Author Archives: Shadowtwin

Concerts

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The wife came through with the Megadeth Tickets I mentioned last time. We will be in the 16th row to the left of center stage. These tickets are not going to put us in quite the prime location that we got when we attened all of the concerts that she got tickets from at her work, but honestly being a bit away from center stage might just make it so that the high-frequency noises don’t hit me straight on and deafen me. Sixteen rows is also not that far back to be, I think that the little caged VIP area that we had at the other venue was just behind the 13th or 15th row, from that vantage point you can see (and certainly hear) everything perfectly.

This is, of course, all academic anyway. You can hear these type of concerts from a couple of blocks away (probably better on your ears that way also), and it is not like a band like Megadeth really has much of a stage show. The only reason that I can think of for going to see a concert is just for the energy of it. It may sound foolish, especially as I am now in my thirties, but you just can not mimic the energy of a live concert regardless of how loud your stereo happens to be.

One of the concerts that we saw, which really illustrates that fact was at the Cricket Pavilion (in the aforementioned VIP seating), with the bands Motorhead, Dio and Iron Maiden. While the concert was pretty lackluster until Iron Maiden hit the stage, after that it was pretty much chaos. There was one point during the concert where a guy jumped the rail from the upper level, charged into our little box (which was dead-center stage) and was trying to make it over the front rail to rush the stage. Security tackled him, knocked over our table and took him away. I am not entirely sure 1) Why they actually bother to put a table in these little boxes in the first place. 2) Why the security guy, one guards the entrance to each of the VIP boxes, didn’t catch him before he made it in. 3) Why they don’t stop selling you beer when you are as drunk as this guy was. What I am absolutely sure of is that there was an energy there, something that you felt, and while it might not make it through in your description of the event the next day, you still told everyone about it. It is certainly something that you really have to experience to understand.

Much on the same topic, you only have one life to live. Sure you could spend that life living inside a little box, eating healthy, excercising daily, not doing anything that is truly fun. When it comes down to it, though, do you really want to live forever? Go to the concerts, blow out your eardrums, you aren’t going to have a chance to do it again.

In yet more really loud, angry music talk, the local radio station 98KUPD, who were the first to offer tickets for the Megadeth show, have another show on the books as well. The radio station is billing it as the “Big Red Night of the Dead”, though that makes no sense, and neither of the artists are performing on the same night. The artist, the one that is not Megadeth, is playing the day before Megadeth at the same venue. There must be some sort of a bi-lateral partnership between the artist and the station though, as the station is being allowed to bill the show as such and is giving away cd’s all month to that end. If you are only going to see one show in your life, it should definitely be the that band.

The band in question is Marilyn Manson (the link is to tour dates). I really don’t like Marilyn Manson at all, yet I have to say that he is a great as a theatrical showman. I mentioned that in my May 23, 2004 post. I will just quote myself from that post to save myself from writing any more about it, and save you from reading it:

I was absolutely blown away by Marilyn Manson. I do not care for their music, but won’t turn it off if it is on the radio, it is just the kind of thing that I don’t actively hate, or like. His (their) theatrics really stole the show. To the point that I was a bit disappointed when I finally got to see Ozzy (for the first time in my life). Manson certainly took care to stage a show that would shock and entertain you for his full set. The rest of the bands, Ozzy included, just did their songs. I will give ozzy a bit of lee-way on this one, since he is no spring chicken, but the other bands, like Korn, couldn’t they have done something other than just play their songs?
Manson had choreographed marionettes (they were actually people behaving as such) that did things for his entire set. He had a little tiered stage kind of thing that they would climb. It is difficult to describe, but it was an experience. The other bands just played their songs. If you want to hear the song, you have the cd, the sound quality is going to be a lot better, just listen to the damn cd. Marilyn Manson, on the other hand, really sold me the experience. Even though I do not like Marilyn Manson, I would be more likely to buy tickets to his next concert than I would be to buy tickets for the next, say, Korn concert…Even though I like Korn a lot more than I like Manson.

That is why you have to buy a ticket and see the show. It is just that, a show, it is never going to be the same twice. While I can remember most of the songs that I have listened to repeatedly over the years, most of them don’t bring up images of a guy trying to stick a microphone into a marionette’s vagina. I doubt you will ever relate trying to stick a microphone into a marionette’s vagina to Marilyn Manson if you never watch the show. Hell that was also over a year ago so I am sure that the stage set has changed as much as the music has. Manson seems to be out to shock you, and it works. Much like a car wreck, you don’t really want to look, but at the same time you can’t look away. I wonder if P.T. Barnum might be a relative of Brian Hugh Warner (aka Marilyn Manson) I apologize for that link, but it was the best I could come up with.

That will be about all for today. I still don’t understand why I continue to defend people like Marilyn Manson and Howard Stern when I really don’t like them. I guess it all comes down to the belief that you are free to say/do what you want, and that liberty can not be bought or sold. I suppose that is why the politicians spend so much time and money trying to get into an office that really doesn’t pay all that well (in their eyes). This land is supposed to be about freedom, and if you are not free to let your children play in the streets then we need some gun laws. If you are not free to speak your mind in opposition of the idiot in office, then we need freedom of speech (without repercussion). If the press won’t talk about the idiocy of the actions of the current administration, then we need to do it ourselves and get rid of the riff-raff. A democracy is not run by one idiot with more money than brains, it is run by the power of the people…Now if the people would just vote…

Christmas lights; John Kerry, Concert tickets

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Yes, as the date clearly states, we are now officially in October. All site-related musings aside, time still seems to be moving at rather a rapid pace. The decorative Christmas lights that I put up on the house last year, and have been thinking of taking down every weekend, now seem to be less of a nuisance, as it now seems that I am just horribly well prepared, as opposed to horribly lazy, as they seemed just yesterday. The local radio stations are already talking about ‘shopping days before Christmas’, completely disreagarding the fact that it is still so unbearably hot that no one really ever leaves the house, unless forced. Of course that is sort of a trade off that one must make to live where I do; We have unusually warm winters, extremely hot summers, and the other two seasons seem to last about three days each. That is not an exaggeration either, last year there was one day that we were running the cooler (in the store) and the next morning it was the heater. So I am going to go ahead and blame the rapid passage of time on having only two seasons, regardless of the fact that winter goes about two months, while summer lasts the other ten.

Attempting to use the weather where you live as an excuse (like I just did) is a pretty poor argument. Everyone, everywhere, has different atmospheric conditions that they have to tolerate. While I really wish I would have made it to take care of the weeds in front of the house (and I mean once and for all, as opposed to using a weedeater every third weekend), at least I have the house, with the weeds in front of it, to bitch about. Practically half of the state of Florida is in ruins, and I am bitching about it being to hot to shoot a bit of RoundUp on them. I suppose that is why there are benfits and drawbacks to living in any environment. And those weeds had better watch out, I may just get off my lazy duff and take care of them next year!

• Now that the small talk about the weather is out of the way… I want to mention briefly that I may have completely underestimated John Kerry’s performance in the first presidential debate. All of the surveys that have been released so far show Kerry winning the debate handily. I would agree with that point, Kerry did win the thing, hands down, in my eyes, but I was actually disappointed in both his, and President Bush’s, handling of the questions. The entire debate seemed to be more of a press conference, each man responded to the question that they were given, but neither were ever allowed to actually ask direct questions of the other.

I may not be much of a pundit on politics, but I do know how to debate. When you do not allow the persons in the debate to ask each other specific questions related to the subject, the persons are not debating -they are ranting- much as I am now. The key to finding out someone’s stance on anything is to not listen to the stuff that they have prepared and memorized over time, you need to see what they say when they don’t have any more notes. While neither candidiate came in with notes, they surely knew the points that they wanted to make, and had likely practiced saying them in front of a mirror. I am not even sure that what I witnessed last night could be called a debate, at least not in the literal term of the word. Bush did his best to spin everything into his (obviously pre-rehearsed) ‘War on Terror’ shtick, while Kerry did his best to have good hair and answer questions that were never asked.

Am I the only person in the whole of the ‘United States of America’ that wants to see what the actual people, the ones that we are actually going to vote for on the second of November, actually think? I sure hope that there are a lot more people like me, people who are disappointed by the fact that the debate was no more than a staged media circus. Even though I really want Kerry to win this election (or even Nader, hell anyone but Bush) I still think that the people are getting the short end of the stick when the debate is all but staged. What the American people need is factual information, not rhetoric. Yet, It seems that facts are no longer the driving factor when we are letting the ‘Leader of the free world’ send our children to war.

• Now to really make you all drool.

It is hard to have a bad day, even though mine was horrible, when you come home to find the following email:

If I bought tickets to this would you be able to work early on Saturday or get the day off so you could go??

The link is now dead, but the concert in question is Megadeth at the Dodge Theatre (in the Phoenix area). If you know anything about me at all, hell, even you know nothing about me at all, you should know that I kind of Worship Megadeth. There is no force in the world strong enough to keep me from making it to see a new Megadeth show, well, I guess death would qualify, but I don’t think that death is really a force. You should all now just bow before me and hope/pray that your wife will ever be so cool as to offer you treats to such an event. Of course not all wives are built the same, so when I am watching Megadeth, you might be trimming hedges…which I would do, that is I would do it if I actually had a hedge to trim.
Not all wives are built the same, choose accordingly.

Meta Blogging; Politics

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Strange how time seems to move so quickly isn’t it? I just updated the dead link at the bottom of this page (you know the one; it entices you to click on the next update, regardless of the fact that I have yet to write it), I have thought to change that link so that is just text, but then I would not have all of the personal satisfaction of knowing that someone, somewhere, is actually trying to click on it. At any rate, It was during this little process that I realized that it is going to be October pretty soon, within a few hours in fact. Seems like it was only last week that I was thinking I needed to get the damn archives around here up to date, of course that was while I was on vacation in July, so you should see what I am getting at with the movement of time.

The real problem with updating the archives isn’t about actually spending the time to do it, since it honestly only takes me a few seconds to scan each update, write a very brief description and slap it on the page. No, no, the real problem with it is that it requires me to read all the dribble that I write. Did you think that the lack of proofreading was due to my integrity? No, nothing like that at all. People say that you are always more critical of your own work, but come on, some of this garbage is just, well, garbage.

When I initially set up this site it was due to a free site having deleted my page and all of its content. Paying a few bucks a month to keep the content online didn’t seem like a bad idea, so that is what I did. I am not sure if I ever had the intention of setting up a daily journal/blog -type thing, but that is what happened. While I do enjoy writing all of the stuff that I post here, I don’t really enjoy reading it all that much. The writing of it is quite theraputic, while the reading of it is boring to me, and hopefully no one else.

It is with those beautiful, self-deprecating thoughts that I go into todays post..Be Warned..

• I, and I alone, have taken it upon myself to declare today “National Stand Out On Your Lawn Holding A Large Metal Pole While Praying For Ligntning Day”. Possibly not the whole day, but certainly for the two hours that the presidential candidates are going to be on television. I am not one to be cynical, oh wait I guess I am, but the simple fact that the online games I like to play have flooded over with players since the start of the ‘debate’ just makes me think that no one really cares which party has the better control of their puppet.

I am actually going to go watch the debate to see if I can be so ‘Un-American’ as to try to form my own opinions based on what the candidates say. Of course the debate is all but scripted, so good luck to me.

I hope to pick this up after Survivor is over, but no gurantees.

The debate was all that I expected: Bush said the phrase “war on terror” at least a thousand times (and I only watched half of it), while Kerry did his best to bring the facts into view; The fact that Iraq was less of a threat than at least four other countries (as far as ‘weapons of mass destruction’), the fact that we invaded Iraq on our own (no help from the UN on that one), the fact that the deaths in Iraq have been steadily going up since the war was ‘over’ (deaths being both the U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians). For some reason you can’t seem to hammer a fact into the head of George W. Bush…No, seriously, I bet if you had a fact that you wanted him to hear, then listened to how the ‘key part of the war on terror’ that fact was, then you became agitated and grabbed a hammer….You know where this is going.

The really unfortunate thing is that I don’t think that Kerry really did all that well at the debate. I could be wrong, or cynical, but it seemed that Bush was able to make his little eyes very steely when he looked into the camera and said “terror” or “war on terror”. I think Kerry had a lot more facts than Bush, possibly a better way to achieve the goals (though that would require looking at each candidates website to find out), I just think that Kerry might have been able to sell himself a bit better.

One thing, in the debate, that I found to be a bit surprising was that Kerry actually brought up the subject of ‘stem cell research’, and Bush’s policy against it. It was a bit of manuevering that Bush had to do to get that subject changed back to the ‘war on terror’, but he did it. He never once mentioned his staunch opposition of it. I tell you, if Bush is not re-elected he could certainly make a good spin doctor for someone else, someone else who likes to not hide facts, but change subjects, that is.

This year’s presidential debates are going to fall into the next trivial pursuit game, I am afraid. The only people that are watching them are steadfast supporters of one or the other of the candidates. The ‘undecided’ people are all playing on-line games, much like I should be, but my ‘journalistic integrity'(hehe) keeps me from doing so.

Here’s to hoping that the presidential candidates sober up…

Dreams; Joke email

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So yesterday I came up with a new idea for a side bar feature. You can see the evidence of that on this particular page! The new addition is, “Is It Porn?” The idea here is that you have to look at the name of a website and try to figure out who made it to get it registered first, either an actual business, or a porn site. The one that is currently there, the side-bar, was exactly the reason that I decided to do it in the first place. If you would have asked me a couple of days ago if I thought that Was.com was legitimate or a porn site, I would have thought it was definitely porn. That led me to try a few other common words, which really shouldn’t be porn, but about half of them were. So, I started thinking that there should be a guessing game involved in the process. While I currently only have a link to it (the first one), in the future I will likely place some ‘secret text’ below it so that you can see if you were right without having to download all the spyware and crap that you get from your average porn site.

• Yesterday’s call for email didn’t result in anything. Though when the wife asked for me to clarify exactly what I was asking later this evening, she decided that what I was asking sounded like normal dreaming. Now, see, I can only actually gain control of the dream perhaps 5% of the time, the rest of the time I am just dreaming and reacting to what happens in the dream world. When she, my wife, asked if I was able to make people appear and disappear once I had ‘control’ of the dream, I could answer it only partially true. I can make people appear, I can make things happen (not just things by my hand, but with other things in the dream) that change the surroundings and the people in the dream. It is certainly impossible to explain, but if you have ever had the type of dream where you can make people/animals/objects appear, then you remember doing that in the morning, you might be having the kind of dream that I am talking about.

I also say that I can do that in about 5% of my dreams, yet I think that might be a bit of a high end estimate. Possibly 50% of the times that I am dreaming I realize that it is a dream. Of that 50%, I may only be able to wake up or take control half of the time. Of that number, I would guess that the percentage of times that I simply wake up would be in the extremely high nineties. To stretch that one a bit further, I can take control of a dream roughly once or twice a month. That is not counting all dreams had in a night as one dream, but counting the times when I am able to take control. If I have five or six dreams in a night I may never be able to gain control of them, this could go on for weeks. If you have never gained control of one of your dreams, you will just sit there wondering WTF I am talking about, yet, if you have ever done so (gained control of a dream, that is), I would really like to Hear from you. Trust me when I say that you will know if you have ever done it.

No more on that subject today, I have more information to gather.

• The wife is a wonderful source of those CC emails that you really wish you never got, but only because you think that they are virus-ridden. For some reason or another, the last couple of emails that I got from my wife made me laugh. One for obvious reasons, one less so. At any rate, I am gonna post them both here, after clipping the names, email addresses and phone numbers of course:

George Bush met with the Queen of England. He asked her, “Your Majesty, how do you run such an efficient government? Are there any tips you can give to me?””Well,” said the Queen, “the most important thing is to surround yourself with intelligent people.”

Bush frowned. “But how do I know the people around me are really intelligent?”

The Queen took a sip of tea. “Oh, that’s easy. You just ask them to answer an intelligent riddle.” She then pushed a button on her intercom. “Please send Tony Blair in here, would you?”

Tony Blair walked into the room. “Yes, my Queen?”

The Queen smiled. “Answer me this, please, Tony. Your mother and father have a child. It is not your brother and it is not your sister. Who is it?”

Without pausing for a moment, Tony Blair answered, “That would be me.”

“Yes! Very good,” said the Queen.

Bush went home to ask Dick Cheney, his vice president, the same question. “Dick, answer this for me. Your mother and your father have a child. It’s not your brother and it’s not your sister. Who is it?”

“I’m not sure,” replied Dick. “Let me get back to you on that one.”

Cheney went to his advisors and asked every one, but none could give him an answer. Finally, he ended up in the men’s room. Recognizing Colin Powell’s shoes in the next stall, he shouted, “Colin! Can you answer this for me? Your mother and father have a child and it’s not your brother or your sister. Who is it?”

Colin Powell yelled back, “That’s easy. It’s me!”

Cheney smiled and said, “Thanks!” Then he went back to speak with Bush.

“Say, I did some research and I have the answer to that riddle. It’s Colin Powell.”

Bush got up, stomped over to Cheney, and angrily yelled into his face, “No, you idiot! It’s Tony Blair!”

Okay, so I am going to post only the one, as I realized the other one would not work quite as well in this format.

Friend dies in car accident

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Well I actually did put pen to paper (actually finger to keyboard) yesterday to write something. What happened is that I got a little bit of the subject that I was typing about and decided that it was a bit to personal to put in such a (potentially) public venue. It was nothing horrible or all that secret, just something that I decided, after I wrote it, that the general public would be better off without that particular knowledge. One thing that was in that post is something that I want to bring up today, as I have always been quite curious about it…Yet not so curious as to actually ask anyone.

Rather than actually going into a whole lot of detail about that subject today, I will just ask the question (for the sake of my own sanity), that has peaked my curiosity. That question is: While you are dreaming, does your mind ever realize that you are in a dream? If so, are you actually able to take over the actions of your ‘dream self’ and manipulate him/her as if it was in real life? I don’t want to go into any more detail than just that, mostly because I am hoping that someone will email me a response. This is a subject that I am very curious about. If you have ever had a dream, your input would be greatly appreciated.

• In other news, a friend of my wife’s has recently died in a car accident. I knew the man as well and he was likely the only person that my wife has ever had as a co-worker that I actually got along with. Of course, to be fair, the wife has had tons of co-workers through the years, some I can relate to, some I can’t. Were I given a few hours alone with each of them I would be able to form a more solid decision about like/dislike, but that just never happens…Well, there was the one time where we all went to a baseball game, we being myself, my wife, and two couples of which the women were her friends. I made a judgement about one of the men on that day, which was reinforced when we had them all over to a barbecue one day (a year or two ago).

The man in question, though, was named Brad. He and my wife had worked together for a couple of years before he transferred to Texas. He was a heavy drinker (possibly as bad as me), but it seems that, on the night he died, he did not know his limits. It is a difficult thing to do; to picture someone in your mind that you know is now dead, regardless of the circumstances. I certainly feel for Brad, his mother and his relatives. He was far too young to die…Younger than me, in fact.

Men, in particular, seem to think that they are ‘bullet-proof’ until they hit the age of 30 (some men hold the belief a bit longer), Hell, I know I did. I can think of at least enough situtions where I ‘should have’ died to make you extend all of your fingers in counting. The simple fact that any man makes it through the ‘Machismo’ part of life should go to prove that there is someone, somewhere, that really doesn’t want them to die.

I try to tell myself that I have ‘Guardian Angels’ watching over me, but at the same time I am not gonna get really wasted and drive a car (anymore). My ‘Guardian Angels’ could all be out on vacation that day, then what?

Perhaps I am just turning into a rambling old coot before my time. First I bitch about how music was better when I was youg (ala old Metallica) then I start to bitch about kids with the waistband of their pants around their knees (pants were skin tight when I was a youngun!). Maybe then I can go into some sort of a ‘Public Service Message’ about the values you learn when you fight with your own fists (as opposed to guns and knives).

Were I 15 years younger, or if I cared, I would try to make it so that this ‘angry music’ wouldn’t claim the lives of any more innocent children. That is, of course, what my father said fifteen years ago. Funny how the generation, the styles, hell everything can change, yet, the adults always seem to never know what the kids are going through. If it was possible to avoid the damn circle that this leads to I would be all over it.

One thing that was in the 5th ‘Harry Potter’ book was that ‘Dumbledore’ said that it is impossible for a child to know what it is like to be old, while every person that is old has been young. That seems to be almost a satisfying resolution for that discussion. Parents do understand what their children are going through, yet, the parents can not get inolved. Getting the parent’s involved would be the sign of a sissy, no one wants to be a sissy. All that the parent can do is be supportive, any other involvement would be just as bad as the ridicule on the playground.

Thank God that I don’t have children. If I ever start thinking that I want a son, I can just borrow my Nephew for a day, then I never want ANYONE to have children ever again.

On Religion

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First and foremost, I want to assure you that I am not going to dedicate this whole page to talking about the new shoes (though I am in some sort of a Nirvana-like shoe state ever since the purchase of those little suckers), so you can read on with confidence, in what I got no idea.

• Flux, over there at BlackChampagne had a bit of an email tiff with the guy who does the movie reviews over at The CAP Alert website (Christian Movie Reviews…That is, reviews of new movies from a strictly biblical point of view; What sins are committed and the such). For my purposes here, I will say that the email exchange was often humorous (as it was displayed right in the blog on Flux’s site for all the world to see), mostly so when viewed from a distance, as a sort of study into the mind of the extremely zealous, religious nut-case (not Flux, but the Cap Alert guy).

Something about what the religious nut-case said in one (well all) of the emails prompted me to email Flux with my two cents. It turns out that there were a couple of people other than me that were also following the saga, probably in almost stupified confusion (I know I was) at what the Cap guy was saying. Flux actually set up a separate page just to host the email conversation with the guy and the resulting feedback. That page can be seen Here.

One of the feedbacks was talking about something called “cognitive dissonance”, a term that I had never heard of. I don’t truly understand that term, or the implications of it, well enough to argue about it. Just a quick break down of how I see it:

1) You have a very strong belief in something, could be anything.
2) You are offered undeniable proof that your belief is wrong.
3) You believe even more in that something, laying all facts aside.

Now, it seems to me that this is exactly what religion has been doing for thousands of years. I remember a story in the bible where a bunch of people were trying to build a staircase to God (which I think is the bible trying to explain away things like the pyramids and any other large structure that pre-dates christianity). God then made it so that all of the workers spoke different languages so that they couldn’t communicate. God didn’t want mortals to be able to reach the heavens (best described in the bible as clouds). Fast-forward that story a couple of thousand years, then note that we have space travel. Now, Heaven is no longer in the clouds, or in space, maybe mortals can’t even see it when they go by, I dunno. If it was true that you could build something tall enough to reach Heaven, wouldn’t that mean that Heaven was a tangible place? The bible said it was, oh, but, wait, there is that “cognitive dissonance”.

Religion, in and of itself, doesn’t make any sense at all. There have been hundreds of ‘known religions’, likely thousands that were practiced but not known to us today. Once no one really practices them any more they turn into Mythology. I just wonder why we wait until there are no more practioners of said religion before calling it a myth. Doesn’t crap equal crap regardless of the defenders of the one pile?

You may have noticed that I am a bit bitter towards religion. I think that is a pretty justified position to take, given my upbringing. My parents were not all that religious (technically, the only time I ever heard the word GOD when I was young was when dad was yelling at whatever he was trying to fix; It was generally followed by either ‘Damn’ or a string of obscenities that I am not going to list here). While my parents were not religious, I (and my brothers) were forced to go to church every Sunday. As a grown man, I think that maybe they were looking for a bit of time alone, but who knows. I did my best to listen to the guy yelling all of the bible verses, I did sing when necessary, I put a quarter in the collection dish every Sunday(I was like 6), I did the religion thing.

I went to ‘Vacation Bible School’, I went to a Wednesday Night program (called AWANA), I did all that I could to excel at this endeavor. My second year at “Vacation Bible School” was the first time that i actually walked down between the pews, kneeled down, and asked God to save my soul. I was in tears as I did that, I am still not sure if they were tears of joy or tears of fear or pain, I just know that I did it. I really, truly, wanted to be the best little christian that I could be…

Shortly after my parents divorced, at which point I was either 7 or 8, I was given a bible, from a woman, at a church that my mother was taking us to. I think that this was the first bible that was ever truly mine. It was a pretty bible too, it was white on the outside and put a lot of the verses in red on the inside. When I asked the woman who had given it to me why some of the verses were in red, she said that they were many of the verses that are cited during your average Sermon. That, of course, intrigued me.

I began to read the book just wondering why the passages that they ( the preachers ) quoted were so few and far between. Within about an hour I knew exactly why there were only a few of the passages in red; There are only a few passages that the Preacher ever wants you to see. It took me a couple of weeks, and I didn’t understand some of it, but, I read the bible, cover to cover. The Bible (at least the King James version of it) is rife with adultery, murder & incest. Were it not for the fact that religions are basing their lives on the damn thing, it might be on the best-seller list as just one hell of a novel.

Even after that epiphany, it took me almost four years before I just gave up and said that all religion is bullshit. I can not cite a single incident that led to this, there had been overwhelming scientific evidence for years, I had avoided it. There was some point where I just thought, okay, enough. It is all crap, life is not being governed by some higher power. If it is, I am certainly gonna be screwed for putting the fingers to the keyboard to write this.

The issue of “cognitive dissonance”, it seems, really does exist. It kept me from giving up on religion for a very long time. Now that I am free of the religious pull, I wonder how I ever got suckered into that garbage. Of course I was a child of parents who were sending me to church so that they could have some nooky time. Had my parent’s actually been religious, I might be writing this from the other side of the fence.

• The strange thing is that I do believe in Karma (to an extent). If you wrong someone, that wrong will come back to you. I don’t think that that implies a religion though. That is something that I keep in mind when I deal with people who are really irritating me (though they may not know it). If you treat your peers the way that you would want them to treat you, this would not be an issue. Unfortunately, the christian community is too involved in what everyone else is doing wrong to find fault in their own actions. Oh, to be so blissfull and naive…

Wrongs have a way of Righting themselves.

Shoe size; Sex pills

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My day at work yesterday involved unloading a truck. I must say that this process has been made much, much easier on me since the change in distributors sometime in July. I used to have to pick every case off of a roller and set it on the floor to the side, now I just have to check in the perishables, which are carted in by the driver, and actually count the rest of the stock. I had never realized just how much work it was to pick up the several hundred cases (ranging in weight from 5-80 pounds) and set them to the side until the point where I didn’t have to do it. Damn that used to be a lot of work.

The unfortunate side-effect of the new system is that If I happen to miss damage to any of the persihable items while checking them in, we can not return them, and can not get a credit for breakage. What this means to me, personally, is that I have to pay a lot more attention to the boxes that the items are shipped in; If the sides of the box appear to be smashed a little bit, it could be that the product inside the box is completely destroyed. Still, having to do less lifting and more careful examinations is something that I welcome, having had problems with my back for the last ten or twelve years.

Unfortunately for you, the reader, I have no intentions of talking about my lack of lifting over the last couple of months. I have more sinister motives. It is all about the shoes.

In my last update, I mentioned that if my new shoes performed perfectly it would be akin to me getting a Pulitzer Prize for the writing that I put into this site. The thing is that the shoes did perform flawlessly, yet I have not heard any mention of my little bitch site being in contention for said Pulitzer. I suppose that I am a humbled man. I am a humbled man who no longer has sore feet every fucking day though, so that should count for something.

What I really want to know is how can a man reach the age of 30 without anyone ever saying anything about the poor fitting shoes? Sure there is not a lot of opportunity for that kind of thing when you buy your shoes at warehouse outlets and the such, but when the guys are fitting you for a Tuxedo they measure everything. Come to think of it, those rented tux shoes didn’t hurt either. Perhaps I should have asked the guy what shoe size I actually was. Bleh. Now I know the problem and I will be able to address it in the future.

One more thing that I must say about the whole ‘shoe size’ issue is that the reason that I used to buy the oversized (so it seems) shoes was that they were the only ones that didn’t horribly hurt my toes even in the showroom (that seems to be based on the shoe getting a fraction wider for every size; assuming that the foot is just a bit wider for every inch longer it gets). The side-effect of that was that they did not bend where my foot bent, which led to further discomfort, well pain usually. If you are a poor/cheap person like me, and you have a lot of foot pain, have someone actually measure your damn feet before your next shoe purchase. The difference is not like night and day, but more like sunshine as opposed to the endless void of the nether realms of a black hole.

I still wish that I could have found a brand that I knew a little bit better, perhaps the better fit of the shoes will keep my feet from busting the seams quite as quickly? I better go ahead and bookmark this page for the inevitable letdown in a month or two.

• In a bit of non-shoe news, for a change, here is a story that I really enjoyed:

Sex Enhancement Pills Fall Short?

I had long thought that no one believed the commercials for those damn ‘penis enlargement’ pills. Well it turns out that enough people did, and enough people are mad about it, that they are going to try to sue the makers of the pill ‘Enzyte’. You see, the thing is, I have to watch at least a dozen commercials for that pill every day. Not once, ever, in the commercials does it actually say that it will make the little willy bigger. It does say that it will give you a “big new spring of confidence”, it also says that it will give you “a little well-deserved respect around the neighborhood”, what it does not say is that it will make your penis bigger.

I think that they go to great lengths to try to make you think that they are saying that it will make your penis bigger, but they never say anything of the sort. Other commercials say that it will give you a “big, new swing of confidence” as well as a “happy woman back at the ‘club-house’.” None of that actually says, or implies, actual penis growth. Sure, some men would think that it implies they will get a larger penis if they take the pill, but aren’t there thousands of people who buy ‘penis pumps’ in the hopes of getting a bit of ‘natural male enhancement’?

The very last line of the article that I linked to at the start pretty much says it all, and it said:

“Enzyte is more successful subtracting from the male wallet than it is adding to the male organ,” Schardt said.

I may not be the biggest horse in the stalls, but I would rather eat my own shit than to pop sugar pills in the hopes that little willy would grow.

It is like my Mother always told me (and no that was not from her personal experience), “It is not the size of the wand, but the magic within.” Come to think of it., That might not have been my Mom, might have been my friend’s mom (the same non-sexual rule still applying), at any rate, someone said that to me enough times that I still remember it. Of course the small wand might make me remember this particular quote all the more.

Now that I have told everyone that has an internet connection that I have both huge feet and a small member, I think I am gonna call it a night.

Tune in to the next post to see how I can turn very innocuous ideas into horrible things that you would rather not read. I am ready.

Shoe size

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Well, just a bit more shoe discussion today (dear random fluctuations of time and space, I hope I eventually come up with some actual content). The shoes that I bought on Sunday performed quite admirably in their first full day of use. Of course you can’t judge a shoe by the first ‘full day’ of use, but I can certainly tell you that most of the downfalls of the other shoes were non-existant in these ones. So much so, in fact, that I think I may finally understand why I can never find a comfortable pair of shoes in any price range. It turns out that I have wide feet.

The latest pair of shoes that I purchased are in a 9 1/2 size, but they are ‘extra wide’. It turns out that all of the foot discomfort that I had been getting from the other shoes might be directly related to the fact that I have wide feet. You see, your average Payless Shoe Source doesn’t have any person working for them that actually cares about your shoe size. The only thing that those type of stores care about is selling the next pair of ten dollar shoes (of which maybe 3 cents per shoe go to the kids in the warehouse that built them). I mention this only because I found it a bit humorous that the women at the shoe store I went to seemed a bit, I will say, less than educated at their craft.

There is a thing called a Brannock Device that can be used to measure the foot, in length and in width. There is always at least one of the damn things in every shoe store. The unfortunate thing is that they never use them, even worse, they don’t know how to use them. Using the device by myself, after I had already purchased the damn shoes, I found that I am actually a size 9 1/2. Beyond that, and not knowing how to use the device properly, I was not able to confirm this until I just googled up the link to the Brannock Device. It turns out that I really do have wide feet.

My usual shoe purchases are in the 10 1/2 to 11 range, and they seem to fit pretty well (after a week or so of expansion). The 9 1/2 extra wide shoes that I got, however, still seem to fit perfectly, no need for expansion or other weird shit to make them fit. The extra wide shoes just fit. If I had known that I had really wide feet when I was in high school, I may have been able to make my dad buy me shoes that actually fit onto my feet. Of course Dad was more ‘old school’ and would likely have told me to grin and bear it.

At least now I know that I have really wide feet and as such will make sure to mention that fact when I am trying to purchase shoes in the future. Honestly, today might be the first day in damn near a decade that I have not felt pain in my feet. Who knew that the pain could have been caused by the limited selection of shoes at the local Payless? Beyond that, who knew that if you wear a shoe that is a couple of sizes too big (if you have a wide foot) it will expand to fit the foot? This is all quite irritating to me, I am not blessed with a huge ‘Johnson’, I am not as tall as an ‘NBA’ player, I just have really wide feet. And you know what they say about people with really wide feet…They have short ‘Johnson’s’. Which is also not helpful.

If these shoes make it through the unloading of the truck tomorrow, then through the remainder of the day, I might call them the ‘Perfect Shoes’. Of course the odds of that happening are about the same as my odds of getting a pulitzer prize for the writing on this website…Not likely, enough said.

At the very least, even if you hate me, my feet don’t hurt and it was the discovery of extra wide shoes that made this all possible.

I don’t have anything to put after that. In the interest of making more readers turn liberal, I offer you this; The Washington Monthly. This site will give you the democratic view of the issues, like them, hate them, this is how we/they think.

New shoe discussion; Neighbor ships to Iraq

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This weekend left me without a lot of desire time to write anything. That is of course not true, but as the whole world now seems to just accept lies at face value I am gonna go with it. Today I will make up for the lack of any posting over the weekend by making sure to bore you to tears, and thus make you thankful that there was not any of this crap for the last couple of days. If all goes as planned anyway.

• Sunday was a day that I really dreaded. It was new shoe day. I dreaded it so much in fact that I have put off the occasion for the last two months, even though it was quite necessary. My old shoes have ripped to the point that it is possible to put my entire fist through the side of one of them where the leather meets the sole. In fact the only thing that kept my foot from slipping out through that enormous hole was the fact that it hadn’t quite made it all the way to the toe of the shoe, just damn close. Of course the rip was almost as bad two months ago, I just hate shoe shopping so much that I kept putting it off.

It hasn’t always been like this, no, no, I actually used to enjoy shopping for shoes. Of course I used to enjoy shopping for shoes when I was following the trends that everyone does in their teens. Back then I would intentionally add unnecessary wear to shoes so that I could go and find the latest ‘in’ ones to replace them. That was when it was still on dad’s dime, so of course I never got the shoes that I really wanted, but I could usually get a cheap knock-off copy of the ones that I did desire. Strange that now that I am buying them myself, and can buy any damn pair I want, I so loathe the experience.

I only own one pair of shoes at any given time, well technically two, but one is a pair of dress shoes that might make it out of the box once a year at best. The other shoes are my everything shoes. Some people have a different pair for things like work, hiking, yardwork, digging ditches in horrible rainstorms, etc. I use the same pair for everything. Sometimes I will wear flip-flops when I am using the weedeater, which is a really stupid thing to do, but it does keep me from having to pick all the little bits of grass out of my shoelaces. I guess if I ever get careless and amputate a toe in the process I will look back at how foolish it was and laugh, or not, depending on what kind of medication I am on at the time.

So why do I hate shoe shopping so much? There is just no longer any selection. I know that you can walk into any random shoe store and see several hundred different shoes for sale, ranging from a couple dollars to a couple hundred dollars, but they never have anything even approaching what I want. So am I some uber-picky shoe snob? I don’t think so. All that I ever ask for is a pair of leather shoes that are black (at least mostly black) and hightops. That’s it, just black, leather hightops, wouldn’t seem that tough to find would they? I haven’t actually acquired a pair of the elusive things in at least four years.

My preferred brand of footwear is Nike, not that I have actually had a pair of them in a few years, since they just never seem to release anything that meets my meager criteria. I prefer Nike not for the fit (as they are always too tight and hurt my feet badly for the first week or two) nor for the name, but for their durability. The last pair of Nike’s that I had kept my feet covered for about a year and a half, I still actually have them and I do actually wear them sometimes when I know that I am going to get really dirty. For comparison, my last two shoe purchases have been something called “Tuff Grip” that I purchased at Wal-Mart, and which lasted about two months, and some “Tx Traction” shoes (a christmas gift from the wife that we never got around to picking up until late January or early February due to the aforementioned hatred of shoe shopping. And while I could have had any shoe in the store I took the 29 dollar traction ones since they were the only ones that came even close to what I wanted), which lasted about four months, though I put off buying new ones for a couple of months after that. As you can see the Nike’s just last longer.

My job actually dictates what kind of shoes I must wear. Not like a dress code, more like something that I have discovered over time. First off, I cut meat while I am at work, this tends to leave the shoes getting blood dripped on them. Try going out to dinner sometime wearing just jeans and a T-shirt along with a pair of blood-stained white sneakers, maybe people aren’t actually looking at the shoes at all, but it does make me feel pretty self-conscious. For that same reason I am not able to wear shoes that have any woven fabric in them, sometimes the blood will actually seep through woven fabrics also and that is quite gross. That is why they need to be both black and leather, and I mean leather not suede. While Blood and Suede might make for a good Ray Stevens song, it is pretty nasty on shoes. I can get away with faux leather, as long as the tongue of the shoe is also made of the same material, but it rarely is in those faux leather shoes. The reason for wanting the shoes to be hightops just comes with the amount of lifting/pushing/pulling that I do while working. I don’t really believe that having the extra lace or two around my ankles is going to save me if the four-hundred pound cart that I am pushing up the ramp comes back on me, but they do keep my shoes from slipping off during that scenario. The worst thing that could possibly happen when trying to control an out of control cart would be to lose traction when a shoe slips off, and low top shoes seem to slip off a lot more frequently than the hightops.

I haven’t been able to find a decent pair of hightops in the last six or so years, all the ones that they sell now seem to be white with many other colors on them. Did the NBA actually start to require players to wear white shoes or what? The only way I was able to get black hightops was with basketball shoes. Also, all of the shoes that even approach midtop height these days, at least the black ones, seem to have both leather and suede on them. So it seems that I am destined to never have a pair of shoes that I really feel comfortable wearing.

To anyone who is now thinking, ‘why not just black work boots?’, the reason is that while I do all of the lifting, pushing, meat-cutting, etc. I also stock the shelves. This means that there is a lot of squatting and kneeling as well. I tried those black work boots when I first noticed how difficult it was to find the shoes I wanted, and a lot of kneeling and squatting in those boots will leave you with horrible bruises on the front of your ankles. That is not even mentioning how horribly uncomfortable they were in the first place.

The particular shoe shopping experience, this time, resulted in a pair of New Balance lowtops. Out of the available selection of shoes that were both black and leather, there were either these or a pair of Reebok’s that felt like they were an inch higher in the toe than they were in the heel. I had at least heard of New Balance, so hopefully the shoes will last longer than it takes me to write this damn post.

Completely on a side note, I was gonna link to the pair of shoes that I bought, but the New Balance website should be a poster child for how not to do website naviagation. You have to be a couple of page-loads in before it gives you the search option, the search option does not actually seem to allow you to search for the actual model number (or whatever it is that they print on the tag in the shoe), and on top of all of that you can’t even browse all the shoes; You have to select a category to browse by. How in the random fluctuation of time and space’s name am I supposed to know if the shoes are walking, running, training, cross-training, basketball, tennis, extreme sports or other? If it said it was a “CT190”, for instance, I would assume that the “CT” stood for cross-training. Yet every shoe on the damn site starts with an ‘M’, that makes it impossible to tell even what category the shoe I bought would be in. Since I browsed through about fifty shoes from the site though, I would guess that they just slap any random number on any damn shoe, as they all look exactly the same.

Well, at least I got some new shoes.

• In other news, the war in Iraq just got a whole hell of a lot closer to home. Right next door, in fact. It seems that my neighbor, who is at least six-and-a-half feet tall, has just re-signed into military service. He was still on Active Duty when the Desert Storm conflict was going on but never got shipped over. He has decided to go ahead and serve his country in the current war to (I suppose) fulfill some sort of patriotic duty. I really believe that that is an admirable thing to do, at least in most cases. I am certainly not going to fault any person that wants to defend our country (regardless of how wrong I think the conflict may be), I don’t have the courage or fortitude to do it, any man who does is either a better man than I, or possibly a bit insane, or both.

I certainly wish him the best of luck in his new endeavor, I believe he ships to a special training course in October and will be in Iraq by late December or early January. I guess he is only doing two years this time, and there will only be one year on the front line, while the six weeks of training and the reaminder of the two years will be stateside. Best of luck to you.

It is impossible for me to understand his logic in signing back up. When he was serving in the military back in the desert storm days, he was likely single and ready to give his all to defend his country. I am sure that he has the same mindset now, but a decade has passed. He is in his thirties, married, has two beautiful children, and has decided to ship off again to fight the baddies in the middle east. Again, I must admire his…well whatever it is that made him make the decision, but what happens if he doesn’t make it home? He will leave behind a widow and a couple of children that will likely spend the rest of their lives wondering why he decided to fight this fight. There is a very famous line from a movie (which I think was ‘Johnny got his gun’) where a child asks his father “Dad, when it comes my time, will you want me to go?” The response from the father being, “For democracy, any man would give his only begotten son.”

What happens when you are a father? You leave two generations to mourn if you don’t manage to make it back. I do admire the courage that it takes to go into a war, especially when you don’t really have to.

Here’s to hoping the neigbor makes it back in one piece. Best of luck to you.

The D&D gamer

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So, have you ever worked in retail? If you have, then you will know that it is your obligation to make sure and talk with your customers about whatever it is that they are interested it, regardless of how much you happen to disapprove of it. It is mostly the simple act of seeming fascinated with the stories that the people (especially the elderly ones) tell, but it does branch off into other areas as well. If there is one thing that I am really good at, it is talking -at length- about things that I don’t know a whole lot about. I credit this directly to my ability to remember mundane facts and figures. I don’t suppose that the ability to rememer useless information will ever get me any further than just being the winner at trivial pursuit, but for some reason the trivial things do just stick in my head.

Normally I just never notice this little ability, if you can even call it that, but, sometimes I am able to talk for at least a good hour about crap that I really don’t think I know anything about. That does seem a bit vague, so I must elaborate. Much like talking to George a couple of days ago about handguns, which I used to know a lot about, but have not actively followed the progression of, I asked him what the powder load of the .50 calibur cartridge was in relation to the load of the .44 cartridge. Why did I ask this, I dunno, where if I had asked him the same question a decade ago I would have known exactly why. Honestly, I even know why today. If you increase the size of the projectile without significantly increasing the powder load, you are making a bigger projectile go much slower and less likely to go through any damn thing. I.E. if you try to shoot a cannonball with a firecracker you aren’t going to get enough velocity to make it out of the barrel, let alone do any damage. Of course, George went on with powder loads and weight issues (things that I would likely have been all over a decade ago), yet, now, I can’t even remember why I was so curious.

The prior story does not matter at all for my purposes today. It simply displays the ability to seem like I care about, and know the requisite lingo to question, whatever the customer happens to come up with. That is the very definition of customer service. If he (George) were to walk away without whatever he came in looking for, he would likely just keep walking, unless he actually wanted to talk to the ‘oh so friendly staff’ for a bit longer. Most notably the guy that just spent a good thirty minutes talking about guns to get him to buy a three dollar steak and a bottle of wine.

So this guy came into the store, I will not describe him here, as I feel I may be just a tad biased. He started talking about the food/drink consumption of your average D&D character. I am not a D&D player, really haven’t been for over a decade, but I did understand what he was talking about. Unfortunateley, for me, I do actually know how to play the game -several years of my life that I regret-. So, being friendly, I started to mention that I hate the way that the four and five sided dice just didn’t seem to roll like they should. Once again, unfortunately, this guy was a DM. He went on to explain that the horrible rolls that I was getting were based on the fact that I was not a competent D&D player. That all might be true, I don’t want to dispute his facts. What I do want to dispute is the business card that he gave to me after this brief conversation.

Not to discuss the person’s name, since it really isn’t important. The guy, the new DM, handed me a business card that said “DM John Doe”, which went on to note his address and phone number, just in case someone actually wanted to learn the game. When I was in Junior High I actualy played a couple of characters, I didn’t win (though I don’t think it is possible to win at D&D).

How far down the road to Loserville must you go before you realize that you have been to ‘Geektown’ and made Mayor there? If you don’t think that printing out your own business cards with the title ‘DM’ on them is a pretty nerdy thing to do, that might be the first clue that you really are a Geek. Not just any geek, no, the kind of geek that makes Star Wars geeks look normal by comparison -And that is saying a lot.

What I really wonder is if the guy actually hands out these business cards when he is in job interviews. That would be absolute proof of either his lunacy, or his firm base in the realm of geekdom, or both.

Thankfully, I only have an unhealthy fascination with porn. That may make me a lot of things, pervert for instance, but at least not a geek. At least not until I figure out how to hack into porn websites, at that point I will be a perverted geek, which may or may not be worse than a D&D geek… I am not sure at this point.