only. Sure, my hands are larger than most, but my wife (who has dainty little hands) will attest that it was fairly ridiculous.

After puzzling over this for several days, and noticing the strange options for taking a shower (more on that tomorrow) I have come to the conclusion that the British must favor "the bath" as a concept over spray & drizzle cleansing. The faucets were there not to wash your hands with, but simply to fill the basin. The basin itself was then to be used as the cleansing tool. I was meant to give my hands a little mini-bath, digits soaking and splashing in an increasingly stagnant pool.

Now, I don't know about anyone else, but I wash my hands to remove the filth of the day (or of the moment). I do not wish to relish it, languishing in a filth-of-the-day soup. Or stew, depending on how chunky that particular day's filth happens to be.

Yes, I still hold with the wisdom of my sainted great-granny, who used to say "Standing water is the devil's chamber pot."

I never thought I would become the Ugly American and stubbornly refuse to adapt to another culture. I don't know. I guess I just can't shake that old Puritan fear of cesspools.

Microstory Monday

2005-10-17T10:30:00.000-07:00

Systematic Self Discovery by Dictionary, Day One

"They don't really eat with their noses, you know," the doctor says, plucking two more ants out of my nostril.

Teetotalling in Yorkshire

2005-10-10T14:42:00.000-07:00

Being descended of water buffalo, I require great amounts of liquid to thrive. I can survive on a paltry liter or two, but it just isn't a comfortable existence. And here in the UK I have found an unforeseen social discontinuity.

The British apparently do not drink more than 16 ounces daily of water-based liquids.

Oh, they'll have a pint. Or two, or three, of ale or beer or whiskey, but coke, sprite, or the fabulous Scottish beverage Iron-Bru are delivered in tiny little sipping glasses. Glasses for tiny little people. Tiny wretched little people. Sub-human people. Baby people. Not real people.

I'll concede that you can get some beverages bottled in convenience stores in sizes up to a half-liter, but that's still not nearly enough. Especially when you're carting 150 pounds of luggage down narrow cobblestone roads and across ungainly train terminals. It's sweaty work. One must replenish or die.

My wife and I had taken to filling up a bottle with water from the bathroom faucets in the hotels we were in, just to stave off death by dessication, but a little sign discovered above the water spout in our hotel in Leeds stated simply "This Water Not Suitable For Drinking."

Which of course calls into question all the other water we'd been drinking from taps.

Was it just that the Leeds hotel (which was quite a nice one, incidentally) was civic-minded enough to want to protect their guests from the pervasive water-borne pathogens of England? Or is it just that the water in Leeds is known to carry something?

Hard to say.

We did fill up in our hotel in Ilkley, though, which is just a few miles outside of Leeds. So far no cholera.

Possibly some bird flu, but no cholera.

Connected!

2005-10-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

At long last I have found a free wireless host for my Parasitic Digital Assistant to latch onto. I'll make an entry here in Manchester while I can. Maybe another in Birmingham in a few days if the wireless outlook is just as rosy.

Unfortunate Locations

2005-09-30T14:40:00.000-07:00

Alas, I depart for The Empire next week, so any updates that may happen over the next several days will be contingent upon either the benevolence of the Queen or the availability of free internet access in Manchester. My lovely and powerful wife is being sent on a book tour to the UK, and I am going along for the ride. I'm having a hard time with the concept of leaving my toddler behind, as my developmental experiments require constant supervision, but I just can't pass up an opportunity to put on my druid cloak and creep about the moors.

One thing I did want to share about my departure from the Mortuary the other night - Right as you leave the building itself to approach your car in the parking lot, you are welcomed by the flashing neon light of "Ray's Burger Barn" next door. In their signage, they tout "Old Fashioned Burgers" and "Fresh Ground Beef."

This is not necessarily disturbing in itself (unless you are vegan), but the proximity of the restaurant to the mortuary *does* lead one to wonder where the ground beef actually comes from.

Disturbing.

Speaker For The Dead

2005-09-28T00:01:00.000-07:00

So I'll be giving my fourth eulogy in as many years tomorrow. Which probably means I won't be updating on Thursday, but you never know.

Hmph.

I never expected to have to speak at this many funerals. I always felt like my "loved one" quotient was lower than most, which you would assume means fewer "opportunities" to speak after they die. But no.

Don't get me wrong. I love the people I've spoken for, and I am proud to have the opportunity to celebrate them, but it can be emotionally draining. The responsibility of summing up someone's entire life in ten minutes is a bit humbling. I mean, it's not really possible. The only hope is to try to reflect some of that person's "light" off yourself, and hope it reminds the audience of who the person was and how they made you feel.

But as much as I would like to believe otherwise, I think the main reason I am chosen to speak at such occasions is because I have the emotional depth of a tree stump. I'm just not capable of the sentimentality that would turn a funeral into a riot of weeping, wailing, and tooth gnashing. Which is good. A wail-free function is usually much more orderly than those full of it. And my family tends to prefer order.

But really, I would prefer that people just stop dying on me. It's getting old.

Potty Snacks

2005-09-27T11:03:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I was washing my hands in the company bathroom today and a guy comes in with a sandwich. I watched him in the mirror as he walked past me and the sinks, carrying his plastic Blimpie bag right into a stall.

This weirds me out. I didn't really have an excuse to sit there and listen (even if, heaven forbid, I actually wanted to), so I don't know if he actually started eating the thing.

But still. Bizarre.

There's even a little quasi-sanitary shelf by the sinks where I think such "oh-I-probably-shouldn't-take-this-into-the-poo-chamber" items are meant to be placed, but he didn't make use of it.

To me, this either means
a) he didn't trust me not to steal his sandwich while he did his business, or
b) he actually wanted to eat the thing on the pot.

At any rate, now that the trail has been blazed, I can feel much more comfortable bringing chocolate bars into the stall with me. I've been wanting to leave little chocolate finger smears on the walls and handles for others to discover in horror for weeks now, but just didn't think it was appropriate.

Microstory Monday

2005-09-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

Mr. Jacobs' Neighbors on "Party Night"

"Go to sleep, boy. It's late."
"But I can hear 'em oinkin', Pa. They's oinkin'."
"I know, son. I know."

Corporate Spy

2005-09-23T11:01:00.000-07:00

I think one of my co-workers is a spy. Or a spy-helper, at least.

He's been posting encoded messages on the whiteboard in his cubicle, which is hung up in such a way as to allow anyone walking through the building to see it. Anyone, including his spy contacts.

Now, apart from being almost unintelligible, the messages he posts are also numbered, which is why I think they are code. On the surface, they appear to be pithy witticisms about business efficiency, but they don't really make sense.

They're either weird permutations of widely known idioms,
"1. Don't waste your time counting chickens when you should be laying eggs."

Absurdly obvious statements,
"2. Remember, power tools need electricity to work. Screwdrivers don't."

And even more absurdly obvious things, with emphasis placed on unsuspected words.
"3. Doing nothing takes less time than doing something."

Now, what reason could anyone possibly have to put such things up to share with the world? None. Exactly. So they must be secret messages. He must really be saying something like

"1. Don't worry about the poultry army. Just plant the bombs."
"2. You won't be able to neutralize the target with a Lightning Gun, you will need to use a screwdriver."
"3. It will be easier to steal the stuffed bear than to destroy it outright."

Of course, these might not make much sense either. But at least they make more sense. At least to me.

And I'm not even a spy, of course. I'm just a regular guy. Yup. No secret codes here.

And Since I'm On The Subject

2005-09-22T00:12:00.000-07:00

Everything seems to beep. Phones, cars, pdas, computers, microwaves, tvs, dvd players. And refrigerators, of course. Pretty much everything that requires electricity to beep does beep.

My toddler speaks about 8 words, one of which is "beep." That leads me to believe that his environment is as full of beeping as it is with "Mam" and "Papa." That seems like a lot.

(My reasoning could be a little flawed here, since one of his other eight is "Goggles," which he only sees when Papa puts them on as part of his costume to fight crime, which is rarely, nowadays.)

But who came up with that particular noise? I mean, maybe beeping only annoys me because it is so prevalent, but why not a click? Or a thump? Or a hum, a buzz, a cough, a tinkle, a rattle, a crunch?

It's not like "the beep" exists in the natural world. That specific sound wasn't chosen because it reminded us, as humans, of something familiar, was it?

Now, with sound technology being what it is, you'd think we would move on. But we don't.

I'm thinking that, as a people, we're keeping the beep not only because we're used to it, but because we actually are hard-wired to respond to it. It seems like the only reasonable explanation. Just like a baby's cry, "the beep" hits just the right frequency to cause notice and/or alarm.

So. Based on this ironclad data, I conclude that we are genetically prepared to be either:
A. Overlords of a nation of robot slaves,
B. Slaves to a nation of Robot Overlords, or
C. Parents of tiny machine babies.

So I'd get comfortable rocking your toaster to sleep, because if there is one thing that slaves, overlords, and babies all share, it's a longing to fall asleep cradled by arms of meat.

Beeps From Beyond

2005-09-21T11:09:00.000-07:00

I have reason to believe my refrigerator is posessed. It moans at odd hours of the night, shudders for no apparent visible reason, and bursts lightbulbs.

But what really convinces me is the beeping. It beeps incessantly. But not like alarm beeping. It's more like Morse code. It doesn't have the static repetition of automation. It will stop beeping for hours, and then suddenly start up again with a strange series of beeps for about 10 minutes, and then stop for two, and then start again. There really is no discernible pattern.

But here's the kicker. It isn't supposed to beep at all. When my wife called the manufacturer's repair people after a particularly annoying "talkative" period, the person on the phone told her that that particular model didn't beep. That it had no "beeper" at all, and tried to convince my wife that it was a fan squeaking. But we both know it isn't a fan. I know beeps, and these are clearly beeps. Beeps That Should Not Be.

I haven't actually buckled down and tried to translate the beeps (assuming it is Morse Code), as I'm scared of what I might find it saying.

"I. Hold. Potroast. That. Is. Six. Months. Old. It. Has. Begun. To. Breathe. And. I. Am. Afraid."

"So. Afraid."

The Reluctant Zombie

2005-09-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

I think we can all agree that nights are scarier than days. Creepy things tend to happen more often at night. People and beasts of ill intent prowl in greater numbers, and things that we believe do not exist in the light of day become much more real.

Because we know, in our heart of hearts, that good people, people like us, sleep at night. It is the criminal, the animal, and the Unnatural Thing that do their wicked business in the dead of night.

So I wonder, as I shuffle about my house at three in the morning, which of those three things I am.

I have recently entered into one of my chronic periods of insomnia, so I spend about as much time at home nightwalking as I do in full light cavorting with my wife and son. My pattern tends to be sleeping from 12-2, shambling in the dark from 2-5, sleeping again from 5-7. There are variations, but I believe this generally qualifies me as a Creature of the Night.

Which is a shame, because I would prefer to be sleeping. It seems a waste just to sit on the kitchen floor in full darkness waiting to get tired, occasionally staring out the windows and idly scratching at the walls. There's nothing good on TV during those hours, and even if there was, I wouldn't want to turn up the volume for fear I would wake my wife and son. And I don't really want to start any truly engaging activity, like fighting crime on the rooftops or baking a pie. It would just wake me up for good, and then I wouldn't get any sleep.

Oh, I suppose I could take sleeping pills, but I don't want to dull my readiness. Someone needs to be up when that Unnatural Thing inevitably crawls into our house.

You know, to hit it with a bat or something.

Microstory Monday

2005-09-19T11:30:00.000-07:00

I Prefer A Silent Harvest

"You've been working too fast," my supervisor says, tightening the restraints on my donor as I work. I shrug, quickly carving out an eye.
The supervisor holds out his hand, and I give it to him.
"Some of your extractions have surgical damage," he says, examining the eye closely.
"I like to finish before they wake up," I say. "I have a hard time concentrating after that."
Almost on cue, my donor's remaining eyelid snaps open, and he begins to thrash and scream.
I sigh, pointing at the flailing body with my scalpel.
"See what I mean?" I say.

The Faceless Army

2005-09-16T00:20:00.000-07:00

I've noticed that most of the comments (actual written ones) I get on this blog are from "anonymous." I don't have a problem with that (except when they are people posting links to their online casino tips), because I would probably do the same thing. Though likely with an absurd alias like "Octavius Absinthe."

But I am trying to imagine what it would be like if the people who give me comments in real life tried to be as anonymous as the ones here.

SITUATION ONE

*Phone rings*
Dean: Hello?
Unknown Caller: Hey, I just wanted to tell you that I agree with you on the whole "let's kill robots" thing.
Dean: Is this Mike?
Mike: No.
Dean: Um, Okay. I never said we should kill robots, though.
Mike (in disguise): But we should, right?

SITUATION TWO

*There is a knock on the door, and Dean answers it*
Person at door in a goat mask: Hi!
Dean: Uh, Hello.
Goat Mask: I wanted to let you know that your blog is great!
Dean: Thanks, but, who...
Goat Mask: And you are wonderful. I'm so proud of you.
Dean: Mom?
Mom in Goat Mask: No. I have no son. Goodbye.

So keep it coming, anonymouses (or anonymice, if you prefer). Just know that, despite your clever disguise, I might know who you are, anyway.

Our Legless Masters

2005-09-15T11:20:00.000-07:00

We have paper towel dispensers at work that are "hands free." What that means is the machine is supposed to automatically know, by your body language and proximity, that you want some paper to dry your hands with. At which point it spews out about a foot of said paper.

Now, because machines can't actually read our minds yet (or most of them, anyway), you can probably guess that this product doesn't always work as designed. I have seen them dispense paper when no one was anywhere near. And they rarely work the way I think anyone wants them to.

The towel dispenser is an Unknown Quantity. The paper it provides is like rain for our crops. We need it, we know that it will come at some point, but we do not know when, and we're not sure that anything we do makes a difference. And so, like peoples of old (and not so old) did when confronted with such engimas, we have developed our own little rituals to somehow give us the illusion of control over the Uncontrollable. The employees here have developed bizarre little gestures and dances that they use to invoke the machine's dispensing power. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.

I have seen hopping and swaying before the box. There has been pointing, jerking, waving, and thumping. None seem to work more than any other, but they all do eventually work, if the supplicant is devoted and patient enough. Just yesterday, I saw a woman in the break room smiling and waving at the box with such friendly zeal that I was convinced she was looking at someone in the reflected metal face of the dispenser. But no. She was just trying to coax paper out.

I am not immune to this instinct, though I favor more of an "oppressive loom", rather than a less dignified wave or shake. I have to let the thing know that even though I am beholden to it for certain services, I will not be cowed by it. That, if I really wanted to, I could rip the thing from the wall and tear out its papery entrails with my bare hands.

I usually get the paper I need.

Letter to an Old Friend

2005-09-14T00:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Television,

I would like a good show to watch, please. Something with a story would be nice. Preferably a story that I haven't heard or seen at least 8 times before.

Also, I wanted to let you know that it is particularly nice to actually be shown a character's personality, rather than be told (i.e "Jessica, you're so cold and impersonal, I can see that you have a hard time forming personal relationships"). I know that that puts a little more stress on the actors and writers, but I feel like a little effort would go a long way.

And since I'm offering suggestions, I love science fiction in my programming, but please don't use those elements as shortcuts to storytelling. If you're going to have a holographic supercomputer than can analyze all materials and simulate everything, please put it in context (the year 2251, for example).

I really am a big fan, and have been for years, so anything you could do to help me out would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
-A Concerned Viewer

P.S. You know the montage sequences with rock ballad background music where no one does anything but look contemplative? Could you just put those after the credits where they won't bug me? That would sure be super.

The Gargamel Complex

2005-09-13T11:35:00.000-07:00

My three year old niece is frightened of cows. For Halloween last year she wore a cow suit - one of those cute kid ones with a holstein-patterned body and a hood with ears and horns. When her parents plopped her in front of a mirror and asked her what she was, she said "...scary...monster!"

My instinct, of course, is to get a cow suit of my own and wear it whenever I visit her house. Or at least make aggressive "moo!" noises whenever I see her. Not that her mother would be too happy about that. Last year I was at their house and the child just older (4 at the time) than the cow-stricken munchkin was refusing to brush her teeth. I told her there were nasty bugs on her teeth that she needed to get off and the only way she could do it was to use a toothbrush. She went pale and wide-eyed, slapping at her mouth as she ran to her mother in the bathroom. I guess she still has trouble with the idea that insects might be creeping out of her gums at midnight. Her mother isn't too happy about that, either. But hey, she did brush her teeth.

The weird thing is, I actually like kids. I always have, and I'm even more fond of them since having one of my own. Yet I am somehow compelled to strike fear into their tiny hearts with tales of absurd fauna. I have many other examples that I think my wife has catalogued with chagrin. One of my favorites involves educating my nephews on the existence of toe-eating garden weasels as they tromped barefoot through Nana's garden.

My son doesn't quite have the language skills yet to properly appreciate father-instilled fear and dread, but I'm sure I will soon be regaling him with tales of rabid hamster packs that seek out and maim children who whine too much. As soon as he knows what a hamster is, anyway.

Microstory Monday

2005-09-12T10:45:00.000-07:00

The Angst of the Witchfinder General

The men of the village say they cannot find any more 20 pound stones, and Goody Jacobsen has not yet confessed. The ropes on The Rack are frayed unto snapping, the wheelwright will not replace them, and the aldermen simply do not recognize the importance of having Ordeal Machines in good repair.
I just can't work under these conditions.

The Price of Water, Part II

2005-09-09T11:05:00.000-07:00

[When last we left our hero, he was tottering on the brink of purchasing water from the company drink-o-mat...]

Inserting 5 quarters (Yes. Five. For WATER.) into the apparatus yielded the expected 16 ounce bottle (Which comes out to roughly 8 dollars a day if I was to get my total quota in this fashion. If you're counting.), but was also followed by a series of *clink* noises in the coin return slot. Upon checking the slot, I discovered that the device had, in fact, refunded the entire purchase price of my water.

Now there are those among us who would simply take the money and chuckle gleefully at their good fortune, but I am stuck wondering if taking the water under such conditions is actually theft.

I mean, if I was to walk into, I don't know, Victoria's Secret, and discover it entirely vacant of sales folk and all surveillance cameras had inexplicably exploded, would I consider that good fortune? Would I shout "Woohoo!" and run out with a fistful of free lingerie? Probably not.

Is the water situation different because of the amount? Because I would only be shorting the beverage company $1.25, instead of the $125 a piece of fancy lingerie might cost? Not really, because I think I would still feel pretty shifty tucking a magazine or a comic book under my arm without paying for it. And that costs about the same.

I think the real reason is that my point of contact is a machine. If the expected mercantile exchange involves people, taking something without paying becomes a personal affront. If it's a device, and it screws up, big deal. It's a robot, and if it gives me back my money, it's its own fault. I mean, what is a machine going to do with my money, anyway? Buy electricity? Stupid robots.

So, as you can see, my real problem is not economic ethics, it's prejudice. You know, against the robot hordes.

And since I think civil rights for automatons are beyond my lifetime, well...

I took the water and the money.

And walked away chuckling.

The Price of Water

2005-09-08T11:00:00.000-07:00

I try to drink at least 104 ounces of water a day, as I've found I develop piercing headaches if I don't. The reason I get headaches when I don't drink enough water is debatable. I tend to believe that I am under constant psychic assault by powers unknown, and the minerals resident in drinking water serve to shield me from Their telepathic attacks. My wife thinks it has more to do with general bodily hydration, but that's fine. Whatever the reason, drinking water removes pain, therefore I drink water.

There are water dispensers freely available in my workplace, but the liquid they spurt cannot really be called water. I'm sure there's water in there, but there are also a number of other things. Probably liquified methane and non-sodium salts, maybe feces. I can't be sure. In short, the water tastes bad. So it makes it difficult to abide actually drinking those 104 ounces.

The water I have at home is better, and if I had good sense I would bring some with me, but even if I did, I don't own the keg it would take to contain my Daily Water Requirement.

So anyway, this is the path that brought me today to one of the beverage purchasing monoliths in my building's break room. They sell water that doesn't taste like Evil in those monoliths, along with a variety of other drinking fluids. And I intended to get some...

[What happens when Dean puts coins into the monolith!? Does it eat his money? Does it shriek obscenities at him? Does it implode violently, creating a portal into another dimension? Stay tuned, Constant Reader! This Epic of The Mundane concludes tomorrow!]

Sympathy for the Feeble

2005-09-07T11:16:00.000-07:00

My wife, son, and I have been passing through the Vale of Disease (No, not St. Louis. Jeez! What do you guys have against St. Louis, anyway?) these last several days. Meaning, of course, that we've been sick. First my 20 month old son with copious snot and a bad attitude, followed quickly thereafter by my wife with her fainting spells and hysteria (just like a good Victorian), and then me and my perpetual grumpiness, general uselessness, and a disturbing tendency to lie prone on any moderately flat surface for long periods of time.

Of course, many would say such symptoms are actually quite common to each of us even in health, but I can say that they have at least been accentuated of late.

Now I've always assumed that The Sick had pretty luxurious lives, mostly stemming from my experience staying home sick from school. I wasn't required to go to school, and was able to sleep all I wanted, watch tv, play video games, read comic books. You know, bliss.

So despite my natural tendency to judge the sickly pathetic, I was still jealous of them. Even in later years, when I was sick, there was usually someone around to help me, bathe me in pity, or just make me orange juice. But when everyone is sick, you all just sort of lay around and groan. Which can get pretty boring.

And as a parent, you can't really shirk your responsibility to care for your spawn, even if you're sick, which means you can't really relax. So life is pretty much as irksome as it always is, except you have more headaches. And you're bored. Well, more bored.

Bah.

I hate being sick.

Microstory Tuesday, because I'm not sure where Monday went.

2005-09-06T11:07:00.000-07:00

It Speaks With My Skin

This morning the welts on my chest said "I'm getting out today."
If the doctors are right, and I really do make the welts myself, I've got nothing to worry about.
But if I'm right, and the words are written from the inside, I may need some bandages later.

Lacerated Meatflaps and Dr. Zoom

2005-09-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

Does it bother anyone else that there aren't tongue bandaids? Believe me, I've tried to put normal ones on whenever I get a wound on my talking tentacle, and they just don't stick. Even tightly wrapped gauze eventually slides off. And it tastes gross, besides.

But for a soft mass that spends its day dancing a hairs breadth from gnashing, dashing, and chopping teeth, you would think there would be more options for the curing of a mangled tongue beyond just bathing it in spit.

Obviously, there is either something regeneratively salamanderish about the tongue, or there are real remedies available to medical professionals, because most peoples' tongues aren't a mass of scar tissue.

I guess such ignorance is the price I pay for not going to medical school. That, and not having that handy amphetamine addiction that helps you get so much done. I mean, sleep is such a drag.

Ah, just kidding, mein Doktor Freunds, I know you're not all meth freaks.

Besides, there are so many tasty heart-attack energy beverages available now. Why risk the prison time when you can just get your jolt from the corner store?

Merciful Brevity

2005-09-01T11:08:00.000-07:00

My keyboard is squeaking in pain every time I hit a key, and because I'm afraid I may be doing harm to a small creature living under the keys, I should keep today's entry short.

That's right, I'm that type of guy. The sweet and tender kind-to-invisible-and/or-miniscule-animals type of guy.

I don't relish the pain of others. Nope. Not me.

There's no way I would do something that would cause repeated discomfort to something small and weak, not even if I thought it was funny.

Because, you know, I'm nice.

Not cruel.

Not cruel at all.

Hmm.

It sounds like the squeak is gone now.

That's odd.

Prejudice and The Reanimated

2005-08-31T00:40:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to figure out why we, as a people, are afraid of zombies.

It makes sense that you're going to be cautious around anything that wants to eat your brain, but I think we fear them in principle. Just the idea of them is enough to make us shiver and hide.

It's weird. There are other things, things more likely than a zombie to kill or mutilate us that we don't fear.

Let's take hippos (the natural foil of the zombie) as a counterpoint. I like hippos. They're cool. They star in many of the books I read to my toddler son as he sits on my lap. I would seek out baby hippos and hug them if I thought I wouldn't immediately be trampled to death by their mother. And that's the thing. Hippos are dangerous. They're responsible for more human deaths in Africa than any other animal (except humans). That's got to be way more than the "death-by-zombie" figure.

But still we shudder at the animated dead, leaving them out of the lucrative plush toy market.

Shouldn't we be happy to see our loved ones revivified? Or, probably more likely, sad that they aren't quite the same conversationalists they were before the change? Nope. We aren't happy or sad. We're creeped out, freaked out, or screaming.

Well, I've got no problem with them, as long as they're on the other side of a stout metal door. Or in a gladiatorial pit, fighting other zombies for my amusement.

Now zombie hippos would be another matter. 3,000 pounds of angry rotting meat. That would be something to really be afraid of.

Yesiree.

Zombie. Hippos.

Free Will and My Traitorous Lungs

2005-08-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

Here's the thing: whenever I start to think about my own breathing, I discover I can't breathe at all unless I think about it. And then I'm flooded with the fear that I'm going to get distracted and suddenly suffocate via forgetfulness. Which is what is happening to me now.
Breathe.
I'm having a hard time writing because
Breathe.
I have to keep reminding myself that I need to
Breathe.
And if I get distracted for a second and forget just how long it has been since I last took a breath, I
GASP!
And then have to focus on regular
Breathe.
breathing again, which means my thoughts
Breathe.
never get too deep.
....
So, basically, it's a living nightmare.
Ultimately I know that my body will autonomously breathe, whether I think about it our not, since I regularly sleep five hours in a row and all my dreams are not about breathing.

But here comes the dilemma. Which is the greater horror: having to consciously manage all bodily systems, or to renliquish your will to an autonomous husk?

I mean, if I can breathe and my heart can beat without my even thinking about it, could my legs creep and my grip close around unsuspecting windpipes too? Probably.

Not that I have any choice, really. The cards have already been dealt, and the autonomous husk has a full house. Even when I am able to wrest control of my breathing from the unthinking beast, all it does is make me feel anxious and tense. So I guess I'll let it continue bossing me around. I can't complain about its work so far, so if it feels I need to wake up in a cornfield in the neighboring county at 4:00 AM, who am I to complain? It's probably for my own good.

Microstory Monday

2005-08-29T10:46:00.000-07:00

Indubitably Delicious
"Woah, Jimmy. I know you said this 'Crispy Critters' cereal was entirely new, but this is ridiculous."
"You don't like the burnt hair."
"No, no I don't."

Energy Weapons in the Workplace

2005-08-26T11:32:00.000-07:00

I'm not a gun person. I don't go hunting, and I never had a BB gun as a child, not that I can remember, anyway. It's possible I'm blocking out some horrible BB accident involving mass eye-putting-out, but, like I said, I don't remember.

But I've always wanted a ray gun. A laser pistol, phaser, blaster, disruptor, whatever. A hand-held weapon that spits out a concentrated beam of energy. I'll accept any kind of energy. Plasma, light, electricity...anything that's shiny and burns or vaporizes its target.

And I don't want it for the Great Power it would certainly give me over my fellow man. That would be a bonus, but I really want it as a fashion accessory. I mean, at a glance, what makes Buck Rogers Buck Rogers? You know, rather than just any other guy? Sure, he might have a jetpack and a finned helmet (both highly desirable), but what really makes the man is the ray gun. All the heroes of my childhood had ray guns. Captain Kirk, Han Solo, Starbuck, Flash Gordon, and the aforementioned Buck Rogers.

I bring this up to explain my obsession with the remote control in one of our conference rooms. It turns the ceiling mounted projector on and off, changes its video inputs and settings, basically everything you would expect such a remote to do. But it also shoots laser beams. Sure, it's supposed to be used to point out items on the projected screen during a presentation, but still. It's a laser beam.

So, obviously, whenever I'm in there, I play with it. It isn't powerful enough for my liking, in that it doesn't cut through metal or flesh, but that just means I can target more objects without fear of disintegrating them. Yesterday I trained the weapon on the ceiling, randomly targeting different tiles. Without thinking, I zapped one of the little fire extinguisher prongs, and immediately heard some kind of industrial "THUNK." The entire building was then treated to two beats of the fire alarm claxon.

Now, I don't know if my ray gun was really the cause, but that's a pretty big coincidence. I'm guessing the sprinklers didn't go off because the flash was so brief. Maybe. Like I said, I can't be sure that it was me at all. So now I'm tempted to try again, just to find out. But I won't. I'll be sitting as far away from the laser pistol as possible from now on.

I want to keep my job, after all. I'll need the money if I'm going to get that jetpack I want.

What Lies Behind: The New Larvae

2005-08-25T00:10:00.000-07:00

Something like a month ago I talked about the hobbled mutant potato bugs in my backyard. Since I posted that, my wife has undertaken a personal vendetta to exterminate the entire potato bug civilization behind our house. She sits back there with a rock in hand while our toddler plays in his sandbox. Whenever she sees a bug, she crushes it beneath the brutal weight of her stone. She estimates a death toll somewhere around 200.

And still they come.

However, now that the bugs have a natural predator (my wife), their evolution has proceeded startlingly fast. No longer will they lie stupidly on their backs when toppled, and their average size has increased about 50%.

Moreover, we have begun to discover mounds of earth appearing on the lawn. I had originally attributed these to my toddler, who loves to deposit piles of dirt in random and unlikely locations. But while idly picking at one of these heaps the other day, I discovered a tunnel beneath the outer layer of dirt. A hidden tunnel. Each one of these dirt heaps had actually been a concealed entry/exit to an underground transit system.

The tunnels themselves are about three times larger than the body circumference of the average potato bug, so they are either

a) building in anticipation of more gargantuan generations,
b) making headroom for when they begin to walk upright, or
c) made by or for some other creature that has not as yet revealed itself

I suppose it is safe to say I no longer really have a lawn, in the normal sense. The grass, never extremely healthy, has now simply become set dressing for the horror show percolating beneath the dirt.

I'm thinking of selling the rights to the Sci-Fi Channel. They love those made-for-TV bug movies. If you missed the two hour epic "Mansquito," you really ought to check it out when they show it again in a couple weeks.

Kinetic Farming and You

2005-08-24T11:07:00.000-07:00

For those of you currently looking for something larger than yourselves to fear or venerate, let me present myself.

No, no. Kidding. I can't know for certain that I'm bigger than you. Almost, but not for certain.

Anyway, let me really present my Theory of Cosmic Parasites. The TCP answers the universal query "Why am I here?" with "To power Their televisions." Them, of course, being the Cosmic Parasites in question.

Something advanced civilizations, people, or other Unclassified Entities always need are sources of power. We (humans) do. Right now we usually burn or blow things up to get it. Ideally what any power-seeking Thing wants is some kind of perpetual motion engine that spits out more X (energy, in this case) than you put into it.

So, naturally, I posit the existence of some kind of in- or semi-comprehensible being(s) that keep the Earth and its inhabitants from exploding or wasting away because the fidgetings of man are Their reactor. We wriggle, flop, flail, or walk, and They get a volt for their batteries.

I was brought to this line of thought because I was trying to figure out if I would get more electricity from strapping someone to a stationary bicycle generator (and forced them to pedal) than I would if I just drained (and stored) all of the electrical impulses from his body with some kind of death ray. It seems like I would get more from the bike. Plus, it would keep coming, if I kept feeding the rider. The food would cost some interpolated energy, but not much.

So, since we humans, in our infinitesimitude, are able to create a stationary bicycle that creates energy, why couldn't something more cosmic create a big blue marble that does the same thing?

So there you are. The Earth is the treadmill of the gods, and we are the hamsters.

At least, you know, that's what I would do if I was a cosmic being. Which I'm not.

No, really, I'm not.

Nightmare Podiatry

2005-08-23T00:19:00.000-07:00

I really hate untrustworthy feet. I think everyone of standard bodily configuration operates under certain assumptions about the function of their feet. You think that they will sit patiently below our ankles until you need them to walk, run, or kick with, and won't complain about it. It's what they're there for, apart from keeping us from bleeding to death from open wounds at the end of our legs, but a thick scab would do that just as well.

My feet have begun to get uppity. If I don't use them for longer than say, an hour or two, and then decide I need to walk any distance at all, they scream at me. It feels like my bones had slowly been re-shaping themselves into another shape while I left them alone. When those bones are wrenched back into normal alignment, well, it doesn't feel good.

Apart from being subtly enraged at such a rebellion, I do wonder what shape my feet would ultimately take if I let the bone flow continue unmolested. I mean, if I was in a coma for several months, what would I wake to find my feet had become? I'm sure it would just be some meaty chaotic mass, but if I could be assured they would transform into something cool like eagle talons, I might just let things take their course.

Plus I would have an excuse just to lie around doing nothing. I can see it now.

Wife: "Honey, could you please get your butt out of bed and do something useful?"
Me: "Sorry, no. I need to stay off my feet. I'm becoming a miraculous bird-man."

Microstory Monday

2005-08-22T11:20:00.000-07:00

The Horrible Efficiency of the Power Company

When the earthquake hit, I was in the kitchen making cookies. A ceiling beam hit my back, the refrigerator pinned my arm, and my right knee crashed through the oven's viewing glass.
I had been waiting for a rescue crew in the dark for two hours when the electricity was restored.
You'd think I'd be happy about it, but my knee feels funny, and I'm starting to smell burning meat.

The Flawed Maw

2005-08-19T11:25:00.000-07:00

Why don't teeth grow back? I currently have all my teeth (except those pesky wisdom ones), but the world is a strange and violent place, and I can imagine many circumstances where I could lose one tooth, two teeth, or pieces of several. I would feel much more comfortable wandering through an industrial manufacturing facility, for example, if I knew that all damage I received from various blows to the head by robot arms could be repaired.

Of course, now that I think about it, eyes don't grow back, either. But I don't really expect a gouged eye to grow back. I guess I just don't think about them in the same way.

I imagine most people, like me, think of teeth as either mouth-housed fingernails or extensions of their bone structure. And both nails and bones tend to repair themselves. You're actually supposed to break off(or clip, if you must) pieces of your fingernails from time to time. And I know from personal experience that a severely damaged/removed toenail will grow right back to its original state with enough time. Given, bones won't grow back if they're completely amputated (for most of us, anyway), but you can put two halves of a broken bone together and they'll at least knit themselves solid again.

But teeth, those bastard step-children of the skeletal system, get short shrift when it comes to regenerative genetics. If they break, they break. Humans are then forced to replace them with pieces of wood, plastic, lead, gold, or whatever else happens to be lying around.

Generally, it seems like the human body is a pretty clever construct, but when we ultimately have to rely on reason and tool-making to accomplish a thing as basic as eating, I don't know. It seems like one of our evolutionary engineers may have dropped the ball.

I guess I just have to cross my fingers and hope we always have a sizable population of dentists. I just couldn't call myself a man if I was forced to exist only on smoothies and various slurried meats.

The Groan of the Meeting-Laden

2005-08-18T00:14:00.000-07:00

I'm no expert on organizational communication, or, heaven forbid, group dynamics, but after going through three five hour meetings in as many days, I've developed some opinions.

Most of them have something to do with electrocution.

In my estimation, most of the problems with meetings, especially long meetings, have to do with people, and behavior modification of people seems best accomplished by electrical shock. Stimulus-response behavior modification, anyway. I'm going to assume reason just won't work, because, again, we're dealing with human beings.

My suggestion: every team should hire an unpredictable dwarf, give them a cattle prod, and let them creep about in meetings, zapping people at will.

The meetings would likely then be much shorter. So to speak.

And they would surely be more entertaining. I'm willing to risk a few volts for that alone.

Consider the Goat

2005-08-17T11:50:00.000-07:00

So I was doing a little research to find out why goat eyes look so bizarre. Because they do. Have you seen them? No mammal has eyes like that. I mean, I like goats in principle, but those eyes are weird.

And as I was scanning the little abstracts google gives you for each search result, right near the top of the list I find something like "...I decided to use goat's eyes in my portrait of Baphomet..." And I think it's some role playing game geek site, but I look down to discover the url was, alas, the Church Of The Devil (and no, I don't mean Microsoft).

What did the poor goat do to be associated with Evil, anyway? You see it everywhere in representations of incarnate evil. Goat eyes, goat legs, goat horns. I don't know of any biblical accounts, apocryphal or otherwise, where a goat led someone to their doom or ate their children or anything. Snakes, we have a story. Pigs even. I don't know.

Maybe I'm just not sufficiently educated on the origins of metaphors for evil, but I think that some monastery somewhere was having trouble with goats in their garden and one of the local serfs heard a monk say "Aye, th' visage of th' Dewill is pertly that of yon foul goats!"

And you know how those serfs are. They told their neighbors, and their neighbors told neighbors, and soon enough, the hapless goat became the recognized physical avatar of The Evil One.

Now I'm not saying goats aren't evil. They still could be. I mean, you have to be a little evil to mess with a monk's garden. I'm just saying you shouldn't automatically judge a guy if looks like a goat. Or if he happens to be wearing goat leggings and a horn hat. Maybe it's a comfort thing. It doesn't necessarily mean that he's evil.

Don't Trust the Charmin

2005-08-16T11:44:00.000-07:00

In a variety of places I've worked, I've noticed printed material left in the bathroom stalls. Sometimes these are magazines, but usually it's something more disposable that has been printed off the internet on the company printers. I assume people bring such things in to be able to have something to read in the toilet, but not have to bring Contamination back to their desks.

The reading matter left behind is usually stuffed in the seat liner container or otherwise outside of the direct path of feces or urinal spray, possibly from some bizarre altruism on the part of the carrier, anticipating the next occupant's desire to read riveting details on the nature of networking protocols or the subtle art of medical codebooks.

So, basically, the text left behind is usually way too tedious for me to tempt the Microbe Gods and actually handle the paper with my bare hands.

Today's literary leftovers had something to do with disease transmission, from the bit of text that was visible without braving the brown smear on the upper-left corner of the page. What I saw, and I'm paraphrasing here since I didn't actually pull the thing out, was something like this: "...multitude of methods to actively distribute parasites and plague in urban environments, including workplace telephones, water fountains, groceries, and high turnover toiletries..."

So I'm thinking, what exactly are "high turnover toiletries?" The only thing I could come up with as I pondered upon the porcelain bucket was toilet paper. Maybe toothpaste, but as I sat staring at the ragged white roll ensconced in the stall wall, I couldn't get the thought of toilet paper out of my head.

Someone thought plague distribution by toilet paper was a big enough deal to write an article about it.

Here I always thought toilet paper was my friend. A pleasant utility of the modern age to promote hygiene and prevent plague. But someone somewhere (quite possibly my workplace), was considering using these innocuous cottony sheets as a method to insert worms and viruses into my body.

And at about this point in my reasoning I needed to wipe.

So after a thorough examination of each sheet before I used them, I found myself getting back to my desk, opening up google, and searching for a clean electronic copy of the article in question (though I wonder what our IT people will think of my "'parasitic worms' +toilet" query if they are monitoring internet searches).

Anyway, nothing really useful or interesting came up. Even within the highly entertaining context of an epidemic of colon-dwelling worms, lab reports and statistical analyses are still boring. And no one really focused on the whole paper delivery system that I feared.

So perhaps my fears are unjustified. Perhaps we can all still comfortably wipe without danger of infestation.

But I'd check my toilet paper for tiny little eggs, if I was you.

Microstory Monday

2005-08-15T10:35:00.000-07:00

Secret Origin
Five years ago I learned a secret from an Inuit Shaman.
The hearts of men hold their power, he said, and by consuming them, one might gain that power.
Today I fight crime with the strength of ten men, and I call myself Captain Justice.

Raining Hats and Hogs

2005-08-12T00:53:00.000-07:00

And now a brief analysis of the strange animal idioms I've actually heard (or read) in the workplace:

1. "Tread on a scared cow"
Possible Origin Idiom: "Sacred Cow"
Possible Intended Meaning: Breaching a touchy subject, altering something inviolate
Implied Meaning: Walking atop a frightened bovine

2. "Like an 80 pound gorilla in the middle of the room"
POI:"The elephant in the middle of the room," "800 pound gorilla"
PIM:Avoiding/ignoring a big issue/problem everyone is aware of
IM: Something possibly disruptive and probably adorable, like a baby ape.

3. "The Pink Elephant in the middle of the room"
POI: See #2
PIM: See #2
IM: The issue being ignored is the speaker's gross alcoholism.

4. "We want to avoid escape goats."
POI: "Scapegoat"
PIM: Person used as locus for all blame
IM: It is important to hide from all goats that may have at one point been used to dig underground tunnels from prisons and war zones.

5. "Loaded for Pear" (Or "Pare" or "Pair")
POI: "Loaded for Bear"
PIM: Prepared for any difficult opposition
IM: Armed with weapons appropriate for the murder of fruit

6. "He got his gander up"
POI: "Get your dander up"
PIM: Make angry
IM: He woke up his goose, or something else particularly bawdy.

Others I've heard but won't analyze, because I fear all this is growing boring:
"Let me put a bug in your hair about this," "A Hog and Pony Show" (Which I'd love to see!), and "Parking up the wrong tree."

The Grotto of My Head

2005-08-11T11:52:00.000-07:00

So today I am dealing with a Static Auricular Pond. Water somehow crept into my right ear when I was in the shower and is refusing to leave. I know of no real effective way to deal with this malady, and though it is annoying, I'm not about to engage a doctor visit that will result in nothing but snickering at the nurse's station.

Unfortunately, it seems like everything you might do to get that pesky water out makes you look like a crazy person. What I assume is the preferred method, turning your head to one side and banging your fist against your skull, is a particularly worrying sight. I did try it several times, though. No luck.

In looking on the internet for other remedies I might be willing to try, the only stuff I could really find had to do with what happens after the pond is left standing for a while. Any stagnant pool, even those inside your head, grows bacteria. This causes pain, and while what I read didn't say it, I'm sure it would would soon infect your brain, starting a downward spiral ending in madness and death.

Despite the inevitable, I went to work and spent the morning with the feeling of having a faulty invisible earmuff strapped to my head, occasionally trying to work the water free by force of will alone.

But in visiting my local sandwich shop for lunch, I was given an idea by the straws in their Condiment Nook. If I could somehow bend a straw into a semicircle while keeping airflow intact, I could suck the vile lagoon out!

While sitting in my workplace parking lot, I carfully bent and twisted a few straws, experimenting to find the technique that both created the proper curvature and allowed the greatest suction. Once I had something that seemed sufficient, I stuck one end of the straw in my right ear and the other in the corner of my mouth. Then I began to suck. I didn't relish the idea of actually tasting my liquid invader (especially in his earwax suit), but enough was enough. No results were forthcoming on my first try, so I redoubled my efforts, clapping a hand to each orifice. As I really began straining, I noticed something in the corner of my eye, outside the car. The woman who sits two cubicle rows down from me was standing five feet away, just about to get into her car. She was staring at me with an expression of confusion, disgust, and maybe fear. When she saw that I saw her, she immediately got into her car and drove away.

The woman in question isn't on my team, so I don't have any real reason to talk to her. She clearly thinks I'm a disturbing freak, and the debatable truth of that aside, there's no real acceptable way to explain what she saw. "Yeah, hey, I noticed you saw me sucking bacteria from my head. Those drink straws are a real drag, aren't they?" No, there's nothing I could really say. So now I'm just going to pass her in the hall occasionally, avoiding eye contact and trying not to take her shudder personally.

And the real bite of it is I didn't even get anything sucked out. No water. I'm beginning to think there might be Something Else in there.

Excuse me sir, but you have a robot on your face.

2005-08-10T00:02:00.000-07:00

I have always been a fan of All Things New and Wonderful. I am fascinated and excited whenever I catch news of some new technology that could make my life that much more like the year 2000 as seen from 1965. I would much rather own a three-wheeled car powered by the sun than have a Humvee. And its not so much about the environment, though that's a plus. It's about having a futurecar. If there was a Hummer Hovercraft Edition, it would move to the top of my "unnecessary things I want" list, despite its 2.5 MPG.

Until recently, the idea of a wireless bluetooth Ear Thing for my cell phone was appealing. It seemed like it would be cool to be able to talk on the phone and still have both hands free to type every word spoken for later reference.

But have you seen those Ear Things? I mean, actually on a person? It's very sad. Bulky hunks of plastic with a constantly flashing blue light. It looks like nothing less than a child's Borg costume from Halloween 1998. And I see self-conscious software developers and crisp sales executives marching about, probably trying to project significance, wearing these abominations. When I see these people parading their shame I get that wincing feeling you experience when watching an actor really blow it in a play. You know, embarrassed for them.

It is odd that I do feel that way, though. I normally derive a certain amount of glee from the ridiculousness of Man. I can only assume it's because I identify with those poor clowns-in-ignorance. Because I'm just one pocket protector away from wearing such an Ear Beetle myself. That, as absurd as I think it is when Wearers tell me they keep their Ear Thing on all the time "because it's just so comfortable," a part of me thinks Really? Why would he lie about comfort? Maybe it is cool, after all. I mean, I'm a Star Trek fan. What's so wrong with looking like the Borg?

The Lost Art of Masculine Millinery

2005-08-09T00:59:00.000-07:00

I've never been a hat person. Even as a youngster, what baseball I played I did bare-headed. During those bleak years between 21 and 24 as I grew progressively more bald, I did attempt to become a cap person, as I feared my exposed pate might frighten or disgust those PYTs I was trying to impress.

It didn't take, though. I found it was easier to shave my head and pretend I was a skinhead than to tolerate a constant skull-sitter.

I was never a sunglasses person, either, spending what brief moments I had exposed to solar radiation with my eyes unshielded. But now, I couldn't live without them. If I must endure high sun and I don't have my sunglasses, I prefer to navigate the out-of-doors with my eyes closed. A little dangerous, but I like to think it increases the sensitivity of my other senses. Soon, I will be able to tell if people are lying just by listening to their heartbeat. And fight crime in a devil suit.

Anyway...my point was going to be that if a personal accessory I once found awkward and undesirable is now indispensable, maybe there are others. Maybe I should start wearing hats. I am bald, after all. Perhaps being hatless is contributing to the slow roasting of my brain, and my increasing tendency toward paranoia has nothing to do with the people listening to all my conversations.

Unfortunately, the only hat I've seen lately that I actually liked was on a bus driver in the Virgin Islands. It was a fairly large stovepipe-type hat that looked to be made of black leather. It was very cool, though I have the sneaking suspicion that it required a large quantity of dredlocks to keep its healthy cat-in-the-hat shape. And even if I started growing now, there's no way I could grow enough hairmass. My scalp is dreadlock-impaired, alas.

I'm currently thinking about derbies or bowler hats, but no one makes good ones since Billingsworth and Co. burned down in the Boxing Day Fire of 1859.

So until such time as I discover a worthy shroud for my magnificent gleaming noggin, I will be looking into the overlooked utility of capes and spurs.

Microstory Monday

2005-08-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

The Day After My Heart Attack

Nobody talked to me at work today, which is fine. I'm used to people not knowing I exist. But now I come home at the end of the day, and there's a body in my bed. A dead body.
And he's wearing my special tiger pajamas.

L'enfer est des personnes loutres

2005-08-05T00:49:00.000-07:00

Jean Paul Sartre, one of my favorite little French madmen, once said (or wrote, but I bet he said it, too) "Hell is other people." And he said it in French, of course, which automatically makes it more disturbing.

In any case, it's something I've always thought. (But apparently you have to put the thought into an existential play to get any kind of props for it.)

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't hate people. I like people. I just know myself well enough to realize that things might grow to be particularly infernal if I had to be around them all the time. You know, "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and all that.

So, despite the fact that little Jean Paul is a French madman, I can still see his point. With the possible exception of certain experiments I should not know about, people are not ants. We are not bees. We are born alone and we die alone. By virtue of biology alone, we are discrete creatures of solitude. We do not naturally have a community mind, and if science fiction has taught us anything, bad things happen when we try to make one.

And because absurd metaphors (and invisible segues, apparently) are my Prozac, let me say that I feel other people are like clothes. They are sometimes fun, sometimes obnoxious, occasionally necessary, and culturally expected. But clothes aren't part of who you are. Or they shouldn't be, anyway. Clothes serve a purpose. I like clothes. Some clothes I like better than others. But if I felt like I had to be in them ALL THE TIME, I would start to hate them.

That, and my bikini area would never get fully clean.

So I think of those poor souls who feel required to have someone around them all the time just to be happy, and equate them to "nevernudes," those quirky folk who have never been seen naked by spouse, neighbor, or doctor. I'm not sure where the motivation to be constantly clothed comes from, but I think shame has something to do with it.

So is that the case with the "everfolked," those people who can't stand to be alone? Are they ashamed of themselves? Does solitude force introspection which is too frightening to embark upon? Are they so filled with self-loathing that they cannot abide a table for one? I think so.

But then all this could simply be a justification for the time I need alone to complete my Manifesto. I can't very well posit The Downfall of Man with other people looking over my shoulder.

Oh no. I need to be alone for that. Those prying eyes are always judging, judging, judging...

Consequences of Extreme Conferencing

2005-08-04T00:17:00.000-07:00

In my office, our conference rooms have clear plastic "sheaths" on the walls, ostensibly to hold announcements. The only thing that has ever been in the one in the main conference room my team uses is an outline of "Conference Room Etiquette." The thing consists of a medium sized list of dos and donts with a picture of a happy little garbage can with arms at the bottom. The whole thing essentially equates to "Keep The Room Clean." No one ever reads the thing. People tend to keep the conference room clean anyway, but no one reads the etiquette sheet.

So, several weeks ago, I changed it.

I duplicated the entire thing fairly poorly, with a different font, and a different happy garbage can. I kept most of the list intact, but added:

Do not leave vomit on the conference table
and

Human waste in the carpet should be removed using water. NO DRY CLEANUPS!

No one has noticed. The sign is at eye-height for a 5'2" person, right by the door. Everyone probably looks at it as they're leaving. But they don't read it, I guess. Or they think it's relatively normal to vomit on corporate conference tables - just frustrating when it isn't cleaned up afterwards.

I'm tempted to escalate both the messaging ("THIS ROOM RESERVED FOR BLOOD VENGEANCE") and the proliferation of the etiquette sheet, but experience has shown that such a plot gone awry is a clear path to getting fired. A joke that only I would laugh at probably isn't worth it.

Probably.

Dreaming of Electric Sheep

2005-08-03T00:40:00.000-07:00

Ever since reading "My Robot Buddy" when I was eight, I have dreamed of having just such a Buddy. A Robot Buddy. You know, someone that would keep me company that I could kick around and would do all my chores for me. A helper. A servant.

Okay, a slave. I wanted a Robot Slave. I still do, really.

My computer has sort of filled that niche, but it doesn't have legs (yet), and it doesn't really do anything on its own, you know, not being self-aware and all.

And there's the ethical dilemma. For a Robot Slave to be truly useful, it has to be self aware (sentient, whatever), and at the point an entity becomes self-aware, I don't feel comfortable having it as a slave. So I'm back to the whole "buddy" thing.

Which, really, I've grown out of.

So here's the trick - getting a self-aware being(in this case, a robot) to do your bidding of its own free will. You know, without the threat of Electro-Magnetic Pulse or electrical starvation hanging over its metal head. To have it serve you because, I don't know. Because it loves you.

Now, I don't want to limit myself to just one cybernetic acolyte (and because it is probably illegal somehow), it couldn't be romantic love. I'm thinking more of the adoration of a cult toward its leader. That's what I want. A Robot Cult that serves me unquestioningly.

An army of metal men who live only to cut my grass, clean my house, cook my food, and build underground bunkers. Perfect.

Except I really don't know how to make robots. And the only kind you can buy are those vacuum cleaner Roombas. I'd feel pretty ridiculous entertaining other geniuses in my lair with nothing but a horde of humming floor-discs to do my bidding.

And there's no way an Aibo could build me an underground bunker. Not even if I had, like, fifty of them.

The Aroma of Ruin

2005-08-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

Unless you are some sort of hybrid Dog-Man, you should not be able to track people by scent alone. It's wrong. If you can track someone by scent, your ad-hoc prey STINKS.

You'd think this would be rare, but it isn't. In nearly every place I've worked, I've been able to detect the path of someone's progress through the building by sense of smell alone. Yah.

And it isn't body odor. I don't think I've smelled persistent body odor (the kind you could track someone with) since high school. It's perfume. Or cologne. Or maybe aftershave, I don't know.

And while I have been known, in my single days, to cover up the stench of rotting furniture with air freshener, it was only because the prospect of daily (or even weekly) couch-washing was too daunting for me to consider. In the Hierarchy of Household Horror, the hassle of sofa baths trumps the unpleasant smell of a thousand roses drowned in rubbing alcohol. At least for me.

On the other hand, most developed countries have a well-established infrastructure to support daily washing of the human body. All of the apartments I've ever rented have always come pre-equipped with some sort of person-sized enclosure that sprays water. Soap is cheap, plentiful, and comes in many varieties. Water, as a utility, is cheap.

Plus, 70% of the earth is water. You can find your own.

So, with all this cultural and material support, you obviously have to CHOOSE to stink, either by conscious rejection of the whole bathing idea, or by opting to slather on industrially produced stench. So doing this means something. You're saying something about yourself. About your issues.

I mean, when we see angry little five-foot-tall men scrambling to get into their enormous "hemi-equipped" pickup trucks, can you really avoid the obvious psychological conclusion?

It's the same thing. To me, when I'm able to smell someone's purchased odor-grease from a distance, it is the olfactory equivalent of hearing them constantly mutter "...not clean, I'm still not clean...I'm so dirty...so so dirty..."

Disturbing.

My recommendation? If you are compelled to make yourself smell like the unholy offspring of a spice rack and a chemical plant, try wearing a t-shirt for a while that says "No, really, I am pretty," instead. See if it addresses the deeper need to inflict your shuddering psyche on others.

If that doesn't work, a bold-faced tattoo of "UNCLEAN" on your forehead might do the trick.

Microstory Monday

2005-08-01T10:52:00.000-07:00

The Curious Incident of the Goat in the Nighttime
I am awakened at three in the morning by bleating from inside my closet.
Sleepily staggering to the door, I slide it open, finding a freshly amputated goat.
It's bleeding over everything, and appears to have pissed on my church pants.
"See, Gordon?" I hear my Mom call from outside my bedroom door. "You should hang up your clothes."

Why I Don't Wander the Woods

2005-07-30T00:55:00.000-07:00

In overhearing a coworker Behind the Cubicle Wall discussing his recent vaction in the Sierra Nevadas, I was struck with the realization that I may be blind to transcendent beauty.

And before my wife jumps on this one, let me say I blame her. You know, in the way you come into a building from a bright winter day, the sun reflecting off the snow, to discover everything dark. The feeble flourescents cannot compete, and it is almost as if the lights are off. Because I live with transcendent beauty, I am unobservant of lesser light. I hear my coworker ranting about the magnificence of the natural landscape, and I see the pictures he's taken, but, I don't know. Eh. Doesn't do anything for me. I can appreciate a natural wonder in principle, but I'm not struck on that visceral level.

I have my transcendence at home. Why give up easy access to indoor plumbing and refrigerated food to seek it in the wild?

Natural Resources

2005-07-29T11:50:00.000-07:00

The other day I was cradling my head in my hands in a pathetic attempt to block out the horrors of the world, and I noticed that my fingers smelled like metal. Not gunmetal, exactly, or coin metal, which both seem to carry an accompanying odor of machine oil or grime, but like freshly milled iron.

Not that you mill iron, exactly, or even that I've smelled such a thing, but that was the impression I got.

So I'm thinking that maybe I finally woke up a cyborg, but iron is pretty old-school, and everything about me was as human as it ever was. I had been bleeding from my fingernails (for reasons I won't detail here) earlier, so I knew I still had blood in my veins, and I wasn't hearing any whirring noises as I moved, so I searched for other explanations.

I won't bore you with the variety of possible causal factors I came up with before I settled on the aformentioned handblood. It seems obvious to me now, of course, but I hadn't washed my hands after my gore-seeping. I just sort of let the wounds coagulate as the excess blood dripped into the garbage. Yeah, yeah, it's gross, I know. But blood, especially blood fresh from the wound, seems cleaner than most things you might find on your hands. Unless you're carrying plague or something. But I'm not. So far as I know.

Anyway, all that aside, the point I wanted to make is that blood is rife with metal. I guess we sort of all know that from biology class, what with hemoglobin and such, but I never thought that there was a high enough percentage in there to actually make my blood-stained hands smell like iron.

And so I'm thinking...if there's that much, could I mine it? You know, extract it for the industrious use of Man? I don't know much about mining, and it seems like access to iron mines might be difficult to come by, but blood is everywhere. And I mean, how cool would it be to smelt a sword with iron you mined from your own blood?

Well, I think it would be cool.

Unfortunately, a bit of research has shown me that the iron content of a single body's blood isn't really high enough to support an amateur weapons smithy. Maybe a tiny letter opener every other year, but that's about it.

For the broadsword I really want, I would need more people than just me. You know. Donors.

And it would all be strictly voluntary, I swear.

Molar Nubbins

2005-07-28T11:28:00.000-07:00

I heard somewhere that the muscles in the jaw are the strongest in the human body, second only to the Mighty Uterus.

If this is in fact the case, I wonder about those poor liminal babies being compressed into existence by a muscle stronger than something that can crack bones. It's a good thing those little suckers are so rubbery.

Anyway, since we're speaking of cracking bones, I can only imagine that is why our jaws are as strong as they are and our teeth are as hard as they are. You know, to be able to crack bones with them. Evolutionarily speaking, I mean. (Or anthropologically speaking, if the "e-word" conjures naught but visions of unholy Ape Men)

I imagine the ability is there because ancient man enjoyed the tasty marrow hidden inside the bones of beasts and enemy tribesmen. They needed to be able to crack the bones to get their juicy treat, and their teeth served the purpose. I mean, I assume this is the origin of our species' supernatural maw strength, because I know I don't eat anything that requires the force of several hundred pounds per square inch to effectively chew. And if I did, I know both my wife and my dentist would not be happy about it.

However, now that I think about it, I do tend to enjoy filling a beverage up with ice cubes with the express purpose of crushing the haughty blocks into whimpering chips with the strength of my indomitable choppers.

And, well, my wife and my dentist aren't happy about it.

I read somewhere that chewing ice was a stress response, which I might have believed applied to me ten years ago.

Nowadays I'm more inclined to believe it is my body's way of telling me I'm not eating enough fresh bone marrow.

Because I'm not.

Not nearly enough.

A Pepper Too

2005-07-27T11:56:00.000-07:00

Like most people, I want things. Preferably free things. Like a fool, I enter online contests and get nothing for my efforts except more spam. Dr. Pepper bottle lids accumulate in my workplace "break room," and I scavenge them, hobo-style, for the little codes they shelter on the inside. I seem to have no problem spending time logging on to the Dr. Pepper website to enter the codes in hopes of being awarded a free Mini Cooper. But if I had to spend money to do it, I wouldn't.

It took me about ten minutes to get an account at the Dr. Pepper site, decipher the codes on the lid, and enter them in (to discover I was not, as I've always suspected, a winner). If I was required to spend a sixth of my hourly salary to discover the same sad truth, I just wouldn't do it. Too risky.

Weird thinking, though. If I run out of money, I can always make more money. If I run out of time, well, I'm dead.

I severely judge people (in silence, of course, since I am both polite and frightened of reprisal) who waste their money in pointless endeavors like pyramid schemes, gambling, or boating. I, however, will happily spend half an hour trying to get a paper clip to float midway between two magnets.

Or writing a blog. Eh.
Let's see...at contractor's rates, I just paid $10 for the privilege to write this.

Bah.

Stuff that bugs me for no good reason

2005-07-26T11:22:00.000-07:00

Wearing your glasses on the top of your head (unless you are developmentally disabled)
"It's All Good"
Anklets
Anything hanging on your belt that isn't alive (pagers, phones, dead monkeys, etc.)
Toe Rings
"Experts"
Carbs (No, not "Carbohydrates." I love those.)
Wine
Parties
"LOL"
Manga
Mouth Breathing
Cutesy/Trendy/Slang names that do not shorten or otherwise ease verbal reference (i.e. "Mickey D's")
Cutesy/Trendy/Slang names.
The apostrophe
The telephone
Tattoos not on the skull, fingertips, or soles of the feet.
Body piercing (yes, earlobes, that means you, too)
Two or more people talking at once
Using "text" as a verb

Oh yes, the list could go on, but the natural disgust one feels (or should feel) regarding public catharsis has flared up, and I must slink away.

Microstory Monday

2005-07-25T10:51:00.000-07:00

Security System
I open the door to my darkened home, and to the familiar feeling that someone is hiding inside.
"Hello," I say, and more ridiculously, "I know you're in here."
It's childish, but saying the words makes me feel more secure.
There is a pause, and then I hear a whisper:
"Yes, but do you know where in here I am?"

Spiky Haired Devils

2005-07-22T11:16:00.000-07:00

A sense of humor is developed through personal experience, not the least of which is emotional trauma, but a big part of it, I imagine, is based on the terms(metaphors, whatever) people learn to use to define reality.

So, TV, basically. At least for me and most of my generation. Movies too. Popular culture generally. I think there is a window, maybe between the ages of 4 and 12 (which would be '76 to '84 for me) where media exposure helps form those building blocks for whatever sense of humor you have (if you have one) when you're older. There are things that I find funny that my Mother (and farther afield still, my Mother-in-law) just won't get. The gap isn't that big, since her formative media and mine were fundamentally based on the same culture, but it's still there.

But I fear my son may develop a sense of humor completely alien to mine because of Imperialist Japan.

"Oh no!" you say. "That all ended with World War II!"
Hah! Have you seen children's programming lately?
Pokemon, Digimon, Xiaolin Showdown, and the horror that is Yu-Gi-Oh! The list goes on, especially if you have cable.

I can forgive the art, barely, but good heavens, have you paid attention to the dialogue and storytelling? It's more than bad. I can deal with bad. That old Fantastic Four cartoon was incredibly bad. But what we have today is bad and insane! It's not that it is extreme or fantastic, which it often is, it's that it makes no sense on some fundamental level.

But perhaps it does, somehow, make sense to the children. And will to my son, once he is old enough to form words. It will warp his little mind into patterns that are surreal and unintelligible to his Superfriends-era father.

Alas, the father-son relationship will disintegrate, and he will seek understanding elsewhere.

Curse you, Nipponese Media Monster! You destroy my family!

An Application to Python's Ministry

2005-07-21T00:06:00.000-07:00

I walk funny. I don't deny it. It's taken me a while to realize this, but after several winters of looking back upon snowy footprints that appear to have been made by a gargantuan duck with a broken leg, I suppose I must face facts. And the thing of it is, I don't really think my unique gait has anything to do with physical mutation. I mean, we've all seen those poor souls of indeterminate disability who lumber along in varying degrees of Quasimoditude. I think we're all pretty sure that results from a physical issue.

I guess it's possible the curve of my spine makes my feet "duck-out" a little by default, but I can walk like a normal person if I concentrate. Or at least make my footprints appear as if they were made by a standard parallel-foot human being. It doesn't hurt for me to walk that way, I'm not bending bones or twisting ligaments. It just takes too much mental effort, and I mostly don't mind giving an impression of lumbering bulk. Plus, when I'm walking with a standard foot configuration, I get the unpleasant feeling that I might be "mincing." Which is worse, somehow, in my opinion.

It is my belief that everyone's walk (and walk preferences) lie somewhere on the continuum between the Saunter and the Mince, with both ends of the spectrum not usually being something you want to witness. There is a guy at work who regularly appears out of nowhere to mince in the hallways (I'm still considering the possibility he is a ghost, since I never see him at a desk or interacting with anyone). Seems like a nice enough guy, but I've never talked to him. And yet, I have a negative opinion of him. You know. Because of the mincing.

And on the other side, while I am a Saunterine myself, I can't count the number of times I've had to wait for a pedestrian to plod across the road when a standard walk would have enabled me to proceed much sooner. Not that I really needed those extra thirty seconds, but still. It bugs.

So there you go. If you were looking for yet another way to objectify, classify, and generally de-humanize the people around you, use the Hale Gressology Scale, with 5 degrees on either side. I am an S-3, and I don't want any of you mincing freaks anywhere near me.

A Bathroom Full of Bundies

2005-07-20T11:13:00.000-07:00

I have discovered that the workplace bathroom is a bubble universe. The loose unacknowledged consensus of perception and social order that defines our current non-bathroom universe simply does not exist in the public toilet.

I should probably clarify that I'm talking about the male version. I have no experience to comment on female bathrooms.

Anyway, here's why people are different in the John Stables:
In the western culture I am familiar with, there is no forum for social interaction whilst purging waste. There are the occasional chatters-at-the-urinal, but they are clearly freaks. So we live these parts of our lives in solitude. The public bathroom thrusts us into a bizarre quasi-communal environment with no real contextual social rules, and no real way to learn them. Obvious things that creep into the realm of common human decency, like, say, smearing feces on the stall walls, are hopefully understood. But the frequency with which I have encountered pools of urine on the floor and coating the toilet seat in workplace bathrooms is frightening and indicative of how lawless this outhouse universe is.

Not all signs of social asynchronicity are this obvious, though. I, personally, prefer a grunt-free environment. Others, apparently, have no sense of noise pollution. Also, and I suppose I shouldn't care (and wish I didn't notice), but I feel that people should wipe after defecating. And more than just once. I know that how clean an exit your waste has varies, but By All The Saints in Heaven, can you really get away without wiping? Yugh.

Moreover, I would prefer not to hear or feel the vibrations of the wiping in a neighboring stall. More than once I have been assaulted by the shockwaves of excessively vigorous wiping. Even if you weren't just smearing the crap around, it sure sounds like it would hurt. Again, yugh.

And of course there is the Legion of The Fetid Hand. Those that opt to sally forth from the stall and urinal back to their desks with nary a rinse.
I have seen with my own eyes a vigorous wiper leave his stall, approach the sink, remove a comb from a pocket, moisten said comb (but not the hand holding it), refresh his 'do, and walk out.

The horror. The horror.

And so I am led to believe these people are sociopaths. I'm no alienist, but I would say sociopathy is basically the inability to integrate external moral and ethical structures into one's psyche. Since there isn't a socially communicated ethical code about public bathroom behavior, what is acceptable is determined by internalized concepts of right and wrong. If those don't exist, as it appears they often don't, civilization collapses. Chaos then reigns in the loo, and the next thing you know you're playing fecal baseball and bowl-bathing.

What Lies Behind

2005-07-19T11:07:00.000-07:00

There is a civilization of isopods in my backyard. Little black bugs that look like one centimeter long alien armadillos. I have always called them potato bugs, but I think that may be a regional designation. Anyway, I've been familiar with these bugs for many a year, and have always had a pretty positive opinion of them because:

1) they don't bite me, and
2) they transform into armored spheres when threatened.

I still like them in principle, but there is something wrong about the batch living in my backyard. First off, there are too many. Growing up in a rural environment between my sixth and ninth years, I naturally found myself rooting around in the dirt fairly often, and in my rootings, would occasionally encounter said bugs. If memory serves, I would estimate about one potato bug per square meter. Maybe less.

Now, my current backyard really is a back "yard." It's small. The non concrete-covered portion is probably about 3 square meters. And we've got about 50 of the little squirming buggers. Moreover, these particular potato bugs are, well, retards. If you poke at one, flipping it over on its back, it will lay there, squiriming, probably until it dies. It might try to roll up into a ball, maybe, but it will fail. So. Not only is the bug failing to perform its primary defensive function, it also has no capability to right itself if on its back. Truly an embarrassment to all arthropods, everywhere.

I can only conclude that my wife and I have unwittingly created some kind of unnatural ecosystem behind our home. We have fostered a civilization populated solely by idiots and the mad. If you cannot count on a potato bug to transform itself into an armored ball, what can you count on? Nothing. How can I be sure these lunatic bugs will not begin to favor the taste of human flesh? Or start some kind of doomsday cult? Or develop a group mind? I can't be sure. I can't be sure of anything.

Microstory Monday

2005-07-18T10:06:00.000-07:00

Haberdasher
That man with the long black hair who worked at the record store was murdered last night. Poor guy. The entire top of his head was removed, and he was left to rot in a ditch. So sad.
In happier news, I have a cool new hat.

The Lament of the Ogrish Man

2005-07-15T12:14:00.000-07:00

When I was in college, after witnessing a particularly zealous undertaking of "Take Back the Night" involving roving gangs of women with torches and baseball bats, I resolved to make an effort to minimize any fear or anxiety I might unknowingly inflict on the fairer sex.

Walking about campus, I noticed that if ever I happened to be going the same direction as a young woman, especially if she was alone, her body language and expression indicated to me that she felt she was being pursued. In such a circumstance, I would usually change my speed to an uncomfortably slow walk so that she could outdistance me easily. Often, I would take roundabout lengthy paths to my destination in an effort to avoid "following" someone.

Now I was never sure exactly why I received a default label of "creepy" or "dangerous." I feel like a nice, friendly guy. I've always been larger than most people, but not "Aieee! A giant!" big. I even thought that getting a little older, pudgier, and balder would give me a more "lived-in" look, and would thus be more comfortable. No luck.

I work on the third floor of a building, and when I leave for lunch, I must pass the elevators to get to the stairs (which I diligently favor in hopes of reining in the pudginess). Quite often, there will be a woman (not anyone in particular, this happens with everyone) waiting for the elevator, and I smile meekly as I pass her on the way to the stairs. Without fail, she responds with an expression of thinly veiled horror at the thought I might actually take the elevator with her. Or grab her and throw her down the stairs or something. I'm not kidding. I mean, it could be just a reaction to my hideousness. I'm sure I might act the same if someone with seeping open sores all over their face approached me. But I really don't think I'm scream-out-loud hideous. Plain, at worst. Is there such a thing as Anti-Charisma? Maybe I have that.

Now, as I decide whether to seriously consider a healthier diet, I need to determine which is scarier: A 280 pound slightly unhealthy monster, or a 240 pound healthy one. I don't want to give up my Grilled Stuft Burritos if it will only serve to make me more terrifying.

In Our Midst

2005-07-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

We're in the preliminary stages of integrating two teams at my work, and so I am beginning to see unfamiliar interlopers in our meetings. This isn't really a problem, and it seems like a good business decision, but here's the thing: one of the new people creeps me out. This isn't because of an awkward personality (which seems to be the most common workplace horror), but because of the way It looks and moves. The visiting fiend might appear to be a regular person, but I think it's Something Else wearing a skin suit. A skin suit two sizes too big. So not fat, exactly. Baggy.

But that isn't all.

There are probably a lot of people whose flesh is over-affected by the Earth's gravity. You know, like old people (this Thing appears to be about 35). But our Visitor also looks to have absolutely no natural muscular tension. Limbs move, but when they reach their intended destination, all effort appears to cease, and the structure collapses. The movements aren't slow or lazy, just, I don't know, rubbery. Like the way you might imagine something without a spine might move. I know I would prefer lazy movement, rather than the twitchy flopping that It passes off as motility.

And nobody seems to notice this but me.

For the sake of decorum, I try to avert my eyes and wipe the expression of horror from my face, but I am not completely successful. Until I have proof, I will have to behave as if all is as it should be, keeping my eyes open for anything strikingly grotesque or uncanny. Only then I will be able to expose It to all with a pointed finger and a stout call of "Behold!"

It's Not About the Corpse

2005-07-13T11:29:00.000-07:00

As a child, I used to like to go to the meat section of the grocery store and poke the plastic-wrapped fish in the eye. I think it was the "squishability" I enjoyed. There wasn't really anything else (especially in the grocery store) that offered the same tactile experience.

I imagine poking anything in the eye might offer a similar feeling, but people and beasts alike aren't particularly willing to let you stick your finger in their eye for fun. And conventional western morality being what it is, fish are about the only dead-things-with-a-head that a young boy might encounter.

Once I approached my teen years, I began to notice how uncomfortable my eye-poking tended to make those who observed it, which I found particularly funny. I started to have staring contests with the fish, and would punish their inevitable victory with a poke in the eye.

It's been a while since my last eye-poke. I'm not even sure they have fish heads in my local market anymore. Maybe the world has moved on.

We can't really change who we are, though. There is a large dead bird, a pigeon I think, in the parking lot at my workplace that has been there since Monday. If I can find the right stick, I may make subtle chirping noises while I poke at it.

If anyone's watching. People have to be watching.

Foiled Again

2005-07-12T11:10:00.000-07:00

A little loo lady update...today I attempted to foil Their insidious plans and go to the bathroom at an irregular time (the time being *all* that was irregular, at least for today).
So there I was, settling in, reading a scanned Batman comic from 1993 that I somehow happened upon through perfectly legitimate means, when...

KnockKnock.
Was that what I think it was?
KnockKnock.
No. It couldn't be!
"Somebady Hier?"

Yes, a full two hours early, the Lurker was at the threshold.
So I finished up quickly.
I swear, They're watching me.

Microstory Monday

2005-07-11T10:30:00.000-07:00

My goal is to produce a bit of fiction every week, though not for any particular reason beyond my own edification. I don't have a whole lot of patience, so I'll be keeping it between 3 and 8 sentences.

The Natural Enemy of the Butterfly
I feel a hot sting in my abdomen as the anesthesia begins to fade.
"Did it work?" I ask. "Is it in?"
The surgeon furrows his brow and glances downward.
"We got it in, Mr. Jacobs," he says, pulling off his facemask.
"But it isn't going to be happy when it wakes up."

Be The Spoon

2005-07-08T13:33:00.000-07:00

I have long been plagued (blessed) with the tendency (compulsion) to mentally prepare myself for horrible event turnings. Which is to say, I already have relevant jokes in place to tell in the years following the accidental severing of my left hand.

In any case, my wife seems to believe this tendency is some sort of handicap, since I don't appear to fully enjoy, say, the simple pleasures of a friendly party when I am spending my time thinking about what to do if I find chips of human bone in the cake or if the host suddenly pulls a gun.

In any case, I mostly just wrote this because I found a quote from William Barrett I wanted to post:

"Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread."

So there. I fear Nothing.

The Power to Control

2005-07-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I changed the name and address of the blog. "Meatscape," while vaguely disturbing (a plus!), was more of an accidental choice as I explored what was available.

I was afraid, by virtue of the title, I would be compelled to discuss the current state of the pork industry, which, of course, I know nothing about.
Another option had been "Shaved Meat," which, while also disturbing, seemed to cant in meaning more toward something bizarrely sexual than would be my intention. And what I might be compelled to discuss in that case is also something I know nothing about. Of course.

Other options included "D" and "DCH" (not very interesting), "Dross" (too self-disparaging, if that's possible), "Ur" (meaningless, unless your name happens to be Gilgamesh), "Spudclot" (unnecessary exaltation of the potato), "Deuterium" and "Carbon" (yeah, I don't know what I was thinking), and, had I been of Mongolian descent, "One Hun Dread."

Lurking Loo Lady

2005-07-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

Apparently my scatological clock is in sync with the cleaning lady's schedule at work. I am amazed at how often, whilst sitting comfortably in the stall, I am disturbed by a knock at the door, followed by a strangely accented "Somebady Hier?" There is always a follow-up reply after I respond in the affirmative, but I've never been able to figure out exactly what words it contains.

While I am pleased by the staff's dilligence, doesn't mid-day seem like an odd time to do the rounds? And I don't even think that real cleaning is undertaken. I only think the garbage is emptied. And given that fact (that the visit shouldn't really take that long), it's all the more remarkable how often our schedules collide.

I am considering the idea that it is all a management plot. I often bring my handheld on such extended bathroom jaunts, and read whilst "in-process." This usually extends the time I spend away from my desk. When interrupted by our possibly-bosnian, possibly-cuban bathroom raider, I feel uncomfortable finishing the chapter I'm on when I know she's camped outside the door with her plastic bags and bright yellow triangular floor-sign, so I end up going back to my desk sooner.

Only to spend ten more minutes making a blog entry.

He would mock me, if he knew who I was. And if he wasn't dead.

2005-06-30T12:11:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to figure out why I didn't already have a blog. (Apart from the fact that all the names I want on the free servers are taken. "Meatscape" was like choice #12.) I don't know. Blogging from the unwashed masses seems awkwardly desperate somehow. Like in high school when you wrote journal entries or poems ("my heart, my heart, it grows black and falls apart") and then *accidentally* left it for the cute punk girl in Drama class to find. *See?* I'm deep! So kiss me!

(shudder)

I mean, who am I to make personal wordslough publicly available? The only person who I can imagine wants to keep track of me and know what I'm doing or thinking is my wife, and maybe my mother. And that's dangerous, because more than anything, a blog entry says "I'm wasting time at work" or "I opted to do nothing instead of installing those shelves in the garage."

Yeah...that's probably true, but I don't want *them* to know. Or to know that *I* know.

Bah.

Mr. Sam Clemens once said that it was "better to stay silent and look a fool, rather than speak and remove all doubt."

Maybe typing doesn't count.