Author Archives: Shadowtwin

Daddy needs a new shirt

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Sometimes I just remember things. Often they are good things, sometimes they are bad things, sometimes they are funny things. No matter what kind of thing it is that I happen to remember, I generally remember it fondly, regardless of whether it seemed so at the time. Such seems to be the case with life. Every memory has played some role in making me who I am today, so I guess I should just embrace them. And share them with you.

The year was 1987. I was in the seventh grade. I was nerdy even by seventh grade standards. I had to do something to try to pull the focus away from my nerdiness, and sports was what I chose. I had played football throughout the sixth grade, and went on to play again in the seventh grade, but I had never wrestled or played basketball, both of which I gave a try in the seventh grade.

Wrestling is one sport that I really don’t think I was cut out for. While I was pretty good at faking the theatrical moves I had seen on Friday night wrestling, it turns out that I really sucked at actual wrestling. When I joined the team I was automatically the best in my weight class, since I was the only one in my weight class, that meant that I would have to represent the school in that weight class at every event ( I never actually made it to a single meet ). It was only a week or so into practice that I simply gave up on the sport. I had to spar with a guy that was in the weight class below me, since there was no one else in my class, and he pinned me in less than five seconds. He wasn’t even the best in his weight class either. Knowing that I would have to face the best guy in the weight class at every meet pretty much sealed it for me, I was not a wrestler. I quit the team, and I am not ashamed of it, relieved is more accurate.

I didn’t take to basketball very well either, but I didn’t give up. When I started playing the only thing I knew about the game was that you had to make the ball go through the hoop. I didn’t know the rules about traveling, key violations, I didn’t know anything, but I kept at it. I never got good at though.

Our coach had a really cruel thing that he did at the end of each practice; He would make us run lines (run to quarter court and touch the line, then run back to the baseline, then to half court, then to the baseline, then to three quarter court, then to baseline, then to opposite baseline and back to baseline) then call a player’s name. That player had to shoot a free throw. If he made the free throw we were done running lines, if he missed we did another set. I dreaded the times when he would call my name.

Some of the guys on the team were really good at shooting free throws; Paul Lakin, Chris Schofield, Brandon (can’t remember his last name), and a couple of guys whose faces I remember but their names are long forgotten. They could probably make it seventy percent of the time or better, which was really pretty good considering we were all only twelve or thirteen. When they would get the call it usually meant that we wouldn’t have to run many lines. When my name came up, not so much.

I was far and away the worst shot on the team, not just for free throws either, I just outright sucked at the game. I usually knew when it was going to be my name called, as the coach would call me only if we had twenty minutes or so of practice time left, since he knew I would probably never make it. Indeed, there were a couple of times where he had to call on someone else after we had run a dozen or so sets of lines since I had yet to make it and the parents were already showing up to pick up their kids. I was just that bad a shot.

In the entire season (which was capped by a first round tournament loss; A loss where the coach never substituted for the starting five guys, leaving the other six or eight of us on the bench the entire game. That is horrible coaching at a level when the game is more for fun than competition) I actually only made one basket. I was probably only in each game for two minutes or so anyway, even then it was just long enough to let another guy get a drink or something. When I was in one of the games I happened to be standing near the basket when a guy with the ball approached me. I stripped the ball from him and took off down the court. I was so concerned with not making an ass of myself that I was concentrating more on the floor and the ball than what was in front of me, I sure didn’t want to doink it out of bounds off of my own foot. I only looked up when my entire team, the crowd, the majority of the other team -hell the entire world, really- screamed “shoot it”. I looked up to see the backboard directly above and I was still moving forward, soon to be out of bounds. I threw that sucker up into the air with all the force my wimpy little arms could muster. Then I started heading for the bench.

It was almost surreal the cheer that I heard when the ball actually went in. I don’t know if there really was a cheer or if I imagined it, either way it doesn’t really matter. I had finally made a basket, my only one ever in competitive basketball. The coach motioned for me to go back on defense, something he had never really done, made a motion towards me that is. I fell back on defense right next to our cheerleading squad, where Angie Ross gave me a huge thumbs up (she was a girl who it seems had a bit of a crush on me at the time). With a head about the size Jupiter I took my position next to the key; where I was promptly burned by a guy about 1/3 my size in a moment that he probably remembers as fondly as I remember my only basket. Yes, I really sucked at basketball… Good times.

Our basketball team had some pretty ugly uniforms. It’s not that they didn’t match, more that they matched at some point but through years of neglect had managed to make it so they covered every conceivable hue of the color green. Our other jerseys were white with green lettering, but didn’t have the same numbers on them, since many had been lost over the years. The coach wanted us to have something that matched when we went onto the court, and had worked out a deal with a t-shirt shop called “The Put-on”, where we would each get a t-shirt with the team logo on the front and our first initial and last name on the back. The price for these beauties was $5.

Without going into a lot of detail here, I will just say that we didn’t have the $5 to spend on such things as basketball t-shirts when we were more concerned with making sure we had food and other such necessities. My mother assured me that she could come up with the money but I really didn’t want to burden her with that, especially since she had to buy me a special pair of shoes to play with (we played on the High School court, had to have non-marking soles and couldn’t be street shoes). I really wanted to get that shirt myself.

By some coincidence there was a fundraiser going on at the school where you had to get people to give you money for some annoying little fuzzy balls (no, seriously. They all had little eye-balls, some were dressed up with hats or glasses and stuff. They were roughly the size of a quarter, only spherical). I got people to shell out money for the little fuzzy balls, but not nearly as much as the other kids (since their parents would always take a few to start them off). Thankfully I had all that I needed to be a part of the assembly contest regarding the little fuzzy fuckers.

(Honestly my memory of exactly how that worked is a bit fuzzy. It might have been that we got the little fuzzy balls for so much money in donations, as I remember a lot of kids were collecting them. I know that I never had any, or maybe I did have some but had to trade them in to participate in the contest. I don’t know, it really is fuzzy. I know that it involved donations and fuzzy balls, and it all ended with the contest during the assembly).

The contest, of course, was all about basketball. The way the contest worked was that for each x number of dollars you raised you got one shot. Shoot a lay-in and you win $1 in cold, hard cash. Free throw for $5, top of the key was 10, three-point line was 15, that circle just outside of half court was 20 and half court was 50. I remember only two shots from the whole contest, one of them was because a guy actually hit the half court shot and the crowd went apeshit. The other one was my own.

I stood there at the free throw line, staring at the $5 bill laying on the ground in front of me (no shit, they actually had the money laying on the court and you got to pick it up if you made the shot). I had seen people bounce the ball a couple of times before taking the shot so that is what I did. I wasn’t really concentrating much on the shot, I was wondering if I would be able to grab the money and make it to the door without being caught. Better judgment eventually won out. I looked at the basket for a few seconds wondering why it was so hard to put the damn ball into it. Then, without an ounce of preparation, I hucked the ball at the basket (hucked isn’t really the word for it, but I can’t find a verb that accurately describes the motion that I used to propel the ball so ‘huck’ will have to do).

Much to my amazement, as well as the rest of the entire student body, the ball actually went in. I stood there dazed for a minute, probably literally, then grabbed the money and ran… Directly to the coach, who was sitting in the front row of the bleachers. I gave him that $5 with a sense of accomplishment that I don’t remember ever having felt before. I actually won something!

When the t-shirts arrived I was the happiest kid on earth, well, until I looked at the back and saw that they had mistakenly put “B. Burgess” on it. The coach covered the little bar to make it look like a ‘D’, but the damage was already done. Even though I got a replacement shirt within a week, everyone on the team called me Bonnie for the remainder of the season. But you know what? I really didn’t care. They all bought their shirts, I had to win mine.

Who knew?

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I am 31 years old, less than six months from 32. It turns out that while I have never worn glasses I may have needed them for a lot of those 31 years.

I have never had an actual eye exam, the closest I ever have had is one of those things they do in grade school where you have to tell them which way the “E” is pointing on the chart. I haven’t even had one of those since I was in the seventh grade, and I cheated on that one to make sure I wouldn’t have to get glasses. Yes, I cheated on an eye exam, how sad is that.

It was really their fault that I cheated on the exam though. They lined all of the kids up against the wall right next to the chart, then had us go up to the line and read off the symbols one by one. Even though I was the third or fourth kid to go I already had the chart memorized. I was therefore able to skate right through the test without really even looking at the chart. I can’t honestly say whether or not I was able to make out the symbols since I knew what order they were in; When you know that letter is an “E” your eyes see an “E”.

Even the charts that they have hanging in the optometrists office are kind of a scam. Tell me if this looks familiar:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

E 
 
 
 
 
 

F P 
 
  
  

T O Z  
  
  

L P E D  
 
  

P E C F D 
    

E D F C Z P 
    

F E L O P Z D 
  

(You will have to alter the distance you stand from your monitor for this to work for personal eye exam purposes.) Yes, the chart is the same in every office. No, I didn’t know it all from memory, I had to look up the last two lines on google. Granted they don’t use this as the basis for what kind of vision correction you require, but they do use it as a general guide to how poor your vision is. Also they have numerous charts that they show you when you are actually getting an eye exam.

I had an eye exam last Monday for the first time ever. So how poor was my vision? I was only able to make it through the first five lines, the ones that I have memorized, mind you. Then Mr. Doctor Dude put that big, fancy machine on my head and, wow, holy bejeezes, I could see! And that was him just guessing where the little machine needed to be, twenty minutes of tweaking and I was able to read the fine print on lawyers commercials from thirty yards (just kidding, NO ONE has vision that good).

I kind of figured that I needed glasses, that is why I went to a local guy where I knew they would take a few days to arrive: I didn’t want to walk in with (what I thought was) normal vision only to walk out with glasses. I wanted to have a bit of time to get used to the idea of it. As the week passed I found myself thinking that maybe my eyes were just tired or blurry when I had the exam, my eyes were just fine. Until I actually tried the glasses on. Yep, that was when I knew that I really needed the damn things. Who knew?

I suppose it is sort of like an epiphany to everyone when they finally get vision correction: Trees have outlines, they don’t just blur into the sky; The road should be a road all the way to the horizon, not just an increasingly blurry black stripe; It is possible to read the license plate of the car in front of you from a couple of car lengths back; It is really amazing all the little things that I am noticing while sporting these marvelous glasses.

I really wonder though if my vision has been getting worse at such a slow pace that I never noticed it, or if I have always had bad vision and never knew it. I can’t remember ever wanting to look at things for the sake of seeing what they looked like. I am sure that I did it as a child, but did I actually see the detail? I really don’t know.

How I wish I would have done this years ago.

A lesson learned

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So you know how when you call any form of technical support line they treat you like you are about three years old -and stupid for that age-? Turns out they do it for a pretty good reason.

I am pretty good with Windows, not in the I can use a computer sort of way, but in the diagnosing problems with hardware/software sort of way. I don’t have a lot of confidence in myself when I have to start screwing with the BIOS, but I do it when I have to (on my own machine at least) and nearly always have good results (not counting the time when my mom’s pc had a boot sector virus and I just gave up and bought her a new machine).

I am familiar enough with Windows 95, 98 and XP that I can usually troubleshoot problems and repair them over the phone (that being software/driver type problems, not major problems). I was trying to help a guy out with what I thought was a software related problem just yesterday.

Microsoft recently released an update for the Windows Media Player, it totally fucked up the microphone on my machine. Well, technically it didn’t fuck up the microphone, it just made it so that I wasn’t able to use it with the program that I wanted to use it with (teamspeak being the program). For unknown reasons the update set all my settings back to default, thus not using the sound card that I had installed recently, and also for unknown reasons it set my mic volume all the way down and my line in volume all the way up. Yay Microsoft! I was able to solve the problem on my own machine in about ten minutes.

There was another guy playing the game I was playing who also was having problems with his microphone. I had never talked to him before, as he was new to our group, but I assumed that his problem was the same as the problem that I was having. I walked him through all the steps that I took on my machine to get it working, but his still wouldn’t work. After about fifteen minutes of text chat trying to fix the software problem I decided to ask a few different questions.

I had him run a mic test on his pc, which was not able to detect a voice at all. I asked him to check where he had the mic plugged in (a lot of people mistakenly plug it into the line out slot), which was correct. Then I asked him if he was sure that the microphone worked, which, as it turns out, is the question I should have asked first. He plugged in a different microphone and it all worked just fine.

I am telling myself that the other steps were necessary anyway, though I really don’t know if they were; his settings all seemed correct as I was walking him through it. At any rate it was a lesson learned. There is a pretty good reason why the technical support people think that you are stupid, usually you are.

Random stuff for no damn reason

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As the title would suggest, this will be a collection of assorted bullshit. Your entertainment value may vary, act accordingly.

First up is a cute little instructional video that I found on the internet. It is quite helpful in defining what exactly constitutes sexual harassment in the workplace. It starts out seeming almost real, but a little too real, sort of like the old energizer commercials where you think it is a spoof but aren’t quite sure. About midway through the video there is no longer any doubt about its intentions, and as such it isn’t really the type of thing you should be watching at work, unless your boss happens to be harassing you, in which case it could be educational for the both of you -providing you don’t get fired-. Linkage here, please enjoy the show.

Secondly I have an observation about human nature and Wal-Mart. The human nature part is in getting a refund for a light bulb that was the wrong size. The bulb cost $5.74, and was six inches too long for my purposes. The correct bulb was $5.64, so only a dime in difference. How long did it take to get the dime back? Just under an hour.

See, the human nature wanted to get my money back since the bulb didn’t fit. But Wal-Mart’s corporate structure has gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that they give as few refunds as possible. After all, who in their right mind would stand in line for an hour to get back a dime (that is sort of rhetorical at this point)? I didn’t even care about the dime, I just wanted the other light bulb. I though about just putting the little pink return sticker on the bulb I needed and walking out the door, but can you imagine the embarrassment if they had actually stopped me at the door? It sure would suck to get arrested for shoplifting when I was just trying to get the bulb that fit.

I really should have just bought the other bulb and given up on the refund of the first one. $5.74 is really not all that much money, anyone’s time is worth more than that, that is why we have a minimum wage after all. But you know how it is once you get into that line; either morbid fascination or a need for closure keep you there no matter what. I walked away with my dime and a sense of self-accomplishment. It takes a great man to waste an hour of his life for a dime!

Finally, and somewhat Wal-Mart (or any shopping center) related. Why is it that some people will drive around a parking lot for ten minutes looking for a parking space that is closer to the door? In order for that to make any sense at all I would have to be able to find a space about a half a mile closer to the entrance (I walk about five miles an hour at normal walking pace, which is why my wife and I rarely go shopping together; she has to run to keep up). Are people really that lazy? Again, that is probably rhetorical.

I have my own technique for finding a parking space. I pick the one closest to the cart return. Most people don’t like to park near the cart return for fear of damaging their precious car. My precious car is ten years old and already dented and dinged so I don’t really give a shit. I am also one of the seemingly rare people that actually return the cart to the designated corral before leaving. If I parked closer to the store I would probably have to push the cart all the way back to the entrance before I could leave, parking near the cart return gets me out of there a lot faster. Also, the farther away from the entrance you park the less foot traffic you will have to contend with. Seriously, parking further from the entrance and close to a cart return saves a hell of a lot of time, but don’t tell anyone, I don’t want everyone to know the secret. Of course most people are too lazy to spend the minute to walk to the door anyway so I guess I am in no trouble.

The ultimate weight loss program?

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It has been three full weeks since I have drank a beer. I have found that even the smell of it is a bit repulsive, but I guess it always has been, I know that I hated the taste of it the first time I tried it. It took a lot of drinking it to get to the point where I found it drinkable, even longer to get to the point where I became a bit of a snob about the taste of it, longer still to get to the point where I didn’t give a damn about the taste so long as it was beer. What a horrible existence that was.

The type of beer that I drank had 100 calories and 5 carbs per twelve ounce serving. I drank between twelve and eighteen of them a day. That means that if I ate nothing at all I was consuming between 1,200 and 1,800 calories a day, with between 60 and 90 carbs (I have never put much stock into carb counting as a factor in weight gain or loss though, I am merely putting it her for facts sake). Of course I did eat though, a stick of jerky when I got home for 360 calories, then usually chimichangas, usually three, for a total of 1,050 calories, plus I always topped them with a generous portion of grated cheese, I don’t know how many calories that added but I am sure it was a couple hundred at least. So I was on a 2,800 to 3,300 calorie a day diet. That is a lot of calories.

My diet for the last three weeks has been nearly exactly the same. I still have a beef jerky snack and still eat chimichangas. I no longer top the chimichangas with cheese, or maybe once a week I do. Also sometimes I have two of them and sometimes I have three, depending on how hungry I feel. Even at that my caloric intake has gone from the 2,800-3,300 range all the way down to the 1,000-1350 range. Yes, I have been taking in about one-third the calories I did previously for the last three weeks. It certainly shows.

I have lost 25 pounds in the past 21 days. When I quit drinking I weighed 195 pounds, now I am just under 170. This is the least I have weighed since I was 19 years old. My slimmest in twelve full years. That is pretty amazing. My pants and belt are far too big for me now, forcing me to punch additional holes in the belt to keep the pants up. The pants also bunch up when I tighten the belt, as they are at least two or three inches larger than my waistline. The ultimate weight loss plan indeed.

Unfortunately I don’t think that it is necessarily healthy for me to be losing weight so quickly. I can’t put my finger on why it would be bad for me, per se, but I do often begin to get quite light-headed towards the end of a long shift at work. I nearly passed out today, likely would have at least fallen down were it not for a handy bench to grab onto. I think I need to start eating a second meal. Not having breakfast or lunch sure leaves me feeling pretty drained by the time I have a jerky snack after work.

I hope I can get something worked out where I can continue to shed pounds without feeling so physically exhausted all the time. Perhaps a granola bar or a piece of fruit in the morning would do the trick.

Completely as an afterthought, I never liked to weigh myself when I was drinking. I know that it was because I knew that the number was just going up. I weighed myself once a month at best. Now I am weighing myself on a daily basis, mostly because I was waiting for/anticipating the day when the little dial stopped short of 170. Hell, if I was to wipe the dust off of the scale I might lose an additional pound.

Shedding demons

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I quit drinking recently. Something that I had tried and failed to do many times before. During the first couple of days of this attempt I wrote down some of my thoughts. Here they are.

Saturday Jan. 07

While I am sure that I have mentioned that I like to drink beer, I am pretty sure that I failed to mention to what extent that goes. I drink beer every day, and I am not capable of drinking only one or two; I continue drinking until the beer is gone or I pass out, whichever comes first. Most would probably say that this puts me into the category of being a serious alcoholic, which isn’t exactly true since I never go to the meetings with anonymous people. I do have quite a serious drinking problem though, and as is always the case I continually deny that fact.

I am sure there are checklist type quizzes I could take to tell me whether or not I am an alcoholic but I don’t need to. The fact that I try to justify my drinking by saying things like, “It has never caused me to miss work” is proof enough. While it is true that I have never missed work because of my drinking, that is about the only thing that I haven’t missed because of it. A few notable examples of what I have missed being things like, say, the last decade of my life, five years of marriage, numerous events that I should have attended with my wife, the list could go on forever. Alcohol is destroying my life and I know it, I have known it for a long time but have been powerless to do anything about it.

I don’t put much stock into the idea that alcoholism is a disease. If this is a disease it is one that I willingly subjected myself to, and one that it took many years to incubate into the out-of-control condition it has become. I used to be able to control the alcohol, now the alcohol controls me. It is rather a helpless feeling.

Quitting drinking is pretty easy in concept, all I have to do is not open that can of beer, not drink that can of beer, but I can’t do it. The alcohol calls to me, my body shakes and trembles awaiting the depressant qualities of the liquor. I think to myself “Perhaps if I have just one, just to calm my nerves, what could it hurt?”, the next thing I know I am completely drunk wondering where the day went. I tell myself that tomorrow will be the day that I don’t drink but when I wake up it is today, and today I end up drinking. In this sense tomorrow really never comes. A cycle that I can’t seem to break.

No more!

I would like to say that I had some great emergence of will power to help me try to quit, that would be a lie. I am not sure if I would ever have even tried to quit drinking for my own sake. Quitting would be very good for my health of course, I just don’t think I could have ever tried to wrestle the demon without some external motivation. Finding out how badly my drinking was hurting my wife was a pretty powerful motivator.

Overcoming a drug addiction is one of the most difficult things a person can ever try to do. I have tried many times to quit drinking and to quit smoking, all attempts have failed. I am not trying to fool myself into believing that this attempt will be any different, but I have taken a different approach. I am not telling myself that I will never drink again, instead I am telling myself that I will not drink today. If I can just make it through today then I will have the chance to make the decision again tomorrow, but when tomorrow comes it will be today, and I have already made the decision for today, right? It is actually a bit more difficult than that, but you get the gist of it.

It has been two days since I have had a beer. That might not seem very impressive but considering that is the longest I have gone without a beer in about a decade I am considering it a victory. I am really wishing I had one right now though, and I have some in the room next to me. Oddly I think that is making it easier for me to fight the desire. I know that the beer is available if the desire becomes overwhelming, which seems to keep the desire from becoming overwhelming. It is like I am tricking the part of my brain that needs the beer into not needing the beer since I have the beer if I need it -which doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, but it is my brain and I know how to trick it-.

Aside from the trembling (more so than usual) the other adverse effect from not drinking was exactly the one I thought I would have: sleeping. My eyes can be as heavy as bricks but my mind, being so used to the daily depressant, is still wide awake. I am sure that within a few days this will get easier, as my body gets used to not having the alcohol administered to it on a daily basis, but the last two nights have just been a lot of tossing and turning.

Sunday Jan. 8

Another sleepless night. I turned off the television at about a quarter after one in the morning then stared at the alarm clock for about three hours before deciding to go read a little bit. Got back into bed at about 4:30 and stared at the clock until I dozed off at about 5, only to be awakened by the barking of my neighbors dog a half an hour later. (totally as an aside. Don’t you just hate the first month after Christmas, lots of kids got puppies that they absolutely loved…For about two weeks. Now all you can hear at night is the sound of the puppies barking as they are locked outside and forgotten. A couple more weeks and the sound will die down as the dogs end up in local animal shelters. One should never give a child a live animal as a gift, it really is animal cruelty). Asleep again sometime shortly after six. Woke up again shortly after seven, this time for good. Once the sun starts to rise I find it nearly impossible to sleep.

I did a bit of research into this and found this website: http://alcoholism.about.com/cs/health/a/blacer030816.htm . It says exactly what I thought it would say, almost verbatim. I am only one of the many people who really began drinking (at least daily) as a sleep aid. Of course it led to dependency, how could it not? Over time it would take more and more to relax me to the point that I could fall asleep, until I was eventually passing out instead of sleeping. Now I am dealing with the fallout of being self-medicated for so long. One unfortunate thing in that article is that it says many recovering alcoholics continue to have sleeping problems for more than a year after giving up alcohol, that is not a welcome prospect.

I have been trying to keep my caffeine consumption as low as possible over the last few days, but since I drink diet coke that is not an easy thing to do. The only caffeine free diet soda I could find in town was 7up, I have been drinking that in the evenings to try to make sure I don’t have a buzz when I am attempting to sleep. Honestly though, that stuff doesn’t taste very good. Not that any diet soda really does. Add to that the fact that each time I get up to use the restroom or whatever during the night I take a quick drink of soda, Diet Coke, and it is easy to understand where at least some of the sleeping difficulty is coming from.

This morning I went to the grocery store in Coolidge and bought one of every kind of caffeine free diet soda they had on the shelf, I am not even kidding. I brought home diet orange crush, caffeine free diet coke, diet a&w root beer, diet squirt, diet mug root beer, diet 7up, and three different flavors of sparkling water. Surely one of these will be to my liking. I am not entirely sure if I should try to give up caffeine completely at the same time as I am giving up alcohol, but if I could just not have any caffeine in the afternoon it would surely be a step in the right direction.

As for how I am actually feeling it is still hard to say. I think my body feels better, I am certainly eating more, or at least more often but in smaller quantities. The effects on my mind have been pretty immediate though. I am thinking more clearly now, even though I feel so fatigued from lack of sleep, than I have in as long as I can remember. My hands are not trembling as bad as usual. And I am actually typing quickly sober, that is something that I used to never be able to accomplish until I had downed at least a couple. I am in pretty good spirits so far, hopefully I can keep them that way.

I quit writing about it after that because it just kept reminding me that I am supposed to be drinking, not the best idea when I was trying to quit. I can tell you though that the most difficult day was the 5th day. I don’t know why but I needed a drink so bad I felt like I might actually die without it. With no way to fight the desire I just went to bed and tried to sleep, of course I didn’t sleep at all. I did stare at the alarm clock until the morning though and by then the desire had passed.

It has now been 8 days since I gave up drinking. I find that I hardly even think about it now, and when I do it is more of a “a beer would be nice” type thought, opposed to the “must drink or perish!” commands my mind had been making for the last decade. I think I may have subdued the demon this time, yet I know that if I ever take a single drink it will likely lead me back to the hell I was in before. So, success for now.

I should also note that I have just about completely given up caffeine as well. It turns out that staying up late getting horribly drunk makes your body desire caffeine in the morning. With the alcohol out of the equation I don’t really have a need for it any more. Since the fridge is loaded up with nothing but caffeine free soda I haven’t had a caffeinated beverage in three days. Let me tell you though, Diet Squirt tastes like a carbonated grapefruit, that shit is foul.

With that it seems that smoking is now my only vice, a vice that I am keeping for myself, at least for now. I don’t think I could handle giving up all my vices in a two week span.

The memes

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I have never actually taken part in any of the memes that all of the bloggers do, this time I really wanted to. Mostly since I want to answer the questions that Flux put up as The evil meme of four. I figure I should answer the questions from the original meme before I do that though, so here it is.

Four jobs you’ve had in your life:
Dish Machine Operator (that is what the place actually called the position, I guess they just didn’t want me to feel like a lowly dishwasher. Keep that in mind as I try to glorify the rest of them), Petroleum Exchange Technician (I pumped gas in Oregon where there is no self service), My current job, being butcher/stocker/cashier/manager/handyman/plumber/electrician/anything else you can think of at a family owned grocery store, Vice President in charge of frozen confection marketing, sales and distribution (while I technically only changed the prices on the billboard, collected money for ice cream cones, then served said cones, this is a fairly accurate statement).

Four movies you could watch over and over:
Pump Up the Volume, The Princess Bride, Jacob’s Ladder, The Shawshank Redemption. Keep in mind that I left a few of my favorites (Monty Python and South Park most notably) out because I have seen them so often on other blogs.

Four places you’ve lived:
Roseburg, OR, Weaubleau, MO (though only on a summer vacation), Florence, AZ, and most notably, in a friend’s garage for six months or so.

Four TV shows you love to watch:
Survivor, South Park, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Four places you’ve been on vacation:
Tijuana, Las Vegas, Disneyland, The Grand Canyon.

Four websites you visit daily:
I am just gonna do my first four in the surfing routine here. Black Champagne,Political Animal, Daily Rotten, Magazine Man. Magazine Man tells some great stories, if you have never read any you really should.

Four of your favorite foods:
Pizza, Chimichagas, Pollo Fundido, Funyuns.

Four places you’d rather be:
The forests in Oregon (since that was my stomping ground back in the day), the Giza plateau (must see the pyramids before I die), Ireland (must see the castles before I die), mid-air with a parachute on my back (I always wanted to try sky-diving but when I actually tried to schedule a session my boss was going to be on vacation so I had to cancel it.)

Thus the original four meme is concluded.

But that was not the one I really wanted to do, on to the good one.

Now to the evil four meme answers:

Four celebrities you’d cheat on your wife/husband/gf/bf with. (Time travel is permitted.):
Doro Pesch, of Warlock fame (would need to be in the mid to late ’80’s though), Marilyn Monroe (always have had a weird fascination with her) probably would be better if it was while she was alive also, Tawny Kitaen (on the hood of WhiteSnake’s car, whatever year that was), Samantha Fox (only in her glory years which have long since passed. I like full-bodied women, sue me).

Four celebrities you’d like to see dead, painfully or otherwise:
Tom Cruise (compared to Scientology all the other religions seem logical), Paris Hilton (can you think of a more vapid, uselss person? She should have been swallowed long before conception), Rob Schneider (I think Schneider is a great comic, however, I can’t justify pumping out movies that suck then criticising the critics that say the movies suck. Suck it up Rob. Your movies suck. Go back to stand-up and get your crowd back). There is a certain nameless individual who has to come first on my list, I am not sure that he is actaually a celebrity, but he has some impressive credentials that make me hate him and, therefore, wish his death. Take from the last statement what you will.

Four movies you’d like to erase from your brain:
This one is a bit subjective. There are movies that I wish to erase from my brain because I hated them, every Star Wars 4-6 would fall into that category. There are also movies that I would like to erase simply because I have bad memories about them. First up will be The Hearse (that was the first horror movie I ever watched, I think I was six at the time, it creeped the hell out of me… I still have hearse related nightmares). Pretty in Pink (enough said). Basektball, this one I only saw a couple of minutes of but it soured me to the whole thing. Every Matrix movie that had a number following the title/ every Star Wars title that put a number before the title.

Four places you never, ever want to visit.
Washington, DC, anywhere in the southern united states (the places where they don’t understand why slavery isn’t legal), Iraq, DisneyLand.

Four TV shows you wish you had never seen/never want to see.
Lost, CSI (I watched that show when it was called “The New Detectives” on the Discovery channel), Judge Judy, The OC.

Four websites you wish would cease to exist.
I would need an audio clip of crickets at night to make this one work. Everyone is enitled to their voice. No matter how wrong, in my opinion, that voice is, there is nothing I can do about it.

Of the “Seven Deadly Sins,” which four do you most frequently indulge in? (Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Wrath, Greed, Sloth.)
Envy, Lust, Greed, Sloth.

Of these four, which would you give your life to save? Your mother, father, wife/husband/SO, or children:
I would certainly give my own life to save my wife. I wouldn’t do the same for anyone else on that list. I don’t have any children, so the wife is the most important/valuable person in my life. My father is dead, my mother would probably understand the choice (were it her or me) if I didn’t take the bullet for her. My wife is a couple years younger than me, I hope she would just avoid the gunfire in the first place, if she didn’t she would be able to move on without me, that doesn’t work the other way.

Have a Happy New Year, all.

So you think YOU have weird neighbors?

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I am far from what would be considered an average, normal neighbor, come to think of it I don’t think there really are any average, normal neighbors. I may think someone is a nutjob based solely on the fact that he decorates his yard with old beer cans, while he would think I was a nutjob because I don’t. It is all very subjective…Usually.

I always thought that the woman who lived a couple of houses down from me while I was growing up was weird, just because she was a bit of a recluse and had roughly 14 million cats. As the years have passed I realize that that is just standard old lady behavior, perhaps a bit eccentric but completely normal when put on the giant pie chart of old ladies. There was another guy a block or so over from us (I think I wrote about this previously but I couldn’t find a reference to it, probably because I don’t know his name and spoke about it pretty vaguely) that threw all of his spare change into the drain gutter in front of his house. There were some neighbors that I literally never saw; I would see the cars leave the garage in the morning and arrive home at night but never once caught a glimpse of them. It seems weird neighbors are everywhere, probably even right next door to you.

The guy that I met yesterday might not take the cake as the weirdest neighbor ever, but I bet he got some door prizes. Hell, I am sure he would have won it all for best costume, the dude you feel most uneasy around, and the guy that gets the most flimsy excuses for why people have to leave when he enters a room. He seemed pretty harmless physically, but he gave off an aura that your mind interpreted as, “Body! Body! We must exit this space immediately! Let us leave now and never speak of this man again!”

The person in question is not my neighbor, quite thankfully. He will, however, be the neighbor of whoever buys the house that I have been working on in the next town over. The Real Estate company would do themselves a favor to do a Simpsons and just pay the guy to not come outside when there is a perspective buyer there. He is that weird. At least I think he is, but it is all about perspective, right? I am probably just as weird to him. Though I am not sure if his mind can process the word weird, or any other word that has more than one vowel, for that matter.

I have been doing work on this house for some time and had never actually seen the guy until yesterday. I was going to the house to do a bit of touch-up painting and to connect the plumbing lines that the contractor had neglected to do. The guy that was installing the tile and carpet was working on it though so I was not able to do any of the tasks I needed to (you can’t walk on the tile for at least 24 hours after it is installed, also he had removed the vanities and toilets from the bathrooms and they were the ones that I needed to finish). I spoke with Mr. Flooring Guy only long enough to find out when I could come back to finish off my tasks, which would have been today for the flooring being done, but the vanities and toilets won’t be back in until tomorrow. I was certainly done for that day. I made my way to the car.

Have you ever had one of those WTF moments? I don’t mean that in the sense that you text message WTF to someone when they give you a weird response, I am talking about a full on “what the fuck” moment. You see something that is so unbelievable that all you can think or say is “what the fuck?” That happened to me midway between the house and the car, in a big way.

I have been thinking about this all day and I still can’t figure out which way to go with it. The weird neighbor was the one that gave me a genuine “What the Fuck?” moment, but it was his attire that brought that about. The whole outfit was the reason for it, but there were three key pieces of it that had me holding back my laughter as I spoke with him, and backing away slowly. He had crossed the line between eccentric and insane, done a couple of laps around the slackers, then lapped the crazy people a couple of times before he dressed himself, by appearance at least.

Though I saw him top to bottom, I am going to describe him bottom to top. His feet were donning some fashionable, blue thongs flip-flops (the wife has told me that I can no longer call the footwear a thong because of possible misconception). Scroll up a bit (oh how I wish I hadn’t) and you will see military camouflage, unfortunately it is on a pair of shorts that look like ’70s era basketball shorts (if I would have looked hard enough I would likely have seen ass cheeks). He was wearing a very sensible long-sleeved sweater, well, it would have been sensible if it didn’t have a Raiders logo on it. That is pretty weird, eh? That was the normal part of his attire though, it only gets worse.

Much like the Gaydar kicks in when I see someone gay (three or more facial piercings and pants that have a zipper on the back will send that thing into the red zone), this guy set off my whackodar. My best guess is that he was voted most likely to bury bodies in the basement when he was in high school, and he probably followed through on that.

So, he was wearing the blue thongs flip-flops, camouflaged short-shorts, a Raiders sweatshirt, and a British Pith Helmet. He was also wearing a gun belt, which had an indeterminate pistol in it. I have never had rules about it previously, but I invented one yesterday: Always run away from the man in flip-flops, camouflaged short-shorts, a Raiders sweatshirt, a British Pith Helmet, and an unidentified gun. That is a good rule. Keep it in mind.

Thank the random fluctuations of time and space that he is not my neighbor. That guy was just creepy.

You load sixteen tons…

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The best part of my job is that no two days are ever the same. Sure everyone makes that same claim, but in my case it is totally true. I am a butcher, in theory, but I have to do all of the stocking of the milk, beer, perishables, and just whatever the hell happens to come into the store. That is just in the first couple of hours that I am there though, after that it can get interesting.

When I first started working there, back in 1994, whenever something would go wrong with plumbing/electrical/you-name-it, they would call someone to come and fix it. Now I am that someone. I have learned a lot of skills during my time at this job, skills that will likely make it a lot easier for me to find another job should I go looking for one. I never knew that I was an electrician, or a plumber, or a building contractor until, I actually had the project in front of me. My logic was pretty simple: If someone with an 8th grade education can do it, I can do it also. Because “I am good enough, I am smart enough, and dog gone it people like me” (no offense if you don’t get the humorous intent of the quote).

In my years working where I do I have taught myself the major aspects of various trades. I can now lay down tile (ranging from the do-it-yourself peel-and-stick, through the industrial grade that must be glued down, all the way to the ceramic, which is extremely expensive but a very good investment as you will never have to replace it.), I can troubleshoot electrical circuits in structures that were wired up at least a couple of decades before my birth, I have become quite proficient at finding and eliminating the sources of leaking roofs, I can replace water lines without a problem (though I only replace with PVC or CPVC since I don’t actually have a torch and the flux that copper would require. Although I did have to borrow a torch to do a copper line one time since building codes do not allow pvc connections behind walls. That is a long story though), yes, I have learned a lot while working where I do, mostly self taught.

The culmination of my self-taught abilities came a couple of weeks ago. There was a vacant rental house that the boss wanted fixed up, but he figured I could do all the work. He was right. I will skip over the minutiae of broken faucets and the such and get to the meat of this one, I had to install laminate flooring (Pergo. Google it if you care, I am not going to link to it). That is some tough shit to put down. While it is true that it just snaps together, what they don’t tell you (the installation instructions tell you but you have already committed yourself to it at that point) is that there has to be a quarter inch space between the flooring and the wall at all times, to allow for expansion and contraction of the flooring. That is probably all well and good in new homes, you know the ones, they are easily identified by their straight walls, standard door moldings and the such. In a house that is as old as the one I was working in none of those things exist.

This description will be horribly confusing, but bear with me. I had to lay the flooring down in a house that had walls and corners about as square as an overhead view of the border between the U.S. and Mexico. There was existing “trim molding” that actually went below the level of the floor (which I could not use for finish molding since it would leave the underside of the flooring completely exposed to the elements, or so the Home Depot guy told me), the existing “trim molding” stopped about an inch before every door, went back to the level of the wall, had a quarter-round molding (vertical), then hit the door jamb. The door transitions were hard.

It took me about an hour to lay 200 square feet of this flooring: It took me about 20 hours to lay the 30 square feet for the 7 doorways and two carpet transitions. I still had to leave the quarter inch gap around all of the transitions (where the doors are), but was able to cover all of the rest of the gaps with molding. Even the housing inspector (that is the guy that comes in to check out the house prior to sale to make sure that the home will be around by the time the mortgage is paid off) didn’t notice the small gaps at the doorways. It is only a quarter of an inch.

So I learned a brand new skill today: I can now haul dirt.

The basement of the place I work is quite cavernous, thousands of square feet. The foundation is extremely visible and made of nothing but huge stones and mortar. Problem is someone decided to mud over the foundation and make it into a living area (I have no idea how long ago that was, but I would guess decades). The mud that they slapped over the enormous rocks has long since turned to sand, which is now filling up the basement. It is nearly knee deep at the corners and along the wall, while being only a light dusting (say an inch and a half) near the center. I have to clean it out.

Dirt is heavy.

I spent three hours down in the basement today doing nothing other than moving out that dirt. I had a helper so that we could do double the damage in the same amount of time. We each filled two buckets, five gallon buckets, before taking them out to the street. Each bucket weighed in excess of fifty pounds, we carried them out two at a time (four at a time since there were two of us). That makes it to be 200 pounds each time we carried them out. I would guess that we only did 25 trips to get the dirt cleaned out, which sucks since I titled the post about sixteen tons and we only did about 2.5 tons. Of course the sixteen ton song is about shoveling, not what we had to do.

Every full bucket of sand has to make it to the street. That trek, from where we were in the basement, was about 200 feet to the stairs, the thirteen stairs, 30 feet to the door, and an additional 250 feet after that. Dumping the pails was taking about five minutes every time, but we were to sweeping near the end so I guess I didn’t really have to work all that hard.

On the upside, I get to do it again tomorrow! We only managed to clear one wall today, there are many more to be taken care of.

Seriously, Kids, stay in school.