Dear Gregory

So wait, what was I saying again?

2011-01-20T11:50:00.000-08:00

I been creepin' all up in this Holy beeyatch.

Greg:

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?

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. -Ed.)

So, to make a really awkward segue, I've been going to church. 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) you and I are preacher's kids and got churched harder than most minor saints, and b) I'm a non-theist would make the idea of ever entering a church again utterly anathema to me. You'd think so, right?

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". -Ed.)

Let me back up. Here's how all that came about:

I work all damn day by myself doing my marketing 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.

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 Theology Pub. 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?

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 literally taking the cock and balls off of God"? (You mean aside from on the bus...every day...directed at no one in particular? -Ed.)

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 hand-jive, 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 did not spontaneously combust.) was just icing on the communion wafer.

Oh and then - and THEN - 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.

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.

Peace,

-Thaddeus

Brains by Jesus. Body by Fisher.

2008-11-25T10:19:00.000-08:00

Birthmark borne by every native of Detroit.

Greg:

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.

Look, this does not make me some kinda weirdo. Or a stalker. (Well, yeah actually by definition it does. -Ed.) I just have to come to grips with the fact that I really love cars and start feeling okay about it.

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." -Ed.)

But first, can I take just a moment to address the current issue with The Big Three automakers flying to Washington on their private jets to look for a handout from Congress? For the record: fuck those guys. And furthermore, fuck those guys. 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.

Now, moving on...

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. Or so Wikipedia tells me.

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 vroom vroom vroom! Yay! Vroom! I swear, every once in a while I see something like, say, the brilliantly designed, well-powered, gracefully accelerating - obsidian-black haunches...glistening I tell you! - Deville in question that makes me practically gob on my shirt. Seriously.

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 CARS ARE OSSUM! VROOM VROOM VROOM! YAY! VROOM! YAY?

I make my case for the assertions above with the examples below:

1969 Pontiac GTO
Remember when we lived on Chippewa Street in Pontiac? (Remember how they name everything in Michigan after Indians? -Ed.) Remember Ruth McLay's mom? They lived on Navajo. (I rest my case. -Ed.) 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!

1973 BMW 2002
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.

2007 Dodge Charger Super Bee
I can feel you judging me already. "Greaser!" you spit with scorn. "Spawn of hillbillies! Trash blanc! " But before you cast the first stone - hold, I say unto thee! 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 have? And you didn't care for it? Well fuck you, hippie.)

2008 Toyota Tacoma w/Sport Package.
Duh.

1947 Chrysler Town and Country Woody Four Door Hard Top
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 bosoms! Maple beams and mahogany veneer - must've been a Steinway Grand in a previous life. I remember no greater joy of my childhood than road trips and camping excursions taken in this car.

Shit. Here comes my boss. Gotta mop up some spit.

Cheers, and back on the freeway which is already in progress.

-Thaddeus

Bruce Lee's Other Student

2008-10-20T21:39:00.000-07:00

My Sensei, Eddie Hart (at far left) back in the 1960s when he was a student of Bruce Lee.
At right is Jesse Glover, Lee's other famous student. Eddie died of emphysema in 2005.

Photo credit: Bruce Lee.

Greg:

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.

I'm taking a class in first person storytelling from David Schmader at Richard Hugo House. 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

PS: There's no title. Suffer. -TRG

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

Because I Got High

2008-09-14T08:32:00.000-07:00

MacAllan's 18 Year Old Single Malt Scotch.
For some it's a taste of heaven. For others it's
like peeing on an electric fence.

Greg -

Excellent birthday, I must say. I enjoyed the hell out myself, so thank you for aging. It was a day whereupon many important facts were exchanged:

Robben Ford is the shizzmatosis. Makes me wonder why I don't have more of his albums.
Jazz Alley is a sweet venue. Makes me wonder why I'm not a millionaire, and can't afford to pitch a tent there.
Starbucks really does make good coffee. A blind taste test at The Palace last night confirmed this.
MacAllan's is Scottish breast milk. Told ya so. I know this even though I can't drink it any more. Some things are expensive for no reason, like Hummel figurines and most dental work. MacAllan's is a significant exception in that it really truly is - well, really goddamn good in the way that the Ecstasy of St. Teresa must've been really goddamn good. And now you know this. (You're welcome.) It warmeth the cockles and maketh glad the heart of man, especially when that man has been standing out on a peat bog in a howling wind wearing nothing but composted wool and eating nothing but lichen and granite since the 12th century. Such are the genes whence we spring. (See also Kilsyth, Scotland, UK. -Ed.)

Certain things are meant to be savored - a doppio, f'rinstance, or a Fuente Hemingway Short Story. A sip from a good doppio spreads on the palate like annointing oil, livens the blood, and makes the ganglia twitch in many delightful ways. A nice slow draw on a Short Story evokes verses of cinnamon and pinola. And a wee dram of MacAllan's, with its soft, long finish and sherry oak sweetness, fondles your palate so divinely that you'll stain your Sunday trewes.

Makes me mourn the fact that I blew my chances of ever having any ever again by becoming a dirt-lapping, sky-barking akkaholik. (See also Drunk As Shite, Scotland, UK. -Ed.) I understand that concept that if you suck at ski jumping, you probably shouldn't go off ski jumps. (See also The Agony of Defeat. -Ed.) And if you're genetically predisposed to overindulge, you prolly oughtta keep an eye on that shit. (See also Scientists Discover Gene Responsible For Eating Whole Damn Bag Of Chips. -Ed.)

I was great at drinking, and drinking was fun for me, except for the part where it ruined my life. I probably would've enjoyed getting high if I hadn't been high.

So I figure here's what I can do. Once a year, on Burn's Day or Hogmanay or St. Andrew's Day or Let's Everybody In Kilsyth Get Pissed Day or whatever, I could have a medical professional apply one drop of MacAllan's 18 to my tongue while I relaxed in a strait jacket. That way I can get one glimpse of The Great Reward (its promise keeping me on the straight and narrow), and everyone could be sure that I wouldn't send my life off a ski jump. And it would act as an innoculation that made sure that I remained Scottish for another year.

Other news before my laptop battery dies and/or I'm kicked out of Starbucks for soaking up too much quasi-free Interwebs:

Somebody broke the Seahawks

If there's not a Seahawk in the world who doesn't have a broken this or a torn that, there will be by the end of the week, I'm sure. They should just keep those guys in boxes full of cotton batting until game day. We're out six - six! - receivers. Who the hell is Hasselbeck going to pass to, the people in the stands? But wait, this just in: the Seahawks are thisclose to signing their former first round draft pick and World Class Alcoholic Koren Robinson. (Robinson got booted by the Seahawks, Vikings, and somebody else for all the get-drunk-and-play-keep-away-with-the-police thing. I only ask one thing: make sure his liver isn't broken.

UPDATE 3:51PM PST: The Seahawks did indeed sign Koren Robinson. As part of the deal, Robinson was required to turn over his 2-year AA chip to Seahawks head coach Mike Holmgren, who gruffly pointed out that the exchange "Doesn't mean that we're goin' steady or nothin'."

Somebody broke the stock market

The Dow is down this morning, what - a zillion points? I woke up to find a soup line in the kitchen. What the f? Somebody wanna tell somebody this ain't the 1930s

UPDATE 3:51 PM PST: The stock market rebounded this afternoon on word from Ben Bernanke that all the collapses, failures and bailouts were just a joke and was only meant in good fun. Now all you unemployed people get back to work!

The Deepest Secrets Of The Greg Revealed!

2008-09-09T05:43:00.000-07:00

A Gargling(tm) of the term "deepest secrets" produces this trippy-ass image as a result.
It is rumored that The Greg lives in the basement of such a pyramid.

People:

Greg - as in the Greg, the one these letters are written to, not the noun Greg nor the verb, nor the infinitive "to Greg" - yeah, him. Well -

I have a hard time starting some mornings. Bear with.

Those stupid little questions that they ask you when you build your profile on a social networking site? The ones the writers (or Tom) 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.

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 know The Greg. In his words:

"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 "da.clitter.us" 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. -Ed.) Check it out."

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.

Without further ado -

Q. What would you do if no one were looking?
A. Create a social networking group for people who aren't looking.

Q. Who would you like to see on a new banknote?

A. Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Gummo and Karl Marx.

Q. What should you be doing?

A. Creating a social networking group for people who aren't looking.

Q. Favorite place to be barefoot?

A. A wading pool filled with those little sausages.

Q. Time flies when you're _________________

A. traveling backwards through a space/time wormhole. I'm pretty sure.

Q. When you go to a party and someone says, "What do you do?", what do you say?
A. "I go to parties so people can ask me what I do."

Q. DVD or TIVO?

A. DEVO.

Q. What's the greenest thing you do?

A. Allow moss to grow in my underwear.

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 if you dare.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Next Time, I Swear I'm Not Coming Back

2008-09-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

Click on the little word balloon thingy in the lower left corner to read the captions.

Greg:

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.

When we went up to Deer Park in Olympic National Park 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'. -Ed.)

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.

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.

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. I’m only doing it for therapeutic value. Honestly. I started going up into the mountains to help overcome anxiety. 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. -Ed.) 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.

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:

Falling into giant icy crevasses.
Eating the dead.
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.)
Having a pulmonary embolism for dinner.
Wigging out on hypoxia.
Pooping in a bag.
Starring in a book by Jon Krakauer.

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:

Fragrant alpine meadows.
Piney pine trees.
Surly marmots.
Tranquil mountain lakes.
Lunch.

In other words, if it's below the tree line, count me in. Likewise, if trees won't live there, why should I go?

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 liked, let alone some mountain.

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.

Picking up dog turds not as fun as it sounds

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.

Hauling rat-pee-covered insulation to the dump not as fun as it sounds

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.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Truck Sex On Satellite: Privacy in the post-InterWebs age

2008-09-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

Exciting New Google Maps feature! You can now use Google Maps to find
all the placeswhere middle-aged men are trying to talk their long-suffering
wives into having sex with them in the cabs of their trucks.*

"A less appetizing Google feature has never been introduced." -CNET Reviews

*Not.

Greg:

Teresa and I were driving over to Lowe's yesterday in my bitchen new truck when a great idea struck me.

"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."

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.

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 -

"No," she said.

"Why?" I said.

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 in flagrante delicto 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.

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.

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.

Some people might say, "Hey, isn't that called obfuscation and inveiglement?" 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 "Hornswoggling the InterWebs".

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 real me. Oh wait - there was some English novelist who had a character named Thaddeus Gunn, a name she undoubtedly stole from me, Thaddeus Gunn.

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.

"And how does us - as you so eloquently put it - "slamming ham" in the cab of your truck figure in to all of this?"

She had me there.

"It'd be fun."

"No."

"C'mon. You know what rhymes with truck?"

"Yes. You're out of luck."

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".

I suddenly lost the urge.

Seahawks place me on injured reserve list

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, "Shit that hurts!" The Seahawks dispatched the Raiders 23-16 in preseason action. In response to the 'Hawks victory, I was also quoted as saying, "Whooooooooo!" and "Go Haaaaaaaawwwks!"

The Indescribable Oomph - Part 2

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.)

The latest opus from this Unstoppable Mass-Mind of Advertising has been channeled through its humble servant eon. Observe his omnipotent flex-action on life-giving fluids:

Iced Tea

Massive Tribal Dump

2008-08-17T10:52:00.000-07:00

Give that man a job. Seahawks seventh round draft pick
Justin Forsett ran like a cat dipped in turpentine last night
in the 'Hawks preseason 29-26 OT victory over the Bears.

Greg:

I'm glad you finally got to witness first hand the huge screaming steaming drinking throbbing mass that is a Seahawks game at Qwest Field. 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.)

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 size of it all.

Now you also know how oh-so-very-goddamn loud 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.

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 tribally 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. -Ed.)

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 voice fer Winchell's sake, would become a frothing sweating screaming flailing fan of football. (Or FSSFF. Not the second mention yet. I know. I'm just getting ready. -Ed.)

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' haiku of all goddamn time from Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828):

It is a dewdrop world

Surely it is

And yet

And yet -

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 chiropractor would like to hear that too. -Ed.) (Quiet you! -TRG.) 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.

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.

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. -Ed.)

But I will always rage over the foibles of Charlie Frye, because as Issa put it so succinctly two hundred years ago:

It is a preseason game

Surely it is

And yet

And yet -

Cheers, -Thaddeus

I Should Be In Jail Etc. Part 3: The Kreamening

2008-08-15T09:12:00.000-07:00

Better products for better kreaming, through science.
Fig 1: A white lab-coated scientist, not unlike those who
create our favorite food products every day.

Greg:

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.

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 the shit out of a telephone. Just you try and stop me.

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 evil hand , die hand die verletzt - and another one that is as numb as a churchgoer's ass. But that's another story.

I feel all jibbity-jibbity suddenly. Are there weasels in my duodenum?

Wait - you know what' s going on? They put sugar in my smoothie. Those guys. The ones at the Alki Cafe. The carburetor on my pancreas is stuck wide open. 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! From hell's heart I stab at the- WHOAH! CHECK IT OUT, A FIRE TRUCK! Just FEAST YOUR BABY BLUES ON THAT BIG SHINY BEEYOOOT-

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.

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 tropical oils 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.

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.)

And then a prank was born.

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.

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, "It'll Have Ya Trippin'!" 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).

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).

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.

"Thaddeus," he said with a sigh of resignation, "That...was really, really, really funny."

"Seriously?" I said.

"Mm hmm." He said.

"OK. Should I just...go back...to work now?"

"Sure. Oh - one thing."

"What's that?"

"Don't do that again."

"Okay I won't."

"Yeah. Do something different. You gotta stay sharp. Test your limits and abilities. Know what I mean?"

"Yes I do."

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.

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.

It'll have ya trippin'!

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

I Should Be In Jail By Now, Part 2: Choking The Chicken

2008-08-12T20:42:00.000-07:00

Careful. That shit can get you fired.

Greg:

K. So. Like I was saying about stuff I did that prolly shoulda landed me in jail. Remember back last time when I told you that bit about getting fired for 'malicious compliance'? Here's how that went down:

Chilly the Weather Chicken

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.alt.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.

In the case of the late KJET-AM, (which thanks to the immortalizing power of the InterWebs you can still listen to on Live365 and MySpace) 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. This was way back in nineteen-ought-eighty-nine. 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 one solid gold rocket car apiece.

Here's a spoiler: If you're not listening to b-side oldies right now, it means the experiment failed.

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, you could always migrate elsewhere. Plus you always got a big fat severance check.

So we're sitting there in this meeting, THE 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.

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 boss-jock horseshit radio we could possibly do. (See also: The Real Don Steele. -Ed.) 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. I changed my air name to Big Rick Hardy.

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 cart of a chicken buh-gawking along with some wild sound of me gagging, perhaps captured during one of my drunken afternoons at the Five Point.

So along comes my new boss Danny Holiday 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. "Nooooooo waaaaaayy!" I says. "Yep. S'a'fact," he says. "Can't bleeve you dinnint know that."

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?!!

Oh yeah, I got a big fat severance check.

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.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

I Should Be In Jail By Now, Part 1

2008-08-06T11:04:00.000-07:00

There once was a town called Nantucket. (Shown here, smaller than actual size.)
The guy with the gimongous schweinstucker lives in the third shack on the left.
Note the wheelbarrow.

Greg:

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 Chateau d'If. What for? Because I pull mildly pernicious 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.

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.

OK - maybe not jailed, but perhaps fired. But if you're gonna get fired, get fired for something, right? You know honestly, I got fired for malicious compliance 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.

But there's been a load of stuff that I didn't get fired for that I prolly shoulda. Like for instance:

THE REHAB GAG

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 rehab. 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 TeleChubbies. I think it was 'TeleChubbies Do Manhattan'. But anyway, s'all good."

Now is that so wrong? My old boss seemed to think so. I was all like, you think I'll get fired? And she was all, I don't know, we'll have to talk about that when we fire you.

By the way, I don't work there anymore.

And then there's:

THE NANTUCKET GAG

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:

There once was a man from Nantucket
Whose **** was so long he could **** **.
He wiped off his chin
And said with a grin
"If my ear were a **** I could **** **."

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".

And as a bonus, after these nice people fire me, I'm going straight to hell.

Is that all? Oh, mais non. I've just cracked the seal on this. I have any number of years to recount, and you, sir, shall be my confessor.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

PS: The Indescribable Oomph

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:

A Prayer to St. Expeditus

2008-07-29T17:08:00.000-07:00

St. Expeditus (above), patron saint of
The Republic of Molossia (where the f?),
also patron of procrastinators, programmers,
and emergencies (I shit you not), but
lest we forget, also patron saint of
greased lightning, fedex drivers, espresso jitterati,
nervous little dogs, wigged-out bugs,
alka seltzer bubbles, 4.4 forty runners,
coke freaks, meth freeeks, crank frreeeex,
and (say it with me now)
les freaks Parkour.

Saint Expeditus -

Howya doin'? You don't say. Ossum.

Most Holy and Glorious Martyr Expeditus,
Let us not beateth around the bush.
I know you know what I need.

I have already entreated St. Joseph on this point
And I know that you two talk,
Belonging thou both to the same lodge, as you do
And drinking ye both of the Fuzzy Navels
And playing thou both the game of bridge concomitantly
Each Wednesday and Saturday

For St. Joseph, while he's a nice guy
And handy with the woodworking tools
And good with the changing of the Holy Diapers of
Our Lord and Savior, Wee Screaming Baby Jesus,
...by the way, where the hell is Mary? Getting a pedicure or something?
Howcome she's not on poop detail?
Ohh...step father. Got it.

But lookest thou here, St. Expedite:
I didst my due diligence
And in accordance with the instructions
(In both English and Spanish)
On the laminated holy card,
Didst bury St. Joseph in order to hasten my request
That he help us procure a new home

I maketh not this shit up. That's what it said to do.
Think about it, St. Expedite.
I am a grown-ass man, yet I found myself
Whispering strange incantations over a plastic statue
And covering it with dirt in the deepest, darkest part
Of the mid-afternoon
My dignity thus compromised
For so great was my need
Disregarded I the chortling of the neighbors
And stoppered mine ears against their epithets

So - St. Expedite - here's the deal:
Whilst Most Holy St. Joseph is taking
A Blessed Dirt Nap
Steppest thou up to the ear of God -
- the BIG God, not any of the little ones -
And with an urgency that denotes impending urination
Beseech He/Him/She/It on my behalf
So that I, my wife, and all of our cohabiting family members
Who number (wait...five, plus eight...carry the twelve...)
Who are more numerous than the beasts of the air,
The birds of the field, and all the stars in the firmament
Of Hollywood combined -
(I didst the math and knowest it to be true for I have shown my work
In mine own third period notebook)
Lo! They are many and the house it is small -

Most Holy Martyr St. Expeditus,
As I hath mentioned before,
One saint has already been put on the job
And he's head-down in a flower pot, mulling his fate.
Don't want to sound like I'm threatening or anything
But unless thou likest the taste of dirt,
Perhaps you oughtta intercede on my behalf here chop chop,
Capiche?

Amen, and BFF:

-Thaddeus

Lunch

2008-07-23T22:16:00.000-07:00

Holy freaking shit! Is that a sandwich!? What sort of life must one lead, I wonder,
that they are amazed by the contents of your lunch box.

Greg:

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.

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 real questions that were actually asked of me at lunch time

Q: Hey, is that your lunch?
A: Holy shit! I have no idea. Let's watch me and see if I sit down and eat it.

Q: You eat salmon?
A: No, I am eating salmon.

Q: But I thought you were a vegetarian.
A: Was. Still am for the most part with the exception of salmon. Guess that makes me a vegaquarium.

Q: Is that a real word?
A: Oh for crissakes.

Q: But why salmon?
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.

Q: What made you become vegetarian in the first place?
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".

Q: So doesn't eating salmon freak you out?
A: Thanks for reminding me. Can I puke in your shoes?

Q: That's not an answer.
A: And that's not a question. And look! Now there's puke on your shoes.

Q: Why are you so grumpy?
A: Because I never get to eat my freakin' lunch in peace.

Q: Ha ha ha Thaddeus, you're so funny.
A: Thank you. But seriously, can I eat my freakin' lunch in peace?

Q: Are you going to eat that whole salad?
A: Yes. Are you going to eat all the oxygen in the room?

Q: Is that an omelet?
A: Nope. It's a placenta.

Q: Gross!
A: You asked.
Q: Is that white rice? That's weird. You eat white rice for breakfast?
A: Yeah, rice for breakfast is pretty rare and exotic. Only me and and six billion other folks are doing it.

Q: Do you put butter on everything?
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.

Q: What?
A: Nothing.

A Prayer to St. Joseph

2008-07-14T14:42:00.001-07:00

Props to the Pops: Lil' Jesus gives his step dad an under-chin high five.

Most Holy Saint Joseph,
step dad of Lil' Jesus,
for whom baby aspirin is named,
you taught our Lord
the carpenter's trade,
and saw to it
that he was always properly housed,
hear my earnest plea.

I want you to help me now
as you helped your foster-child Jesus,
and as you have helped many others
in the matter of housing.

Yeah, that's right, I said "housing".
I know I bought a house just a year ago.
Heareth me out.

I wish to purchase a house in the Admiral District,
a beautifully renovated 1929 Tudor,
in a great location near schools,
shops & parks(!)
with elegant period details & modern updates
leaded glass windows, tile fireplace, picture moldings
& mahogany woodwork
(yea, though the listing hath many ampersands
and parenthetically-ensconced exclamation points)
slab granite counters & eating
bar, new cabinetry, farmhouse sink & stainless appliances.

Yea verily, it is even earthquake retrofitted!

Most Holy St. Joseph,
who seest the content of mine heart and wallet
and knowest that I need more liquidity
and more open credit sufficient to procure
this domicile (though my credit rating be blameless),
...just hang tight for the rest of my plea, okay?
And not let thy holy eyes roll heavenward in disgust
and exasperation.

For with thine aid, I shall purchase it
quickly, easily, and profitably
yea though mine own real estate agent
mocketh me and telleth me to
suck it up for another year
with mine current shack.

And I implore you to grant my wish
by purifying the hearts of the two nice ladies
who own the place,
and filling them with eagerness, compliance, and honesty,
and having them see their way clear
to accommodate my impoverished ass
(likewise, a shitload of cash
thrown my way wouldn't hurt either,
if thou gettest my drift)
and by letting nothing impede the
rapid conclusion of the sale.

Dear Saint Joseph,
I know you would do this for me
out of the goodness of your heart
and in your own good time,
but my need is very great now
and so I must make you hurry
on my behalf chop chop.

For lo, my current residence overfloweth with residents.
My beloved mother-in-law Lucy,
who maketh The Waffles of Righteousness
each morning of which we eat,
verily I trod upon her even this morning
so pinched are our quarters.
Likewise the cat I have trod upon,
as well as the wife, the dog, and several door-to-door
salespersons, and they likewise have trod upon me,
each in their own time
verily because of the tiny
space wherein we live.
Yea, we squeezeth through the roof beams
like toothpaste, so pinched are
our quarters.

Saint Joseph, here is the deal:
I am going to place you
in a difficult position
with your head in darkness
and you will suffer as our Lord suffered,
until the aforementioned house is purchased by us.

Why? Because All The Catholics I Know
said I have to bury your likeness in the yard,
head down, until the deal is done.
And there was the part about pouring martinis on you, too.
I am not making this shit up.

Then, Saint Joseph, I swear
before the cross and God Almighty,
that I will redeem you
and you will receive my gratitude
and a place of honour in my new home.

Just do me this one solid.

Amen.

Well...How Did I Get Here?

2008-03-10T21:43:00.000-07:00

Say hello to Pearl. My utterly bitchen new Toyota Tacoma is outfitted precisely

as the one pictured here - right down to the black pearl paint job, Bilstein shocks and

skid plates. The only thing missing is the dirt bike in the back and the kid with the

mullet who is undoubtedly driving it.

"And you may find yourself at the wheel of a large automobile."
-Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime

Greg:

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.

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.

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.

For instance, it's no secret that I'm no fan of The Secret - you know, that book that tells you that your thoughts create invisible tractor beams 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.

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 how. 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 BLAM it suddenly existed all at once.

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.

Any insights you have are welcome.

Cheers, -Thaddeus

SPROING! / Later That Same Day

2008-02-17T06:49:00.000-08:00

Sprout faster, you cotyledonous bastard! Spring comes not when
the calendar says it does, but when I'm damn good and ready to
get on my bike and speed it into existence.

Greg:

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 (just like this one) 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.

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, "Winter Dankness: Sucky, Or Really Truly Sucky?" 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. -Ed.) 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 multiple sclerosis. 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.

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.

Sure, it could be placebo effect. Or it could be that I'm finally experiencing Garcia Effect for the taste of winter.

Look, I'd love to stay and chat but the sun just came streaming through the front win-

(EPILOGUE: The author's chair was found empty, as was his bottle of vitamin D3. His bike was nowhere to be found. -Ed.)

LATER THAT SAME DAY:

Greg:

I had a heck of a bike ride. Tested out the new bike rack by taking our bikes down to Myrtle Edwards Park 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 Hiram Chittenden Locks. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 "Baby's Got Back"). 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 at least hissed at.

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.

And with that, I bid you a good night, my dear Bonus Lips!

-Thaddeus

There Are Things I Simply Must Do

2008-01-31T17:55:00.000-08:00

It's the least I could do. Out of horror over
the roiling, bombastic stench that my alimentary
canal produces and out of pity for my new co-
workers, I've resorted to taking DA's Gas Defense.
It's the least I could do, considering that I no
longer have an office to keep the evil sealed within.
The upside is that it works. The downside is
that it makes your viscera glow with almost
phosphorescent splendor (as accurately pictured
on the box).

Greg:

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...IRON MAIDEN". (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. I would not crap you about a thing like that.)

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 prairie".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.

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 machina of deus 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.

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!

And finally - not to be crude but these things simply must be addressed - 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.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Positively Tripping Balls

2008-01-27T19:28:00.000-08:00

Scrunchy The Bear, ShopRite's cereal mascot and
CEO of Scrunchy's Bunch Kids Club which purports
to be the "Coolest Club Around" (much to the chagrin
of the Lankershim Crips of LA's San Fernando
Valley). Members of Scrunchy's Bunch are afforded
such expense-free premiums as downloadable
activity books that will show you how you can just
fuck shit up and totally blow the lid off your family's
Hanukkah celebration. Give up the dreidl, bitches! I
fidda take all y'alls snap!

Greg:

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 Ghetto Mart. 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.

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 too 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. ("That incompetent?" "Yes, that 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.

Onward.

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 THAT!" 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!"

Diversion: the oil change notification sticker from my local Jiffy Lube says "have a excelant day" on it. They have openings. Valedictorians need not apply.

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.

It's getting late. I should probably wind this up before - The Weevils! The Weevils! Quick, someone hand me a Shoggoth!

-Thaddeus

Post-Christmas Catchup

2008-01-06T19:37:00.000-08:00

Ich Bin Ein Berserker: Seahawks defensive end Patrick Kerney
celebrates his umpty-millionth hit on Redskins QB Todd Collins.
If you squint real hard, you might be able to see me. I'm a tiny speck
of fuzz in the background.

Greg:

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?

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. Triple teamed. They devoted three 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? -Ed.) 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.

My tiny Christmas Village has expanded to two neighborhoods this year: Lower
New New Gunnswick, and Upper New New Gunnswick (pictured above) which sits
high atop Mount PianoForte in the province of Living Room. Newly added this year
are the Fruit Market and (I shit you NOT!) Dr. John E. Wilson's Dentist Office. Plus
I threw in some moose and bears and foxes and shit just to fuck with the locals. When
Teresa saw all the new stuff, she was approximately 70% less than stoked.

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 ensemble makes me look like the Hugh Hefner of the frump-slash-sports fan set. I couldn't be happier.

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 'TOUCHDOWN SEAHAWKS!" (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.)

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 all 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. Adieu, mes amis! Beau heau heau heau heau! (Is that how they weep in France? -Ed.)

Inside joke to the people at Real: At least we'll have the holiday party! Oh wait, no we won't. Psyche!

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.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

The Church Of Crunch

2007-12-10T13:30:00.000-08:00

Namaste, Motherf#$%er! The Buddha of Violent Compassion drops
220 pounds of enlightenment on Cardinals kicker Mitch Berger.

Greg:

I took time off from being a mold farmer to attend Sunday's Seahawks v. Cardinals NFC West Divisional Championship Extravapalooza at Qwest Field ("Home Of The Loud Crowd"). I cannot tell you how much joy it brings me to be able to go to games, especially games where a hardcore Nichiren 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. -Ed.) 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. -Ed.)

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.'"

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:

Exhibit A: The Reverend Leonard Weaver, who coincidentally plays fullback for
the Seattle Seahawks, resists tacklers like he was a solid steel I-beam rooted
in The Jesus. He had four receptions for 56 yards on Sunday as the Seahawks
beat the Cardinals to clinch the NFC West...with yours truly propelling his
team to victory by screaming his guts out from section 342, row EE, seat 1.

I mean check it out, what was that crazy basketball game those Aztecs used to play? (Mayans, but who's counting? -Ed.)And weren't all those games to the greater glory of the god Chocolatl 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 Glory: "May I fight with the rifle in one hand and the good book in the other." -Ed.)

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? -Ed.)

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. -Ed.) 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.

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? -Ed.)

Speaking of play, I have to work now.

Cheers, -Thaddeus

After The Deluge

2007-12-04T06:23:00.000-08:00

Answer: Holy fucking shit. Question: What are three words that describe the
second rainiest day in Seattle history?

Greg:

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".)

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 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.

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.

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. 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. 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.

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.

Cheers, -Thaddeus

Malaise: Rhymes With "Holidays"

2007-11-19T10:51:00.000-08:00

Totally gratuitous photo of Seahawks'
wide receiver DJ Hackett that has nothing
to do with this letter except that he's
ossum.

Greg:

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?"

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".

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.

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 fawking hawribble! 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."

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. Then I put a bunch of blinky lights all over everything so I'd look like a 25 MPH Christmas Tree. And 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.

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.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Zombie

2007-11-06T12:58:00.000-08:00

Sleep Apnea Spokesmodel. Every CPAP device now comes
with a complimentary cranky old fat dude.

Greg:

Quick update. So I got the results of the sleep study. I'm not completely dead. Only mostly 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. -Ed.) That's called sleep apnea, of course, but the real interesting thing is the sleep hypopnia. 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. -Ed.) 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 re-tarded. I'm pre-tarded.

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. -Ed.)

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. -Ed.) 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. -Ed.) 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.

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 fugu poisoning feel like.

So if I get this CPAP thing, no matter how cumbersome and silly it looks (Yo! Snuffleuppagus! -Ed.), perhaps I won't get so damn tired every afternoon that I practically fall face first onto my keyp0[qawfp9wef'pwiaeh089234q07tq0[gfqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq348y---------------0[

il Purgatario di Morpheus

2007-10-25T14:18:00.000-07:00

Before: Wired for sound.
The great part about it was that I could receive
all 789 channels of DirecTV
in my sleep.

After: "You didn't knock me down, Ray."
And then I had to wear those damn wires
all damn day.

Greg:

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)"
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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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 -

GIANT SANDWICH! WHY DO YOU TORMENT ME!?

We Admitted That We Were Powerless Over Football

2007-10-19T10:41:00.000-07:00

Wow. Didn't see that one coming. Many of the '07 Seahawks
were off to the best year of their careers until they inexplicably
starting playing like freaked-out retards. Pittsburgh's Ryan Clark
enfolds Seattle WR Bobby Engram in the loving embrace of a bone-
crunching open field tackle during the 'Hawks 21-0 loss to the
Steelers.

Greg:

It is now week seven of the NFL season and -

Hey! Stop playing dead! I know you're totally faking it just so I'll stop talking about football. That's not even a real tailpipe you have in your mouth. Listen here, you. Football, like global warming, that staph superbug that's killing everyone, and the sudden hotness of Katie Keene, must be addressed. My team is sucking right now, and admitting that is the first step to recovery, is it not? (We admitted that we have a powerless running game, and that our passing game had become unremarkable. -Ed.) Therefore, it would be an inexcusable moral failure on my part, not to mention a complete delusion, not to talk about it. So get some toothpicks to prop your eyes open, start hitting that crackpipe like you mean business, and try to stay awake just long enough to hear my manifold lamentations.

Ahem.

It is now week seven of the NFL season and my beloved Seahawks are languishing with a completely schizophrenic 3 and 3 record. We've beaten some good teams and inexplicably lost to some completely shitty ones. We're facing the 0 and 6 St. Louis Rams (no seriously, 0 and 6, as in "they haven't won shit all year") this Sunday at Qwest Field here in Seattle (aka The Loudest Goddamn Place On Earth). Regardless of the Rams' losing record, one can in no way infer that they are easily beatable. Why? Because thus far, we've played like one-legged retards with amblyopia. Our formerly stellar NFL MVP running back couldn't average four yards a carry if he was fired out of a cannon. And our stupendously illogical play calling and devil-may-care clock management are among the most confounding mysteries to well up from the heart of man. To wit, we suck.

Yes, that's us during happier times, getting
our photo taken for a Jones Soda label during the
'Hawks win over the Buccaneers earlier this year.
Notice the full fan regalia and the upraised "We're
#1" index finger.

But why oh why, you ask, is it important at all how well (or not well) the Seahawks do this year? Ain't it just football? To which I answer that you, Dear Gregory, are woefully unaware of just how little there is to be joyful about - and conversely - how much there is to be woeful about in the sog-tastically sog-tacular Pacific Northwest between any given October and the following July. (That is the actual length of our winter and a 100% crap-free meteorological fact. -Ed.) To wit, suicidal ideation is something we do in the winter for fun. So yeah, when all your favorite hiking trails have turned into roiling crap-sluices, all you can look forward to is the warming glow of a crackling football game. And when your team is playing so horribly that even doing that is as squirm-inducing as watching The Iron Chef make Kitten Sushi - well, let's just say that without a win this Sunday, it's going to be a very long winter.

At lunch the other day, some of my co-workers who are non-Seahawks fans were giving me a yard for being one. "You're never going to get the love you deserve from the goddamn football team," they squawked. One even offered to take me in as a Bears fan (although he did admit that this year was equally as shitty a time to be one of those). I said look, it's like this. I only gots one mom. I'm only ever going to get one mom. Whether she's batshit crazy or a Nobel prizewinner, she's still my mom and I love her for that. Likewise, you only get one home team. I wasn't a football fan when I was growing up in suburban Detroit, to the Lions (God love 'em) are out. I became a football fan in 2002, my fifteenth year in Seattle (which arguably makes me from here equally inasmuch as Americans born to ex-pat English parents are from here), - ergo, I was born (allegorically at least) a Seahawks fan. Heaven knows they were nothing to crow about back then. And they may be on a long slide back into that oblivion whence they came. But that comes with the territory when you declare yourself a fan. You get the dizzying vicarious ride to glory only to be killed dead by the fall therefrom. (The same could be said of crack smoking. Perhaps you should become a fan of that sport. I've heard that it's way cheaper than buying 'Hawks tickets. -Ed.)

OK. I'm done. You can stop pretending to listen now and go back to eating your Kitten Sushi.

Cheers, and Go Hawks!

-Thaddeus

KatyDreams

2007-10-11T14:08:00.000-07:00

Old Flat Katy was pretty hot, but she's nothing compared to what the
horndogs over at Archie Comics are rolling out nowadays. With any
luck, I'll see her in my dreams when they put me in the sleep lab.

Yes, I know. I'm a bad person.

Greg:

I'll dispense with formalities. This is too important for opening bromides. Much as you often do, I was making my sesqui-monthly visit to the Archie website this morning. Not as much has changed as you think it might for that underfed ginger kid with the checkerboard on the side of his head. I mean he's looking pretty good for someone who's been 17 since 1941. All the Botox in Dick Clark's medicine cabinet couldn't make you or me look so good. But look, I said this was important and here I've digressed from my original point which is that Riverdale gang member KATY KEENE (gang as in "pals" not gang as in "banger", FYI) is suddenly WAY THE FUCK HOT. Betty and Veronica are gravy munching old hags compared to this chicquita whose measurements can only be described as whammitty-slammity-bang. And on top of that, she's the only Archie character that is drawn with relief shading. (Who dropped a quarter in the ink and paint guy?) That is also to say that she has voluptuous roundnesses, whereas Betty and Veronica are flat. HAH! Get it!? Anyway, don't take my word for it. Just take a gander at her ass. (By clicking this link, you certify that you are twelve years old or younger. -Ed.)

Other Archie news: several characters have come out recently, among them Moose Mason, Mrs. Beazly, and Hot Dog. And on a bittersweet note, hilariously Scandinavian janitor Mr. Svenson left the comic five years ago to play the part of "Jamie Hyneman" on the Discovery Channel's hit show "Mythbusters".

Ok. So. When I'm not on the verge of a mental wank over pulp-printed princesses, I'm signing up for scientific experiments. True story. The doctor is sending me in for a sleep study to figure out why'n'the hell I can't sleep right and howcome I keep having that "sleep paralysis" thing where my brain is completely awake and my body is totally paralyzed. (Yeah, it's scary.) They're going to do two tests: a PSG or polysomnogram, and a Multiple Sleep Latency Test (MSLT). The PSG is the one where you go in at night and they hook you up to all kinds of wires and put tubes in your nose and then tell you to go sleep in a strange room. Then they shoot night-vision video of you freaking out like that girl on The Blair Witch Project and they put it on YouTube. Then they charge you money to take it down before all your friends see it. It's a scam I know, but hey - free bed. Oh yeah, and then the MSLT is a whole different deal. It takes place the following day. Between 6:15 AM and 6:30PM, they make you take a series of five naps. And they leave all the wires and stuff on. (And they don't even give you milk and graham crackers first - I know, I asked!!) And if you're bad and get up and watch Bugs Bunny instead of taking your nap they'll know, even if you turn the sound way down and draw the curtains. So you gotta watch out or you could get a spanking. Kind of a shitty deal for a full-grown man like myself, but I've heard that other full grown men pay good money for spankings. So there you go.

Speaking of sleep, in the run-up to this whole sleep testing thing the doctor made me take Rozerem ("Your dreams miss you(tm)") which is a new - well, new to us, old to Japan - sleeping aid that doesn't make you drowsy and doesn't have any dependency risk. Every night, you put one tablet in your ear and it tells you that you should probably turn that crap off and go to bed. It's only TV for crissakes, and it'll be there tomorrow, so why the hell are you staring at it night and day? It'll rot your brain. Your mother and I need some sleep, goddammit! So yeah, they had me on that stuff for two weeks and it was really fascinating. I didn't have anything I'd call truly remarkable results. I still woke up for no apparent reason exactly six hours after I went to bed, which is about par for me. But I fell back to sleep much more quickly. And I did sleep for about twelve hours one day and only woke up twice in that time for a couple of minutes each. And then - and THEN! - I found out that it's not even a controlled substance. Sheesh. (In America, we call it "Placebo". -Ed.) I was so hoping that there would be weed or something like that in it.

Okay so yeah, I'm taking a camera with me to the sleep study, so I'll have all kinds of embarassing photographs to show you next time I write - like a picture of me with Johnson, the tiny plush stuffed buffalo doll that I sleep with. And probably a photo of what a sleep center nurse looks like after I ask her if she wants to touch my Johnson. Stay tuned.

Cheers, -Thaddeus

Fish Friday

2007-09-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

Didn't want to; had to: the doctors say that if I don't start eating fish,
my heart is going to sludge up and slam shut. And that will
seriously impinge on my ability to watch football.

Greg:

I freakin' ate a goddamn fish this week. It wigged me out more than just a little. And it was just plain bad. Wait - let me start at the beginning.

So I got all this bullshit going on where I'm getting old (apparently - I don't feel old), and my shit is coming unwired, like my blood pressure is going up and my cholesterol is freaking out and my sleep is all screwed up and I'm all "what the hell - I ate right and exercised so this wouldn't happen" and they're all "it's hereditary" and I'm all "just fuck my fuckin' genes already the bastards". You know what I'm saying? So now for the third time a doctor has said to me, "you gotta eat some fish or this bullshit will keep happening", and the first two times I was all "up your arse, fish killer!" But then - well, if three people tell you that you're a horse, you prolly oughtta saddle up.

So after eight years of strict vegetarianism (excepting that one time I swallowed a leaf hopper by accident while I was hiking in the Olympics), I have resigned myself to eating fish once a week. The Fish Friday thing hasn't killed any Catholics - none that I know of anyway. As far as I know, they all die of guilt. The thought of eating a dead animal still freaks me out, which I guess means that I'm not so much "vegetarian" as "meat phobic". But as my friend Jim "LiveWrong" Bergman pointed out, it's much easier to practice compassion and loving kindness when you're alive. Bein's I'm a grumpy old shit who labors desperately hour by hour to hold down the lid on a broiling magma geyser of hatred, I can't say that I entirely agree with that. But I do enjoy my life quite a bit and would like it to continue, so eat fish I must.

Loath to do anything on time, I launched my new Fish Friday tradition on Saturday at Ivar's Salmon House on north Lake Union. It's a swell little place, kind of a reproduction of a Salish long house. There's a dock on one side of the restaurant, too. You can bridle your dinghy and hang out on the deck while watching yacht-loads of University of Washington frat boys mend the injuries of rush week with earnest applications of alcohol. It's almost like watching the grunions run if all the grunions were male. I digress. Jump cut: I ordered a fillet of Sockeye; they served me a charred lug sole. (As in "boot" and not "Dover", I assume? -Ed.) So to make a truly horrible pun, my first fish experience went anything but swimmingly. (I warned you, did I not?) And just to plant the flag of irony on the whole thing, their vegetarian plate was incredible. No, seriously, they do some kind of magic to grilled vegetables that I haven't encountered anywhere else.

Oh oh oh - AND - here's just another discovery that I've made recently because of this whole Fish Friday thing: fish is really goddamn expensive. Meat in general is really goddamn expensive but fish in particular. How do you meat eaters do it? I'm going to have to get a night job at Starbucks just to afford one salmon fillet per week. Any more than that and I'm going to have to take out a third mortgage or go down to the river and strangle the fish myself. On second thought, I'm not so sure this whole new fish-eating thing is going to prolong my life at all. I could be crushed to death under a stack of debt.

Cheers, and send fish.

-Thaddeus

Who Flipped The "Old Man" Switch?

2007-08-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

Because he's bony and he tastes like shit, that's why.
Apparently my squeaky-clean vegetarian lifestyle hasn't done
my heart any favors. If I'm going to stay youthful, it looks like
I'm going to have to start eating people's pets.

Greg:

So I told you about the exam I got last week. Well I just got the blood test results and greeted them with a resounding WHAT THE CRAP?! Last year when I went in for my 40,000 mile checkup, my cholesterol was low, my blood pressure was fine, and they told me that I was in great shape for a guy my age. They even did an EKG on me and told me that I had the heart of a much younger man. And I said, "Yes I do. I keep it in a jar on my desk."

But then comes this year. Dr. Pitt's assistant calls me up day before yesterday to tell me that in the last year, somebody came by and flipped the "Old Guy" switch. All of a sudden my cholesterol is up, my blood pressure is up, I have "moderate cardiac risk" markers (whatever the shit those are), and they tell me to go on aspirin therapy. All of a sudden I'm 70. Fucking hell. Oh yeah, and there's blood in my whiz. How unbelievably not-awesome is that? And apparently all I had to do in the last year to get into this decrepit state was to maintain a strict vegetarian diet, work out at least three times a week, and hike about 200 miles - including, mind you, the transect of a 10,000 foot mountain pass - twice.

There can only be two explanations for this. 1) Jesus hates me. (That's a given. -Ed.) 2) When my old doctor, Dr. Cranky McGrumpenstein told me last year that my cholesterol was low, he warned me that my "good" cholesterol count (that's HDL for those of you who don't obsess on WebMD every day) was low also. He said - what was it now? Oh yeah, he said that might eventually lead to an increase in my bad (LDL) cholesterol since one balances the other. So he told me I oughtta go eat some fish once a week or so. I said no fuckin' way. He said how come? I said because it freaks me out. So he said fine, it's your funeral. Which, according to my recent blood test, it most assuredly is.

The good news is (or so they tell me at Dr. Pitt's office) that all of this can be corrected with diet and exercise. I gotta eat more oats, get more exercise (if that's possible - I'm going to see if they'll let me put a cot in the gym), and - ulp - eat fish oil. I don't mind telling you that last one freaks me out major bigtime. But I'm doing it. I'm freaking out on the inside, but I'm by God choking down my Omega-3 Fish Oil pills...chanting the Jewel In The Lotus mantra under my breath the entire time. But if I don't do it, I'm afraid my entire contribution to this life is going to be the following ironic headline: MODERATELY ATHLETIC VEGETARIAN PACIFIST DIES OF HEART ATTACK. Everything we know is wrong, say weeping pack of mantra-yodeling holistic doctors. But hey, on the upside, I figure if I was a fish, I'd want to be eaten by a Buddhist. Wouldn't you? Of course you would. So there you go. Maybe it's not all that bad.

Which brings me to the dream I had last night. Yes, there was meat in it. I dreamt that I was sitting at the dinner table and there was a big, juicy chunk of prime rib on a plate in front of me and I was really really really hungry. (One of my elementary school classmates back in Pontiac, MI once defined the word "ravenous" as follows: "Whens youse hungry, dat's whens you jus' wants sumpin' to eat. But whens youse ravenous, dat's whens youse hoonnngry!") In other words, I was ravenous. But the idea of eating meat was still freaking me out, as it always does. So I sat there and started reasoning about eating it, which led to rationalizing about eating it, which lead to outright denial and lying to myself. And then I cut a chunk off and put it in my mouth...and yeccchh. Not only did it taste rancid, it tasted like soap. Rancid meat soap is what we're talking here. (Soap? WTF? -Ed.) I durn near puked. Guess that means I'm still a vegetarian.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Punched In The Love Donut

2007-08-09T08:01:00.001-07:00

The Brothers Hieronymous: A recent sighting in Portland, OR.
Clockwise from lower left: Thaddeus, Gregory, John. Rumor has it
they all have prostates.

Greg:

Hello. How are you? I'm fine except for getting punched in the prostate yesterday. No, seriously, I had to go in for an overall physical exam because I've had ringing in my ears for about three weeks now. And I don't mean just a little. I mean like somebody testing a smoke detector in the next room all day, every day, every night and on weekends. Yes, it's disturbing. Yes, I know that my prostate is a long-ass ways from my ears. Tell my doctor that. Maybe he was just getting fresh with me.

I went to an Ear-Nose-Throat guy (who did not punch me in the prostate) to see what was up with the ringing. He took a good look inside my noggin and threw his hands in the air. Then he told me to go get the physical so's to rule out anything metabolic causing the ringing. He also made me stop drinking coffee for a month. Why? Because my blood pressure is up as well. And perhaps because he just likes to fuck with me. He knows how much I love coffee. He probably just wants to see me cry.

And I don't get the whole blood pressure thing. Last March when I went in for my regular exam, I was the picture of health. Now my blood pressure is one fifty five over way the hell too much. What gives? I'm a vegetarian and I work out way the hell more than most people. I've always had 120/80 for as long as I can remember. Maybe it's just my simmering rage that has finally taken its toll on my blood vessels. Or maybe it's the salt lick that I keep in my office.

On the up side, I have a new regular physician now - a sports med-slash-GP who's real personable. You like a guy to be real personable if he's going to put a fist up your Hoosegow and try to rip out your uvula. Makes it less awkward. Anyway, he's not like that grumpenstein Dr. Fisse that I've been going to for the last six or so years. My last exam with him...well let me just say that I've had friendlier bar fights.

"You examine yourself do ya?" he says.

"Yeah," I says.

"Oh yeah? How often?"

"'Bout once't a month."

"Bullshit! Ya do not!" he shouts. "Gimme those! You don't know what you're doin'!" And then he grabs my junk and goes over it with the care and thoroughness of a jeweler who has the touch of a goatherd. Ouch. Cough.

But my new doctor Dr. Pitt (like the University, not the actor) is real cordial and gives you the whole rationale behind the effectiveness of the manual prostate exam coupled with the blood test before he winds up and punches you in the love donut.

"Put your forehead on the table," he says. I oblige. "Now I'm gonna touch - "

What comes next is nothing that I'd describe as a "touch". So I says, "Next time, you're gonna buy me flowers first."

Anyway, it's a necessary evil and all, I know. And I shouldn't complain too much because I'm almost walking straight again and it's only been about twenty four hours. Plus, since he's a sports med doctor, I got him to look at my right Achilles which has been sore ever since I attacked that pampas grass in the front yard last month with a spade and a lot of swearing. The prognosis? I damnshit near ruptured it and have to get ultrasound therapy on it for the next eight weeks. And he says no jumping off of stuff or sudden sprinting or I'll damnshitsure rupture it for real. Thanks for the tip, doc!

I tire of this topic. It makes me hurt. Allow me to change course.

Not to turn this correspondence into an ongoing review of self-help books (File under "general grooviness". -Ed.) - but this particular nugget was too good to pass up. As you know I'm in the habit of trying out various exercises in self help books and passing the savings on to you. I think that's probably a better way of reviewing that genre than to simply comment on the writing style, don't you? Otherwise, it's kinda like reviewing a new car based on its looks alone. One has to kick the tires, as it were. Or in this case, kick the therapy model. I think that people should try out therapists the same way. And by that I mean by kicking them. Onward.

"Wishcraft - How to get what you really want" by Barbara Sher has been around a while, probably since the late eighties, anyway. I picked up a used copy at Horsepucky Books (or whatever the name of that place is down in central Greenwood - the place I just found). The upside: it has some very potent exercises that will reveal things about yourself that you scarcely knew. The downside: there are so goddamn many exercises that you will probably die of writer's cramp before you finish the book. I mean, c'mon Barbie! I'm a writer. I write all damn day every day for business and pleasure. And even I cannot muster up the either the verbal ganglia or the manual fortitude to write the seven-odd concurrent journals you're asking us to write. Simplify it, wouldja? Cut it down to one journal that contains everything.

Okay, so all of that said - here is one exercise from the book that I would highly recommend doing. No, it's not easy. Yes, it will make you squirm. Yes, it will be some of the best stuff you've ever done to or for yourself. I guarantee it. If it is not, I will send you a full set of Bridgestone whitewalls for your Lincoln. (Tires not included. -Ed.)

Ready? Begin. Sit down with someone whose opinion you trust implicitly. Ask them to tell you everything that's good about you. Just the straight dope. No qualifiers ("you're really excellent BUT..."), and no backhanded compliments (viz., "you don't sweat much for a fat girl" and the like). You need someone who is going to take this seriously. All you do is sit there and write down every word they say. Go on like this for about three minutes or until they're all talked out. Like a good cup of coffee, it will blow your mind. It's also extremely enlightening and energizing. After I did this exercise with Teresa, I sat down and edited 235 pages of my previous work. (No seriously, I did.) Try it and see how it changes your life.

And you know what? I think next year at my annual exam instead of getting pounded in the Dark Side, I'm going to ask Dr. Pitt to sit down and tell me everything that's good about my prostate.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

You Can Be Happy For Just Six Bucks

2007-08-04T06:29:00.000-07:00

Author Richard Carlson looks nothing like this dashing fellow, who is the
actor Richard Carlson. You may remember him from such classic films
as "Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3-D". It is rumored that when he died
in 1977, he willed his lower lip to Angelina Jolie.

Greg:

By now you're well acquainted with my fascination for the whole self-help genre especially when it comes to anything with "happiness" in the title. So you won't find it surprising that when I found a new bookstore to frequent in my new neighborhood, I went straight to the self-help section and picked up a priced-to-move pre-owned copy of Richard Carlson's "You Can Be Happy No Matter What".

I always wonder what the story is behind books like that winding up in used bookstores. Is there someone out there who applied every lesson in this book and felt it was their duty to spread the joy? Or was there some disillusioned sourpuss who tied it to a rock, drove by and hucked it at the front door of the place with a note taped to it that read "This is total bullshit"? Either way, I'm glad for the fact that it wound up there and I only had to spend about six bucks on it. Thrift is something that makes me happy no matter what. (Except when it comes to kitchen appliances, apparently. Perhaps you'll get lucky and some disillusioned sourpuss will drive by and throw an AGA range at your front door with the same sort of note taped to it. -Ed.)

So here's my take on it. "You Can Be Happy..." is worth reading and there are some valuable lessons in it. Carlson presents one idea that is especially enlightening, and that is that thinking is a voluntary function. From a cognitive science perspective that's true, although it does not seem to be true in our subjective experience as we don't seem to question our thoughts much. They just seem to happen. But by the same token we all know that we can stop thinking about something if we try hard enough. I side with Carlson on this one. Drawing on the vast calico of piecemeal knowledge that I have retained as a cog sci enthusiast slash pseudo intellectual slash autodidact slash dilettante, I can't find anything to refute that point. I can tell you that emotional and thought patterns are both unique to the individual and habituated. But that doesn't make them autonomic or intransigent any more than, say, smoking is. We tend to experience our propensities as hardened facts of life. One look outside yourself will tell you that assumption just ain't true.

This is also akin to an idea that I first read in "The Art of Happiness" by HH The Dalai Lama. It is that pain is an inexorable fact of life that arises from being human and having a nervous system. However suffering on the other hand is an emotional choice that you make about your pain. I can't even begin to tell you how much that the idea of emotional choice has influenced my life. Who the hell knew there was such a thing? I mean, c'mon, don't your emotions just happen to you? (Short answer: nope. They're learned, practiced, repeated, and ingrained. They're almost anything but automatic.) Anyway, reading those two words juxtaposed was like hearing a note from a five hundred pound singing bowl. I nearly shat my zafu.

Anyway, before I go off on another scatological digression, let me get back to Carlson's book. He divides his approach into five principles: the principles of thought, mood, separate realities, feelings, and the present moment. I already mentioned the core of the "thought" principle. The "mood" principle is that our moods fluctuate and that in different moods we feel and react differently in response to the same stimulus. (That word always makes me think of the sensation you get when you stick a9 volt battery in your mouth. Mmm! Stimulus! -Ed.) "Separate realities" means that other people think and feel differently that you do. Before you dismiss this as a "duh" realization (which I did, wholeheartedly), make yourself aware of it the next time you find yourself thinking "Jesus Brain-Injured Christ, that is the most retarded thing I've ever heard" in response to some pearl of enlightenment that falls out of the mouth of one of your co-workers or the president or that one guy at the gas station who always calls you Carl. We tend to look at our own way of thinking as right and others' as wrong, whereas it's less rage inducing to think of those two things in terms of our way of thinking and their way of thinking without the good/bad qualifier.

Moving on, "feelings" states that our emotions work as a biofeedback mechanism that tells us how we're doing from a psychological standpoint. In other words if you feel shitty, you're doing shitty. And "the present moment" is learning to keep ourselves from being distracted by negative ruminations and projections, or anything that takes us out of the present moment for that matter.

Yeah, sure, to you and me this is mostly "duh". But speaking for myself, it's a really good reminder and can be a pretty good gauge of how well I can repeat this stuff versus how well I live it. Like the difference between the appraised and market value of my house, there is always going to be a gap. It is always good to be mindful of the gap.

So where does it fall short? In the same place where every self-help book falls short and that is in the edge cases. (The downfall is to assume that you're an edge case every time you don't agree with something. You see it in AA all the time. "Oh that doesn't apply to me because I'm a special case" is a favorite rationalization of the addicted. It's more constructive to really take a hard look at the ways in which these things really do apply to you.) The principle of separate realities is fine until you come across somebody who genuinely wants to do you harm. Then the picture becomes more complex. I doubt that anyone who put up with years of verbal and emotional abuse from their spouse would solve that problem simply by believing in that principle, although it might go a long way to lessening the effects of the abuse. In fact, it might even speed your departure from a harmful situation. "S/He thinks I'm a target for any abuse s/he cares to dish out, and s/he's welcome to her/his opinion. However, since it's just their opinion and not mine, I don't have to live with it. And putting up with this bullshit day in and day out is for the birds. I'm young. I still have my figure and all my own teeth. So fuck that thick necked chump, I'm out."

The little dog just crowed. It must be morning. Let me wrap up by just saying this. I agree that thinking is a voluntary function, and I think this book is totally worth the six bucks I spent on it if not more. It's an easy, fun read and, thanks to some disillusioned sourpuss, is on the shelf at your local used bookstore right now.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Kitchen Lust

2007-07-25T09:42:00.000-07:00

My precious. The four oven AGA range makes succulent
roasts, delicious toast, and cures leprosy.

Greg:

Teresa and I have discovered the most covetable object on Earth: the AGA (pronounced AWW-guh) 4-oven range (pictured above).

Okay, so you're saying, "Buh-whuh-huh? It's a goddamn stove!" Nay, my friend. It is not just a goddamn stove. It is a scientific marvel invented by Gustaf Dalen, an honest-to-Sverige Nobel prize-winning physicist that can - and does - make enchanted toast.

But you're saying, "Right. It's a goddamn stove." Oh ye of little faith in toast. Attend to mine word. For I have been to the Sacred Place (read: Luwa Distributing in Renton) to witness the Miracle of the Checkerboard Toastage (read: product demonstration) and to bask in the countenance of the Blessed Appliance (read: AGA range). So stop your grinnin' and drop your linen whilst I evangelize you with my new found faith.

First of all, t'was none other than Sergeant Rock locked me in the thrall of this Questing Beast of Glazed Cast Iron. He and I went into Sutter Home & Hearth in Ballard because I needed a fireplace screen. As it turns out, they're AGA dealers. As it also turns out, Sgt. Rock is a hardcore AGA enthusiast. I never woulda pegged him for being all ghey for high-end appliances. Nonetheless, he began to witness and was soon joined by Clint The Sales Guy, and soon they were swapping stories, high-fiving, embracing, and weeping openly over the wonders of this appliance.

When it came to his toast, Nobel prize
winning physicist Gustaf Dalen did not
fuck around. One look at those wicked
shades of his will tell you that.

Of course, you can find out everything I'm about to tell you if you just go to www.aga-range.com, but let me give you the crib notes first. This is what I found to be astounding about the AGA, and why I must have one toot sweet! 1) It has no knobs or dials at all simply because you never have to turn it on or off or set the temperature. Like our life-giving sun, it is always on. 2) Despite the fact that it is always on, it doesn't burn a ton of fuel. It is a super-insulated thermal mass of cast iron, so once it gets up to speed, it remains hot and "coasts" as it were, and doesn't keep sucking down gas. By comparison, standard open-flame gas ranges are unquenchable gas-huffing beasts. If you prepare six meals on a standard gas range, you will have used all the fuel an AGA uses in a month. 3) You can cook right on the burner, just as though it were a flat-top grill. 4) It makes enchanted toast.

And speaking of kitchens, we're planning on redoing ours not just so that it can accommodate a 1,290 pound, ten foot square AGA range, but also so it can accommodate other modern appliances, like a refrigerator and a dishwasher. You know, the little things. As you know, my house was built during the Depression. Apparently people didn't eat during the Depression so they had no use for kitchens. Mine is the size of a mouse's hind teat. Teresa and I resolved that while the rest of the house should be left as it was in that era, the kitchen was going to have to be expanded. The downside is that we really don't have the cash on hand necessary to do a kitchen remodel at the moment. We decided that we should start doing the groundwork and cost estimates anyway so that when the Giant Cash Meteor lands in our yard some day in the future (or more likely when I decide to vampirize my home equity), we'll be ready to start work. We went ahead and met with an architect who told me (much to my surprise) that I could do the plan myself.

Speaking of home equity, we got a notice in the mail telling us that the county has decided that our house has increased $30,000 in value since we bought it on April 30th. How they figure that stuff out, I'll never know. They probably drove by the house the day I set the two dead toilets out front for pickup and figured that I was putting in two new restrooms or a Roman Bath or some goddamn thing.

We got some good news last night. A certified AGA fitter came over to do a free survey and told us that no, the ponderous weight of the AGA will not make our floor joists to snap like a sparrow's leg and cause the stove to crash right through crust of the earth and down to the Mohorovicic discontinuity as we had feared. But he'll have to come back after we get the addition framed in to make sure that he'll be able to install the venting properly.

But anyway, the best news thus far is that our kitchen remodel has cost us nothing but the calories necessary to fuel full-blown kitchen lust. When it starts to cost money, we may have to turn to crime.

Speaking of crime, I have to get to work.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

13:54 Of Fame Left

2007-07-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

WARNING - MAY BE FRIGHTENING TO CHILDREN: My visage has been digitally
de-hanced to include wobbly jowls, extra eye baggage, and lemur-length fingers.
Oh, and my hair has been replaced by a digital overlay of JFK's famous 1961 atomic blast resistant pompadour.

Greg:

It has finally happened. There is a clip of me gibbering away like a disembodied clown head on YouTube. It is surely a sign of our Internet-infused times when a person's visage can dribble onto the Web and into the eyeballs of tens of persons without them having to lift a single greasy finger out of the Cheeto bag.

How the hell did this happen? Well I'll tell you. I was one of the test subjects for something that's actually really cool (and might be cooler still were it not for my face being on it) called Interview Studio. It's like Monster on Bovine Growth Hormone. Posting your resume on the Web is now passe. You must now back up your claims with video clips and scientifically sound skill and personality test results. The profile that Interview Studio creates for you is so thorough and lifelike that you might want to email an exam glove to your prospective employer along with a link to your profile.

In all seriousness, I'd much rather use a tool like this than go through the cornea-chafing process known as resume reading. Last time I had to hire someone, I had to read something like 100 resumes. (100 resumes = 1 shitload. -Ed.) Being a fan of the cinema, I'd've much rather sat down with a bag of popcorn, dimmed the lights, and let Interview Studio roll while I occasionally lobbed half-chewed Hot Tamales(tm) at my monitor. What more relaxing way could there be to screen candidates? Boo resume reading! Yay Interview Studio!

But enough about me and more about my latest invention: The Shiva Pile.

I am become Shiva, the destroyer of shrubs.
The bones of mine enemy (foreground) lay
at my feet while I brandish the tools of their
demise.

As you know I have a yard now, and as you also know I have been waging a (losing) battle with the shrubs and various other flora 'round about the Gunn estate. Last weekend, I waged a bloody campaign against a camellia bush that was threatening to eat my house. No, seriously, the sumbitch had got to be about 20 feet tall while I wasn't looking, and had almost completely blocked all sunlight from coming through my living room window. With every implement of destruction at my command, I hacked it down to a humble 4 feet. However, this also meant that I was left with a ponderous stack of leaves and branches that I would have to bribe either the city or an itinerant pack of beavers to destroy for me. Being the cheap-ass with a scientific bent that I am, I decided that I was going to devise away to rot the whole pile down to mulch without paying a cent to either the city or the beavers. Here's what I did: I got some landscaping fabric and some Stump-B-Gone (or whatever the shit they call that noxious powder that will supposedly rot tree stumps down to oatmeal). I made a neat pile of all the camellia detritus, soaked it with the hose, and generously dosed it with the Stump-B-Gone powder. (NOTE: Stump-B-Gone powder does not feel good in your eyes or nose. Do not use it in a high wind or a slight breeze. -Ed.) So of course a stout summer breeze sprang up and shot a handful of the powder into my eyes and nose, much to my chagrin. Undeterred, I covered the whole schmear with the landscape fabric, pinned the edges to the earth, heaved the remaining camellia branches on top to help hold it in place, and took a moment to marvel at my handiwork. In this fashion, I effectively created the conditions of the underside of a rotting log. Hopefully this will cause all that crap to compost into a dark and handsome mulch in the next six months or so. Then I will uncover it and spread the remains under my lilac bushes as a horrific gardyloo to all the other shrubs in the yard, lest they conspire to eat my house as well. I think that fear is an excellent gardening tactic.

Wired for sound. The little dealio on the right is not a pushbutton switch. It's
actually the depression era's answer to the InterWeb.

And one last thing - I found the coolest thing in my living room. No, not my wife, silly! There's some sort of outlet on the wall that I've been wondering about for the longest time. It looks like one of those old-fashioned push button light switches. Problem is that it's too far down on the wall (about six inches above the baseboard) and it's right next to an outlet. So last weekend I let my curiosity run away with me and I attacked it with a screwdriver. Pulling it away from the wall, I discovered two things. One is that the original tenant of this house had horrible taste in wallpaper. It was some kind of crazy black and silver "gothic" pinstripe, no doubt inspired by the gangsterwear of the era. Second is that subsequent tenants were lazy bastards and didn't even bother to pull the wallpaper from behind the plate to paint the walls. And then I discovered a third. Third is that there were two braided copper wires trailing from the back of this thing and going up the inside of the wall between the studs - not horizontally or down between the floor joists. And all of a sudden it occurred to me that what I was looking at was antenna wire. This little dealio I found was where you plugged in your floor console radio's antenna wire. This was the 1930s equivalent of having your house wired for Internet. If I can get my grubbies on a decently restored floor console radio of the era, I just might try reviving that antenna plug. How bitchen would that be? Maybe there are some radio shows from the 1930s still living inside my walls somewhere.

Crap. Gotta go to work. More later.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

New Roses

2007-07-06T08:35:00.001-07:00

Is this bullshit really necessary? Neuroses, while they are inarguably
a pain in the fucking neck, are not actually as intractable as Big Pharma
would have you believe.

Greg:

You know what I can't wait for? Yeah, that's right - football season. I love football because it gives me an opportunity to take a gigantic emotional dump in public without getting arrested or having to buy booze. I never thought of myself as an exhibitionist or anally expulsive until I caught myself freaking out and screaming like a stone-cold lunatic at a Seahawks home game - correction - every Seahawks home game. (I hope to God you're using the term "anally expulsive" in the psychoanalytic sense and not actually firing turd javelins out of the 300 level. -Ed.) Actually going that nuts in public is so freeing that it makes me wonder why there aren't places where you can go and drop your inhibitions and just run buck-wild without having to take some kind of psychoactive substance. (There are. They're called whorehouses and football games. And neither one of them is free. -Ed.) Seems like there would be a lot less angst in the world if there was a place where you could just peel back your social mask and get batshit freaknuts without fear of reprisal. (Hmm. Well now you've ruled out football games. -Ed.)

Which brings me to neuroses.

Our talk on Sunday about neuroses - what it is and how to deal with it - got me to thinking, which is sometimes not a bad thing. Sometimes I use my brain for good and not for evil. Then again, sometimes my brain is not so good to me. Maybe it's bad to me because I have not yet given it what it wants, kinda like women I used to date who thought I could read their minds. They thought I was an incredible jerk for not simply giving them what they wanted without them having to ask for it. Maybe my brain is exactly that kind of pain-in-the-ass. Maybe my brain is in fact in my ass, like I'm some kind of latter-day brontosaurus. That would explain a LOT. It might even explain why I digress so often and so readily when I'm trying to make a point.

Oh look, a bird!

What the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah, neurosis.

I should know a thing or ten about neurosis as my neuroses are beyond multitudinous. They are legion. It's like having a petting zoo full of comically deformed barnyard animals. Pigs with antlers. Sheep with steering wheels. Goats with extra goats on them. Fortunately, neurosis husbandry for me has moved beyond affliction into the realm of hobby. In other words, it is no longer an obsession but more of a bemusement. I take a walk every once in a while down the grotty stalls of depression, anxiety, neurasthenia and phobia, stopping to pat each on the head in turn and give it a peck of oats. Each neurosis then gives a pitiful bleat and ralphs on my Wellingtons.

Suffice it to say that I know a lot about neuroses (including the fact that phrase has 40 letters and 11 spaces in it). So to answer the questions you had when we were discussing the subject, I sewed together a number of definitions from sources medical and otherwise, and came up with a definition of neurosis that just about meets everything I know about the subject. It is this: Neurosis is a functional disorder in which feelings of anxiety, obsessional thoughts, compulsive acts, and physical complaints without objective evidence of disease, all in various degrees and patterns, dominate the personality. It is a relatively mild personality disorder typified by excessive anxiety or indecision and a degree of social or interpersonal maladjustment not attributable to any neurological or organic dysfunction. (I think its intractability would be the indicator of whether it is a personality disorder or not. Sometimes it is and sometimes it ain't. It can also be transient, like in response to extreme stress or whatnot.)

Does that sound familiar at all? But wait, here's the good news. (My oil needs changing and my horse is pregnant? -Ed.) Neuroses arise from the inclination to focus on only the negative aspects of an event or situation. If you are so inclined, then you will have anxiety. You will be depressed. You will fall prey to magical thinking, believing that your rituals and systematic avoidances will have a direct influence on your outcomes. Worse yet, you will have manifold physical complaints without frank and objective evidence of disease or pathogens.

Yes it gets better! How do I know? Because thinking that way is just an inclination. It's not a certainty. It is not a truth about reality as a whole. It is a way that you have chosen to think about things, and other people would think differently about the same situation. On another day, with more sleep, I myself might even think differently and act differently in the same situation. I might see more possible outcomes than only the negative ones that I see right now.

To wit, I can be neurotic, know that I'm not neurotic every single day, and have faith that this neurosis too shall pass.

Martin E. P. Seligman one of the forefathers of positive psychology and former head of the APA lists depression and anxiety as the top two most curable neuroses in his book "What You Can Change And What You Can't". Considering that friggin' everybody and their dysfunctional uncle seems to suffer from those two things, that fact alone seems to offer a great deal of hope to humanity as a whole. Most heartening to me is the strong evidence that he presents that proves that panic does not respond to any medication and can be unlearned. UNLEARNED. When I was diagnosed with panic disorder in 1984, they told me it was intractable, could not be cured, and that I would be on medication for the rest of my life. I wasn't satisfied with that diagnosis and did everything I could to simply not ever feel like that again. And I sure as Eli Lilly didn't want to keep eating the truckloads of brain-stopping will-withering pills that they were giving me. I didn't know at the time that what I was doing by creating a program to deal with my panic was called "unlearning it". I thought it was called "how to not feel like shit every day". In the end, panic proved to be just an inclination - a patterned way of thinking, like the inclination I used to have to smoke cigarettes or order a Domino's pizza each and every goddamn day, both of which I am now disinclined to do. And just as a ten ton flatbed truck has the nearly unquenchable inclination to barrel down a 10% grade it is therefore not easy to stop, but with the right amount of force applied at the right time, it can be stopped.

Know what this means? Mm hmm. If this idea catches on, you better dump every bit of stock you have in Big Pharma.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Children, Fools And The Endodontist

2007-07-02T13:51:00.001-07:00

The Prince of Pie nearly torches his own
eyebrows in a fit of birthday-induced joy. His
teeth (pictured, above) would later be subjected
to assaults that no one in their right mind could
smile about.

Greg:

I went to an endodontist for the first time in my life this morning. Now before you Google the word "endodontist", let me just save you some time and tell you what an endodontist does. They fuckin' torture you, that's what.

Check it out. Relive the horror with me. I was referred to an endodontist by my dentist because he couldn't figure out why'n'the shit my teeth still hurt so much after he put a couple of crowns in. That whole deal, the whole grinding-off-the-tops-of-my-teeth deal, launched me into new horizons of candy-colored pain. Tiny demons took ice picks and shotguns to my hurt bone, waking me up every night, driving me to eat Vicodin by the fistful. (I don't know why people eat those things to get high, by the way. All they do is make you feel sick and dumb. I used to get higher than that sucking the sugar coating off of mom's thyroid medication. Sue me! I was a child and they looked just like red M&Ms.) But get this: It turns out there's only so much Vicodin you can eat before it kills you. No really, it's a fact. So the dentist decided that maybe there was some more drilling or nerve pulling or something that they could do to put me out of my misery without the added risk of having me become another sad drug-related statistic.

So I go to the endodontist this morning and what does he do? He takes a cotton ball and freezes the crap out of it with some liquid nitrogen. Then he tells me he's going to press it against my tooth - not the tooth that is still causing me pain, but a completely different tooth to cause me completely new pain. He says, "Raise your left hand when you feel the pain" and then he puts the cotton ball against my tooth. I say, "GAGH!" and flip him off with the middle finger of my left hand. He says, "Good. Okay, we're going to use that as a baseline to compare how painful your crown is." And before I can say, "Baseline - what the hell?", he goes and freezes the crap out of practically every tooth on that side of my jaw. When he gets to the Hurtiest Tooth I Ever Had and presses the little frozen cotton ball against it, it causes an explosion of icy pain in my head along with a completely extemporaneous hallucination of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" in its entirety (but fast-forwarded). I try to flip him off with every finger on my left hand. He says, "Good."

Long story short, I don't need a root canal. He said I was inflamed. I said damn right. I'm supposed to go back in a month for a follow up. Next time I'm going to ask him if he can use the cooling power of peppermint schnapps instead of that liquid nitrogen stuff.

I don't know why people are afraid of dentists. Dentists are the Sugar Plum Fairy compared to the endodontist. The dentist digs into your teeth and gums. The endodontist digs into your soul.

In other news - my birthday, which started on Wednesday, just wouldn't quit. I got to celebrate it again on Sunday. I was blessed with good company and several more gifts. My collection of the articles of suburban destruction has been added to quite nicely. I got a wheelbarrow, for instance. And not one of the little crappy ones either. One with real oak handles and a big fat tire that you actually have to pump up. I'm telling Teresa that we're throwing away that car of ours and taking the wheelbarrow to work every morning from here on out. Plus I got a corn knife, which if you did not know it, is kinda like a katana for hillbillies. With it I can now easily quarter, cleave twain or cleanly behead any pugnacious sister-cousin or uncle-daddy that gives me guff. It also cuts corn. Or so I am told.

Plus, I got a gift certificate to Hardwick's Hardware (since 1932), the coolest hardware store on the planet. And you should check out what I bought! I got a socket set with every size socket from Mouse's Toilet Bolt to Elephant's Nut Sack (and by that I mean sack of either stainless steel or brass nuts which are overly large and in the possession of an elephant, and not a pachyderm's man parts). It also contains the very rare 25/32nds socket which is only for parts that come from Taiwan. With that fact in hand, I'm taking my 25/32nd socket over to Taiwan and doing some damage. I'm going to loosen everything. Taiwan is going to fall apart when I'm done. You're gonna see thirty million bicycles all dissolve into a pile of loose parts - k-thwank!

And yes, there was PIE. Blueberry pie (pictured, above).

And now this word about toilets: I moved my two dead toilets from the side of the driveway into the back yard so's to stop offending the neighbors. Not that they made a ruckus or anything (the neighbors, not the toilets). I just needed an excuse to show off the pythons by lifting each toilet with one hand. (Don't try this at home. That said, I should not have tried it at my home.) A friend of mine pointed out that the problem with being burly is that it's never a question of if you can lift something one-handed, it's always a question of why you should lift something one-handed when there are things like dollies and forklifts in the world. That's the question you should always ask. Likewise, that is the question that I did not ask before I single-handedly beefed first one then the other six-thousand pound porcelain crapper ten or so yards into my back yard. And even though I did not ask that question, my back has answered for it as usual. My folly created such exquisite pain that I was entertaining the idea of opening my abdominal cavity so I could ice my spine from the inside. I'm okay now, though. My spine is back in tip-top shape and ready for the next foolhardy stunt I have to dish out. As the old saying goes, God looks out for children and fools. Thank God that despite my rather large collection of birthdays I still fit in one of those two categories.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Loving Everyone, Squirrels And A-Holes Included

2007-06-30T06:36:00.000-07:00

Scariest book you'll ever read. It's a scary, scary
squirrel world, and we're just living in it.

Greg:

It's me, Thaddeus. Remember me? I showed up in your house somewhere back in 1962 - June, I believe. The 27th, to be exact. 45 years and three days ago. You thought mom and dad had brought a puppy home from the hospital. Ring a bell?

I'd have to use a calendar to recall how long it has been since I heard from you. And not just any calendar. I mean the Mayan Calendar, because it seems like millennia. I know you have a penchant for holing up inside your tuba with a peanut butter sandwich and a book of Green Stamps, thrift and nut butters being your keenest interests. But you should really poke your chalky-white face outside once in a while and take a look at who's making all the racket. You may find that it's me, the puppy your folks brought home from the hospital, begging you to throw me a bone. Or a word. Whatever.

I've been doing things. Working, for one. Reading, for another. I got a couple of really great books for my birthday. One was "Squirrels of the West" (Tamara Hartson, editor). Squirrels have filled me with a combination of warmth, fascination and horror ever since we had one as a pet when we were kids. Remember Desiree? Our little pet squirrel that we kept in the house who taught herself how to ride the turntable on the stereo? (Squirrels are such smart little bastards! Cross a monkey and a rat, get a squirrel. S'true. It's in every squirrel's creation mythology that they are the descendents of Hanuman and Karni Mata. Just ask one.) And remember how she pooped on, like, everything we owned? Living with a partially-domesticated squirrel is like randomly firing crap-rockets inside your own home. Few except us will ever experience the exhilaration of a chittering, crapping blur whizzing by their oatmeal bowl and caroming off the walls first thing in the morning. Unbelievable that we got away with it. No wonder dad drank so much. Either he let us get away with it because he was anesthetized by a half-rack of Carling most of the time, or he kept himself half-racked as a defense against random crap-rocket attacks. Not too sure which. Anyway, the book lets me feed my fascination with these vituperate, tree-dwelling rodents in the comfort of my own home, where I'm now safe from crap-rocket attacks. That is until I step outside of course.

Perhaps this book will teach me how to harness the power of squirrels for good. This has been one of my goals in life, believe it or not. A friend of mine once wrote a play wherein squirrels were a pervasive and aggregate evil. Hundreds of them would combine to create human forms and then attack the unsuspecting, Trojan Horse style. Not too far from real life, if you ask me. Judging from his personality, my cat could be nothing more than a dozen bilious and phlegmatic squirrels held together by cat-shaped spackle who are just waiting for the opportunity to explode like a seed pod and attack me from every corner of my being. But what if I could harness those squirrels and use their combined power to mow the lawn, replace my toilets, or shoot out the legs of my rivals? (That's a job best left for raccoons. -Ed.) Then I could make some real money. Then I could drive down Broadway in a faux gold trimmed Lincoln with a license frame that read "My Other Car Is A Squirrel".

The other book I got for my birthday was "Best Buddhist Writing 2006" which is more of a hoot than its title would lead you to believe. Usually books on religious matters are all too serious and leave me feeling like I've taken some kind of medicine that does nothing more than make me feel bad for being a schmuck. Not so much with this book, though. Allow me to submit as proof the laugh-out-loud-funny and deeply touching "Hair Braiding Meditation" by Seattle poet Polly Trout that is included in the book.

May I be filled with loving kindness. May I be well. May I be peaceful and at ease. May I be happy.

May my daughter, who wants a billion tiny little braids this morning, be filled with loving kindness. May she be well. May she be peaceful and at ease going to school with a billion tiny little braids.

May her best friend, who got a billion tiny little braids put in her hair at Club Med Ixtapa last week, be filled with loving kindness. Also her mother, may she be peaceful and at ease. And the woman the mother hired to do all that cornrowing, may she be well. May she be happy.

May I be filled with loving kindness as I put in these billion tiny little braids. May I be peaceful and transcend greed. Also, may I go to Club Med Ixtapa next season, when the beach will be even more inspiring due to my newly enlightened and greed-free state. May I be happy.

May my coworkers be filled with loving kindness as they wonder why I am late for work as I make these billion tiny braids. May they be peaceful and at ease.

May my daughter not notice that these braids are not nearly as cute as her friend’s braids that got done professionally in Ixtapa, or if she does notice, may she be peaceful and at ease about that, please for God’s sake.

May my toddler, currently trying to vie for my attention as I make these tiny braids for her big sister, be filled with loving kindness. May she be peaceful and at ease.

May my mother, who did this for me when I was five, be filled with loving kindness. May she be peaceful and at ease. I wonder why I never thanked her for that.

May I remember this day sitting with my daughter, braiding her hair, late for work again, peaceful and at ease, happy.

There's also the work of Marc Ian Barasch, an apparently very prolific Buddhist writer who I've never had the pleasure of reading before. What I really like about him is that he's a sort of Buddhist Everyman, a Dharma-working shlub who readily exposes his multiple warts and confesses his manifold failings in the face of his Bodhisattva vows. It's kind of like what it would be like if Thich Nhat Hanh did slapstick. My kinda thing, in other words. I highly recommend his essay "Searching for the heart of compassion". Aside from being quite engaging on an intellectual level, it's just plain fun reading. There's something very refreshing about teachers who engage in this sort of reverse pedagogy: "I can't tell you how to do it right, but I can tell you how many times I had good intentions and still completely fucked it up. Maybe you can pick up where I left off."

Which brings me to a point which I consistently get hung up on: how to love the assholes in your life. As Barasch says in his essay, it's pretty easy to love the good people. Our expressions of compassion get winnowed down to the precious few in our lives. But compassion is supposed to be for everybody. And everybody means everybody: you, me, that guy I don't know, that asshole that wants to kill me, squirrels - everybody. The issue that I'd like to addressed exhaustively is how to express compassion for people who hate you. Better still, how to express compassion for people who will turn around and use your compassion to harm you. I mean, c'mon. Everyone has had that happen one time in their lives. There are people in the world who will do whatever they can to capitalize on the best part of your nature and will at some point use whatever you say or do to stab you. One of that species of person is mentioned in the article, but the issue is only dealt with briefly, and that is to say that a line was drawn in the sand. "Letting you use me as a doormat isn't good for either of us, so in the spirit of compassion, I'm telling you in the kindest way possible to fuck off and stay fucked off. Namaste." But there has to be more you can do than that, isn't there? Or is there? Maybe there comes a point when you're dealing with someone who can't help but be abusive that you just have to say "Okay, I'm done" and break that contact permanently. Maybe the only way to make that action compassionate is to not do it in a spirit of anger or retribution, but in a spirit of contributing to mutual well-being.

Or maybe I should just sic some squirrels on 'em.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

It's My 45th Birth - Wait, What Was I Saying Again?

2007-06-27T05:03:00.000-07:00

This is the look of old. The ravages of time as recorded by a camera held in my
quaking 45-year-old hand.

Greg:

Jesus Christ, I'm 45 today. That means that you're...wait, I have to do the math...plus five...carry the twelve...six hundred and seventy eight years old, give or take. I don't know why people get so wanged out about getting older. I really don't feel any different than I did when I was seventeen...other than a little smarter...and not so impulsive...and my propensity for using ellipses has increased....yes it has.

Know what gives away the fact that I'm old? Here's the difference between my 20th birthday and my 45th. On my 20th, all I wanted to do was snort coke and Jim Beam off hookers while jumping the Snake River Canyon on a Yamaha. And for the most part that was how I rolled in back then. Now all I want to do is spend the day in my back yard, sitting in my folding recliner, yelling at my cat to shut up. And that's most likely what I'll be doing. And it'll be ossum. And I'll be happy.

What was I saying again?

Oh yeah. So we filled our ears with coins and swam naked all the way to Boston. And that' s how we me and your uncle Humbert licked the Jerries back in dubyah dubyah ought five. The End.

Oh man! You know what I've got in my back yard? Raspberries! They just ripened up the other day. We only have a few little canes, but they're pumping out a crapload of fruit. We threw some on some Chex the other day. Chex with raspberries in the back yard - now there's a picnic! If only we could've found a way to barbecue it...

Didja see that we (meaning RealNetworks) just released a new version of the RealPlayer that'll let you download videos right off the Web and barbecue 'em on a DVD so you can show 'em on your plasma TV and make your friends blow milkshakes through their noses from laughing at stuff like this right here? (Friends and milkshakes not included.) S'true. I fully endorse its use, however I'm barred from using it for religious reasons as I believe that putting your image on a DVD will trap your soul, then expose it to ridicule by milkshake -snorting troglodytes seated 'round a plasma TV.

Tip For Campers: While I was in Yellowstone, I got some kind of rash on my ankles, most likely from coming into contact with poison ivy or poison oak or poison raspberries or some damn thing while I was running around camp in my sandals. After I got home, I'll be gol-damned if I didn't re-inflame my ankles by putting on my sandals without washing them first. My point is that once an article of clothing has been exposed to poison [insert plant name here], it must be burned, and the earth around it must be salted, and you must turn your back on it and never speak of it again.

Don't I have a job? Shouldn't I be at work right now? Yes, I probably should be. Too bad for them

I'm going to go eat cake for breakfast because I'm a grown-up and I can do that.

Know what I really want for my birthday? The Field Guide to Squirrels. I know it exists, even though I can't find it on the InterWebs. I saw it in a bookstore just last Saturday. I plucked it from the shelf and gazed upon its pages with a mixture of awe and terror. Teresa axed me why on earth I would want that book for my birthday. I answered her with one simple phrase: Know thine enemy.

Time to go wring out the dog.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

A Tale Of Two Toilets

2007-06-24T05:11:00.000-07:00

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. My toilets offended me so I cast
them out...all by myself, even!

Greg:

Have you ever used a toilet? It's that big porcelain thing full of water in that "closet" in the house that has other stuff that water comes out of. Looks kinda like something that would be produced if the "comedy" mask mated with the Elephant Man. Yeah, that thing. If you find one in your house, give it a wide berth and approach it with caution. If my experience is any indication, it could capriciously explode at any moment.

I only ask because I know you're the practical sort and as such may have eschewed the use of such sophisticated and pernicious plumbing accoutrements in favor of a large yard, some wide-leafed shrubs and a sturdy spade. Hey, I'm with you. If it's good enough for the cat... Unfortunately my wife does not share this purview, and demanded that I replace the toilets.

Wait, I'm ahead of myself.

I have two toilets in the house, one upstairs and one in the apartment downstairs. The downstairs toilet had been a cauldron of filth since the day we moved in. From the looks of it, the former tenants attempted to flush toxic waste and dead prostitutes with little success. To make matters worse, the owner of the house left the apartment unheated when it wasn't occupied, thus creating a cave-like atmosphere which in turn caused the toilet to grow a rather stout green beard 'round about the seat. It more closely resembled a troll than anything else. To our credit, we did give it a very thorough cleaning. This removed the beard, but not toxic waste or prostitute residue. It was functional nonetheless, so we (meaning I) took occasion to make it feel useful from time to time. It returned my kindness by failing. To wit, the wall spigot went to hell and then the inflow valve went on vacation. And one of the bolts that secures it to the shitter cap snapped off. As you can surmise, using this toilet was like the combined thrill of riding a mechanical bull while hoping against hope for a payoff from a slot machine. It had to go.

On the upside, even if the downstairs toilet was ferkochte, we still had the upstairs toilet. But then that one decided - apropos of nothing - to fracture its tank and send wee little tsunami rumbling through the bathroom...at 9PM...on a school night. I mean no one was even sitting on the goddamn thing when it busted! I say if you're going to crack and flood my bathroom, at least let it be because I beat you with a Crescent wrench. (How frequently do you say that and to whom? The authorities would like to know. -Ed.)

So there we were, a household without Toilet One, having to clench our bowels through the dark night, into the next day, and down the street to the Starbucks. When morning came, I called the first number of the first plumber on the first piece of junk mail I could find. (By the way, I found out that your mortgage company pimps out your personal information to every Tom, Dick and Plumber in thirty states the minute your loan funds.) Luckily, these guys were the shit (pun intended). They showed up on time (which just about made me faint dead away), took an educated and meaningful look at my situation, and showed me the rate sheet. They told me that what I could do for ten bucks worth of parts, they couldn't do for $400 in labor. They told me the parts I needed, and bid me adieu with no charge whatsoever for the call. I am their customer for life.

In the process of replacing the parts, I got the overwhelming "fuckitden" urge. If we were just going to replace the toilet when we refurbished the bathroom, just fuckitden. Might as well rip the freakin' things out and install a new one. Which is precisely what I did. I tore out two toilets and purchased and installed a new one. Now at least we have one functioning toilet. We also have one hole in the floor downstream from it that roars and gurgles every time you flush. I'm thinking of jamming a big-ass funnel in there and using it just the same (pun not intended), long as I can keep it secret from the wife.

But here's the important thing, not only was my standing as a man increased by doing all of this*, my admiration for our brother John's vocation as a plumber is now boundless. Now I know that he has to deal with The Most Noisome And Disgusting Object Known To Man on a daily basis - the wax ring that seals the toilet to the sewer pipe and keeps the evil locked within. I'd go into more detail, but you no doubt have a peanut butter sandwich in your hand at this very moment and will chunder directly into your tuba if I say any more.

Which reminds me of something I heard the Dalai Lama said once regarding attachment: "Even a delicious piece of chocolate cake eventually becomes something that no one likes."

Namaste on that, my brother!

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

*...not to mention the angle that I stand at, considering that deadlifting and carrying two toilets fucked up my back Grand Royal.

Prune Back In Anger

2007-06-20T12:27:00.001-07:00

The earth's fragile, beautiful biomass. Kill it first before it kills you.

Greg:

Got a yard? I wouldn't know. I haven't seen your new place. If so, does it have dirt in it? Hey, it's a fair question. Some places just have concrete or rocks or whatever that they paint green. Okay, so if it has dirt, are there any plants growing out of it? If so, -

KILL THEM NOW.

Scorch the earth. Pour salt on it. Get thirty eight dogs, make 'em drink six quarts of coffee each and have them piss all over the whole deal until it is dead dead dead. I've seen what happens to a yard when you have plants and you let them grow, and let me tell you brother, it ain't pretty.

First off, just get used to the fact that plants hate you. They're not "pretty". They don't want to "coexist" with you. They don't care about whether you need the oxygen or not. They know that all you see when you look at them is salad. I have a blackberry bush all the way at the far end of my yard that is just itching to strangle me. Every day when I get home from work, I notice that it has grown five more tendrils of six feet each. I just know that one night it's going to creep in through my bedroom window and wrap itself around my tender, tender neck and choke me 'til I'm dead dead dead. (...or "dead cubed". -Ed.) Why? Because I eat its children with abandon. I make them into pie. I put them in fruit salads. The blackberry bush knows this and has worked itself into a bloated, vengeful rage. It will not rest until I am deep in the humus. Good thing I'm the one with the pruning shears...and the opposable thumbs.

This does not explain why my lilac bushes are such bitches to me. I don't eat their kids. I thought I was doing them a favor by deadheading all of them and clearing out all their dead brush and suckers. Well, they returned my kindness by sending legions of now-homeless spiders into my house to set up shop in my dishtowels. (I know the spiders must've been told to do it. They're smarter than to come inside where my spider-eating cat lives.) Anyway, fuck them lilacs. Just fuck 'em. Who cares about a plant that doesn't pull its own weight? It blooms once, and then it spends the rest of the year taking up lawn space that I could be using for suntanning or burning tires. If the wife wasn't so fond of them, I swear I'd have a nice crackling lilac-wood fire in the fireplace right now.

Don't even get me started on you, pampas grass (rhymes with "pompous ass"). Your day will come, señor. And that day is this Saturday. You'll be staring straight down the blades of the shears that I have nicknamed Los Diablos Dos. I will first give you my special "butch" cut, the Howie Long special, The Flat-Top To End All Flat Tops. Then I will take my shovel, stab it into the earth, and tear out your still-beating heart....er...roots.

And you, House-Eating Camelia - I want you dead. I want your parents dead. I want your family dead. Your dog - if you had one - dead. Hamsters - dead.

So what kind of plant do I like? That's easy. Corn. It's tasty and makes a great fence. Think of it as "bamboo with benefits". And I like my cedar tree. It stinks pretty, keeps the bugs away, and provides shade for my surly old cat. Someday its mighty branches will be home to my Dubble-Seekrit Klubhaus (No Girlz!). And my three apple trees. Other than that, I could seed this whole place with alfalfa and be happy. And by that I mean that I could bury former child actor Carl 'Alfalfa' Switzer in my yard were it not for the fact that he's been dead since 1959.

Hey, speaking of which, who are all those guys who are allegedly shaving the Amazonian rainforest down to the nubs? And what's their phone number? I have a job for them.

Shears,

-Thaddeus

My Hot, Hot Legs - And Other Father's Day Observations

2007-06-17T06:09:00.000-07:00

Actual photo of my left leg. I don't know whether I should tan it or
baste it.

Greg:

It's early Sunday morning - Father's Day, to be exact. I find myself puttering around the house in my underwear with a cup of coffee and a perplexed look. I've been going around the house looking for something, and by the time I get to the place where I think I must've left it, I forget what it is. I never understood why our Dad did the same thing - puttered about with a cup of coffee, mumbling to himself, "Now where did I - hmmm, oh! No, that's not it." All I know is now I do it, which leads me to believe that puttering is gene-based.

I can tell you exactly why I putter without pants on, though. I'm old and my legs are hot. Hot as in temperature, not hot as in "damn!" Although, I must say that the last time I was in San Francisco - well let me just say that the fellows there know how to make a man feel appreciated. I went for a run one morning and got two - umm - compliments within three blocks. One was a rather passionate yowl from two bon vivants in a passing car. The other was when a guy walked out of a restaurant, ogled my legs and said, "WOOF! Oh honey I needed that!" This is not the same response I get when I wear running shorts around my own neighborhood, though. I stopped by my neighborhood Starbucks yesterday on the way home from the gym wearing the self-same pair of shorts that had garnered me so much praise in San Francisco. The septuagenarian VFW members in the cafe gave a few homophobic snorts and chuckles; the girls behind the counter asked my thighs if they'd like to try the new orange mocha. I suddenly understood that whole "eyes up here!" thing that women sometimes do. But I really don't mind if the girls at Starbucks only love me for my legs. They can talk to 'em all damn day if they want to. I'd be really concerned if they loved me for my wobbling mancakes (or "chesticles" if you prefer) or the wide selection of keratosii that cleave like sheaves of barnacles to my back and shoulders. I'd be even more concerned if they loved me for my ass, which is - well my ass is just wrong. That's all I can say about it. And I would gape in disbelief if they got steamed up over my pythons. When fully flexed, one looks like it has eaten a mouse; the other like it has eaten a piece of spaghetti with a knot in it. To put the whole thing into automotive parlance, I may have a nice set of rims but my upholstery is shot. Best to just gawk from the curb, ladies.

All of the above begs the question why my ex-wife spends any time trying to insult me when I already do such a good job of it myself. But then again, perhaps there are some people who aren't strong enough to kick someone unless that someone is already bound, gagged, and face down. I often think of replying to her vitriol by quoting Cyrano: "I find your vain attempts to insult rather ineffectual. If you had really wished to skewer me you could have said, oh a great many things." But even being playfully facetious means that I'd have to walk the same low road as my aggressor, and that's something I can't afford to do if I really want to give more than lip service to "be[ing] the peace that [I] want to see in the world". That is something that I really am dead-sober-serious about. Perhaps I insult myself to inure myself to insult, which is also a way to concurrently immunize myself against the compulsion to return anger and hatred in kind. Maybe not the best system in the world, but it works okay for the moment. Besides, I don't really believe that I'm all that ugly. I do, however, still have to sneak up on a glass of water. And I must say that my teeth are so yellow that I spit butter. (Thank you! I'll be here all week, ladies and gentlemen!)

I have digressed. Indeed, digression is my forte (pronounced "fort" meaning "strong point", not "for-TAY" meaning "loud"). Therefore I have succeeded in completing the metaphor that I set out with: wandering around the house in search of that thing - you know, that thing! What was I looking for again? Jesus, I can remember the difference between "fort" and "for-TAY", but I can't remember the difference between my ass and -

Hey, did I tell you a dug a hole in the ground the other day? First time in years. I even have my own shovel now. I was installing a kitchen waste composter in the back yard. Coolest thing ever. Throw table scraps in there and it turn 'em into humus in no time. Has a lock on it to keep the rats out and everything. Got it from the city. Sweet deal. Plus I got a yard waste composter from the city as well, one of those barrel-shaped deals that you throw lawn clippings and whatnot in. And let me tell you, that sumbitch gets HOT! I took the lid off and took a gander inside and it gave me a complimentary facial steam. I'm sure Aveda will be capitalizing on the dermatological benefits of compost soon.

Which brings me to my next point of digression, which is that I have found that homeowning is not so much owning an object as it is creating an enterprise. My home is a veritable factory of domestic products which include construction, organic waste disposal, small animal (dog and cat) farming, small animal (dog and cat) sewage treatment, junk mail recycling, neighborhood diplomacy, and homeland security (viz., keeping those goddamn kids from the flophouse out of my backyard). The only challenge now is to create positive cash flow from all of those pursuits, and to stem the tide of currency flowing out of the gigantic hole in the money-dike. Were it only as easy as digging a hole, I'd be set.

Hey look! I have legs!

Speaking of which, Teresa got me a manure fork for Father's Day. I am now the proud owner of yet another item on the list of Things That Make You A Man. My manure fork takes a place of honor alongside my stainless steel Coleman cooler, the cargo nets in the back of my Subaru, my 6,000 cu. in. vol. Gregory (that's the brand name) backpack, my JetBoil, and my Seneca-Wallace-autographed football. And of course my Johnson, which is the name of the tiny stuffed buffalo that I purchased in the gift shop at Yellowstone. Why, what did you think I meant?

Now I forgot what I was talking about.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Happiness Is Wood

2007-06-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

Fig 1: A cross-section of old growth happiness. In the future,
we may be able to practice sustainable happiness practices, and
not rely solely on harvesting irreplaceable old growth stands.
(You said "practice practices". Idiot. -Ed.)

Greg:

I had another realization about happiness (You don't say. -Ed.), and its relationship with other emotions and I thought I'd pass it along.

While doing my "three things" exercise, I suddenly realized that one of the three things that made me happy that day was writing down my three things. That seems like a paradox, but I'm perfectly okay with that. It's as though practicing happiness begets more happiness. That's kind of a "duh" realization, I know. But you'd think there would be a diminishing return in that control structure somewhere. (E.g., in psuedocode it might read like: "practicing happiness will make you happy UNLESS OR UNTIL some douchebag comes along and fucks up your day. CASE NEXT: Continue practicing. CASE ELSE: beat aforementioned douchebag soundly about the head and shoulders.") As a point of logic, though, it seems that if you practiced happiness regularly and without interruption, you would create a perpetual state of mental well-being that was unshakeable.

From my experience, it seems that's possible, but looking at my day-to-day emotional life, I know that's not the case. Not yet, anyway. For instance, last night we were getting ready to go out the door to the theater ("West Side Story" at the 5th Ave - not a bad show as it turned out), and I couldn't find the tickets. Did I undertake a serene mental recapitulation of my actions in order to recall where the tickets might be? As the French say, "Oh FUCK NO!" I ran around the house ripping stuff out of drawers and turning pockets inside out while hurling epithets and verbal assaults on everything and everyone including but not limited to mine own creator. I was on the verge of giving the dog a cavity search when lo, the tickets didst appear to me, verily in the spot where I left them. But where was my happiness then? Where was that unshakeable feeling of "everything's going to be okay"? I should've probably turned the house upside down looking for that instead of the tickets. As it was, once I had the tickets were in hand, I was instantly ashamed of how I had acted.

Maybe all of that is fodder for practice, too. As I said in my last letter, dealing with frustration seems to be the next big challenge in this whole quest-for-happiness thing. And in trying to ameliorate anger and frustration in order to gain happiness, I've come to realize that anger and happiness are not opposites. Not that practicing happiness doesn't go a long way as a prophylaxis against anger and discontent. It does. But it's like comparing apples and horse apples. They're completely different. (Glad you pointed that out. After the last time we had lunch, I was beginning to wonder if you knew the difference. -Ed.) I'll save the whole point-by-point explanation of exactly how they are different for another letter. Just suffice it to say for now that the only thing they share in common is the rubric of emotion, and that's where the similarity ends.

Anyway, getting back to the paradox (or tautology, if you will) that practicing happiness is a way to be happy. The fact that writing my three things is one of the things that makes me happy reminds me of that old saying about how wood warms you three times: once when you cut it, once when you split it, and once when you burn it. Likewise, happiness warms you three times: once when it happens, once when you recall it (like when you do the "three things" exercise), and once when you share it. That doesn't roll out quite as smoothly as the thing about wood, but you get my drift.

I tried explaining all of that to Teresa this morning. She waggishly replied with, "So happiness is wood." This only led to a back-and-forth exchange of very naughty puns, each more titillating than the last, and none of which are fit to reprint here. But just let me say this. While wood by itself may not be happiness, it can be a very important ingredient of happiness in consensual relationships between mature adults. Ahem. (A phrase containing the terms "spank" and "plank" also comes to mind. -Ed.) (Quiet you. -TRG)

Okay now I'm embarassed.

-Thaddeus

Happiness: The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis

2007-06-07T06:54:00.001-07:00

Nobel Laureate Konrad Lorenz attempting to induce an aggression
response in a goose by blowing his stinky-ass pipe smoke in its face. The
goose later ripped off his beard and crapped on his nice new shirt.

Greg:

I feel like chokin' a fool. Lawd, lawd does I feel like chokin' a fool!

And through that statement, you may have guessed that our Cognitive Science lesson for today is on Dollard and Miller's Frustration-Agression Hypothesis. Put down your tuba and peanut butter sandwich and stop readjusting your frilly under-drawers and listen, dammit. This is important. The lives of thousands of customer service professionals are at stake.

Ready? Begin.

Way back in 1939 when everyone was nice (except maybe Hitler), a buncha eggheads (Dollard, Miller, Doob, Mowrer, et. al.) got together and worked out this crazy idea that frustration and aggression were inextricably linked. According to them, aggressive behavior was a response to what they called "goal frustration". In English, that meant that if you have a goal in mind, and you try to achieve that goal but you can't, you respond with aggression in order to achieve that goal. They said that pretty much all aggressive behavior could be explained that way.

Okay. So. A few years go by and a bunch of critics call bullshit on that, so Dollard et. al. come out with another paper that says, "Dear Chumps: We didn't say that aggression was the only response to frustration; we said that aggression was one kind of response to frustration. Love forever and - seriously - go fuck yourself. Dollard et. al. PS: We spent all the grant money on bathtub gin. Ha ha ha on you."

Konrad Lorenz - remember the guy with all the geese following him around? That guy - he was another one who studied aggression in animals 'round about the same time as Dollard and Miller. In his book "On Aggression", he hypothesized that aggression was a natural drive that had to be slaked by acting out from time to time. I say bullshit. First off, he worked with geese, and everyone knows that geese are the most predeterminately pissed off animals in the universe. Second, I'd like to meet him and his geese some Friday night down at the Fight Club. I've got something they can slake!

Look, I'm not saying that Dollard and Miller were right or they were wrong. (I am saying that Lorenz was wrong, though.) What I am saying is this: it seems that dealing with frustration is my next great hurdle in this whole happiness thing. The "3 things" exercise has worked out swimmingly. I highly recommend it. It seems to be a panacea for a whole spectrum of neuroses...half a dozen of my own, at least. (At this very moment somewhere in New York State, a certain Dr. C. J. Spezzano is higly amused. -Ed.) My state of mind is generally pretty - what's the word - "chill" I think is the correct clinical term. But every once in a while, specifically when I'm in some sort of frustrating situation with some public utility or Internet service provider or contractor or - well pretty much anyone you have to deal with to - what's that word - live, I find myself thinking very aggressively if not acting aggressively, and that certainly doesn't make me happy. To wit, the Death List that I have recently composed which consists of several public institutions and enterprises that have stymied my attempts to live a calm and peaceful life. Chief among them (with their various transgressions enumerated for your edification) are:

My Mortgage Company: who just this morning sent me on a circuitous jaunt through PhoneLand and the Valley of Being On Hold because they got my Social Security number one %$#@ digit off.

My Phone Company: who still have not flipped the tiny, tiny switch that makes my downstairs phone work, despite my manifold entreaties and requests...not to mention the fact that they just doubled my phone bill instead of halving it and combining it like they said they would...and don't even get me started on how &^%$ing long it took to get my service hooked up in the first place.

My TV Company: who...aww Christ, I don't even want to say it. The appointment is for between 1P and 5P. They show up at 9:30P, whistling a merry tune. Then they don't even install my...arrrrrrrgh. Choke, hell!Where's my gun, goddammit?! (You're a pacifist. Remember? -Ed.)

My Various Contractors and Service People: who, while they're very cordial and congenial and do good work, I still have to...every time I call they don't...and then I have to...arrrrrrrrgggggggh! I said where's my gun goddammit!!?? The big gun! The one with the knife on the front of it and the part that sprays poison!! Find it!! (Gun, hell. You need some booze! -Ed.)

Okay, there's more but I gotta stop. Otherwise I'm going to have to get someone to stand on this blue vein on my forehead to get it to go down.

Frustration is a part of life. That's just a natural fact. (Or a Noble Truth, if you like. -Ed.) If there weren't any frustrations, that would mean that things happened exactly the way you wanted them to every single time, and all you'd have to do was blink to get anything you wanted, and then where would you be? That's right. You'd be a ditzy blonde living in a tiny bottle, polishing the chrome on Major Healy every time he turned around. (You youngsters ever watch "I Dream of Genie"? -Ed.) And how's that a way to live? Fuckin' no thanks. The interesting thing about life is that it has some randomness and surprises to it, and that's what makes it ossum. Can't have surprises without frustrations. They're flipsides of the same thing.

But how to deal with the frustrations when they arise? It always seems to me that they're so sudden and unexpected that you're stuck in the middle of one before you can say "I need to kill a fool". And since these little, petty things seem to be the only obstacle left between me and a constant state of happiness, it seems like if I get this one solved I'll be doing pretty goddamn good. Plus, I'll be able to pass the savings on to you! (And by "petty" I mean for example that it was the TV guys that showed up late. It's not like I was waiting for a dialysis machine or rabies vaccine or something. That would be totally worth getting freaked out over.) And the solution must be at least slightly more complex than "just chill the hell out". It seems that frustration is one of those autonomic responses, like startling, sneezing or grasping at donuts. Or maybe that's just me.

Awright. So that's the next "assignment" that I'm going to give to myself: come up with a way to disarm frustration. But in the meantime, any suggestions that you have would be more than welcome. Remember (he said, polishing a .303 Enfield with a drop sight), the lives of thousands of customer service professionals hang in the balance.

Cheers, goddammit!

-Thaddeus

Yellowstone

2007-06-05T20:04:00.000-07:00

If it gets any more beautiful here, my head will explode. Me and Teresa
near a rapids on the Yellowstone River. My hair is standing on end because of the
shocking amounts of beauty we were exposed to each day, and not because I rubbed
six quarts of DEET and #50 sunblock into it and then baked it in the white-hot heat
of the red-hot sun. I discovered on this trip that I could really give a marmot's ass
about civilization, and really never cared if I saw it again.

Greg:

Just - and I mean "just" - got back from backpacking for four days in Yellowstone. Yes, I mean capital-The capital-Yellowstone, and no, that's not a euphemism for some mosquito-infested water park that I spent the weekend at.

Where do I start? Christ, man - it's Yellowstone! The great-grandpappy of national parks! The one with Old Faithful (which I did not see) and the buffalo (which I did see) and the bears (which I had spray for but did not see)! How much more park-ier can you get than Yellowstone? It's vast, the size of something really big, like the InterWeb or maybe Stupidity. And - with the slight exception of the heavily touristed areas, like the steam vents or the restrooms - is as wild as wild can be. Animals spend their whole lives eating other animals there, and they never run out of animals! How freaking freaked out is that? It's like having a lifetime pass to Kentucky Fried Antelope if you're a bear. And you can walk for six to eight days and never, ever see a toilet. S'true.

We were hiking along a migration path for the whole of our trip, and although we did not see much large wildlife, we were constantly confronted by their bleached skeletons and almost loveseat-sized turds. We were compelled by these parts of our experience to write a new ad slogan for the park - "Yellowstone: Where Animals Come To Eat, Shit and Die". We think it'll be huge with the juvenile male demographic.

True fact that I just made up: The average weight of a single tourist at the Mammoth Visitor Complex is six hundred sixty eight pounds, not counting the Winnebago that they ate for lunch. And you can tell their age by counting the hairs on their back.

Oh oh oh! Speaking of Winnebagos - When we were driving back from the end of the trail to our hotel, Christina, one of our guides, happened to mention (apropos of nothing), "Didn't I tell you guys about the 'anal" thing?" To which we replied - in chorus - "NO." So she told us about how hilarious it is when you add the word "anal" to the beginning of the name of any motorhome that passes by you on the road. And she had just heard the so-far best of this ongoing "competition", and it was this: Anal Dutchman Express. And she was right. It was hilarious. And we howled like rabbits until we could no longer breathe. Of course I had to chime in with: "...when your usual Anal Dutchman just isn't fast enough." The Anal Pop-Up, The Anal Rimrock Express, and The Anal Sunseeker provided us with enough guffaws to make it all the way back to Jackson, where Teresa dished out an honorary self-propelled vehicular title to a wayfaring Anal Ram 1500.

Look, okay, maybe we were high on Gorp and had been massaging our bare hineys with prickly pears for four days. Anything would've been funny. I know I was in a physically compromised state. The two days previous, I drank six quarts of water per day and only peed once. Maybe I was high on thirst.

I wish I could give you some travelogue about the trip like what we did day by day, but doing that just seems so boring and mundane. Was the hiking difficult? At times, yes. On the third day, we had some pretty good elevation gain up some pretty rough terrain. Not the worst I've been on, but - hey, who wants to hear me whine about heat and exertion? I know I don't. Exertion and exposure and bug bites and all that are part and parcel of backpacking, and if I didn't like that kind of stuff, I'd stay at home and tape cheesecake to my ass. The rest of it you can probably guess, having backpacked yourself before. It's the usual pains, made completely immaterial by the unusual, unexpected, and at times indescribable glories of nature. At the end of the trail, I honestly thought I was going to cry. I saw the end of the trail come into view, and all I wanted to do was turn around and go back whence I came, back into the comfort of Yellowstone.

So yeah, maybe instead of trying to give you a blow-by-blow, I'll just include a link to the photos and let them tell the story. For now I'll just go curl up in my nice, warm, civilized bed and dream that I'm still out there somewhere near the Yellowstone River, happy as hell, face down in the weeds and the bugs and the dirt.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Yellowstone 2007

Ruminating: It's Not Just For Cows Anymore (Happiness Part 10)

2007-05-27T06:51:00.000-07:00

Joy may be fleeting, but self-loathing and doubt are
lifelong companions. Just ask my editor. (Props to my homey
Marc Chagall.)

Greg:

Remember that "happiness experiment" I was doing, the one where every night, I'd write down three things that had made me happy that day? Well I decided that I'd stop doing it for a while to see if any of the benefits that I had received from doing the exercise would disappear and if I'd go back to my old cycles of thinking. I got some interesting results.

By the way, this is how I help combat animal testing. I do experiments on my own brain rather than, say, a Rhesus monkey or, say, my cat. My own brain is less expensive, is right here where I can reach it all the time, and I don't have to clean up any poop. I foresee a glowing, cruelty-free future where all psychology students will do the same. I also foresee a future of totally wigged-out zombies who roam the earth in search of research grants so that they can feast on the sweet, sweet money inside them. But that's a discussion for another time.

So did I go back to my old thought cycles? Yes and no. The "lows" in my day-to-day mood never returned. I never had what I would term a "bad" day since I started the exercise or since I took a break from it. There was always something positive, some accomplishment that I sensed in the back of my mind. The feeling of "everything's going to be okay", even if it was only slight, never went away whether I was doing the exercise or not.

However, I did go back to ruminating quite a bit. As I've said before, I believe that rumination is at the center of every neurosis, so that covers pretty much everything except maybe the schizophrenias, brain damage, and organic disorders. I also think that rumination must be in large part a chemical process in the brain. I know that it can be controlled by the same supplements that help defeat the over-firing of neurons that occurs in the locus ceruleus of people like myself who suffer from panic disorder. (Think of over-firing as a sort of "feedback loop" that doesn't stop when it's supposed to.) Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is an over-the-counter supplement that works pretty well, but if you take too much of it or take it for too long, it inhibits your ability to...oh what's that thing? The thing that you do when there are thoughts in your head? Oh yeah...THINK. And that...ummm...what's that thing where something's really bad and you hate it? Oh yeah...BLOWS.

Don't even get me started on Elavil, Norpramin, Xanax, Valium, or Imipramine. I think those should all be reclassified in the PDR as Schedule IV Dick-Wilting Barbiturates. (Was that crude? Beg pardon.)

But back to the point. Since I stopped doing the exercise, any kind of...how shall I say this...negative stimulus, whether it was general stress (traffic, work, and the myriad daily frustrations) or specific stress (my ex-wife calling me names - everything from "sub-human", "complete failure" and "sperm donor" to "faux Buddhist"), caused me to go off into wild tangents of rumination, sometimes lasting for days.

(Hey, cut her some slack. At least she didn't call you "motherfucker" this time. Although I can see how her calling you that, while it may have been intended as hurtful, borders on comically tautological. -Ed.)

(Oh yeah. Hilarious. But c'mon, don't make fun. People who are that pissed are not having a good life. Don't contribute to the suffering. That ain't right. -TRG)

(Oh dude, c'mon that was AWESOME! I even threw in the word "tautological"! That was fuckin' SWEET! That'd get you hella points in Scrabble! -Ed.)

(May I continue? -TRG)

(Whatever, ya fuckin' faux fuckin' Buddhist fucker. -Ed.)

(Thank you for giving me an opportunity to practice. Namaste. Now onward. -TRG)

And I don't mean ruminating just a little. I mean quite a bit. On the upside, it wasn't the old, negative kind of rumination, like "how can I retaliate? or "on a scale of one to a billion, how hateful can I feel?" Instead it was more along the lines of "what is the best, most ethical way to handle this?" And then afterward ruminating ad infinitum on whether I handled the situation well or not.

Well I've pretty much decided that whether it's ruminating on good things or bad, ruminating at all - if it doesn't have any specific outcome - is a pretty huge waste of brainpower, not to mention a phenomenal waste of time. It's like putting your car up on blocks and revving the hell out of it in neutral. Even if you engage the clutch, nothing is going to happen. In the meantime it's a huge waste of fuel - and with gas prices being what they are this Memorial Day Weekend and what with the Global Warming and all the drowning of the polar bears and whatnot, and all the stinky of the exhausty fumes blowing into the neighbor's yard while he's trying to have a barbecue, and then him getting all aggro with the threats and the dog and the shotgun...well, you can see how ruminating just makes it bad for everyone.

Okay. So. Yeah. Here's the good part. Just one day of doing the happiness writing exercise brings all that unnecessary rumination to a tire-barking halt. I know because I resumed the exercise. It was like Baby Jesus poured out a mighty flood of calm that immediately extinguished my brainfire. The experience was truly phenomenal. It's as though the action of focusing on things that made you happy even for a moment completely negates the brain's ability to ruminate. It's as though you can't be miserable and happy at the same time. Shocking I know. (Whatever, ya fuckin' faux fuckin' failed cognitive scientist. -Ed.) (Namaste. -TRG) It's also probably something that Big Pharma would hate for you to find out, but there you are. If doing this simple exercise is all it takes to elevate a person's general mood and inhibit if not altogether stop neurotic ruminations, then Big Pharma is going to go broke. And I know there must be something to this because I performed this experiment on the most jacked-up brain I could find: my own.

Cheers, (Whatever. -Ed.)

-Thaddeus

Jerk Appreciation Day

2007-05-20T07:42:00.000-07:00

Soda Jerk ca. 1940: While most believed that Soda Jerks were
trained to be complete assholes, the truth is that they were hired for
their natural penchant for blatant assholery.

Greg:

Ever heard of rice? They eat it like crazy in Asia. They even make "milk" out of it. Word on the street is that a little farm girl offered some to the Buddha during his ascetic period and it was so tasty that he said (and I quote), "Fuck this 'starving' shit. Suffering is for the birds. Rice milk shots for everyone!" And then they all got enlightened. The end.

But wait - one more thing about rice. I've found that it is the training food of the future. I've been using it to train for my backpacking trip to Yellowstone, and let me tell ya, it works. All ya gotta do is load 40 pounds of the stuff on your back, and your legs will be as burly as oaks in no time. I filled my backpack with a Buddha-load of rice today (1 Buddha-load = 40 pounds or roughly 385 East Indian pala. -Ed.) and then commenced to haul my hiney up and down every hill I could find in Carkeek Park. It was awe-inspiring. I swear that I sweat out my entire body weight and achieved pure freedom as an Emissary Of The Light. Then I woke up and dragged my 260-pound rice-burdened ass home through the pouring rain.

I hear the only downside of training with rice is that you get huge, but you occasionally experience "rice rage". We'll see about that.

Speaking of things that are good for you but cause also cause you pain, I've developed a whole new appreciation for difficult people, or "jerks" as some refer to them in the vernacular. Perhaps you've met some. Perhaps you've been one. I know I have, so it is not without a certain affinity that I offer "jerk" as an omnibus term that includes people like me. (I foresee a new best seller: "Jerk Like Me", by T. Gunn. -Ed.) I realized a little while back that were it not for the jerks I've known, I wouldn't have some of the truly wonderful things that I have in my life right now. I'm going to take this opportunity to redefine the word "jerk" for myself like this. Instead of it being a pejorative, I'm going to give it the neutral definition of "anyone who gets your attention much as you would get a dog's attention by jerking on its choke chain". It is not pleasant attention-getting, but it is potentially useful attention-getting nonetheless.

This begs the question "what the fuck are you talking about?" Bear with me. As my Spanish teacher used to say, por ejemplo:

When I worked at Perkins-Coie, the mammoth international law firm in downtown Seattle, I used to share a work space with a woman who drove me nuts. Our personalities were as compatible as water and flaming trucks of dynamite being attacked by Mongol hordes with flaming trucks of dynamite. And I had to sit with her in a tiny room every day and listen to her blather and prattle while doing the most demeaning work known to man: litigation support. Just as my frustration with her was driving me to the point of double murder/suicide (meaning I would kill myself, rise from the dead, and kill myself again while she prattled on unawares), she brought in a newspaper clipping and showed it to me. "There's a story about a really cool company that just opened, and I think you ought to work there." The story was about AtomFilms. So strong was my desire to work there, and so strong was my compulsion to flee this woman's presence that I harassed AtomFilms until they gave me a job. (No, really, I did. There was no open position at the time.) So in a way I have her to thank for my job at Atom, which lead to - well pretty much the rest of my copywriting career. Thanks, Horrendously Annoying Lady!

More recently, there were the people who moved in upstairs from us at Uwajimaya. We'll call them The Thumpingtons. These people were so noisy that you could swear that they were made of solid lead, suffered from fainting spells (or at least leapt into the air and belly-flopped on the carpet for no reason), and flew into apoplectic fits where they threw their furniture across the room. (Their furniture was also ostensibly made of lead from the sounds of it. -Ed.) We let 'em know that we could hear everything that they did, not in a "shut the fuck up" kinda way, but in a more friendly "you are compromising your privacy by all that goddamn noise you make" kind of way. That freaked 'em out pretty bad (I'd say from the looks of them, they were born freaked out. -Ed.) and caused them to increase the noise forty-fold. Mrs. Thumpington started vacuuming with a power saw (from the sounds of it), and Mr. Thumpington attached a motor to the davenport and started ramming it into the walls (again - from the sounds of it). So great was our noise-induced distress that we decided to do the unthinkable. We called John L. Scott President-Award-Winning Real Estate Moghul Gloria Lee and got her to sell us a house. Now each night when we come home to nothing but birdsong and the wind in the cedars as a soundtrack (and neither crashes nor thumps emanating from the ceiling), we thank Scott and Tami Thumpington of the Uwajimaya Village Apartments for motivating us to achieve our dream of perfect tranquility through home ownership.

I've got a ton more, but I'll save all of them for another time. But suffice it to say, if I'd've been dismissive with these people and just shunted their presence in my life off as annoying jerkitude that I couldn't bother with (or worse, tried to engage it and do battle with it), I never would've experienced the gifts that they offered me.
I honestly bear no grudge against these people, these "jerks" as I've said. I truly feel that I owe them a debt of gratitude for all the good they've done, although I don't know what form the repayment of that debt would take other than to stay as far from them as possible. "Look, we don't get along, so I'll do you and me the favor of giving you a two-state-wide berth." So I've unofficially declared May 18th as Jerk Appreciation Day for every person I've ever known who gave my life a yank in a positive direction. (And why not? It's the same day that Mount St. Helens blew up and the anniversary of my high school graduation. Not to say either one of those things was a yank in the right direction, either academically or geologically speaking. Although there are certain fans of vulcanology who might disagree.)

When I saw the Dalai Lama in San Francisco last month, he had something interesting to say about jerks. The Chinese government has done some unspeakably reprehensible things to his people over the years, and someone asked the question of how he found it possible to still sit down and negotiate with them. He said - and this is an imperfect quote, mind you - that he always approaches the situation this way: he truly believes that the people he is negotiating with are his friends. He says that he knows this because as human beings, they have the same fundamental needs and desires as he does. But, he said, although I truly believe they are a friend, I never forget what they are capable of.

That's compassion tempered with wisdom, to be sure.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Best. Week. EVER.

2007-05-15T10:47:00.000-07:00

Man, what a jerk! It may surprise you to know that a lot of
people thought the Buddha was a douchebag of simply epic
proportions and told him so to his face quite frequently. Good
thing they did and he talked about it, otherwise I'd have no
idea what to do when it happened to me. Blessings come in the
strangest packages.

Greg:

I've had the best week EVER. You couldn't top it if you tried. And when I tell you everything that has transpired, you're gonna thing I'm being facetious, or nuttier than an acre of squirrel crap, or grasping your frilly underdrawers and giving them a firm tug, or all three. Let me assure you I am not. I'm totally serious.

Don't get me wrong. Nothing good happened. And a bunch of stuff happened that was quite arguably bad, or would at least make a minor saint wring his or her stigmata-covered hands in despair. But it was still the best week ever because I didn't forget to practice the Dharma!

Look, c'mon, I'm not holding myself up as a paragon of patience or virtue. I've been pretty much a hypertrophic bleeding heart at the parade of my own pity most of my life. And I still may very well be. But at least I'm figuring out how to not make myself or others suffer for it. And that, dear brother, is the very first step on the Eight Fold Noble Path. (Or not. You prolluby oughtta go back and read "Buddhism for Dummies" again. -Ed.)

So here's what happened. I gots a whole list.

A few days ago, I got two crowns way back in the hurty part of my mouth, way back where the ear canal connects to the hurt bone. First they stabbed me in the facial nerve when they were delivering the anesthetic (felt like somebody had clefted my chin with a flaming tomahawk), and then they just kicked my ass for fun with every tool in their arsenal of ultimate pain for a couple of hours. They put one mammoth temporary crown over both teeth, giving me a gigantic dinosaur tooth to crunch on stuff with, which would be ossum if I were seven years old and still liked to eat saplings, but is not so cool when I'm forty four years old and like to eat blazing hot lasagna...which doesn't feel so good on an inflamed double-mammoth-crown. So the pain wakes me up at night, and not just the pain, but the whoomp-whoomp-whoomping in my ear because the whole area is as inflamed as the Middle East. So what do I do? I sit. I breathe. I try to remember other people who are also in pain. I try to visualize them all. I don't try to make my pain subside. I just sit there and observe it, and let that pain build more empathy within me for all those other people - like Michael Coates, that guy in the paper I sent money to so he could get his teeth fixed. Why just sit there and observe the pain and use it to generate empathy? Because the Dalai Lama said to. That's what he does when he's in pain. Who am I to argue with that? (Hey, look at what I found! Wikipedia tells me that aspirin was invented in 1899. I bet they're still making it. Maybe you could eat one and sleep at night and dream of all the other people who are sleeping, hmmm? -Ed.)

And then - well I won't bore you with how I spent more than four hours on the phone with Qwest trying to get the long distance at my new house to work. Everybody does that. If you haven't spent four hours on the phone with Qwest, you're just not living a human life.

And the DirecTV guys have been showing up (or not showing up) at my house at all crazy hours. They were supposed to come over between 1PM and 5PM one day. They showed up at 9:30. That's PM. And it wasn't even on the day they were supposed to show up. I made 'em go away. Then on the day they were supposed to show up, they called and said they had a hangnail or terminal ennui or some damn thing, and so they'd have to reschedule me. So I said, sure fine, why not Tuesday night between 6 and 8? And they said why 6 and 8? And I said because I like even numbers. So I get a call this morning - Tuesday morning - at 9:45, which is in no way an even number or night - from a DirecTV guy saying there was nobody at my house to let him in except this one crazy guy who was digging in the backyard for no apparent reason. And I thought "Hey! Great! That contractor I hired showed up to do the excavation!" So me and the DirecTV guy had a big laugh over all the miscommunication and he said you have a great attitude and I said hey, it's my TV not my dialysis machine so who cares? If I miss The Daily Show my kidneys won't fail. And we laughed some more and when I went home for lunch, lo and behold there was a satellite dish perched up on my roof. Finding humor is practice, too.

Is there more? Mais oui.

I got a letter from the IRS telling me that they were disallowing my IRA contributions, and that I owe another $2,211 in taxes for 2005. But if I freaked out over it, that'd mean that I was attached, right? So I didn't. S'just money.

But that's okay.

My ex-wife sent me an email. That doesn't happen every day. She was asking for something, and I thought that when I declined her request I was being pretty reasonable. I said I'd rather take it up with the person it concerns, which was not her. She, on the other hand, did not share my view, and returned to me a raging screed that was awesome (as in it inspired awe - I'm no-shit serious here) in its terrible majesty. As I recall, no portion of my person, heritage, parentage, profession or religion was left unassaulted. (She left out your complexion. I mean, get some dermabrasion for that keratosis, wouldja? -Ed.) You may think I'm poking fun or trying to capitalize humorously on someone who has enraged themselves way beyond reason, but in all seriousness I'm not. First of all, it's pretty apparent that you have to hate somebody pretty bad to disparage their religion as false, call 'em half a dozen names like "phony", "sperm donor", "miserable life entity", a "blind fool", sub-human, and then compare them to George W. Bush. (Surprisingly, no common swear words were used. What the fuck is up with that? -Ed.) I mean you have to sit down and think through what would hurt the worst, and then spend time crafting it into a letter. Malice aforethought. Again, I have to remind you, I'm not making a joke here. So what do you do in a case like that? How do you reply? Even more to the point, why would you reply to someone who is trying to impress upon you in a very specific and exhaustive if not catholic manner that they hate you - as though they were vaulting all their energies into describing the breadth of the sky?

Illuminating point: I have a card on my desk that sits right next to my computer. I read it every day about a million times. I don't think of it as an adage or a bromide. I take it absolutely to heart. It reads:

"Every day, think as you wake up, 'Today I am fortunate to have woken up. I am alive. I have a precious human life. I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others. I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.'" -H. H. The XIVth Dalai Lama

So, instead of answering rage with rage, I figured that if I really wanted to make difference, I'd have to take that moment to become the peace I wanted to see in the world. You can take refuge in the Dharma only if you can remember to. Again, I can't say that I'm Joe Serene or that I'm the best Buddhist in the world. I get mad, I'm self-centered, I'm short-tempered with people, and I think badly of others sometimes. Christ, I cut people off in traffic yesterday! (Man do I suck!) But at least in this one case for one moment - in the middle of a week like this one, no less - I remembered the Dharma and tried to practice it as well and honestly as I could. (My reply to her is below.) It gives me a little hope that I can do something about the only thing that I can really do something about, which is me.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

L~-

Your opinion is yours, your insults are yours, your anger is yours, and your hatred is yours. However you choose to act on those things is up to you. I can't share that with you, take it away from you, or return it in kind. Nor do I need to defend myself against any of it. Also, it would be wrong of me to try to change you or change your mind and not accept you the way you are. You may believe that you hate me, but I think the fundamental reality is that I am your best friend, and you are mine.

I've never been called names like that or had someone slur my religion until your last email. Being Jewish, you probably have had people slur your religion to your face, and not being Jewish, I can only guess how awful it makes you feel. When I feel like somebody is really trying to make me feel bad, instead of getting really wound up over it, I think of a newspaper story that I read once. I've reprinted it below.

"...try to empathise with the person who harmed you. The Dalai Lama believes that no-one is congenitally evil. He believes that all of us have a right to a certain measure of happiness, and, remember, even people who love you will hurt and sometimes betray you; it doesn't necessarily mean you should sever the relationship.

If these things seem difficult, think of forgiveness as a gift to yourself. The Dalai Lama calls this an 'enlightened self-interest'. No-one benefits from forgiveness more than the one who forgives.

Whenever the Dalai Lama talks about forgiveness, he likes to use the example of Lopon-la, a Lhasa monk he knew before the Chinese occupation. Lopon-la had spent 18 years in a Chinese prison before he was released and came to India.

The Dalai Lama told me: "For 20 years I did not see him. But he seemed the same. Of course he looked older. But, physically, OK. His mind still sharp after so many years in prison. He was still the same gentle monk. He told me the Chinese forced him to denounce his religion. They tortured him manytimes in prison. I asked him whether he was ever afraid. Lopon-la then told me: 'Yes, there was one thing I was afraid of. I was afraid I may lose compassion for the Chinese.'

Namaste,

-Thaddeus

Deeply Moving

2007-05-07T08:50:00.000-07:00

Meet the new neighbors! Even though it is entirely
landlocked, residents of Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood
insist on wearing uniforms with a quasi-naval theme...
and carrying comically large signs that represent the area's
Year of Glory.

Greg:

We've done it. We've moved to Greenwood, which is precisely 6.9518 nautical miles (8 miles or 64 furlongs. -Ed.) and 71 years (1,851.07143 fortnights. -Ed.) from Chinatown. To wit, it is a long-ass ways in both quality of life and crow's flight from my previous place of residence. My new residence was built during the depression (1937 to be exact) and my neighbors seem to be of the same era, at least in terms of gregariousness. Or maybe it's their Tom Joad-ishness. Dunno. Anyway, as would be the case with any time/space traveler, I'm feeling unhinged at the moment in ways both good and bad. I'm like Dave Bowman at the end of Kubrick's 2001, filling one leg of my spacesuit with the pee of joy, and the other with the pee of abject terror. Lemme 'splain:

I lived in downtown Seattle for over 14 years. As it is in the coal-black heart of any large American city, noise, crowds and angst are constant companions. Rhesus monkeys raised in conditions similiar to downtown Seattle turned to cannibalism, and Seattle compared to other urban areas in America is freaking benign. I can only imagine that if you raised primates in conditions mirroring downtown Los Angeles, they might do something truly psychopathic like join Amway. Still though, living for more than a decade in a sea of 800,000 people who, on a minute-by-minute basis, want to take your parking space, your wallet and your girlfriend is, shall we say, a wee stressful.

Now I'm in Greenwood which is still inside Seattle proper, according to the map at least. But judging from the demeanor of its residents, you'd swear on your mother's wooden leg that you'd dropped straight through the Mayberry hatch. People greet you. They smile. They wave. And I'm talking about people you don't know. Excuse me, let me clarify: people you don't even fucking know. Example: we were somewhere in the neighborhood, looking at two cats lounging in someone's living room window that were - I swear - the size of ottomans. (The cats were the size of ottomans, not the window or the living room. The Ottoman Turks were, by the way, a gigantic people. -Ed.) Now anywhere else in Seattle you might get greeted with a stern middle finger or an even sterner firearm for staring into someone's front window. Not in Greenwood. The lady of the house just waved and smiled at us as big as you please. I don't know which amazed me more, the size of her cats or the size of her cheeriness.

Second example: I met my neighbors. Met the neighbors! They came across the street and introduced themselves. (Ward and Yoshi, in case you're interested. Nice folks. Ward uses a manual push mower, so he can't be all bad. -Ed.) And it's not just the people, it's the - whattaya callit - the nature, the environment...you know environment, that thing with all the dirt and twigs and animals and stuff. That thing. I have a gi-mongous yard now that has nature all over it. Quick tally - three apple trees, four or more lilac bushes, raspberries, blackberries, tulips, bamboo; umm..buncha other stuff...parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme - oh yeah, and The Rhubarb That Ate Manhattan. I got up this morning and went out and had coffee on my stoop and listened to the birds. The air was packed full of birdsong! They were jamming! It was like karaoke night in my cedar tree or something! For a minute I thought to myself, "Man, I wonder if all that racket is going to wake up the neighbors." And then I thought, "Oh by the mangy beard of Baby Jesus, what have I become?" It took me a while to key down and actually enjoy the moment.

Since the move only happened on Saturday, I'm still having to tie up loose ends. I have neither my InterWebs nor my fancy-schmancy satellite TV hooked up at the new place yet, so for all intents and purposes I could've moved back to 1937 and not even know it. I do have a radio in the house, but all it tells me when I turn it on is that Roosevelt has no plans for getting into another war in Europe, no matter how much trouble this smarty-pants Hitler fellah causes.

I'm off to the soup line. Long live the New Deal!

-Thaddeus

The Big D in SF: Part 1

2007-05-01T06:07:00.000-07:00

The Dalai Lama, right, listens to Imam Mehdi Khorasani of the Islamic Society
of California during a discussion of ways to promote understanding and lessen
religious intolerance among Muslims and people of other religious faiths. During
his public talk in San Francisco last Sunday, His Holiness said that since 9/11 he
has become a particularly staunch defender of Muslims. (Genaro Molina/ LAT)

Greg:

Sorry I haven't written in a while, but I was down in San Francisco over the weekend getting a triple-dose of the Dalai Lama. Teresa and I flew down for two days of teachings and a public talk. The whole experience was quite blowing of the mind, so forgive you me if speech mine disjointed becomes. Random observations will I make, rather than unskillfully trying linear thinking to execute. Bicycle underpants; yet frequently razorblade? To be sure. Dilute dilute OK!

Here are the points, in no particular order:

San Francisco is desperately trying to become New York, if only inasmuch as everyone is pissed off to beat the band and is as surly as a legion of wet cats. Why? Search me. (This is not my imagination, by the way. I've had it confirmed by a few returning SF ex-pats.) Never in all the years that I have visited that city have I seen unexpurgated rage on the streets and roadways. One guy actually leapt from his car amdist a sea of tourists at the corner of Union Square to accost another driver. Nor have I ever been exposed to such unpracticed rudeness by metro transit operators. I say "unpracticed" because they're bad at it. They don't seem to have been at it for very long, like their Cheerios only got peed in just this morning. New Yorkers, on the other hand, have had nothing but pee 'n' Cheerios for breakfast since they cut teeth. I can credit New Yorkers for their attitude as they seem to come by it honestly if not genetically. San Franciscans, on the other hand - well, what the fuck, you guys? The last hundred times I visited you were all goodness and light. What happened?

Speaking of surly nutbags - we're at His Holiness' public talk on - what was it - Sunday. First of all, I have to tell you that it's a whole different environment than the teachings. The public talks are always for the scenesters, the same people who would be there if it were Howard Zinn or if it were, hell I don't know, Dave Matthews/Trey Anastasio Duet Nite. They're the curiosity-seekers and a few of the stinky rich Marin County former hippies who dropped $25 large to sponsor the event. So - first nutty experience - I'm walking down the concourse to enter the auditorium, and the guy walking in front of me stops, so naturally I run into his back. Lo and behold it's fuckin' James Hetfield of fuckin' METALLICA. (Per the Chicago Manual of Style, 3rd Edition, METALLICA must always appear in all caps. Otherwise it's just not metal enough. -Ed.) So. Yeah. That was weird. I had half a mind to tell him not to listen too closely to His Holiness. Otherwise it was going to drain the angst out of all his music, and then where would he be? Just another douchebag greasemonkey working in a body shop.

So second nutty experience: The Dalai Lama is taking the stage, getting ready to do his talk, when all of a sudden some guy in the front row starts shouting, "Dalai Lama! Dalai Lama! Can I give you something?" And of course His Holiness cheerfully toddles over to the corner of the stage to accept whatever "gift" this wingnut has to give him. Needless to say, the boys from the Secret Service found absolutely zero humor in this bullshit, and started closing in on the nutbag. I, on the other hand, was in my seat twelve rows back, feeling like I'm watching a movie - you know, like the part right before the killer jumps out of the closet or the starry-eyed nutbag in the first row gives the Dalai Lama a live hand grenade. So now here's the Dalai Lama, extending his hand to take whatever it is that this guy has, and the Secret Service dudes are lined up alongside him, and all of a sudden, Mr. Wingnut hucks - and I mean like pitching a baseball, not a lob - an apple at the Dalai Lama. And then the Secret Service guy closest to the Dalai Lama does this ossum kung fu move and whacks the apple out of the way. I got the impression I was seeing hundreds of hours of Secret Service training in action. I don't think it would've mattered if it were an apple or a grenade or a flaming hedgehog that the guy threw. That Secret Service agent would've done the same thing. And now because of his quick-thinking and bravado in protecting the life of the Dalai Lama, he will receive total consciousness. Nice perk.

So yeah, they bottled Mr. Apple-Hucking Dipshit up and scuttled him out of the auditorium and all was well in the world again. The rest of the talk went off without a hitch.

While I'm on the subject of nutbags (I am, aren't I?), this is the third time I've been to a talk by the Dalai Lama (but only the first time I've been to a teaching), and I've noticed each time that all the white people at the event look like they've been beaten with pillows. Look, you don't have to tell me how my prejudice regarding white people lurks only scant millimeters beneath my skin. (...or on top of your skin; have you seen a mirror lately? Or your parents? What the hell is wrong with you, anyway? -Ed.) But all the white folks have their hair on sideways and have that faraway look in their eyes like they've been beat to shit with a big-ass feather pillow, and if they take ten more steps they're going to fall right the hell down. I know how contact between disparate cultures usually freaks people out, so maybe it's that. We come from a largely war-like culture. So do the Tibetans, come to think of it. They were #1 in the pillaging business way back when. But then they met the Dharma and it freaked them out so hard that they became pacifists. Maybe this is what I see happening to the white folk at these gatherings.

Although I did see/hear a guy in a t-shirt that had the Jewel In The Lotus mantra printed on it give a resounding FUCK YOU! to a cab driver at the event. Change comes slowly I guess, even in the presence of His Holiness.

More next time,

-Thaddeus

Luckiest Friday the 13th EVER.

2007-04-17T18:02:00.000-07:00

Up His Nose

2007-04-10T14:14:00.000-07:00

...and believe me, he means it.

Greg:

Want to try something that's just nuts? Stick a Q-Tip up your nose. Seriously. That is some freaked out shit. I did it this morning. It was like I'd taken a tiny sheep or a bunny or something and put it on a ramrod and stuck it in my snout. And then my eyes got all watery and my head got all swimmy like I had just sneezed. It's nothing like sticking your finger in there. Q-Tips have no sensory structures - nerve endings and whatnot - like your finger does. You have no clear way to judge how far you put that thing in there until it's way too late. I swear to the Patron Saint of Otorhinolaryngology (...which is Saint Blase. I'm not shitting you. Google it if you don't believe me. -Ed.), I poked myself square in the frontal lobe. I nearly retarded myself by doing it, and it was a retarded thing to do in the first place. Is that what they call a paradox?

But retarded or not, using a Q-Tip is just a great way to clean your nose. Your finger has all kinds of microscopic beasties on it, but a Q-Tip is made from Cherub Down. It's sterile. You could get impetigo or gout or some other eighteenth century disease from picking your nose. Or somebody could bump your elbow and you could inadvertantly self-lobotomize. And don't even get me started on the time that I stuck the vacuum cleaner hose on my beak and nearly collapsed a lung.

You may well ask what I was expecting to accomplish by sticking a Q-Tip up my nose, and I may or may not tell you. But it's a well-known fact that I've been nasally fixated since I was a wee one. Remember how I used to jam cotton in my nose when I was a kid? Jesus Paint-Huffing Christ, you'd think somebody would've called a social worker or something and said, hey, this kid's packing his nose like he's fixing to ship it to China. Maybe there's something wrong with his brain.

Well we both know how that turned out, don't we? I switched from balls of cotton to fistfuls of cocaine, and by my mid-twenties I had turned into a disc jockey. Everyone knows that cocaine is a gateway drug for broadcasting abuse. If I were an adherent of a 12 step program, I might think that this morning's escapade with the Q Tip was a relapse. As it is, I regard it as acting out - a form of stress release, if you will. I've been doing this house-hunting, mortgage-brokering, contractor-wrangling, paint-chip-selecting, Ikea-safari-ing way too long. I can't drink booze any more because I've already proven to everyone within chundering distance that I'm just plain bad at it. So what opportunity do I have to act out my self-destructive-yet-benignly-weird tendencies that seem to bloom when I'm under stress for protracted periods of time?

Speaking of which, Teresa and I were down at Ikea the other day. (You don't say. -Ed.) As is to be expected when a couple is going through something stressful, like - oh I don't know - buying a house, we were sniping and bitching at each other and getting short tempered. And suddenly it dawned on me that nothing, not even buying a house, was worth souring our relationship over. I mean, c'mon, I go around preaching this happiness stuff like my poop was made out of sunshine, and do I remember to practice it when it counts? Well not always, but at least this time I did. So I told Teresa that while I'd been waiting pretty much most of my life to own a house, I'd also spent a good chunk of my life looking for the girl of my dreams. And lo, here she was. I considered myself one lucky Son of the Lineage to have met her. (It's a Buddhist thing. Google it if you don't believe me. -Ed.) But if owning a house meant fighting with the girl of my dreams, it was totally not worth it. In fact, I told her I'd rather lose the earnest money than be unhappy with her. So yeah, we kinda refocused our perspective on this whole house thing. While we feel fortunate to be on the brink of home ownership, the truly important thing is our happiness.

And that's why we're installing morphine-dispensing Tickle Me Elmo dolls in every room of the house.

I kid! I'm a kidder!

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

HouseHunt '07: Home At Last

2007-04-02T15:57:00.000-07:00

GunnMansion 3.0: The Cottage of Industry. It's gonna take
some tough love, brow sweat and hammer blows, but she'll be the
most ossum cottage in the shire when we're done with her.

Greg:

We did it. We made an offer on a house and it got accepted. This was owing in no small part to the efforts of our agent, President-Award-Winning John L. Scott realtor Gloria Lee who put the seller's agent in a headlock and rapped her soundly on the snout until she acquiesced. (Figuratively. Not the "acquiesce" part, the snout part. -Ed.) But more on that later.

So yes, we are 30-some scant days away from posession of a 2BR, 1BA 1930s cottage with a 1BR, 3/4BA legal mother-in-law apartment. And - oh yeah - arched doorways. Picture molding. Coved ceilings. SWEET. And - dig this - a climbing wall in the detached garage! DOPE! (Stop it with the 90s-era hip-hop slang. It does not suit your Urban Bur-Zhwa-Zo-Honk lifestyle. -Ed.) The lady who lives there currently is a mountaineer, so she built a full-on-Kevin's-mom climbing wall, and yes, it can take my weight. I leapt upon it the moment I saw it, bringing the full force of 220 pounds of Scottish love to bear on its frame and it did not protest.

Oh oh oh! Wait! And check this out. She has a full free weight set with dumbbells, a bench and everything, plus a speed bag and a heavy bag. These will be ideal items for relieving the stresses of first time home ownership if I can talk her into either leaving them behind or leaving them behind for money. But yeah, if I can get all the workout equipment too, I'll be a SUPERHERO! The yard will go to hell because I'll be down in the basement every day feeding the pythons, baby!

And speaking of yard, it's hooge! The house is on an 8,800 square foot lot, which in Missouri terms is "cozy" or "a window garden" but in urban Seattle terms is "freaking vast, yo". (Again with the slang. -Ed.) 'Nother thing about the lady who lives there currently: she does landscaping, so she got in the habit of bringing home orphaned plants and plugging them into the ground. Therefore we have three apple trees, three or four lilac bushes, raspberries, blackberries, bamboo, rhubarb, bluebells, rhododendrons - I mean it's like we have some kind of Audobon collection going on back there. Plus we have a gi-normous cedar tree. (Sacred to Buddhists! Big plus! -Ed.) The downside is that the yard, while rife with flora, is undisciplined and looks like exactly what it is - a place where somebody randomly took orphaned plants and plugged them into the ground.

We'll get around to taming the yard eventually. Our first priority, though, is the house. Since the plumbing and wiring are new, the only work we need to do is cosmetic. And I just want to make it clear that we're going to be restoring, not remodeling. Thank the carpenter Jesus that in 70 years nobody came along and screwed up the kitchen or the bathroom in the name of remodeling. They're both still structurally the same as they were when the place was built. And the kitchen still has the original sink and cabinets. Someone did, however, come along and put recessed light cans in the kitchen (why, Jesus, why?). I will be plugging them right the hell up forthwith and restoring the original central and sidewall fixtures - plus cheating a little by installing under-cabinet lighting.

However the first order of business is to throw some new linoleum, carpet and paint into the mother-in-law so we have a decent place to live while the chaos of restoration reigns on the main floor. Teresa and I know you're handy with the tools and stuff, so don't be surprised if you get offered an all-expense-paid "vacation" to Seattle some time this summer. Snicker. Grin.

Oh wait, I was going to say something about the headlock thing. You'll appreciate this since you're in real estate. Yeah, so the house had been on the market three days and we were the only ones who submitted an offer. The owners had planned an open house for last Sunday, but our offer was set to expire on Saturday at dusk. It was a full-price offer with an inspection contingency and a pretty handsome chunk of earnest money, so it wasn't bad. But the seller's agent tried to tell Gloria that maybe if we offered more money, they'd just accept our offer right then and there. But Gloria said NO YOU DIH-INT! NUH-UH GIRL-FREEE-IIND! Knuckles were bared. Claws were unsheathed. Hair flew. Caps were forcefully placed - "popped" as it were - in asses. Forsooth, the seller's agent soon saw the error of her ways, and mutual acceptance ensued.

The inspection is this morning. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

HouseHunt '07: I Heart This Crap Shack

2007-03-30T13:09:00.000-07:00

She's got freckles on her butt I love her. First thing I'm gonna
do if I get this place is get rid of that damn Dr. Seuss plant in the
yard.

Greg:

I'm out the door to do some last minute scrutinizations of another house before I put an offer on it. If I decide to do it, it'll be the third offer I've put down since I started looking. I'd tell you what happened with the last offer, but why? It'd be as useless as talking about an old girlfriend. "Why did she dump me? Because she didn't like me. End of story."

So my colleague Mike Woo took me aside and counseled me on real estate hunting. He pointed out that if I keep looking at "turnkey" places - pretty houses that you don't have to do anything to - then you're going to have a lot of competition. However, if you single out the one ugly girl at the dance, you might just be fortunate enough to find out that she has a ferocious body underneath that gunny sack. (Yeah, okay, and she has a big brain and a really great personality. Now stop calling me a douche.)

With that in mind, I turned HouseHunt '07 into CrapShackHunt '07: The Search For Curly's Gold. And lo, a pretty decent crap shack didst reveal itself unto me. Cue the biography music:

Born in 1937, this cove-ceilinged, arch-doorwayed charmer got her mascara smudged and her skirt ripped when she got pimped out as a rental property way back in ought-two. And it appears some fast-talking shellback on Cinderella liberty squeezed her soffits and left her with a mother-in-law apartment. Now she's on her own with an extra bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom to feed. Who's gonna help a poor tarnished girl like her?

Me, that's who. Provided the terms are right. So far, the owners are saying yes, we know it's a crap shack and no, we do not care. It takes fitty dollahs to make us hollah. Pay what we're asking or beat it. Truth be told, the comparables in the neighborhood are right in line both quality and price-wise. So I'm going to make an offer that is contingent on inspection, and if she passes muster then it's off to the altar.

I must also say, though, that this whole househunting thing is taking its toll on my psyche. I feel like I actually have to push my jowls up with both hands in order to get myself to smile. Why is that? People say that buying a new house is hard on couples ("I'm in the business of ruining marriages!" moans our agent), but I think I have been not as much of a raging prick as I usually am (Ask his wife. -Ed.), and I think we're getting through this okay. So why all the worn-out feeling with all the frowny-face all the time? I used to love to look at houses. Now I feel that if I have to look at another house I'm going to throw up in my pants.

Speaking of tolls, I helped Aaron move out of his apartment yesterday. Although it was tiring, I had a really great time. His apartment had at least as many fascinating odds and ends and impromtu science experiments lying around as mine did when I was his age. (No, you actually had homemade petri dishes. Remember when you got the flu for three months? And then you found that thing that looked like "a big, fuzzy Jesus coin" under your bed? And then you thought, "oh yeah - I was growing something in some agar and beef base that I put in a jar lid and...that's where that thing went. Under the bed!" You think the smell would've tipped you off. So yeah, Aaron's apartment is pretty much a surgical theater compared to that. -Ed.) It was some hard work, though. We had to call on every bit of our Tetris skills to get his recliner out the door and into storage. For a chair that's made for lazy people, they make it awful goddamn hard to move. (Or perhaps that's the point. -Ed.) The best part was when we took all the garbage to the dump and got to throw giant seeping bags of collagenous goo into a mouldering pit of indescribable horror and domestic filth. T'was fun! T'was!

I gotta run because the realtor is going to pick me up in a couple minutes. I'm really tired of looking at houses. I'm really tired, period. At this point, I just want to buy something so I can lay down in it and go to sleep.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

HouseHunt '07: The Real Estate Lexicon

2007-03-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

I'd love you if I weren't so goddamn jaded. At this point, I'm not so much
concerned about getting my offer on this place accepted as I am interested in
being done looking for houses.

The backyard. Why do they call it "beauty bark" if it is neither bark nor beautiful?

Greg:

So the house hunt is going. Just going. Not "going well" or "going poorly". Simply going, as in it is a force of nature that I can not stop. The good news is that I've become better at weeding out the "crap shacks" as my agent Gloria calls them...that is before I make her drive all over hell and gone looking at them.

"Don't go south," she tells me. "Go north. I'm not going to let you go south any more. Too many crap shacks." So I said fine, I'll stop looking in the Honkie Hollows trailer park even if that's the only thing in my price range. Speaking of which, we've effectively raised our ceiling by $50k over where we started. And yeah, we put an offer down on another place, this one in West Seattle. It seems decent and it is, for all intents and purposes, completely brand new even though it was originally built in 1928. It was a 2BR, 1BA Craftsman bungalow once upon a time. Then somebody raised and leveled it so they could make the basement a mother-in-law apartment, and did a studs-out remodel of the whole place. John did a thorough inspection on it and didn't find anything that would stop a person from buying it. The only drawbacks I can find are that there is no formal dining room and no garage (it was in the basement and became the mother-in-law).

But still, even though this place is kinda sweet, we've decided that if they don't take our offer (there are currently six other competing offers), there are probably other houses in the world that someone will sell us. We've gotten over that whole "attachment" thing.

The thing we haven't gotten over is the sheer magnitude of the falsity, gall, and outright blasphemy present in some of the listings we've read. What do they do to listing agents, I wonder - send them to Republican Spin School? I mean c'mon, nothing that is 6' by 8' is a bedroom. It's a cell. And water cascading down the basement wall really is a problem, regardless of how much the owners say it's not. I swear to Jehovah's Curly Beard, this one place we looked at had so much water in it we were expecting Baby Moses to float by. Yes folks, it's only "not a problem" if you have gills. I mean if you're gonna be that obtuse, at least be inventive while you're at it. Tell people the place comes with an "double-secret underground submarine port".

So Teresa and I, after much study and increased bile flow, have come up with our own Real Estate Lexicon that translates Realtor-ese into English. I have published it below for your edification. Oh, and if the offer we've submitted gets accepted, you'll know. Believe me, you will know.

-Thaddeus

THE REAL ESTATE LEXICON
Weasel-to-English translation

Cozy: cramped
Charmer: shithole
Fixer: tear-down
Artist's Studio: can't get the smell of weed and patchouli out of the walls for love or money
Up-and-Coming Neighborhood: fewer meth labs and crackhouses on the block than last year
Priced To Sell: did not pass inspection and never will
Motivated Seller: going to prison for tax fraud
3BR 1BA: 1 bedroom, 2 closets, and half a toilet
Craftsman: it's old and we wanted to justify jacking the price up by $50k
Daylight Rambler: former bowling alley that has several holes in the roof
Completely Refurbished: completely ruined by some jackass with a Home Depot card
Off-Street Parking: the location that your car will be stolen from
Fenced Yard: we didn't say "all the way around"
Mature Trees: dead elms
Shy Quarter Acre: huge if you're from Lilliput
Mother-In-Law: dank basement crypt for storing relatives; see also "toilet included in garage"
Hardwoods: fiber board with 38 coats of shellack
Near Public Transpo: Metro bus parked in the yard
New Construction: spackle was too expensive so we used toothpaste
Near Shopping: ...if you're shopping for crack
Must See!: there aren't enough words in the English language to describe how much of a shithole this place is

HouseHunt '07: Kiss My Ass, Cute Little House!

2007-03-24T05:53:00.000-07:00

Bitch.

Greg:

I know I haven't written in a while, but that's only because I've been looking at houses. I have no time to do anything else. Seriously. My plants are dead. My apartment is a landfill. Somebody keeps calling me and telling me to "come back to work" - whatever that's about. And I think perhaps I had a dog once, but that recollection is getting fuzzier as time goes by.

So we've looked at about 225 to the third power houses so far, and have made an offer on one, but that didn't turn out s'good. As a matter of fact it turned out kind of weird. Mind you, this is the first time in my life that I've ever made an offer on a house so I don't really have a basis for comparison. But you and your wife are in the dirt-peddling business so you can tell me if this is usual or not.

Okay. So. On Wednesday, I was hiding in my office and screwing around on the InterWeb instead of working, and I found a cute little house online (how did people look for houses before the InterWeb existed, I wonder?). I decided to do a drive-by and see if it was as cute as it seemed to be in the pictures. This whole house-hunting thing has become like Internet dating except that you get to stalk without getting arrested or being shot by somebody's husband. I digress. And yes, it was not only as cute as it was in the photos, it was cuter. And nicer. And cleaner. How often does that happen?

Here's the stats: stucco, built in 1947, up and coming neighborhood, 2BR 1BA, 790 square feet with garage & shop, 2-story newly built outbuilding (which was also unbearably cute), gardens and fruit trees on an 8,500 square foot lot. It was formerly owned by an artist, so the color palette was perfect, and there were all kinds of really nice little artsy touches on the inside. I mean, c'mon, it even had daffodils in the window boxes. It looked like it was all dressed up for Easter, for bleeding Christ's sake! And the price was right: $364,950. (Those of you reading this from outside Seattle who are not used to seeing grossly inflated prices should probably take a shot of rye at this point to calm your nerves. -Ed.)

Naturally, I did the only decent thing, which was to call Award-Winning John L. Scott Realtor Gloria Lee and tell her that I would probably die if I did not own that house immediately. She informed me that there was another offer being written on the house at that very moment so there was no time to waste. We wrote up an offer - unbeknownst to my long-suffering wife who has weathered many of my hare-brained schemes over the years, and somehow sees fit to continue in this marriage. Rest assured I told her all about it...after I picked her up from work...on the way to show her the house. "Hi honey! This is the house we made an offer on!" Surprise is sometimes good for marriages. Sometimes.

Good thing she liked it as much as I did. She signed the offer all on her own without me having to wrestle her tiny hand to the paper. And it was a decent offer, too. We gave 'em the asking price, put down $5k earnest money, and put in an escalation clause up to $385,000. We've been approved for what they call in the mortgage business a "shitload" of cash, but I have a moral compunction against compromising every other facet of my life while slaving to a mortgage. We're working on a cap of $400. (Which, owing to the remarkable number of shitholes in that price range, just crept to $425. Mortgage slavery is getting closer at every moment. -Ed.) After we signed the offer, we went home to chew on our nails.

The offer was set to expire at 10PM that night. At 9:40 the phone rang. It was our agent, telling us that our offer was declined in favor of the other party. Apparently they came in at $390,000 - $5k higher than us - and put down (get this) $117,000 in earnest money. And I'm thinking "who are these people that got that kinda cash hanging around for earnest money? Colombian drug lords? Meth lab contractors? Coffee growers?" But the listing agent said (allegedly) that hey, these people just might be nutso-ballo, so have a backup offer ready.

But you know something? Teresa and I thought about it after we put together the backup offer, and we both just said, "You know what Cute Little House? Fuck you. You cheated on us with some Colombian Drug Lords, you little ho. Why don't you just take your cute little window boxes and your crown molding and your sweet little gardens and stuff 'em up your soffits, you bitch. And you know what? That paint job makes you look fat. And your porch is probably stuffed." And then we spat on the ground. And then we left.

Suffice it to say we're still looking. We're over it. We've moved on. We're dating again. But still, it's gets tiring, you know? I swear to Jesus the Finish Carpenter that if another cute little house cheats on me, I'm going to shoot it square in the transom.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

HouseHunt '07: The Place Where Evil Dwells

2007-03-18T06:10:00.000-07:00

4 BR, 3BA $349,950. You don't have to have a ton of dough to own
a palace like this in Tacoma. However, you do have to have wicked
paint-stripping skills. And be bullet- and hobo-proof.

Greg:

So we went to Tacoma looking for a house yesterday. We were going in search of a few turn-of-the-century gems we had found online. What we discovered was the reason why the Salish named it "the place where evil dwells".

Not that Tacoma is all bad, mind you. My sensibilities may have been softened by living in Seattle all this time. Seattle is A) clean, B) rich, D) stunningly beautiful almost everywhere and C) populated largely by honkies whose sense of entitlement borders on megalomania. (I'm painting with a broad, racist, self-hating brush actually. I'm just about the only honkie in my neighborhood and I like it that way. When I see another honkie, I'm like a budgie with a mirror. My eyes dilate, my crown feathers stand on end and I start hissing. Why? Two words: instinct.)

Anyway, as it turns out the places I looked at were not really hellholes. They were actually grand old houses that could do with some cosmetic love - stripping the paint off the woodwork, getting bloodstains off the floorboards and whatnot. But at least the walls hadn't been rearranged and they hadn't been turned into toilet farms. The downside was the neighborhoods surrounding the houses we looked at. (And the fact that they were about a 40 mile commute. -Ed.) A couple of times, our agent was reluctant to get out of the car. No, honestly it was pretty grim. In some cases it appeared as though each and every house in the neighborhood came with its own miniature landfill and hobo colony.

So Tacoma is out of the picture. Even as much potential as some of these places had, I still can't see myself commuting 40 miles a day one-way, and then spending all my spare time stripping paint, hanging sheetrock, and training moles to cultivate my yard. Christ, I only live in a 1,200 square foot apartment now and I'm such a lazy bastard that I insist on having a housekeeper. I prolly oughtta only look at houses that come with a Teflon yard that I can hose off from time to time. Or pay somebody to hose it off for me. I am such a bourgeoisie dick. Lenin would be ashamed.

So I've brought my soft palms, expensive haircut, and wingtip shoes made from the flesh of the proletariat back to Seattle where prices are high but the median income is even higher. Hopefully I'll be able to find something here that pleases me. Of course the first thing to catch my eye was a really cool "green" housing development near Green Lake, which is an enviable neighborhood to be in. They're called Ashworth Cottages, and to be honest, if I were to design and build a house for myself it'd be exactly like one of them: recycled brick, beams and glazed terra cotta taken from a disassembled warehouse structure formerly on the site; small footprint, no toxic paints or finishes, a rainwater reclamation system, Craftsman repro design...and on and on. But the kick in the 'nards was the oxymoronic, almost hyperbolic price point declamation in their verbage: "STARTING IN THE LOW $700s!" I almost want to call them and point out that nothing that has a 700 in it and is not an 80-acre pot farm in Hawaii is low.

More later. Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Flipped Off: How Speed And Greed Kill Houses

2007-03-16T09:24:00.000-07:00

DON'T KILL THIS FLIPPER. Save your rage for those d-bags who
ruin houses and then jack up the price.

Greg:

Know what I'm going to do? I'm going to get a pump-action 12 gauge Remington and ventilate the liver of the next "handyman" I see attempting to "flip" a house.

Yeah, OK - I won't. Yeah I know, I'm all Buddhist and stuff and the whole shooting somebody with a shotgun kinda runs against the grain of the whole compassion thing. (Yeah. Kinda. -Ed.) But I'm hacked at what I see these guys doing to houses, not to mention to what they're doing to prices, and I desperately need to vent my anger by at least soaking one of these guys with a squirt gun filled with wee-wee. That's harmless and it'll get the point across, right?

Let me back up. Here's how I hyperextended my spleen on this particular subject.

Teresa and I are in the market for a house. We have to get something by July 1 because that's when our lease is up. Besides, Crashy McThunderfoot just moved in upstairs, so our apartment is kinda like living in the basement of a bowling alley now. If only to save our eardrums, we must move.

So we're out looking for houses now. You are already well acquainted with my inclination to obsess on turn-of-the-century Craftsman architecture, not to mention work myself into a pungent lather over small domestic gems of the early 20s. So the first house we go to was - at least architecturally - a classic small Craftsman bungalow. My kinda place. Looked great from the street. But oh, Sweet Mother of Gustav Stickley what this man - the owner, who we'll call "Flipper" - had done to the place. It was obvious in very short order that he had tried to flip this house - to improve its appearance quickly and on the cheap so's to fool the first cloth-eared bint with a swollen wallet and leaden aesthetics that walked through its ill-hung front door.

First of all, he must've got the paint and plaster buckets mixed up. The place needed plaster desperately. What it got was 36.8 coats of paint. Even that did not stop the canyons that were forming in the walls even as we watched. Then he replaced all the interior doors with hollow-core pieces of shite; turned the kitchen into a mustard-colored, black-marbled, 1970s love pad, and then - and THEN - painted the Christ-all-freakin'-mighty out of the exterior without - withOUT! - scraping it first. It looked like a case of post-adolescent acne that got a dermabrasion treatment from Lizzie Borden.

Needless to say we didn't buy it.

But - man! - don't you think people like that oughtta be arrested? At least? The Craftsman bungalow is an American architectural icon and legacy. Anyone who compromises one of these places in any manner should at the very least be forced to live in a rusted-out single-wide on the Hanford nuclear reservation. Surely there must be some rule of law whereby these speedy, greedy Home Depot recidivists can be flogged in a very conscientiously designed village square.

But no, this is America, and those who throw art into the meatgrinder of commerce get their own TV show. And those who throw Thomas Kinkade on their walls are looked upon as "art collectors". (Frankly, I'd rather draw on my walls with a poop crayon. But that's just me. And my poop crayon.)

So off we went and continued down the list of homes that we had decided to view that day, and the next was no better. Someone had turned the back porch of a cove-ceilinged 1920s cottage into a very long, narrow bathroom - or rather Bathing/Pooping Assembly Line. If you turned sideways in there you'd be trapped forever. Best to just face the wall and move along. And again, plaster that was practically basted with dusty flat cheap-ass acrylic.

Oh, the price on both of these palaces? 'Bout $380k. I think you can buy Utah for that much now. Which brings me to my next point, which is the fact that house flippers have contributed in no small way to the hysterically inflated prices of real estate in our formerly affordable neck of the Pacific Northwest. (Not exactly so. The increased focus on Seattle because of the Grunge Movement, microbrews, our "liveability" index, and MegaJillionaire Paul Allen's Seahawks - not to mention overpaid Boeing veeps, Genentech billionaires, Immunex zillionaires, a feistly little startup with a can-do attitude called Microsoft - and - the predilection of the mossbacks to fleece California transplants all contributed in their own small way. -Ed.)

Yeah. So. Poop. Not going so well so far with the whole house-hunting thingamadillyo. However, we are venturing down to Tacoma on Saturday to take a look at a Craftsman we found there for a buck-two-ninety-five. We've discovered that you can still find unmolested architectural treasures in Tacoma for cheap. And we've been assured by our agent that the low, low real estate prices have nothing to do with the fact that the city is riddled with crime and smells like baked ass, or that "Tacoma" is the Salish word for "the place where evil dwells". We'll give you a full report when we get back.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Happiness Pt. 6.5: I Won The Lottery. Again.

2007-03-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

THAT'S HOW I ROLL. First thing I'm gonna buy when I hit the Lotto jackpot
for real is a sweet setta wheels just like this bizzad bizzoy right here.
Dudes at the Starbucks driveup window are gonna crap every corner of their
pants when I glide up for my short drip in this ride. Oh yeah. And then
I'm gonna give the rest of the money to world peace. Amen.

Greg:

I won the damn lottery. Again. Well - wait - not the whole thing. If I'd've matched one more number, we'd be having this conversation at 600MPH on the Bonneville Salt Flats in the front seat of my solid gold rocket car. But anyway, for the third time in less than a year, I won $1,000 in the Washington State Lottery. Fu, the guy at Uwajimaya who sells me my tickets, gave a little squeak and exclaimed, "That's three times! You're the luckiest person I know!"

So what's my secret, assuming I have one? Well it's like this. I do have a lottery-winning secret. However it's not the reason that I keep winning money literally by the thousand-fold. Here's what happened:

Way back in ought-one when I was going to Seattle Central Community College on the state's dime, I was forced to take math against my will. Unbeknownst to me - or to the gnomes who run my checkbook - I had hidden powers of mathematical wizardry that suddenly bloomed under the tutelage of my many, many math teachers at SC(3). So yeah, I'm hanging out in the math lab one day, (Just saying that makes you a certified nerd. -Ed.) and I'm all talking smack about how the lottery is not truly random because if it was you would not be able to plot a bell curve on the results (which you can). No number would have a better chance of being drawn than any other number. It would be pretty close to a flat line. And Nick, the Uber-Math-Geek (If math smarts were pectoral muscles, he'd have an 80-inch chest. -Ed.) says no, it's truly random. I'm all like, "Hey Nick, why'n't you go blow a quadratic?" And he's all, "Why'n't you suck my rational equation?" And our professor goes, "Yeah, real mature." So I says to him I says that I had a way to prove that it wasn't random, and I was going to go do it, and when I did, he would have to wear a t-shirt every day in the math lab that said "THADDEUS GUNN'S KUNG FU IS THE BEST - and I, Nick, am his bitch for life".

So I got a spreadsheet of all the results for the Washington State Lottery Lotto game from day one up to the present, and I listed them all out in descending order of how frequently each number was drawn. I drew a median line through the results, thus creating a set of the top 50% most frequently drawn numbers. Then I wrote a simple Visual Basic program (OK - now you're a certified nerd with a gold star. -Ed.) that would randomly draw sets of six numbers from that pool. I would draw five sets of six numbers this way, and then create a control set which was drawn randomly by the Lotto machine at the store where I bought the tickets. So what I wound up with for every drawing was ten draws: five by me, five by the machine.

After doing this for three months, I calculated (with my bitchen new math skills) that my draw set won over five times more often than the control set. What I mean is that it won something - any prize level from $1 to $75. I wasn't shooting for winning the whole damn thing. I just wanted to influence my frequency or chances of winning anything. So it looked like I was right, that the lottery was not truly random, and that meant that a person could indeed influence their chance of winning a prize. Nick would be my bitch for life. Of course he poo-pooed the whole thing and told me it didn't mean anything, to which I replied that he should probably drive a Fibonacci equation into his rump at high velocity.

Nick now works as a Programming Titan for some company that prints money by the silo-full especially just for him. On the weekends, he crushes numbers with his 80-inch pecs at the Pike Place Market. (The tourists love it. -Ed.) He also drives a solid-gold rocket car. I, on the other hand, do not.

So yeah, so I've been doing this "experiment" for...oh more years than I can count now (Six. -Ed.), and my draw set still beats the control set five-to-one in number of wins. However - here's the rub: the control set, though it wins five times less frequently, wins - and I have calculated this mathematically - way way way WAY more $money$ than my draw set. The three times that I won $1,000, it was the control set that won. Same with the times that I've won $150. My draw set wins $1, $3, $5 and $20, like, all the time. But the big duckets come from the control set.

Ancillary-yet-interesting note: On my "three things" list the night that I won for the third time, I wrote, "Won $1k in the lottery again. Although I didn't mind winning, it didn't make me as happy as I thought it would."

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Happiness, Pt. 6: Gettin' My Dawdle On

2007-03-08T15:51:00.000-08:00

Meet my new role model. Droopy Dog is the pace car in my rat
race.

Greg:

I sent an email to that guy you asked me about - Max Hong, the guy who was relocating to Seattle. I said yeah sure I can show you where to score fat, gnarly buds with big red hairs, captain! I've been hooking foreigners up with ganja since '87 and I've got the t-shirt to prove it. Just say the word! I hope this did not offend his Korean sensibilities.

PSYCHE! I did no such thing. Actually, all I told him was that I've lived here for 20 years and had no plans of leaving my White Supremacist compound on Whidbey Island.

PSYCHE AGAIN! Good God man, you are so easy! Freakin' just look at you! You're all wigging out because you think I probably told this guy about how your strange affection for your tuba (and proclivity for having sex in barns while the brass section of the London Philharmonic watches) made you the model for the main character in Peter Shaffer's gritty psychological drama Greguus. Look, if he knows about that it's because he reads the paper. I didn't say anything. So chill. Eat a donut. Carbohydrates are a calming food. Or that's what Dr. Max Hong tells me.

Speaking of chill, this happiness experiment that I've been doing on my brain since November has caused me to chill in the most delightful ways. Here's an update. Doing the "three things" exercise really does work incredibly well for something that seems like such an insignificant gesture. However it does work a whole lot better if you do it right before you go to sleep. I know this because I was having a hard time staying awake and writing in my journal each night while I was in a state of repose on my TempurPedic Coma-Tron 3000, especially if I'd just eaten dinner not long before. As you know I get up at 4AM every day, so laying on the world's most comfortable mattress with a gutful of pasta at 9PM was proving to be a knockout combination. Even trying to avoid premature narcolation by writing while sitting upright at the dinner table didn't work so well. Half the time I was doing a full on neck-wilt followed by a face-plant right between the pages of my Moleskine. Most of my journal entries started to look like "1. Getting a check fro~~ #20a;slkjd ~~~~~~~~~. Snnrrrrrrrrrrfff." And then there'd be a stain on the page that looked like the Shroud of Turin would look if Jesus had been wearing glasses. So I started to do the exercise first thing in the morning which is just about the only time my brain works anyway. I have to admit, it's a great way to start the day, but the persistent mood-elevating effect from it began to ebb after a couple of weeks, so I decided I oughtta go back and do the exercise the way it was prescribed. I figure if I don't eat anything after 2PM, I should be able to stay awake long enough in the evening to get it done. I'll let you know how that turns out. Since I have a tendency to obsess on pudding at about 2:30PM every day, I believe accomplishing that will take a great deal of fortitude that I may in no way possess. We'll see.

I've continued doing the other exercise, the one I created to do in the morning, that one about "Three Things To Look Forward To Today". That one has been working out really well and works exponentially better than any "to do" list I ever wrote in my life. Stuff that I write in this list actually get done. Who'd'a thunk?

But the best side effect (or is it direct effect?) of this whole experiment is the across-the-board deceleration of my life in general. To wit, I have begun to dawdle, to dawdle well, and to dawdle often. Example: usually when I go hiking or snowshoeing on the weekends, I like to be the first person on the trail so I can enjoy the silence unperturbed by dogs, children, adulterers, fastpackers, sullen teens, Fat Grannies, Ozzie fans, and other representatives of the various phylums, classes or species tributary to the H. fartknocker evolutionary branch that might be found in the deep woods of the great northwest. I'm usually making everyone's life a living, shrieking hell by prying them out of bed at an UnGawdly hour on a weekend morning and making them rush to the trailhead. Not so anymore. Last weekend I was content to let the group gather at its own speed, then meander its way to the trailhead at a pleasant - dare I say floaty - pace. It was so much more relaxing than my usual way of doing things. The general texture and pace of the day reminded me of a rather pleasant week I spent in a Canadian hospital smacked out of my gourd on morphine. Everything had the languid, beautiful tempo of a still, warm autumn day, or...say...Hempfest. But this time I didn't have to have my appendix removed to enjoy it. What's more interesting is that this deceleration took place apparently without my volition. I didn't plan it. I just woke up one day, stopped giving a rat's ass, and started moving at a more organic pace...say the speed of a carrot...or perhaps even dirt.

Now I'm assuming, mind you, that this is the result of the exercises that I've been doing and not the result of the gradual evaporation of my precious life-giving fluids as I approach and overtake middle age. I'm convinced it's the former because of the proximity between the initiation of the exercise and gradual entanglement of my limbs in the giddy molasses of sloth. The fact that I can bench three times what I could when I was twenty, not to mention the vexing new growth of insolent black hairs on my chest where there were formerly none, both indicate that the bung and stopcock on my hormone barrel is getting - if anything - more leaky with age. At this rate I should be the strongest, slowest, most hirsute 80-year-old you've ever seen.

And speaking of geriatrics, I was surprised to find that not only is Jack LaLanne still alive and jumping at age 92, but another pugancious nonegenarian desperately wants to kick his ass. I thought that guy had stopped pissing people off and jumping-jacked his ass right into Forest Lawn decades ago. Apparently not. Well if he's still around when I'm 92 (which would make him 140), I'd probably like to take a crack at slapping the gums out of his mouth, too. I can see it now. I'll throw one punch and it'll take half a day to land.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Flying Blows

2007-03-03T06:58:00.000-08:00

Big Heavy Sweater. You might think it was
really ossum to sit next to Hemingway on the plane...
that is until he got his itchy pretzel dust and
stinky rum sweat all over you.

Greg:

I've made a psychological breakthrough. I've managed to upgrade my irrational fear of flying to fully rational hatred of flying. As The Bard once quoth, How doth flying blow? Let me count the ways.

OK - so here's how this came about. I had to fly down to San Francisco for work a couple days ago. I was sitting in the waiting room at my gate - you know, the one with the screaming kids (what do they do, import choleric infants from 18th century England and stick them with pins or something?); crackling, unintelligible PA announcements; scoliosis-inducing seating, and That One Guy Who Stares At You The Whole Goddamn Time (is he on airline payroll, I wonder?). I was starting to get some anticipatory anxiety, something that I've learned to recognize as easily and detachedly (Hey, nice word! -Ed.) as you might recognize a stomach ache. I've been dealing with it and an entire spectrum of related and ancillary anxieties since you dropped me off at the nuthatch that one night back in 1984. Suffice it to say, I've also learned to deal with it for the most part. So yeah, I'm feeling the clench train pulling into the station and so I figure I'll listen to the fear of flying audio course that I always take with me to impart some rational wisdom to my irrationally-twitching brain. And then I just said to myself, "Y'know what? Fuck that. And not just fuck that. Capital FUCK capital THAT. I don't wanna be that "guy" who has that "thing" that he has to treat all the time. That's a lot of work and a bunch of BS." So I just quit. And I wasn't fearful anymore. And that was pretty much it. Done. Quit. Stop. No mas para yo. Goose egg. Empty set.

So now that I was no longer distracted by thoughts of falling out of the sky in a flaming, tangled mass, I was free to experience the splendor of traveling aboard a modern aircraft.

It sucks. It's not nice at all. Who in their right mind wants to be bombarded with cosmic rays while trapped inside an aluminum sausage? And it's loud, it's stuffy, and that 110% real faux leather they make the seats out of - why, if one were to break wind against it, it would most certainly make a mighty cracking sound like two razor strops colliding at supersonic speed. Papp!! Imagine the embarassment. (Speaking of which, ever since I wrote that bit about farts, the traffic on this clog has not abated even for a day. Google Analytics shows me that they're reading what will become known as The Dear Gregory FartBlog in Malaysia this evening.) I suppose I could go on to whine about the pretzels they gave us which were - and I crap you negative - the size of the nail on my pinky finger. But it all seems so pointless. Flying is what it is - a suffocating, claustrophobic hell peopled with people who get their people sweat all over you because you're crammed smack up against 'em in a 600 MPH autoclave of human misery. And neither you, nor I, nor all the magical pixie dust in Baby Jesus' coke bullet is going to change that. I've been working on this "happiness" thing, and it seems really counterproductive to dwell on that which induces agony, y'know?

But here's the ape in my ointment. I have two more round trip flights coming up in the next two months. I got tickets to go to two full days (two days!! ) of teachings from His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama (we call him The Big D) at the Graham Civic Center in San Francisco at the end of April, so I gotta fly down to that. But I figure either way, if I go down in a flaming ball or land safely but all schmutzig with people sweat, I was on a pilgrimage to see The Big D so I'm pretty much a shoo-in for nirvana.

Oh yeah, and then I'm going backpacking in Yellowstone at the end of May, so again, I'm going to have to fly not once but twice both ways for that. You can only fly from Seattle to Boise and then straddle an angry gnat to Jackson. They won't send you direct. I'm sure that the fine people of Wyoming put the kybosh on direct flights, citing the danger of their fair state filling up with steers, queers and hobos from Liberal Ol' Seattle if such a thing were allowed. (Hey - wait a minute... Actually... There was a movie about... Oh never mind. -Ed.) But again, whether it's a flaming ball or people sweat, I was on my way to Yellowstone so I'm pretty much a shoo-in for the Happy Hunting Grounds. (Think again, kimosabe. -Ed.)

But that's it, though. No more flying for me after that. I'd probably have to fly if I were going to Europe or something, but I'll probably never make it to Europe because I don't believe it exists. That's just some story they made up to scare us when we were kids. ("Little Thaddeus, did you know that in Europe they have a toilet that shoots water right up your hiney?" "Eeeeewww! I hate Europe!")

And if I go to Bhutan, I'll just take the train.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

The People In Hell Called. They Said Thanks For The Ice Water.

2007-02-24T14:55:00.000-08:00

Manchego speaks: Chinga los otros! Soy Manchego,
el luchador mas pequeno y mas feroz de todo del noroeste!
Témame, putos! (NOTE: Manchego's opinions are his own, and
do not reflect the opinions of Dear Gregory, its affiliates, or
the many Dear Gregory-related defense industries.)

Greg:

As you can see from the picture, my fascination with tiny Mexican wrestlers has not abated. I call this one Manchego, and cobbled him together from a Seahawks bottle koozie, a Jones soda bottle, and a genuino 1/8th scale Mexican wrestler mask from the most Mexican part of the Mexico. A co-worker just returned from Mexico City (or thereabouts - can't be too sure as I wasn't listening) and brought along what at first appeared to be a half-score of tiny severed heads. Imagine my glee when they turned out to be cat-head-sized Mexican luchador masks which he graciously distributed evenly among his fellow man. Such a boon. Most confusing though was the tag sewn inside which read, "To be used as a novelty device only. Not for the prevention of disease or unwanted pregnancy." I think something may have been lost in translation.

There are no Mexican wrestlers in Children of Men, the new movie directed by the excellent Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mama Tambien). And why should there be? Oh, because he's Mexican? Look at you, ya racist! It takes place in 2027 in an England that is in the midst of mass sterility and rampant xenophobia. No one has had a kid in 18 years and illegal immigrants are rounded up like beeves and penned at the roadside while they await deportation. It's a real "feel good" flick along the lines of Pollyanna. I'm lying. But while it is an excellent, excellent film, be forewarned: there is not nearly enough morphine in Canada to offset the feeling of dread and despair that it induces in the viewer - namely me. I loved the film, but I had to go home and cleanse my brain by viewing The Little Mermaid afterward. (No seriously, he did. -Ed.)

And as if that wasn't bleak enough for me, then I had to go and watch Running With Scissors as a follow-up. I thought I was going to be seeing a dark comedy along the lines of The Royal Tennenbaums. What I saw was home movies from our dysfunctional youth. Again - a great film, but oh by the flaming, dyspeptic heart of Baby Jesus was it depressing. If you go see it, make sure you have the suicide prevention line on your cell phone's speed dial. You may need to call them directly from the theater...perhaps even while the film is showing. (Now available on DVD. -Ed.) I'm just going to say ten words about it - ten words that encapsulate that entire film and my entire youth: "Agnes, I want you to make me some Hamburger Helper." Those who have seen the movie will get it.

And no, I'm not going to launch into how much of an emotional quagmire our home life was. After 29 years out of the house and realizing how happy my life is now, it seems pointless. That movie just reminded me of what it was actually like because there were so many parallels. Since the film has a lunatic psychiatrist as a central character, it reminded me of the first psychiatrist I was sent to when I was 17. The guy was a whack job. We were talking about anger and he was telling me how he hit his wife because she deserved it. He even described how satisfying it was to him when her head made a thunk when he threw her against the wall. And for my part I just thought well, he's a psychiatrist isn't he? He has a degree. He must know what he's talking about. But here's the thing. Regardless of how awful it was overall, I have a lot of really happy memories from my childhood, a lot of them having to do with you. And that gives me faith that regardless of how dire the present circumstances may seem, there is always some small bit of joy available if you are attuned to perceive it, even if it is only Chekhovian irony. I learned how to be happy in the midst of my dysfunctional childhood; ergo, it couldn't have been all bad. If it was hell, there must've been some ice water in there somewhere.

Still - have the suicide prevention line and the morphine handy when you watch the movie.

So. Where was I? Oh yeah. This American Life. Speaking of living hells, I just listened to an episode of TAL that was entirely devoted to the life story of Carlton Pearson, the once nationally celebrated evangelist with a congregation of 28,000 who fell from grace (and financial security) when he stopped believing in hell and started preaching a gospel of inclusion. (Yeah, that's right. The self-righteous freaked right the shit out when they heard that homos were going to heaven. -Ed.) Furthermore, he was branded a heretic by his church. Did that stop him? No way, Jesús. But you really gotta hear his story. You can listen to it for free on the TAL website. The salient point of the program for me was when Pearson said the he realized that hell is not a place; hell is what we do to each other.

So on that cheery note, I'm going to go take my aching brain out of my skull and baste it with adorable puppies and kittens before watching My Little Pony and eating ice cream until a rainbow sprays out of my butt.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus