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

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

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

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:

• Bacon
• Peppers
• Microsoft
• Obama

A Prayer to St. Expeditus

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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