Note to self 389: 1/04/2012

 

Welcome to 2012... Now what the fuck?

 

Don't worry, I can GUARANTEE you that it will suck as badly as 2011 did. Don't fret, snowflake. Well, I guess 2011 wasn't all that bad a year for me. I did get a week off of work (still paid!) when the tornados blew through the South in late April and fucked up numerous power stations and power lines; I saw Nobuo Uematsu direct an orchestra playing Final Fantasy music from the front row; I got to hang out with a bunch of friends at DragonCon for the first time in years, and Mehve and I rocked the shit out of Japan in October (and I think Mehve's forgiven me for being me for most of the trip)... All in all not bad, especially since the Feds never found those two Ukrainian whores' bodies that the MegaPlayboy and I had to get rid of after last New Year's Eve. That was just the cherry on top.

 

Anyway, now it's on to the things that occurred in 2011 that I just never got around to talking about due to me not finishing them (like shitty shows or books or women), or them being interesting, but me just not having enough time to cover them due to my life sucking while working 14 hour days and having my soul drained by the forces of the universe that HATE me. So anyway, here's my Year-End Wrap Up for 2011:

 

DOCTOR WHO: Jesus Christ, call me late to the party on this one! I had grown up with my older cousins trying to push the 70s and 80s Doctor(s) on me all the time, and it always looked so weird and British that I never gave it a chance. Then the MegaPlayboy tried again in the late 90s/early 2000s, but I just laughed at his really weird 12-foot long scarf... But back in November of '11 I found I had a shit-ton of Amazon gift cards in my hands and went for broke with the Complete 5th Series Blu-Ray set, sight unseen and on a total leap of faith... I am kicking myself so hard now for waiting so long to try this show. I've finished all of the 11th Doctor's (Matt Smith's) current series, and am now jumping back to the 9th Doctor before finishing up with the 10th Doctor's tales. If those pan out as fantabulous as series 5 and 6, then I might start looking up some Tom Baker eps for shits and giggles, and hell, maybe Torchwood too (and yeah, I've already been warned away from the "Children of Earth" mini-series). It's just so great, sweetie!

 

The SONG OF ICE AND FIRE: If you're a total goob who hates reading anything deeper than the most recent insipid James Patterson or Judy Blume book then you have no idea what this is. If you have HBO then you'd probably recognize the title "Game of Thrones." Well, GoT is just the first book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, and it is good. Nothing but kick ass politics, murder, wars, whores, betrayals, midgets, and bad-ass little girls with daggers throughout. I'm currently only on book 4 in the series (book 5 just came out in 2011, and there are still two more planned after that.... Though I have no idea how, considering pretty much every main character is dead by book 4), but George R. R. Martin's story has me firmly by the nuts, and it will not let me go. Goddamn it I hope he finishes up this series before his fat fingers pop one too many Twinkies into his gullet and he dies of 27 kinds of Dia-bee-tus.

 

NATSUME YUUJINCHOU SAN: Holy shit, the third season is just as good as the first two... Only with less Reiko than I'd like.

 

ROBOPOCALYPSE: What the fuck? Supposedly Steven Spielberg fell in love with this Michael Crichton-wannabe tale of computers going all Skynet on mankind and almost destroying civilization before humans unified and rebelled. It's just a really sad World War Z rip-off that doesn't understand what made WWZ so fucking great in the first place! No, not "zombies," but a realism and viewpoints that were engaging. Robopocalypse is just a bunch of really awful coincidences shared by 3 or 4 people who save the world from the machines almost single-handedly, and it's written as if by a social outcast Sophomore in a third rate high school literary club who thought he was writing the next Terminator. It's not even the next Terminator: Salvation. It's just trash, and I'm so sorry I wasted any time on it.

 

TIGER AND BUNNY: Just could not get into it. I tried, and I may try again if I run out of stuff to watch (hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiighly unlikely), but it just seemed to be too much like the aimed-at-retarded-toddlers Heroman that Stan Lee worked on with Studio Bones a while back. The characters were all dumb or annoying, and it's only "catch" was "superheroes have corporate sponsors in this universe"... Which Mystery Men did over a decade earlier and 100Xs funnier. Meh, fuck it.

 

C: The MONEY OF SOUL AND POSSIBILITY CONTROL: Did ANYBODY involved in this clusterfuck understand real-world economics? Did the writers, directors, hell, even the seiyuu ever ask themselves "Hey, what is this 'money' thing, and how for does it work?" No. No they didn't ever. This show was more retarded than Shangri-La. Think about that.

 

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL, HARRY POTTER and the DEATHLY HALLOWS 2, HUGO: ..... Much better than I had expected. Hugo especially.

 

KORE WA ZOMBIE DES KA (aka IS THIS A ZOMBIE?): The same old recycled harem anime shit you've seen twice warmed over 500 times before. Lame jokes, boring characters, no drama. Way to keep us riveted, Japan.

 

HYPERION: Ho-lee-shee-it. I gave the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons a try thanks to a friend's insistence, and it blew my fucking mind. What's even more mind blowing is that I now totally get why Nagato gave Hyperion to Kyon to read in the original Haruhi Suzumiya book and anime. Wow. Pure awesome.

 

K-ON the MOVIE: Seriously, people, please, for the love of all the Shinto gods and spirits and all that is holy in the Land of the Rising Sun... PLEASE STOP WATCHING THIS CRAP so Studio Kyoto will stop wasting time and money on it that could instead be spent on giving us more Haruhi or Full Metal Panic!

See you all flip side! Now I'm off to buy some suspenders and a bow tie. Bow ties are coo'.

 

Note to self 388: 12/21/2011

 

Okay, yeah, Christmas is supposed to be about goodwill towards men and peace and joy and blah blah blah, but FUCK the goddamn 12 Stone Church in Lawrenceville, GA! Fuck them to HELL where they can BURN.

 

See, it all started out this past Saturday when I tried to get a group together to see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol at the IMAX theater at the Mall of Georgia, which was like the only place that movie was playing this weekend before it opens wide this upcoming Friday. Everybody was either hungover, sick, visiting parents, or couldn't get a babysitter, except for Kiff. In fact, when I called him, Kiff was already at the Mall of Georgia, and he ran down and got two tickets for the 3:45PM show for us. I thought that was most excellent, and so I jumped in my car at 2:15 (in Athens, about 55 minutes away from the mall), and started driving.

 

At about 3, I got to the exit of highway 316 for 20/Buford Drive, and hit dead-stopped traffic. At 3:15, after moving 100 feet (at MOST) I called up Kiff and explained the situation.

 

"Ummmmm," I said. "I don't think I'll be able to make it to the 3:45 show. Traffic is stopped. I don't mean that it's bumper to bumper but it's moving at like 10 - 20 MPH, I mean it's STOPPED. It's not moving. Nothing is moving. I want to die."

 

Kiff said that for the past few weekends traffic had been bad if he tried to get to the mall in the late afternoon, but that things eventually opened up after he made it past the 2nd traffic light on Buford Drive, and that I had plenty of time, so no worries. Granted I was still 5.5 miles away at this point, but if traffic did indeed free itself up after the next few lights, I'd still be okay, I thought.

 

At 3:40 I called him back. "Ummmmm, no. I won't make it," I said with finality. "I just passed a marker that said that 85 is 5 miles from here. We maybe moved half a mile in the last half hour. No, looking at my odometer it shows it's only been .4 miles. I won't make it, man. Refund the tickets. Want to try for the 7PM show?"

 

He said no thanks, that would be WAY too much time for him to be at the mall, and I didn't blame him. I then tore across the big, grassy median, and zipped back towards 316, which I then took South to head on over to Mehve's house (where I had to drop something off, which I had originally planned to do after the movie). I then got stuck in almost the SAME damn traffic blockade just a mile from Mehve's house (which is right across 85, but like 3 - 4 miles South of the Mall of Georgia). I managed to take a back road (without an entrance to 85 on it) across the main highway and to his house, where I could see that highway 85 was bumper to bumper heading North, but completely free heading South... Ugh... After a quick visit at Mehve's I then went to Marksy's place and dropped off something for him before trying to find a way around the whole mess. That's when I got a call from Kiff (who took some back roads home easily enough) who told me what was going on.

"You're not going to believe this," he said. "All that traffic, ALL those roads blocked the fuck up, that's all because of a church, man. The 12 Stone Church just off of 20, just down from the Mall of Georgia is doing some sort of really retarded promotion for itself where they're giving away 5-goddamn-thousand honey-baked hams. All of the Atlanta area is racing there to get one. They say they're like $40 - $50 each normally! Anyway, the news had to helicopter reporters to the church to report on the huge fucking clusterfuck because they couldn't drive to it. ALL THE ROADS ARE BLOCKED UP, man! The mall parking lot was empty when I was leaving there... I thought that was weird."

 

Anyway, I then spent around 2 hours getting lost in all the many backwoods/back roads of Georgia before I finally made it to the mall, and even though the promotion of the hams was over and the sun was setting, the mall was relatively empty. All the news reports that day warned people to STAY HOME. "Don't bother trying to reach the mall (the biggest in the Southeast) because this fucking retarded church fucked up it's ridiculous advertisement campaign for itself." This was the busiest shopping day of the year (the Saturday before Christmas), and this church killed the local economy. Mission accomplished, fuckwads.

 

End of story: I did eventually get to see Ghost Protocol (really fucking awesome movie, and I shit my pants when Tom Cruise started climbing the tower), I got to order my authentic Captain America shield at the Museum Replicas store, and that night on the news I saw them reporting on the church's stupidity. It was awesome! Because the church is in a well-to-do neighborhood, only rich white locals were able to get the hams, and that 5-hour traffic jam that brought Northeast Georgia to a standstill also kept all the poor people (who could have actually USED a free ham) away until the hams were all gone. Oh, and it made them waste about $30 - $40 in gas just getting there and then back home. So to recap: Local economy destroyed on what should have been the best retail event of the year; poor people who needed hams didn't get one; and rich, white people who lived across the street from the church got all 5,000 of them. And the 12 Stone Church was ridiculed for being run by retards on national news.

 

I think Chi-Chi put it best when he said "If God had wanted those people to get free hams, he would have made it rain ham." Meh, whatever. Fuck them all. Anyway, here's my new and awesome Nightmare Before Christmas tree this year! And yes, that's Optimus giving a Nazi "Sieg heil!" salute to its incredibleness.

 

 

 

Note to self 387: 11/30/2011

 

Four years ago I had the worst Thanksgiving ever (where nobody died). It all started when my dear, dear mother suggested that we (everybody in the immediate family) all gather together in a rented cabin near Gatlinburg, TN for 3 to 4 days over the holiday weekend to eat, drink and be merry. Unfortunately, I had already spent a month at those very cabins one weekend back in 2002/2003. Not that the cabin itself was really all that bad (it was okay, but cold and breezy), but I was mainly pissed off at the time because there was NOTHING to do there except drink and play board games or poker with a bunch of drunk (but nice) frat guys. Yeah, we could have gone to Dollywood, but I didn't want to have to kill myself.

 

Okay, so my family chose to go to almost the very same cabin for our Thanksgiving that year, but I put my foot down. "No," I told them (well, mostly my mother). "I've already been there. The cabins are freezing and shoddily constructed, they're all up on a mountain, accessible only through awful mountain passes and gravel roads, and it's much colder, damper, and icier than anything we'll ever experience if we just stay here in Athens, GA. Trust me, it's not a good idea."

 

But once my mother (egged on by my sister and sister-in-law) gets something in her head it's stuck there. So the whole family got prepared to descend into the Mountains of Hell (me under duress) for Turkey Day '07... But then my siblings had the idea of making this my parents' anniversary present, and wanted us three to pay for everything (including food) and cook the meal ourselves. That's when I said "No. Fuck it. Ain't happening" and planned to spend the holiday with either Tammi with an "i"'s family, or Chef Jax's crew, where they were having something like roast pork, Texas brisket, and Chicken Marsala. I was NOT going to make a weekend-of-suffering my parents' gift. Instead I went out and bought them a 4 day Caribbean Cruise. Because I'm awesome.

 

Anyway, long story short, I was talked into (by my patient father) just coming up to the cabin (a 4 hour drive) Thanksgiving morning, and then having an early dinner with everybody before heading out again before it got dark. The drive up was fucking treacherous (google map that trip, you'll see that the second half is nothing but the shittiest and most hair-pinned roads winding through the Southern Appalachians), what with the shitty drivers, the twists and turns that would have even made Takumi Fujiwara piss his pants in fear, oh, and the snow and sleet that started as soon as I reached 2000 feet.

 

My knuckles were white with anger, fear, and cold when I arrived at the cabin, but I did my best not to open my mouth for the whole day (I would have just bitched and moaned, especially over the lumpy potatoes, the so-wet-it-puddled stuffing, and cold half-turkey bits [that we each only got two mouthfuls of because the people doing the cooking didn't bother to ask my mother how big a bird they should get to feed 7 adults and 5 children]). The cabin we ate in was so chilly and damp that we might have done better had we just left the windows and doors open, but I didn't say a word. That evening, right before sunset, somebody had the super idea to drive down to downtown Gatlinburg in the freezing rain to see all the Christmas lights... I simply got up, said my good-byes and got back into my Explorer to drive back to Athens and my nice warm bed with flannel sheets. My dad walked me out to my car and whispered to me as I got in, "I wish I was going with you...." I told him he was free to join me, but he muttered something about my mother castrating him or some such thing if he tried. I then drove away and thanked Buddha above that I was not married.

 

From the top of the mountain, in the twilight of Thanksgiving Day, I could see that all streets leading into and out of Gatlinburg proper were backed up like a toilet in a house of obese people, so I took some back roads (most were just trails) to get around to the highway I needed to head back South, and found that they were even more dangerous with sleet and ice after the sun went down (though half the fucking insane drivers were still riding people's asses and swerving around them even with double yellow lines and 5 feet of visibility).

 

I made it home after 9 that night, and was so exhausted that I passed out for 13 hours. The rest of my family had the most miserable holiday weekend ever (even more so than that one where people died) — stuck in 2-hour long traffic the couple of times they tried to go out anywhere, and wishing the cabin had even the most basic of TV reception (even if it was just PBS) — and we had an unspoken agreement to never speak of it again... Until my sister altered her own memories and brought up the cabin-in-the-woods Thanksgiving idea again this year.

 

"It was soooo much fun! We should totally do it again!" she said in July of this year.

 

"What the goddamn hell are you smoking?!" I politely asked, not caring that small children and my parents were present. "Do you not remember the shitty accommodations? The awful food cooked on crappy stoves and ovens that nobody knew how to use? The cold? The miserable, bone-chilling cold? The killer mountain roads? The hell that was Gatlinburg and Dollywood, and all the traffic they brought forth with them? Did you hit your head? Are you suffering from early dementia? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!"

 

But apparently the rest of my family starts blocking me out when I begin to rant, and soon my mother and sister-in-law all chimed in that the first cabin Thanksgiving was indeed quite awesome in retrospect, and we truly needed to recreate its majesty and magic all over again this year. I looked to my brother and father, and they were just frozen in self pity and resignation. Fuck!

 

By early September, my sister-in-law had booked a new cabin in North-North Georgia (Blue Ridge, GA), and she found a Santa's Train Ride for everybody to take on the day after Thanksgiving too. I tried to weasel out of this one as well, but my mother invited my uncle and aunt (whom I hadn't seen in years), and I was kind of forced into it.

 

Everybody else in my clan had taken the Wednesday before Thanksgiving off this year, except for me (thanks to the Japan trip sapping my vacation time to nil... Not complaining at all, just explaining), so I had to take off for the cabin directly after work. It was only supposed to be a 3 hour drive, but Google Maps kind of sucks when it comes to directions in tiny, rural, Southern, bumpkin, redneck, hicksville towns. This was no exception. At about 3 and a half hours into my drive (and stopping for directions once, and getting lost 3 times) I got a call from my older brother who tried to help me find the last 4 roads I needed to take.

"Hey, we're all waiting for you? Did you get lost any? We all got lost coming up here ourselves, and that was in daylight, so I can only imagine what it's like for you. So, where are you now?" he said.

 

"....I AM SO PISSED THE FUCK OFF RIGHT NOW! I'M LOST, AND I'M SUPER FUCKING ANGRY.... You do NOT want to BE ON THE GODDAMN PHONE WITH ME NOW!" I replied.

 

"Well we all understand, like I said, we each got lost ourselves coming up here earlier, so if you have any--" And then I hung up on him while I banged my head against the steering wheel and screamed while shooting down a dirty farm road at 70 miles per hour, praying Roscoe P. Coltrane wasn't out with a radar gun that night. He called twice more, but I didn't feel like picking up the phone any after that.

 

After a few more wrong, then right turns, I came across something I didn't expect. "Holy fuck my red ass!" I shouted out loud to myself. "That's the Rolling Thunder White Water Rafting place Team Greenwood and I went to two years ago!" It was true, and that revelation let me know where I was in relation to where I needed to be. I turned the truck around and found the last few turns I had to make.

 

All the kids were asleep when I eventually got to the cabin, but everybody else was still up and talking. I put my stuff into my room, took the two 12-packs of Yuengling I brought with me to the kitchen, downed 2 in a couple of gigantic gulps, popped a third, and then joined my family with an intoxicated grin on my face (I'm not a heavy drinker for just such an occasion... When I NEED to get plastered QUICKLY!). That night wasn't too bad after that, and we all just ignored my verbally violent behavior towards my brother on the phone earlier that evening.

 

Thursday morning I woke up at around 8 (well, truth be told I was originally woken up at 5:30 when little ones started waking and making a goddamn racket... Honestly, bro and sis, it can't take much to either train your chillun to stay in bed [or at least stay QUIET] till at least 8AM with a system of rewards or harsh, harsh punishments), and then got my first real view of the cabin and the area it resided on. All in all, not bad. Yeah, the mountain it was on was really fucking steep, and no football could be played anywhere on its premises, true, it didn't have cable, satellite, or receive any TV signals, and yeah, it was kind of cold, but it was about 1425% better than any of the ones I'd spent time in previous (including the female counselor cabins I snuck into at that summer camp I went to when I was a kid, and those cabins were HEAVEN!). It was a fancy-schmancy cabin, we overstocked it with already prepared Thanksgiving foods, and I brought tons of board games and card games for adults and kids so that we never wanted to start writing "All work and no play make Homer something something..." all over the walls. And most importantly, thanks to our (well, mostly MY) preparations, nobody died this time. Even when that Sasquatch came tearing around the property that third night, looking for whoever shaved its young the previous day. Man, those fuckers can howl like crocobears in heat when they're ticked! And their shaved babies look like Winston Churchill.

 

We had a decent Thanksgiving meal (not anything epic or grand, just infinitely better than the last Cabin-giving), took all the kids on the "Santa Train," and we watched Christmas Vacation and Raiders of the Lost Ark (well, at least my mom and I watched that last flick one night). I still think the whole idea behind Cabin-giving sucks Dave Lister's unwashed taint, but this was as harmless as I can ever imagine one being. Still, if we have another one before 4 years are up I will turn off my cell phone and fly to Hawai'i for a week instead. Oh, and if we still do this when all my siblings' kids are teenagers, I will get up at 5:30AM (after they've all been up talking and playing games amongst themselves all night) and go stomping around the place while banging pots and pans until at least 8. Then when they come out to complain I'll flip them the bird and shit in their cereal boxes. Goddammit, that's just such bullshit.

 

Note to self 386: 10/05/2011

 

Do you have a food allergy? If so, it sucks, doesn't it — always having to be super-extra careful about the food at parties, restaurants, and what's placed upon the perfect breast of a gorgeous woman at an orgy... If you don't have a food allergy, well then you don't understand the constant fear, the almost overboard questions we have to ask waitresses and party hosts that make us look like stupid pussies because we either don't want to vomit in public or die. Fuck you.

 

For me it's shellfish. I remember eating shrimp for the first time when I was like 5 or 6 and puking in the back seat of my parents' station wagon on the way back from the restaurant. Then a few years after that tasting some fancy crab dip at my uncle's house and puking in the bed just an hour or so later. Then finally having shrimp one more time when I was 10 and puking and shitting my guts out all night. That was when my parents finally put 2 and 2 together and got "allergy." At least it was nothing fatal, sure, but I actually LIKED the taste of shellfish, and as I got older I started hanging out with lots of people who loved it too, and loved cooking it, and ordering it at restaurants, and serving it at gatherings. I felt like an unpopular goomba who had to explain to everybody whenever people kept trying to get me to try the tasty finger foods at the hip party I was at, "No, thank you. Yes, that shrimp cocktail looks very, very good, but I would puke all over you if I ate it. Yes. I'm allergic. Yes, yes, I know, it sucks. Thank you for your sympa--.... Yeah, you just leave and go over there while I'm still talking to you...... Oh, Bob, yeah. Yeah, that shrimp looks good, but I'll dies if I eats it. Then they'd have to call an ambulance, and the party would be ruined. Yeah, not worth it, I know."

 

Anyway, after a few close calls in college with crustaceans, I started dating this hot dietician, and as a topic of conversation I brought up my shellfish allergy, and I wondered aloud if there was a chance I could have outgrown it, considering how mild an allergy it really was.

 

She told me "There are really three possibilities. One: you could be completely over it after your body changed during puberty. There's about a 33% chance for that. Two: it could have stayed the same and you will still puke the next time you eat any. There's a 33% chance for that as well. Three: the allergy could have actually gotten worse and could cause you some major life-threatening problems if you eat it now — your throat could close up, your heart could stop, hives could cover your body... Around a 33% chance for that as well... Do you still want to try it?"

 

I declined, and we eventually broke up because she just wouldn't stop pushing me try some shrimp for a paper she was writing or something. I was always afraid that the next meal she cooked would mysteriously have some bits of crab or lobster in it.

 

Anyway, things proceeded with me staying ever vigilant with my shellfish-free diet, until a friend and I decided to finally take a trip to Japan. We've been planning for months now, but my biggest (and really only) fear was going into a restaurant where they don't speak English (or even worse, just a little tiny bit of English) and trying to explain to the moe waitress in a maid outfit that shellfish would kill me. "No shellfish. No lobster, no crab, no shrimp," I would say loudly in over-exaggerated English. She would then nod and smile happily and report back to the chef in Japanese, "That tall, handsome gaijin man said he want LOTS of shrimp, lobster, and crab in his sushi. Banzai!" Then I would die.

 

So, a few weeks ago I decided that I HAD to know if my allergy was still fully armed and operational, so one Friday I went to a fancy Chinese restaurant in town and ordered a whole helping of Sweet and Sour Shrimp. I then took it home, placed a triple-lined 13-gallon trash can next to me, put 911 on speed-dial, and I ate 4 giant pieces of shrimp. It tasted different than what I had remembered, and the texture was really strange as I moved it around in my mouth and chewed it very slowly. The fear that I had in my brain was much more potent than the flavor of the shrimp though. It is the strangest feeling to force yourself to eat something that you've been absolutely TERRIFIED of for over 20 goddamn years... Every bite was like a click from an empty chamber of a revolver at my head in a fucked up game of Russian roulette.

 

Then I waited. I watched some TV. I worked on my website. I waited some more. I even went to bed about 6 hours later with the trash can next to my head. Nothing. I woke up excited, but wary, yet I still spent no time jumping on Facebook and declaring my freedom from my lifetime's Achilles heel!

 

The next Friday I drove directly over to my closest supermarket after work and had the guy in the seafood section steam me up a half-pound of snow crab legs, with "California herbs & spices." I took that home and ate the shit out of every last bit of crab meat there. I cracked and then ripped apart every last shell and sucked it all dry. Again, nothing. Then the following Friday I went balls out and took a friend to a local seafood place, ordered fried calamari, crab cakes, and lobster, and ate it all. No puke at all. Not even an upset stomach. Not even any gas... Well, no more than normal.

 

 

So, I seem to be free of the curse, but in the end I don't think I'll ever intentionally order any Shrimp Scampi, or Lobster Thermidor, or any crab dip on my own... The stigma of "avoidance at all cost" is still lodged in my brain. Seriously, 20 years of constant conditioning and fear is very difficult to just toss aside after three lucky meals. And for all I know, those three meals were all my system could take. Maybe the next one would make me heave my ho all over the bathroom before I could reach a toilet... I doubt it, but still, it's like living in the Soviet Union for my entire life, then fleeing to the U.S. and winning the lottery... I'd be soooooo apprehensive to buy anything big, or even live the good life after barely surviving communism for so long. I'd constantly be thinking "Is this a trap? Is this really okay? What if they change their minds and I have to give it all back? I better just take it easy and not spend much... Maybe buy two-ply at the market... Maybe."

 

Anyway, my point is that I seem to be safe in case I eat some ramen with shrimp in it, or some sushi with crab when I'm in Japan. So I have that going for me. Wait... Oh man! I probably could have partook of the crawfish boil at Captain Rugged's wedding! GODDAMMIT!

 

Note to self 384: 08/24/2011

 

This past weekend was a rough one — the kind that makes you appreciate the quiet, slow ones where you're not expected to do jack shit beyond watching movies or possibly mowing the lawn. I had to work from 7AM till noon on Sat (eh, sometimes shit's gotta be done, no complaints), then I spent the rest of the day in the blazing 98 degree Southern heat watching my nephews in little league football and soccer games. This is usually a fun thing, but everybody was fucking MELTING out there that day, and the football game was an hour and a half late getting started because the dicktards in charge of everything have no goddamn idea how to keep a few games involving 7 - 10 year-olds on track, even though the kids themselves understand the rules and regs more than they do. Those poor fucking kids too... Two passed out due to heatstroke (after waiting around for 90 minutes in full pads before even hitting the field). I stopped sweating due to dehydration after an hour in the outdoor sauna myself, and that was after downing two Gatorades.

 

The game with my nephew eventually started and went on without a hitch, but then 4 minutes into the second quarter my 4 year-old nephew (the youngest) tells us he needs to go potty. His mother told him to hold it, but he started getting VERY fidgety, so I said I'd take him (and hit the concession stand for another drink afterward).

 

So we get to the filthy rest room (untouched by mop for at least 5 seasons), and the little guy makes a bee-line for an open stall. I use the stand-up model next to it. I then notice under the stall wall that his feet turn around and point the wrong way before his pants hit the ground, and I groan in comprehension and anger (at myself, for not asking earlier)...

 

"Hey, buddy," I started off with. "Are you going number one or number two in there?"

 

"Ummm, which one's number one?" he asked back.

 

At this point I felt a little relieved thinking "I've taught him the difference between 'number one and number two'... This is a good sign. He's just sitting down 'cause the seat's too high. Whew!" I answered him with "Number one is pee."

 

"Oh yeah," he said. "I'm doing number two."

 

"(under my breath) Fffffffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck....... (out loud) Oooookay. You know how to wipe yourself, right?"

 

"Mommy always does it for me."

 

"Well," I said with absolute assurance, "you're learning today."

 

"Oh!" he then exclaimed. "I guess it's a little bit of one and a whole lotta two."

 

"Goddammit so much....."

 

Needless to say that doesn't really cut it with a four year-old, and when he claimed he was all done I had to go into the danger zone myself... The SMELL... How can a kid that small make an odor like that? Anyway, I kept waiting for him to get off the can to show him how to do the "wipe of champions," but he just sat there looking back at me like "Well, what are you waiting for?" So I took a loooong piece of toilet paper and folded it up, and passed it to him. He then reached behind him while still sitting (he was on the edge of the rim, and had a lot of open space behind) and proceeded to wipe wipe wipe wipe wipe with the same piece of paper, explaining to me "Mommy only wipes twice and says I'm done."

 

I handed him another piece of fresh TP and said "Yeah, we're gonna go for a new record here today. Keep wiping, but use this new one." That confused him, but he complied. After one more new folded piece after that (and 20 more wipes) I figured that must have gotten it. He hopped off and before I could flush I got a look at what he dropped.... Jesus. Fucking. Christ... He must have been storing that thing for half a fucking month! The turd was bigger than his arm! He must have lost 10 pounds in 2 minutes! I'm surprised the porcelain didn't shatter on impact! Holy shit... I was so glad it didn't clog the toilet as I flushed and then dragged the kid over to the sink (he tried to just run outside to see what the crowd was cheering about).

 

I made him wash his hands for 3 minutes, reapplying soap every 10 seconds. This was bad enough but some 7 year-old with crazy eyes (think "Ogre" from Revenge of the Nerds, only not intimidating in the least), in full football uniform and pads was using the sink next to us and he wouldn't shut the fuck up. At this point we were the only three people in the facility, and I kept looking around to see if anybody would witness me grabbing the player's helmet and smacking him upside the head with it.

 

"Why do they make these helmets so big?" he asked nobody in particular. My nephew was about to answer (with God only knew what response), but I shushed him and told him not to talk to insane people with eyes that don't focus on the same thing. The peewee player laughed, put his helmet on, held his hands up like he was a bear ready to attack, and he started growling and giggling. I grabbed for some paper towels (turning away for only an instant), and I heard another growl, then a yelp of pain, and a plastic helmet hit the tiled floor. I whipped around and saw my nephew with his right fist extended at 7 year-old crotch level, and the football player grabbing his junk and unmoving on the ground. I quickly dried off my nephew's and my hands, gave him a high five, then picked him up in a fireman's carry and RAN out of there. I even forgot to get another Gatorade, and spent the rest of the game suffering from the heat because I dared not go back near the concession stand lest I be ID'd as the "guy with the nut-punching child."

 

Sunday sucked even more, what with those fags burning crosses on my lawn and using up all my buried land mines in my yard. Those fucking things are expensive!

 

Note to self 383: 08/03/2011

 

Nature is a cruel whore of a bitch sometimes. A few weeks ago I noticed some bird was starting to build a nest in my 12-foot tall oak tree in my front yard. "Not too secure," I thought, as I saw that she only built the thing 5 feet off the ground, on close to the lowest branch, "but I guess she knows what she's doing. We humans don't know to build outside of flood plains, so I can't criticize too much."

 

I checked on the nest the following weekend while mowing my lawn, and found that it was already completed, and there were 4 speckled, light-blue eggs in it. I remember thinking that these poor fucking eggs were never going to hatch seeing as we were in the middle of one of the longest, hottest heat waves the South had ever fallen under since the previous summer. "Those poor fuckers are going to be hatched sunnyside-up," I so wittily surmised.

 

A few days later I checked on the nest again and found four of the UGLIEST wrinkled and blind baby birds I'd ever seen, all stretching their necks up for someone to feed them by puking down their throats. A robin had flown away out the other side of the tree the second I stepped from the driveway into my yard toward the oak (great mothering... "I'll fly away, so he can't eat us all!" Unlike that mother swallow I had that one year that would dive-bomb the shit out of me [if I got within a football field's length from her nest above my front door] until I ran away, screaming like a little girl), but those hideous little fuckers just kept stretching and struggling, as if the first to have his or her head pop off would win.

 

After that I would go out every evening and peek into the nest to see (and take photos of) how the once bald, then down-covered, then partially-feathered chicks were doing. But then a few Saturdays ago I came out to find the most pissed off female mockingbird going absolutely ape shit, flying in and out of the lower branches of my oak, squawking like that annoying girl that I used to date in college did whenever anybody insulted her horrible fashion sense. I ran over to the tree, chased that cunt of a bird away, and noticed that only three of the chicks were still alive — the fourth was lying there lifeless in a heap. I then spent the rest of the night on vigil, throwing acorns, pinecones, and pebbles at the mockingbird when she kept trying to get close to the nest again. She'd be all like "Whoa! What?! I'm way the hell over here! I'm nowhere near that robin nest..... *Sneak, sneak, sneak* (thrown acorn) Holy shit, man! I was just looking for a worm or something! Seriously! That had nothing to do with the baby robins! Jesus! Just everybody calm the hell down." Soon she gave up for the night, and I went inside, hoping the momma robin would stop being such a pussy and come back to feed her chillun.

 

The next day I found the three living babies all huddled down close together, but the dead baby was gone... But it wasn't under the nest or anywhere to be found. I thought it odd (did the psycho-territorial mockingbird actually carry it off? A cat would have gone for fresh kill if it had attacked...). At least the remaining chicks still looked alright. At this point they were still mostly down-covered, but their feathers were coming in well enough. That Monday after work though, I came home to find the whole nest was empty. All the little chicklets were gone, and I didn't see the momma at all that night. Then came Tuesday.

 

I came home on Tuesday and found a dead baby bird in the middle of the driveway. It was like it was a message, like the horse head in The Godfather. Like the mockingbird or something was saying "Stay out of it. It ain't your fight." Then I got pissed. I got a little disgusted too when I tried to scoop the dead body up with a gardening spade and a plastic grocery bag and it began to move. That's when the giant maggots starting going all wriggly and writhing and making a break for it. They were not faster than my shoe though. I gave the bird a burial in my garbage can by the street, and as I approached my front door I noticed a little dull-colored grey bird (with speckles on its breast) underneath one of my bushes just staring at me. I approached it, making wild arm gestures and hoots and hollers that probably scared my neighbors and convinced them I WAS some sort of pervert, or worse, a performance artist like they always feared, but the bird just twitched its head to the side. It didn't move till my hand was about two feet away from it, then it squeaked and ran back behind two more bushes (right into a brick corner under my dining room window).

 

I followed the bird, hoping that it was indeed a refugee baby robin, but I couldn't be sure. This bird looked like it was fully feathered and big enough to fly; my babies were far from that point last I had seen them... But that was a few days ago. So as the winged creature stood in the corner I approached it again, but a lot quieter and smoother this time. It cheeped at me, but didn't move. I was actually able to gently pick it up. That's when it started squirming, but that's also when I noticed its wings were really tiny, and it was still about 1/5th covered in down. It was cute in its terrified panic, but thankfully it never shat on me, and I put it down in the same place, just as softly as I had picked it up. All that night I kept watch on the baby robin from my dining room, and scared that goddamn mockingbird away 2 times as it tried to attack the youth. To my astonishment my little baby was now sticking up for itself though. Whenever the mockingbird landed closer than 3 feet from the robin, the little guy would puff out all his underdeveloped feathers and wings and SCREECH at the invading murderer. Eventually the mockingbird would always fly away (usually after I threw stuff at it), baby birdy unmolested. I was so proud.

 

Soon it was getting dark and I started to call it a night, but then I noticed that my bird was beginning to let loose with a high-pitched chirp every 5 to 10 seconds. I thought he was calling for his mother to feed his sorry ass, but soon I began hearing return chirps. Within minutes two other babies joined the original, and they all scurried off across my front walkway and into the larger shrubs and bushes on the other side.

 

The next day I found the original baby in a shrub and took his picture a few times (see above). Then I went inside, opened up the window a bit, and waited for that goddamn mockingbird to come back and try and terrorize my robins again. I didn't have to wait long. As soon as my baby got down from his bush and started his chirping for his brothers/sisters again while walking around my mulch, that mockingbird flew in and landed within two feet of it. The robin put on his best show of puffing up and screeching at the older, bigger bitch-bird, but then the mockingbird started mocking the poor, frightened baby. It started raising its feathers, flapping, and screaming back at my bird (who proudly did not back down). That's when I had enough, aimed the pellet gun that I borrowed from Johnston in Accounting, and blew that goddamn cunt of a mockingbird away, right in front of my baby robin. Feathers actually flew and then floated to the ground. I was positive that my baby bird must have thought he was fucking Superman or something after that. He just tilted his head and cheeped before running off though.

 

After a few more days I stopped hearing the cheeps from my bushes, and I swore I saw a tiny bird fly off from my main baby's favorite shrub one afternoon. I had a tear come to my eye in the knowledge that I saved and helped 3 baby robins grow into adulthood (with no thanks to their cowardly mother!).

Soon I started showing off pictures of the day-old babies, and then the two week-old juvenile bird in my shrubbery, to the people in my office. All the women would "Oooooo," and "Ahhhhh" over the pics and my story, but then I got to Frank...

 

"Yeah," Frank said after a quick glance at my iPhone pictures, "Those are cute baby mockingbirds there." Then he went back to typing.

 

I felt I had to correct him. "No, no, no, no... You see, these are baby robins. I SAVED them FROM a mockingbird that was terrorizing them though."

 

Frank glanced up again. "Ummm, nope. Those are mockingbirds. See the breast plumage of the one in the bush? Mockingbird. It's all speckled. Mockingbird."

 

"But, but, but, the eggs!" I told him in desperation. "The eggs were speckled blue! Robin eggs! EGGSSSSSSSS!"

 

"Speckled? No, robin eggs are like bright, bright blue. Mockingbird eggs can be light blue with speckles of brown."

 

You know, I always used to laugh at that South Park episode where Eric Cartman killed Scott Tenorman's parents, cooked them up into a chili, and made Scott eat them in front of the town.... Not anymore. Not anymore.

 

Note to self 382: 07/13/2011

 

Dream time: Last night I had a dream that my sister thought it would be a good idea to have a picnic with the whole family in a "really cool" park she found about a half an hour away from my house. I agreed to meet everybody there, and as I got outside I was pissed to see that it was night. "What kind of yahoo wants to have a family picnic at night?!?" I screamed to the heavens. But not wanting to be the one to ruin a family gathering (I typically leave that up to the in-laws) I got in my truck with my printed out Google Maps directions and headed towards the park.

 

Soon though I came upon a small town (kind of like Mayberry), all lit up like Christmas, with cops (real cops, not Andy Griffith or Barney Fife) stopping traffic everywhere, searching everybody's vehicles. As one officer came up to my truck I asked what was going on.

 

"Oh, see," he started, "there's this escaped murderer out in the woods. We're trying to catch him, but he's quick, and he's already killed 4 more people since his escape."

 

"Out in the woods?!" I exclaimed. "Oh shit! He'll kill my family! They'll all blame me! Fuck!" That's when I tore away from the pig and started flying towards the park we were supposed to meet at. Unfortunately I had my windows down and my directions blew right out into the night. Now, at that time I was already down some country road I had never been on before, it was pitch black, except for my headlights, and there was a goddamn killer with Olympian sprinter abilities on the loose... I was NOT about to get the fuck out of my truck to look for several pieces of paper in the darkness. That's how idiots in horror movies die.

 

I must have gotten hungry by then because I found a Wendy's and went inside for a burger and some fries and a Frosty. I sat next to two friends I used to know in grade school (Joe and Chris), but Chris took offense when I asked if he was the killer people were looking for (I was semi-serious, as he was a bit of a trouble maker in the day), and he left in a huff. Then Joe and I went back to my place and we played some Call of Duty on the PS3 (which is bizarre, because I loathe first-person shooters) until my ex, Lisa, came over with her little girl. Then I got pissed and started yelling at her.

 

"What the hell are you doing here, you whore?!" I asked politely. "Why don't you just go over to your boyfriend's house and suck his dick! Don't bother me! I'm playing Playstation with Joe!" I pointed to where Joe had been, but he was gone, and Lisa started to laugh.

 

Holy shit... I had never been so mad in a dream before. It took everything I had to keep from swinging at her. So instead I picked up her daughter (who was laughing at me too, though I was sure it was only because she was imitating her mommy) and threw her out the window. She was lucky it was open, though Lisa didn't seem to think so.

 

As Lisa continued to pummel me with her fists and her purse I tried to assure her that there was a lake outside that window (there never was before, but I just knew it was true at the time), but then she started raking my face. I ran because the Rossman does not hit women (though apparently he's not opposed to chucking children out of windows).

 

The next thing I knew I was in bed with Lisa, but I think she was dead. It was just like the opening scene of Sin City in Marv's story with Goldie; I knew I didn't kill her, and I had some faint recollections that I had a good time before passing out. Then I woke up.

 

Any dream analysts out there? Does this mean I need a dog or something? Do I need to take up heavy drinking again?

Note to self 381: 07/06/2011

 

I picked up the new Lord of the Rings: Extended Edition Blu-ray set this past week, and spent the 4th of July weekend chilling out with my Middle Earth bros from Friday night till early Sunday evening... But that's when the greatest idea of all time came to me in a Morgothy dream of POWER! I would control all of Athens, GA by creating some rings of awesomeness of my own, distribute them to the leaders and most influential fuckers in town, and then create a bad ass Uber Ring of my own to manipulate them from the shadows and get me out of parking tickets and bar tabs and shit. It would be glorious!

 

I started out by breaking into the local second-hand jewelry shop in town and stealing borrowing 3 rings of real gold for the Mayor and the City Council Lords, 7 glittery rings for the leaders of the hottest sororities in town, and 9 plastic gumball machine rings for the most powerful of my friends/enemies! I then spent the night casting my spell over all the rings (which included a lot of chanting, a lot of Red Bull and antacid tablets, and a whole lot of urinating my essence onto the jewelry in question... Just like Sauron did). Then I dipped my won-in-a-poker-game Super Bowl XXVI ring into the mix and cackled like an evil lord who just pulled a fast one on the world at large.

 

First thing the next morning, I went to the Mayor's office and presented her with the prettiest pearl ring I had. Well, I tried to present it to her, but her aid and her bitchy secretary kept telling me she was in a very important meeting, but I could clearly see in her door that she was just passed out at her desk with her panties on her head and some naked old guy hanging from the chandelier. The secretary promised me she'd pass the ring along though.

 

Then I went to the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chief of Police (who were both at the Sea Wench Pub getting soused at 10 in the morning... Seriously, I think my town has a pretty bad drinking problem). I slipped the emerald ring onto the Secretary, and the ruby ring onto the Chief as they were busy talking The Skipper's wife into letting them do "titty shots" with her titties.

 

The glittery rings were the easiest to give away, as I just went down to sorority row, attached a garden hose to Tri-Delt's spigot (if you know what I mean), and put up a big sign in the front yard declaring it the "4th of July Wet T-Shirt Contest of Freedom!" I then spent about 4 hours hosing down hot college girls (I would use the FIRE HOSE on the Omega Mu's when they'd try to get into the action) and passing out rings to the hottest presidents of the hottest chapters. A grueling task.

 

After that I braced myself as I went about handing out the plastic flower and unicorn rings to my personal acquaintances. I gave the first one to Angry Amy after flattering her on the lovely tent she was wearing (she said "mu-mu", I said "circus tent"... same diff), and watched her promptly drop it into a pile of wet dog crap on her lawn (actually, it was a pile of me-crap, seeing as I left it on her yard not 4 days prior... I was actually still impressed it was still that moist!... I need to see a doctor about that). Then I tried to chloroform Carl and force a nice pink ring on his finger. After I came to in the hospital with 12 stitches and only one eye (and missing 5 of my remaining rings), I decided to force the rest on Jimmy Jammer and Kuni. I used a brick and super glue to make sure the task got done.

 

After all that was sorted out I placed the Super Bowl XXVI ring onto my own finger, praised the deviant god Heccubus, sacrificed a yapping lap dog to Alice Cooper, and bent the wills of those with the lesser rings to do as I commanded! Unfortunately I got some of the spell incorrect (two of the pages of my Necronomicon were stuck together due to me lending it out to the Megaplayboy earlier so that he could get "a better look" at some of the sexy wood carvings set in human blood in the margins of chicks doing it with satyrs and centaurs and shit), and all the sorority girls either killed themselves with spatulas or butter knives, or they got it on with Kuni and Jimmy Jammer, who I then killed with a screwdriver out of jealousy. Oh, and the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chief of Police ran off to Bora Bora with the remainder of the town's yearly budget, but I'm not sure that I had anything to do with that seeing as they were sucking each other's dicks when I left them at the Sea Wench pub earlier before I cast my spell. Oh, and the Mayor never got her ring, seeing as her secretary tried to hawk it at the same jewelry store that I borrowed it from. She's doing two to five now, that dirty, dirty whore. Next time I'll just use a Balrog to take over this shitty town.

Note to self 379: 05/04/2011

 

This has been an in-fucking-sane week. It all started last Wednesday with a monster storm that dumped record amounts of rain on us for a 12 hour period, and also set a record for the use of our town's tornado sirens which ran from 9AM to 9PM (and a record of number of tornadoes in a 24-hour period). The sky was a dark green-grey all day, and from 7PM to 9 the lighting was so frequent it looked like Zeus and Thor were having a disco party just above the clouds.

 

Anyway, the shit really hit the industrial-sized fan at 4:30 that afternoon. That's when the power went out. Not for our office, not for our street, not for our town, but for half the goddamn state. As we heard from scattered radio reports as we braved the 60+ mph winds, hail, and dropped lakes on us as my coworkers and I each tried to make our ways to the relative safety of our houses, a main power station was either hit by lightning or by one of the hundreds of tornadoes that was spawned from this uber-storm from Hell... You think I'm over exaggerating, don't you... No, we had 5 tornadoes within 10 miles of my house (and over 340 total in this storm), giant antebellum, pre-Civil War mansions were turned into empty lots, an entire town just off of GA-75 was wiped off the map, and Tuscaloosa, AL, home of the Crimson Tide, was hit by an F-4 that lasted for over 25 miles, touching ground the entire way. As some redneck schlump named Daniel Berry was quoted in the paper the next day while looking at the rubble of his destroyed home, "I don't know what the crap came through here, but it was evil."

 

So I stayed up to about 10PM that night reading my Fables collections by candle light and checking my ceiling for any signs of leakage. I woke up the next morning to the most beautiful blue sky I'd ever seen, got word that the office was closed that day and the next — seeing as the power plant that was hit didn't have any replacement parts for what was broken in stock — and it would take 3-5 days to fix, along with apparently around 50 or so giant steel towers carrying power cables around the state. Then I heard on the radio that just 15 miles North of me the power never went out, and that they had food and gas to spare. Huzzah! (I only had one sleeve of crackers, two spoonfuls of peanut butter, and two Diet Cokes left to my name.... Hey, when the snow and ice season was over I ate all my emergency supplies. Fuck you, Mr. "I Plan Ahead Douche".)

 

So I packed up my truck with my computer, 20 DVDs, 15 books, and all the clothes I'd need for a week, and planned to head North, get gas, and then just keep driving to the next big city where I'd get a cheapo hotel room and just wait for the call from my boss that work was back open. Before I drove off though I did tag my garage door with a huge gang graffiti sign to make it look like I was already hit by looters.

 

I got caught in some heavy traffic about 10 miles up the highway, but then started taking side roads and country lanes until I finally came across a little hick town in the middle of nowhere with two working gas stations. There were only about 4 cars in line for each pump! Long story short, I chuckled directly into the faces of all the local yokels who were flabbergasted at the amount of people overrunning their Mayberry-like gas stations and grocery stores (the Piggly Wiggly's parking lot was a THIRD FULL!), and it was just as I was getting to the highway that I got a call from my parents inviting me to their house to sit this outage out. I weighed the options in my head: sit in a human-bodily-fluid-stained hotel room watching The Wire, Red Dwarf, and a ton of anime and action movies on my 21-inch computer monitor, or head on over to my parents' house, get warm home-cooked meals, free room, and see some old friends. It was a lot longer drive (about 5 hours), but fuck it, my truck was full and I could make the whole trip on one tank of gas — and back again probably. So I cut across 3 lanes, a grassy median and two hitchhikers, and high-tailed it over to my parents' place.

 

A good time was had by all. I watched reruns of the royal wedding with my mom while she commented about fancy dresses and high British protocol, I met my dad for lunch that Friday, went out to eat with friends and family all weekend, rented The Social Network with my parents (never realized the Napster douchebag had such a big part in Facebook's founding... Hmmm, that means I still have a shot at billions of Ruples myself!), went shopping for candles, bottled water, canned foods, and other non-perishables to last me the rest of the storm season, and then just chilled-out as best I could.

 

That Saturday night though I began to get a little nervous about the state of things in my neighborhood. For some reason I started believing that a mini-ecosystem based on The Road Warrior had spontaneously erupted around my part of town amid the still electricity-void emergency, so I started trying to contact my neighbors to see if all was still well... Goddamn cell phones! HALF the people on my street do not have land lines anymore apparently (even the people next door who claim they have a security system... which REQUIRES one), but by using spokeo, whitepages.com, and a ton of other intelligence gathering sites I was able to find 6 neighbor numbers. Of those, only one was home. That phone call went like this, almost verbatim:

 

Me: "Hello, is this the Kettlebury residence? Is Martin Kettlebury there?"

 

Elderly woman: "Hello?"

 

Me: "HELLO, IS THIS THE KETTLEBURY RESIDENCE? Is MARTIN KETTLEBURY there?"

 

Elderly woman: "This isn't Martin........"

 

Me: "Ummmmm. Hi, Mrs. Kettlebury? I, uh, my name is—"

 

Elderly woman: "I'm Martin's mother. I'm Jezebel."

 

Me: "Faaaaaaaaaaaaantactic. Okay, Jezebel, I'm your neighbor. I live across the street from you. I was wondering if the neighborhood had power yet. Do you know? Can you see any lights that don't have already deceased family members in them goading you to join them?"

 

Elderly woman: "Hello?"

 

Me: ".....Oh my God..... Hello, mother? Hi, it's me, Martin. Do you have lights on at our place?"

 

Elderly woman: "Martin?"

 

Me: "Yes, mother. Are the lights back on yet?"

 

Elderly woman: "Martin's just down the hall. I can hear him.... Who is this? Is this a rapist?"

 

Me: "I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU IF YOU DON'T TELL ME IF YOU HAVE LIGHTS ON OR NOT!!!!"

 

Elderly woman: "Martin? Is that you?"

 

I gave up at that point, but swore to TP the Kettlebury yard when I got back into town. And set it on fire. Maybe put a dead hooker on the hood of their car and call the cops.

 

Sunday came and I was told that the office was back online, and that work would be business as usual on Monday, so I packed up all my stuff and hit the road again pretty early in the afternoon, only to be stopped in bumper to bumper traffic for about 6 miles (and 54 minutes) by the STUPIDEST fucking waterheads who ever got licenses to drive, at the GA-75 exit 348, where the trees and town were splintered or blown away to Oz (the magical land, not the prison TV show). I swear to Satan that half the morons rubbernecking at the damage had pulled out cameras and were taking pictures or video of the destruction... They slowed down to a crawl on a 3 lane highway to take pictures of something that wasn't there. Okay, ONE of the hotels at that exit was still partially standing, but that's it. They risked a major accident to take a picture of that. Christ, if they want firsthand photos of death and destruction and dismay so badly I'll send them to Tripoli or Baghdad if they want. One way.

 

So I eventually got back to my house (still dark), inspected it for any damage other than the pretend forced entry that I did to it to make people think it was already ransacked, and then unpacked everything. It wasn't until I walked by my darkened fridge that I remembered that I had forgotten to empty it out before the giant Exodus that previous Thursday. It took me a few minutes to gather up my courage and brace myself for opening the door... It wasn't enough. The ground chuck I had in my freezer was oozing red juices upon my unfrozen Healthy Choice fish dinner. All my other frozen foods (including, most regrettably, my 8 cartons of ice-cream [everybody has a weakness, mine just tastes much better than your skanky on-again/off-again whore named Janice]) were done for too. What a goddamn waste. And what an odor! It made my neighbor's little yap dog howl in smelly pain! Granted that fucker was actually locked in the freezer with it, but ugh, I felt bad for him. I then spent the rest of my evening bleaching the shit out of my freezer (the regular fridge wasn't too bad) and bemoaning the criminal destruction of all my fucking Breyer's... Then I made myself a PB&J, read some more by candle light, and when my home was filled with a light haze of candle smoke and carbon monoxide, I quietly closed my eyes and went to sleep.

 

Since then my daily schedule has been to get up, eat a handful of Raisin Nut Crunch, take the quickest, coldest shower in the universe, dress by flashlight, go to work, go home, pray for death to take me, read a book, go to bed, etc. Despite them sending over power plant people from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Minnesota, they STILL haven't gotten my part of town up and running yet. (I'm getting this update to you by using an unlocked Wi-Fi signal while parked in front of Old Man Jenkins' place over on the rich side of town... Then I plan to download a shit-ton of music and porn, and make a threat to the life of a certain high politician through a new Hotmail account by way of Jenkins' ISP.) My neighborhood has a small airport nearby too! Isn't that kind of an important thing that they need to keep running? Without those crop dusters our farmers then get screwed, and pass the savings on to us, the consumers. Fuck the average consumer! Get the richies' power up first! They need their jacuzzis and hooker electric swings NOW!... I want a hooker electric swing too...

 

Christ in a bucket, sometimes I just hate modern conveniences (when they completely break down and FAIL). I still have no power and NO ICE-CREAM. Oh, but I do have 25 Arm and Hammer baking soda boxes opened in my freezer.

 

And thanks to my out-of-the-loopness, I just found out that Obama got shot in the face by our Navy SEALs this weekend!..... Wait, Jenkins is yelling at me that OSAMA got killed this Sunday by our super soldiers.... Oh, that isn't quite as newsworthy, but much cooler.

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