countdowns

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Countdown Hall of Fame
Only 2926 days since Michigan last beat Ohio State.

hypocritical oaf

June 18, 2005

March 18 - Bill Frist addresses the Senate, "speaking more as a physician than as a US senator. There is insufficient information to conclude that Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state. I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office. She certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli."

June 15 - The autopsy goes public.

"(AP) An autopsy on Terri Schiavo backed her husband’s contention that she was in a persistent vegetative state, finding that she had massive and irreversible brain damage and was blind, the medical examiner said Wednesday. He also said that her brain was about half of its expected size."

June 16 - A humbled Frist is contrite. "I never, never, on the floor of the Senate, made a diagnosis, nor would I ever do that," he tells the Today show. "I never said she responded." Showing as firm a grasp of the word "never" as he does of his Hippocratic Oath, he adds: "Would I do it over again? Yes, I would do it over again."

speaking of never: signs you will never, ever see

starbucks = progress

June 17, 2005

Seattle was just ranked the #1 wireless city in America. How this can be when Seattle isn't the #1 wireless city in Washington, I do not know. The Intel-generated list gives Seattle credit for hotspots in its many Starbucks, which of course require you to pay for access, and at two tourist attractions. Spokane, meanwhile, is a wireless hotspot. The city itself provides free wireless Internet access anywhere downtown and beyond. My guess is that they didn't buy their hardware from Intel.

and thus is everyone cut off except carla

John: "Minette and Karen were complaining that those chocolate chip cookies were way too sweet. What did you think?"

Carla: "I thought they were perfect."

the great curling-iron massacre

June 16, 2005

Finally, proof of the existence of a higher power. Or of natural selection. I gotta tell ya, if you don't love this story, you're downright un-American.

my parents had sex too much, too often

The familial Medusa: drop one sister off at the airport and another takes her place. This one's Linda, the eldest, more than a decade my senior, which means we measure her age not in years but in half-life. She'll be here in two weeks. I'm not sure what the sudden interest is in me, the family white sheep, but I really do need to nip this nonsense in the bud. Quickly.

I don't much remember Linda. She moved out, on greased rails, when I was six. What I do remember is my brother beating the crap out of me with one hand over my mouth so that I couldn't yell, and me slobbering on/biting his hand in order to get the half-second needed for me to scream "LINDA!" And then there'd be the purposeful rumbling of Linda's heavy feet down the stairs, the glorious sound of my impending liberation.

Hit him again, Linda.

colorful expressions

"Black sheep" is one of those useful expressions I always wonder about, like "pot calling the kettle black" or "calling a spade a spade." Time to look up whether these have racist origins.

"Spade a spade," my favorite of the three, is safe. It predates, well, everything. Erasmus wrote in Latin in 300 BC: "I have learned to call wickedness by its own terms: A fig is a fig and a spade a spade." So now I'll just explain that every time I use the phrase. Better still, I could switch to "Let's call a fig a fig, shall we?"

"Black sheep" seems innocent enough. It could as easily be "unstriped zebra." I did find some support for getting rid of the expression out of sensitivity, which I guess I understand. But it seems like instead of getting rid of innocent and irreplaceable expressions, it'd be easier to just concede that no one's actually white or black, that we all just range subtly from beiges to browns. Yeah, that'll happen.

"Pot calling the kettle black," I can't find a defense for, other than a bunch of people asserting unconvincingly that it can't possibly be racist and that "they" are ruining English. Uh-oh.

line o’the week

June 14, 2005

Sportswriter Bill Simmons on renting the Katie Holmes flop "First Daughter:"

"No wonder poor Katie had to join the Tom Cruise Struggling Actress Scholarship Program to get her career going again."

family is relative

June 13, 2005

julie

Everything you need to know about Percy & Thelm@ and my sister Julie are contained neatly in one anecdote. That is, this encounter is typical of my every encounter with these people. To fully appreciate the anecdote, know that I left out nothing. This was the unembellished sum total of their contact.

Having not seen Percy and Thelm@ for the first couple days of Julie's stay, we finally saw Thelm@ poking her head out her door as Julie and I were departing.

As I climbed into my car, I hear my sister happily (and typically) scream "I'M HIS SISTER!!!" across the yard.

Thelm@, having no window overlooking my house nor any reason whatsoever to care, was nonetheless unsurprisingly unsurprised. "Yeah, that's what we were figuring. You were here before, right?"

"MY AIRLINE TICKET WAS $315 USUALLY I WAIT UNTIL IT'S $140 BUT THIS TIME WHEN IT GOT TO $315 I KNEW IT WOULD BE THE BEST I COULD DO BECAUSE YOU CAN'T FLY ANYWHERE FROM COLUMBUS FOR $139 ANYMORE!" my sister shrieked.

"Please shut up," I asked.

"What?!" My sister whirled, surprised. "I didn't want them to think that you were having some girl over."

"Huh? Who gives a crap?"

"She asked."

"No she didn't."

"Well, she waved when she saw us. She was curious."

"Of that, I have little doubt."

d’andre

d'Andre's much-anticipated visit was surprisingly mellow, for two reasons: 1) he brought his bride, the refined and ladylike Pam (henceforth d'Pam), who lent sorely needed sophistication to the occasion, and 2) we're mellow old codgers now. It was a pleasure to see my friend again and to compare our wildly divergent paths from our common point of origin to our not-too-dissimilar stations in life. It was a meeting of friends unlike any to which I've previously been a party. It was a comprehensive catching up, a touchstone, a status report covering 14 dramatic years in which we'd both known everything from abject failure to giddy accomplishment. 14 years. That's, like, 56% of a Jen. And we covered all 14 in great detail—we literally began with my driving the U-Haul out of the apartment complex. There's something uniquely bonding about originating from the same time and place and circumstance, a feeling conspicuously absent from my life. And the more we talked, the more I came to appreciate my commonalities with my friend and foil. I think even d'Pam learned something about her husband and from where he came. If I know women at all, she went to bed prouder of him than she'd been the night before.

We watched the passing lights in the shipping lanes, our feet on the fire pit and margaritas in our hands, toasting one another and friends long gone. "Who'd have thought one of us'd be here?"  d'Andre mused, shaking his head.

"Who'd have thought one of us would marry a supermodel Ph.D in biochemistry?" I added.

A nearly sheepish d'Andre bussed the good Dr. on the cheek. "Who'd have thought she'd marry one of us?"

I clinked his cactus glass. "Here's to marrying up."

•  •  • 

All right, thanks for indulging me. I know what you came for. There weren't many insults, but here ya go.

• The first and best point was scored by—no surprise here—D. He had not seen me since I was in the peak physical condition of my life. As they passed the security station at Seatac, he saw me, stopped, stared, cocked his head, and said, "Santa?"
• Not that he's not a tad bovine himself these days. "Rerun?" I replied, in my imagination six days later when I finally thought of a response.
• When we got into my Jeep, I had Careless Whisper on the stereo. He looked at d'Pam knowingly. "Who called it?" Yeah, but did he call the vintage George Michael/Andrew Ridgely poster on the back of the guest room door? No.
• Of my modern physique: "You're not 'Eggre' anymore. You're 'The Cracker Barrel.'" Then Pam hit him.
• Of my Jeep: "The cracker box." Then Pam hit him.

I'm pro-Pam.

who would jesus slander?

June 11, 2005

My older sister's visit supplied a few more theories circulating about me back home. My born again Christian brother and sister-in-law, no doubt emulating Christ's well-documented malicious speculation about people he didn't know, have publicly declared the following:

• When I psuedo-married Elan in Vegas, I lied. I really got married.
• A decade ago when I took my friend Tammy to my sister's wedding, she wasn't really my friend. She was someone I hired from an escort service. (Although stunning runway models will secretly marry me, I apparently have no friends I can use as wedding dates.)
• The Approval Whore wasn't really my girlfriend. She was a friend who was lying for me for four years and is now suddenly gone. (I apparently now have friends and  no longer need to hire escorts, which I guess is progress. I haven't figured out where Elan went that a fake girlfriend became necessary, though. It's all so confusing.)
• My house is not really my house. It's a rental I use to fool Julie when she's here...because I'm a druggie, you see, and I couldn't afford both the house and the drugs...because I gotta be on drugs...because there's no other possible explanation for my disliking people as kind as them.
• They know me better than Julie, the only family member to see me in the last eight years, the only one to come to my home, and the only one who's spent more than a couple hours in my presence in 18 years. Because she's gullible, you see.

As you can see, they are fantastically central to my universe. Like Annette observed: "They think they're so damn important that you'd bother to put on that dog and pony show for them? No matter how you swing it, it's a me, me, me thing."

I can't help but see parallels between these intellectual giants' zealous, truth-be-damned beliefs about me and their equally zealous, equally spurious religious beliefs. It's all about being right, about being better, about telling everyone—damn the abundant evidence to the contrary. And you know they must be right, 'cause they agree with one another so fervently.

Praise the lord and tighten my blinders, honey!

•  •  • 

In trying to explain their zeal—why their John mythology is so obviously more important to them than John himself—Julie offers the following explanation: "They just don't understand why you don't want anything to do with them."

Should I send it gift-wrapped?

hath your heart grown fonder?

June 9, 2005

Sorry about my absence. I'm dealing with nested visitors from Ohio this week. Have pity on me.

way to watch her back

So from the unrelenting media coverage we've learned that Natalee Holloway's girlfriends observed her leaving a club with several unknown men. Observed?!?  These chicks should start practicing for that "Friends of the Year" award acceptance speech.

a mind are a terrible thing to waste

June 7, 2005

Sign outside the Kingston Christian Church for the last week:

aren’t ugly people ever kidnapped?

June 5, 2005

Nothing against the latest Media Hysteria Poster Girl, Natalee Holloway, who's led every newscast for three days now, but how come I knew she was pretty before I ever saw her picture? Because the media doesn't whip itself into an orgasmic froth when ugly people disappear.

cover song of all time?

Yeah, I'll admit I'm a fan of the oddball cover, like the train wreck that was Pat Boone crooning Black Sabbath. But I just found my favorite: Ben "She's a Brick" Folds singing Dre and Snoop's "Bitches Ain't Shit." It's available exclusively through iTunes right now, but you can sample it for free there. Truly, my eyes are stinging from the tears.

Folds plays it straight. Stripped of the preening and posturing of its creators, the song utterly, hilariously exposes them as the Nobel laureates they are.

burning up in the blogosphere

June 3, 2005

Is anyone else annoyed by the popular media suddenly discovering blogs? They're batshit for blogs, yet they clearly have little understanding as to what they are—they routinely refer to, say, George Will's online column as a "blog." But oh my god, blog blog blog blog blog BLOG. Blog watch! Time for the latest from Planet Blogger! They can't say the word enough. They invent words like "blogosphere" to dazzle us with their with-it-ness. Which means, of course, that blogs are officially passé. As if Microsoft offering free blog space hadn't already established that beyond all doubt.

And no, I haven't done anything but watch cable news for two days. But it's tapering off now.

deep throat

closure for a news junkie

June 1, 2005

When I was very young, I was bedridden with rheumatic fever, the worst part of which—besides several shots per week—was that Watergate was the only thing on TV. On all three stations. (If you're over 30, you too remember the dark days of "all three stations.") At first, I was horrified. This, this  was worse than bowling coverage on all three stations. Slowly, surely, I became horrified for better reasons. I couldn't believe the things they were saying about the President, who is just above Jesus to a small child. I got sucked in.

My family was eating dinner when I staggered down the stairs in my bunny-footed PJs.

"Mom, Dad, what's extortion?"

Dad was typically helpful. "Jesus Christ! Get that TV out of his room!"

Mom didn't move it. It's still there, tuned to CNN, waiting for something else to happen.

more great moments in parenting

May 30, 2005

In rural Minnesota this weekend, a four year old child at a family picnic was shot and killed by a relative. The child wandered behind the paper targets being used for target practice at this family function. Right about now, you're asking yourself what parent thought "target practice" and "family function" should be in the same sentence, so here's another little tidbit to digest: the same kind of parent who dressed the kid in camouflage for the occasion. According to the sheriff: "While the paper target didn't completely obscure the child, he was wearing camouflage pants that made him difficult to see against the foliage."

I suppose there's some evolutionary advantage to the parents' genes not proliferating, but I sure wish it'd been achieved through their deaths and not the kid's.

don’t let the tobacco spit hit you on your hairy ass on your way out

May 29, 2005

Race car driver Robby "Who?" Gordon has declared that he will not race against chick sensation Danica Patrick because she enjoys an unfair advantage: she weighs less than him. All together now: waaah.  Like this hasn't been a part of racing since the first jockey stuck his finger down his throat. Gordon actually had the temerity to demand that the powers-that-be handicap her, presumably by adding weight to her car. Meanwhile, the powerful American Association of Fat Jockeys, Irish Sprinters, Samoan Quarterbacks, and Rodeo Barrel Boys labor union has threatened to join him in a class action suit. Christian Laettner has filed an injunction to have Shaq and Alonzo wear 40 pound ankle weights in order to mitigate their unfair advantage—superior talent—and "level the playing field." Even I'm getting into the competitive spirit, demanding that other writers type with six fingers like me. They use 66% more fingers than I do. Do the math.

american idle

May 27, 2005

I'll allow that Carrie Underwood is blandly cute, if the scent of peroxide is really your thing. That she can really belt a few notes is undeniable. But that's precisely my problem with the new American Idol: she can belt only a few notes. She has a mere half-octave range, and when forced to leave its safety, she disappears into an inaudible whisper. The audience then talks amongst themselves and reads magazines until the song eventually meanders back into her range, a development that causes them to cheer wildly. Even within her range, she misses notes right and left. All told, she's lofted more clankers than anyone in the history of the show, yet here she is, your American Idol, Tone Deaf Barbie.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

rarity of rarities

this actually made me homesick for ohio

May 26, 2005

If you have to ask, you'll never understand.

talkin’ sith

May 25, 2005

Ever since I wrote yesterday's heading, I've had that insipid Gwen Stefani song in my head. Now I very much want someone to record a parody in which Mace Windu confronts the Emperor with

I heard that you were trainin' sith
And you didn't think that I would hear it.

And the Emperor, referring to Anakin, replies,

Oooo-ooo
This my sith
This my sith.

I'll get a life now.

you’re so lucky

As Dirt Glazowski and I smoked cigars on his deck last night, watching the sun set over Puget Sound, we remarked that he is truly blessed. Sheepish, he then confessed something that increasingly bothers him: people urgently dismissing his new lifestyle as mere "luck." This is, after all, a man who a year ago left his career and family in Minnesota to move to a town 2000 miles away, where he knows no one but his wife and where he now makes sandwiches 12 hours a day for a living. But the move also allowed him a lovely waterfront house—affordable because it's in the middle of nowhere—and that moment on his deck last night. And he thinks the sacrifice well worth it. But the determination of some people to dismiss the fruits of his sacrifice as mere "luck" visibly hurts.

They don't have to be happy for him, but why must they go out of their way to diminish his hard-won happiness?

"You're so lucky."

I hear this sentence a lot, directed at me and friends both. Sometimes the sentence is rote politeness, like "Hi, how are you?" and nothing more. Sometimes it's an expression of like-mindedness, as in "Wow. How cool! I'm happy for you." I often use it that way myself. And then there are the sometimes about which I'm writing, the sometimes when the person repeats the sentence purposefully, defensively, even somewhat angrily. Often times they grab the listener's arm for added gravity. "You're. So. [beat]  Lucky." The intonation is not one of a compliment, but one of resentment, as in listen to me—it's exceedingly important that you understand that the only difference between you and me is that you're a fucking luck sack. Sometimes they even say as much. "Yeah, I thought about doing x, too," they'll explain, and then they'll say something derogatory about x.

In my own case, I never hear "you're so lucky" more than when showing whale photos. With this assessment I do not disagree, as most things in life are one-third luck, least of all finding wild whales. But I find the resentment thing off-putting, even insulting. I'm sorry, but blind-assed luck isn't all there is to it. Luck is, as they say, the residue of design. Consider the whales. For me to be floating out there two Fridays ago, I had to make the following decisions.

• First and foremost, I'm single and childless. I've repeatedly traded companionship, family, security, validation from other human beings, and having someone to change my colostomy bag when I'm old for the flexibility (career, time and money) I now enjoy.
• 13 years ago, I decided I did not like the pedestrian direction my life was headed, and I changed course dramatically, knowing that this would require that I move 2000 miles from anyone I knew and would likely torpedo my six-year relationship. But I wanted to get to the Pacific Northwest above all else. I bet on myself, and I won.
• 11 years ago, I moved to Seattle, again by myself, again to rebuild, again betting on myself and winning. Moreover, I made an uneasy alliance with a company that I truly despise because trading my services for its cash was the best route to where I wanted to go.
• 3 years ago, I bought my dream house in Whale Central, some 80 minutes from work, thereby committing myself to quitting soon. I bet on my ability to earn a living in the sticks.
• 1 year ago, I decided to make that switch to vending, if a bit earlier than planned. I left job security, health insurance, vacation time, sick time—trading it all for more flexibility with my time. Even in the face of job uncertainty, I stuck to the plan and dropped half a year's salary on a boat.
• In that year, I've gladly worked for two kind people whom I used to outrank, which certainly wouldn't have been possible if I'd conducted myself like many at MS. Or if my ego were invested in work status.
• In that year, I've also cracked the books hard, teaching myself how to boat in tidal waters, about the movements of whales, about using a hydrophone, about studying them safely. Every day, I track their movements in the area, trying to discern their patterns. I've gone out dozens of times and failed, usually on weekdays.
• Two weeks ago, I noted a high probability of whales in good boating conditions, and I headed out on a Friday, knowing that I would have to work on the weekend to make up for it. And then I put my tiny boat in the path of 60,000 pounds of mammal-eating predators, one of which came within three feet of landing on me.

"You're. So. [beat]  Lucky."

No doubt. But unless you too have eschewed the path of least resistance and bet on yourself, kindly shove your resentment up your ass.

•  •  •

A favorite and relevant Simpsons line:

Selma just got married, and her sister Patty is saying goodbye at the limo. Patty doesn't know quite what to say.

Selma: "Just tell me what I most want to hear."

Patty: "I am eaten alive with jealousy."

Selma (embracing her): "Thank you!"

•  •  •

The flip side of all this is that I, too, feel twinges of jealousy when I look at friends' lives and see paths not taken. Dorkass' new palace makes my house look like something that fell out of a cereal box; I bet her back yard has 3x as much square footage as my entire place. The Kerrs uprooted and got away from retarded Seattle people, and for that I'm eternally spiteful envious. The Coxes conspired to have a positively brilliant and beautiful little girl. Elizabeth is moving back to Cheney. And on and on. It's only natural, I think, to look at the fruits of their choices and feel some jealousy. Where a lack of health comes in is when jealousy ceases to be homage, when it and happiness for your friend are mutually exclusive. Their happiness is of a variety I did not choose, and yes, that makes me pause and reflect and even second-guess, but it does not threaten my own. I'm delighted for them. Is that not how it's supposed to work?

metaphoria

May 24, 2005

Bright orange signs adorn its door: the Metamuville Christian Church has been condemned. Huge cracks have formed in its foundation, and as it's a public hazard, no money will ever be collected there again. Got your jokes ready? So did I. And then Pastor Greg managed to surprise me: why, this shoddy masonry constitutes heaven's endorsement of his fundraising efforts for building himself a brand new church. Hallelujah!

this sith is bananas

I caught ROTS in a digital theatre last night, and now as three years ago, the digital version was eye-poppingly better than the digital-to-film transfer playing in most theatres. The latter is muddy looking, frankly. Digital projection made last week's experience seem as though the screen were covered in wax paper. It's a beautifully photographed film, but on film, not so much.

I went to the only theatre in the Puget Sound region to be showing the film digitally: the Galaxy in Monroe. Yes, Monroe. All those geeks waiting outside the Cinerama were waiting to see silk curtains and an inferior product.

spanglish

May 23, 2005

It's my ferry viewing this week, which means I've seen about a third of it. Here we have a movie written and directed by a Jew, starring a Jew, about a couple of Mexicans, and the sole WASP character is one of the most shrill, repugnant characters in recent memory. I have no point, not yet. Just waitin' for everyone else to pile on.

great moments in parenting

At the store yesterday, a eight year old child was "petting" Ed by raising his arm straight above his head, elbow straight, and windmilling his open hand on to her back. That Ed was trying to get away from him only egged him on. The parent? Standing immediately behind the child, watching him while he talked to someone else. On the fourth slap, the child's hand smacked my forearm, which I had placed between him and poor Ed.

You know what's coming, don't you?

"Hey!" said the outraged parent, incredulous that I would hit his child's moving hand with my still forearm.

"I strongly suggest," I growled as the brat shook his hand in pain from absorbing the force he had intended for my elderly dog's spine, "That you give your next sentence a great deal of thought."

"Asshole," he snarked bravely as he collected his brat and left without further comment.

Way to parent.

kellen winslow jr.

perhaps you should play two games in two years before you give yourself the nickname "The Chosen One"

May 20, 2005

Hey, who'd have thought we have something in common? We've both been charged with disregard for personal safety in Ohio! 'Course, I was 12 for mine...

it doesn’t suck

"hold me like you did by that lake on naboo” wins Worst Line

May 19, 2005

Episode III is corny at times, has the wooden romantic moments we've come to expect, clunks here and there, and has plot holes I find irritating. It is also one dazzling ride, without major blemishes. There is no "what are midichlorians?" or "I hate sand, it's not smooth like you" speech to make me want to open fire in Marin County. It is, in short, the only prequel worthy of the original trilogy, and I would rank it well below Empire and Star Wars but somewhere above Jedi.

WHAT WORKS
I knew 30 seconds into this movie that I would see it again. The opening scene is an elegant, jaw-dropping, vertigo-inducing tracking shot of our heroes' spaceships looping through a colossal battle. I have GOT to see this in 3D in a couple years. Here's a hundred bucks; can I see it now?

The actors, notably Ewan MacGregor and Ian McDiarmid, inject some life into their dialogue this time. When Obi-Wan apologetically tells Darth Vader that Obi-Wan has failed him, he makes you feel his heartbreak. And the cackling McDiarmid flat-out steals every scene he's in. What a fun character to play.

Anakin's turn to the dark side. Lucas does not cheat. We see the strains the guy is put under, and the psychological underpinnings for this horrific transformation are there. When he turns into Vader, we get it. No small feat.

The light saber duels. There are lots, but the fights aren't protracted, and the choreography is fresh. The final duel between Obi-Wan and Anakin in the lava flow is easily the most intense of the series. It'll be hard to watch Obi-Wan and Vader clank broomsticks like little old ladies swatting flies in Star Wars now.

God help me, I actually liked the midichlorians scene. I found it chilling.

Moral ambiguity. I love how Anakin thinks he's doing right.

Simultaneous births of the twins and Vader.

Silence. Lucas has the confidence this time allow his actors to act in silence, and I found two moments genuinely affecting: a montage of the Jedi being hunted down, and interlocking moments of reflection by Padme and Anakin. Silence is far more powerful than words, especially hackneyed ones.

Lead-ins to Episode IV. Seeing Luke's homecoming was cool, but seeing Yoda walk down the hallway of Princess Leia's future ship was cooler.

WHAT DOESN'T

The digital transfer to film. It still looks muddied.

Natalie Portman still sucks, with the exception of an excellent scene in the Senate, but considering that her character spends the entire movie being told by other characters about plot developments we just watched, she doesn't have much to work with. The "romantic" scenes in general consist of two actors with zero chemistry talking about how much love they feel without showing one iota.

Anakin and Palpatine watching giant holographic sperm fertilize an enormous ovum. Well, what was it supposed to be?

Obi-Wan galloping on a lizard. Enough.

Lucas still abandons scenes, rather than finishing them. Several times, it felt like the actors were standing around and waiting for him to yell "cut."

The Wookiee planet. Utterly inconsequential. Why did they bother?

General Grievous works, I guess, but IMO he just takes up space and serves as extra limbs to be lopped. As with the Wookiees, I just didn't care.

"Noooooooooooooooo!" You'll know it when you see it.

Lucas had some loose ends to tie up, and he did a half-assed job of it. Much of it happens perfunctorily, rat-a-tat-tat, at the end, as he goes down his checklist. We now know why Threepio doesn't remember Obi-Wan in Star Wars. We do not know why Obi-Wan doesn't remember the droids, or why he ages 40 years in 20. We now understand why Vader doesn't know about Leia. We get a half-explanation as to why, upon their deaths, Yoda and Obi-Wan disappear and Qui-Gon does not. But we get zero satisfaction as to why Obi-Wan would choose to "hide" Luke with his family and give him the name "Skywalker." Way to hide him. Spoiler alert > And Lucas completely screwed up with Padme's death. She dies within seconds of delivering Leia, yet in Jedi, when Luke asks Leia to "tell me about your mother, your real mother," Leia waxes about how Mum "died when I was very young," but she was "very beautiful, kind...but sad." Not a shabby assessment, for a 1-minute old. George, you don't need to fix Greedo shooting first; fix this!<  End spoiler.

countdown to legality

May 18, 2005

Katrina and I have long agreed that those "countdown to legality" stalker sites are creepy and revolting, and I fully expected her to recoil in horror and demand that I take my ever-so-clever satire down. She has not complied. So now I either have to remove it with zero satisfaction or put up with it for the next 6568 days. I hate her.

better res whale photos

forget mine. minette scored big!

May 17, 2005

The gray whale from two weeks ago.

Hood Canal transient orcas from last week

Money! Click the photo if you want the world's coolest orca wallpaper.

The same swim-under I shot, just clearer. You're looking at the nose of an upside down orca as it's coming toward the camera, right before it swam under our feet.

vicente fox, you’re no yasuhiro nakasone

Anyone else remember the Japanese prime minister saying that America's economy was handicapped because our work force's collective intelligence is dragged down by "a considerable number of blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans?''

Two years after the remark, the Japanese economic bubble burst, and they've been in the toilet ever since. But far be it from me to point out the irony. Yes, I am above those sorts of juvenile antics.

Hey Nakasone, how's 16 straight years
of unparalleled recession been treatin’ your racially pure, intellectually advantaged asses?

HOW
YOU
LIKE
US
NOW?

i’m sure they appreciate your support

May 16, 2005

compost disc

May 15, 2005

I'm trying to like Dave Matthews Band's new album, Stand Up. This is hard, thankless work. Mindful that I didn't much care for any of their albums on first listening, I've listened to it for about a week, now, and one thought is ever more recurring: so when can I chuck this thing out the car window?

It's dull as day-old dishwater. Gone are the lush arrangements, the indulgent solos and bridges, anything bordering on musical complexity. I had to check the liner notes to be certain that drummer Carter Beauford wasn't replaced by a Ronco Drum-O-Matic. You know you're bored when the tedious lyrics and mind-numbing percussive clap inspire you to mockingly sing along

S-A!

T-U-R!

D-A-Y!

NIGHT!

clive owen film festival

closer, sin city

Awed by Kevin Spacey's revelatory performance in "Usual Suspects," I afterward declared that "I would pay seven bucks to watch Kevin Spacey take a big ol' steamin' dump."

And then along came "Pay It Forward" to put that oath to the test. But I digress.

Having watched "Sin City" and now last year's "Closer," I'm ready to make a fecal declaration about Clive Owens. The man is magnetic. He effortlessly blows such charismatic actors as Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Benecio Del Toro and Rosario Dawson off the screen.

"Sin City" was what I expected. Using the metric of how well a film pulls off what it set out to do, it's a resounding success. It's a visual and tonal stunner, and if it lacks emotional resonance, well, it's not like it tried. Pass the popcorn, already. It's fun stuff. The enormous cast of 40ish men and 20ish Maxim cover-girls is strong from end to end, with one notably beautiful exception. As I watched Jessica Alba's deathly line reading in a key role, all I could think was, "Here is an actress born to play a comic book character."

"Closer," on the other hand, was far better than I expected. I'd avoided the film in theatres because Natalie Portman plays a stripper, and I still have nightmares from the time Mark and I were perusing magazines and he thrust paparazzi photos in front of me and said, "Look. Natalie Portman naked." Shudder. I would have gouged my eyeballs out with an icepick if it would have helped, but some shit just cannot be unseen. So I gave "Closer" a wide berth until someone informed me that she, in fact, stays clothed. The film is certainly not everyone's cup of tea, with its entangled infidelities, revenge fucks, and its commentary on the sometimes-hurtful nature of truth. A veteran of those wars myself, I enjoyed the discussion. The performances are wondrous, especially Owen's delightfully bitter victim. A raw performance. Portman's Oscar nomination is a bit of a mystery, if only because she was the weakest member of an extraordinary cast. Of the narrative's unclear zig-zagging through time, well, I don't much enjoy having to work at watching a movie. But that's nitpicking, really. I know these people, and it was a pleasure to see a film be honest about love's presence in word only. In its indirect way, this was one of the most romantic movies I've ever seen. Portman's final indictment of Law's declaration of love could have been me—with my family, with several exes, when observing friends' relationships, or just when seeing other, more "romantic" movies: "Where is this 'love'? I can’t see it, I can’t touch it, I can’t feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words, but I can’t do anything with your easy words."

the rev. al green

May 14, 2005

"I find that's true 99.999 times out of 10."

how was work?

May 13, 2005

Minette, Ed and I observed the Hood Canal transients for an hour or so today, before they apparently went into hunting mode and gave us the slip. We saw it all: more than twenty breaches, upside down breaches, spy hops, porpoising, swim-unders, you name it. One breach came within 3 feet of my boat. Minette has the better camera and I'll post her photos later, but here are some snapshots to give you an idea.

This is what it looks like when they notice you.

Now as before, the orcas breached their way toward the boat to take a look. This is one of many such breaches.

This was a fan fave: a double breach, one right-side up and the other upside down. The upside down one is just beginning here.

The Breach. It quite literally rocked our world.

A desperate attempt to shoot straight down during a swim-under. This is the belly and genital slit (bottom-center) and tail (top right) of an upside-down 25' whale, swimming under my boat.

opinionated

From Annette comes this delightful court opinion written by the Honorable Terence Evans of the Seventh Circuit.

conundrum

Katrina having gone to extreme lengths to renege on our Star Wars pact, I'm left wondering what to do. I should wait for her, of course, but getting Mom away from baby for three hours seems prohibitively far away. I could go with someone else, but that's just plain wrong. I won't do that. Sigh. I guess I'm watching this flick suck by myself—just me, it, and the bilgewater.

bacardi: check

and with a quick snip, annalie embarks on a lifetime of having to spell her name for people

May 12, 2005

Welcome to the planet, Johnetta!

Oh. I guess they went with second choice. The dream is all up to Annie and Eric now.

Also born on this date: Steve Winwood, Ving Rhames, George Carlin, Florence Nightengale, Katharine Hepburn, and (this one gives me goosebumps) Yogi Berra.

foreshadowing, indeed!

May 11, 2005

Katrina's little girl will be born on May 12, a tad early. Mom is in excellent spirits. Baby looks fine. The men in the vicinity of Mom and baby are completely whack. Thus endeth my report for now.

The original Lionel (a.k.a. Spazzie McDrama) took it upon herself to send out mail proclaiming Katrina hospitalized. When it arrived, I was seated next to a very surprised Trinie at her dining room table. I said it then, and I say it now: people who eagerly trumpet other people's drama as their own, who contrive to use others' news to draw attention to themselves, are vermin.

foreshadowing

Helen Hunt was on Letterman last night, and she talked at great length about raising her toddler. It was gripping stuff. He uses the same word for everything! Can you even imagine?! And he's crawling—ha, ha!—really fast now! And don't even get her started on potty training. It's quite a hoot and a holler, let me tell you. I'm on pins and needles until her return engagement.

of geese and ganders

Today's P.J. quote: "Republicans are the party that believes government doesn't work. And then they get elected and prove it."

May 10, 2005

By rights, I should use today's space to make fun of conservatives who annoy me. But honestly, it ain't funny. Whereas liberalism merely has a silly wing, conservatism is dead. Utterly. The people who call themselves "conservative" nowadays are an unseemly patchwork of gun nuts, bigots and religious zealots, all of whom indulge in extremism—rather liberally, to these eyes. Where are the fiscal conservatives? The people who believe in moderate government?

Six. Feet. Under.

•  •  • 

Okay, this is funny. Not an hour after I wrote the above, on American Idol, that trollup with the three-note range, Carrie something, sang the country song "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition." A better synopsis of modern conservative principles, you will never find.

•  •  • 

I'm fascinated by the former Presidents club. There's something about the unique pressures of that job, something that transcends party and even personal animosities, and forges a fraternal bond. Former adversaries Ford and Carter? Stalwart friends and allies for decades, combining forces on various political and philanthropic fronts. When Nixon was still alive, President Clinton sought his counsel. Ex-Presidents Bush 41 and Clinton are cozy, and the latter and Bob Dole have all but had raw gay sex on Larry King Live. But the elder men are not long for this earth, and in five or ten years only Clinton and W. will remain, and this makes me feel a great swell of pity for one William Jefferson Clinton. How lonely that fraternity will suddenly be. I can imagine former prez W. collecting a big speaking fee and a standing ovation at Oral Roberts and Bob Jones Universities, but I can't imagine him rolling up his sleeves and handling Haiti's election crisis or Asian tsunami relief. But hey, surprise me. I'll gladly apologize.

•  •  • 

Prediction: the string "raw gay sex" is gonna get me a lot of hits. More so if I mention Orlando Bloom's girlfriend and Lindsay Lohan nipple slip, too. Hello, morons! Do not adjust your monitor; these strange things you're seeing are called "words."

seattle liberals

May 9, 2005

In defining the people he was about to criticize, the great P.J. O'Rourke once wrote a paragraph that crystallizes my thoughts better than I ever could:

"When I say liberals  I certainly don't mean openhanded individuals or tolerant persons or even Big Government Democrats. I mean people who are excited that one percent of the profits of Ben & Jerry's ice cream goes to promote world peace."

This is what I've come to call "Seattle Liberalism," a peculiarly bubble-brained experiment in fashionable, ill-read politics. Being in this area is like perpetually being on a college campus, surrounded by shrill, left-leaning personifications of the maxim "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." A typical conversation goes like this.

"Bush sucks," we will agree.

"He's made a mess out of Iraq," they will continue. "It's anarchy."

"Well, in all fairness," I'll say, "The British made a mess out of it long ago when they redrew the Mesopotamian map and forced long-warring tribes to function unnaturally as one state."

"Guh?" they will say.

And then they'll climb into their Volvo beater, with its "Attack Iraq? NO!" bumper sticker still inexplicably attached, and drive to the co-op to fill their brand-name burlap sack with Cherry Garcia.

•  •  • 

Sadly, I must report similar silliness from my alma mater, Ohio State. I've recently decided to fill a lingering gap in my education—readings in rhetoric. (Not rhetoric in the popular, "bullshit" sense of the word. Rhetoric as in persuasive strategy.) So to the Web I went for a reading list, and there they were: Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Bacon. Then I noticed that for its rhetoric students, Ohio State offers focuses in the following: environmental rhetoric, rhetoric of colonialism, rhetoric and disability studies, and feminist rhetoric. Way to push an agenda, guys. This sort of indulgence is why that moron in Colorado wants to limit professors' free speech. All that's missing is "the rhetoric of Bush sucking."

“god, i’m having trouble not adding ‘idiot’ to my e-mails.”

May 9, 2005

And thus is the Triniometer upped to “ill-tempered.”
 

it took percy a whole day

A creeped-out Kiki called me last night. It seems that while she was stocking shelves, Percy took it upon himself to lecherously run his fingertip up her back.

Oddly enough, he's never seen fit to touch me affectionately. Or at all.

filmstrip

When I made the image at left, my idea was to combine three photos of me that were essentially the same—head tilted, mouth agape, face in corner—with one of Ed in the same pose. Did anyone notice this?

chappelle’s no-show

May 8, 2005

Comedy Central and Dave Chappelle aren't talking about why the premiere of his third season is almost a year late. Wags speculate about drugs, but I somehow doubt that this multimillionaire who, along with his wife and kids, still lives on Ohio farmlands is all that into the L.A. club scene. No, I think I know what the problem is. I sensed it coming as soon as he hit the jackpot with a $50 million payout for his third and fourth seasons. Dave Chappelle has hit the wall.

Mark Twain hit it. Robert Benchley hit it. H.L. Mencken and Pat McManus and James Thurber and Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams and Dorothy Parker and P.J. O'Rourke all hit it. Every humorist, regardless of genre, hits a wall where the real experiences that he'd been mining so successfully become depleted, and his comedy, stripped of its truth, becomes forced and unfunny. And Chappelle, like all humorists before him, rose to fame on the back of his best material. We have seen the very best that Dave Chappelle has to offer, culled and honed over a lifetime. It's season three now, and he's left with 1) the unused dregs that remain or 2) making stuff up. Why is he late? I suspect he feels the cold grip of imminent failure around his throat.

percy update

"would it kill you to go to arizona for material?" asks dorkass

It is perhaps appropriate that I find readers' #1 request so annoying: we want more Percy. The problem is that Percy and Thelm@ spend half a year in Arizona. They are a combined 202 years old, after all, and the law is the law. But fear not; Percy peeked in my window just last night, so updates cannot be far behind.

In the meantime, I give you a photo of the Metamuville Koffee [sic]  Klatch [sic] , of which Percy [sic]  is a member (though not pictured).

Yep.

This is my world now.

Save me.

Just out of frame on the back wall are photos of deceased Klatchers, each adorned with a little brass plaque with a saying that manages to be both cloying and repulsive: "Bob Magoo, Gone Fishin' In Heaven's Lake," "Betty Struedel, Knitting God's Afghan," and the like. It's utterly fuckin' mortifying.

Other activities in town:

the lionels

May 7, 2005

The Lionel Award honors achievement in not having the remotest qualification for one's job. It is named after the first such person I met at Microsoft, a justifiably defensive editor at Bookshelf whose spastic incompetence actually required that her peers meet in secret without her, lest she spaz incompetently. Mind you, I can stand energetic. Incompetence and defensiveness, too, I can tolerate. Put the three together, though, and I have a most unwanted hobby, a completely pointless time-sink that thwarts me from doing my own job. I have overhead. I have a "Lionel," a nickname coined by this editor's irritated peers and inspired by her immense, rat-infested white chick 'fro.

As I resent the very existences of her and Lionel Richie about equally, I'm running with it.

•   •   •

Microsoft requires no skill-set or experience from its editors, and consequently Lionels abound in their ranks. A typical situation follows. I once wrote that

"the look and feel are similar to those of Windows 98."

An editor whose professional training consisted of, as I recall, a degree in religious studies, changed my sentence thusly:

"the look and feel is similar to those of Windows 98."

I then spent the next day apologizing to a bunch of preliterate art history majors and VPs' daughters for that remark.

In a postscript all too unsurprising, the whole debate was made moot. "Look and feel" was struck down by company lawyers, who had previously argued in a court of law that the Macintosh OS look and feel could not possibly have been stolen because no such things exist.

trai essex

May 6, 2005

Steelers rookie Trai Essex:

"This is the team I wanted to come to. I watched the Steel Curtain as a kid, even though I wasn't born yet."

why boy babies are better

May 5, 2005

*Projected

you know, in all honesty, i usually think most newborns are pretty weird looking, but not yours. yours is the most beautiful baby [girl/boy] i've ever seen. honestly! [he/she] has your [body part that is remotely plausible].

Just practicing.

My summer is gonna be like a fireworks show, only instead of gunpowder, it'll be explosions of amniotic fluid. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! BOOM!

i need to have a separate page for scary church signs

May 4, 2005

The latest wisdom from the Kingston Christian Church:

YOU AND GOD ARE A MAJORITY.

If this doesn't mean

YOU'RE ENTITLED TO IMPOSE YOUR WILL ON EVERYONE ELSE.
(ESPECIALLY HOMOS AND JUDGES. AND HOMO JUDGES. AMEN.)

what exactly does it mean?

mother’s day

If you know someone who lost their mother in the last year, you might give 'em a call this Sunday. Obvious though it seems, it's surprisingly jarring for this day to suddenly have zero meaning. It's everyone else's holiday now; you're excluded.

don’t take me down with you

try repressing

Making the blog rounds the other day, I came across a link to the below missive. I've been mulling over a response ever since. My first reaction was that I owe a lot of good women an apology for thinking that vermin like this were figments of their imagination. I apologize unreservedly.

My second thought was of adults who spar with yappy teenagers. No satisfaction can come of it; no one respects you for making a child look foolish, and the child won't understand that he lost.

My third thought was anger—anger toward his female enablers/victims, without whose consent and collaboration this guy might have learned to be a thoughtful and responsible human being. Oh well.

Which brings us to where I am at this writing, irritated that this swine has excused his behavior by making generalizations about my gender and thereby impugning the character of every man. The generalizations, like the entire post, are unmitigated nonsense, a steaming pile of horse shit obviously designed to distract a very specific reader from his selfish misdeeds. He is the Irrepressible Shaun, and if that charmingly self-deprecating, self-bestowed nickname evokes thoughts of the Great and Powerful Oz, that's appropriate. Now I'm going to show you the pathetic little man pulling levers behind the curtain. Mouse over the horse-shit icons for line-by-line translations.

duerko del asno

May 2, 2005

Minette smelled something rotten with the below fake, but god bless'er, Dorkass bit, even after I said it was taken at "Point Adobe."

But now that I've done the hard work, it's time for the CheckRaise World Tour.

may day

May 1, 2005

the checkraise crew:

john, your captain
minette, your naturalist
dorkass, your ballast

April 30, 2005

Yesterday was a fun day of whalin', a day that included two beachings (one accidental), bone-jarring four foot waves, the repainting of both sides of my boat, and a boarding by two young men with two big guns. Three, if you count the enormous machine gun mounted on the bow of their Coast Guard boat. I passed my inspection, but that didn't stop a gleeful Dorkass from trying to make a John-skewering anecdote out of it.

"So did he do something wrong?!? " she asked in the same hopeful tone that a child asks "May I have some dessert?" She eagerly had her camera out, hoping to capture for posterity my arrest or, better still, my pistol-whipping. Alas.

Perhaps it was the disappointment, perhaps it was the unremitting waves, but soon her breakfast was adorning the starboard side of my boat. Unfortunately, the waves were coming at us from the same side; with the boat tilted, we were corkscrewing into them. "Tell her to puke off the other side," I snapped, fraught with concern for her comfort.

Oh yeah. And there were whales.

Our best guess is that we observed 1-2 adult and 1 juvenile gray whales as they circled and fed in 50' deep water. We saw several deep dives (which I presume is when their flukes appeared), countless blows, and a lotta barnacles. I got a good look at one's blowhole, and Minette saw a full body roll. The highlight for all was when we lost track of the whales and then an adult surfaced and slowly passed the boat, not 50 feet away. Just exhilarating.

the unbearable whiteness of being

April 29, 2005

Yeah, I admit it; that heading's a groaner.

As foreshadowed, my discussion of there being "no 'white experience' comparable to the set of unifying common experiences that members of a minority group share" was ineffective. This is not the first time. Usually, the responses are thusly:

Minority: "What do you mean? From where I sit, you all have the same experience."

White: "Why would we have a 'unifying common experience?' "

It's quite the piece of writing that fails every possible audience. I swoon with pride.

To the first question, the answer is yes, of course we do. As was pointed out to me yesterday, when I walk into a room, I expect to be treated with the respect that my skin color (and gender) affords someone in this society. Where we diverge is that I am not aware of this. It does not occur to me, before or after, whether I'm treated well or poorly. I am not reminded daily that I am white. I've said it before: it never comes up. When I meet a white stranger, then, we share no bond. We feel zero kinship. We don't notice one another's race. We are blank. What we're talking about, really, is not a "common experience" enjoyed by the majority, but the absence of one. We are null. The absence of a minority experience ≠ a majority experience.

To the second question, then, the answer is we wouldn't. No external force unifies us, makes us see the world that way.

When he retired, Thurgood Marshall had a lovely line. I wish I could find it verbatim, but it went something like "Race will continue to be a problem in this country until a single day goes by in which I am not reminded that I am a black man." The "white experience" is the exact opposite of this.

•  •  • 

An ugly passing thought that unfortunately makes some sense:

For the sake of argument, suppose that the growing white supremacist movement isn't motivated entirely by bigotry. Suppose that privilege in a society is a zero-sum game; that for one group to gain privilege, another must lose it. Minority advances, then, could be exactly the sort of unifying external threat I mention above. Could it really be that the white supremacist movement is the primitive beginnings of a shared white experience?

truth in advertising

April 28, 2005

Dirt and Kiki Glazowski were over the other night, and I showed them the entry that introduces their pseudonyms. How dead-on is my choice? Kiki asked, "How did you know his nickname was 'Dirt?'"

I didn't.

torn

This pains me. When those ever-so-classy Michigan sports fans pelt Allen Iverson, do I condemn them...or congratulate them on their aim?

crap tv mercy killing

I usually watch the last few weeks of American Idol. Yeah, I know. I can't stand much more than that, either, but I'm fascinated by who America deems more worthy. In the end, America and I have always been in sync, but along the way we diverge wildly.

Not tonight. Tonight, they mercifully jettisoned that god-awful, smarmy, greasy, camera-humping Constantine. I will not miss his creepy stoner-lothario leer. The remaining kids aren't nearly as annoying. America can't go wrong from here.

So long as it's Bo or Vonzell.

a heartbreaking work of staggering genius

dave eggers is no more. finally.

April 27, 2005

Oh my god, his rambling, self-conscious writing style is just like this, only less readable, if that's even humanly possible, or even divinely possible, which isn't to say that the word "divine" should ever be used in describing Eggers' pretentious, postmodern shtick— I found myself staring into space rather than read his prose, often— Finishing this Song of Himself was like passing a kidney stone out my urethra, if the stone were the size of a small child, not a teenager, certainly, but at least a toddler-sized stone, and my urethra were the size of a pin, and not a thick bobby pin, either, but one of those itty bitty collar pins they use on the shirts at David Lawrence— My mother lay dying, making gurgling sounds on her respirator, the tubes between her ribs draining malignant fluid from her lungs as she smoked butt after butt with no sense of irony whatsoever— Maybe a pin the size of a twelve year old— A girl, not a boy, as girls that age are bigger.— Did you see how I plopped non sequiter pathos in the middle of my kidney stone joke?— isn't that clever and amusing and unique and above reproach because it was about my dying/now-dead mother?— And well worth killing trees for, I mean, you know, if this post were printed on paper instead of electrons, so I should have said worth killing salmon for, since my electricity is largely hydroelectric?

Now. Imagine 450 pages written like that. And make it about frisbees and tacos.

This week I'm going to track down a mailing address and send Eggers the period key from my keyboard.

katrina’s redemption

She capitulated. Revenge of the Sith will suck on schedule.

Is this winning?

ed’s miracle drug

Purely for the benefit of Googlers:

My 10 year old spayed female English Springer Spaniel became incontinent, progressing from bedwetting to involuntarily urinating while awake. Proin 2-3 times a day helped but did not eliminate the problem. A combination of Proin and diethylstilbestrol, a synthetic estrogen, really did the trick. After a few unfortunate weeks of really creepy behavior (think pole dancing), she settled down and the bedwetting stopped. As a side bonus, it's taken 5 years off her disposition. She's always pestering me to wrestle and play, now, whereas a year ago she was a total couch potato.

deadlock

April 25, 2005

Gentle reader,

Sorry about the lack of posts lately. I've been dealing with some issues. You see, Carla IMed me thusly:

"Stop saying that Seattle sucks."

Oh. Okay, fine. How many Michigan graduates does it take—

"Michigan too."

And thus do we have our impasse.

metamuville crime wave!

if you're gonna give someone a pseudonym, I say go for it

MetamuMart Grocery, Trading Post & Provisions was hit last week. Thieves punched out a window and stole some beer and, tellingly, some cough medicine. Dirt Glazowski, the store owner, who's a dead ringer for Howie Long and did, in fact, play professional football for a time, has been a litany of profanity ever since. In addition to the classics, his every sentence is also peppered with the words "derelict," "reprobate," and "beat into a twitching mass of pulp on the ground." His wife, Kiki, has skidded into depression. As their friend, I've taken both sides, simultaneously assuring Kiki that it'll never happen again while helping Dirt plan his installation of a Burmese tiger pit in aisle 4.

The area old farts have rallied, too. A letter to the editor in support of "the kids" Dirt and Kiki appeared, addressed "Dear Meth Heads." Okay, good start. The letter goes on to scold the thieves and their lowly place in this world. You're parasites. Addicts. Degenerates. "Apparently, all you see when you meet people like Dirt and Kiki is a source of drugs."

Unable to speak, I stabbed the sentence with my tear-soaked finger. Kiki was mortified. I showed it to the contingent of gossipy old farts always on hand. They didn't get it. Even funnier.

•  •  • 

That the Glazowskis and I would become friends was inevitable, as we're the only people under 40—hell, under 60—in town. The first time I had them over, we watched the sun set and roasted brats in my backyard. As we pounded drinks, Dirt told stories of gridiron glory while I fawningly hung on every word and Kiki did a rather remarkable Terry Schiavo impression.

An Ohio State player blew your knee out and ended your career? Great, great!

"Was there anyone you really enjoyed hitting?" I asked.

"Mike Tomczak," he answered without hesitation. "I hated that prick."

"Same here," I replied. "Do you lie awake at night wishing you'd hit him harder, too?"

worst. hit. ever.

April 22, 2005

OMG

if this is health, gimme back disease

"That whole last year with AW, " noted Dorkass recently, "When you were really just despising her, I was thinking, 'Oh well. He says he knows what he's doing, so I guess he knows what he's doing.' Except now you haven't been remotely interested in women in how long?"

Almost two years.

"Think that's healthy?"

Not particularly, no.

Which brings us to the momentous occasion of yesterday, when I walked into the kitchen at work, and an attractive woman engaged me in conversation, and for the first time in years, I responded in the manner that's always come naturally to me.

Did I simply converse with my colleague, as I would have a week ago? No.

Did I dazzle her with scintillating wordplay? No, no.

Did I suavely compliment her cute new pumps? No.

Did I at least make her feel at ease? No.

I opened my mouth and tongue-tied idiocy poured out like diarrhea. The explosion was spectacular. It could not be contained. It was a physiological civil war in which my brain was a mere spectator, helplessly watching my mouth be an asshole.

Wow, that was a stupid thing to say. That too. Okay, damage control time. Wrap it up. Pick a sentence and end with that. Any sentence. There. And there too. That would have been a good place. Okay, you really need to stop now. She's looking bored.  There ya go. Right there. Perfect. Nicely done—why the hell are you talking again? Shut up! For the love of all that's holy, shut up. Now she's looking frightened. People are staring. They're rubber-necking. Legs! Get moving! I don't care that he's still talking, just get us out of here. Walk and talk! Move it! Move it!

It was years' worth of pent-up inanity, artificially restrained and kept under high pressure, waiting to blow. And blow I did. I guess  this is a good thing.

i’m in the mood for a little japanese tonight

April 21, 2005

It's been 12 years since I got to use that joke. 12 years is too long.

If you want to see what a $12 pink cookie looks like, and you know you do, here it is in the blog of that flourishing herpes farm the lovely Mariko (April 20 entry).

so sue me again

On Saturday, I was whipping up a wasabi dipping sauce for the spring rolls Sue had just made. Sid, an unabashed good ol' boy redneck, looked at me for some reassurance. "It's like horseradish," I said. "Or it would be, except that Sue purchased this particular can of wasabi powder sometime during Eisenhower's first term, so it pretty much tastes like green chalk dust."

Sue whirled. "My God, John. You bitch more than anyone I have ever known. Honestly! Bitch, bitch, bitch."

I reminded Sue that at 77, she's met an awful lot of people.

"Yep. And you're the bitchiest."

I reminded Sue that she grew up in a Japanese relocation center, a freaking internment camp, a veritable bitchfest if ever I've heard of one.

"Yep."

 

tom delay

April 20, 2005

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, inciting fundamentalist wrath on on the judges who allowed Terry Schiavo to die naturally:

"The time will come for the men responsible for this to pay for their behavior!"

Tom DeLay, on his paying his wife and daughter half a million bucks in election funds as "advisor salary:"

 "Politics is a tough business and it is difficult to trust people." 

Tom DeLay on Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy:

"He said in one session that he does research on the Internet? That is just incredibly outrageous!"

honorable mention

nah, these aren't desperately empty people searching anywhere, and i mean anywhere, for meaning

"(AP) A steady stream of the faithful and the curious, many carrying flowers and candles, have flocked to an expressway underpass for a view of a yellow and white stain on a concrete wall that some believe is an image of the Virgin Mary."

I know what they mean. I think I've seen the face of Satan in my guest bathroom toilet bowl.

this rose by any other name...still really smells like doo doo

April 19, 2005

Speaking of reader mail, a question I'm often asked is why the Approval Whore (AW, or just "a-dub" for short) merits a pseudonym, yet I readily name other exes. There are two answers. 1) If an ex prefers not to be named here, she too has gotten a pseudonym, just not an obvious one. 2) I don't hide her identity to protect her  from embarrassment.

chocolate pancakes with raspberry syrup

You'd think this would be good. You'd think.

reader mail

I never know what kind of posts will elicit responses from readers. Posts that I like or hate never yield what I expect. Now that right-wing fundamentalists and white supremacists (I'm pretending I see a distinction) have discovered my page, certain topics reliably result in hate mail. And anytime I say anything unkind about a Lord of the Rings movie, I'm guaranteed an e-smackdown. But outside those parameters, it's a crapshoot.

Of all the possible hostile reactions to the d'Andre piece, I never would have anticipated what I did get: angry mail from angry women. They saw me as glorifying (or at least making light of) deadbeat, mooching men, and they've clearly had their fill of what I called "that species." I thought I'd mocked my mooching years, but they didn't read it that way, and the flood of mail isn't really ebbing. Unlike most criticism I receive, this is wholly unwarranted. So if you'll permit me the indulgence of self-defense: Yes, in my low 20s I mooched off my girlfriend. She supported my sorry ass through most of my undergrad years. I am not particularly proud of this. However, I also atoned for it. When Maddie later went to grad school, she didn't have to pay one damned dime for her tuition. I set her up in a cute apartment off-campus, where she and our dog lived for two years, and she paid not a penny for that, either. Note that I didn't say "we stayed there." When I cut these checks, we were already broken up. 

To summarize: I think I have atoned for my deadbeatedness in a manner damned few would. Kindly get off my back. 

¡viva spokavegas!

April 18, 2004

It would happen several times, but the first was at the Rocket Bakery. A stranger walked up to me, making eye contact. "Beautiful morning, isn't it?" he chirped.

Oh my god, does he want money? Is he a religious missionary? A pyramid schemer? Is he just homeless and mental? I hope he's just homeless and mental. Then I can give him money and he'll go away. No, he's too well dressed. Shit. Maybe I should smile politely and go to the other side of the street. Or fake a cell phone call. Fuckin' Spokane weirdo. Of course it's a beautiful day. What do you mean by that? This always happens to me here. Waitaminute.  I vaguely remember handling this sort of thing. Before....before... anyway, could he just be making conversation? Maybe so. I forget what to do. Damn, what did I used to do? Did I....converse back? That's just kinky enough to work!

"Yeah."

Pleased at being acknowledged, the man proceeded to ask me about myself, and I reciprocated, and soon a lovely and healthy 20 minute dialogue ensued. I left smiling, comforted by the knowledge that Seattlitus isn't a permanent affliction.

•   •   •

"Spokane," said fellow grad student Leigh Ann, grasping for the right analogy, "is like this backward 50s retro town, only accidentally and not cool."

"Any attempt to beautify downtown Spokane," I once sneered at just such an effort, "is as aesthetically meaningless as a decorator toilet seat cover."

"Honey, you can always move back here." said a consoling girlfriend. "It'll just be without me."

Large stretches of Spokane are exactly what I remember: North Aurora without the charm. Overdeveloped, ugly cement expanses. The valley, I hear, has seen its population double since I left, which must make it unimaginably ugly 'cause it was already stretching the limits of my imagination 10 years ago. But the part of Spokane that feels like home to me, that being Cheney to downtown to Sue's house, this has not changed a bit except for the better. The busses are off the streets and at a centralized hub, which helps enormously. Empty businesses are filled and ugly malls have been replaced by gleaming ootsymalls. Most impressive to me was downtown, which has been thoroughly revitalized. There's a vibrant nightlife now. Best of all, there's free wireless Internet from anywhere. I was checking email from my car. Why in hell hasn't Seattle done this? For a town whose residents love to sneer at Spokane (generally without ever having been there), Seattle is lookin' mighty backward.

•   •   •

Politics in Washington follow a straight line. Democrats go no farther east than the ski lift at Snoqualmie. As soon as you go over the mountain pass there, the Kerry bumper stickers are replaced wholesale by W stickers. I saw exactly one Kerry bumper sticker in Spokane, and it made me laugh out loud:

CHRISTIANS!
for Kerry

And no, I'm no more comfortable among the God-mongering Republican rednecks in Spokane than I am among the more-pure-than-thou guilty white liberals of Seattle. Hmmm. Perhaps Ellensburg...

guilting my old office-mate

Mariko gave me a shopping list for while I was in Spokangeles. I was to try the french dip at the Scrapbook and take a picture of it. Then I was to go to her old grocery store and get some Mamma Something sauce. And then I was to go to the Rocket Bakery and try to beat their pink cookie recipe out of them. "I'll tell you what," I said, foolishly being Mr. Big Shot, "I'll buy whatever they have and overnight them to you."

The Scrapbook? Gone.

The sauce? Gone.

The Rocket Bakery? Still there and still unwilling to part with the cookie recipe. When they opened at 6am, I bought the six pink cookies they had left. I hope they're good, Fuj, 'cause those motherfuckers cost me $10 to overnight. Each. Upon hearing this, I took one out of the box and scarfed it down. One must pinch pennies where one can.

this place where i belong

April 17, 2004

Sue's guest room is mauve now. Ew.

I hadn't stopped in Cheney the last couple of times I visited Spokane. It ain't for lack of wanting to; it's just difficult for me. It's like looking at a photo album chronicling the happiest times of my life, only everyone I cared about is airbrushed out of the photos. Nothing remains but the backgrounds. And yeah, that aches.

Nevertheless, to merely pass the exit for Cheney feels as wrong as driving by my mother's grave. That time, those people, that me—these things and their passing must be acknowledged. So when the pine trees appeared around Tyler, I took the newly named Michael Anderson highway, wove through the familiar rolling yellow hills, traveled back in time, and stepped into those photo backgrounds alone, fairly wallowing in sadness.

There's where we met. There's my first classroom. There's where we ate on our first date. There's the PUB. I wonder who Mariko's lunch date is with nowadays? There's the railroad tracks I used to walk at night. There's Hilari's shitty apartment. I gave her a blanket to use as a curtain on that window. Huh. Same blanket I use every night, still. She just vanished. There's my first place. I wonder if the ping pong table is still there. There's where we had our first kiss. There's Phil's old place. That stupid slanted half-step nearly killed me, and they still haven't fixed it.  He just vanished, too. There's where we used to throw the frisbee and I would hit her softballs so she could practice fielding. Man, she sucked at ground balls. There's Patterson 266, the classroom where I met Katrina and Pam and Mark. There's Elizabeth's old house, and Sharon's, and Karen's. Poor Karen. There's the hills Pam and I went horseback riding on. There's that vet that tried to stick me for $200 for dropping off a dead dog. Talk about blood and a rock. There's another place we ate on our first date. Jesus Christ, how many times did we eat that day? There's where we lived. What a happy house. Okay, driving on, I can't remotely deal with that.

Symptomatic of the fact that we were all broke, there were two Trash TV nights in our circle. In Spokane, it was Melrose night; in Cheney, it was Star Trek. When Deep Space Nine premiered, we were there. I remember growing bored during the DS9 series premiere. Sisko had lost his wife years earlier, an event we come to relive in flashbacks. He's simultaneously trying to explain the concept of linear time to aliens who live outside time—they have no sense of future or past. They find the notion baffling. What vexes them, it turns out, is Sisko himself. If the past is in the past, someplace you cannot return, why does he insist on continuing to reside there? I remember yawning at that point and looking at Phil, who was visibly devastated, and thinking "Jeez, what a puss." Well, today I'm the age he was then, and perhaps not coincidentally, I get it now.

Lo, I am basking in irony.

A few hours after my Cheney tour, I sat in Sue's living room, covered in mauve paint and reminiscing with her and Lynn. These reminiscences only become more brutal over time, as we wonder whatever happened to so-and-so or talk about someone else's lovely memorial service. It's sobering.

"What was the name of that girl you dated here, John?" Sue asks.

"Fucking Amy," Lynn and I groan in unison. I frantically search my mind for a new subject. There's one!

"Say, does the ironing room need repain—"

"Man." Lynn shook her head. "I've never seen anyone get creamed as bad as you did. I mean, you were completely destroyed. Bet it all and lost. I sometimes wondered if you'd ever recover. But, thank God, you eventually pulled out."

"Yeah," I stared at my feet. "I'm all better now."

it’s bitchslappin’ time

This post is just for people who are googling one Anthony Flinn (Tony Flinn) of EWU. If he was your prof, I want to hear your story. I'm especially looking for evidence that post-graduation, any non-cute-coed has seen one iota of help from this guy.

the “nba most valuable player (whose name doesn't rhyme with ‘schmaq’)” award

April 15, 2004

I love Steve Nash's game, and I'm happy for him that he's about to win league MVP, 'cause he had an awesome year. But let's be honest. The most valuable player in this or in any year is, and will remain for as long as he breaths, Shaq. I don't even particularly enjoy watching him play—to me, basketball is about flow and precision, not brute force—but come on. It's the "most valuable" player. If you're choosing a pickup team right now, are you really taking Nash or Iverson over Shaq? It's not Shaq's fault that he's dominated for so long that we're sick of him.

Speaking of the Immense One, he had a good line last night. Addressing the Lakers missing the playoffs after unloading Shaq:

"It's the curse of the Shaqino."

football weekend x

directions to ann arbor: east until you smell it, south until you step in it

April 14, 2005

Mark and I locked ourselves in his office tonight and poured over the college and NFL schedules until white smoke appeared. The tenth anniversary edition of our annual ode to excess will start in Ann Arbor, at the Big House, where my beloved Buckeyes will take on the loathsome Michigan squad. The show then moves to Chicago, one of our favorite towns, and the Panthers/Bears game there. Monday, we drive up to Green Bay and watch Dante Culpepper and Brett Favre duel on Monday Night Football.

Second choice was an exhausting trip that would take us to four college games in four days, zigzagging from Louisville to Pittsburgh to Athens to Morgantown, followed by pro games in Indianapolis and Boston, but you know what? At a certain point, sitting in a car all day is just sitting in a car all day.

talking at me in all caps

I talked to dorkass tonight. She kept her streak alive regarding this page, that being that she only comments on (and presumably only reads) entries that specifically mention her. I think she just searches on her name.

"I LOVE your little EMBELLISHMENTS," she chided, as though anything I said didn't happen precisely how I said it did. "Like how ALL married people are SO FASCINATED with single peoples' lives, how it's ALL we want to TALK about."

"Actually, I only said that you asked about it. I never said fascinated, all, or any other the other words you just put in my mouth, and I know I said we talked about other stuff."

"It's just SO EMBELLISHED," she repeated in all caps, so you know it must be true. Lo, I am crushed by the weight of her evidence and the sagacity of her argument.

Stank stands by its account of that evening. Except to add that she kinda had a booger thing workin.'

twilight

April 13, 2005

As the day breathed its last, friends and I smoked fine cigars, floated in Admiralty Inlet, watched countless harbor porpoises feed around the boat, and listened to J-pod in the distance. Life is very good. 'Course, we could have been watching J-pod, but that's quibbling.

britney spears’ pregnancy

April 12, 2005

Yep. That's officially everyone.

egger and d ride again

speaking of assholes and race relations...

d'Andre contacted me last week. He's coming. And I'm increasingly nervous.

If we talked more than twice a decade, I'd call him one of my oldest friends. But we don't, so I won't. He was my neighbor several lifetimes ago, in an apartment complex far, far away. None of us had any money. That was a given. We were all on the downside of advantage, yet that was easily the happiest, tightest-knit neighborhood in which I've ever lived—even for the polka dot, the piñata, the prematurely balding white guy saddled with the nickname "Egger." I'm not going to repeat them here and just give friends ammo, but trust that I am among the leading authorities on "cracka" jokes in any hemisphere. The unremitting verbal abuse I took was never hostile—it was affectionate, even—yet I'd be lying if I said I was completely at ease with my status.

Which, if I might digress, was a growth experience for me. I've tried many times to articulate this, and I don't know that I've ever succeeded. It begins with there being no "white experience" comparable to the set of unifying common experiences that members of a minority group share. A wealthy Vietnamese-American man in Fresno will have a base set of experiences in common with an impoverished Vietnamese immigrant girl in Louisiana; for all their differences, they deal with the same stuff every day of their lives, and they understand that they have this link. They're of the same tribe. People outside the tribe can achieve acceptance, but the very nature of tribes is such that they'll never achieve inclusion. (A nested digression: for my money, "8 Mile" was pure fantasy. If I'd tried to co-opt a black identity like that, scoffing rejection would have been the best response I could have hoped for. Acceptance starts within; your only hope for acceptance is to be who you were born.) Anyway, for whatever reasons—being in the majority probably chief among them—white Americans don't have that unifying sense of identity, of tribe. We don't think of ourselves or each other as white unless made to. It just isn't naturally a part of our self-image. It flat-out doesn't cross our minds. It doesn't come up. Where the growth came in, then, is that for better and worse, I became hyperaware of my racial identity. It's healthy business for someone in the majority to taste being a minority, and during this time I saw myself as white, as excluded, as different, morning noon and night. And I had lots of help with seeing that. Lots and lots. My chops were busted, my chain yanked, my buttons pressed, my goat gotten, my balls busted, and my place, um, me, um, put in.

Wrote myself into a corner, there.

Now I don't mean to say that I was targeted for exclusion, or verbally abused more than anyone else, or a victim who didn't himself dish out abuse. Trust me; I wasn't. We were gleefully unemployed young men with too much time on our hands, and in the grand tradition of that species, we invested more energy into not working than any job has demanded of me since. We watched girls. We watched one another's girls. When there were no girls, who oddly enough seemed to have jobs that occupied much of their time, we talked about watching girls. We balled, of course. We held great socially conscious debates like Terminator vs. Predator and Magic vs. Michael. We repaired one another's junk-heap cars, each of us having our specialty. (I was the "repairing brakes without paying to have your rotor turned like it really should be" guy.) We swapped car parts freely, the theory being that between us, we owned a single functional Frankencar. We played chess and dominoes, we schemed about how to earn money by playing basketball poorly all day, and after playing basketball we watched cartoons while eating cereal on my girlfriend Maddie's new couch juuuust as she was coming home from work. (How many times do I have to say I'm sorry?) But mostly, we sat around and crafted insults. Nothing was out of bounds; no little difference, no wart, was above public examination. The sober guys insulted the stoners. The stoners insulted the crackheads. The taller guys insulted the shorter ones. The guys who were going to college insulted those who didn't, and vice versa. The guys who didn't live with their mothers insulted the guy who did. The guy who was fired by UPS insulted the guy who was fired by USPS. The guys with acne insulted the fat guys. The young guys insulted the old guys. The white guy insulted the Mexican guy. And everyone insulted the white guy.

Yes, d'Andre is coming.

About five years older than most of us, he gradually assumed a role of elder statesmen. The perks of high office: no one ate more of my cereal, no one made more cracka jokes, and no one else decided that Egger'd taken enough abuse for today. He might publicly and mercilessly skewer me, but he'd be damned if others did, not on his watch. I was his boy. Or maybe just his personal punching bag. I'm not sure there's even a difference.

The single funniest ad lib I have ever heard spilled from his lips.

"Hey Egger, can you put on a hat?" he says as we jog back on defense.

"Why?"

"The glare off your head is really messin' with my jump-shot." Much snickering ensures.

"Baldists," I shoot back pathetically.

When d'Andre feigns offense, he always asks a question twice.

"Baldist? Baldist?!" He puts his hands on his hips and affects an exaggerated white dialect. "I am nothing of the kind."

More snickering. He continues.

"I like bald people."

The laughter builds.

"There's good ones."

The crowd roars its approval, waiting for the kill.

"I have bald friends."

Complete pandemonium.

I honestly don't remember finishing that game. I do remember grown men propping one another up as they laughed and flicked tears off their cheeks. Hell, I'm still tearing up, just writing about it. This was fairly typical of our dynamic, which is to say he generally got the best of it.

Until.

One glorious day, we climbed into his car, he turned the key, and the CD player resumed playing what he was last listening to. Realizing simultaneously the significance of the moment, we listened and stared straight ahead at crows picking through a dumpster. Finally I spoke.

"D?"

"Yeah."

"Is that Careless fuckin' Whisper?"

He started backing the car out of its parking space.

"I wish I was dead."

And thus was my go-to punchline born, a veritable nuclear warhead added to my arsenal. Andrew Ridgley and wake-me-up-before-you-go-go jokes would soon abound. Once I'd beaten him to death with it, I dug him back up and beat him some more.

The last time we talked, I called him after five years of silence and asked for a favor, a monstrously unreasonable favor.

"Hey, d. It's John."

[Complete silence]

"We ran at Mesa Ridge?"

[uncomfortable fidgeting]

"You know," I cringed. "Egger."

"SNOWFLAAAAKE!"

"No two are alike! Still, I'm touched you remember me," I said through grit teeth.

"Remember? Remember?! Man, we still  talk about the time you blocked a brother's shot."

"Hey, it wasn't just—"

"Damndest thing I ever saw."

"— the one ti—"

"We never let that sorry sumbitch play again."

What, did he have this material on a legal pad next to the phone for five years, just in case I called?

And thus did I lose control of the conversation. Just like old times. But in the end, the man followed my now-ex Maddie's sleazy boyfriend for two days, confirming suspicions that he was not only cheating on her but with her—he was married, with kids, and even had another girlfriend on the side. d'Andre didn't even consider not performing this garish favor. He remembered Maddie being kind to him, and that was all the incentive he needed. What a sense of honor, of loyalty. Can you imagine? After five years? Hell, my current friends groan about getting on a ferry to see me once a year if I pay.

d'Andre is coming. Yeah! No! Excitement and anxiety.

Yes, this summer my old friend and antagonist, the man after whom I named the older brother character in my screenplay, is visiting Seattle. I'm excited to see him, but man, are my old excluded-outsider insecurities ever getting inflamed. Those differences I used to be so self-conscious of?

They've grown. A lot.

I think it's safe to say that no one from that old neighborhood has seen their lifestyle change as much as mine has, which does not bode well for when ol' Egger is put under a microscope this summer. Every square inch of my life is packed with ripe comedic fodder. Katrina did not exactly help my anxiety level.

"What's he going to say when he sees Metamuville?" (white population: 104%)

"[unintelligible groaning]  Probably something with 'saltine-assed' in it."

"What about your gay man's kitchen and all the doilies in your guest room?"

"Holy crap. I am so toast."

"If he breaks your designer speckle-glass soap dispenser," she giggled, "Will you make him pay the $130?"

"Oh sweet christ."

"Will you tell him you accidentally gave Bill Russell the finger in traffic last winter?"

"Hell  no."

"Don't forget your purebred English Springer Spaniel on her princess bed."

"Right. I'll kennel her."

"And Percy."

I hadn't thought of that. d'Andre is going to meet Percy. Yep, death would be so sweet right about now.

In the meantime, I'll continue to fervently pray that sometime in the last 13 years, d'Andre sold out, too.

gay man’s kitchen

Gotta give credit for the phrase to Mariko.

the most chilling 5-word phrase

April 11, 2005

I was getting breakfast at the MetamuMart this morning and a horrifying flyer caught my eye:

First Annual Metamuville Talent Show

"How many spoons acts can you stand?" I asked Kiki, the store owner.

"It gets worse," she groaned. "There are no fewer than three square dancing demos."

This got me thinking. What are the five scariest-assed words in the English language? "First Annual Metamuville Talent Show" is bad, but not the worst. I see four distinct genres.

You have the professional:

• Can you shut the door?
• Stop fishing the company pier!
• We are making some changes.
• Thank you for your contributions.
• Khristi is in your building.

The familial:

• Will you be my executor?
• I just arrived at SeaTac.
• Maria has a new theory.
• How much do you make/did this cost?
• I'll pay you right back.

The friendshippy:

• So, I have some news!
• That's not what Karen said.
• How goes the love life?
• So I have this friend.

The romantic:

• Know what your problem is?
• My parents are both living.
• How old is this condom?
• Did the condom just tear?
• I'm late. I'm never late.
• Oh. Yeah. I'm HIV positive.

and my winner, also romantic:

• We really need to talk.

sir charles April 10, 2005 This one's for Carla, who will be doubtless be thrilled to hear that our boy Charles Barkley, in whose honor this page is named, has written a book about improving race relations. And I didn't know what to get her for Christmas.

so sue me

see, i can get along with a septuagenarian...kinda

April 9, 2005

I'm heading to scenic Spokavegas next weekend to paint Sue's living room, so I naturally assumed that next week's posts would continue the tradition of chronicling her (s)mothering comments. Alas, she just called, and I need to get a head start.

"So when are you coming?"

"I was thinking Saturday morning."

"Oh. And then you're leaving Monday?"

"No, I was thinking Sunday night."

"JOHN! That's only two days! You said you'd be coming for the weekend!"

chex and balances

The other night I was out with friends, and talk among the married folk turned toward the love lives of we singletons. Why? Because married lives don't interest even the married. When it came my turn, my "type" was discussed. Terrell used a visual aid, pulling her hair back into a knobby little brown ponytail.

"Brown ponytail," declared Dorkass.

"Brown ponytail," said Jill in near unison.

And thus was swift judgment rendered. I felt stereotyped.

"All I'm looking for," I said with great gravity, sipping my bourbon for effect, "Is a girl who's read Tolstoy and who can turn a double-play."

And the stunned ahhs  rang out around the table. Daaamn. I don't know anyone like that. Pleased with myself for having mounted my perch above them all, I smiled in smug silence. Yet I knew I would have to atone for this moment later.

That moment came with distressing speed. The next morning, I tried my line on my ex Allie. "All I'm looking for," I repeated, "Is a girl who's read Tolstoy and who can turn a double-play."

"Ca-righst almighty," she snorted as she laughed. "You've never even picked up Tolstoy, and you hit into double-plays more than any other 10 men I know."

"I know."

"Why didn't you just say 'brown ponytail?'" she said from under her brown ponytail, now accented with flecks of grey.

"Ummmm..."

This, for the uninitiated (and Maria), is what being friends with an ex is like. If you can get over the blame hump, which honestly takes at least a year of buffer time, if your current SOs can get over the jealousy hump, and most of all, if you were great friends when you were a couple, you can grow a friendship unlike any other. It's flat-out closer. You know one another eerily well, right down to what you've read and how you hit a softball. You know where one another's buttons are better than you know your own, and on special occasions, you lean on those buttons for the pure evil joy of it. You know how your closest friends will open your fridge and ask if they can have a drink? Exes don't ask. And they'll go a step further, adjusting your thermostat to their liking as soon as they enter your home. Politeness rituals long ago worn away during your romantic era, they say the bluntest things—but they say them out of love, so you prize it. If you're stranded, they have to come get you no matter how inconvenient it is, and you don't feel the slightest bit guilty. Ditto with your bail if you're jailed, although it hasn't come to that for me yet. And they still have to give you rides to and from the mechanic. One of my favorite features.

I've seen two exes get married. More than that are married, of course, and all seemingly to a man named Gary, but I was actually present at two of the weddings. (And even invited to one of them! [rimshot!])  I was oft asked how I felt. How did I feel? Happier than I would for any friend, any family member. I don't know how a dad feels on his daughter's wedding day, but I imagine it's the closest analogy. I felt pure joy for these women and their happiness—and I felt like a proud investor in that happiness, an integral participant in the formation of the human being dressed in white. No matter how close a typical friendship might be, I never feel that.

•   •   •

If you haven't seen it, allow me to introduce The Ex Files (left), which serve as a repository for some of Allie's best lines.

thanks thanks, frank frank

April 8, 2005

Another night, another excellent seat at a Mariners game, this time in a catered private suite. I mean, lord! Thanks, um, Mr. Dorkass!

’nique

April 7, 2005

Dominique Wilkens has taken to the airwaves, professing to be "shocked" not to be an  NBA Hall of Famer. Shocked? Really? A small forward who never played defense and who only got an assist when he occasionally dribbled the ball off his foot? 'Nique, I love you, but it's time for an intervention. You didn't make the Top 50 Players list a few years ago. You were never invited to watch the all-defensive team, let alone play on it, nor were you ever invited to represent your country in the Olympics. Your stats didn't go up during the playoffs like James Worthy's or Dennis Johnson's did. And worst of all, your fingers are naked. Never underestimate the power of jewelry.

Stats at his position in the 80s:

What's so shocking? It ain't the Hall of Really Fun to Watch.

katrina’s dishonor

April 6, 2005

Katrina and I both grew up Star Wars geeks. When the new trilogy was announced in 1997, we vowed that we would take off from work for the opening of each new movie and see the films together. Now with Episode III, she's reneging. Why?

"They suck."

"Your point being?"

"I'm not wasting a vacation day on that. We'll go in the evening."

And suck they do, but I ask you, does this release her from her vow? She's taking away the only upside to these movies!

seattle chill, part deux

how big an enema kit does Fleet make, anyway?

April 5, 2005

As I shuffled toward Safeco Field for the Ms' opener, surrounded by fans presumably as happy as I was, I decided to try out someone's theory that I find people in other towns more sociable because I'm in "vacation mode." I decided that I would engage these strangers in conversation.

"I hope they open the roof," I chirped pleasantly at five fans, making eye contact each time.

The five responses totaled six words. And that's if you count a panicked "uh-huh," followed by a purposeful street-crossing, as two words. One guy said "I heard it's closed." Two others smiled politely then averted eye contact as they stared anywhere else. The fifth did likewise, except for the smile.

I later found a couple of visiting fans in Minnesota garb. "I hope they open the roof," I said, then was in an animated conversation for the next twenty minutes. Of course, I'm sure they were in vacation mode....

mirrors are a bitch

Yesterday Carla and I were IMing about a friend of hers who was recently falsely arrested, jailed, and generally terrorized by the police. One story of abuse begat another, and soon I found myself staring at a particular sentence I typed. I blinked at that sentence for a long while.

Here we were, 37 years to the date that MLK was gunned down for uttering things like:

"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. "

Or before him, Thomas Jefferson:

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."

And now, John joins the immortals with his own elegant decree of personal conviction:

"This is why I hide in my house. Society is scary-assed."

church signs

April 4, 2005

Ever since a certain demographic started monitoring this page and orchestrating protest emails, alternately praying for my soul and condemning it to ETERNAL HELL IN ALL CAPS, I've been collecting these.

I invite you to send me anything you find.

there’s following seas, and then there’s stalking seas

From Rob comes this link, showing one sailboat's misadventures as it attempts to enter San Francisco Bay.

popeadope

April 3, 2005

When my mother was in labor with me, the sitter charged my older siblings with naming their new brother while she was gone. The first ballot was unanimous: I would be "Bullwinkle." Despite the election rules not allowing for a veto, my mom exercised one anyway. Many ballots later, the good Catholic name "John Paul" was agreed upon by all.

My grandmother, a Polish immigrant and devout Catholic, met her fate while sitting in a pew. This surprised me not at all. She spent so much time at church, her dying there it was a statistical near-certainty. I tell you this to establish the degree of her Catholicism. When years earlier she heard of the choice of "John Paul" as my name, her response was "Oh, you named him after Pope John and Pope Paul!" "Uh, yeah, Mom," my parents replied. With a pedigree like that, she declared, I was destined to become a priest.

I'll give you a moment to compose yourself.

Then years later the Pope died and John Paul I ascended to the papacy. Grandma swooned. Surely this meant her grandson would become at least a Bishop. Then JP1 died immediately, and this confused her briefly, but soon John Paul II replaced him, and Grandma dared dream of even bigger things for me. Cardinal! Dare she hope...Pope?

Memo to the Vatican: I require telecommuting privileges and unlimited free beverages. Oh, and my view of birth control might diverge a bit from doctrine.

it’s character month

April 2, 2005

I'm going to try something a little different this month. Oh, sure, I'll still bitch and bellyache, but I'm also going to include some portraits of the characters I've known. People seemed to enjoy the Stan and Dorkass and Percy backstories, and they're useful to link to, so let's experiment and see if we can't make this world a little richer.

In not-even-remotely related news, my sister just emailed me the first digitized photo of my childhood self that I've ever seen. I'm the Mexican armrest. I guarantee you that those mittens were attached to an long elastic cord running through my sleeves.

if you’ve ever wondered who voted for Bush twice, wonder no more

My sister-in-law Maria is a throwback to the turn of the century. The 3rd century. She married her high school boyfriend at the worldly age of 18, and, not much seeing the point of getting her Mrs. degree when she already had her Mr., she instead became a rollickin' fundamentalist and raised their three kids in a hermetically sealed environment where Harry Potter books are banned and Jesus controls such minutia as who wins the election for class treasurer. With no sense of irony whatsoever, she will talk about Jesus' love out of one side of her mouth and utter the vilest hate out of the other. Her utter lack of curiosity about the world—I've never known her to read, travel, or in any way educate herself beyond being told how righteous she is by fellow churchgoers—inhibits her not at all. No, she is a bona fide expert on matters she knows nothing about, and she makes sure you know it. To say she is a gossip is inadequate. Remember Gladys Kravitz on Bewitched? Breed her with Jimmy Swaggart and give their love child an 8-ball of cocaine, and you'd have Maria.

When I was 19 myself, my relationship was teetering, and I was in danger of flunking out of college, so I withdrew. I tried again the next quarter, but my mind was still on my relationship, so I withdrew again. I did not tell my family, whose first through 92nd instincts are to attack, about my withdrawing. I didn't really need the additional grief, what with their already perforating me about my relationship issues. So I told them I was still in school. Suspicious, Maria took it upon herself to call the registrar and prove this was a lie. She trumpeted the news of my failure and cover-up to the four corners of the world. Fortunately for me, her world is exceedingly small.

Anyone sane would think this all youthful sound and fury, signifying nothing, but it proved the defining moment of our relationship. Lo these many years later, nearly two decades in which Maria's seen me for maybe 20 hours, she still basks in triumph. I am a proven liar. This is established. It is what defines me. It is all she knows of me, or cares to know. You know John? Oh, he's a pathological liar now. I'd feel sorry for him if he weren't such a liar all the time. School? Career? House? Probably all lies. Any money he has is probably from selling drugs, but I'm not sure about that one. He has nothing to do with me because I know what a liar he is.

This is now a joke amongst my friends. If I say I'm picking a family member up at the airport at 3:00, Allie will press my Maria button. She insists on using an elongated y for maximum effect.

"Are you really, or are you lyyyyyyy-ing again?"

"Fuck you also."

It's a reliable button.

These days, conversations with Maria are the toll I have to pay in order to talk to my brother. They invariably go down one path: my continued friendships with ex-girlfriends.

"So, are you still in touch with, um," she'll say, pretending she doesn't have the name handy in her phoneside RIMS (Rolodex of Intelligence info and Malicious Speculation), "Allie?"

"Yeah. She's one of my closest friends. She's family."

Maria doesn't pick up on what I thought was an unsubtle dig. In fact, judgment is swift and scornful.

"See, I don't get that. I don't get that at all. If your brother still hung out with his ex-girlfriend, it would drive me insane. Insane!"

My mind parses the Fellini movie that are my disjointed memories of the 70s, searching for anyone else my brother might have ever dated.

 "You mean...Tina from the 10th grade?"

"Yeah! I would be sooooo jealous."

"Well, believe it or not, relationships change a bit after high school." Another unsubtle dig impacts harmlessly on her surface.

"And [insert some girl's name] didn't mind?"

"Not a bit. I'm upfront about it from the first date."

"Are you sure? I think it's probably what broke you up," she'll declare (and no, she has no more information than this post contains).

"I'm sure," I growl, realizing for the first time that this is the speculation in Ohio.

"And what about Allie's boyfriend?"

"He's my fishing buddy."

"That's just so weird."

"Compared to what? It's not that uncommon. If we loved and enjoyed one another when we were a couple, why can't that evolve? Why would it end just because we're not right for each other romantically? My life isn't that black and white."

Maria ponders, scouring her world for an apt analogy.

"So it's like Ross and Rachel."

The right lobe of my brain fires off a quick message of sympathy to the left lobe: Yeah. I heard it too. Jesus H. Christ. Just say yes and ask for your brother again.

"Um, I guess. Only we don't, you know, secretly want to get back together. And, um, we really exist."

"It's just so weird, John."

"Yeah. So is my brother back yet?"

i'm gonna beat my PM with my bare fists until his soul rises out of his body and then i'm going to grab his soul by the neck and start giving it open-handed pimp slaps

April 1, 2005

This is my new favorite expression.

oh my god, they saved kenny

Unable to sleep last night, I found a South Park episode at 4am. Perfect. Kenny died, of course, and went to heaven. He was standing on a cloud and talking to Saint Peter, who was putting Kenny in charge of leading the armies of heaven in a coming battle with the minions of Satan...when Kenny faded away.

"What the hell?" Saint Peter screamed.

Cut to a hospital room, where a bunch of doctors surround Kenny's body.

"Hooray!" they say. "We brought him back! True, he'll be in a persistent vegetative state and have to eat through a feeding tube while his brain cells irreparably decay..."

metamuville times

March 30, 2005

I certainly bash my town in this space, particularly the old farts who clogs its streets and s-l-o-w-l-y pull in front of speeding traffic. The dread Metamuville Road—straight, flat, fast—has claimed three more lives since December. And dammit, Percy is back from wintering in Arizona already, so walking around the house naked is indefinitely out.

But days like yesterday are why I live here. On my way into work, I left my keys in the ignition as I stopped to give my lawyer the software he accepts in trade for his legal services. And then I again left my keys in the ignition as I picked up Ed's medication at the vet, where a bemused local store owner was picking up his golden retriever, who periodically wanders across town to hang out in the vet's waiting room. On my way home last night, I stopped at the tiny MetamuMart grocery to pick up a newspaper, and when I returned to my car, the store owner, Kiki, was wriggling into my passenger seat.

"Am I giving you a ride home?" I asked her.

"No, we're going drinkin'."

I nodded to the three bald eagles perched on the nearby pilings, and then we went drinkin.'

getting out my bannin’ stick

March 29, 2005

In addition to the six people I've banned from my home for destructive and thoughtless behavior, I'm thinking about adding a couple of ill-trained dogs. Second verse, same as the first: sure, bring your dog. I love dogs, and Ed needs sex. But the time to start telling your pooch to stay off furniture is not after the behemoth has already shredded my expensive custom couch with his muddy paws.

"Well, I let him up on my furniture," you'll sniff, as if my expectation is somehow unreasonable.

"Yeah, and I've seen your furniture," I'll counter as I sop up mud in order to examine the fabric tears. "This ain't exactly St. Vincent DePaul here."

- or -

"And I let Ed hump my calf bloody while she fills my shoes with urine.  I hope that won't be a problem."

I'll leave it to your imagination as to which retort I actually used. Seriously, though, what mental defect is at play here? I understand that different homes have different dog rules, but I'm astonished that people expect the world to accommodate their permissiveness. A good rule of thumb: if you're not reasonably confident that your dog won't damage anything expensive, leave him at home.

This really needs to be said?

wonder of wonders,
a miracle a miracle

March 28, 2005

I've lost that interminable Dave Eggers book ("Heartbreaking Work blah blah blah"), so now I don't have to finish it! I think I'll celebrate by reading Positively Fifth Street again.

brad and jen

March 27, 2005

I just heard about this for the first time. With the Approval Whore gone, I'm, like, totally up on all the wrong current events.

Is this heaven?

offensive childhood humor

My thought process started with bin Laden's videotapes. I was amused by his dramatic overkill. It's not enough to say "We despise Americans and will kill you with our last breaths." No, no. That's not nearly sophomore-angsty enough for Binny. He has to issue gloriously overstated threats like "If you invade Afghanistan, prepare for airplanes to rain from the skies such that will make 9/11 appear to be insignificant." Or "it behooves you to reflect on the last wills and testaments of the thousands who left you on the 11th as they gestured in despair." Or the oldie but goodie "There is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots. Its greatest buildings were destroyed, thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. " He hasn't much changed his melodramatic tune over the last four years, and at some point, whenever I heard him, I started thinking about a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Yep.

I haven't seen it in probably 30 years. Bugs is being chased around the Australian outback, I believe, by a primitive aborigine with a bone through his nose and a vocabulary of "Ooga booga" and "Binga banga." Toward the end of the cartoon, a cornered Bugs confronts the none-too-bright aborigine with a litany of overenunciated gibberish:

 "Un-ga Bun-ga Bin-ga Ban-ga, Bon-ga Bin-ga Un-ga  [beat] Ban-gaaaaaa."

And the spear-waving aborigine screams in outrage over whatever insult Bugs said.

So yes, bin Laden's gibberish makes me think of the outraged aborigine. But that's not my point here. My point is actually that I hadn't thought about this cartoon in three decades, and holy crap, was it ever racist. A quick stop at Google confirms that Cartoon Network refuses to run this cartoon for that very reason. So now Bugs joins those great Uncle Remus cartoons in the ashbin of stuff that was funny when you were too young to realize what was really being said.

Now as Bill Cosby once said, I told you that story so I could tell you another. This morning on the ferry, I fired up some old Cosby albums, also staples of my youth. You remember Tonsils, Chicken Heart, Noah. Great stuff, and I still have it all utterly memorized. Even doing stand-up, Cosby was family entertainment. I was struck by how much of his material was about being a child; no wonder this appealed to me so as I was growing up. Yet...yet...there were the homeless people jokes. The midget jokes. The "retarded kid" jokes, complete with imitative vocal stylings. The "Meso sawry" Chinese jokes. Racial stereotypes of all kinds, in fact. Now, I don't mind mining this stuff for humor—Chris Rock is the funniest man alive, and he certainly pushes these buttons—but that's the point. Cos wasn't pushing buttons. It was so casual, shockingly casual by today's standards. It's jarring to look with adult eyes at what passed for family humor when I was a child.

easter sunday homily

March 26, 2005

On this sacred day, I ask my life-loving fundamentalist fans to please take a break from sending death threats to judges and instead celebrate the anniversary of their savior's murder and subsequent transmogrification into the Invisible Man in the Sky. Can I get an amen?

my big accomplishment of the week

besides slogging through another 50 deathly dull pages of dave eggers

I ordered some pine wine lattice over the Internet, stained it to match my cabinets, and installed it in one of my kitchen bookcases. Considering my utter lack of craftsmanship, it came out remarkably, stunningly well.

bring on the middle age jokes

March 25, 2005

I have a new mental handicap. I first noticed it last year when I returned to teaching and was surrounded by intelligent, viable adults who were born in years during which I vividly remember feeling like an intelligent, viable adult myself. (That feeling has long since abated, of course.)  This is when I began to discover that I can't tell 15 year olds from 25 year olds anymore.

Katrina and I are being seated at Cojo. I'm astonished about being seated in a bar by a dewy prepubescent. "Man, how young can you work in this state?"

"John. She's 18."

"No she's not. She's 14, tops."

"What are you, ninety? She's clearly at least 18."

"She's all baby fat. She has no cheekbones. She's a fucking zygote."

Part of my retardation came, I know, from this unwelcome paradox: 1) I used to have sex with 18 year olds, and 2) this chick was a decade removed from being someone that anyone should want to have sex with. It's the type of creepy realization that makes you run home and look at old pictures to verify that, yep, you and your high school sweetheart didn't have cheekbones either.

Being a good American, I set off to prove that this was someone's fault other than my own. I'm settling on old reliable: the media. Specifically, why in the world do they cast 25 year olds as high school students? The oldest example I could find in IMDB was Tom Welling of Smallville, a whopping 28 years old. If this is the popular standard of a 17 year old, I absolve myself of all responsibility with Cojo chick. More seriously, I can't help but wonder what such a media standard does to the minds of still-developing teens. When you're comparing yourself to TV "teens" Welling or Eliza Dushku, man, that's got to mess with your self-image. No wonder teens are cutting their breasts up.

seattle chill

an excellent name for a sports franchise!

March 24, 2005

Several people sent me this Seattle Times article, and I keep forgetting to post it. I thought it a spot-on, even a little generous, assessment of Seattle folks' frostiness. The one thing it nails: any local friendliness is only skin-deep.

I remember the first time I noticed it affecting me. It was a decade ago, when I first moved here, and a friend from the midwest was visiting. We were standing in line at Safeway when my friend attempted to converse with the cashier beyond how-are-you-today/great-and-you? She asked about any area restaurants that the clerk favors. It was a normal enough question of strangers in Ohio, but here, as I'd learned, such constitutes a misdemeanor form of assault.

"Oh please god no," I cringed. "Don't embarrass me like this." But it was too late. The clerk was paralyzed by discomfort, mentally filling out the restraining order. I left that store troubled, wondering why I was embarrassed. I wouldn't have been just three months earlier.

It's ten years later, and a decade of hand-slapping has taken its toll on me. I flat-out don't talk to strangers anymore, unless I'm outside of King County, in which case I give the old social skills a whirl. Allie dismisses that shift as my being in vacation mode, hence more comfortable, but I think that glosses over a crucial point: I used to be in "vacation mode" wherever I was.

personals ad

March 23, 2005

I'm told that yesterday's post seems "mean." Granted, it was a pregnant woman who told me that, but—what with there being no one else in my life but Mark and pregnant women—that was a given. Trust that that post was written for someone who thought my initial reaction to her news was disappointingly supportive. I'm never one to disappoint.

In related news:

american idol

How horrible for them that they had to squeeze one more night of programming out of their cash cow due to a typographical "error." And they've been so protective of their golden goose, so careful about not running the franchise into the ground.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

March 21, 2005

Congratulations. Really. I mean that. The world was getting dangerously underpopulated, and its natural resources were stacked precariously high.

if i were terri, she never would have left her fate in the hands of idiots

If there's a lower form of life than people who make their kid carry signs in support of their cause, well, I can't think of it this morning.

But to answer the kid's parent's question, if I were Terri Schiavo—if I've had no brain waves for a decade, if my unfathomably selfish relatives are force-feeding my lifeless body because of some moronic delusion that I'm "laughing and crying with them," if I become the pedestal upon which sleazy, grandstanding politicians jockey for visibility—pretty please, with a cherry on top, pull the fucking plug.

Toward that end, I put my plug in the hands of an ex. I figure that'll ensure zero mercy. "Can I pull it now?" she asks.

ray too

March 20, 2005

It's still bugging me. In glossing over the racism of Ray Charles' era, the filmmakers completely undercut what made him so ballsy. In his era, no black man controlled his career like he did, dictating terms to the white establishment and making them love him for it. Ah well. Wouldn't want to make the audience uncomfortable when there are soundtracks to sell.

re-defeat gregoire

I saw this bumper sticker tonight. I'm speechless. Katrina doubts that many people view Dino Rossi and Al Gore as peas in pod as I do, but man, I barely even see a difference. Right down to neither man ever having to worry again about getting my vote.

ray

March 19, 2005

Before I saw Taylor Hackford's film "Ray," I never realized that Jim Crow–era racists were so darn cuddly. Turns out the moment a black man said he was a veteran or played a tune, those good ol' boys dropped their prejudices and embraced him warmly. Man. Did my history teachers ever have that era wrong.

acclaim dropping

March 18, 2005

Are you like me? When someone c-a-s-u-a-l-l-y injects a mention of their charitable work into a conversation about, say, breakfast cereal or marketing buckets, do you want to flog them to death with their own pretensions? It's a Midwestern hangup, I think, that mentioning one's charity is not only distasteful but invalidates any magnanimity. But I think it's a healthy hangup. Is it really charity if you're acquiring a favorable image?

lord knows we wouldn't want someone to cap him before the government can

What's more of a head-scratcher: that upon Scott Peterson's arrival on death row two women called with offers of marrying him, or that he arrived on death row wearing a bulletproof vest?

starlet fever

March 16, 2005

When you're sick for nearly a week, you watch far more TV than you should, or even than you can bear. I've long since exhausted my Tivo's supply of Mythbusters. I've watched Regis. I've watched Lifetime. I've watched Alien vs. Predator. (I have to say, it delivers what it promises.) I've watched, God help me, local news. ("Is a sexual predator stalking your kids this very second? Find out at 11.") I've even watched the Now Playing list for minutes at a time.

After a while, I made my own entertainment out of it. My favorite new game: how long can John last into the starlet's interview before he has to change the channel? Sadly, I'm quite the unwilling expert on vacuous teen actresses, now. It turns out, for instance, that Lindsay Lohan, Hillary Duff, Amanda Bynes, and the Olsens are not all the same person.

The winner of this dubious little derby was implant-cautionary-tale Lohan, who managed to articulate nothing more than "like" and "I know" for an astonishing 32 seconds of hair-flipping before I lunged for the remote. But the biggest groaner came from Duff, who defensively tells Conan O'Brien that in her cover of the Who's anthem "My Generation," she changed the lyrics "to be more positive." So yes, kids, she sings "I hope I don't die before I get old."

Seriously, how would one even begin to explain to such a person the depths of her own stupidity?

into redmond, grousing ungently

March 14, 2005

Okay, not having sick time sucketh profusely.

No one is more relieved by my return to work than my dog, who's visibly sick of me. Gone are the enthusiastic greetings of the past. Now she won't deign to lift her head more than a quarter inch, just to verify, with visible disgust, "He's still here?!"

Ed recently provided me with one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Wobbling on stiff morning legs across the hardwood floor, Ed suddenly and quite violently sneezed, sending all four legs sprawling out in four different directions as she belly-flopped to the floor. It was worth my subsequent coughing fit.

death to oprah

March 12, 2005

I am soooo sick of daytime TV.

I don't know why I dared imagine I'd be any healthier for the weekend. Wishful thinking, I guess.

crown of mucous

happy birthday, dorkass

March 10, 2005

Yesterday, I gave Puget Sound the finger. Two, in fact. I'm home from work, and there it is, mirror-like in its calm boatability, taunting me while I lack the strength to get off the couch. Yes, boys and girls, me sick. And for the first time since I was way under my car and needed someone to hand me a tool, I miss having a girlfriend. For there is no one, no one, who is a bigger baby than me when sick, and only feminine doting can temper my suffering.

"Drink fluids, get rest," IMs Annette.

"no Diet Cherry Coke," IMs Carla.

"I have work to do," IMs Katrina.

This is not exactly what I mean by "feminine doting." Fortunately, I can get some of what I need from my ex Allie.

"I feel horrible," I moan, somehow making "horrible" a seven-syllable word. I don't even have to describe my symptoms. She understands intuitively.

"No one," she says with a stoic gravity that some mistake for bored indifference, but I know better, "in the long history of illness, injury, or man's cruelest inhumanity to man, has suffered as much as you are, right now, at this moment."

"I know," I say, grateful that someone understands the cross I bear.

But even she draws the line at coming out and helping me do that heavy cross-lifting. Something about squandering the #2 benefit of breaking up. I dunno. I wasn't really listening.

and frankly, i don't want to

March 8, 2005

I will never, ever get used to deleting a person from my address book.

Many thanks for the kind responses to yesterday's entry. I hate it, oddly enough. It's one I just gave up on. It used to be three times as long and very angry, lashing out at the family and born agains who tormented Stan in life and doubtless now celebrate his death. It was very me...but not very Stan. He was an upbeat, positive sort, and my homage wasn't appropriate. So I deleted the bile, and what scraps remained formed sort of a flip "My Gay Friend Stan" entry, with which I wasn't happy but with which I was stuck. Ah well. People seem to like him. Mission accomplished.

requiem for a flake

March 7, 2005

When the word came, it wasn't unexpected. Stan had been dying for a long, miserably long, time. This tempers the sting of loss not at all. A world that can ill afford to be less good is decidedly less good today.

I've thought for hours about how to eulogize my friend. I'm reticent to make it about me—I find that self-serving and distasteful—yet I do not know how to extricate myself. I likewise hesitate to dwell on Stan's orientation, yet I do not know how to remove our differences from my Stan the Flake stories. We celebrated, even clung to those differences. All my best stories are about our Odd Couple dynamic. So I'm not going to put any artificial limitations on this. I'll just type, and if it gets unbearable, stop reading.

When we met in September '94, I was a freshly hollowed out human being. We needn't spend time rehashing that period, but to recap: I abruptly had no relationship, no friends, no income, and massive debt in a new and chilly town, and my new hobby was going to bed at 5pm. There was no reason in the world for anyone to want to be my friend. That's not modesty; it's an ugly fact. I had nothing to offer another human being. And at the time in my life when I had the least to offer another person, one person figured it out and took it upon himself to reach out to me and be my friend, anyway. There is no repaying a debt like that.

Lord knows why he reached out. Stan the Flake: worldly, buff, health-obsessed, vegetarian, alternative medicine-promoting, alternative-everything promoting, flamingly gay man from whitest small-town eastern Washington. Me: provincial, beef-fed, dousingly straight Midwesterner from a black neighborhood, a fellow who'd never knowingly met a gay man in his life, let alone heard of the putrid herbs and teas littering the Chinese pharmacy that was Stan's kitchen. Much as there was no reason for him to be my friend, there was no reason in the world to think he could  be. Yet...yet...

•  •  •

In my will, I instruct my executor to forego any kind of service and instead invite my friends to participate in a John roast. One of my regrets about that decision has been that I, myself, would never get to hear Stan tell stories similar to the below, only with himself installed as the hero. Alas, now no one will hear those stories. Here are mine.

•  •  •

"How many hours have you put in this week, John?"

"75. But it's only Saturday."

"You and your death wish. Here. Take this. And don't take it with fucking Diet Coke. Get some water."

"I already have a mother. Get that muck out of my face."

"Now look. You're incredibly stressed, and you're susceptible to all ki—"

"Say 'susceptible' again."

"Thutheptible. Oh goddamit, I do not either lithp."

"Only when you're agitated. And you don't normally stand with your hips cocked, either."

"That ith not a gay thtereotype."

"Oh yeah it is. With hands on hips. Yeah, just like that."

"Fine. You justh go ahead and work yourthelf into a coma. My fault for caring, ya fwuckin'  cornpone bible banger."

And he would pirouette and leave. And I would swallow whatever pond seepage he left in a Dixie cup. This, you see, is how men say they care about one another.

•  •  •

Briefly convinced that a woman was the cure-all for all my problems, Stan emailed me a spreadsheet put out by the Microsoft gay and lesbian group.

"Stan? Why did you send me a spreadsheet identifying all the gays at Microsoft?"

"Yeah!" Stan replied with way too much earnest exuberance. " I figured it might help you if you could weed out the lesbians!"

[about 10 seconds of silence]

"You. Sent me. Me. Me, Stan. Think about what you've done, here. Me. Malicious me. A list of all the gays at Microsoft."

"Well not all of us," he chirped. "Just the known ones!"

•  •  •

More recently, a group of us were downtown, and Stan and I were in the back seat bickering. A collision sent our car spinning some 500 degrees in the middle of a busy street. Everyone was okay, but we were startled speechless. I finally broke the silence. "You know," I growled disapprovingly at Stan, "I always figured when it came my time, it'd be a beautiful woman by my side."

"JETHUTH CHRITHST, HOW THE FWUCK DO YOU THINK I FEEL, JOHN?!"

•  •  •

In trying to boost my self-worth, Stan once gave me one of the greatest compliments I've ever received. I didn't deserve it, but it was still impossibly great. There's a sweet strangeness, or perhaps a strange sweetness, in a gay man trying to buck up his straight friend by telling him what his attractive qualities are. And nonsense or not, the unusual sentiment behind it was wondrously caring. That was Stan. His grace transcended differences that for others would have comprised an insurmountable chasm.

Huh. How about that. Stan is the hero of my stories, too.

For obvious reasons, names and chronologies have been scrambled a bit. -jh

maybe the whales work for microsoft

March 6, 2005

When you spend all weekend on a boat, waiting for whales that never show, there ain't a lot of ranting material to be had. But lemme tell you, that's one clean boat now.

storm warning

I have major diatribes about 1) Seattle and race and 2) born-again Christianity festering. But they're not there yet. Which basically means "I'm not at work yet."

scandinavian breeze

March 5, 2005

Hit stats indicate that this page is developing a following in Scandinavia. On behalf of both this page's regular readership and myself, I extend to our new Nordic friends a very warm and heartfelt "Why?"

spotters

March 4, 2005

Wry observer though I like to imagine myself, I can only watch about 160 degrees at a time, which leaves the whales a 200 degree window through which they can slip. Just Saturday, I boated right past six transients as they headed the other direction. Unacceptable. I needs spotters!

I called dorkass first. Having now heard about the various hair appointments and Tupperware parties that the wild animals, tides and weather will just need to work around, I need backup. If this remotely interests you, lemme know, and we'll talk more.

what would jesus steal?

March 3, 2005

Bill Watterson, the inspired creator of Calvin and Hobbes, who retired at the top of his game at the height of the strip's popularity, has always zealously defended his creation from being commercialized. "My strip is about private realities, the magic of imagination, and the specialness of certain friendships." he explains. "Who would believe in the innocence of a little kid and his tiger if they cashed in on their popularity to sell overpriced knickknacks that nobody needs?" So every stuffed Hobbes, every decal you've seen of Calvin urinating—those are brazen copyright theft. They're unlicensed, and Watterson is perpetually battling those who profit from stealing his work.

Which brings us to the instance that amuses me the most. Yes, nothing says "I walk with Jesus" quite so much as shameless theft. And nothing says you're secure in your faith quite like receiving validation from affixing an illegally used cartoon character to your pickup truck.

(And before some hysterical born-again fucktard with atrocious spelling points out that I too possess the very stolen good I deplore, the picture at right resides on the thief's server.)

relative isolation

March 2, 2005

On Sunday at noon I was boating in the wilds, surrounded by mountains and with nary a house to be seen, when a thick fog socked me in. It lasted only an hour, but it was an off-putting hour. My imagination ran wild with macabre fantasies of Ed's and my skeletons being recovered ten years hence, or of us blundering through the wooded wilderness in perpetuity, trying to find civilization.

Today, I looked up our position. We were a 300 yard walk from a bed and breakfast, a mere 2 mile walk from the Bon Marche.

having now peaked, I'm getting on with the bad part of my life

February 28, 2005

Another appointment with a Microsoft employee, another no-show. Gosh, this is fun. Katrina says if I continue to try to meet with MS employees, I forfeit my right to whine. Mark, meanwhile, suggests a refundable deposit for MS types. "Sure, I'll show you the air purifier. I/O me $50 cash, and I'll set up a time. If you show up yet don't purchase the item, you'll get a full refund."

after shooting this footage,  john and his idiot dog were never heard from again

note my first mate diligently looking for whales through her eyelids

February 27, 2005

I cannot remember a better day than today.

Today began yesterday, naturally. I packed up Ed the dog and boated south to Dabob Bay, at 30 miles away the nearest location where the ever-elusive transient orcas have been recently sighted. It is also occasionally a restricted military area, as the nice man with the deck-mounted, high caliber machine gun patiently explained to me. After a half hour of weighing my options, I decided to go all the way to Hoodsport, the southernmost location the whales have been spotted, and work my way back north the next day. I found a slip at the absurdly nice Alderbrook Resort in Union, where I slept on the boat Saturday night (room: $300; moorage: 11 bucks). A quick check of my email revealed that the orcas were indeed in Dabob Bay when I was talking to the machine gun. Shit. So I grabbed some breakfast, fell in love with a waitress named Emmy, and hit the water as soon as the fog lifted at 10am. I was watching whales by 10:15. I lowered the hydrophone into the water, and soon the stereo was alive with their cries. They put on quite a show—hunting, playing, spy-hopping, diving. They stayed about 1000 yards away.

Until two of them noticed me.

It happened while I was on the phone with an orca researcher, reporting my sighting. One breeched a mere fifty yards away, coming generally toward me. Then he breeched again, only 20 yards off. Then he and his buddy plowed through the water straight at my port side, not even pretending to want to avoid a collision. You've seen this on nature programs, sure. But from the comfort of your couch, you have no idea how fragile you'll feel. Yeah, you know ahead of time that these animals are 27 feet long and weigh six tons each, and yeah, you've seen them at Sea World or maybe from a large vessel, but when you and your tasty mammalian companion are on a 22 foot, 1800 pound boat being bull-rushed by 24,000 pounds of predator...well, it's an adrenaline rush like none I've ever known. If I'd had time to think about it, I would have lost all bladder control, too.

The whales did not hit me, of course. I braced for it, involuntarily getting low to the floor, but there wasn't so much as a dorsal fin scrape. They even somehow avoided the thin 45-foot hydrophone cable. I don't know how they missed my port side. I never saw them flinch; they disappeared only because eventually, the boat obstructed my view of the water. When close, one of them looked at me, or maybe at Ed. He had the pulpous remains of a fresh kill clenched in his jaws. That lucky seal passed within a yard of my feet as the whales swam under me. A second later, my heart was palpably pounding and the whales were to starboard, swimming away, probably laughing amongst themselves.

My camera, sadly, has a 30-second limitation on the length of its video clips. It's never been more aggravating than today, and you'll see why: I missed filming my close encounter. I did, however, get footage of a breach and of the beginning of the charge. And of my idiot dog's schnozz.

empirical evidence that microsoft employees suck?

February 25, 2005

I've been selling off the stuff in my flop, preparing to sell the place, and toward that end I've placed some ads. One of the ads is in the Microsoft corporate newsletter, the MicroNews. This has resulted in a telling phenomenon.

A quick survey of my mail history shows that I've received 82 inquiries about stuff. Over half never resulted in anything more than a hopeful lowball offer ("Will you take $10?" for the air purifier I paid $350 for in March). 19 inquiries resulted in scheduled meetings at the flop. Of those 19, a whopping 13 people were no-shows. This is not insignificant. I don't live at the flop. I have to leave work to meet them there, or put myself into rush-hour traffic to meet them there after work. Last night was typical. A MS employee scheduled a 6pm meeting to see the entertainment center. "Please," I emphasized in writing, "if you need to cancel, please let me know as early as possible. I'm skipping my ferry to be there." So I stayed later than planned, went there at the appointed hour, and received a call at 6:10. She wanted to reschedule. At that point, traffic was atrocious, and waiting it out put me on my couch at 9pm instead of the planned 4pm. I'd rather set the entertainment center on fire than sell it to you, lady, fuck you very much.

Now I'd normally end this rant with the observation that people suck, but in this case it's decidedly demographic suckage. They all have one thing in common. These aren't accountants from the CD or U-District rudely standing me up without warning.

Percentage of the 19 inquiries from MS employees: 68%

Percentage of the no-shows that were Microsoft employees: 100%

Percentage of non-Microsoft employees that kept their word: 100%

Percentage of Microsoft employees that kept their word: 7%

Now, I know their names and where they work. Imagine how little regard they have for you, Mr. Customer.

seriously, i didn't get this far without knowing how this works

two groups, same peeve

February 24, 2005

"What can I help you find?"

Store greeters. Yes, I know they're made to do it. My beef is with whatever genius decided to inundate me with blandly pretty, blandly vapid teenagers when I walk into, through, and out of their store. Never mind that they always have to ask someone else for the answers to questions. Never mind that I would pay a cover charge at the door in order to not have to interact with them. What irritates me most is the inevitable, "Okay, well if you have any questions, let us know." Really, Poindexter? Really? Holy cow! And like a blind dog, I'd been trapping myself in corners of the store all these years.

"You called?"

Seriously, I know how your voice mail works. If I'd wanted you to call back, if what I was calling about wasn't trivial or time-critical or a mere slip of the finger, I would have left a message. While I'm very proud of you for both 1) having and 2) successfully mastering Caller ID, please don't call me back and put the burden on me for justifying your call.

"Hi, it's Bob." you'll say. "What's up?"

"Huh? [slow realization] Oh. Um, I was calling for your wife."

"Oh, she's not here."

"That's okay."

[enter awkward 15 minutes of small talk, frosted with just a hint of irritation for my having wasted Bob's time]

for laura

February 23, 2005

I had a request for an Approval Whore (AW) valentine entry, but now as then, I really can't think of anything she contributed to my life.

An, um, increased awareness of Us magazine?

So here's a placebo, a heretofore unmentioned AW mini-anecdote: upon hearing Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On," she disdainfully sneered that she liked Jack Black's version better.

on WTFF

The origin of "WTFF" is only vaguely more interesting. When I was a lead, I'd read behind the writers' work regularly. Some writers were impeccably clean on the very first draft. I call them "my favorites." Some sucked bilgewater (as the editor, Annette, put it), no matter how many drafts they got. I call them "Roxanne." And one turned in excellent final drafts but really—insanely—weak initial drafts. She answers to "Dorkass." You can call her "Karen." If the words stuck to the page, she figured, she'd done her job and met her deadline. She'll fix it later. Off to the mall! She specialized in the glittering generality. "Windows can be faster than nearly each and every one of the other alternatives," she'd type just to fill up space so she could get to the Bon Home sale. "Almost every last one of them."

One day, when I was working a weekend in order to read the draft she'd handed off before going to Banff, I came across the following. This is verbatim. "The new, comprehensive migration tools provided with Windows help you migrate items comprehensively."

My note was succinct: "WHAT THE FUCK? I MEAN, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?"

On Monday Annette sniffed, "I guess I've been doing it wrong all these years, giving actual feedback when all I had to do is swear like a 10 year old." She then proceeded to butcher the phrase in her memory, and now half the world thinks I say "what the fuckity fuck."

award o’the day

February 22, 2005

It's a tie between Valerie Bertinelli, whom I overheard on some morning show, and the leader of the free world.

"This notion of United States attacking Iran is simply ridiculous. Having said that, all options are on the table."  (G.W. Bush)
 

"It was, like, surreal. But in a strange way."  (Valerie Bertinelli)

schmoscar^® season

February 20, 2005

It's self-love time yet again for Hollywood, and everywhere you look, Oscar predictions abound. Of the love being doled out, the heaps being piled on Virginia Madsen of "Sideways" are the most curious to me. Sure, she was appealing in her role. No argument. Any middle-aged man would want to marry that character. But to me that's faint praise, considering the character's 100% middle-aged man's fantasy. Look! She's beautiful and charming and has no apparent standards whatsoever! In fact, she's magnetically drawn to unremittingly selfish repugnance! Sign me up—but let's not praise the performance as anything bordering depth or reality.

This means, of course, that she'll win in a landslide.

Ever since I left "Last of the Mohicans" criticizing the way the atmospheric sounds (e.g., a babbling brook) drowned out the dialogue, only to see that film later win for Best Sound, I realized I'm woefully out of step with the Academy. Or maybe it's the reverse. Consider:
 

social securizzzz

February 15, 2005

Anyone who ever has to talk money with me gets two minutes, tops, before my eyes completely glaze over. It's an involuntary reflex, like gagging on sweet potatoes or tuning out Cameron Diaz when she's stumping for whatever cause is flavor of the month for the Cameron Diazes of the world. For me to knuckle down and spend an hour reading about Social Security, then, is an accomplishment indeed. I think I got 15 whole minutes of reading done in that hour.

I don't pretend to be an expert, but I came to the following inescapable conclusions:

• The Democrats are shifty-eyed goddamn liars, because Social Security will clearly go broke in 2042, as Bush says. What are they doing to make the math work—growing more workers or offing retirees? Oh, that's right, we have a "surplus." A surplus filled with IOUs from the Treasury, which has been borrowing from it for years. This is like me buying a boat with my savings, leaving myself an IOU, and calling it my nestegg.

• Bush is a shifty-eyed goddamn liar, because 1) his private investment accounts do nothing to make up for that shortfall, and 2) if they earn a profit above inflation, the government snatches it from the "private" account holder anyway. What's the benefit to us again? Oh right, the $2 trillion we'll have to borrow in order to switch from an inter-generational model (me paying for grandpa) to an intra- one (me paying for you).

• So long as multimillionaires are drawing benefit checks and people like myself stop paying FICA tax at $89,000 every year, everything else we're talking about is utterly asinine. Let's start by doing the painless obvious and then see how much radical surgery is left to do. Jesus christ.

The preceding insults are in loving tribute to Harry Truman, who once said: "Nixon is a shifty-eyed goddamn liar. He's talking out of both sides of his mouth...and lying out of both sides."

retro valentine

February 14, 2005

Lately I've been gnashing my teeth over my long dormant screenplay. The plan once was, of course, to film it myself with the excess hundreds of thousands jingling in my pockets.

Yeah, I remember my money. I remember my vanity project movie. I remember the sweet smell of my impending mid-30s retirement. I remember the loving caress of ludicrously hot golddiggers. Sigh. Gone, all gone. All 'cause Microsoft can't sell products if they have to do it legally. But I digress.

My greatest lament here is that the script is in many ways a valentine to the women scattered throughout my life. My positive male role models were few. (And fictional. Bugs Bunny was more of a role model than my old man.) No, if I have any redeeming qualities, you can bet I learned them from a woman. And my script, while not really autobiographical, did borrow this element wholesale from my life. You see a man raised by a single woman; whose closest friends are an old woman, two exes and a young girl; who works for a woman in an industry dominated by women. One suspects that if he ever got the chance to relate to other men, he might not know what to say. In dubious art as in dubious life.

Deprived my intended outlet, on this valentine's day I want to toast my exes. I still love every last every-other-one of you. To Cec, who took an angry teenaged ass and merely taught him what it means to love another. To Stick (lest the reader judge me, I was "Stump"), my longest relationship at six years, who picked me up when I fell and did nothing less than ensure I grew up into manhood. To Fucking Amy, through whose bankruptcy of the soul I learned the moral imperative of empathy. (That's admittedly grasping for a silver lining.) To Flake, who taught me the pleasures of embracing people decidedly unlike myself; who was and remains my personal conscience, my Jiminy Cricket. (Hey, Orkin man!) To my pseudo wife, with whom I went out only three times yet somehow married twice, for encouraging my taste for the larger-than-life, then and now. To Chicklet, who injected so much fun and whimsy into my life that now I refuse to live without it for long. To P, and S, and M1 & M2, and the Stef/phs, who weren't around long enough to get cloying nicknames and who, okay, weren't all that influential, but of whom I'm frequently and very fondly reminded. To you all, my ever-growing gratitude. To quote Carl Wilson, god only knows what I'd be without you.

And while I've got your attention: I  broke up with you, dammit.

inaugural bash

February 13, 2005

Those of you who've been waiting for me to set off on my previous group at work, you need wait a little longer. I want to quote without violating my non-disclosure agreement, and that requires that this stuff get published. Which happens this month. So sit tight and make popcorn.

Dabob bay

February 10, 2005

A happy confluence of events occurred yesterday: great tides, a rising barometer, the continued presence of transient orcas in Hood Canal, and nothing time-intensive to do at work. So while my friends reacquainted themselves with the review goals they hadn't seen in six months, I was motoring 40 miles down Hood Canal. The orca's trail was cold. I went to where they'd been reported 3 hours earlier, Point Whitney, but I found only a bunch of shore-bound gawkers with binoculars. Tellingly, I never saw a seal. I imagine those that survived will be ashore for nine or ten years.

Despite the whale whiff, it was a truly marvelous day. When I rounded Hazel Point, heading west, I actually gasped. What revealed itself, quite suddenly and without foreshadowing, was the entire Olympic range, without obstruction. The mountains seemed to rise right out of the water, like at Lake Pend Oreille. And happy me, I spent my Wednesday sunning myself, chain-smoking cigars, and listening to underwater sounds in this very spot.

call screening

My friends were supposed to join me on the trip. When Kiki called to cancel, I screened the call, picking it up after she identified herself.

"Ah, a sociopath and his answering machine," she cooed. "It's a classic American love story."

flush joke

February 7, 2005

The joke about flushing an iPod (two posts ago) is one of those jokes. I think it's simply hiiii-larious and never fail to laugh. Everyone else just stares impassively.

virtual homicide

Last night, Courtney and I had scheduled a virtual movie night. We were each going to rent Streetcar Named Desire in our respective homes in our respective towns, watch it, and commiserate afterward. I called Metamuville Video. Astoundingly, they had it. Shortly before the appointed hour, I went to pick it up. They were holding it for me at the counter. I paid for it, and they handed me a VHS tape. (Ew.) Of a 1984 made-for-TV version. (Worse!) Starring Beverly D-Angelo, Ann Margaret, and Randy Quaid. (Doink! I went over the edge.)

Seriously, who would think to ask "what version is it?" If I reserve the Wizard of Oz, Valerie Bertinelli had better not be playing Dorothy opposite Eric Estrada's Scarecrow.

name two adjectives that one might use to describe a stunted intellect

Micro, soft

February 6, 2005

The other night, a friend showed me something very telling about a certain world's largest software company. A pinhead executive there recently distributed a survey to my permanent-status brethren. He wants to know how many employees own iPods. He then plunges straight into question-begging, scolding 'Softies who buy non-MS products. Although I was morbidly curious about his justifications for dictating how employees choose to spend their wages, I stopped there. After ten years of traversing the scum-laden petri dish that is the corporate culture, I have the rest of the memo memorized. It will assert that MS technologies are clearly superior due to their obvious non-inferiority and that customers, although always right, are unequivocally wrong. The memo will then prove these assertions by citing someone who quotes the memo. Slogans will be coined, posters will be printed and hung in the hallways, and 4.0s will be handed out, all without a single goddamned sale being made. Such is the nature of accomplishment there.

A few years ago, a slogan du jour was "delight the customer." We all had to huddle in our offices and somehow work that buzz phrase into our annual reviews, the scores for which were of course already submitted, but I digress. We had to specify how, precisely, we were delighting the customer, and since we were being evaluated on a curve, the delights we were concocting had damned well better be more salacious than our peers'. The slogan has long since passed into oblivion—going the way of the February bonus, merit raises, stock options, and motivated employees—but I'm resurrecting it here in order to demonstrate a crucial hypocrisy. I am an iPod owner. Like the overwhelming majority of iPod owners, I am thrilled with it. Every day I use it, I become more impressed by the thought that went into its elegant design. And I am a dream customer. If it died tomorrow, I'd shed a manly tear, have a tasteful little funeral, flush, and then sprint to the store to get on the waiting list for an even more expensive one. I am, in short, the quintessentially delighted customer of my employer's competitor. But are my experiences mined for a better understanding of the customers' wants and needs? Are they a handy catalyst for introspection and self-improvement? No, they are resented, berated, corrected, dismissed.

Here's a more personal tale. I know folks who work on Windows Media Player. We were discussing the Big 3 media clients (WMP, Real, QuickTime), and I told them that, as an average end-user surfing average Web media, my experience was that QuickTime and WMP are the most reliable of the three, in that order. Did they shake their heads sadly? No. Did they want the details? No. Did they politely thank me for my data, roll their eyes at some oversight on my part, and forget about it? No. Did they inform me that my experience was somehow not representative? No, no, of course not. They argued that my experience wasn't what I remember. Instead of listening to the customer, they sought to discredit what he said, even if it meant correcting his own memory. And I'm their friend. Imagine how little regard they have for you.

Correcting the customer's memory. Is there a better metaphor for arrogant incompetence? Well, maybe one.

Stock performance during the iPod line's brief lifetime

art of war

February 3, 2005

The old commute staring at me once again, I downloaded an audiobook of Sun Tzu's Art of War. It's narrated by Joe Mantangna, the voice of Fat Tony on the Simpsons.

This. Is. Distracting. It's like listening to Isaac Hayes songs post–South Park.

All it's missing are some "youses." Imagine Fat Tony saying "Da clever combatant im-poses his will on da e-ne-my, but does not allow da e-ne-my's will to be im-posed on him," and you've pretty much got it.

progression

February 2, 2005

I don't think I ever feel more out of place in Seattle then when waiting in line at Trader Joes. These pretentious twits. I just want to hang their brand-name burlap sacks full of sudless soap and yogurt cheese on their eyebrow studs.

This is the same demographic who drops the word "progressive" into conversations in the same unsubtly self-aggrandizing fashion that Microsoft dweebs use "intelligent," as in "I like living/working in/at Seattle/Microsoft because of all the progressive/intelligent people here." These are the people who root through my kitchen trash, looking for recycling fouls, just so they can remind me that I'm not progressive like them. The same folks who snort derisively at my boat's outboards, even though their emissions are vastly less than a sailboat's smoke-belching diesel engine. The same folks who congratulate themselves about electric-line powered busses that, because of the resistance in the electric lines, ultimately cause far more fossil fuels to be expended. The same folks who haughtily correct me if I say "black" instead of "African-American," yet who've never had a non-white in their homes in their entire lives. Sorry, electricians and maids don't count.

Speaking of which, has anyone else noticed that 107.7 (The End) only plays Unpigmented-American rappers? I've only heard Eminem and the Beastie Boys. Ever. If you don't want to play rap, great, but I'm put off by the obvious color line. It's like Johannesburg (or MTV) in 1982.