Deeply Moving

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

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.

Up His Nose

...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

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

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

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Tashe Dalek, Yo!

Snow cornice. Hurricane Hill trail, Olympic National Park. If you're looking for
a place to freeze every single one of you 'nards off during Lunar New Year,
I can't think of a more beautiful place to do it.

Greg:

Tashe muthaphukkin' dalek, and a Gung to the Hay to the Phat to the Choy! It's Lunar New Year, yo! It's 2133, Year of the Boar! Hope this letter finds you eating something made of pork, which in Chinese medicine is a warming food. (Although, don't get me wrong, I can't really endorse the eating of pork since I'm a vegetarian and all. But as I recall your diet consists of about 68% pork so I'm probably correct in assuming that you are reading this with a bag of chicharrons in one hand and a ham hock in the other whether I like it or not.)

Instead of staying in Chinatown and watching my little dog freak right the hell out over all the firecrackers and whatnot I decided to split town, hit the frozen road and do some snowshoeing.

Wait! Wait! I have to tell you something funny that happened even though it has nothing to do with Lunar New Year. Last week I was walking back to the office after lunch and I was just about right in front of the building when I encountered a lady out walking a great big beautiful golden Lab. Musta weighted about 150 pounds. Real pretty dog. So I asked her if I could pet her dog and she said yes - but, "Watch it. He jumps." So I put my hand down there by his snout to let him sniff it and BANG! The dog totally fucking tackles me and - more startling still - starts making those earnest, arduous gyrations that dogs are wont to make in fits of sexual passion. I don't know if you've seen me recently but I'm fifteen and three-quarter stone heavy and eighteen and a half hands high. It takes a shitload of sex-crazed Labrador to knock me down. So the lady starts screaming "CHICO! CHICO! GET DOWN! JESUS CHRIST, GET DOWN!" And I was wondering to myself - while being dry-humped with all the might and mechanical determination of the steam hammer that killed off John Henry - whether the lady knew what the word "jump" actually meant. Once I had wrested myself free from her dog's unsolicited - er - embrace and got to my feet I wanted to say, "Ma'am, your dog doesn't jump. It does something that rhymes with jump. But it does not in fact jump. Get my drift?" But by the time I got my shit back together she was throwing all of her weight into the dog's lead and dragging it off up the street.

As usual, I have digressed. Onward now.

So anyhoo, Teresa and I rounded up some friends and rented a cabin Wayne the Hell out in the wilds of Port Angeles (where the yards are more plentifully sown with rotting Volkswagens than a beach-hippie's crack is sown with grains of sand) and made a snowshoeing weekend of it. T'was a gaye auld tyme. We went to one of our usual summertime stomping grounds, Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. It's a whole different ball of wax (or snow) in the wintertime, though. We decided to take a pretty easy trail that we'd done in the summer a bunch of times: the Hurricane Hill trail. Well, in the summer it's a walk and in the winter it's a freakin' trek, especially with tennis rackets on your feet and snow and 40MPH winds stomping you in the face most of the way. Although don't get me wrong, it was still a blast and a half and rather a hefty workout, and the stunning beauty of the park in winter was more than sufficient fuel for the usual breathless exclamations of love, sacrifice and self-enucleation.

Can I stop right here and do some product endorsements? First, let me just say that there's nothing like brewing up a cup of Boyd's Country Creme with your JetBoil on a snow-covered ridge at 5,500 feet after having trekked a few miles on the best goddamn snowshoes ever. The tenacious grip and feather-like weight of the MSR Lightning Ascent makes snowshoeing a - well I won't say breeze, but it makes it way nicer than doing it with queen sized bedframes of beaver sinew on your feet like the Cheechakos used to do. We were lucky that one of our party - Tami Fairweather, the most mirthful person on this otherwise drab planet - (No, seriously. It's a huge compliment. -Ed.) works for Cascade Designs and five-fingered us a few pairs of these bad boys from the promo pile at the office. Her promotional ploy worked. I shall purchase my own pair anon.

Wait - another word about Boyd's real quick. Every other beverage they produce blows. Their coffee is simply atrocious. You should use it to stun tobacco beetles or something but for God's sake don't drink it. And it probaby took the combined brainpower of thirteen marketing executives to come up with the term "Country Creme" for something that is essentially hot egg nog made from chemicals that would otherwise be sprayed on tenement rats. But with all that said, it's goddamn delicious.

Final product endorsement, then I gotta skeedaddle. The guys from Tempur-Pedic are coming over to replace my box spring. They didn't even quibble for a second when I told them that my box spring was squeaking. They're just up and replacing it - snap - like that. Now that's service. They should be here any minute so I gotta run. Have a looksee at the photos from our trip below.

Cheers, and Happy New Year!

-Thaddeus

Snowshoeing 2.17.2007

Uncle To The 26th Power

Pull my finger: Something tells me that at least one of these guys is somebody's

batshit-crazy uncle. So this is what I have to look forward to.

Greg:

I'm going to tell you something that may surprise you. These letters that I write to you are not private. In fact, they are "posted" on a "blog" called "Dear Gregory" where literally "hundreds" of "people" "read" them.

Now let me tell you something that will surprise you even less. Our niece Morgan gave birth yesterday at 5:10PM to our newest grand-niece, a linebacker of an infant girl (8 lbs. 10 oz., 21") named Mina. That brings our nephew/niece total to 26. We are now uncles to the 26th power.

Just stick with me. All of this seemingly disparate information does have a singular point.

Back to the "blog" issue. Last month, I installed sophisticated tracking code on this blog which enables me to see exactly how many people are reading it and exactly wherefrom. It also tells me which installments get the most "hits". (Ask me to slow down if all this heady technical jargon is too "much" for you.) What I have discovered from reading the data produced by my new analytics tool is that people everywhere simply love farts. As a matter of fact, people love farts five times more than they love philanthropy. Here's my proof. Of all the letters I've written to you, the one about farts scored five times as many page hits as the lowest scoring page (which was essentially about philanthropy). And the "fart" entry set an all-time record for number of hits from any entry point - and - and - it was read worldwide. Wimbledon, Valencia, Madrid, Paris, Budapest, Beijing - all God's chilluns love they farts. Yes they does.

However, people read about farts much more quickly than they read about philanthropy. People spend about 3 minutes ripping through an installment on farts, whereas they spend a dawdling 16 minutes on installments about philanthropy.

OK, so - how does this figure in with the astounding number of nieces and nephews we have in common? Lord knows I can't even remember most of their names. Who are they again? Let's see if I can keep a running total - John's kids: Gabe, who has four kids, so that's five; Camiya plus her three kids - so that's nine - Brendon has two...or three? - I'll spot him one, so that's thirteen total now for that one sibling. You've got none, so that's easy. Sgt. Rock's kids: Phaedra - fourteen - Alowan - fifteen - Morgan plus one - sixteen, seventeen. And our sister - she has ten. Whoah, that's twenty seven! But that takes into account Brendon's extra mystery kid that I may have just made up (let's call him Shmendrick), so it may just be 26 after all. Well, anyway you slice it, that's a buttload of kids. It's like somebody got out the baby hose and sprayed it in every direction.

So with that many nieces and nephews of ours crawling the planet, it's a pretty good bet that some of them read this blog. And if they read this blog, then according to my fancy new analytics tool, they love farts.

Here's a tip, kids, if you're reading this: don't tell anyone we're related. You know why? I'll tell you. One day you're going to be somewhere, maybe somewhere far away, maybe some place where they read this blog, like China. And you're going to be in a Starbucks in Beijing and some guy is gonna come up to you and he's gonna say (in Chinese), "Hey, do you read 'Dear Gregory'?" And you're gonna say, "Read it?! I'm freakin' related to that guy!" And then all of a sudden the guy's gonna point at you and scream "You love farts!" And then pretty soon everybody in the place is going to be screaming "you love farts!" in Chinese. And you're gonna feel pretty crunchy. And then they're going to put you in a labor camp where you'll be forced to build the Victory Over The Fart-Loving Roundeye Memorial Dam. And that'll pretty much be it for you. Done deal. Game over.

Look, all of this may sound like lunatic ravings to you and there's a very simple reason why it does: because it is. But every little kid out there needs to have a crazy uncle who spews rambling, nonsensical yarns to the point of glossolalia, don't you think? A friend of mine had an Uncle Carl who used to raid buffets at the funerals of complete strangers while wearing a Santa hat. Nobody said shit to Uncle Carl and he was always well fed. Never had a grocery bill in his life. People gave him a wide berth and a bottle of suds and let him be. I learned from Carl's example that pretty much anything you want is attainable, provided you're willing to compromise a big, thick slice of your dignity to get it. I always wanted an uncle who was about that nuts. Then one day I looked around at a crowd of my nieces and nephews who were laughing their fool heads off because I had my suit on backwards and was talking gibberish, and you know what I realized? I realized that crazy old Uncle Carl was me. (Only thing missing is the Santa hat. -Ed.) So yeah, with 26 (27?) nieces and nephews, I figure I have to be able muster up enough crazy to go all the way around.

I'm rambling now, but like I said, that's exactly what crazy old uncles are supposed to do. They're supposed to ramble and tell fart jokes. So far I'm doing pretty damn good, dontcha think?

Pull my finger,

-Thaddeus