tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131786682024-03-13T07:40:38.588-07:00Dear GregoryLetters to the one guy who gets it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger172125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-53310055640351651972014-08-29T17:50:00.000-07:002014-08-29T17:50:06.594-07:00World Blog Tour: Isaac Boone DavisGreg:<br />
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Isaac Boone Davis (pictured here with what appears to be some species of Elvis) is a damn fine writer who is also blogless. Therefore, I am lending some of my Internet real estate to him so that he can join the World Blog Tour.<br />
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And now, Mr. Davis.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>What are you working on?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> As much as I'm working on anything (which is to say not much) I'm playing around with a few stories that have some interest in becoming a novel. They are centered around life in eastern Kentucky; life in the coalfields after there are no more coalfields. This is not out of any great passion of mine for the material. It's just that I live there, currently. And I am a ridiculously non-creative person. I've discovered that writing about eastern Kentucky is a little like writing about Vietnam. Everyone is extremely possessive of their own particular experience and whatever your experience was there it better align with the people that matter. Lest you run the risk of being the subject of very angry blog posts where you will be accused of not "understanding the richness of the land, the struggle of the people, or simple dignity of the local cholesterol." My brother Willie has a hilarious phrase about this: Holler than thou. The other thing about the writing life in eastern Kentucky is that everyone here likes getting offended. They do it a lot. They have a great affinity for the word 'stereotype.' You would think it would be a cash crop or something. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> Boy, that Vietnam metaphor did not hold up. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> <b> How does your work differ from others of its genre?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> It's worse. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> I don't exactly know that I have any kind of genre. I've been pitching a collection to a few agencies that revolved around "the darker side of the working class experience." Strangely, that hasn't garnered much interest. Anything I've ever written tends to be ninety five percent autobiographical or biographical. Again, I have remarkably little imagination. I'm a bit of a method actor that way I guess.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> <b>Why do you write what you do?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> When people would ask me this question before, I would say 'because I wanted to give voice to the voiceless.' I was a truly wretched person. I was like Bono if his entire audience consisted of his mom and some dude at The Review Review. I really think some of the instinct to create (whether its through writing, or music or making vintage birdhouses) is hardwired. Eventually,if it's in you, you just simply need to do it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> I wanted to record things that I've seen and stories that I've heard about happening to people that otherwise may not get told.Stuff, that maybe didn't happen to people every day or maybe in some ways were completely regular events for people, but not easily relatable. For example I knew this girl who would go down to the Federal prison on 200th Street in Sea-Tac, Washington. And she would dance for her guy who was locked up there. And I knew a guy who was locked up in Monroe who had this insane story about the day he got out of prison. So I sorta rubbed the two of them together and wrote a story about it. I knew this kid who was risking his life after work every day to buy crystal meth for his dying mom. So I wrote a story about it. I knew some girls who were homeless and stealing for a living. So I wrote a story about it. I knew a guy who had been sexually assaulted and when he would drink he wouldn't stop talking about it. And would sometimes get into fist fights with people who didn't want to hear about it anymore. I wrote it down. This stuff just seemed worth recounting even if it was ugly and awkward and painful as shit. I don't play guitar anymore. I can't paint or draw or design antique furniture. My singing voice has caused miscarriages in livestock. If I was going to record any of these things it was going to have to be by writing them down. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> <b> Explain your writing process</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> It ain't much. I work all day and I'm pretty tired when I get home. I try hard to schedule some time for it on my days off and maybe another day or two during the week. I do agree that the best stories are the one's that you have written in your mind before you commit to paper. Going into a story without a roadmap is terrifying to me. There are ocean's smaller than my inner critic. If I don't know what I'm about to write I'll get confused or just ditch it. I have to know what I'm wanting to talk about. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> There's a funny part of Mark Richard's autobiography House of Prayer Number Two where he is interviewing Tom Waits and he thinks he's going get drunk with Tom and watch him write Cold Water or something. But, it turns out Tom Waits doesn't want to drink (at least not that night.) And when asked about watching him write a song, he says "No. That would be like watching someone bathe." Most stories I write take a while for me to write. I average six pages probably a month. It's a lot of hunt and peck and a ton of re-writing. I read aloud a bunch to catch mistakes. When I think something is close I have a few writer friends who I have learned to trust over the years. I didn't go to college and I've never been to a writing conference in my life, so the internet has been a huge help in finding a writing community. My sole piece of journo-fiction, The Cherry Picker, would never have happened without the careful editing of Chris Miller, who is an enormous talent and exacting editor.He was like a personal trainer. Always ready to pick me up when I didn't want to keep going. Recently, I've learned to show my work to my fellow editors at Smokelong. People like Tara Laskowski and Gay Degnani and Ashley Inguanta. Smokelong does not mess around so I've learned to keep my ego in a box when I show them something. It reminds me of what Stefan Grossman said about taking guitar lessons from Gary Davis: there are no shortcuts. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> The best story I can think of about writing process is Louise Erdich talking about how she writes when driving through the North Dakota. Literally, when driving. She keeps a journal in the passenger seat. Something about the idea of literature as a possible act of vehicular homicide. I mean why do it at all if it doesn't run the risk of killing somebody?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> So here's the links to a couple of my stories. If you want to check them out. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> Journalism. Probably the only thing I've done that will ever take that much out of me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> <a href="http://southernpacificreview.com/2013/09/09/the-cherry-picker/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://southernpacificreview.<wbr></wbr>com/2013/09/09/the-cherry-<wbr></wbr>picker/</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Crappy job story. I'm addicted to reading them because I've had so many. I figured I could write one. Parts of it are sorta funny. <a href="http://www.thebaconreview.com/featureone.php?id=45" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://www.thebaconreview.<wbr></wbr>com/featureone.php?id=45</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> First story I ever finished/published. About a kid in Kentucky in a crappy little town who has tasked himself with killing his dying mom. <a href="http://www.writethis.com/z03.html" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://www.writethis.com/<wbr></wbr>z03.html</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> Flash fiction. Girls that live the hard way. Sleeping in abandoned buildings, stealing to eat. Hating themselves. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.smokelong.com/flash/isaacdavis35q.asp" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://www.smokelong.com/<wbr></wbr>flash/isaacdavis35q.asp</a></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-1081261726169089162014-08-23T13:29:00.001-07:002014-08-23T13:29:26.020-07:00Blog World Tour!<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Greggistry:</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Lauren Westerfield</span></b></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My pal <a href="http://www.laurenwesterfield.com/" target="_blank">Lauren Westerfield</a>, newly-minted Assistant Essays editor at <a href="http://therumpus.net/" target="_blank">The Rumpus</a>, has asked me to join something called the World Blog Tour wherein I describe my writing process in all its recalcitrant and perfunctory glory for the world to deconstruct, criticize, and roundly mock.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I said yes, yes, I will absolutely swing aboard that hobo train.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I met Lauren in 2013 at the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. She was in Maggie Nelson's workshop at the time. In addition to being a fantastic essayist (please read her essay <a href="http://therumpus.net/2013/05/twenty-seven/" target="_blank">"Twenty-Seven"</a>; it will put the term "sister burn" permanently in your emotional lexicon), she's a certified Hatha Yoga instructor and Whole Foods Nutrition Counselor. I'm surprised she was able to make her way through the alcoholic force-field (read: margarita breath) that surrounded me for that entire week. But I'm very glad she did.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Here goes: </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>What are you working on?</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I'm working on a collection of short creative nonfiction. It includes re-tooling some of my short fiction which was just thinly veiled nonfiction anyway. As I'm fond of saying, life writes a hell of a lot better than I do. Who am I to attempt to rewrite God's stand-up routine? Besides, so far my nonfiction is getting accepted and my fiction is (almost) all getting punted. That's a pretty good sign that creative nonfiction is the life for me. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>How does your work differ from others of its genre?</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It's all autobiographical. It doesn't differ so much because of that as it does because one can't help using their own voice (as opposed to their writerly voice or character voice) when recalling factual events. That's what makes autobiography so interesting to me: all the distinct voices telling true stories from outside our personal experience that we can somehow still relate to and empathize with. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Why do you write what you do?</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">People kept telling me that my stories were fascinating. So I started writing them down. Kind of like how this blog started. I was supposed to be writing a term paper or some such brain-chafing horror during my second tour of college. I thought I'd "organize my thoughts" by writing to my brother Greg. Turns out I wrote a lot more letters to Greg than I did pages of term paper. <a href="http://benjaminpercy.com/" target="_blank">Benjamin Percy</a>, who was my mentor when I was at Tin House in 2013 and read a number of my stories, very graciously dubbed me "the most interesting man in the world". It seems pretty egotistical of me to print that, but doing so reminds me that others find my stories helpful and engaging, even if I only find them somewhere between embarrassing and mortifying.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That's the other reason that I write these things down: because I feel that I have a duty to write about things like child abuse and mental illness from the first person so that I can give voice to those who do not possess the words themselves. So far, judging from the comments I get on my published stuff, it has worked. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>How does your writing process work?</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It doesn't. Whatever I do to conceive and write a story is never the same twice. I suppose I could make a graph or a Venn diagram that exposed certain stresses and values that influenced the work (enter a value of "distraught" for x and a value of "drunk" for y and see what kind of parabola it creates).</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The one commonality all pieces have is that they are written mostly in my head before I go to the page. If that means two full weeks of writing in my head and not touching a page once, then that's how it works. I met Micheal Arndt at the Hawaii Writers Conference back in 2009, and he wholly endorsed this sort of process. He wrote most of "Little Miss Sunshine" while lying on the floor in his office with a pillow over his face. As he puts it, characters are much easier to control when they're in your head. Once they get on the page, they can get away. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I wrote <a href="http://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/slapstick/" target="_blank">"Slapstick"</a> as part of a writing exercise at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. I was in Dinty W. Moore's workshop on creative nonfiction. It was written and revised there in about two and a half rounds, almost all of it while workshop was in session, so essentially in the company of others. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.smokelong.com/flash/thaddeusgunn43.asp" target="_blank">"White Guys Are All The Same"</a> was written under completely different circumstances. To wit: I sat at the dining room table with a bottle of Chopin vodka, got drunk, and cried through the whole thing -- first through third drafts. Even though I was fictionalizing real-life events, it was horrible to recall and I felt that I needed general anesthesia to get through it. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When I wrote <a href="http://literaryorphans.org/ttl/life-bat-children-thaddeus-gunn-2/" target="_blank">"My Life With The Bat Children"</a> I was doing something menial and repetitive -- vacuuming, I believe -- and trying to sort out and explain and enumerate the reasons and history of everything that caused the events of one very traumatic evening. Come to think of it, I write a lot of stuff when I'm doing something else: I wrote "The Refugees" (forthcoming in the Tin House blog) mostly while I was drying dishes.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">More than anything, writing works like a songwriting process for me. I hear a "melody" or "voice" in my head. Then I let it brew for a while, run through some phrases mentally, maybe hum or speak some of the words of it aloud to myself before sitting down at the keyboard. (If any of you have heard me talking to myself in half-sentences, I'm actually writing, not seizing.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I can't stare at a blank page. It completely kills creativity for me. I can't do the thousand-words-a-day quota thing. I can't do the butt-in-seat every day thing (I've written a lot while hiking). And nothing worth expanding on has ever come from any journaling I've ever done.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I just realized that I could've summed up my whole writing process in this one statement by Bruce Lee about the art of Jeet Kune Do: "No form as form; no way as way." Just by being "undisciplined", I am disciplined as a motherfucker, apparently. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And now writer pals whose work I admire:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(From his website): <b><a href="http://dintywmoore.com/" target="_blank">Dinty W. Moore</a></b> is author of numerous books, including <em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life, Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction</em>, and the memoir <em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Between Panic & Desire</em>, winner of the Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Having failed as a zookeeper, modern dancer, Greenwich Village waiter, filmmaker, and wire service journalist, he now writes essays and stories. He has been published in <em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Harpers, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Gettysburg Review, Utne Reader</em>, and <em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Crazyhorse</em>, among numerous other venues.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dinty is also the editor of <a href="http://brevitymag.com/" target="_blank">Brevity</a>, the journal of concise literary nonfiction.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><b><a href="http://cerena.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Kenzie Allen</a></b> is a poet and Zell Fellow at the University of Michigan, as well as the managing editor of Anthropoid. We met at the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop back in 2011, heard her read at the (now legendary) Sullivan Guerrilla Reading, and I've been bananas about her poetry ever since. If you're lucky enough to be her friend on Facebook, you may even get some of it delivered piping hot to your wall. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Isaac Boone Davis may be a Turing machine for all I know as I have never seen him in real life (although we've chatted quite a bit online and he has been gracious enough to edit some of my stuff). He's a reader for SmokeLong, and doesn't have a blog, but I command you to read his excellent short fiction which can be found at <a href="http://blackheartmagazine.com/2014/03/31/armed-robbery-gone-bad-by-isaac-boone-davis/" target="_blank">Blackheart Magazine</a>, <a href="http://ampersandreview.com/2014/07/aint-nothing-to-talk-about-by-isaac-boone-davis/" target="_blank">Ampersand Review</a>, and <a href="http://hcquarterly.com/prose-by-isaac-boone-davis" target="_blank">Hidden City Quarterly</a>.</span></span>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-38623802822488744482011-01-20T11:50:00.000-08:002011-01-20T13:09:36.042-08:00So wait, what was I saying again?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/TTiUKWmgLaI/AAAAAAAAA8s/er75clLYG8o/s1600/church2.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 284px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/TTiUKWmgLaI/AAAAAAAAA8s/er75clLYG8o/s320/church2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5564360245202922914" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">I been creepin' all up in this Holy beeyatch.</span><br /><br />Greg:<br /><br />It's been about two and a half years since I last posted here, but I figure hey, what better time to reinvigorate the long-form blog (a' la 1997) than one year before the Mayan Apocalypse of 2012?<br /><br />No better time. None. (This post will also be available on clay tablets, so that those survivors of the aforementioned apocalypse who shamble the barren hellscape in search of human flesh will have a little after dinner reading. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)<br /><br />So, to make a really awkward segue, <a href="http://bigassmessage.com/b3298">I've been going to church</a>. I know that saying that sounds both radical and benign, like saying, "I've been huffing acrylic paint". And you'd think the combined facts that a) <span style="font-style: italic;">you and I are preacher's kids and got churched harder than most <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/__hS8b5tEhY4/S2SqpwGSL7I/AAAAAAAAAl0/QNLAKFkyQjs/s400/New-Orleans-Saints-Logo.gif">minor saints</a></span>, and b) <span style="font-style: italic;">I'm a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheism">non-theist</a></span> would make the idea of ever entering a church again utterly anathema to me. You'd think so, right?<br /><br />Well that's before they started combining Jesus H. Christ with beer. (Contrary to what you may have heard, mixing beer with Jesus and lemonade does not make it a "shandy". -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)<br /><br />Let me back up. Here's how all that came about:<br /><br />I work all damn day by myself doing my <a href="http://tpdsaa.tumblr.com/page/1">marketing</a> thing talking about marketing stuff writing marketing stuff talking to marketing people about marketing stuff. Do that for six months and see if you don't want to kill yourself in the face about two hundred times.<br /><br />So I was searching the interwebs for something - ANYTHING - to do socially or otherwise that wasn't related to marketing or advertising, and lo! What should appear in my search results but <a href="http://www.meetup.com/TheologyPub/about/">Theology Pub</a>. Yep, you read that right. Beer + Jesus. So I was thinking to myself that what did I have pounded into my head for years but loads of theology, and how could I possibly not hold my own in both the "beers consumed" and "bullshit spewed" columns at a shindig like this?<br /><br />There are two that I attend now, one in Capitol Hill and the other in West Seattle. People, a lot of them theology students or certified theologians, actually get together, get a skinful of belabored grain in 'em, and debate theology, Jeebus, Gawd, JHVH and what have you. I tell you, the amount of passion that pours forth in those gatherings is just goddamn scintillating. Where else can you hear somebody scream, "You are<span style="font-style: italic;"> literally</span> taking the <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_p7wkrZM3P2E/SFgViVUmKEI/AAAAAAAAALs/YdN90Io6m30/s400/ChickenFootball.jpg"><span style="font-style: italic;">cock and balls</span></a> off of <span style="font-style: italic;">God</span>"? (You mean aside from on the bus...every day...directed at no one in particular? -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)<br /><br />So how I started going to church again was that I got invited to come to hear Matt Lyon, founder of the West Seattle Theology Pub, deliver the homily at St. John the Baptist Episcopal on the First Sunday in Advent. And I was all like, "Hey - I dig the smells and the bells, and know all the hymns and the <a href="http://www.chanttherosary.com/images/diagram_signum.png">hand-jive</a>, so why the F not?" The fact that he got up and totally dunked on the reading from Revelations ("Not sure I agree with this..." Yeah, he said that. In the pulpit. And <span style="font-style: italic;">did not</span> spontaneously combust.) was just icing on the communion wafer.<br /><br />Oh and then - <span style="font-style: italic;">and THEN</span> - I have to tell you all the other ecclesial adventures I've had, like "outing" myself as Buddhist to the minister, knockin' 'em dead at compassionate listening practice groups, and getting told repeatedly by Theology Publicans that I am, in practice, the most Christian person they've ever met.<br /><br />Yeah, I know. Me, the prong-horned non-theo-Buddho-ag-nostic preacher's kid. Pick yourself up off the floor and stop slapping your knees. I'll give you all the deets later.<br /><br />Peace,<br /><br />-ThaddeusUnknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-30199763863472257542008-11-25T10:19:00.000-08:002008-11-25T12:06:35.998-08:00Brains by Jesus. Body by Fisher.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SSxWWTzqJvI/AAAAAAAAA1I/Mc7jbLvLNR8/s1600-h/body-by-fisher_sill_1_sm.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 202px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SSxWWTzqJvI/AAAAAAAAA1I/Mc7jbLvLNR8/s320/body-by-fisher_sill_1_sm.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272684205018064626" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Birthmark</span> borne by every native of Detroit. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Greg:<br /><br />I did something in public this morning that left me ashamed, yet elated. (No, not that! Get our mind out of the adult aisle!) I was bewitched by a beautiful black Cadillac Deville and followed it about twenty blocks beyond my place of work. I'm in the office now, under the watchful eye of my boss, and safely away from any windows where someone might identify me from the street. Or where I may, God forbid, see another beautiful automobile and lose control of myself.<br /><br />Look, this does not make me some kinda weirdo. Or a stalker. (Well, yeah actually by definition it does. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.) I just have to come to grips with the fact that I really love cars and start feeling okay about it.<br /><br />I also have to pay attention to who I'm following. That Deville could've been driven by a very strong man with a very large gun and a very small sense of humor. If I'd've pissed him off a little too much by following him too far, I could be writing this blog post through a straw right now. (Practice this line in the event that the driver exits the vehicle and approaches you: "That's a sweet ride you got there...sir." -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)<br /><br />But first, can I take just a moment to address the current issue with <a href="http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=auto+bailout&btnG=Search+Blogs">The Big Three automakers flying to Washington on their private jets to look for a handout from Congress</a>? For the record: <span style="font-style: italic;">fuck those guys.</span> And furthermore,<span style="font-style: italic;"> fuck those guys</span>. They need to give up their fat-ass salaries and spend a week on the swing shift at GM with the shop rats and bloody their knuckles on a goddamn wrench before they'll get my respect or my money. Take their bonuses and distribute them between the good people working the line. As a matter of fact, let one of the folks who work in the plant go to Congress, pick up the check, and make up their minds about what oughtta be done about the situation.<br /><br />Now, moving on...<br /><br />At present, I'm conflicted. While I'm not 100% "green", I consider myself at the very least "green curious". On one hand, cars burn gas which creates carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and cigarette fumes, all which lead to a global condition which will eventually parboil us all out of existence. <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming">Or so Wikipedia tells me</a>.<br /><br />On the other hand, cars - the well-designed ones at least - are a moving art form, a perfect marriage of technology and design that makes the ten-year-old in me go <span style="font-style: italic;">vroom vroom vroom! Yay! Vroom!</span> I swear, every once in a while I see something like, say, the brilliantly designed, well-powered, gracefully accelerating - obsidian-black haunches...<span style="font-style: italic;">glistening I tell you!</span> - Deville in question that makes me practically gob on my shirt. Seriously.<br /><br />Is it because we grew up near the auto center of the world? Or is it because our dad has ethyl for blood? Or is it because it is a universal and unimpeachable truth that <span style="font-style: italic;">CARS ARE OSSUM! VROOM VROOM VROOM! YAY! VROOM! YAY?</span><br /><br />I make my case for the assertions above with the examples below:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SSxUbbVvkoI/AAAAAAAAA0g/zKE-eo3W08Q/s1600-h/1969_Pontiac_GTO_Judge_large.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 188px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SSxUbbVvkoI/AAAAAAAAA0g/zKE-eo3W08Q/s320/1969_Pontiac_GTO_Judge_large.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272682093916164738" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">1969 Pontiac GTO<br /></span></span><span style="font-size:85%;">Remember when we lived on Chippewa Street in Pontiac? (Remember how they name everything in Michigan after Indians? -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.) Remember Ruth McLay's mom? They lived on Navajo. (I rest my case. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.) She had one of these. Even though it wasn't tricked out (it was the "mom" edition), you could tell that it was Blood of Champion. That friggin' thing ROARED from the front door to the Kroger and back in no time flat. I always wanted to steal it. I had a slim jim and I was good to go, but I was six and I couldn't reach the pedals. PS: The tach is on the hood! I don't know if that's good, bad, smart, dumb or what - but it's COOL!<br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SSxVDXvgtTI/AAAAAAAAA0o/EjcC5dC5XzM/s1600-h/1972BMW200.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SSxVDXvgtTI/AAAAAAAAA0o/EjcC5dC5XzM/s320/1972BMW200.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272682780145268018" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">1973 BMW 2002<br /></span>I had one back in the '90s and wept when I let it go. It had all the torque of a wee mountain goat and a full metal dash that would turn your brain to mayonnaise in the event of a low-speed collision. Fun mandatory. Seatbelts optional.<br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SSxVUw6cEaI/AAAAAAAAA0w/J4iUDbyAYFU/s1600-h/2008SuperBee_frt3.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SSxVUw6cEaI/AAAAAAAAA0w/J4iUDbyAYFU/s320/2008SuperBee_frt3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272683078959763874" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">2007 Dodge Charger Super Bee</span><br />I can feel you judging me already. "Greaser!" you spit with scorn. "<span style="font-style: italic;"></span>Spawn of hillbillies! </span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Trash blanc!</span> </span><span style="font-size:85%;">" But before you cast the first stone - <span style="font-style: italic;">hold, I say unto thee!</span> Who among you gathered here present experienced the monumental, face-bleaching thrust and vertiginous acceleration of the soon-to-be-legendary 368HP Dodge hemi? (Wait - You in the back. You <span style="font-style: italic;">have?</span> And you didn't care for it? Well fuck you, hippie.)<br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SSxViTK4UCI/AAAAAAAAA04/ToJeQt7oAjo/s1600-h/tacoma_main.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 192px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SSxViTK4UCI/AAAAAAAAA04/ToJeQt7oAjo/s320/tacoma_main.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272683311493828642" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">2008 Toyota Tacoma w/Sport Package.</span><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2008/03/wellhow-did-i-get-here.html">Duh</a>.<br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SSxVxdVhI9I/AAAAAAAAA1A/FTFKej-4gng/s1600-h/47_Chrysler_TnC_DV-07_AI_02.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SSxVxdVhI9I/AAAAAAAAA1A/FTFKej-4gng/s320/47_Chrysler_TnC_DV-07_AI_02.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272683571920839634" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">1947 Chrysler Town and Country Woody Four Door Hard Top</span><br />Of course I had to mention the family car. From a purely technical standpoint, it was underpowered. But from a design standpoint - shit, it was so curvy it almost had <span style="font-style: italic;">bosoms!</span> Maple beams and mahogany veneer - must've been a Steinway Grand</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> in a previous life. I remember no greater joy of my childhood than road trips and camping excursions taken in this car.<br /><br />Shit. Here comes my boss. Gotta mop up some spit.<br /><br />Cheers, and back on the freeway which is already in progress.<br /><br />-Thaddeus <br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-14865319981397076712008-10-20T21:39:00.000-07:002008-10-20T22:22:16.577-07:00Bruce Lee's Other Student<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SP1iQsacVXI/AAAAAAAAA0Y/u8D_P4fHiT4/s1600-h/Edmejessleroy.jpeg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SP1iQsacVXI/AAAAAAAAA0Y/u8D_P4fHiT4/s400/Edmejessleroy.jpeg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5259467978778105202" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">My Sensei, Eddie Hart</span> (at far left) back in the 1960s when he was a student of Bruce Lee.<br />At right is Jesse Glover, Lee's other famous student. Eddie died of emphysema in 2005.<br /><br />Photo credit: Bruce Lee.</span><br /><br />Greg:<br /><br />You're probably wondering why I haven't been writing. Well it's because I've been writing. You already know that I write all goddamn day at work. Now I have two other things: one extracurricular project, and one writing class. That means I have to write all the more. Were it not for the fact that I'm about to just cut and paste what I've been working on in my writing class for the past couple of weeks, I probably wouldn't be making this post at all.<br /><br />I'm taking a class in first person storytelling from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Schmader">David Schmader</a> at <a href="http://www.hugohouse.org/">Richard Hugo House</a>. It's six weeks long and totally worth $195 and skipping the last two hours of your workday each Wednesday if you can swing it. And like I said, I'd love to chat more right now but instead I'm gonna just let you read this excerpt from the essay I've been working on for class. Why? Because I'm a bitch-ass lazy punk who tries to find the easy way out of everything. That is when he's not writing like some kind of hypergraphia-fueled nutbag. The assignment for the next class was to write a 500-word chunk of the essay from anywhere you feel like starting. Anyway, enjoy. -Thaddeus<br /><br />PS: There's no title. Suffer. -TRG<br /><br />My sensei Eddie Hart used to videotape all of his student’s progress. Week 1: there’s Thaddeus, getting his ass kicked. Week 2: there’s Thaddeus, getting his ass kicked, but not quite so bad. Week 3: there’s Thaddeus getting his ass kicked, but at least he’s looking good. His arms are getting definition, his strikes more precise, and his falls are more controlled, even though he’s on the edge of consciousness.<br /><br /><br />On the other hand, his sparring partner, Ted Hart, Ed's son, looks great – all six feet six inches of him. He works in a vacuum, undistracted, his focus impermeable. It’s because he’s a second dan. And he’s as deaf as granite. Got mumps when he was thirteen. The last music he remembers is Boston. I often wonder if it’s an unimaginable torture to get “More Than A Feeling” stuck in your head if there’s no competing sound to offset it. Oddly enough, I wonder this while Ted’s fists are crashing down on my head. It distracts me from the pain.<br /><br /><br />Three punch combinations land in rhythm – boom boom clap, boom boom clap, boom boom clap. I throw my hand up in front of my face to make the sign for “stop”. Ted’s fist connects with the back of my hand and I punch myself in the face. Eddie calls a stop. I’m beat, but I’m not angry or ashamed. I’m just beat.<br /><br /><br />Eddie takes me aside to work with me on three punch combinations. He’s supposed to block my first two, and I’m supposed to let the third fly harmlessly past his left ear. We do this for fifteen minutes straight. I get tired. I start thinking about how the boom boom clap sounds like Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing if I got punched in the ears and went deaf and got that song jammed in my head for all eternity. I get sloppy, and put a stiff right square on the center of Eddie’s upper lip. His head snaps back and he looks at me in amazement.<br /><br /><br />“No one has ever hit me that hard in anger,” he says. I wait for a reciprocal right cross from the guy who used to spar with Bruce Lee. Instead he turns and addresses the rest of the dojo.<br /><br /><br />“Anyone wanna to spar with an amateur?” he asks. The rest of the fighters bawl dissent. He turns back to me. “Go home and don’t come back until I tell you that you can come back.”<br /><br /><br />When I first interviewed at the dojo and Eddie went on a tear about how he knew Bruce Lee, I thought he was just stacking bullshit to impress me before he named some exorbitant price for his own exclusive method of instruction. It seems that everybody in Seattle who was anywhere near martial arts in 1964 claims to have known Bruce Lee. Turns out there are only two people in Seattle who were in Bruce Lee’s dojo back then. One of them is Jessie Glover, the first martial arts instructor ever certified by Bruce Lee. The other one broke out his old snapshots so he could show me him and Bruce out at dinner, him and Bruce at his wedding, him and Bruce slapping the holy hell out of each other, all of this while chattering excitedly and smoking hand-rolled shag while wearing street shoes in the dojo. Then he got out all his clippings from Black Belt magazine, articles he had written about The Little Dragon back in the day.<br /><br /><br />Somewhere along the line we finally got to talking about kickboxing, more specifically jeet kune do, and even more specifically chi sao, the “sticking hands” technique, and pretty soon Eddie’s asking me to take a shot at him. I mean here’s this guy, a chain smoker, who is about as big around as a butt thermometer, who looks like he’s gonna cack if so much as a cat fart even glances him, and he’s asking the 27-year-old, very-much-in-shape me to take a swing. Happy to oblige, I put up my dukes and fire away.<br /><br /><br />My hand never makes it anywhere near him. It gets blocked so far away so fast that my shoulder gets torqued all bass-ackwards. I am now convinced that this man can show me at least one thing about martial arts.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-29954934592971400412008-09-09T05:43:00.000-07:002008-09-09T06:58:36.059-07:00The Deepest Secrets Of The Greg Revealed!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SMaAB1ZUswI/AAAAAAAAAns/78Cg0IYTFC8/s1600-h/title.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SMaAB1ZUswI/AAAAAAAAAns/78Cg0IYTFC8/s400/title.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5244019585121039106" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">A Gargling(tm) of the term "deepest secrets" produces this trippy-ass image as a result.</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">It is rumored that The Greg lives in the basement of such a pyramid.</span><br /><br />People:<br /><br />Greg - as in</span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" > the </span><span style="font-size:85%;">Greg, the one these letters are written to, not the noun Greg nor the verb, nor the infinitive "to Greg" - yeah, him. Well -<br /><br />I have a hard time starting some mornings. Bear with.<br /><br />Those stupid little questions that they ask you when you build your profile on a social networking site? The ones the writers (or <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Anderson_%28MySpace%29">Tom</a>) work so hard to make clever, entertaining, provocative and revealing, yet fail so miserably? Greg tackled the tough ones and came out with - I think - flying colors.<br /><br />And strangely enough, though his answers were so flip that standing near them would get you bitch-slapped, they are at the same time strangely revealing. After reading his responses, you may actually become possessed of the notion that you </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >know The Greg.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> In his words:<br /><br />"Here's my answers to one of those stupid profile question things found on some new social site - I think it was called like "FaceBlast" or "ClusterFuck" or "<a href="http://da.clitter.us/" target="_blank">da.clitter.us</a>" or some shit like that. I don't remember. Anyway, I'm pretty sure my answers will get thousands of friend requests instantly, especially from hot babes. (If by "hot babe" you mean feverish with infection. -</span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >Ed</span><span style="font-size:85%;">.) Check it out."<br /><br />While less lengthy than the MMPI, the fusillade of questions below is no less probing, and has revealed things about The Greg that few have known, including me. And that's saying a lot, because The Greg lives in my basement. Least he did last time I looked.<br /><br />Without further ado -<br /></span><div><div><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />Q. What would you do if no one were looking?<br />A. Create a social networking group for people who aren't looking.<br /><br /></span><div><div><span style="font-size:85%;">Q. Who would you like to see on a new banknote?</span></div></div><span style="font-size:85%;">A. Grouc</span><span style="font-size:85%;">ho, Chico, Harpo, Gummo and Karl Marx.<br /><br /></span><div><div><span style="font-size:85%;">Q. What should you be doing?</span></div></div><span style="font-size:85%;">A. Creating a social networking group for people who aren't looking.<br /><br /></span><div><div><span style="font-size:85%;">Q. Favorite place to be barefoot?</span></div></div><div style="display: block;"><div style="display: block;"><span style="font-size:85%;">A. A wading pool filled with those little sausages.<a href="http://www.tbd.com/viewProfile.html#" target="_blank"><br /></a><br /></span><div><div><span style="font-size:85%;">Q. Time flies when you're _________________</span></div></div><span style="font-size:85%;">A. traveling backwards through a space/time wormhole. I'm pretty sure.<br /><br />Q. When you go to a party and someone says, "What do you do?", what do you say?<br />A. "I go to parties so people can ask me what I do."<br /><br /></span><div><div><span style="font-size:85%;">Q. DVD or TIVO?</span></div></div><span style="font-size:85%;">A. DEVO.<br /><br /></span><div><div><span style="font-size:85%;">Q. What's the greenest thing you do?</span></div></div><span style="font-size:85%;">A. Allow moss to grow in my underwear.<br /><br />K. So. Here's your turn - and trust me, you don't get one very frequently as Greg and I are seldom wont to let a word creep in edgewise - gimme your best profile Q&A <span style="font-style: italic;">if you dare</span>.<br /><br />Cheers,<br /><br />-Thaddeus<br /></span></div></div><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></div></div><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-39396221736144577522008-09-06T09:00:00.000-07:002008-09-06T12:55:40.152-07:00Next Time, I Swear I'm Not Coming Back<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fthaddeus.gunn%2Falbumid%2F5236822963946096513%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss%26authkey%3DuVYNP-J9GYw" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" width="400" height="267"></embed><br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Click on the little word balloon thingy in the lower left corner</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">to read the captions.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Greg:<br /><br />The leaves turning on the maple tree across the street is making me pine for summer. I hardly got in any hiking this year. One of these days, when my dowsing stick finally hits the underground money stream, I'm going to hike my ass out of here and never come back.<br /><br />When we went up to <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2005/06/screw-bambi-already-okay.html">Deer Park in Olympic National Park </a>this last time, I almost didn't come back. At one point John and I were sitting on top of Blue Mountain sharing the same fantasy. (You were somewhere downhill, avoiding the altitude.) In this fantasy, we call our wives, tell them to sell all our stuff, and to come meet us up there in the mountains where we belong. We live happily ever after. Cue sunset. Roll credits. (But who delivers the Indian food? You won't survive without Indian food. Or cable. Just sayin'. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)<br /><br />That same mad, lycanthropic euphoria bubbles up every time I go into the mountains, the mania that wants me chuck it all and not come back. You know, like Col. Kurtz, but not quite so batshit homicidal crazy and stuff. </span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />When I hiked out to Skoki Lodge in the Banff NP backcountry last year, my inner Amish almost got the upper hand and kept me there for good, too. If it were not for my very sane, very-disinclined-to-bathe-in-ass-freezing-mountain-streams wife, I’d prolly still be there, picking my teeth with a marmot or warming my hands over a blazing hiker.<br /><br />Speaking of being on top of a mountain, I understand your concern about how I like to hang near the edge of the biggest drop-off I can find. <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-roses.html">I’m only doing it for therapeutic value.</a> Honestly. I started going up into the mountains to help overcome <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2007/03/flying-blows.html">anxiety</a>. As folks like myself who have an anxiety disorder often do, I was becoming afraid of heights. Anxiety disorders often "morph" to include basic phobias. (The five basic phobias are water, spiders, snakes, heights and small spaces. And, if you're male, that list may include commitment. -</span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >Ed</span><span style="font-size:85%;">.) While I was educating myself on how to get over anxiety, I found out that the best way to deal with a phobia is through exposure. (Not of one's loins and whatnot, but exposure to the phobia-inducing stimulus.) So I started getting myself up as high as I could reasonably get without standing on the ledge of a building or filling a recliner with helium.<br /><br />I’m not afraid of heights anymore, that’s for sure. But now it’s kinda like I have to get a little dose of the medicine that cured me every once in a while, lest it wear off. Call it a “booster shot”. At least I’m not doing anything truly goddamn crazy, like mountaineering. Mountaineering is not my bag, and and I’ll tell ya why. There are certain activities I abjure, chief among them:<br /><br /></span><ul><li><span style="font-size:85%;">Falling into giant icy crevasses.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:85%;">Eating the dead.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:85%;">Sustaining frostbite injuries. (I've actually done this one before. I frostbit my face in 1984. Parts of it turned all black and fell off. And it fuckin' hurts like you would not believe.)</span></li><li><span style="font-size:85%;">Having a pulmonary embolism for dinner.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:85%;">Wigging out on hypoxia.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:85%;">Pooping in a bag.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:85%;">Starring in a book by Jon Krakauer.</span></li></ul><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />These are all things that you either must do or may wind up doing if mountaineering is your cup of freeze-dried tea. But please don’t confuse me those peak-hopping, ice-axe-wielding bag-shitters. The things that I like aren't usually found where you find alpinists, f'rinstance:<br /><br /></span><ul><li><span style="font-size:85%;">Fragrant alpine meadows.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:85%;">Piney pine trees.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:85%;">Surly marmots.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:85%;">Tranquil mountain lakes.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:85%;"><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2008/07/lunch.html">Lunch</a>.</span></li></ul><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />In other words, if it's below the tree line, count me in. Likewise, if trees won't live there, why should I go?<br /><br />The other reason I'm belaboring the distinction is because some hiker recently took a couple-hundred-foot drop and creamed himself into human chip dip on a pile of granite. This was of course covered in the paper which of course means Dad read it which of course means he gave me several stern warnings and admonitions (replete with the appropriate finger-stabbing of the appropriate story column in the local paper) about doing the same to myself. So I had to give him the requisite assurances that Mister Salad Bar Item was (or at least fancied himself to be) mountaineering whereas all I do is hike. I don't even use ropes. Hell, I wouldn't tie myself to something I </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >liked</span><span style="font-size:85%;">, let alone some mountain.<br /><br />Okay, so if I've done nothing more than set the record straight (assuming it needed to be set straight), me = hiker, not mountain climber. Hope that puts you at ease.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Picking up dog turds not as fun as it sounds</span><br /><br />Before the monsoon season strikes (I mean strikes and any harder than is has already struck for the past few months of our goddamn soaking wet 58-degree "summer"), I'm trying to get things in and about the yard put away. This includes dog turds which - come to find out - are not as water soluble as you would think. I've been finding chalk-white turd carcasses all over the yard, or "turd bones", if you will. And come to think of it, there's no way our wee little Corgy can produce that many boluses. She must be recruiting help. She's not asking you to chip in, is she? If so, help me out and use a trowel. Or just scratch like a cat.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Hauling rat-pee-covered insulation to the dump not as fun as it sounds</span><br /><br />Since I was over at E's house dropping off some stuff that she so graciously offered to store for me, I counter-offered to help haul another load of that rat pee covered insulation and wallboard that you tore out of her basement. I only mention this because I made an interesting discovery while at the transfer station. You know how I keep all those fancy essential oils in my truck so I can mix my own air fresheners? (Yeah, I do, so what? Shut up!) Well bitter almond oil effectively cancels the crushing, mephitic redolence that only a steaming hot garbage dump can produce. Might be a good thing to keep in your lunchbox next time you want to carry along another ptomaine-laced hot dog. Might make it easier to choke down.<br /><br />Cheers,<br /><br />-Thaddeus</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-38413794278701972172008-09-02T17:00:00.000-07:002008-09-02T17:16:21.940-07:00Truck Sex On Satellite: Privacy in the post-InterWebs age<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SL2bBu3n6AI/AAAAAAAAAmY/gjRJ7n4dH5o/s1600-h/google_maps_wifi_finder.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SL2bBu3n6AI/AAAAAAAAAmY/gjRJ7n4dH5o/s400/google_maps_wifi_finder.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5241515995392632834" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Exciting New Google Maps feature! </span>You can now use Google Maps to find<br />all the placeswhere middle-aged men are trying to talk their long-suffering<br />wives into having sex with them in the cabs of their trucks.*<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"A less appetizing Google feature has never been introduced."</span> -CNET Reviews<br /><br />*Not.</span><br /><br />Greg:<br /><br />Teresa and I were driving over to Lowe's yesterday in my <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2008/03/wellhow-did-i-get-here.html">bitchen new truck</a> when a great idea struck me.<br /><br />"Hey honey, instead of going to Lowe's, how 'bout we go have sex somewhere right now - just find somewhere shady to park and knock off a chunk right here in the cab of the truck."<br /><br />You can probably already guess by knowing Teresa that the idea was less-than-enthusiastically received. I counter-pointed that the features of the 2008 Toyota Tacoma Access Cab (with Sport Package) would surely accommodate almost any position that a man of my noble dimensions and a woman of her diminutive stature could dream up. She said yeah, you go ahead and keep dreaming, Mr. Tetris.<br /><br />Undaunted, I pressed on by pointing out that not only do the front seats fully recline, I had proven on more than one occasion that the jump seats afforded me more than enough room to nap (albeit in the cannonball position). And for the truly adventurous and outdoorsy, the suicide doors could be utilized to create a veritable -<br /><br />"No," she said.<br /><br />"Why?" I said.<br /><br />She explained that here in the Age of the InterWebs that some damn satellite would whiz by and snap our picture, and there we'd be </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >in flagrante delicto</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> on Google Maps. She has a point, but I shan't be deterred. Besides, I am already on a quest to be the most privacy-compromised individual on the InterWebs.<br /><br />Not like I haven't had my privacy compromised already. I have. My identity has already been stolen once. Back in nineteen-ought-ninety-two, I received a very politely-worded warrant in the mail from the Silverdale County Sheriff asking me to turn myself in for felony forgery. I called them up, said what the f, they said you wrote a bad check for $400, I said joke's on you, I don't have a checking account, they said so sorry to bother you - our bad, but keep the warrant as our lovely parting gift to you; but then that kinda shit kept happening until February '98 when I had to have my name and my birth certificate and my SSN card changed, and then my credit was completely dicked until about two or three years ago - true story.<br /><br />But I figure in this day and age of Facebook and MySpace and Twitter and what the hell all else, the only defense you have of your privacy is to put so much information out there about yourself that eventually people will be hard pressed to figure out what's fact, what's rumor, and what's legend - you know, kinda like it is with Bigfoot, the chupacabra, and Britney Spears.<br /><br />Some people might say, "Hey, isn't that called <span style="font-style: italic;">obfuscation and inveiglement</span>?" To which I reply, "Only if you're smart and use big words". I have my own name for this tactic, and I call it "<span style="font-style: italic;">Hornswoggling the InterWebs</span>".<br /><br />So far I'm on a pretty good pace to accomplish my goal. Last time I vanity-Googled, damn near all the results on the first page were me - the <span style="font-style: italic;">real</span> me. Oh wait - there was some English novelist who had a character named Thaddeus Gunn, a name she undoubtedly stole from me, Thaddeus Gunn.<br /><br />Of course I ran this whole "hornswoggling" idea past my wife if only as a transparent last-ditch ruse to get some truck sex. She usually supports all my crazy notions, but not this time. She was steadfast in her refusal.<br /><br />"And how does us - as you so <span style="font-style: italic;">eloquently</span> put it - "slamming ham" in the cab of your truck figure in to all of this?"<br /><br />She had me there.<br /><br />"It'd be fun."<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />"C'mon. You know what rhymes with<span style="font-style: italic;"> truck</span>?"<br /><br />"Yes. <span style="font-style: italic;">You're out of luck</span>."<br /><br />She said that the real danger was not really in getting snapped by a satellite or in footage of us "in progress" winding up on YouTube. That was a foregone conclusion. The world is rife with electronic eyes in the 21st century. The real danger that once the footage was posted, we'd be arrested for boring the crap out of everyone on the planet. She said that there's a good reason why you don't see porn videos with titles like "Middle-Aged Married Couple Having Consensual Sex In A Mid-Life Crisis Truck".<br /><br />I suddenly lost the urge.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Seahawks place me on injured reserve list</span><br /><br />The Seahawks made a fan-cap saving move this weekend when they placed me on injured reserve. Seems I pulled that plantar fascia thingamadeal in the bottom of my foot as I was running up the stairs to my seat in row II (as in "aye aye") in the 300 level of Qwest Field. I was quoted as saying, "<span style="font-style: italic;">Shit that hurts!</span>" The Seahawks dispatched the Raiders 23-16 in preseason action. In response to the 'Hawks victory, I was also quoted as saying, "<span style="font-style: italic;">Whooooooooo!</span>" and "<span style="font-style: italic;">Go Haaaaaaaawwwks!</span>"<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Indescribable Oomph - Part 2</span><br /><br />The search for the Best Goddamn Copywriter In The Whole Wide World continues. As it turns out, the phenomenally well-written "Look At This Fuckin' Product" series of print ads is not written by one, nor two, nor three different copywriters, but is the product of a distributed cognitive system comprised of a lot of people everywhere. (Or more precisely, all over hell and gone. -Ed.)<br /><br />The latest opus from this Unstoppable Mass-Mind of Advertising has been channeled through its humble servant <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://eon.blogslol.com/">eon</a>. Observe his omnipotent flex-action on life-giving fluids:<br /><br /></span><ul><li><span style="font-size:85%;"><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://eon.blogslol.com/random/FuckingTeaShit.jpg">Iced Tea</a></span></li></ul>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-20432313681418445952008-08-17T10:52:00.000-07:002008-08-17T15:46:13.704-07:00Massive Tribal Dump<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SKhms0yONbI/AAAAAAAAAkI/7qHY8SnIJeA/s1600-h/forsett.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SKhms0yONbI/AAAAAAAAAkI/7qHY8SnIJeA/s400/forsett.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5235547487087769010" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Give that man a job.</span> Seahawks seventh round draft pick<br />Justin Forsett ran like a cat dipped in turpentine last night<br />in the 'Hawks preseason 29-26 OT victory over the Bears.<br /><br />Greg:<br /><br />I'm glad you finally got to witness first hand the huge screaming steaming drinking throbbing mass that is a <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/search/label/Football">Seahawks game at Qwest Field</a>. Granted, it was only a preseason game, and therefore was only "sports orgy lite". Still, it made our backup QB Charlie Frye's foibles - the interceptions and whatnot - no less rage-inducing. (If he were more competent perhaps we could get "World's Most Athletic Human" Seneca Wallace out where he should be, catching passes instead of backing up Matt Hasselbeck.)<br /><br />But I have to tell you, every year at the first game when the players come flying out of the tunnel to all the smoke and fire and beer-gurgling fanfare, it reminds me of the scene in "Gladiator" when the fighters are brought up into the light of the coliseum for the first time and all nearly crap their loincloths over the sheer fucking <span style="font-style: italic;">size </span>of it all.<br /><br />Now you also know how oh-so-very-goddamn <span style="font-style: italic;">loud</span> it is. Again - it was only a preseason game, so it was "ear-splitting lite". Increase that cacophony by a factor of 2.5 and you get an idea of what a post-season game is like.<br /><br />Now that you know what I mean when I say that I find it quite satisfying to take a gigantic emotional dump in public, and to do so without consequences, and to have it be an expected behavior. Also, as you pointed out, to not just take an emotional dump individually, but <span style="font-style: italic;">tribally</span> as part of the tens-of-thousands-strong screaming steaming drinking throbbing mass. (SSDTM for those of you who need an acronym for everygoddamnthing if it gets more than two mentions. I'm looking at you, Microsoft. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)<br /><br />If you know me as well as you do, dear brother, it begs the question how I, who never had the athletic inclination to throw my <span style="font-style: italic;">voice</span> <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.paulwinchell.com/index.html">fer Winchell's sake</a>, would become a frothing sweating screaming flailing fan </span><span style="font-size:85%;">of football. </span><span style="font-size:85%;">(Or FSSFF. Not the second mention yet. I know. I'm just getting ready. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)<br /><br />Easy. I think football is a dharma. It represents an integral concept of this difficult and oft-confusing life that is represented in my favorite fuckin' <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/search/label/Poetry">haiku</a> of all goddamn time from Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828):<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">It is a dewdrop world<br /></span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Surely it is<br /></span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And yet<br /></span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And yet - </span><br /><br />Football is only a concept. (Oh yeah? Try convincing Bears backup QB Caleb Hanie that the 600-pound sack of man-crete that flattened him last night was a concept. I'm sure his <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/search?q=calhoun">chiropractor </a>would like to hear that too. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.) (Quiet you! <span style="font-style: italic;">-TRG</span>.) It is what it is - to flog a hackneyed football interview phrase - because we all agree that it is. The fans, the players, the coaches, the ticket scalpers - you get the drift. It only has as much importance as I interpret it to have. I scream until I hyperextend my pyloric valve in anger when our backup quarterback Charlie Frye throws an interception, but I do so by choice. If it were, say, Bears QB Rex Grossman throwing the interception, I would shriek with glee and dispense high-fives to everyone within high-fiving range.<br /><br />I find it enjoyable to become a FSSFF (Nice! -Ed.) because it is one of the few times in life when I am conscious of the emotional choice. In the rest of my life, it's not like that. Someone tells me shocking news and I startle. People die and I weep. My brother grieves and I despair. The cat pukes on my bedspread and my heart is filled with blackest rage. All of these things, though they seem appropriate to the situation, arise spontaneously and therefore seem as autonomic as a sneeze.<br /><br />All these emotions, however autonomic they may seem, arise from values that I possess: the worth of my bedspread and the importance of my brother's well-being, for instance. These could be subject to emotional choice as well. I could choose to help others breathe through their upsets as I breathe through mine, to listen compassionately when my brother grieves, and transform the urge to punt the cat into compassion for his dyspepsia. (Or if you must punt the cat, punt him delicately and with loving-kindness. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)<br /><br />But I will always rage over the foibles of Charlie Frye, because as Issa put it so succinctly two hundred years ago:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">It is a preseason game<br /></span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Surely it is<br /></span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And yet<br /></span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And yet -<br /></span><br /><br />Cheers, -Thaddeus<br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-77208161421622674142008-08-15T09:12:00.000-07:002008-08-15T10:57:02.831-07:00I Should Be In Jail Etc. Part 3: The Kreamening<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.markwenzel.com/wenzelact.htm"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SKWuBXMgh7I/AAAAAAAAAkA/muvO_mwj99I/s400/madscientist.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234781480317650866" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Better products for better kreaming, through science.</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">Fig 1: A white lab-coated scientist, not unlike those who<br />create our favorite food products every day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Greg:<br /><br />With full knowledge that all I have told you thus far will undoubtedly be used against me in a court of law, a strange mix of pride, guilt and glee urges me on. I must tell you the Karnation Kem-Kreme story.<br /><br />The year is 1986. I am working as an executive secretary for Carnation Corporation in Los Angeles, California. They hired me because I type 85WPM and I can answer <span style="font-style: italic;">the shit</span> out of a telephone. Just you try and stop me. <br /><br />Correction - I did type that fast until I effed up my right hand by jamming it into a mason jar and cutting the hell out of my right radial distal nerve. I didn't even know what a right radial distal nerve was until I severed the sumbitch. Now I have one good hand - the left hand, the<span style="font-style: italic;"> evil</span> hand , <span style="font-style: italic;">die hand die verletzt</span> - and another one that is <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2006/12/best-christmas-ever.html">as numb as a churchgoer's ass</a>. But that's another story.<br /><br />I feel all jibbity-jibbity suddenly. Are there weasels in my duodenum?<br /><br />Wait - you know what' s going on? They put sugar in my smoothie. Those guys. The ones at the Alki Cafe. <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2008/01/positively-tripping-balls.html">The carburetor on my pancreas is stuck wide open.</a> That's why I can't track and I'm mildly paranoid. Make sure you have the padded bar pulled down and tight across your lap. This may get bumpy. SUGAR MAFIA, HEAR ME! <span style="font-style: italic;">From hell's heart I stab at the</span>- WHOAH! CHECK IT OUT, A FIRE TRUCK! <span style="font-style: italic;">Just</span> FEAST YOUR BABY BLUES ON THAT BIG SHINY BEEYOOOT-<br /><br />Where was I? Oh yeah. Carnation. I worked in the Contadina tomato products division. It was on the seventh floor across from the Coffee Mate division. It freaked many people out to have a male secretary in the company (seriously - they couldn't handle a man's baritone coming across the line when they'd call looking for some executive's secretary and some people would just hang up). So they bumped me up to marketing assistant.<br /><br />Then the news media got their little pulp-stained paws on a study from the National Institute of Whatever The Hell Is Bad For You This Week that proved that <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4779">tropical oils</a> worked like Kwik-Krete in your arteries. Plus, they said all excited-like, eating tropical oils will give you man-teats. Chicks, they warned us gravely, will no longer dig you. And that is some cold, cold shit.<br /><br />The folks in the Coffee Mate division did not receive this news gladly. In fact, they were apoplectic. Y'see, back then, Coffee Mate was made with plenty of tropical oils. (It's not any more.) They were convinced that Coffee Mate was going down. Some figured - wrongly - that the only way to circumvent disaster was to come up with an even more gruesome chemical brew that had no tropical oils but would taste like real cream. (Thankfully, they did not do that. Actually, something good happened and now you can get Coffee Mate in just about any flavor of the rainbow including Blueberry Cheesecake which, while I will never sully my morning doppio with it, I will chug it straight from the bottle. It's that good. And I am that effed in the head.)<br /><br />And then a prank was born.<br /><br />I had access to all the marketing materials for all the divisions because many of the executives I worked for didn't wanna learn the new Alias computer system so they let me go learn it for them. That was mistake #1: giving Pranky McPrankington the keys to the fun box.<br /><br />I got into the graphics files for the Coffee Mate labels and just had a gay olde tyme "re-interpreting" them. I changed the product name to Karnation Kem-Kreme and added the tag line, "<span style="font-style: italic;">It'll Have Ya Trippin'!</span><span style="font-style: italic;"></span>" I rewrote the ingredient label to include hog jowls, dog mucus, and influenza. Then I forwarded the files to the factory with the instructions to label up a test batch and send it over to the head of Coffee Mate (who I'll call Rick).<br /><br />Did Rick get the joke? Oh he goddamn well did. And it pissed him off grand royal. He stormed over to my desk. "I guess you just don't have enough to do!" he spat at me, hard enough to blow the eraser crumbs out of my Smith-Corona. Then he stomped over to the office of my boss (who I'll call Steve).<br /><br />I peeked through the window. Rick stood there, raging at Steve with the anger of a Titan. When the catharsis was over, Rick stomped by my desk again, giving me the requisite glare on the way by. Steve walked over to his window and wearily waved me into his office.<br /><br />"Thaddeus," he said with a sigh of resignation, "That...was really, really, really funny."<br /><br />"Seriously?" I said.<br /><br />"Mm hmm." He said.<br /><br />"OK. Should I just...go back...to work now?"<br /><br />"Sure. Oh - one thing."<br /><br />"What's that?"<br /><br />"Don't do that again."<br /><br />"Okay I won't."<br /><br />"Yeah. Do something different. You gotta stay sharp. Test your limits and abilities. Know what I mean?"<br /><br />"Yes I do."<br /><br />And the moral of the story is - well, I don't have a moral. I just didn't get fired. I think I moved to Seattle about a week later just to avoid it.<br /><br />Let me just end this epistle with this unsolicited endorsement: Coffee Mate is fuckin' delicious. Shake it up with some Scotch and pour it over ice. You'll see what I mean.<br /><br />It'll have ya trippin'!<br /><br />Cheers,<br /><br />-Thaddeus<br /><br /><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-89675268990747218772008-08-12T20:42:00.000-07:002008-08-13T09:48:39.465-07:00I Should Be In Jail By Now, Part 2: Choking The Chicken<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SKJYjz3Ot5I/AAAAAAAAAjo/DEjWmQbLrl8/s1600-h/rubberchick.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SKJYjz3Ot5I/AAAAAAAAAjo/DEjWmQbLrl8/s400/rubberchick.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5233843089198462866" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Careful.</span> That shit can get you fired.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Greg:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">K. So. Like I was saying about stuff I did that </span><a style="font-weight: bold; font-family: georgia;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2008/08/i-should-be-in-jail-by-now-part-1.html">prolly shoulda landed me in jail</a><span style="font-family:georgia;">. Remember back last time when I told you that bit about getting fired for 'malicious compliance'? Here's how that went down:<br /></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:georgia;" >Chilly the Weather Chicken</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />Way back before there was a radio format called 'Alternative' (which is now anything but), there were teeny tiny little AM radio stations that held the torch for such gittar-pickin' surrealist enclaves as The Church, Alien Sex Fiend, Robyn Hitchcock, and Midnight Oil (as well as Johnnycomelatelys Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and fuckin' Nearvanna). And since these wee little alt.<span style="font-style: italic;">alt</span>.alternative stations were usually the poor relation of some FM AOR juggernaut (because no one can have enough Skynyrd), they got the snotty end of the stick day in and out until they were sold for chump change to televangelists.<br /><br />In the case of the late <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://10thingszine.blogspot.com/2007/07/kjet.html">KJET-AM</a>, (which thanks to the immortalizing power of the InterWebs you can still listen to on <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.live365.com/stations/bleekswinney">Live365</a> and <a href="http://www.myspace.com/1600KJET"><span style="font-weight: bold;">MySpace</span></a>) it was sold to a bunch of chumps with a wad of change who thought that b-side oldies was the format of the future. </span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">This was way back in nineteen-ought-eighty-nine.</span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"> Never mind that these tracks sucked too hard to be on the a-side forty years ago, and that the intervening decades had not redeemed them. The folks who bought the station thought they had some sort of statement to make and that they were all going to be able to purchase at least <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2007/03/happiness-pt-65-i-won-lottery-again.html">one solid gold rocket car</a> apiece.<br /><br />Here's a spoiler: If you're not listening to b-side oldies right now, it means the experiment failed.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:georgia;">Now 'tis a little-known fact that if you work in radio, you can expect to get fired about every twenty minutes or every time a station changes format, whichever comes first. But the upside of this was that since this was happening everywhere in the industry, <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2006/07/follow-up-letter.html">you could always migrate elsewhere</a>. Plus you always got a big fat severance check.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:georgia;">So we're sitting there in this meeting, <span style="font-style: italic;">THE</span> meeting, the one where they tell you that the station is changing format and boo hoo hoo and here's your big fat severance check, when I'll be go to hell if they didn't say, "...and we'd like to keep you all on." You could've knocked us all over with a mangy feather plucked from the soiled pillow of Kurt Cobain. It meant we would get no big fat severance check. And that would not do. We had all promised ourselves that we were going to binge drink, and there's no way we could do that on regular salary. There was only one way to get the big fat severance check and that was to get fired.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:georgia;">So we hatched a plan - a plan that would fix us good. We were all going to change our air names and do the worst puking <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_Radio">boss-jock horseshit radio</a> we could possibly do. (See also: <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.reelradio.com/rdsc/airchecks.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Real Don Steele</span></a>. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.) They would have to fire us. And then we'd get our big fat severance checks. And then we could get all get fried to the hat and stay that way, at least for the afternoon.</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;">I changed my air name to Big Rick Hardy.<br /><br />Since the new station's call letters were KQUL (Cool Oldies!), I figured we needed a mascot with an arctic theme, so I created Chilly the Weather Chicken. Then I put together some outrageously bullshit contest centered around him. To wit, if you out-guessed Chilly on what the next day's high temperature would be, you got to 'choke the chicken' on the air. This meant that I mentioned your name and played a </span><a style="font-family: georgia; font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.jimprice.com/prosound/carts.htm">cart </a><span style="font-family:georgia;">of a chicken <span style="font-style: italic;">buh-gawk</span>ing along with some wild sound of me gagging, perhaps captured during one of my drunken afternoons at the <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/five-point-cafe-seattle-2#hrid:l9lD-y9V56v31eLNnMn6iw/query:five%20point">Five Point</a>.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;">So along comes my new boss </span><a style="font-family: georgia; font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.dannyholiday.com/">Danny Holiday</a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> one day and throws the cart down in front of me. "Can't do this anymore," he says. "Whyforhowcome not?" I says. "Because 'choking the chicken' is a euphemism for masturbation," he says. "</span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" >Nooooooo waaaaaayy!</span><span style="font-family:georgia;">" I says. "Yep. S'a'fact," he says. "Can't bleeve you dinnint know that."</span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />So I came back the next Monday with a new on-air quiz called "Beating the Bishop". I got crap-canned hyper-quick, and I got a little triplicate form showing that I was terminated for 'malicious compliance'. HOW SWEET IS THAT?!! </span> <span style="font-family:georgia;"><br /><br />Oh yeah, I got a big fat severance check.<br /><br />Next time: On a whim, I create "Karnation Kem-Kreme" on the job and get a large piece of my ass chewed off for my trouble.<br /><br />Cheers,<br /><br />-Thaddeus </span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-25399662422614367062008-08-06T11:04:00.000-07:002008-08-07T08:47:35.319-07:00I Should Be In Jail By Now, Part 1<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SJpIHh0I0rI/AAAAAAAAAi8/OPLuq4UqaL8/s1600-h/Nantucket-08-2004.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SJpIHh0I0rI/AAAAAAAAAi8/OPLuq4UqaL8/s400/Nantucket-08-2004.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5231573211317588658" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">There once was a town called Nantucket. </span>(Shown here, smaller than actual size.)<br />The guy with the gimongous<span style="font-style: italic;"> schweinstucker </span>lives in the third shack on the left.<br />Note the wheelbarrow.</span><br /><br />Greg:<br /><br />Somebody is going to send me to jail. And not just for shit I did. For shit I still do all the time. And I'm not talking an overnighter in King County. I'm talking like prolly a stint in the <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_d%27If">Chateau d'If</a>. What for? Because I pull </span><span style="font-size:85%;">mildly pernicious </span><span style="font-size:85%;">pranks that bring me volumes of that special joy one can only get from peccancy. And I pull them on a regular basis...in the workplace, no less. And I'm a grown-ass man.<br /><br />Just what the hell is wrong with me? If you ask my son, I'm fourteen on the inside. That's what's wrong with me.<br /><br />OK - maybe not jailed, but perhaps fired. But if you're gonna get fired, get fired for <span style="font-style: italic;">something</span>, right? You know honestly, I got fired for <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance">malicious compliance</a> once. That's one hell of a Jeopardy category, I tell you what. I even got a triplicate form with that on it, proving my transgression to all the English-speaking world. Too bad I lost it. I'd've liked to have that bastard framed.<br /><br />But there's been a load of stuff that I didn't get fired for that I prolly shoulda. Like for instance:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">THE REHAB GAG</span><br /><br />When somebody at my place of work is gone for an extended period of time, I like to go around the company telling people that they're in <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2005/06/born-to-be-in-rehab.html">rehab</a>. And when people ask me "What for?", I like to say that "...they got Hooked On Phonics, ate a bunch of phonemes, and careened their Beamer into the kiddie pool. That was pretty fucked up, so the court remanded them to treatment." And then the other person will say, "No way! Did anyone get hurt?" And I'll go, "No, the kids were all inside drinking Scotch and watching Teletubbies. But not the real Teletubbies, the porn Teletubbies - you you know, the Tele<span style="font-style: italic;">Chubbies</span>. I think it was '<span style="font-style: italic;">TeleChubbies Do Manhattan</span>'. But anyway, s'all good."<br /><br />Now is that so wrong? My old boss seemed to think so. I was all like, <span style="font-style: italic;">you think I'll get fired?</span> And she was all, <span style="font-style: italic;">I don't know, we'll have to talk about that when we fire you.</span><br /><br />By the way, I don't work there anymore.<br /><br />And then there's:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">THE NANTUCKET GAG</span><br /><br />When I first started working at my new job, I noticed that everyone talked at the same time in meetings. It blew my mind. It was cacophonous. I couldn't imagine how anything ever got done. So just to see if anyone was even listening at all, I started reciting the "Man from Nantucket" limerick during meetings when everyone was uber-blabbing. In case you have lost familiarity with this particular limerick (as I know you have a veritable trove of them brewing and at the ready in your noodle), it's filthy. It goes like this:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">There once was a man from Nantucket</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Whose **** was so long he could **** **.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />He wiped off his chin</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And said with a grin</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />"If my ear were a **** I could **** **."</span><br /><br />Did I tell you that a lot of people I work with are kinda churchy? And I don't mean that to be pejorative. Nice folks. But prolly not the kind of people you'd find reciting this kind of filth. So when I pointed out to them one day when we were all gathered in the lunch room that I was reciting this horrifying limerick and that none of them could hear it because none of them wanted to give up the floor, they were shocked. And then meetings got pretty doggone polite. Now "Nantucket" has become a code word in my cube pod for, "shut yer trap, you're interrupting me".<br /><br />And as a bonus, after these nice people fire me, I'm going straight to hell.<br /><br />Is that all? Oh, <span style="font-style: italic;">mais non</span>. I've just cracked the seal on this. I have any number of years to recount, and you, sir, shall be my confessor.<br /><br />Cheers,<br /><br />-Thaddeus<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">PS: The Indescribable Oomph</span><br /><br />You know I've been writing copy for nigh on to twenty years. Well I've just met my match. Doesn't matter what product it is, there's nothing this guy can't handle. Whether it's bacon, peppers, or some space-age Microsoft technology shit, this guy captures that indescribable "oomph" that all clients are clamoring for. His ability to provoke desire is uncanny. He needs a $1 to $2 million dollar a year gig. Fuck yeah he does. Check out his inimitable stylings and muscular prose in extra-spicy five-star not-safe-for-the-workplace language:<br /></span><ul><li style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://i167.photobucket.com/albums/u149/BigD906/baconeq8-1.jpg"><span style="font-size:85%;">Bacon</span></a></li><li style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://a442.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/1/l_1c48d2d7391705e5c2dc101d27a24a99.jpg"><span style="font-size:85%;">Peppers</span></a></li><li><span style="font-size:85%;"><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://iputatextonimage.com/wp-content/look-at-this-motherfucking.jpg">Microsoft</a></span></li><li style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://cache.jezebel.com/assets/resources/2008/03/obamacampaignholyshit.jpg"><span style="font-size:85%;">Obama </span></a></li></ul>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-59116423430160122852008-07-29T17:08:00.000-07:002008-08-05T22:05:26.731-07:00A Prayer to St. Expeditus<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SI-x4PpyRDI/AAAAAAAAAiU/ONwPaPewiUc/s1600-h/stexpeditus2.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SI-x4PpyRDI/AAAAAAAAAiU/ONwPaPewiUc/s400/stexpeditus2.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5228593272233018418" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">St. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Expeditus</span> </span>(above), patron saint of<br />The Republic of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Molossia</span> (where the f?),<br />also patron of procrastinators, programmers,<br />and emergencies (I shit you not), but<br />lest we forget, also patron saint of<br />greased lightning, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">fedex</span> drivers, espresso <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">jitterati</span>,<br />nervous little dogs, wigged-out bugs,<br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">alka</span> seltzer bubbles, 4.4 forty runners,<br />coke freaks, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">meth</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">freeeks</span>, crank <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">frreeeex</span>,<br />and (say it with me now)<br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEeqHj3Nj2c"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">les</span> freaks <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Parkour</span></span></a>.<br /><br />Saint Expeditus -<br /><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Howya</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">doin</span>'? You don't say. <a href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2005/11/ossum.html"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Ossum</span></a>.<br /><br />Most Holy and Glorious Martyr <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Expeditus</span>,<br />Let us not <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">beateth</span> around the bush.<br />I know you know what I need.<br /><br /><a href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2008/07/prayer-to-st-joseph.html">I have already entreated St. Joseph on this point</a><br />And I know that you two talk,<br />Belonging thou both to the same lodge, as you do<br />And drinking ye both of the Fuzzy Navels<br />And playing thou both the game of bridge concomitantly<br />Each Wednesday and Saturday<br /><br />For St. Joseph, while he's a nice guy<br />And handy with the woodworking tools<br />And good with the changing of the Holy Diapers of<br />Our Lord and Savior, <a href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2005/12/baby-jesus-is-antichrist.html">Wee Screaming Baby Jesus</a>,<br />...by the way, where the hell is Mary? Getting a pedicure or something?<br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Howcome</span> she's not on poop detail?<br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Ohh</span>...<span style="font-style: italic;">step</span> father. Got it.<br /><br />But <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">lookest</span> thou here, St. Expedite:<br />I didst my due diligence<br />And in accordance with the instructions<br />(In both English and Spanish)<br />On the laminated holy card,<br />Didst bury St. Joseph in order to hasten my request<br />That he help us procure a new home<br /><br />I <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">maketh</span> not this shit up. That's what it said to do.<br />Think about it, St. Expedite.<br /><a href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2007/06/its-my-45th-birth-wait-what-was-i.html">I am a grown-ass man</a>, yet I found myself<br />Whispering strange incantations over a plastic statue<br />And covering it with dirt in the deepest, darkest part<br />Of the mid-afternoon<br />My dignity thus compromised<br />For so great was my need<br />Disregarded I the chortling of the neighbors<br />And stoppered mine ears against their epithets<br /><br />So - St. Expedite - here's the deal:<br />Whilst Most Holy St. Joseph is taking<br />A Blessed Dirt Nap<br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Steppest</span> thou up to the ear of God -<br />- the BIG God, not any of the little ones -<br />And with an urgency that denotes impending urination<br />Beseech He/Him/She/It on my behalf<br />So that I, my wife, and all of our cohabiting family members<br />Who number (wait...five, plus eight...carry the twelve...)<br />Who are more numerous than the beasts of the air,<br />The birds of the field, and all the stars in the firmament<br />Of Hollywood <span style="font-style: italic;">combined</span> -<br />(I didst the math and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">knowest</span> it to be true for I have shown my work<br />In mine own <a href="http://itssamsview.blogspot.com/2008/05/sweet-sweet-memories.html">third period notebook</a>)<br />Lo! They are many and the house it is small -<br /><br />Most Holy Martyr St. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Expeditus</span>,<br />As I hath mentioned before,<br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;">One saint has already been put on the job<br />And he's head-down in a flower pot, mulling his fate.<br />Don't want to sound like I'm threatening or anything<br />But unless thou likest the taste of dirt,<br />Perhaps you <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">oughtta</span> intercede on my behalf here<span style="font-style: italic;"> chop chop</span>,<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">Capiche</span>?<br /><br /></span>Amen, and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">BFF</span>:<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /></span>-Thaddeus<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><br /></span><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-40738873176227208692008-07-23T22:16:00.000-07:002008-08-06T09:20:57.912-07:00Lunch<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SIhxZJnmlmI/AAAAAAAAAiM/GYQy-fzCYQA/s1600-h/Lunch-Atop-a-Skyscraper-c1932-Print-C10090221.jpeg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SIhxZJnmlmI/AAAAAAAAAiM/GYQy-fzCYQA/s400/Lunch-Atop-a-Skyscraper-c1932-Print-C10090221.jpeg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226552044456154722" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Holy freaking shit! Is that a sandwich!?</span> What sort of life must one lead, I wonder,<br />that they are amazed by the contents of your lunch box.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Greg:<br /><br />We have a really big kitchen at MRM (McCann Relationship Marketing, part of the McCann-Erickson world-gripping octopus), so everyone - including me - avails themselves to it to cook and eat their lunches every day. And every day, somebody or bodies develop an almost preternatural fascination with my lunch. Why? Beats me. I'm not eating shiny rocks or live squirrels, so why anyone would have such a keen interest in what's on my plate is beyond me.<br /><br />So what I've decided to do is to write down standard answers to the usual questions that I get regarding my lunch and post them here. Then I'm going to have the URL to this post printed on the back of my business cards and hand one to the first querier that pops open their gob (because Wee Lil' Huggies(tm)-Bound Christ Our Lord and Savior knows that I have yet to hand one of my business cards to a client and I want to feel like that tree didn't die for nothing). So here goes. And rest assured, these are </span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >real questions</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> that were </span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >actually asked of me</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> at lunch time<br /><br />Q: Hey, is that your lunch?<br />A: Holy shit! I have no idea. Let's watch me and see if I sit down and eat it.<br /><br />Q: You eat salmon?<br />A: No, I </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >am eating</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> salmon.<br /><br />Q: But I thought you were a vegetarian.<br />A: Was. Still am for the most part with the exception of salmon. Guess that makes me a vegaquarium.<br /><br />Q: Is that a real word?<br />A: Oh for crissakes.<br /><br />Q: But why salmon?<br />A: Doctor's orders. Seriously. They took a look at how high my cholesterol was and shat a kitten. Then they told me for the third time that I have to start eating fish.<br /><br />Q: What made you become vegetarian in the first place?<br />A: I had a dream about a cow that completely freaked me out. Never touched meat again until the kitten-shitting doctor told me I had to. So I've never been so much "vegetarian" as "meat-phobic".<br /><br />Q: So doesn't eating salmon freak you out?<br />A: Thanks for reminding me. Can I puke in your shoes?<br /><br />Q: That's not an answer.<br />A: And that's not a question. And look! Now there's puke on your shoes.<br /><br />Q: Why are you so grumpy?<br />A: Because I never get to eat my freakin' lunch in peace.<br /><br />Q: Ha ha ha Thaddeus, you're so funny.<br />A: Thank you. But seriously, can I eat my freakin' lunch in peace?<br /><br />Q: Are you going to eat that whole salad?<br />A: Yes. Are you going to eat all the oxygen in the room?<br /><br />Q: Is that an omelet?<br />A: Nope. It's a placenta.<br /><br />Q: Gross!<br />A: You asked.<span style="display: block;" id="formatbar_Buttons"><span class="on menu-top" style="display: block;" id="formatbar_FontSize" title="Font size" onmouseover="ButtonHoverOn(this);" onmouseout="ButtonHoverOff(this);" onmouseup="" onmousedown="CheckFormatting(event);toggleFontSizeMenu();ButtonMouseDown(this);"></span></span><br />Q: Is that white rice? That's weird. You eat white rice for breakfast?<br />A: Yeah, rice for breakfast is pretty rare and exotic. Only me and and six billion other folks are doing it.<br /><br />Q: Do you put butter on everything?<br />A: Just about, but there are some things that even butter can't fix. Like when you make toast out of wood. Or you date a Russian.<br /><br />Q: What?<br />A: Nothing.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-39707592487029321442008-07-14T14:42:00.001-07:002008-08-05T22:05:26.731-07:00A Prayer to St. Joseph<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SHvIdzGDUKI/AAAAAAAAAh0/CJ5Wc2nc6Ss/s1600-h/StJosephAndChildBig.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/SHvIdzGDUKI/AAAAAAAAAh0/CJ5Wc2nc6Ss/s400/StJosephAndChildBig.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5222988607123574946" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Props to the Pops:</span> Lil' Jesus gives his step dad an under-chin high five.</span><br /><pre style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Most Holy Saint Joseph,</span><br />step dad of Lil' Jesus,<br />for whom baby aspirin is named,<br />you taught our Lord<br />the carpenter's trade,<br />and saw to it<br />that he was always properly housed,<br />hear my earnest plea.<br /><br />I want you to help me now<br />as you helped your foster-child Jesus,<br />and as you have helped many others<br />in the matter of housing.<br /><br />Yeah, that's right, I said "housing".<br />I know I bought a house just a year ago.<br />Heareth me out.<br /><br />I wish to purchase a house in the Admiral District,<br />a beautifully renovated 1929 Tudor,<br />in a great location near schools,<br />shops & parks(!)<br />with elegant period details & modern updates<br />leaded glass windows, tile fireplace, picture moldings<br />& mahogany woodwork<br />(yea, though the listing hath many ampersands<br />and parenthetically-ensconced exclamation points)<br />slab granite counters & eating<br />bar, new cabinetry, farmhouse sink & stainless appliances.<br /><br />Yea verily, it is even earthquake retrofitted!<br /><br />Most Holy St. Joseph,<br />who seest the content of mine heart and wallet<br />and knowest that I need more liquidity<br />and more open credit sufficient to procure<br />this domicile (though my credit rating be blameless),<br />...just hang tight for the rest of my plea, okay?<br />And not let thy holy eyes roll heavenward in disgust<br />and exasperation.<br /><br />For with thine aid, I shall purchase it<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">quickly, easily, and profitably<br />yea though mine own real estate agent<br />mocketh me and telleth me to<br />suck it up for another year<br />with mine current shack.<br /><br />And I implore you to grant my wish<br />by purifying the hearts of the two nice ladies<br />who own the place,<br />and filling them with eagerness, compliance, and honesty,<br />and having them see their way clear<br />to accommodate my impoverished ass<br />(likewise, a shitload of cash<br />thrown my way wouldn't hurt either,<br />if thou gettest my drift)<br />and by letting nothing impede the<br />rapid conclusion of the sale.<br /><br />Dear Saint Joseph,<br />I know you would do this for me<br />out of the goodness of your heart<br />and in your own good time,<br />but my need is very great now<br />and so I must make you hurry<br />on my behalf <span style="font-style: italic;">chop chop</span>.<br /><br />For lo, my current residence overfloweth with residents.<br />My beloved mother-in-law Lucy,<br />who maketh The Waffles of Righteousness<br />each morning of which we eat,<br />verily I trod upon her even this morning<br />so pinched are our quarters.<br />Likewise the cat I have trod upon,<br />as well as the wife, the dog, and several door-to-door<br />salespersons, and they likewise have trod upon me,<br />each in their own time<br />verily because of the tiny<br />space wherein we live.<br />Yea, we squeezeth through the roof beams<br />like toothpaste, so pinched are<br />our quarters.<br /><br />Saint Joseph, here is the deal:<br />I am going to place you<br />in a difficult position<br />with your head in darkness<br />and you will suffer as our Lord suffered,<br />until the aforementioned house is purchased by us.<br /><br />Why? Because All The Catholics I Know<br />said I have to bury your likeness in the yard,<br />head down, until the deal is done.<br />And there was the part about pouring martinis on you, too.<br />I am not making this shit up.<br /><br />Then, Saint Joseph, I swear<br />before the cross and God Almighty,<br />that I will redeem you<br />and you will receive my gratitude<br />and a place of honour in my new home.<br /><br />Just do me this one solid.<br /><br />Amen.</span></pre>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-43575000586168825812008-03-10T21:43:00.000-07:002008-08-06T09:17:52.089-07:00Well...How Did I Get Here?<div><a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R9YPNdM-STI/AAAAAAAAAbc/Tg72VBgxdT8/s1600-h/tacoma_main.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5176341545560721714" style="" alt="" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R9YPNdM-STI/AAAAAAAAAbc/Tg72VBgxdT8/s400/tacoma_main.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><span style="font-size:78%;"><strong>Say hello to Pearl.</strong> My utterly bitchen new Toyota Tacoma is outfitted precisely</span></div><div><span style="font-size:78%;">as the one pictured here - right down to the black pearl paint job, Bilstein shocks and</span></div><div><span style="font-size:78%;">skid plates. The only thing missing is the dirt bike in the back and the kid with the</span></div><div><span style="font-size:78%;">mullet who is undoubtedly driving it.</span></div><div></div><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">"And you may find yourself at the wheel of a large automobile."<br />-Talking Heads, <span style="font-style: italic;">Once in a Lifetime</span><br /><br /></span><div><span style="font-size:85%;">Greg:</span><br /></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">Somebody once said that good things come to those who wait. I'd like to expand on that sentiment by saying no they fucking don't. How do I know? Because back in the early 90s, I lived in a car. And not even a cool car, Greg. It was a 1974 Ford Maverick with a mild case of cancer and a severe case of every other fucking thing that can go wrong with a car. Way back then, I used to fantasize about having a brand new Toyota truck that I could drive up some of the more treacherous dirt roads in Olympic National Park and camp and hike to my heart's content. It represented all the freedom that my poverty and completely misguided and chaotic lifestyle was denying me. And each day as I was desperately trying to collect enough change to buy a Slurpee, I knew that was never going to happen.<br /><br />Well now I have a bitchen new Toyota truck with 4 wheel drive and all kindsa shit I didn't even know I wanted until the salesman pointed out to me that I did. He said if you think you don't want it, just keep throwing bricks of cash at me until you realize that you do. And I'll be go to hell if it didn't work just like he said.</span></div><div></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">I have digressed. The point I am driving at is this: I have some pretty amazing stuff in my life right now, some of which I actually planned. But I'll be hornswoggled if I can figure out how things actually turned out the way they did.</span></div><div></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">For instance, it's no secret that I'm no fan of <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.thesecret.tv/">The Secret</a> - you know, that book that tells you that <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Attraction">your thoughts create invisible tractor beams</a> that shoot out of your head in every direction and attract the things that you covet most, like parking, fame, and bulging pectoral muscles. I did, however, do a "creative visualization" exercise, Wayne the hell back when I was unemployed and lived in a 400 square foot studio apartment in a building where the guy down the hall got murdered completely dead with a real knife and I occasionally had crack rocks show up at my door completely unbidden. I really did the whole exercise. I cut pcitures out of magazines that represented how I wanted my life to be and wrote a letter from the future about what my life was like, and featured prominently in that cardboard cutout fantasy was a brand-spankin' new Toyota truck...and I was the guy spankin' it.</span></div><div></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">Fast forward fifteen years and I now have everything - tangible and intangible - that I put together in that creative visualization way back then. Job, house, wife, kid, bitchen outdoor gear, bitchen truck, freedom to hit the road and have bitchen adventures. Everything. I wish that I could tell you that I had a plan or that there was a direct and well thought out correlation between my thoughts and actions and the acquisition of my dreams. But the fact of the matter is that there wasn't, and I still have no idea how any of this came about. It was planned inasmuch as I did the exercise, but by the same token it was not planned at all. So while I can say without a doubt that the exercise worked, I have no fucking idea <em>how</em>. I will say that I know that none of these good things came to me because I waited, because I sure as shit did not. I whined, pissed and moaned and wondered how my life could be taking such wrong turns and how I never got what I wanted until <em>BLAM</em> it suddenly existed all at once.</span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">I do not mean to endow my new truck with more importance than it is due. It's not supernatural. It's just a truck...although I have named it Pearl and often find myself kissing it on the hood. (What, is that so wrong?) It is more what it represents. It shows that I must've done something right, even if I don't know what that is.<br /><br />Any insights you have are welcome.<br /><br />Cheers, -Thaddeus<br /></span></div><div></div><div></div><br /><div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-54126403574836715872008-02-17T06:49:00.000-08:002008-08-06T09:17:52.090-07:00SPROING! / Later That Same Day<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R7kPmPxyWnI/AAAAAAAAAbM/WyJA8tdIqDI/s1600-h/parrish_spring.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R7kPmPxyWnI/AAAAAAAAAbM/WyJA8tdIqDI/s400/parrish_spring.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5168179197129153138" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sprout faster, you cotyledonous bastard! </span>Spring comes not when<br />the calendar says it does, but when I'm damn good and ready to<br />get on my bike and speed it into existence.<br /></span><br />Greg:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">It's spring, goddamnit. It is because I have proclaimed it so. The fact that I laid in my driveway and installed a new bike rack on my car yesterday (<a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.feedthehabit.com/gear_reviews/bikes/thule/sportworks_thule_t2_angle.jpg">just like this one</a>) without either getting soaked to the bone or freezing my treats off is my proof. Today the forecast calls for sun - real sun, not that half-assed ice-cold "mock" sun that you get in the winter - so I'm planning on spending my entire day on my bike, wind in my teeth, pollen in my hair, manufacturing vitamin D until the cows roost.<br /><br />Speaking of which, there was an article in the Seattle Times recently on the impact of living in unrelenting dankness. I think it was called, "<a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2004179538_vitamind13m.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Winter Dankness: Sucky, Or Really Truly Sucky</span>?</a>" or something to that effect. It was 'duh' sort of proposition. Of course living in dankness can't be good for you unless you're a salamander or porpoise or some other sort of critter who can't retain bodily fluids unless partially submerged at all times. (Or a Scandinavian, for instance. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.) The interesting-yet-shocking point that the article brought up was that we (meaning Pac Northwesterners or "Mossbacks") have a notable increase in or susceptibility to diabetes, heart attacks, and <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.whyhere.org/">multiple sclerosis</a>. The Times points the finger at vitamin D3. There's just no way the tiny amount of solar radiation we get between October and March is enough to maintain a healthy level. Since I don't drink milk, I don't have a real good source of D3, so I figured I'd just go out and buy some and start taking it and see what happened.<br /><br />What happened was SPROING! It was as though spring bloomed full-force within the very garden walls of my being. People who know me well claimed that I had positively annoying amounts of energy. I don't know about the annoying part as I believe that I'm pretty annoying to most people most of the time, what with my constant baying and hooting and "raise the roof" gestures in otherwise serene-to-languid settings as, say, the workplace and, say, mortuaries. But I can tell you that I got that feeling that I only get when the sun comes out - specifically when I'm hiking in the sun. I'm talking like toddler-esque amounts of joy.<br /><br />Sure, it could be placebo effect. Or it could be that I'm finally experiencing <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garcia_Effect">Garcia Effect</a> for the taste of winter.<br /><br />Look, I'd love to stay and chat but the sun just came streaming through the front win-<br /><br />(EPILOGUE: The author's chair was found empty, as was his bottle of vitamin D3. His bike was nowhere to be found. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)<br /><br />LATER THAT SAME DAY:<br /><br />Greg:<br /><br />I had a heck of a bike ride. Tested out the new bike rack by taking our bikes down to <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.vrseattle.com/pages/browse.php?cat_id=148">Myrtle Edwards Park</a> which is about 8 miles south of here, and is also a place where a portion of my proposed bike commute to and from work will pass. Since the bike route maps of Seattle are incomplete in places, I thought I'd start at Myrtle Edwards and find my way going north to the <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/192/470888036_22f183f4eb.jpg">Hiram Chittenden Locks</a>. From there I figure I can pretty much by guess and by golly it the rest of the way home. The one-way distance from my workplace to my home on my proposed route is about ten miles. I did about that much today (I think) going from Myrtle Edwards to the Locks and back. Or maybe it was only six. It felt like thirty. The important thing is that I learned that it's mostly uphill with one vertiginous downhill block and slippery wooden bridge just before you get to the locks. I'd better grow and extra lung.<br /><br />After our ride, Teresa and I went and purchased many more (necessary) doo-dads and knick-knacks for our bikes (rear view mirror so I can see if my sweet, sweet Muffin has fallen too far behind; panniers and a trunk for my laptop and work clothes). Then we came home and treated ourselves to a cigar in the sunshine whilst reclining in our camp chairs in the back yard. She entertained herself with some thirty-pound novel and I read The New Yorker.<br /><br />Which brings me to the subject of nicknames. There's a rambling article about nicknames by David Owen that's definitely worth reading, should you happen upon the latest issue of the NYker at the dentist or bail bondsman's office. Owen suggests that we give nicknames for different reasons. We give them to teachers and other adults when we're young to limit their terrible authority. We give them to our peers out of affection that lends us the ability to see something in them that those who christened them never saw.<br /><br />When I was in high school, all my friends had nicknames: Bilm, Pro, Rocky, Little Rock (Rocky's brother), Cork, Megaton, Oatface, Nielsaroni Face, Big D (alternately Big Dez), Bish, Looter, Mack, Bills, Lizard, DKR (alternately Dra Kay Ra, acronymous for Daniel Kenton Reasoner), and Hercle Ivy. (Hercle Ivy even gave nicknames to his family: sister Jive, mother Jive Senior, and The Bear.) I simply went by T, the least colorful of all nicknames. Perhaps it was because I was enigmatic in some way since I was the only kid I knew who didn't live at home. I also often carried a "bag of tricks" with me to class which at any given time contained a length of jute rope (for who knows what), a jar of vaseline (for greasing doorknobs), a fifth of Seagram's gin in the "ancient" bottle and some Tom Collins mixer (for fun), a hemostat, and several dozen condoms (for wishful thinking). I was known from eighth grade on as the inventor of the most complicated handshakes imaginable, some taking almost two full minutes to execute. I was an honor student, by the way.<br /><br />I don't know many people who have nicknames now, other than old bosses and co-workers who I've bestowed nicknames on behind their back - Kaptain Kaos (or Double K), for instance. Or the pestiferous duo of product managers who had the habit of buzzing into my office and telling me how to write copy. I dubbed them Thing One and Thing Two. I have affectionate nicknames for former co-workers who I consider friends - Francie, for instance, for Francesca who in turn calls me Gunny Sack. I'm pretty sure everyone who has ever worked with Matt "Douchebag" Lange calls him either Lange or Douchebag (lovingly, mind you). Given his unique and consistent penchant for blowing things off, we actually verb-ized his last name. If you inadvertantly stand someone up for a lunch date, you have "totally Langed" on them. You've met Elizabeth, of course. How she got the nickname Becky was a stretch. When I was really excited over something I'd say to her, "Ohmigod Becky!" (which is naturally a reference to the opening line of the Sir Mix-A-Lot classic <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/sirmixalot/babygotback.html">"Baby's Got Back"</a><a href="http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/sirmixalot/babygotback.html">)</a>. To which she would reply, "OhmiGAWD my name's not Becky!" So of course from then on out she was Becky to me. However if anyone else called her that, I'm sure they'd get <span style="font-style: italic;">at least</span> hissed at.<br /><br />Which now brings to the reason why I absolutely hate being called "Thad" - always have, always will. I know that relatives do it out of habit, and acquaintances do it out of a need for familiarity, like automatically calling someone "Bob". But it's not a name. "Thaddeus" is a name. It means "big hearted". "Thad" is a sound effect. It is the sound that horse poop makes when it hits pavement. I'd rather be called by one of the nicknames I've heard before (T. Gunn, Gunnie, Gunny Sack, or Teresa's reciprocal nickname for when I call her Muffin, which is Stuffin') than be called Thad.<br /><br />And with that, I bid you a good night, my dear Bonus Lips!<br /><br />-Thaddeus<br /><br /><br /><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-3826467674873163952008-01-31T17:55:00.000-08:002008-01-31T19:57:22.319-08:00There Are Things I Simply Must Do<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R6KXTV8xdII/AAAAAAAAAak/nasVt2o81Yg/s1600-h/box_gas.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R6KXTV8xdII/AAAAAAAAAak/nasVt2o81Yg/s400/box_gas.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5161854481485362306" border="0" /></a><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">It's the least I could do. </span>Out of horror over<br />the roiling, bombastic stench that my alimentary<br />canal produces and out of pity for my new co-<br />workers, I've resorted to taking DA's Gas Defense.<br />It's the least I could do, considering that I no<br />longer have an office to keep the evil sealed within.<br />The upside is that it works. The downside is<br />that it makes your viscera glow with almost<br />phosphorescent splendor (as accurately pictured<br />on the box).<br /></span><br />Greg:</span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">I've found what it possibly the only drawback of my new job, and it is this: I cannot pick my nose. RealNetworks, for all its faults, was good enough to provide me with an office. And that office came with a door. A door that closed. The door was also opaque, as all good wooden doors are. That means that I was free to carry out all manner of disgusting but oh-so-necessary grooming activities in complete privacy. All I had to do was to put a series of Post-Its on my door that read "ON THE PHONE...INTERVIEWING...<a href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2006/07/follow-up-letter.html">IRON MAIDEN</a>". (This is an almost entirely inside joke that perhaps only my former co-worker Edwin Sprague will get. Ed Sprague, by the way, was on the editorial team of my favorite mystery novel, the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences. <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=-wt1aZrGXLYC&pg=PR14&lpg=PR14&dq=ed+sprague+MITECS&source=web&ots=91VBd6OY9q&sig=FmrGyDI6wfJ5t4Tw-hf2pVKqKSk">I would not crap you about a thing like that</a>.)</span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">At my new gig, (T. Gunn, Senior Copywriter, MRM Worldwide, damn glad to meet ya) I am out on the open floor in a cube farm. Did I say "cube farm"? I meant "cube <em>prairie</em>".They're nice cubes, mind you. Made of very attractive blonde wood veneer and frosted glass. Not those things that are covered with The Grey Upholstery of Mind-Numbing Death that are designed to dampen the shrillness of your screams. But they are cubes nonetheless, so they are extremely challenged on the "privacy" vector. As fate would have it, mine sits right next to the door of our foremost conference room. And as fate would have it, I had my index finger buried to the knuckle as though I was trying to self-lobotomize, when lo, half the staff exited its door and filed past my desk with looks of mingled puzzlement and horror on their faces.</span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">In my defense, I must say that Baby Jesus cursed me with rather diminutive nostrils, and in the dry air season, they tend to fill up with gravel, salamanders, and all manner of real estate that must be dislodged if I am to breathe at all. God, not man, decides when you should breathe. If you don't believe me, hold a pillow over your face. God will make you breathe. Therefore, it was the <em>machina</em> of <em>deus</em> that drove my index finger into my nose in plain view of 50% of the MRM staff. T'was not my will, nor my practically genetic inclination toward the uncouth. </span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">And speaking of diminutive nostrils, the second joke that Baby Jesus played on me was to make them hirsute. Half the time, it is as if I am trying to breathe through a fir tree - without the piney fresh scent. So again, if I am to breathe at all, that damn pelt inside my snout must be rent and ripped free. There's not other way to do it. Grip it and rip it. (And don't make that face like you've never done that before. Everyone on the planet has pulled a nosehair or two, even if it was only to fake weeping.) So now, instead of being able to rip to my heart's content inside the protection of my office, I must excuse myself to the men's room and hunker down in a stall with a jumbo binder clip in one hand and a sock to stuff in my mouth, lest I cry out in pain. O, the indiginty!</span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">And finally - not to be crude but these things <a href="http://deargregory.blogspot.com/2007/02/why-must-i-fart-so-much.html"><em>simply must be addressed</em> </a>- I used to be able blast a pretty good pants-ripping poot in my old office without fear of offending anyone or setting anything on fire. (The main sprinkler stand pipe ran right through my office.) But here, if my ass were to make any of its usual clapping, shouting, alpenhorn-tooting, whip-cracking, duck-squashing onamatopaeia, at least thirty sets of eyes would snap away from their monitors in shock. So I have become adept at suppressing several dirigibles worth of flammable gas during my workday. The downside is that I am becoming quite round, and have devloped a fear of even the smallest sharp object. </span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">Cheers,</span></div><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">-Thaddeus </span></div><br /><div> </div><br /><div> </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-7584963965805270452008-01-27T19:28:00.000-08:002008-08-06T09:17:52.090-07:00Positively Tripping Balls<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R51ZtV8xdFI/AAAAAAAAAaM/07XFOqm5J5M/s1600-h/Left01.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R51ZtV8xdFI/AAAAAAAAAaM/07XFOqm5J5M/s400/Left01.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5160379383557485650" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Scrunchy The Bear</span>, ShopRite's cereal mascot and<br />CEO of Scrunchy's Bunch Kids Club which purports<br />to be the "Coolest Club Around" (much to the chagrin<br />of the Lankershim Crips of LA's San Fernando<br />Valley). Members of Scrunchy's Bunch are afforded<br />such expense-free premiums as downloadable<br />activity books that will show you how you can just<br />fuck shit up and <a href="http://www.shoprite.com/Cnt/documents/WK4606ChanukahBook2web.pdf">totally blow the lid off your family's<br />Hanukkah celebration. </a><span style="font-style: italic;">Give up the dreidl, bitches! I<br />fidda take all y'alls snap!<br /></span></span><br />Greg:<br /><br />I'm feasting on a positively baroque delight right now, a concoction that I cobbled out of Rice Dream, bananas, and Scrunchy's Cocoa Bombs, a chocolaty breakfast staple that can be found for 87 cents a box at the local <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.groceryoutlets.com/">Ghetto Mart</a>. This means that in no time at all I'll be positively tripping balls, running around the house screaming, trying to avoid the Sugar Weevils that claw at my soul every time I have a wee too much of the sweet stuff before bedtime. That also means that tomorrow sometime around 2PM, my head will slam into my desk and I will not be roused by either lemon juice to the eyes nor repeated applications of the whip to the tender, tender flesh of my nape.<br /><br />Speaking of desks and tender napes, I have a new job! I alluded to this in my last post, but now I am allowed to speak freely (although not <span style="font-style: italic;">too</span> freely, as I have not yet received my last check from my old employer). I'm inclined to do some mourning on behalf of my former colleagues - really good people caught in an untenable and utterly dysfunctional situation - and some lambasting of my former keepers, viz., anything VP or above in that organization. However, I will not engage in the latter because it's pointless, not to mention bad manners, to air one's bile-covered laundry in public. I already said anything that I needed to say during my exit interview, much to the disbelief of the interviewer. ("<span style="font-style: italic;">That</span> incompetent?" "Yes, <span style="font-style: italic;">that </span>incompetent." "Should not be..." "...be managing let alone exposed to humans; right - that's what I said. Write it down.") Not that RealNetworks is going to make any sweeping changes based on the peevish ranting of a departing employee. Let me just say that I really miss my former colleagues. But thanks to the magic of email, I can still badger them from afar. And I do. Lovingly.<br /><br />Onward.<br /><br />How would I best describe my new position? Lemme put it this way. At the end of a 13-hour day, when you can walk out of a five hour meeting that adjourns at 9:30PM and say, "THAT'S THE STUFF, LAD! TEAR ME OFF ANOTHER PIECE OF <span style="font-style: italic;">THAT!"</span> without a hint of irony (but with a thick Glaswegian brogue), then you know you're in the right place. How can I make this claim? Because I did it. Ask anyone who was driving on 1st Avenue South last Tuesday night. Or simply Google the headline "Crazy Fuckin' Scottish Guy Has Excellent Day At New Job". I think it'll take you to a video link on CNN.com. I told my former boss this and she said, "They must be doing something right. I was hard pressed to keep you from falling asleep during a ten minute conversation, fer crissakes!"<br /><br />Diversion: the oil change notification sticker from my local Jiffy Lube says "<span style="font-style: italic;">have a excelant day</span>" on it. They have openings. Valedictorians need not apply.<br /><br />The sun peeked out for more than ten minutes today, so I seized (Soze? -Ed.) upon the opportunity to ride my bike. I rode 200 blocks. That's about 12 miles, but it sounds more impressive as blocks, dunnit? The map of Seattle is diced with bike trails, and there's one - the Interurban Trail - that starts a block from my house and runs...hell, I think it runs all the way to Canada or something now. I just rode it up to the county line, then stopped and wistfully pondered what suburban wonders must lie beyond before heading back. The best part of the ride was when I saw a guy reading the Sunday paper in his living room. Not too unusual except for the fact that he had an 80-pound tabby cat lounging on the back of his neck. He seemed not to notice, although the cat looked pretty goddamn smug.<br /><br />It's getting late. I should probably wind this up before - <span style="font-style: italic;">The Weevils! The Weevils! Quick, someone hand me a Shoggoth!<br /><br />-</span>Thaddeus<br /><br /><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-73133543374262081982008-01-06T19:37:00.000-08:002008-08-05T22:13:50.930-07:00Post-Christmas Catchup<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R4VXa9FMOVI/AAAAAAAAAZY/9F8u_OXVw4U/s1600-h/Kerney2.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R4VXa9FMOVI/AAAAAAAAAZY/9F8u_OXVw4U/s400/Kerney2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5153621469179951442" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Ich Bin Ein Berserker:</span> Seahawks defensive end Patrick Kerney<br />celebrates his umpty-millionth hit on Redskins QB Todd Collins.<br />If you squint real hard, you might be able to see me. I'm a tiny speck<br />of fuzz in the background.<br /></span><br />Greg:<br /><br />Sorry I haven't written for more than a month. I have been distracted by ever so many things, football among them, as well as football most recently, so why don't I just go ahead and start there and work backwards? Hmm? 'Kay?<br /><br />After a completely schizophrenic season, the Seahawks are in the playoffs. So naturally I spent Saturday shrieking my ever-living 'nards off at the Hawks-Redskins Wild Card playoff game, which my beloved Seahawks won quite handily 35-14. The score was not always that lopsided, as those dastardly Redskins conspired to edge ahead in the third quarter. But lo, my beloved Seahawks pulled their helmeted heads out of their spandex-clad asses and scored - what, like 21 points or something? - in the fourth quarter, thus ensuring that they would live to play the Green Bay Meat Packers (that was their original name - nay, I poop you not) Saturday next at Lambeau Field. Quick highlight reel: Hawks defensive end Patrick Kerney, the only man whose biceps can be seen from the space shuttle, flattened the poor 'Skins QB Todd Collins any number of times even though the 'Skins defense had him triple-teamed. <span style="font-style: italic;">Triple teamed</span>. They devoted <span style="font-style: italic;">three</span> strapping young lads to foiling his progress, yet they could not stop this hammer-willed juggernaut of unquenchable force. (Do you write comic books...or porn, for that matter? -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.) Nearly incomprehensible amounts of ass were kicked, and I was not only on hand to witness it, but used my lungs to propel my team to victory. I am hoarse as heck even today, four days later. I left it all on the field. 130dB at the 50 yard line during the game.<br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R4WfktFMOWI/AAAAAAAAAZg/4VbmbnjjSjY/s1600-h/NNGswick.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R4WfktFMOWI/AAAAAAAAAZg/4VbmbnjjSjY/s400/NNGswick.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5153700801520875874" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">My tiny Christmas Village</span> has expanded to two neighborhoods this year: Lower<br />New New Gunnswick, and Upper New New Gunnswick (pictured above) which sits<br />high atop Mount PianoForte in the province of Living Room. Newly added this year<br />are the Fruit Market and (I shit you NOT!) Dr. John E. Wilson's Dentist Office. Plus<br />I threw in some moose and bears and foxes and shit just to fuck with the locals. When<br />Teresa saw all the new stuff, she was approximately 70% less than stoked.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Christmas was good to me. I got, among other things, a new job. I'll leave the details on that to a future epistle, but suffice it to say for now that it's a gigantic step up. I gave Teresa a string of black pearls. She was so stunned, she hasn't taken them off since except to shower. Aaron got a digital video camera, and was likewise speechless. I got Seahawks slippers, Seahawks socks, and a 2007 edition Seahawks knit cap (so I can look just like my heroes of the gridiron). When paired with my Seahawks bathrobe and Seahawks jammies, the entire <span style="font-style: italic;">ensemble</span> makes me look like the Hugh Hefner of the frump-slash-sports fan set. I couldn't be happier.<br /><br />Speaking of happier, did I say that I got a new job? Yes, yes I did. Well I'll leave off the details again, only to say that I'm really going to miss the people I work with at Real. It's sad to leave, but leave I must. As a parting gesture, three of my colleagues re-carpeted my office with astro turf while I was away over the holidays. They even put little hash marks and a goal line on it! Now every time I walk to my desk and sit down, I shout <span style="font-style: italic;">'TOUCHDOWN SEAHAWKS</span><span style="font-style: italic;">!</span>" (The lady in the office next to mine is going to stab me in the gizzard for making her jump all the time. I just know it.)<br /><br />It seems like it was barely four years ago that I was sitting in Myrtle Edwards park on a bright sunny day, just across the way from the RealNetworks corporate HQ, mulling the prospect of accepting an offer to become just about the only on-staff copywriter here. I knew that meant that I'd have to give up the thrill of being a freelance copywriter-slash-bill collector. I knew it meant that I could no longer work from home in my underwear...well, not <span style="font-style: italic;">all </span>the time. But I took the plunge. And four years later, here I am with a wicked case of carpal tunnel syndrome, a bunch of people that I'm going to miss horribly, and an office full of turf to show for all my hard work. RealNetworks now has at least a hundred and thirty eight writers, all of whom are more bitter than me. I call that progress. <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span>Adieu, mes amis! Beau heau heau heau heau!</span> (Is that how they weep in France? -Ed.)<br /><br />Inside joke to the people at Real: At least we'll have the holiday party! Oh wait, no we won't. <span style="font-style: italic;">Psyche!<br /><br /></span>By the way, congratulations on your new gig! It's not very often that you get something that uses every one of your talents. It's about time, though. You deserve it.<br /><br />Cheers,<br /><br />-Thaddeus<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-32252168223121849912007-12-10T13:30:00.000-08:002008-08-05T22:17:01.902-07:00The Church Of Crunch<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R2AMWJ8OtoI/AAAAAAAAAYw/RZLv-nBnNe8/s1600-h/09000d5d804f51e9_gallery_600.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R2AMWJ8OtoI/AAAAAAAAAYw/RZLv-nBnNe8/s400/09000d5d804f51e9_gallery_600.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5143124349222303362" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Namaste</span><span style="font-weight: bold;">, Motherf#$%er! </span>The Buddha of Violent Compassion drops<br />220 pounds of enlightenment on Cardinals kicker Mitch Berger.</span><br /><br />Greg:<br /><br />I took time off from being a mold farmer to attend Sunday's Seahawks v. Cardinals NFC West Divisional Championship Extravapalooza at Qwest Field (</span><span style="font-size:85%;">"Home Of The Loud Crowd")</span><span style="font-size:85%;">. I cannot tell you how much joy it brings me to be able to go to games, especially games where a hardcore <span style="font-style: italic;">Nichiren</span> Buddhist like Seahawks kick returner Josh Scobey delivers the full weight of karma to Cardinals punter Mitch Berger in his own end zone, resulting in a safety for the Seahawks and instant enlightenment for the entire crowd of 68,000 (see above). Ironically, (...or not. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.) Qwest Field is where the Dalai Lama will be laying down the hits on happiness and compassion next April. Believe me, I'll be screaming my guts out from the 300-level on that day, too. I predict that he will sack ignorance for a loss. I can hardly wait to see his end zone dance. (Wait, the Dalai Lama plays both offense and defense? No wonder he won the Nobel. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)<br /><br />Digression: I heard this great bit in a standup routine once. "Why is it that football players blame themselves when they do poorly and thank God when they win? Just for once I'd like to hear a player say, 'I was doing great until Jesus made me fumble.'"<br /><br />Which brings me to the subject of sports and religion as the two things seem to be inextricable. And I'm not talking just during player interviews. I submit as evidence Exhibit A below:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R12yAZ8OtmI/AAAAAAAAAYg/sSl-eLpDug4/s1600-h/Weaver.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R12yAZ8OtmI/AAAAAAAAAYg/sSl-eLpDug4/s400/Weaver.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5142462069560227426" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Exhibit A: The Reverend Leonard Weaver</span>, who coincidentally plays fullback for<br />the Seattle Seahawks, resists tacklers like he was a solid steel I-beam rooted<br />in The Jesus. He had four receptions for 56 yards on Sunday as the Seahawks<br />beat the Cardinals to clinch the NFC West...with yours truly propelling his<br />team to victory by screaming his guts out from section 342, row EE, seat 1.<br /></span><br />I mean check it out, what was that crazy basketball game those Aztecs used to play? (Mayans, but who's counting? -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)And weren't all those games to the greater glory of the god<span style="font-style: italic;"> Chocolatl </span>or something? And the Olympics - weren't they also for the greater glory of the Divine Residents of Mount Olympus? And now football - isn't pretty much everything that happens in football for the greater glory of The Jesus? I have no answer for that, nor do I have further musings. Although I find it interesting how at the end of each football game, a large contingency of players from both teams gather at center field to pray. One presumes that because they're praying en masse, it is a group effort of peace and compassion. Maybe it's not. Maybe they're all praying something like, "Lord, whensoever we see these muffuckers here present up in our house, may we rain Thy vengeance upon them, and tear they muffuckin' heads off fo' sho' next time. We ask this in sweet Jesus name. Amen." (It reminds me of a line from the Civil War film <span style="font-style: italic;">Glory</span>: "May I fight with the rifle in one hand and the good book in the other." -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)<br /><br />Sylvia Boorstein gives a nod to football fans in her book "It's Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way To Happiness". She dispels the notion that we (meaning Buddhists) are all about serenity and equanimity 24/7. We don't watch sporting events hoping that just the best team will win. Buddhists get as wound up about competition as just about anyone else, and it's perfectly okay to do so. Gelugpa monks go after theological debates like they were being televised on WWF Smackdown. Besides, there's nothing in the dhammapada about not freaking right the hell out over sporting events, like when some douchebag official destroys the sanctity of the Super Bowl by making a spate of doubtful calls. (Still bitter? -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)<br /><br />Likewise, I think it makes a huge difference when you choose to recognize both fandom and the game itself as dharma. Then football becomes a play that has the power to reveal the deepest values of nature, just like anything else would that you choose to recognize in that way. Football, fans and all, has no inherent reality, and is purely a contrivance based on arbitrary rules. And upon close inspection, (introspection?) I could say my life is pretty much the same damn thing. (Put. The Bong. Down. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.) But in either case, it doesn't keep me from screaming my head off when I feel moved to do so, either in real life or at Qwest Field. The difference is that I often forget that real life is just a play as well.<br /><br />I'm glad that I didn't forget that while my basement was flooding all to hell last Monday. As we were mopping and bailing, I said to Aaron (mostly to remind myself) that we should probably nevermind the rug, the walls, and the other tangible losses for now. I said the most valuable thing we probably had at that moment was our sense of humor. (Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how'd'ya like the play? -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)<br /><br />Speaking of play, I have to work now.<br /><br />Cheers, -Thaddeus<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-28594868805137615902007-12-04T06:23:00.000-08:002008-08-06T09:17:52.091-07:00After The Deluge<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R1VvtxuFitI/AAAAAAAAAYY/wUuJ-E-JSLs/s1600-h/2004050985.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R1VvtxuFitI/AAAAAAAAAYY/wUuJ-E-JSLs/s400/2004050985.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5140137381944724178" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Answer: Holy fucking shit.</span> Question: What are three words that describe the<br />second rainiest day in Seattle history?<br /></span><br />Greg:<br /><br />Here's a shocker: it rained in Seattle yesterday. That's not the big news. The big news is that it was the second rainiest day in Seattle history. A very angry, very soggy god sent a deluge which wiped out our evil and iniquitous storm drain system, turning manholes into geysers, city streets into raging rivers, and severely dampening my mother-in-law in her basement apartment. (I can't imagine what my mother-in-law Lucy, who is as sweet as sugar candy, could've done to offend the rain god. As she described it over a cup of coffee early this morning, "I was baptized by Seattle yesterday".)<br /><br />So to recap - I got a call from Aaron yesterday morning telling me that Lucy woke him up to tell him that something was wrong with her refrigerator. He went downstairs to find water coming from underneath it. I told him to handle it with towels for the time being and I would be right home. By the time I got home, there was no mistaking this for what it was: a flood and not a simple refrigerator malfunction. There was standing water in the apartment and more coming from underneath the baseboard on the north wall. Lucy and Aaron were working like champs to keep it at bay. Wise and experienced homeowner that I am, I saw fit to call our contractor John and get some advice. I tried to keep the hysterical shriek in my voice to a minimum as I explained the situation to him. (Hysterical shriek: think triple-high C on the shriekiest<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>stop of the famous Wanamaker Grand Court Organ.) He swung by post-haste and he, I and Aaron worked to move dirt and dig channels in the driveway to direct water away from my north wall. (You should see my driveway now. It's criss-crossed with a drainage network that would make the Dutch fight the Venicians for my honor. To quote Aaron, "It looks like war.") Speaking of which, Aaron and Lucy fought like Spartans against the water yesterday, Lucy mopping and wringing to beat the band and Aaron bailing with a strength and determination that might have saved the Titanic.<br /><br />Our brilliant network of canals worked eventually, although the downpour overwhelmed it at the beginning. John and I surmised that there was nowhere to send the water except into my neighbor Shawn's yard which was already underwater. After inviting Shawn to take a look at the situation, he offered to bring over his rotohammer and blow a few holes through the low concrete wall that separates our properties and let the water drain over on his side. John took me aside and whispered, "Holy cow. Now that's neighborly!" I'm glad our drainage channels worked and that Shawn didn't drill holes in the wall because the water in his yard made it all the way to his front door sill. I don't know if it made it into his living room or not.<br /><br />Speaking of neighborly, John L. Scott multi-award winning real estate agent Gloria Lee drove all over hell and gone to track down a submersible pump for us yesterday. She finally got one from Hertz. She has firmly established how much she rules, and everyone on earth should buy a house from her. </span><span style="font-size:85%;">Aaron was all too glad to hand over the bailing work to the pump, as hucking bucketloads of water out of a basement doorwell for hours on end is a Sisyphean task at best. </span><span style="font-size:85%;">Elizabeth was a rescuing angel for us as well, and brought us the three essentials of flood survival: homemade Ethiopian food, my cell phone charger (t'was dead during during the storm - not good), and her carpet cleaner. <br /><br />So today I will be continuing the cleanup work that was begun yesterday, wet-vacuuming the carpet in the downstairs apartment and generally douching the rest of the basement before mold sets in. I have COIT services coming over on Thursday to give the place the Hurricane Katrina cleanup treatment. Hopefully we won't be growing mold by then. Today I'll also have to throw myself upon the mercy of the Boeing Employees Credit Union and beg them subsidize new roofing, siding, and at least one French drain for this splendid-yet-soggy house that I have amassed precious little equity in so far. Wish me luck.<br /><br />Cheers, -Thaddeus<br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-10951521579598497382007-11-19T10:51:00.000-08:002008-08-05T22:13:50.930-07:00Malaise: Rhymes With "Holidays"<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R0nDzMcieLI/AAAAAAAAAX4/3HBNmPISJ1M/s1600-h/DJHackett.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/R0nDzMcieLI/AAAAAAAAAX4/3HBNmPISJ1M/s400/DJHackett.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5136852134274431154" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:78%;" >Totally gratuitous photo of Seahawks'<br />wide receiver DJ Hackett that has nothing<br />to do with this letter except that he's<br />ossum.<br /></span><br />Greg:<br /><br />Sorry to hear about you losing your job. What a freakin' pain in the arse. And what timing, too - right before the holidays! It seems like the fourth quarter thing to do: freak out about the books (because you were a dumbasss and, oh I don't know, created a revenue shortfall or something) and fire some completely innocent person. Teresa also got notified last week that her current contract in the IT department of Starbucks would be cut short by ten months; viz., it will be ending on November 30th instead of way the hell next year some time. Good thing we all have bills and mortgages, otherwise job loss wouldn't be so stressful. Shit. Which reminds me of the classic Shakespearean rhetorical quote: "Is Wayne Brady gonna have to choke a bitch?"<br /><br />So while we're at it, let's just sweep the rest of the woe out of the way so we can get on to happier things. A recent rainstorm has revealed that my roof leaks, and I have no means of getting up there to fix it at the moment. Nor do repeated pleas to contractors do any good. The guy who was supposed to finish the shower in my MIL in August still has not shown up, despite repeated threats to do so. I often wonder aloud what it must be like to be a contractor and be so immersed in cash that one can let work just slip away. Apparently I am in the wrong line of work. Every time I see some guy driving a shitty old truck with the words "General Contractor" on the side of it, I think to myself "There goes another recalcitrant millionaire".<br /><br />Perhaps there's an upside. Perhaps by the end of the rainy season, natural hydrometrics will have given me a brand new skylight right above my fireplace.<br /><br />Other stuff to bitch about: I went in for my second sleep study, the one where they strap you to a CPAP machine and then crank up the pressure until you look like Dizzy Gillespie. (No, honestly, every time the mask slipped my cheeks would inflate. It was 80% less than awesome.) When they came in to get me up in the morning, they were all "You did great! Your EEG shows that you slept a lot better and your blood oxygen was higher! Wow!" And I was all, "That was <span style="font-style: italic;">fawking hawribble!</span> I had a dream that I was being suffocated by Dizzy Gillespie! Worst night of my life!" And they were all "Well, to tell you the truth, we do try to crank up the pressure as high as we can through the course of the night." And I was all, "Wow, I wish I could get a job where I could torture people for fun."<br /><br />Since the CPAP experience was so damn fun, I decided that I'd try to attack the snoring problem by losing weight (which was a viable alternative, according to my doctor), and that I'd try to lose weight (and save some gas money) by becoming a bike commuter. So I went out and bought enough bike clothing to make myself look like a gigantic neon sausage. </span><span style="font-size:85%;">Then I put a bunch of blinky lights all over everything so I'd look like a 25 MPH Christmas Tree. And </span><span style="font-size:85%;">then I put a rack and panniers on my bike. So now that I'm all outfitted, now all I need is to grow some lungs - at least enough to do a 17 mile round trip every day. I've been practicing by doing 50-block sprints. Fortunately, there's a really nice bike path that starts only five blocks from my house and goes all the way to Everett, which is about 22 miles from here. That's nice because it means that I can actually sprint that distance without having to stop for traffic. Well almost never, that is. There are some crossings. Anyway, I've been doing this for a few weeks now and the net effect has been that I've actually gained two pounds and it looks like I've added a couple of panniers to my flanks. To wit, I am becoming mightily thick from the obliques down. If I get any thicker, I shall don a garland of acorns and look like a 25 MPH oak tree.<br /><br />Gotta run. I'd love to talk more, but it's only a few minutes before kickoff (Seahawks @ Rams) and once that ball leaves the tee, my IQ plummets drastically. I become such a yawping, mouth-breathing pithecanth that I have to coat my tongue with Vaseline lest it turn to jerky.<br /><br />Cheers,<br /><br />-Thaddeus<br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-8516588762292850512007-11-06T12:58:00.000-08:002008-08-06T09:17:52.091-07:00Zombie<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/RzDh3iRB1II/AAAAAAAAAXw/vEaiSUVWVNE/s1600-h/CPAP.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/RzDh3iRB1II/AAAAAAAAAXw/vEaiSUVWVNE/s400/CPAP.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5129848319782278274" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sleep Apnea Spokesmodel. </span>Every CPAP device now comes<br />with a complimentary cranky old fat dude.<br /><br /></span>Greg:<br /><br />Quick update. So I got the results of the sleep study. I'm not <span style="font-style: italic;">completely</span> dead. Only <span style="font-style: italic;">mostly</span> dead. Here's how they know. I wake up from having my airflow interrupted about 27 times an hour. (No, seriously, that's a completely crapless fact. 27 times an hour. That's about once every two and a quarter minutes for those of you who are playing along with your abacus at home. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.) That's called sleep <span style="font-style: italic;">apnea</span>, of course, but the real interesting thing is the sleep <span style="font-style: italic;">hypopnia</span>. That's when you just stop breathing altogether without an airflow interruption, necessarily. I do that too. However - and here's the good news - it's not from lack of trying on the part of my brain. That would be cause for concern, but I'm glad that's not the case. Perhaps I'm just being stubborn. Or perhaps I have no brain at all. Look at our mom. She has a calcified brain tumor the size of a walnut. (That's about 4 inches in circumference for those of you playing along at home with your calipers. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.) It hasn't harmed her not no way not nohow. Me not having no brain couldn't not do more any less harm to me, right? It must be genetic. I'm not <span style="font-style: italic;">re</span>-tarded. I'm <span style="font-style: italic;">pre</span>-tarded.<br /><br />Other interesting fact. My blood oxygen level while I sleep is 89.5%, which is not great, but not awful. It's not until you get down to 85% that you start talking about heart attacks. Good/normal is 98%. ("Blue In The Face" is #1208AF for those of you at home playing along with your hexadecimal codes. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.)<br /><br />So yeah, the next step is to send me back for another sleep study, this time with a CPAP. (That's Constant Positive Airway Pressure for those of you from NASA, "Home of the Acronyms", who are following along with your 2nd edition Acronomicon. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.) While I was in for my last study, somebody was in there with one of those things getting the pressure adjusted on it or the tranny pulled or some damn thing. All I know is that it sounded like a freakin' paint sprayer. Anyway, the doctor told me that I'd probably have to do two things to get rid of my snoring: 1) sleep with one of those damn paint sprayer things and 2) lose 30 pounds. Using the CPAP machine will facilitate weight loss and weight loss will help relieve the sleep apnea. It's a win-win, a "kindly cycle", if you will. Problem is, at 6'2", 230# and 16% body fat, I can probably lose 30 pounds. (Or if your math is wrong - which is likely - that's not possible. That is unless you don't mind being freezing cold all the time and having the wind whistle through your ribcage. -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.) I will either look completely ripped (sweet!) or like Skeletor the 2nd (which is sweet if you like Skeletor). Looks like I'll be riding my bike the 17-mile round trip to and from work every day. Either that or I have to cut off one of my calves and all of my hubris to get that skinny.<br /><br />I know it's going to be difficult, but here's what I'm dealing with now. I have very little short term memory left. Or at least that's what it feels like. What was I saying? Oh yeah. They say sleep effects memory, and right now I feel like the guy in "Memento". I also have that sleep paralysis thing going on a few times a week, which is something that you get from chronic sleep deprivation. Imagine not being able to move, speak or breathe - in other words, being completely paralyzed - and being completely awake. Now I know what people who die of <span style="font-style: italic;">fugu </span>poisoning feel like.<br /><br />So if I get this CPAP thing, no matter how cumbersome and silly it looks (Yo! Snuffleuppagus! -<span style="font-style: italic;">Ed</span>.), perhaps I won't get so damn tired every afternoon that I practically fall face first onto my keyp<span style="font-style: italic;">0[qawfp9wef'pwiaeh089234q07tq0[gfqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq348y---------------0[</span><br /><br /><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13178668.post-80435405234726506662007-10-25T14:18:00.000-07:002008-08-06T09:17:52.092-07:00il Purgatario di Morpheus<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/RyFSdCRB1FI/AAAAAAAAAXA/ZH2fZrQrYwQ/s1600-h/before.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/RyFSdCRB1FI/AAAAAAAAAXA/ZH2fZrQrYwQ/s320/before.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5125468509702313042" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Before: Wired for sound.</span><br /> The great part about it was that I could receive<br />all 789 channels of DirecTV<br />in my sleep.<br /><br /></span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/RyFTIiRB1HI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/EOt-LIyMuOQ/s1600-h/after.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 165px; height: 206px;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_lCnlt_QhwBI/RyFTIiRB1HI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/EOt-LIyMuOQ/s320/after.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5125469257026622578" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">After: "You didn't knock me down, Ray."</span><br />And then I had to wear those damn wires<br />all damn day.<br /></span><br />Greg:<br /><br />So I went in for my sleep study night before last. They should really call it a Lack-Of-Sleep Study, or Sleep Jail, or the Purgatory of Morpheus since someone obviously spent a lot of time dreaming up ways to fuck with people while they sleep. To wit: the thirty-six miles and forty eight leagues of wire that they attach to everything but your taint. I was right. They really do wire the hell out of you and put tubes up your nose, then put you in a strange bed and tell you to go to sleep. Not that the bed's so bad. It's a Tempur-Pedic, just like the one I have at home. But apparently Tempur-Pedic's "revolutionary support at an unmatched value(tm)"<br />freaked some people out (they thought that memory foam felt weird and kinda hard) so the good people at Sleep Center Northwest made the beds even more comfortable by frosting each mattress with a thin layer of futon. The result is a delicious sleepcake of unmatched comfort for the highest quality in somnolent repose. Too bad you don't get no somnolent repose, what with all the wires and the wires and the more wires and them waking you up because "oh shit one of your wires came off". They even had a tiny wire attached to the end of my left index finger. What they failed to tell me was that it had a tiny red LED in it, so when I went to rub my eye in the dark I was nearly blinded by its laser-like brilliance.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><br />So I was in for two things, an overnight sleep study (polysomnogram) and the daytime sleep study (multiple sleep latency test). At the end of the overnight test, an EEG tech, a skinny Asian fellow, came in and woke me up and made me go into another room and get on a treadmill. I thought that was kinda weird, but I played along because, hey, what the hell do I know about stuff? It's my first time. So I'm on the treadmill with all the wires hanging off of me and I'm puffing along and the tech starts complaining about how he has intestinal gas and asks me if I have any Tums or anything. I say yeah, I think I have some in my toilet kit in my room, so I get off the treadmill and go into my room to get him some Tums. Well while I'm in there rummaging around in my toilet kit, I'm looking at my comfy, comfy sleepcake bed and thinking about how groggy I am and how nice it would be to snuggle back down between its creamy layers, and suddenly I'm all "fuck it, I'm going back to bed". So I crawl back into bed and nod off, and in about ten seconds another EEG tech opens the door and gets me up. But this time I notice that he's a real EEG tech and that the other guy was, well, kinda imaginary. And there's no treadmill anywhere in the building. I dreamt that whole thing.<br /><br />The real guy's name was Grady and turned out to be a boon companion in what was an otherwise purgatorial experience. He was charged with performing my MSLT. That means that he made me take a series of five naps throughout the day and about two hour intervals. The rules were that if I fell asleep in the first fifteen minutes, I got to sleep for another fifteen minutes before they woke me up. But if I failed to fall asleep in the first fifteen minutes, then he'd come back in and get me out of bed. (And he'd know if I fell asleep or was just faking because something called "K spindles" would show up on my EEG if I nodded off.) I don't know if you've ever taken a nap in the middle of the day and then been woken up against your will, but it makes you so you're not quite awake or asleep for the rest of the day. OK - now imagine doing that five times. Yeah. Harsh. But I did manage to fall asleep two or three of the five times. I don't really remember. But what I do remember that I had a dream where I was attacked by a giant Reuben sandwich in outer space. (No, seriously, I actually dreamt that.)<br /><br />One thing I forgot to mention is that there was an infrared camera in the room so they can laugh when you roll over on your morning missile and squeak with pain. I also forgot that it was there when I was buck-ass naked, getting into and out of my pajamas. I apologize to anyone at the front desk who may have been traumatized by either event. Just be glad the monitors are black and white and not color.<br /><br />I managed to kill the time between naps by watching the "Empire of the Air" episode of Ken Burns' America series (good, nerdy stuff) and "Junebug" (Amy Adams is awesome and the Oscar nomination was well deserved, however the rest of the movie sucked a big, fat southern stereotype). Once those were gone, I was left with nothing to read but trade rags for the sleep industry. Not very compelling stuff, as you can imagine. Prolly great for inducing naps, though.<br /><br />I get my results back next Tuesday. Until then I'll probably just continue in this half-awake state that has been become my living nightm -<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">GIANT SANDWICH! WHY DO YOU TORMENT ME!?</span><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0