Let’s go further and say that there may be a few dozen people on earth who have as much experience knitting yak-hair cozies as I do.

Approximately 99.98% (±0.02%) of the time this has no bearing on my life.

About two weeks ago, I was contacted out of the blue by a recruiter looking for a yak-hair-cozy-knitter. No foolin’.

The job, in many ways, is the opposite of what I’d want: the position is not local, the job is not guaranteed to be permanent, the housing market sucks, and I haven’t dealt with yak hair in a while.

On the flip side, with enough money a lot of those issues get solved. With a fuck-ton of money the rest don’t matter.

The list of what I won’t do for money is pretty much limited to:

1. Risk the life or health of myself or my loved-ones.
2. Behave immorally.

The thing is, I have no idea what people pay for this skill. It doesn’t exactly show up in salary guides. Hell, most people give you a blank stare when you try to explain why someone would want a yak-hair tea cozy.

Compounding this dilemma is the fact that the recruiter is an information gate between me and the people that want the tea cozies, and one that is economically motivated to low-ball me. The more they can get from their client and the less they pay me, the more profit they take in. They want to sell the client a expert who knows yak hair backwards and forwards, but they’ve got good reasons to offer the expert as little as the expert will accept.

Their initial offer would be good money if I wasn’t looking at traveling or relocating my family out of my own pocket. With those caveats, not so much.

It really comes down to Tim’s philosophy as expressed on a past TANcast: if you’re going to give me a million dollars to have your way with me, you pay for my travel.

I think I’m going to ask for a fuck-ton and see what they do.

Please don’t out me.

If you know me, you know what sort of jobs I do and you probably understand why I don’t want Google to connect real me to TANcast me in any way, shape, or form. Office environments tend to frown on the sort of loose talk and questionable content we enjoy throwing at passers-by (à la feces) and employers know how to search the Internet.

If you’re a listener/reader who doesn’t know me personally, I’ll elaborate a little.

I like food. I like for my family to have food. I need to earn money to buy said food. TANcast costs me money to keep running (not nearly as much as food costs), so I also need to earn money to make TANcast go. I also like porn, but porn is free with the price of Internet.

Corporate America sucks in a lot of ways. It may not hire you if you say things like “I also like porn” in public, and, rest assured, everything on the Internet is public. I once found topless pictures of someone I knew in High School on the Internet. That was weird.

The way I reconcile being unfiltered on TANcast, thus making TANcast as much fun as it is for you guys (i.e. a little), with maintaining my professional persona is that I keep the two “me”s separate. It’s a thin veneer, more self-delusion than firewall, but it lets me feel okay with doing the shit I do here.

Those who know me personally are now thinking to themselves, “Self, doesn’t Andy curse a lot in real life, too? Doesn’t he say weird shit to coworkers to make them laugh?”

Yes, guilty as charged. But there’s a world of difference between letting the guard down a little among people you work with and being judged by people you might work with. Unless I stay at my current job for the rest of my life (Magic 8-Ball says: “Un-fucking-likely”), that’s going to matter at some point.

I’ve poked fun at this in the past, but it seems like more and more people are trying to connect the dots so I wanted to be sincere for one tiny moment.

I’m not Mysterious Andy because I’m doing a bit or running a scavenger hunt or trying to be a real-life Where’s Waldo.

I’m the monkey because I don’t think I can responsibly be the man.

So again: Please don’t try to find me or link me or friend me or out me. It’s not that I don’t like you guys. I just feel I need to keep this part of my life confined to TANcast and related, pseudonymous accounts.

Y’know, so my family can continue to buy porn.

I mean food.

It is simply this:

I hate black people.

There! I’ve been wanting to say that out loud for a while now.

To be clear, there aren’t all that many that I hate and they certainly are not as numerous as the white people I hate (those fuckers are legion), so here’s wishing all the black people I don’t hate a festive Kwanzaa and a Happy New Year.

PS: See what I did up there? I used ambiguous language to have some fun. Ain’t I a stinker?

PPS: I’d just like to remind everyone that the best way to spot a counterfeit is to touch it. A fake may look convincing, but you would be surprised what your fingers can tell you that your eyes may have missed. This holds true for twenties and titties.

Blah blah, late post, socked nuts…

I’ve been trying to locate a copy of a short story (~5000 words, I think) originally created for an English class back in 1998. I called it Paranoia, and it was essentially the diary of a madman.

Thanks to Hotmail’s old “log in regularly or your email archive goes away” policy, my 4 subsequent moves, and possible lending to an ex-girlfriend along the way I’m not even sure a copy still exists in the world except the general structure and some details that live on in my melon.

I’d probably be embarrassed to read it now anyways. I’m not saying 32 year-old Andy is a better writer than 21 year-old Andy, just that 32 year-old Andy is probably better at recognizing shit writing. I have read Digital Fortress in the meantime, after all.

Still, there’s a little voice in the back of my head that tells me I should rework Paranoia and see if I can get published in some shitty little dead-tree magazine. The reasons are complex.

My mom read it a decade ago and called to ask if I was feeling alright and if I should maybe talk to somebody.

My dad read it and immediately offered suggestions on polish and pacing.

There was a frustrated novelist locked somewhere behind his wall of self-doubt; big ideas he never quite finished, beautiful stories he never quite sold. I found a bunch of his ideas and work after he passed, and it reminded me of how alike we were in just about every way.

He didn’t see Paranoia as a cry for help. I wrote a weird little story and he understood it. I wanted to create something and I wanted others to experience what I had made. I wanted to mindfuck the world.

He got that. I think he saw something of himself in it.

He wanted to tell the tale of a stubborn garden worm that refused to bend in spite of all logic and reason. I think it was my favorite children’s story, and I think 2 children in the world have had it read to them.

I’ve had a lot of interesting ideas pop into my head. I have notes and scraps and the best intentions. I also have a thousand other things that I can distract myself with, a distaste for the grind of typing for hours and hours, and probably every drop of insecurity that used to run through my father’s veins.

I don’t know if I’ll ever find Paranoia in its original form, and I’m certain my dad’s notes on it are gone for all time.

If it’s lost, though, I’ll rebuild it.

Before the end of the year you guys are going to be subjected to something heinous.

I just wanted to share with you all something I said to my then-not-yet-wife one evening in early December 2005:

Pink Meatstick of Death …

Pink Meatstick of DEATH !!!

Yeah, she didn’t get it either.

Yeah, yeah, I know… This time it was a dick-punch.

Long, long ago, back when (or before?) some of you were actually in diapers, I did some development work (wait, didn’t I claim to have been a banker?) in C, C++, and Smalltalk. Recent career shifts got me back into programming by making me work with a Java-esque special-purpose language. I’ve also been trying to pick up and polish skills with PHP since that is the language that makes TANcast tick.

The recent events seem to have re-ignited my old interest in coding, so as I try to knock rust off of old knowledge and deal with the above I’ve also been starting to wade into Python and some Objective-C. I chose the former because, from all accounts, it is simple, sane, powerful, and Google loves it. Google is like the new IBM: nobody ever got fired for picking Google. I’m working on the latter because I regularly use a Mac for the first time since OS 8.1 was released.

All this résumé padding got me thinking: What else should I try to toss on that pile?

Then it hit me. I should join a high-IQ society. That won’t make me look egotistical or elitist, no sir. That may, in fact, be just the edge I need in this topsy-turvy economic climate!

I then spent at least 30 minutes trying to figure out just how high up the Ladder of Brainiacs my standardized test scores would entitle me to climb. The answer was enough to send me off on a new quest to figure out how to get old copies of my scores. Ego BOOST!

It didn’t take me long to figure out I’d wasted a ton of time internally bragging about how smart a test I took a decade and a half ago told me I was, rather than actually working on the skills I’d meant to attack in the first place.

I guess what I’m saying is that I am what you get when you stick a big brain in a lazy fucktard: lots of potential, but mediocre output…

… and I’m self-aware enough to know exactly how full of shit that makes me.

This afternoon I was sitting at the computer, watching people with more active and interesting lives fail, when there was an unexpected friendly “shave-and-a-haircut” knock on my front door. I hopped up and, after a moment of frantic legs/pants battle and a quick check of my zipper, I waddled over, opened the door, …

… and almost fell into a porno.

You know those skin flicks where the pizza delivery guy shows up and the big-tittied housewife breathlessly says “Oh, but I didn’t order a pizza.” while the pizza guy makes single entendre references to his penis?

It was like those, but backwards. I was the big-tittied housewife.

Standing on my porch, grinning as if she knew me, was some 18-year-old (I hope) blonde piece of ass I’d never seen before. I married the last blonde to make the mistake of smiling at me, so I assumed that either I was in for a sales pitch or else she was a robot sent from the future to assassinate me.

Hmm. Assassinate has two “ass”-es and one “I”, just like the showdown at my front door where I had an ass and she had an ass. Also, when you capitalize “Assassinate”, one of the “ass”-es is bigger than the other which is also apropos. I need to lose weight is what I’m saying.

Anywho…

I stand there for a beat wondering why the hell Junior Miss Salesperson/Terminator was saying “Hi” like she knew me. Blondie fills in the gap with “I’m here to babysit… But I think I’ve got the wrong house.” Still smiling.

Big Pimpin’ Andy says: “No baby, this is the place. Why don’t you come on in and I’ll fix you a cocktail. My cock, your tail.”

It wasn't this girl...

Big Pimpin’ Andy lives somewhere else, though, so she probably didn’t hear him say it. Instead she hears Fat-Ass Married Andy say “Unless you know something I don’t, you probably do have the wrong house.”

I spend a moment longer trying to help her figure out which house number she was looking for (it was mine, oddly), then say goodbye.

As I close the door my wife calls down asking who was at the door. I tell her it was the babysitter she’d called and forgotten to tell me about.

Still stuck in my haze of porno-confusion, I get a sudden mental picture of my wife setting up the babysitter scenario to surprise me. This is awesome. She bounds downstairs in a nightie to ask the barely-legal girl for her references. Vaginal references. I don’t know what that means, but Daydreaming Andy doesn’t think in complete sentences and sometimes makes up words.Fat-Ass Married Andy starts to wonder why life isn’t more like all the porn he watches.

My reverie is interrupted by her calling down again: “Did you get her number?”

Wait. I’m allowed to do that now?

Awesome.

Andy’s October of Suckage: Day 1

Because I lack the ability to form original, meaningful thought, I am stealing Tim’s idea, like, whole. I’m just biting off him, completely shamelessly.

The only promise I make is that if I miss blogging at least once in any day in October I will punch myself in a testicle of my choice (the left one is getting uppity). Oh, and I’ll also try to be better about grammar and spelling than Tim was. Oh, and I’ll probably be less funny, more political. Oh, and I’ll do it while FUCKING YOUR MOM!!!

AAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!

Enjoy the suck.

I mean, I bought a my first house in July, my mom’s birthday is in July, my wedding anniversary is in July, the 4th of July is in July, but I think I’m just done with it, on the whole.

Two weeks ago my wife and I had finished celebrating 3 years of marriage and were getting ready for bed when my cell phone rang. I ignored it because it was my dad’s phone, it was 11:30 at night, and I figured he was calling to wish us happy anniversary and lost track of the time difference. At 12:04 it rang again and I figured I should answer. The strange voice asking me my name and whether my dad was my dad told me just about everything I needed to know.

Some day I’ll hear the words I spoke at his funeral. I can’t remember any of them, but I’m told there was a recording made. I do know that I stood in a church and heard a lot of other people talk about how it was God’s plan and how my dad was in a better place. I feel like I should say “I wish I could believe it”, but I don’t think I do wish that.

Heart attacks killed my father’s father just short of his 53rd birthday and my father at 59 1/2. My dad did live long enough to see both son’s married and meet 3 infant grandsons, unlike his father, two of who’s sons were teenagers when he died. Still, he’ll never come visit me again. He’ll never drive his Miata down sun-drenched California highways again. He’ll never IM me with banal questions about the weather in Georgia while I’m trying to power through a project again.

I was raised to believe in a loving power who took my father home to eternal rest and peace, but I live in a rational world governed by laws of causality and physics and let me tell you these last 2 weeks feel more like the cold randomness of a unfeeling universe than some supreme being’s greater good.

But if God exists, then He’s a prick for taking my dad when his grandsons are too young to remember him.

I think I’m done with Him and His plan.

And I think I’m done with July…

It’s time to unmask the monkey…

Honeymooning with the Wife

My name is J. Randall Simmons, and no, I’m not related to Gene Simmons. That isn’t even his real name, goddamn it.

All the men in the family get called by their middle names, and I’ve been “Andy” ever since I was a baby when my mom’s very proper English father refused to call me “Randy” on principle. Supposedly one of the only times he’d been heard to curse was when he said to my father “Why not just call him ‘I Like to Fuck’?”

Up until a few months ago I was the only IT worker in the Athens, Georgia office of a major metal foundry (we also dealt with recycling a bunch of different alloys), though they’ve since outsourced all IT functions to another company. I was actually born here and moved to Northern California during my freshman year of high school when my parents split up. I met Tim in high school and Noah a few years later when I moved to San Jose for school. Noah and I worked together for a short while at the foundry company’s main Western Region office before they offered to move me and my wife back out here.

I know I’ve implied I live in or near Cobb County on a few podcasts, but that was all misdirection, I’m afraid. My dad’s brother and his family life in Marietta, so I know the area well enough to fake it. Clarke County, born and bred.

So, there you have it. I’m a big fat liar head. Still, all the cards are finally out on the table and I can stop trying to keep all this shit straight.

To any potential employers who Googled me and found this, turn back now. TANcast is completely uncensored, unfettered, and often untrue. Whatever you hear or read on this site may be my honest opinion or it may be me saying something just to be ironic, funny, shocking, or all of the above. Don’t for a second think you’ve found out some big secret about me. My personal amusement is none of your concern.

Kisses,

“Mysterious” Andy

PS: I may need to change the user ID on my Twitter account now…

The real rub, Zombie Ann, is that I sometimes talk about actual personal stuff on this social network; the sort of stuff that I wouldn’t talk about in public, with “work buddies” who aren’t also “actual friends”, or with friends-of-friends.  As such, I don’t feel comfortable accepting this friend request and letting this person into my private affairs.  On the other hand, this person is quite nice, was always friendly, and may feel insulted or snubbed if I reject/ignore the friend request.

What should I do?

Sincerely,

Friendly Friend of a Friendly Friend

I miss California sometimes…

PS: This post got stuck in my iPhone a week ago and never posted, so I went back in time and put it in the right place.  It has since been warmer, almost as cold again, and then warmer again.  It’s like the thermometer is hooked up to a yo-yo.

I told a story back in TANcast 012 about how a guy I used to work with had apparently been referring to me as “Mmmmmm, Bear!” to a mutual friend.  I’ll call him “Dude” and the mutual friend “Buddy” in the rest of this post.

Buddy and I were IMing yesterday and at one point the conversation shifted to how Nebraska’s recent “abandoned children bill” was working out for them:

Buddy: I really don’t understand this: 2nd Out-of-State Teen Dumped in Omaha

Andy: Kids gotta learn.

Buddy: “Last week, a 14-year-old girl from Iowa was left at an Omaha hospital by her grandparents. The girl has since been returned to her family.”
Buddy: How do you recover from that? How can you trust your family after they leave you?

Andy: You wait a few years, then kill them for the insurance.
Andy: Make it look like an accident…

Buddy: You’re so horrible.

Andy: I know.
Andy: The real shocker in that story is the widower who left 9 of his 10 kids.

Buddy: Yeah.

Andy: What about the 10th? “Oh, that one’s a keeper.”

Buddy: I just can’t imagine how the other 9 feel.
Buddy: On a recent episode of MTV’s “True Life”, it was something like “I’m a dating single parent”.
Buddy: There was this 25 year old white guy. He had a 10 year old, a set of triplets, and a set of twins.
Buddy: He had the twins and triplets with his ex wife. She started partying a lot after the kids were born, decided being a mom was too much, and left.

Andy: Well, at least his dates know he’s easy and he won’t make them make him wear condoms.

Buddy: OMG. I feel like I’m talking to Dude.
Buddy: He says shit like that.

Andy: Dude and I should form a detective agency and be wisecracking know-it-alls.
Andy: You know, break the mold.

Buddy: Oh yeah, that hasn’t been done before.

Andy: There is supposed to be one straight-laced guy and one wise-cracker.

Buddy: Ohhh… Gotcha.

Andy: We’ll have one straight guy and two crackers.

Buddy: LOL

Andy: We could be “BJ and the Bear”.

Buddy: You’re so horrible.

And that was that. I’d performed my random act of semi-offensive weirdness for the day and I was happy. Oh, there was something else later about writing a country song called “The Ballad of the Lonely Penis”, but it doesn’t relate to what I’m talking about here.

Buddy sent me a link today to a “sexual harassment training video” that I’d seen before, but I watched it again because it is funny as hell.

After seeing that clip I was inspired:

Andy: I’d love to know where that came from.
Andy: I mean, that CAN’T be real. Gotta be a spoof.
Andy: Nobody says “fat cock” in a training video.
Andy: Though now I look forward to making an official training video that uses that phrase somehow.
Andy: I think I’ll deserve bonus points if it is subtle enough to be missed, or if it is somehow in context and therefore serious.
Andy: I’ll put it in a training video for my new detective agency.

Buddy: Would you like Dude’s email address so that you two can make some business plans?

Andy: Only if you think he’ll let me be BJ. He can be “the Bear”, ’cause just like that 80′s show you gotta pick names that will confuse the sheriffs who are gonna pull you over.

Buddy: I was telling Dude about our convo (BJ and The Bear), and he said: “Tell Andy I have something he can open.”

Andy: Is is a pack of cookies? Fat man loves him some cookies.

Buddy: Dude says: “I’ve heard it called that. No crumbs here though.”

Andy: Hmmmm.
Andy: Tell him that they’re called “Private Dicks” because they keep them to themselves…

So it is settled: I’m going to quit my job and become an investigator just so I can use a line from a fake sexual harassment video in my own real training video while being sexually harassed myself by my new partner, who may or man not have a fat cock.

Since JPMorgan Chase doesn’t appear to have any branches or ATMs in the Metro Atlanta area, the only benefit I can see is that WaMu sucked hind teat when it came to systems integration.  We opened a bank account in California and applied for our mortgage (on our Georgia home) and LoC there, but the Georgia branches almost always had trouble finding our account and the bank gave us separate web logins (different sites AND different rules on acceptable usernames and passwords) for the account and each loan type.  Hopefully Chase will do a better job when they convert everything from the now-legacy WaMu products to native Chase products.  If not, perhaps we’ll jump ship.

We started with a power nap, then got up around 3 AM, loaded into my car, and drove from San Jose to Anaheim. The rest of them continued to sleep/doze on the way down while I passed semis (for our foreign readers, that is pronounced “sem-eyes” and means “large trucks pulling large trailers”) at 100 mph on Interstate 5 in the pitch black. Hey, it kept me awake.

We stopped for breakfast at the International House of Pancakes where, if I remember correctly, Tim had French Toast, Noah had Belgian Waffles, OG Steph had an English Muffin, and I had American Deep-Fried Gravy-on-a-Stick, a staple of southern cuisine. I’m international that way.

We hit Disneyland near its opening, whereupon Tim jumped up and threw his arms around my neck while I tossed a hand under his outside thigh and carried him like a little brown sidecar for several yards. I remember telling him at some point that he is “difficult to spend time with”, but I can’t recall what period of sugar-induced Tim-frenzy this happened in. It might have been after the sidecar thing. I’m pretty sure it was that day.

At any rate, it was an awesome day. We rode all the rides we wanted, we ate whatever we wanted, Noah peed a lot (we eventually renamed peeing “Riding the Noah Ride”), and generally felt like kids again, reliving the unbridled joy of our childhoods in the world’s best playground.

When the park closed we ate dinner in Downtown Disney and then drove home. Tim took driving duties from me so that I could sit in the back and freak out about every jerk of the car instead of sleeping (I loved that car).

We got home around 3 AM the next morning, mission accomplished.

I think it is more than just making fond memories of Disneyland as a kid and then reliving them as an adult. I think it is Disneyland’s manic, nigh-fascist need to present a unified, polished front to every visitor that facilitates adult enjoyment of the place.

I have plenty of fond childhood memories of things that, viewed today, are rather cheap and shitty (I’m looking at you, original Transformers animated show), but Disneyland never seems to fall down that hole.

It may be a difficult, demanding, soul-grinding place to work, but it pays off for the guests.

Still, as Tim said, you should really take your kids to Disneyland.

It turned out this was a goddamn automated dialer system calling me to tell me about a great special at my local Domino’s Pizza franchise.

Since my phone is on the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Call Registry, I went ahead and filed a complaint with the FTC.  The notes on the complaint page and the form reminded me that, since I have done business with Domino’s in the last 18 months, the Do Not Call terms don’t apply, but I went ahead and filled out the form (completely truthfully) anyways to get the events registered.

I did a little more digging and found out that, since the number they called was a cell phone and they were using an automated dialer and prerecorded message, they are in violation of Federal Communications Commission regulations.  As this is a different law and a different governmental agency, I filed a complaint with the FCC as well.

They were probably within the FTC’s rules, but the FCC’s page seems pretty iron-clad. I also hit all the keys that Domino’s recording prompted me to so I could get on their Do Not Call list (unsurprisingly, the machine wouldn’t take “NO!” for an answer and made me confirm my confirmation before it would take me off) so at least I don’t have to wait for the 18 months to expire.  If they call again they will be violation of the FTC rules.

All bitching to the government aside, any company that is going to repeatedly cold-call me in the middle of the workday to play me an automated pitch can go get skull-fucked: I’m done with Domino’s.

Because I’m an asshole, I also called the local Domino’s, asked for the manager, and informed him (Michael) that I’d received prerecorded marketing calls on my cell, that such calls violate FCC regulations, that I’d filed a formal complaint, and that the calls had cost Domino’s any future business from me.  I know he probably could give a shit, but getting chewed out generally pisses people off (especially when they have to be polite afterward) and who knows, maybe he’ll complain up the ladder about the retarded marketing driving customers away.

Did I mention that I LOATHE telemarketing and telemarketers?

About a month ago the wife and I walked out on an appointment without having seen the doctor; he was still 2 patients away from seeing us and it was 90 minutes after our scheduled 9:15 am appointment. The office had opened at 8:30 am, and somehow in just 45 minutes they were already running 2 hours late. I’m guessing the doctor actually strolled in around 10:30 am and they just kept all the patients in the dark, expecting us to take it like good little sheep…

Let me be clear on this (especially since Tim and Noah are bound to bust my balls): I am habitually late to almost everything. I procrastinate like no other man. If my superpower was not killing jokes, it would be being late.

I do see a difference, however, between sometimes being tardy and chronically keeping people waiting for hours. If I was like these doctors, I’d expect my friends to just leave without me. Actually, I’d expect them to stop scheduling time with me.

Worse, we pay the doctors for a service and yet somehow our busy schedules are expected to be as flexible as the MD’s whims dictate on any given day. There are typically no weekend or evening appointments offered, so working professionals like us get to take some unknown numbers of hours off in the middle of the day to see a doctor for a grand total of 5 minutes, often less and rarely more. If they are running hours behind, there is no courtesy call or offer to reschedule. They usually don’t even warn you when you walk it. You just get to take it and like it.

But I digress. This isn’t a rant about how unfair life is and how doctors by and large seem to think that their training and degrees grant them utmost entitlement over the lives of others. This is all about me, as befitting my own capacious ego and sense of utmost entitlement.

When I get bored I like to make my own fun. Sometimes my idea of fun does not mesh with that of others around me, or indeed with people’s desire to lead calm, normal lives uninfected by the sort of awfulness I bring wherever I go.

Case in point:

One day in mid-May, my wife and I had progressed through the minefield that is her obstetrics office and were waiting (for some now-forgotten but assuredly interminable period) to get some routine checkup done by her OB. I saw an informative poster on women’s health and reproduction tacked to the back of the exam room door and, being presently bored and eternally an asshole, decided to make some fun.

Since I am well-possessed of the same naughty fascination with lady parts as any prepubescent boy and had a camera phone handy, the results were sadly predictable…

I should not be allowed to go where normal people are.

See what I did there? Based on the title and intro I made like this was going to be about how shockingly bad the service is at doctors’ offices, but actually it was all just a setup to flash you all “The Shocker”!

If you can stand it, click the image above to see a larger (though no less crappy or stupid) version of the pictures.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what my scale registered.

Yes, this does mean I am about 0.345% as dense as you are.  I think it may be all the methane.

On a happy note, I seem to have about doubled my aerobic capacity over the last 6 weeks.

On a sad note, it looks like I am going to have to double or triple my (admittedly light) workout routine if I am ever going to reduce my side length to 11 ft 5 in and thus hit my goal weight.  Either that or (shudder) diet.

I also think I may start wearing black turtlenecks with jeans, but it could just be the time of year…

• There is no CJ’s, only Hardee’s.
• Jack in the Box is a distant dream. By that I mean it is 200 miles away.
• Don’t even ask about In ‘N Out Burger.
• Here it’s Edy’s, not Dreyer’s. Apparently the other guy who started the company wanted some credit, too.
• You can’t buy alcohol on Sunday except in licensed bars in certain areas, because the whole fucking state is the little town from Footloose.
• On a related note, you can’t buy liquor from grocery stores, only wine and beer.
• Continuing the theme: They don’t call the only places you can buy hard liquor “liquor stores”, they call them “package stores” or “bottle stores”. I guess it’s to confuse Al Qaeda.
• Chicken is best served with pickles. Don’t ask me why, but every chicken sandwich has pickles on it. I ordered chicken NUGGETS and the fucking things tasted like pickles.
• Everything, especially biscuits, needs gravy. I don’t even know how they make gravy from biscuits. I thought you needed meat juices.
• Bail bonds, DUI schools, and title pawns are everywhere. I have no comment.
• 3 Christian Contemporary stations isn’t enough, but 2 Alternative Rock stations is more than the market can handle.
• Turn signals are optional. In fact their use shows you to be an outsider or otherwise dangerously interested in living.
• Checking your mirrors or looking over your shoulder before you change 3 lanes without signaling is also optional and apparently not a standard part of drivers training.
• Good luck getting anywhere. I swear to God that streets here are 4-D objects: you can actually be at the intersection of a street and itself. I passed myself the other day. I didn’t signal. Fucker.

I’m sure there are some things I am forgetting, but that is the knowledge gained thus far. I’ll report again when I come to my senses.

What I am driving at is that I am married.

No, seriously.

Yes, to a girl.

No, I didn’t pay her.

No, she isn’t an actress I paid to stand next to me to convince my mother that I am not a gay. I already said I didn’t pay her.

No, smart-ass, nobody paid her on my behalf.

Okay, I’m done talking to you now. Asshole…

So, we were at this play put on by a local (and excellent) theater (theatre?) troupe (troop?) when I began to fear for my life. It was a stage presentation of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (Disney seems to insist on it’s name being part of the play’s name) but, I swear to Buddha, I thought it must have been Outbreak: The Musical.

It has been a long, long time since I have heard so many rude sons of bitches coughing loudly during slow or quiet parts of a play. I know winter is cold season, but in a house that seats maybe 350 or 400 patrons of the arts I wouldn’t expect dozens of them to have whooping cough at the same time.

Then it hit me:

The dead don’t cough.

We had third row seats, because I am that awesome. We didn’t have first row, because even my awesomeness is limited.

We were so close I could smell the sweat of Keith Urban’s balls, and it was the most wholesome, refreshing thing I have ever smelled. It was like the scent of a baby’s head mixed with the sweetness of honey.

Aw, shit. Now I’m hungry…

It was seven years this fall
That I lived with this guy.
It was no fucking picnic.
The smell’d make you cry.

People thought we were lovers,
But I swear I’m not gay.
Just because women hate him,
Please…
Don’t think I swing that way!

So Tim’s a freak.
He’s a weirdo.
He had a wall covered with Harrison Ford.
He makes fun of my mother.

When his shit doesn’t work,
He loses his soul.
He bashed up his walkman,
And four remote controls.

He want’s to be noticed,
So he’ll dress like Britney Spears.
He’s always been like this,
And I know,
‘Cause I’ve known him for FOURTEEN YEARS!

But Tim don’t drink.
He’s no wino.
He looks just like Michael Jackson
Had an affair with Jim Carey.

Oh… Oh…

He’s the only karaoke addict on Earth.
If you lived with him, you’d cry, cry, and want to die.
I hate this guy!

He says “Call me Slappy”…
Whatever that means.
People think that he’s special,
Like “Short School Bus” special.

So Tim’s a freak.
He’s real weird now.
Why the hell did I live with him?
I need a new place…

Is there room at your place?

I liven up all the boring bits and talk over the interesting ones.

That is all. Please resume your regularly scheduled masturbation.

Four instances may sound insignificant, but it means that between 5% and 10% the time I don’t get what I ordered. I then have to either make do (if I’m too busy to leave work again) or drive back to the “restaurant” (that word doesn’t seem like it should be associated with fast food, but I am unable to locate a better one) and wait while my order is corrected. I do not, for the record, like having my hamburgers covered in salad and mayonnaise. I do, in fact, hate it.

I don’t think I’ll be going back to that restaurant again. I’m tired of the hassle for what should be “convenience food”.

The root of the the problem seems to be the worker who is not fluent in English and yet runs the drive-thru ordering system. I have had this exact, chronic problem with a specific Jack-in-the-Box near my current (soon to be former) house and because of it I can count on both hand the number of times I have patronized them in the last 2 years.

Keep in mind that I eat fast food a lot. Waaaaay too much, even.

Back to the point, though: I see no problem with people not being fluent English speakers (in fact, to believe otherwise seems small-minded and vaguely un-American to me) but in an environment where the customer will be likely be speaking English and all communication will be verbal I think perhaps some language skill might be called for. I can’t exactly point at what I want through the microphone, right?

I don’t give a flying fuck if you can’t pronounce the shit your company is selling, but if I tell you to make my order with no mayonnaise then my “Yumbo Yak” better damn well not have any fucking mayo on it, capisce? If you can’t grok that, hand the little earpiece off to someone else.

As an aside, I once went to a taqueria in downtown San Jose while drunk off my ass and ordered a burrito in Spanish. I was so drunk I forgot which language I spoke.

But they got my fucking burrito right!

THAT is how service should work: even my own inability to speak should not get between and me the food I want.

Fat Man gotta eat!

All is forgiven. Farewell, holy chonies…

Men are not supposed to throw tighty-whiteys away; they must gently fade and tear until they become translucent, nebulous things, things no longer of this earth, destined for a high purpose.

Holey chonies become holy chonies. Just ask the Pope.

Speaking of Mentos, I had the worst dream last night that I think I have had in a decade or more. Woke up uncontrollably upset, if that gives you any clue. I regularly have weird, vivid, often even upsetting dreams, but this is the first time in a long while that I have been unable to sleep afterward.

The short version is that I dreamed I was going to be murdered and there was nothing I could do about it. I had a few minutes to get my affairs in order and say goodbye to whomever I could get in contact with and then it was the end for me. No running, no hiding, no fighting back: I was just going to die.

I honestly don’t know what upset me more about this dream: the fact that I was powerless to stop things or the fact that my legacy was just debt and promising possibilities and plans unrealized. I was going to die with little to offer my beneficiaries, childless, single, and largely unremembered.

Or maybe it was the fact that I couldn’t get my parents to stop fucking sniping at each other long enough to understand what was going on and listen to my goodbyes…

Happy Valentine’s Day, Brain. Thanks again for fucking nothing, you useless mass of shit.

I don’t want to hear shit about “Oh, it will get better.” from anyone.

I know it will heal with time, but it will NEVER be anything but broken. We are just going to accept this as part of our lives at some point and go from there. It will still be broken, somewhere underneath the healthy veneer. A scar that will be there until the day the last one of us dies.

Sorry this wasn’t cheerful or entertaining, but that is just not where find myself. Go look at porn or something…

A truncated timeline follows:

Thursday, July 22 – At about midnight or 1 am, on my way back from 5 days of vacation spent house-sitting for my folks with my sweetie I think I feel a bit under the weather. I figure it could be allergies (I’m not allergic to my parents’ cats) since I just spent 5 days in Stockton which is known for its dust, pollen, and mold, or possibly I could be sporting a mild sunburn.

Saturday, July 24 – I’m definitely sick. Fever, aches, desire to watch shows on UPN: all the signs are there. My girlfriend is on her way back to her house, too, to finish packing for her move this direction. After 9 days together it is weird to have her 200 miles away again.

Monday, July 26 – I’m home sick from work, the temperature outside is going to try to hit triple digits again for the third day in a row, and I have no AC at my place. Doesn’t matter, though, since my own body has spent the last 3 days dancing on both sides of the 100 degree mark. I’m standing in the freezer section of the grocery store in a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals and so hot I am sweating profusely. Advil and Tylenol are taking the edge off, but every 4-5 hours the fever comes back as the last dose wears off.

Tuesday, July 27 – I haven’t slept through the night in 4 days. I sweat through my sheets every 4 hours because of the fevers. At about 4:30 pm I get a call from my mom asking how I am. And telling me that she left my father. For good.

See what I did there? “Warmth” because of the fevers and “surprise” because my parents are throwing away what would be 33 years of marriage as of August 29. It was “wondrous” because I am full of wonder that I didn’t die from something.

I did lose about 8 pounds, though. It wasn’t all bad, I guess…

For the record, it looks like the 13 total days I got to spend with my fevers were due to a bad bout of influenza, a low-grade West Nile virus infection, or something similarly heinous. I followed all that that with a lovely 7 day chaser of strep throat. It was actually a shitty 3 weeks, but who’s counting?

I don’t want to hear from any 30-somethings or middle-agers or AARP representatives. I know old, and “late 20′s” is old. I can’t even say “mid-20′s” anymore with a straight face. Late. LATE !!!

What have I accomplished with all the time I’ve had?

Have I cured cancer? Ended suffering? Made sweet love down by the fire to Meredith Baxter?

No.

Have I written the Great American Novel? Have I conquered Canada? Am I an astronaut?

Again, NO !!!

I don’t own a cool robot minion, I never built that pedal-powered helicopter in my backyard, and I have yet to start a rock band.

I don’t think I have achieved a single one of the goals I set when I was 5. I guess I should just dig a hole, climb in, and pull the earth back in on me.

What hope do I have in the meager years left before me? Others are closer to curing cancer already, Meredeth Baxter is just getting older, NASA is constantly facing cutbacks, robot minions are tough to come by, my accursed voice turned out to be better suited for barbershop than grunge, and I seem to have a greater propensity for causing suffering than for ending it (sorry, L).

Must be about time to quit. I mean, LATE 20′s, man. Twenty Seven.

3³, for you math geeks.

Then again, the Canada thing is kinda stuck in my craw. I don’t think I can just give up hope of being King of the Great White North (or North California as I will be renaming it) when it has haunted my dreams for so long.

Fuck it. I’m heading north, and woe betide the Canuck who dares challenge my supremacy. They shall know my coming by the sultry sounds of “Happy Birthday to Me” hummed in a rich Baritone.

In closing, Happy Belated Birthday, Andy. You weird, tubby fucker.

To the Sunday drivers, yes I know it is actually Sunday but seriously: MOVE THE FUCK OVER. I should not be doing 62 in a 65 zone in the FAST LANE behind you. Hell, you shouldn’t have been going 65 in the fast lane if people behind you are trying to go faster. Funny thing, that. The law states you can’t exceed the speed limit, but you ALSO can’t impede traffic even if they are trying to speed. And a special “fuck you” goes to the guy doing 55 in a 65 zone on a 2-lane highway next to a big rig. You deserved every inch of that finger I flipped you, buddy.

As an extension to the above, the granny going 45 in the slow lane should look for her gas pedal, look for her nerves, or look for someone else to drive her. Ever try to merge left into real traffic when you are stuck behind some fucking blue-hair who is forcing your lane to be 20 mph slower than the rest of the freeway? I can only say “Thank God I drive an Acura.”

To the asshats who forgot how to merge, I suggest you look at your steering column on the left side. You will find a nifty little stick there which tells the rest of us you want to move over. I, as a fairly conscientious driver, will try to make room for you unless you have been driving like a dick (see below). One caveat, however: it is a physical impossibility for us both to exist in the same space at the same time, so to the two special fucktards who almost ran me off the road I suggest that in the future you use that nifty doodad called a “neck” (the thing that holds your shit repository up) and LOOK OVER AT THE ROAD NEXT TO YOU. I’m no ninja, so I have no idea how you idiots failed to note the presence of me and my big green car in that lane.

To the dick in the Mitsubishi, the fact that you put a fin on your little piece of shit car does not mean you own the road. In fact, even if you paid substantially more in taxes than I did last year, you still do not get to drive like the rest of us are your road cones in some car slalom game. And yes, I saw your turn signal when you were trying to merge in front of me. I also saw you cut across 3 lanes of traffic and make a bunch of other people hit their brakes because you thought you were in the next Indy 500 trials. I stuck you in that lane so you could think about what you did. Ass.

To end on a higher note: to the other THOUSANDS of people I was on the road with today, thanks for all being decent human beings. I would let you all date my sister, if I had one.