Dead Horses Should Stay Dead

Update: MySpace still hasn't deleted my account. Tom must really want to keep his 535,987th friend around forever, in spite of my profile space resembling an abandoned storefront.

In an effort to break a mental sweat and fill the void of the missing Tuesday night Guitar Hero tournaments, I have taken up going to trivia nights at a bar downtown in order to nerd out and keep myself from becoming a sheep and taking Domino's up on their Two Times Tuesday offer. If I ever order pizza alone, I will eat all of it so that my heart will stop, and I will die. That is how it will go down.

Trivia is a strange beast indeed. Is it trivial to know trivia? Or is it trivial to be trivial about trivia? Who am I to judge? Trivia might be more important than a casual observation of it might suggest. Consider Jeopardy! Ken Jennings didn't exactly stack paper as an offensive lineman Seahawks; he was on the show seventy-five times. At sporting events, there is always some sort of trivia challenge and handsome reward that accompanies the nerd who knows the answer. Since alien technology brought us the television, there has been a bevy of game shows that involve knowledge that most of us wouldn't exactly consider "common." Yet, retaining such information can, on occasion, make you look like the world's best person. That's right, the best person in the entire world.

What happens, however, when you corral a sizable number of individuals into an establishment who have a history of self-aggrandizement and massive egos with faulty foundations? Which is to say, what happens when you have a trivia competition?

Each Tuesday night downtown, Blackfinn Restaurant and Quasi-Overrated Nightlife Hotspot holds a trivia event where smug Richmonders fake the funk and act like the cock of the walk when it comes to identifying celebrity mugshots and recognizing 50s pop hits. Now, I run hot and cold when it comes to competition. If I know I can emerge victorious, I transform into a mean-spirited, venomous creature who does not acknowledge failure as an option. However, if I know I haven't shit for a chance, I acquiesce to those competing who will surely smite me down with righteous indignation. Trivia night is one of those potentially victorious occasions.

I'm not the smartest person I know by any means, and have no way of quantifying intellectual capacity in any sort of scientifically sound manner. But if I'm in a trivia contest, I trust myself first and foremost, and pretty much no one else. Is this conceited? Yes. Am I being a dick about it? Yes. Will I change? Never. The thing to keep in mind, however, is that there are tons of people exactly like me, in the same room as me, on these trivia nights.

Easily the best and worst part of the evening involves me criticizing the competition to my teammates to the most petty of details. It is as if a fog washes over me and I morph into a beast who considered those on other teams to be the bane of my existence. But seriously, why not? It's a competition, and these people, one and all, are giant assholes. Giant, gaping, assholes. They name themselves such clever things as "No Pictures Please" and "The Artist Formerly Known As..." and "Soviet Masturbation" and "We Are Dominatrices" and on and on and on and kill me. Some groups are less smug and pretentious than others, but let's face it, folks: if I'm calling them smug and pretentious, they've got to be exactly those things.

We all sit crouched around answer sheets with ice in our veins and an unquenchable hatred in our eyes, as pens furiously scribble across paper to determine the proper Soviet premier for this or that multiple choice question. We ponder quizzically as the DJ plays song snippets in the identification portion, as if our thoughts might levitate towards the ceiling and form invisible air forces, battling it out above the din of the crowd and the haze of cigarette smoke. Through it all, I remain transfixed on the opposition, waiting for them to err and allowing my team to gallop forward.

Much to my chagrin, we never really do such things. Certain teams pack considerable heat and leave us in the dust week in and week out. Perhaps this only fuels my relentless desire to eviscerate the competition and claim myself to be the top nerd. Is this trivia or American Gladiators (thank you, networks, for allowing the writers' strike to result in the defibrillator working on this dead horse of a physical game show and bringing it back to air in place of legitimate television)? Maybe my dislike of the competition is actually the way I manifest self-loathing, and this has become too psychoanalytical for my tastes, so let's recede a bit and use words like poop to lighten the mood.

Hope, as they say, springs eternal, and pending the rapture, there's always next week. At least I know what Nick Nolte looks like in his mug shot.

Identity Theft or Identity Crisis?

Checking my bank account is not something I particularly enjoy; personal grooming is often a preferred pastime over a few mouse clicks and keystrokes. It's as if I half-expect to see all $.79 of my account drained like a Larry Bird three, shorts, 'stache, and everything else. Yet, such a fear is there, as irrational as the avoidance of aluminum foil or pickled beets. The end result is that I don't monitor my checking account as close as I should monitor it.

Until today.

Going through a bank statement is sometimes like reading over an old paper you wrote and received back with a grade. You tend to skim it over, expecting the usual comments and nit picking, but tend not to pay much attention to it as you'd like to put the whole process behind you and have no interest in reading something you wrote some time ago. However, you still have to peruse it thoroughly because you never know when WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!!!!?1?!/?!!ONEwhoaONE!!!!1!??/1/!?1

But wait.

Take that.

Rewind it back.

Secondhand Smug's got the beat to

That's too many syllables.

Why didn't I preface the preface with this preface? Last week I received the Gap card in the mail that I applied for two weeks previously. However, the next day in the mail I received a notice from the bank that the Gap uses (with the curious moniker "GE Money," as if the organization were secretly a member of Master P's old No Limit Records label) informing me that my application for a Gap card had been unceremoniously denied, based on the existence of a previous card in my possession.

Jigga what?

What would have caused me to forget about applying for a card? I remember far too many tarradiddles to let a credit card application slip through a fissure in my brain. Then, my extremely boorish inner monologue said: "Hey asshole! Maybe it wasn't you!" For once I thanked my extremely boorish inner monologue and debated the possibility that someone was trying to steal my identity, in a very methodical and ultimately stupid fashion.

I decided to make the pilgrimage, or hajj (I'm huge in the Middle East apparently) to a local Gap establishment to determine the root of this evil. It turns out that paranoia and delusions of grandeur really do cloud one's judgment and make things transform into something more nefarious than reality has them appear. It turns out that a system error caused my information to be reentered into Gap's database two days later, making it seem as though I were either quite stupid or I had decided I liked the Gap so much I would prefer to have two of its credit cards in my possession just for the hell of it.

Thus, with some excellent sleuthing, I put my fears to rest like a baby with colic.

Because like a baby with colic, my fears would soon wake again.

*flash forward whoaaaaaa on tachyons*

I decided to do something remotely mature and investigate the balance on my checking account. It seemed, at first glance, to be at a reasonable amount, so I paid no further heed to it and prepared to let my brain rot reading baseball trade rumors or the allmusic.com blog or something equally as trivial. Yet for the hell of it (and because I wanted to see how much I really spent on certain nights that will remain unmentionable), I chose to revisit my online statement and comb through it...with an imaginary...fine-toothed...comb.

That's when I discovered that I spent, or some identity thief spent...seventy-nine American dollars on Amazon.com. Frantically, I checked Amazon for my most recent purchases, in the event that one early Sunday morning I decided to buy a bunch of motion-sensing LED lights for my bathroom or somesuch nonsense. However, no purchases had been made on my account since October, when my grandmother made her quarterly charge of me to purchase several out-of-print novels by expatriate Frank Yerby; I doubt my grandmother knows he was an expatriate.

Scanning further up the statement, I then discovered that someone, myself not a party of the first part, or at least in my opinion at the moment of truth, had made a six dollar purchase at a place indicated as "201 HAPPY OWL AKA." Thus, after several scrolls of the touchpad, I tallied up the oddities on my statement, and only the two previously mentioned were the aberrations. The game was still most certainly afoot.

The bank was actually helpful when I called its toll free number and I reached someone no more than several states away rather than on the Indian subcontinent. However, they could either cancel my card or let me take care of the transaction myself. Back to sending some carrier pigeons Amazon.com's way. After faking mental retardation, I was connected to a delightful young woman from...guess where?

The Indian subcontinent! Oh boy!

After several minutes of miscommunication and both parties being completely baffled as to what the other person was saying at the other end of the tin can telephone line. While checking several network news websites, I noticed that Congress had passed several bills on immigration reform, Iran promised to put a stop to its nuclear program, and Alex Rodriguez hit his 800th home run to an empty crowd in New York as the Yankees dropped to a season-low 20 games below .500. Mind you that I am talking about the far future. That was a brief illustration, because I am clearly such a self-enamored, cocksure clairvoyant that I can predict the future in the most asinine way possible.

It turns out that on Monday December 3rd, 2oo7, Amazon.com woke up and decided to make me a member of its Prime Club, to the tune of seventy-nine American dollars. Did I want my account to be sapped of precious resources so Jeff Bezos could put a couple gallons of premium in his tricked-out Hummer? Hardly. In a boon of good luck, the young lady half a world away informed me that she could remove me from Prime Club membership and give me a full refund because I hadn't used its benefits yet. What damn benefits? Faster shipping? It already gets to your doorstep in two days! If you're that impatient, go out and get it yourself! If you're that impatient and also an agoraphobic, you should consider suicide, since you live your life in a contradictory manner.

With seventy-nice greenbacks corralled into my little ranch of an account, I sojourned forth to determine what this Happy Owl place could be, so I phoned a friend WHO WILL REMAIN NAMELESS. Not that anyone cares. We walked through the previous couple of days to analyze how some $6.19 might have fallen through the cracks, and then, like a crappy episode of Lost, the proper flashback came to me.

The previous Friday I had attended Richmond Renegades hockey game, which was sort of like a roller derby on ice with the amount of white trash that populated the backwater Richmond Coliseum. My quarry that night was granted with the possibility of ten free bones covered in hot wing sauce from the fifth-rate "restaurant" known as Hooter's, if only it could even be called such. Really, it just collects overweight, pasty white men in sleeveless shirts, so it's kind of a clearinghouse for that precious...commodity. In any case, if the Renegades happened to score five goals that night, we'd get free wings. Miraculously, they did, and somehow it was Christmas day in the morning. My party collected its due and I forgot all about it a few days later. How could I forget our charming Eastern European waitress and her insinuations that we split the check three ways, despite ordering completely different items off the menu? It was pleasant, all around.

So, at the end of the day, I realized I was not the target of identity theft, but rather a victim of identity crisis, having not remembered what happened the day before or having the rug pulled out from under me by Amazon.com. In some way, I feel like my parents' generation, with their constant fears of being wiped clean by some faceless, devious entity in a way that might resemble some mid-90s movie about the Internet. I suppose I should understand that no one has your information, they can't steal your identity. I have enough trouble being myself anyway, so who would possibly want take the reins instead?

Hatred in Retrospect

More often than not, I fail to execute on some of my ideas for this little piece of Internet. Is this a source of pride for me? Certainly not. However, it is better to put ideas in the dumpster or on a back burner than it is to keep releasing albums, Duran Duran.

In any case, this entry is about sports. Sport? I do not know. I guess I'm not a sports fan in that particular sense. I am first, foremost, and only, a baseball fan. Why resort to such antiquated fandom in the days of Peyton Manning commercials and FIFA 2259? No telling. Why write a dreadfully inane blog three or so times a month? ***THIS ENTRY IS LONG AND YOU WILL MOST LIKELY GET BORED WITH IT, JUST SO YOU KNOW. I'M FLOODING THE INTERNET WITH USELESS DRIVEL***

Legitimate sports fans are made through suffering. Supporting your team through the bad times is what really bonds you to a franchise and helps you savor victory when it finally comes. By this logic, Chicago Cubs fans blah blah blah blah blah. We know the story all too well. Admittedly, I know very little about championship or even .500-plus seasons when it comes to other sports franchises. Do Atlanta Hawks fans exist? Anyone reading support the St. Louis Blues? Wikipedia tells me the Detroit Lions are still around, which was pretty shocking to me. "lol" as it goes. The point here is that somewhere in the bowels of these American cities, there are still never-say-die season ticket holders who come out year after year to yell themselves blue in the face for the hometown squad. This is loyalty. This is an unbreakable and unexplainable bond between man and team, and naturally woman and team as well. I wrote that to avoid getting heat. You see what I'm getting at here, and if not, watch a game with one of these teams in it. Someone is still out there wearing the team colors and supporting the franchise until his dying breath. Or her dying breath. Whatever. THEY'RE OUT THERE ALL RIGHT.

Consider this though: what if there were a sports team who didn't seem to have those fans? What if they seemed to sprout up like those God-forsaken magnetic yellow ribbons currently causing the paint to fade on a car on your street as you read this? You know the ones. Support our ribbons. It seems wasteful to pass judgment on individuals in a pissing contest regarding all things loyalty and history and whatnot, but let's say I've been holding it for a while. And now I can no longer hold back.

Flash back to 2003. A year like any other, right? Sure. Some of the few people who weren't chomping at the bit waiting for Peyton Manning commercials to saturate the TV airwaves were transfixed to the American League Championship Series between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. A grand rivalrly that spanned decades of acrimonious, polarizing competition was once again competing on a magnificent stage to prove who would take home the American League pennant and play either the beloved Chicago Cubs or those fire-sale prone Florida Marlins. The Yankees, with their limitless payroll, boisterous fans, superstar roster, and twenty-six World Series titles were more than ever living up to the "Evil Empire" appellation as they put the choke hold on the scrappy, underdog Boston Red Sox. The Yankees would eventually prevail and thankfully fall to the upstart Marlins in the World Series, who after winning lit Pro Player Stadium on fire and shot all of their players in order to slash payroll. Such as 2003, another season of heartbreak for a baseball fan and supporter of parity like myself. I sat in my dorm room, crushed after the Red Sox fell from grace, seething with contempt for Yankees fans as they again through their weight and dollars around to win a pennant. I sat out the World Series in protest. Boston's wait for a World Series would now be 86, rather than 85 years.

2004 would bring about the nearly the identical scenario, with the Yankees on the verge of achieving a FATALITY against Boston. I watched nervously again in my dorm room preparing to have my dreams cracked and crushed, trampled underfoot by a rampage from the Bronx. Yet, something happened. A Dave Roberts (nerd reference) stolen base improbably ignited a Boston comeback and in Game 4, the Red Sox turned it around and stampeded through the powerful New York squad and left the St. Louis Cardinals in the dust in four laughable games. After eighty-six years, the Boston Red Sox were on top again, and I was overjoyed. Finally, the Yankee rivals had taken over and toppled the Evil Empire. It was a good day.

What the fuck was I thinking?

Since October 2004, baseball has been stricken ill with an incurable cancer that is spreading through the sport at an incalculable rate and nothing can be done to stop it.

The Boston Red Sox and their fans are destroying the sport from the inside out, and no one even seems to be batting (super pun intended) an eyelash. Consider this: seven, eight, nine years ago, how many Red Sox fans did you know? A few maybe? One or two? None? Yeah, that's what I thought. Maybe your uncle in Rhode Island. Sure. Fine.

While this is a trivial matter for most, it is of threat level midnight importance to me. I hardly have the stamina to proselytize enough on my exponentially expanding hatred for Red Sox Nation. What a stupid name, to start of with; the notion that Red Sox fans are peppered all over the American landscape and can invade American League cities at the drop of a hat, ruining the atmosphere for the hometeam crowd. When your bandwagon has the space, let 'em on, right? Where were these people when the Red Sox were in the thick of playoff competition in the 1990s? Asleep? Setting up sleeper cells inside other NFL teams to establish a cheating network for the Patriots? I sure didn't know about them, and I keep tabs on this sort of thing. Now they're everywhere. People who don't even watch baseball are goddamn Red Sox fans. It makes me want to vomit up my stomach.

As I said before, I don't have the stamina for this sort of thing. It throws me into fits of blind rage. I am unable to establish any sort of outline at which to dispatch reasons why the Red Sox and their cobbled nation, unfit to even deserve capitalization, are polluting Major League Baseball. I would chalk it off as arrogance, but that is perfunctory at best. Is it that Red Sox fans believe the players on their team are better than anyone else's? That might be it.

Ask a Red Sox fan who the best pitcher in baseball is right now.

"JOSH BECKETT WITH HIS WICKED CURVE!" Wha? Johan Santana much?

What about the best first baseman?

"YOOOOOOOOOOUK." No, you retard. Albert Pujols? Justin Morneau? Mark Teixiera? Ever heard of them?

It slays me. Red Sox fans will think Dustin Pedroia is the next Roberto Alomar when players like Chase Utley take the field every day.

Red Sox fans are also the only fans I have encountered who will actually talk about how much they "hate" this player or that player on their team. What is that nonsense? If the guy's on your team, you support him! What kind of fan encourages dissension in a team sport? Unforgivable.

There are more than two teams out there, Red Sox Nation. You can't spend the whole season looking forward to the series games between your team and the Yankees. Other teams play too. What happens when you play the Mariners? The Orioles? The Tigers? Do you pretend they're the Yankees? What? You tell me.

What about the pink hats? Since when did this become a staple? It's perfectly fine for women to enjoy baseball. In fact, I wish more did and fewer gave me dirty looks when I get excited to watch the playoffs. Yet, Red Sox Nation has embraced these sickening articles of headgear in order to bait more women to pack in the Fenway Park dumpster/bandbox/"field" in order to watch David Ortiz walk from the dugout to the batter's box four times.

Amongst all of this wreckage that used to be a worthwhile sports franchise, I ask myself, and I ask you, if you're still reading: what has provoked the mutation of Red Sox nation and given them this abominable sense of entitlement? Each year their swagger goes greater as they demand more crappy Dropkick Murphys songs about Boston, more Jonathan Papelbon Riverdancing (fucking shoot me), more weight gain and hair growth by Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, more hating of the Yankees and cheering like they've won the lottery when the Yankees lose, no matter what team they're playing. What other group of fans so passionately roots against a team? Are you with me?

This disease of Red Sox bandwagon fandom has to be taken behind the shed and shot multiple times, until the last gasping "Yooooouk!" cheer is kicked clean out of its lungs. No longer are the Red Sox the underdogs. Their payroll has bloated to that of the Yankees, and they too will not hesitate to buy talent for their needs. Their gimmicks are, as expected, the opposite of New York's: haggard, dirty, and weathered compared to the Yankees' reserved, clean-cut, and opulent. These are trite, predictable, and transparent. Worthless smoke and mirrors to fashion a paper-thin facade for Boston's true goal: Yankee-level dominance of baseball. Admittedly, I can't say I blame them: who wouldn't want to have 26 World Series titles? It took the Yankees a long time to earn these, though. Red Sox "nation" wants them now.

I hope that doesn't happen. I hope you've been convinced. Join me in this scatterbrained crusade to stop the new Evil Empire.

Why? Because I am a bitter, jaded, immature, and selfish Cleveland Indians fan. The pieces have all fallen into place.

How I Learned to Stop Caring and Delete My MySpace Account (Hopefully)

Usually I hold a considerable amount of contempt for individuals who like to apply a scorched-earth policy to their personal histories, regarding everything even the most recent past as a blunder or mistake or ill-conceived trend of the times. And why not? Without the trial and error of life, everything would have this fantastical, cinematic quality about it that would smack of implausibility, recalling little else than an episode of Grey's Anatomy. You know, the one where they play that Snow Patrol song at the end. Wait, that's every episode of Grey's Anatomy.

Every.

last.

episode.

But you know, there are those occasions, those minor swatches in the tapestry of time that sometimes don't warrant forgiveness on our parts, allowing us to scream "THIS IS SPAAAARRMYYYYEARRRFFGGGHHHHH!!!1111!1111ONEONONE!!111!11" as we kick them down a greenscreen pit.

MySpace.

"But it's so great!"

"It really helps me stay connected with my friends."

"I never update my account. I just keep it to stalk people about once a month."

I've heard it all, and two weeks ago, I decided to put the old profile to rest. Why? MySpace is really like the mall in your hometown. It's full of people you don't want to see and pray to every last deity on the books that you can avoid for the rest of your natural life. However, old habits are hard to kick, and you still log on to MySpace just like you make that trip to the mall, warts and all. But couldn't you pick up that hoodie somewhere else? Did you really need to slog through all that rabble to get a fresh pair of steps? Shopping shouldn't eviscerate your soul, and neither should using the Internet or specifically a social networking site. I never want to see some of these people again. It's really nothing personal. But somehow it completely personal. I respect your privacy though. I sought to delete my account to stop stalking you and your boyfriend/husband/mom/pet/favorite post pop punk hardcore electro duo band from your high school. Only because you stopped stalking my favorite post-hardcore acoustic dub sextet from my high school.

I had grown tired of the nauseating format of MySpace, with the endless permutations of colors and fonts and Panic! at the Cartel American Rejects Like Girls songs that invaded your audio space with every hesitant click of the mouse. As if MySpace had become Russian Roulette for mall punk bands. Do I want to read this person's profile that bad? Do I really want to be forced to listen to what they're listening to, even for a few fleeting moments? Does the site lag on purpose so I have to listen to this garbage? Should using a social networking site really feel like hiding from the monsters under your bed?

What's worse is that the monsters kept multiplying. Constantly, my inbox would be flooded with a deluge of friend requests, comments, and other such wasteful bits and bytes, littering the Internet like styrofoam coffee cups and weathered Doritos bags from back when Doritos had one flavor. Perhaps you recall. In any case, it got a little bit too much. You know how you can only stuff so many marshmallows in your mouth before you turn into an oral Gatling gun. KAPOW KAPOW KAPOW KAPOW KAPOW.

I thought of these things and decided to delete my account.

That was two weeks ago.

And then, I stopped getting emails. Suddenly, my computer ran smoothly. Attractive women started smiling at me at work and on the street. I was informed I no longer owed any money for student loans, and Publisher's Clearing House gave my mom ten million dollars though she never did any of those sweepstakes things to begin with, so I was now able to get that rhinoplasty I'd always wanted. Last week, life was great.

Until I started getting more emails.

Friend invite. Message. Group invite. Friend invite. Message. Group invite.

I thought I had deleted my account.

No, I will not accept your friend request, amateur porn stars and former childhood neighbors. I deleted my account. MySpace is worthless. Follow my lead.

Yet they kept coming. So today, I decided to revisit MySpace and see what the trouble was, and it turns out, I didn't delete my account after all.

I blame myself for a lack of good judgment and follow-through. I trolled down to my profile, like the police did looking for Bruce Willis in the Fifth Element and discovered my profile page to be riddled with adds and chain messages and all the trash of pre-Giuliani New York City. Just not that cool. So this time, I meant business, and went through the motion to delete my account. I received this message:

Account Cancellation Scheduled

The account registered to the following email address has been scheduled for cancellation:

roliver@rmc.edu

NOTE: Please allow 48 hours for cancellation to take effect. Thank you.

You'll never let this end, will you, Tom?

Thanks for the Toll Quarters, Toni Collette

An advantage to having an elephantine memory is that it enables one to exploit those who pay little heed to the meaningless minutiae of popular culture. So, to be candid, when I see the opportunity, I pounce on it.

Some weeks ago I was challenged that the female character in the Amityville Horror remake alongside Ryan Reynolds was the same woman as the lead female character in the Sixth Sense. I knew this not to be true, but eventually escalated the bet from $5 to a cool $50 before iMDB settled the score as it does with most 21st century bets. I won. I settled for $3.50 in quarters. Thanks for the toll quarters, Toni Collette.

This eventually has something to do with the meat of this entry.

SPOILERS: I AM TOTALLY GOING TO RUIN THE SIXTH SENSE FOR YOU. IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN IT, IT CAME OUT IN 1999 AND IT IS NOW 2007, SO THERE IS NO REASON FOR YOU NOT TO HAVE SEEN IT. ANYWAY, I WILL KEEP GOING.

Recently, I jumped head first into another empty pool of maturity: paying for my own cell phone bill. Now, most of the readership might assert that they have been doing so for a while, and blah blah I suck at life. Well, that could be true, and maybe the big boy pants have been put on a little late for me when it comes to this one, but don't go on and tell me you're 22, completely self-sufficient, and not miserable. So, I bought my own cell phone and I subsequently died in the process.

The plot now merits that I provide a brief overview of my personal history with cellular telephones:

1999: Received a Motorola Talkabout.
2003: Received unknown Motorola flip phone.
2004: Lost phone in freak accident involving a sewer drain and torrential rainfall. Replaced with Nokia 3530. Cracked screen of Nokia 3530 the next day. Replaced with same brand/model the next week (the story behind this is not fit for this blog).
2005: Received unknown Motorola flip phone, switched from Alltel to nSUCKOs.
2006: The Fountain Incident of 2006. Replaced Motorola flip phone with Motorola V710.
2007: Replaced Motorola v710 with LG enV. Switched from nSUCKOs to Verizon.

The point to all of this is that throughout this checkered cell phone past, I have retained the same number. In eight years, that has not changed. I attempted to stay the course and keep my number as I changed to my third provider.

And then I died.

How did I die?

In the interim while waiting for my number to be ported from my old phone to my new phone, I received no phone calls or text messages. No messages I sent were granted responses, and all of my phone calls went straight to voicemail.

M. Night Shyamalan? Is that you?

Wow, it's suddenly Philadelphia, 1999.

Whoa, is that you, Donnie Wahlberg? Why are you wet and in your underwear? OH MY GOD THAT'S A GUN OH MY GOD OKAY REALLY DUDE CHRISTIAN BALE HAD NOTHING ON YOU WHEN HE LOST ALL THAT WEIGHT FOR THE MACHINIST REALLY PLEASE JUST DON *KABLAM*

Man, I thought I was gone for sure. But you know what, still no one responded to my communiques. I asked several parties about my texts and calls and none were received. They would be lost in the ether forever. And yet, my phone still made calls and sent texts. But to where?

I'm fairly certain Haley Joel Osment isn't part of the Verizon network headed by that mysterious bespectacled gentleman. Yet, driving on Sunday night, I felt his presence. And again Monday afternoon after work. Finally, he showed his face. When he did, he said:

"I see you're roaming."

So I tried to make a call.

"Your call cannot be completed as dialed."

OKAY, THIS IS A REALLY GOD AWFUL VISION. REALLY, HALEY JOEL OSMENT? THAT'S IT? I'VE REALLY HIT ROCK BOTTOM HERE.

At least that's what I thought.

In the end, it turns out that I have two phones. Neither work. What a life.

PS: Bruce Willis was killed by Donnie Wahlberg.

An Inner Monologue/Buying Socks (Whatever I'm Back)

A great man once asked me, "What happened to your blog, assh0le?" He was right. He never said that, but he was right anyway.

I am no expert on what people in the majority call "the real world." I am new to what is basically Chutes and Ladders "for keeps," as we used to say when the bloodsport of Pogs was the event of the day. BUT I will say that I have picked up on something in a rather expedient manner, and that is the disproportionate amount of time one spends alone. This is not about loneliness, although the two can be connected. This is about forced alone time, and what one man must do to get some socks.

Since falling face first onto the concrete slab that is life, I have spent a lot of time by myself, and if you pardon me for a moment to be lachrymose, it has quite simply blown. Why? Well, it's not like you can do much alone.

That's not entirely true, is it?

Is this pathetic?

In all honest, it's quite difficult to think of things you can't do alone, but at the same time, when you start listing things like vacuuming and eating, you get sad, so you stop. You compose yourself, and you start again. Mike Myers, while in a fat suit, once said...

This all stems from a Sunday afternoon where I set out to buy some socks. I have found that my Sundays are sort of an amorphous series of hours, a diamond in the rough I have not quite found yet from that big scary tiger's mouth that Jafar walked through that one time. Remember? So anyway, these Sundays are jumbles of both weekend regret and weekday guilt...basically what I did do and what I should've done in the first place, you know? Enter the socks.

So I go into a department store whose name is irrelevant in search of some dark socks.

From hereon out, the asterisk (*) will indicate when I am seeing it fit to conduct an inner monologue. It will also be used for when Roger Maris hits 61 home runs to break Babe Ruth's single-season record for home runs. Curiously enough, it was ignored when Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs in 1998 and even not really brought into conversation when Barry Bonds took 73 deep in 2001, yet Marc Ecko decided to bring Ford "SexyBack" Frick into the limelight again with Bonds' 756th home run ball escapades. The asterisk also looks like a booby tassel.

*socks socks socks socks socks socks socks gotta find socks dark socks muh muh muh MYYYY SHARONA where are these damn socks?*

*hmmm this inner monologue thing might be a sweet blog idea. damn but i haven't written in that thing in weeks. it is sunday i've got plenty of time i guess. oh cool socks, dark ones even*

Shopping is a lot like going for the two-spot in a public restroom, there is a sense that an audience is present and you must either perform or wait until they exit the venue. I'm speaking completely from personal experience and have no empirical evidence whatsoever to validate such a slipshod statement, but I waste my semiprecious time writing this and you don't have to read it. ONWARD.

There was a dude there, perusing the aisles for some undergarments. In my periphery in caught a glance of his prospective items and thankfully he had decided to avoid such novelty accessories as Tabasco or Corona boxers. I wouldn't have stopped him from buying them though, we all have to learn from our mistakes.

*wow good thing that dude didn't buy those Family Guy boxers that could've been a doomsday scenario with a lady. if i had those on, i would kill myself first. good thing, good thing. can't really get songs from My
Aim Is True out of my head. sneaky feelings, sneaky feelings ooooh can't let those feelings shoowwww...*

*okay so we've got some socks here, got em right here, like prying them off the feet of the Wicked Witch of the East had she not been hit by a house but merely left them in a drawer, clean, unworn, and also been a dude, so that is legit*

*shit*

*gotta decide because people are starting to circle around me like hungry buzzards for carrion*

*these. no, these. i could get both. or i could get these. or these. maybe those instead. two pairs? three pairs? two pairs. TWO TICKETS TO PARADISE, WON'T YOU PACK YOUR BAGS WITH ME TONIGHT*

*two sets. seems like a decent deal. watch that dude over there. he's looking at socks. don't look over here at me. i'm in the socks zone. the quadrant. the area. keep to yourself. i'm in this place. i came for the socks. it is sunday and this is what i'm doing. socks and i right here, in this place*

*okay i guess i am good to go*

*dum da da dum dum dum da da da dum dum dum dummmm shoes shoes shoes walking past the shoes that people wear sometimes where is the damn checkout? oh over there. cash or card cash or card what's the total strange looking cashier girl. wipe those eyes off your face. well crap. one more dollar and i could've paid cash for these socks. probably should've tipped that waitress less last night. enjoy my halfhearted pleasantries, cashier girl*

*where is my car, i can't hit anyone with my car, that'd be terrible*

*okay there it is. puttputtputtputtputtputt ZZZZZZZOOOOOOOMMMMMM lord I hate driving*

*man, traffic is so terrible. in hell, all you must do is wait in traffic. with red lights and rubbernecking and big cars you can't see around. i guess i could blog about all this. but people hated James Joyce so there's no way any of this drivel could get off the ground. great.*

Man's Last Great Sanctuary

I figured it out the other morning in the shower.

Someone somewhere once asserted that the last safe haven for the modern male was the toilet. If it was Jeff Foxworthy, and I think it might have been Jeff Foxworthy, you can stop reading now, because I apologize. I don't remember. Perhaps it was another stand-up "comic," though Foxworthy is more of a walking, game-show-hosting Shakesperean tragedy than a great comedian in the vein of Bill Engvall or Ron White or America's greatest stand-up comic, Larry the Cable Guy. Look, okay, I don't fucking know who said that, so find out for yourself. I am onto something here.

Having been party to several experiences of being interrupted while...heh...reading in the bathroom, I decree that the toilet is no longer safe, and that man's last, best hope, as some dude with Marfan Syndrome once said...is the shower. And honestly, I learned this from my mother. Maybe it has to do with being fully clothed more often than not when you're in the bathroom that people sense the fleeting possibility that their pressing business might be enough to interrupt an intimate and solitary moment. Should we strip down to nothing every time it's required so that we aren't defecating, interrupted? Oh Angelina, don't adopt any more babies from East Timor.

When I was a kid, I often had questions for my mom that coincided with when she was in the shower. This is where it all came together for me, a few days go, after twentysomething years. Whenever I asked my mom something and she was in the shower, I would yell through the door. Now, our house didn't have any showers inside bank vaults or panic rooms, so Forrest Whitaker never had trouble robbing us every leap year. What I'm getting at is that the door and shower curtain separating myself and my mother weren't that thick. Yet it seemed like every time I came to my mom with a matter of Threat Level: Midnight importance, she acted like she was inside of a roaring jet engine. Maybe she couldn't hear me, I don't know, but slick move on her part: enforcing the shower as the last great sanctuary. Where else would I have been able to figure this out?

Figure what out?

I thought this was about pooping and Jodie Foster avoiding burglars?

Huh?

Bear with me as a I change gears. Again, when I was a kid, I never understood why adults loved to sit around and talk all day and all night. Shouldn't they have been running around until they passed out, or playing videogames, or watching hours and hours of TV? That's what I thought, at least. But then again children are stupid.

The primary purpose of adulthood is to tell old stories, and correct me if I'm wrong. When I'm sitting in a bar, or talking on the phone, or eating lunch at work, or anything else practically, I find myself spinning yarns about past occurences to people who weren't around to hear about them firsthand. It's because the world is getting older and people who were once together have grown apart, so the majority of social interaction is bringing everyone up to speed. This is not to say that I find this bothersome, although I do when hearing rehashed stories or information I've already been given from another source. That's wasteful.

That's what I figured out in the shower.

The Phone Book is Never Down

Stop me, oh oh oh stop me, stop me if you think I'm making a giant ass of myself by plagiarizing someone else's work and I have no ideaaaa...

After a most arresting two-part narrative, I have decided to return with something a bit more abstract. This spawned out of a discussion I had with my uncle a few nights back. Mostly it was me hypothesizing wildly and making erroneous assumptions but that's neither here nor the proverbial there. The center of the Tootsie pop is this...is it possible that a new generation gap exists? A generation gap unlike the previous one driven by a counterculture of polarized values, but one spurred by technological advances and new gadgets and thingamajigs that roll off Asian assembly lines every six months? iPhone, KRAZR, DS, WiFi, Zune, PS3, etc.

I wonder. Baby boomers seem to have slight difficulty adapting to text messaging, Instant Messenger, iPods, and so forth, and those older than them believe that they face a learning curve so steep they do not even want to bother, rejecting the personal computer as if it would bring one in direct commune with Lucifer himself. Of course this is typical hyperbole you might expect from me, so take it for what you will, which is roughly four cents. In any case, I only speak from experience and without any sources or citations. Disregarging all legitimacy (which I never purported to have), I believe that increasing advances in technology have left a gap between today's children and their parents.

Most kids today are able to live two lives: one that their parents see, and one that their peers see. Of course this has always been the case, but now the Internet and social network websites have enabled children to be "themselves" towards their peers without their parents finding out. Twenty years ago, this was unheard of; you might be the ultimate badass on the phone in front of your girlfriend, but when mom and dad pressed down on the receiver on the phone in the kitchen, you were done for, dude. Pulling the ethernet plug out to keep you from upload "ur pix 2 ur MySpace lol" might be a little more like an act of Congress for some parents, if they even know that the cable looks like. Kids can now call and text their friends with phones their parents will never use or even see, a godsend of privacy that Anthony Michael Hall might've killed for when he was fawning over Molly Ringwald. He should really encounter her in The Dead Zone. Is she dead? I don't know. OH WAIT she was in that movie...shit what was it called...whatever it'll come to me later. Anyway I just looked her up on Wikipedia and she is alive and was in Not Another Teen Movie in 2001, which, ah, sucked.

Case in point amongst the chaos here: my mother asked me not too long ago what Facebook was, and I explained it to her, including Facebook's functions and applications, including but not limited to pictures, friend invites, wall postings, groups, poking, Total Sports Fan, The Sorting Hat, Happy Hour, My Heritage, Top Friends, Flixster, Compare People, iLike, Superlatives, Horoscopes, Honesty Box, Where I've Been, Gifts, Free Gifts, X Me, Grafitti, Super Wall, Scrubs Quotes, Awareness Ribbons, HotLists, My Questions, Fortune Cookie, Chuck Norris, Greek Pride, The Compass, The Social Feed, Texas HoldEm Poker, Big Photo, Dane Cook, Moods, Tattoos, Art, Arrested Development, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, The Outer Limits Flight of Fear, Six Flags over Georgia, "Deez Nuts," The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, and those Applebee's commercials with Chef Tyler Florence in which he refers to portions of lettuce as "bibs."

My mom understood all of this, but still did not see much of the point of Facebook, and I think here lies the so-called rub. What my age group sees as necessities in text messages, The Baconator, Facebook, and the XBox 360, those who came of age before Fourthmeal view as frivolous, egregious, and extraneous. To them, we don't need these things, because they got along just fine without them. My uncle had a point when he said that the phone book was never down. It's not...but can you ask a teenager to look up the number to the local pizza place? You could probably drive there, make the pizza yourself, fart, and drive back and eat a slice before he could find it in the phone book. Unless he's really bright and you might not be able to fart. Anyway, young people these days treat the phone book like a car that required winding up. It's an antiquity, an anachronism, a holdover from a dark and dreary age ruled by Led Zeppelin and General Motors.

WHOA DUDE DID YOU SAY ZEPPELIN!??! DUN DUN DADADADA DUN DUN DADADADA DUN DUN DADADADA DUN DUN DADADA HUUUUUHHHHHHH WAAAAHHHHHHH UNH HUUUUHHHHHH WAHHHHHH UHN WE COME TO THE LAND OF THE ICE AND SNOW AND BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA ANNNDDD YUDDA DUDDA DUDDA YOW HAMMER OF THE GODDSSSSS YEAHHHHH ROCKKKKK

This all boils down to one thing, I suppose. Technology today has extinguished the presence of a vitriolic generation gap, spearheaded by differences in values and beliefs. In this modern age, generations are divided by MySpace prowess and feats of dexterity aboard a smart phone keypad. We can be ourselves, whoever that might be, depending on the dynamics of the situation. Sure, it's duplicitous and dishonest, but are we really and truly the same person around everyone we meet, know, and love?

It is most curious that the things we take for granted are the ones that will never leave us when catastrophe arrives. The Internet may go down but you can still listen to the radio or read print media for information. Your cell phone might go out of service but a land line is still reliable and available. In the end, the phone book is never down.

Picking Up Where John Lennon Left Off: Part Two

Flash-forward roughly twenty-four hours to 6PM the next evening. After making the same mistake twice and taking the wrong exit on the interstate, I found myself back at where it all started, and where it was about to start again. This time our course was set for downtown rather than around the corner, which meant that I got stuck with the bag and had to drive. I was all set to see my car keyed into a paint by number scheme the next morning.

(Actually, let me interject here. I couldn't think of a better place to put this since I was content with the flow of the opening paragraph. While slowing down to approach a toll booth, I was cut off by this small van that glided from three lanes over to get into the full service lane. How in the hell do you mistake an E-Z Pass for the full service lane? The Autobahn isn't where you ride a tricycle! Anyway, I got in the exact change lane and loaded up two quarters like dice and tossed them into the basket like a craps champion, and without missing a beat, sped through the toll before the light turned green to beat the van to the punch. Ultimately it was a stupid and childish move, as my conscience and probably the city of Richmond will later tell me.)

Though I've been there before and shouldn't be surprised, every trip to the Tobacco Company at Shockoe Bottom is like a time warp back to an earlier age. Girls walk around as vendors of tobacco products and kind gentlemen and ladies are always swooping down to pick up empty glasses and ask if you'd like another beverage, as if we are all high-rolling gangsters in the Prohibition era. Aside from the modern conveniences of a powerful soundsystem and dancefloor lighting, I expect flappers and tommygun-wielding wiseguys to regally enter the doorway and saunter up to the bar for some jazz chowder. Only there are two bars, and while one is more modern in appearance, the other seems to stretch on and on, with tiers and tiers of liquor bottles standing sentry between the bartender and the dirty and faded looking glass, as if it has witnessed the entirety of American history from its spot on the bar wall, from the birth of the nation, to the rise and fall of the Confederacy, to the Kennedy assassination, and finally to High School Musical 2.

The place also has a table set up for Blackjack, and the purpose of it is to donate to a charitable cause of which I did not get the name. In my humble, inexperienced, and ultimately worthless opinion, it is the best place to enjoy the establishment's Happy Hour as it gives you a prime view of the door and all of the denizens of the night that pass through the portal. In the middle of some good-natured ribbing I received from the dealer and some borderline harrassment from her sorority sisters demanding us to put more money in the tip jar, I was able to observe a hilarious phenomenon that I had not previously witnessed in college: the single man on the prowl. You see, while single men are on the prowl every waking moment of their lives, the quote-unquote real world single man is a new and most ferocious beast. With a pack of other single men, they travel, resplendent in exposed gold chains and well-styled with hair gel in animalistic fashion, strutting and fanning their feathers, hoping to attract young females with their elegant plumage. Since I lack the necessary feathers for the ladies to fawn over, I sat at the Blackjack table. Par for the course.

Of course, Tobacco's dollar drinks don't last all evening, so after as many as we could stomach, we asked not for whom the bell tolled because we jumped up before it did the tolling thing. Once again I found myself following the lead of dangerous rapscallions through seedy parts of town to another establishment I had yet to attend.

When we arrived at the place called Blackfinn, I thought I had stepped into a Gotham City haunt as high-end cars with halogen lights blazing pulled up to the front door, their owners passing keys off to the lead-footed valets who stormed off into the night. The bouncer at this establishment also suffered from the same brief spell of illiteracy as the gentleman from the Three Monkeys in part one of this blog entry, but thankfully their were no gutter-mouthed barflies hanging outside the door chastising patrons, so I made it inside without any threat of a developing brouhaha.

Unfortunately such a high-end establishment lacked the character and panache of the watering holes in the Fan, so I'm unable to relay much about this point in the evening. I'm also not sure about the presence of the overly active porter in the bathroom, discussing the possibilities of the newborn football season with inebriated customers. For one, he would squirt soap into my hand while brushing off my back, which I found astonishingly offensive, as if I had some sort of extreme dandruff problem that required medical attention. In one seamless motion he would wave his hands in front of the paper towel dispenser's motion sensor to appropriate towels for the damp digits of each man passing through, yet he would not rip off the towel. All of this occured while he discussed the finer points of LT or CBGB or VDOT. I quickly made haste without even letting the neurons in my brain begin to consider the possibility of a tip. It was not as though the man drove me somewhere or delivered me a pizza. His services were simultaneously superfluous and subpar, and didn't prevent me from being inconvenienced by the much more intoxicated gentlemen around me. We can all prevent muscle atrophy by pumping our own damn soap.

Quickly my comrades and I discovered that we would not be able to "ball" with those in attendance, plus we were getting bored of the Richmond skyline, which is to say some bank buildings. It was not an arduous task to locate a cab and promptly we were whisked uptown by a cabbie with a Redskins shirt and jorts that screamed to me, "I miss Doug Williams." He had the voice of a weedwhacker disregarded the cab company's emblazoned request to refrain from smoking with the cab's confines: hence the sound of plastic being whipped across blades of grass. We made it back to Quinn's and paid the man his due, only to slingshot back into the night and to more Fan hangouts.

Essentially this was more of the same. Running into alumni from years gone by or girls we had previously embarrassed ourselves in front of at one time or another. Those who had not seen me in some time clearly exhibited some form of excitement or contenment upon my arrival. I am free to make this assumption without any trace of modesty because there's honestly no way bottled domestic beer brings anyone any semblance of euphoria.

Luckily for us or not the places seemed to be less crowded that the previous evening, all of the scenester girls having grown weary of running into uneven sidewalks and the barflies not recovered from threatening unassuming people like myself the night before; a certain energy seemed to be sapped from us all. Perhaps it was the humidity, for it was very draining. In time we shuffled back home and fell into peaceful slumber, and so ended the lost weekend of a working class hero. 4 8 15 16 23 42.

Addendum: My thanks to you, if you soldiered through all of "Picking Up..." Expect the next post to be a bit less Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and a little more...iPhone.

Picking Up Where John Lennon Left Off: Part One

When last we spoke (or I wrote and you read), I permitted myself to partake in some Benadryl to help with my cat allergy, and I considered the Benadryl-influenced results to be pretty satisfactory, so WATCH OUT, I'M DOING IT AGAIN. Also, to be fair, this post will be narrative in approach, so if'n you ain't like that much none, go'on and git outta hurr.

After a work week that resembled the Hatch plot of the second season of Lost and paying $1.00 to get into Richmond rather that skirting around the insidious Powhite Parkway, I found myself at the home of a certain nefarious character who has truly been at the root of some of the most embarrasing moments of my entire life. His reputation as a scurrilous personality is only preceded by his abnormally large head, so large in fact that hats cannot contain it, so if everyone's head were his size New Era and every mom and pop haberdashery in the country would be out of a job, which would be a true system shock to the American infrastructure and G Unit. If you guessed Quinn Ramsey, congratulations. If you guessed former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, well, he hasn't been returning my Facebook wall posts lately. But you were close!

Yes, Quinn Ramsey. Tales of him smack of the apocryphal but they are so solid Wikipedia won't even claim "citation needed." Once again for Friday night he had assembled a motley retinue of vagrants and vagabonds. What follows is a whirlwind two evening introduction to what seems to be what people do AFTER they punch in 4 8 15 16 23 42 at work.

Friday evening our merry band of ne'er do wells found ourselves first at Buddy's, an establishment where we sought sustenance for the evening. When my number was up, I asked the waitress what came on the indigenous club sandwich. She may have considered this an attempt at being jovial, but I was serious and too famished for any sort of extended repartee. I merely wanted to know if the sandwich came with any sort of unwritten condiments or fixings that in my opinion would've made the creation undesirable and I would've been dismantling that meal like the 1998 or 2004 Florida Marlins, take your pick. And I hate doing that any looking like some ungrateful jackass. UGH I CAN'T BUHLIEVE THEY PUT THIS SHIT ON THIS SANDWICH...GOD. WELL I AIN'T TIPPIN' NONE MUCH. My query still left her perplexed but she concluded it would be cute to call me "Mr. No Surprises." Here's a surprise miss, my drink's empty.

Anyway.

The time between Buddy's and the next stop at the Metro Grill (maybe?) may or may not have been taken up by us not playing Guitar Hero for what was probably not an hour and a half.

I've written about bars. I tried to write about bars. I wasn't content with the work I did in attempting to sum up the experience, but thankfully our escapades have enabled me to retrofit my old post with some new insights.

Bars are about as loud as one's face inside of a fighter jet's thruster. The worst part about it, for me personally, is that everyone seems to be able to hear everyone else. Are my ears damaged from seeing too many crappy bands like Clockcleaner? If so, I guess I'll need to start listening to more Maroon 5. Really though, no one appears to have a problem but me. I have to scream and constantly cup my ear to make out sentences, looking like Joey D. Vieira's character in The Patriot. iMDB that one for your homework.

I had long since decided that I would be unable to converse with any of the young ladies Quinn had intended for us to meet, so I decided to focus on the ESPN ticker to see if the Detroit Tigers had won or lost. Mind that four persons were squeezed into a booth that reminded me more of a pew than anything else, so I sat straight back waiting for something with a little more kick than grape juice. My position in the booth caused my right leg to stick out, and soon enough, some drunk Jimmy Buffett fan stepped on my foot. My train of thought was as such...

I can't hear in here.

Neither can he, look at him, he's so drunk he thought Hawaiian print would be decent to wear out.

I've already yelped in fake pain. What now? Oh God, he's trying to talk to me.

I can't understand him.

I'll yell back.

Nothing. Like a tennis ball against a brick wall.

Okay. I'll...tell him MY LEG IS FAKE!

"HEY DUDE IT'S COOL MY LEG IS FAKE. I'VE GOT A FAKE LEG! SEE? TOTALLY MADE OF WOOD!"

His response was something like "AGRGHRHRGRGHHGGR OKAY!"

Of course, all the dudes we were with found this hilarious. All the ladies didn't get it because they were sitting on the other side of the booth.

We tried to explain it to them: "ARGRHRGRH HAHAHAHAHAHAH SWQDAFSGF OKAY!? HAHAHAHAHAHA!"

They sat stone-faced.

The rest of my time spent at this bar is unremarkable, save for the accusation by some gentleman that I was using the bathroom for something other than bowel movements. I promptly replied in my best football stadium voice "AM NOT!" Then we left.

I have absolutely no idea what's going on or where we are, I'm just following Quinn's lead, which I stupidly did in college for two years. We were apparently following these girls we met up with to another establishment, though I couldn't see them for the lights. I was busy trying to avoid the runaway freight train that was a scene girl flying down the street on a bike. In perfect cinematic timing, she hit a bump in the sidewalk and slammed into the ground. We tried to assist her but she started yelling at us, as did another scene girl from across the way. I responded with numeric assignments to the biggest words she was using per sentence, concluding with "WELL THAT WORD'S GOT SEVEN LETTERS IN IT, SO WAY TO USE ONE OF THE BIG ONES!"

Continuing on we approached the venerable Three Monkeys, where a slight line kept us from crashing the gates yet again. Perhaps in this moment is where I found Richmond to be called the "Fist City" by some...

Everyone else in our cadre easily passed through the door, but I guess the bouncer had a relapse of illiteracy as he decided to inspect my ID in the time it takes the College of Cardinals to elect a new Pope.

As I stood there, a very inebriated gentleman who resembled an unholy union between Kevin Federline and the guy on the cover of the first Arctic Monkeys album was standing beside the bouncer, smoking what looked like a stick of ash. He shot something derogatory my way and I looked at him so he did it again.

I asked him: "What's wrong with being nice?"

He responded: "Well who the fuck (he said this in italtics) wants to be nice?"

I responded: "I do."

The guy growls back at me and the bouncer still intently stares at my ID like it's written in Cyrillic. Talk about agony. I get a few more cusses thrown my way and some smoke blown on my person. Then he propositions me to some old-fashioned fisticuffs right there on West Main., which I promptly decline, asserting some sort of Quaker religious alignment and fluidly snatching my ID from the bouncer and gliding in the door like Deion Sanders might, if Deion Sanders were white. That rhymed nurrrrrrrrrr. Fist City indeed.

Once inside, the jet engines are roaring and I can't hear a damn thing. I find my quarry and relocate, and though it would hit me like a ton of bricks later (man, what great masonry imagery I've got going on here in this parenthetical moment of self-aggrandizing glory), I started to realize that everyone I was with who was male was a couple of sheets to the wind, while everyone I was with who was female was stone sober. It would come in this evening-defining moment.

One of the young ladies in our party found it appropriate at this point in the evening to make judgments about my physical appearance. Culled from my patchwork memory, it went something like this...

"You're gorgeous."

"WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU IT'S REALLY LOUD!"

"I SAID THAT I THINK YOU'RE GORGEOUS!"

"OH THANKS THAT'S REALLY NICE OF YOU TO SAY."

Then, less than five minutes later...

"YOU'RE GAY."

"WHAT? IT'S REALLY LOUD."

" I SAID THAT YOU'RE GAY. YOU HAVE A GAY WAVE."

"Oh."

Then they left.

Soon I found myself stumbling around side streets in the Fan looking for Quinn's house. With orientation skills I didn't know I had, I finally found my destination.

But that was only Friday, and Lennon had a lost weekend...

Stopgap Measures: Love, Loss, and the FM Transmitter

How do some people blog on an almost daily basis? What does it take for me to get my own Wikipedia entry? Will I say something else about perezhilton.com? Huh?

I always enjoy a good quest. An adventure with multiple chapters that takes one across many lands and takes days, months, or perhaps years in what seems like an endless odyssey. The last noteworthy query I explored was a song I had only heard twice in my life - once in 1997 and once ten years later. With twenty minutes checking out crappy 90s compilations on Amazon.com I figured out what I was missing (ASK ME ABOUT IT FOR THE INTERACTIVE PORTION OF THIS BLOG), and that was about it. I suppose waiting it out was better than listening to alternative rock radio for ten straight years. I'd probably keep Incubus and 311 CDs in their original jewel cases in the trunk of my car, and I'd rather still drive a 1989 Isuzu Trooper with more dents than Stuart Scott's tie than do that.

Anyway, with a slight jaunt up north to Richmond to ensure my continued existence and a removal of the apron strings (sorry Mom), I have obtained a new automobile with different audio capabilities than my previous 1999 love machine, though perhaps with fewer miles per gallon. In any case, I was previously forced to obtain an FM transmitter in order to use my iPod in a vehicle without a tape deck or iPod input. This proved a most daunting challenge since I found this alien technology from the 1940s (they found FM transmitters in the UFOs that landed in Roswell, durrrr) to be arguably overpriced and wasn't about to let some rapscallion force the inflated doodad upon my person, though most of you will find this to be an ironic situation.

I write in the past tense because after a week of searching high and low, the proper FM transmitter eluded my grasp and I was burdened with CDs from 2004 in true Jacob Marley style, and I thought all was lost, until early one morning...

Ultimately, this is a story about friendship. For in my darkest hour of Saddle Creek albums and the occasional pop punk cut from Victory or Vagrant Records, one of my oldest friends heard of my doldrums and offered me his FM transmitter, under the auspices that I look after it for safekeeping. I understandably obliged and was grateful, though our exchange went something along these lines...

"You can borrow my FM transmitter while I'm gone."
"Really? Great! Thanks!"
"Lose it or break it and I'll devour large pieces of your family."
"..."

I don't know if he will read this because he is a pretty big asshole, but Kris King, one of my oldest and best friends, made a dramatic improvement to my everyday life when he extended me that final gesture of his friendship, and in his classic begrudging way nonetheless. You see, Kris has decided to go on a quest of his own, by journeying across the pond to dear old London, that backwater British town that got on the map after some dudes in this band The Clash wrote about it. His is a quest of love, unemployment, and hopes of seeing the Spice Girls live, which are things that any person on this earth might strive to obtain. He might write about it in his blog, but he's really lazy. There are Spice Girls lyrics to memorize, after all.

Though we have gotten older and the cruel and crippling winds of the world have swept us up into different places, I will never forget Kris King and the times we had together...

We have a longstanding bet that whoever dies "loses." There is no prize.

For three years Kris convinced me he did not sign up for the Selective Service Act. For six years he convinced me he saw a certain girl we knew naked. I was fooled.

I watched his car die in the ghetto with him. We walked the long way to safety because of my suggestion.

I once made a disparaging comment about his deceased dog. He left a pig's foot on my front porch. I deserved it.
He was once fired from his job by our mutual friend. I laughed upon hearing about it.

He almost got me expelled from high school in the ninth grade. I forgave him.

True, this has been a most sentimental detour, but we all have our own personal quests that involve love, loss, friendship, struggle, and maybe even the FM transmitter. I hope everyone has their own Kris King, because life wouldn't be life without one.

Please Don't Mention "Lightning Crashes"

Allow me to apologize in advance for the following "I went to work today" narrative. I went to work today.

Approaching the building for my very first day, I noticed an inordinate amount of people standing outside as if there was some sort of anthrax scare or a really bad fart had been released in the lobby. These weren't disgruntled smokers angry at years of prejudice heaped on them since the invention of secondhand smoke, nor were they Gideons attempting to hand out more pocket-sized copies of the New Testament.

What have they got against the Old Testament, anyway? Without it, the New Testament wouldn't have been such a best-selling sequel. Just saying. Gideons and the Marlboro Man aside, I noticed that not many people were going inside the building as 8:30 rapidly approached. Rather, everyone was standing about, playing Wii work with their Blackberries and Motorola Talkabouts. YEAH RIGHT! Look that one up for a guffaw or seventeen.

Those who did decide to amble up to the front doors did so with very pensive looks on their faces, as if they were Rick Moranis looking for Sigourney Weaver but without the special effects. Each successive person walked in and disappeared for a few moments, then returned in a manner that I thought might have been some tie-in with the new Nicole Kidman movie Remake This About Aliens or Whatever III. I tried not to show emotion as everyone walked stone-faced back to their cars. By that, I mean everyone said "Hell! I ain't goin' in!" and sped away. Still, I had no clue what had transpired. I didn't know people still went on strike, if that was the case. We are long past the days of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, you know. Rough first day.

Finally I decided to call someone on the inside. Otherwise the Mexican gentleman cutting the grass would've mistaken me for part of the sidewalk and blown clippings around my person with abandon. It turns out that

OHHH NAHW FEEYAIL AIT COMAINNNNN BAICK AGAYAIINNN
LIKE A ROHLLLAIN THUNDARRR CHAIISIN THE WEEEEEEYAIND

...the building was struck by lightning.

So they told me to go home. Maybe the sequel will sell better.

Zero to Forty in a While

The whole complaining about the price of gas is old, so don't look here as I discuss automobile-related fare. Just don't. Go away. Read perezhilton.com or whatever else is on your Mozilla toolbar IF YOU ARE EVEN AWARE OF WHAT THAT IS, GOD! REALLY.

I have noticed that lately I have been doing some driving. Most of it is personal, to be truthful. That jaunt out to Tropical Smoothie a few days ago ain't exactly on the company dime. Nevertheless, I have been logging the miles hither and thither.

I have not experienced a truly egregious incident of road rage since August of 2004 while attempting to drive faster than a hurricane, but driving is a most infuriating of necessary life activities, at least in this neck of America. Understand that this is not a soapbox for any particular political agenda, but damn if the roads in seven I-can't-believe-there's-still-road-construction-going-on-here-after-five-years seven aren't an unholy gridlocked labyrinth to the point of making a person bleed out of the anus and ears in sheer agony. I should know because I have lived the nightmare in several movements, and at this point it's hard to decide which example to embellish. It's like having to play Whac-a-Mole with stillborn children. So much suffering is involved yet you want to get that high score.

Tackling Hampton Roads road construction here is best done in an all-encompassing way without accusing any sort of transit authority of taking away my tax dollars and giving them to dangerous minorities. Simply, there is a lot of road construction going on around these parts. Why? Well, I would point the finger at city fathers so eager to rape and pillage the land for tax revenues that they let developers run wild and build a metropolis of two-story vinyl pup-tents on a few swatches of farm land, but that's neither here nor there. So now we gots lots of cars and people and ain't got much roads to put them on to git to places or somethin'. Yes, Virginia, we have traffic. All road construction here seems like once, ages ago, we lived in a prosperous community with a Department of Transportation eager to accommodate the growth of the surrounding cities. Then Deep Impact, Armageddon, or Little Black Book happened and everything was wiped out, leaving a bunch of wretched roadways for oversized gas-guzzlers to traverse with trepidation. I'm not kidding. There are a ton of roads under construction, but no one doing any constructing. Really constructive.

So that's an eye-gouging experience, to be truthful. But amidst war zones of unreasonably slow speed limits, awkwardly placed road cones standing sentry along highway that seems perfectly fine, and construction workers doing absolutely nothing but growing facial hair, there are worse things. Yes, follow your nose...

While road construction might be the third-worst thing out there in the Seven Cities, the second worst thing are the cities themselves. We possess a culture that has, over time, perpetuated what can be described as nothing short of a woefully retarded practice of poorly estimating time and distance between two points within the area code.

Chesapeake to the Oceanfront? Psshaw, that's a quick 20 minutes.

Maybe at 3AM in a Dodge Viper, douchebag. Everything is "a quick 20 minutes." Even Williamsburg to Portsmouth has been topped out at a "reasonable 45 minutes." A tradition of lies if you ask me. Nothing is as close as it seems. Why do we do this to ourselves, crippling each other with optimism? Road construction has exsanguinated the highways and byways to the point of lifelessness and the overabundance of traffic lights has left us with a mutated version of the children's game "Red Light, Green Light," only this time, we're playing for our lives. And inside deadly hunks of giant metal.

This brings me to a concept that I first discovered in Virginia Beach but eventually found it elsewhere in the United States, that of "DON'T BLOCK THE BOX OR WE WILL LOCK YOU IN THE STOCKS!" This is not entirely true, but the Virginia Beach police are decidedly vociferous when it comes to the enforcement of keeping intersections clear for the purposes of a smooth flow of traffic. The fine levied upon the disobedient is admittedly steep, but these days, $500 can't even buy you a next-generation gaming console. Sest lah veeyay, I think is how the French say it. In any case, if you catch yourself in such a debacle where you are "blocking the box" everything turns into a race against the clock to prevent cataclysm, or worse, getting pulled over beside a mini golf course. Here is how things go down...

You're minding your own business, trying not to stare at the pack of boisterous (insert choice of stereotype here), waiting for cars ahead of you to lurch through the waxing and waning green light at the Oceanfront. As time slips through your hands, you notice a buildup by the intersection that shows no signs of dissipating. A most malicious of bottlenecks is beginning to form. Soon, it's too late. Time stands still, and you catch yourself in the box.

The light's still green though. You've got time.

Really.

Don't worry.

You do.

Don't you?

Frantically, you start jerking your head around to view the status of the rest of the lights at the intersection, praying for a reprieve, that the lights don't change colors on you and leave you high and dry. A funny image considering you're at the Oceanfront. HAW!

The cars ahead of you aren't helping a brother out. Every inch forward seems to take eons, as if they envision themselves as a collective Atlas, with the weight of the world on their shoulders. The bright green hue of the stoplight seems to be fading with the setting sun, and the red light at the intersecting street appears poised to drop through like the penultimate Connect Four piece, like you've beaten your ten-year-old cousin for the ninth time in a row at Thanksgiving and are really looking forward to complete victory, not unlike what John Travolta was aiming for in Battlefield Earth. Don't see Battlefield Earth.

You can see each grain of sand fall from the hourglass, as if you have achieved total enlightenment, yet realize that you will never enjoy it if you owe the city of Virginia Beach $500 and can't savor your epiphany over a good sandwich or something.

The light in front of you turns yellow.

Now you are gritting your teeth into dust and your knuckles are a most spectral white. You scream cuss words.

Then, slowly, on cue from TLC, the cars creep, yeah and keep it on the down low.

Said nobody is supposed to know.

So they creep, yeah.

They clear the box. You apply as much gas as time and space will allow and fling your vehicle into the other side of the intersection as the light starts to bleed red. It behaves not unlike the haunted carriage from Beauty and the Beast.

True, the perpetual state of road construction and the lies we acquiesce to about time and space are frustrating enough, but what is without a shadow of a doubt the most nefarious menace on the Tidewater (old school) roads are the other drivers that have held the DMV up with staplers demanding to become licensed drivers. If this is not true, then I am a liar. Even if I am a liar, then it is easier to get a driver's license in Virginia than it is to learn what colors you get when you mix the primary ones together. This can't be made up. It is seriously unfathomable how some people are allowed to get driver's licenses.

I've heard the sayings all before. "It takes all kinds." "Variety is the spice of life." Sure, fine, sunshine and puppies. However, there is absolutely no excuse for stupidity or poor taste, which ultimately translates into an ignorance for the well-being of others on the road. And no, I'm actually not referring to magnetic ribbons or the purloined cartoon of Calvin urinating on everything.

This is easily the best example I can think of in recent memory. The other day I found myself on an off ramp attempting to merge onto Interstate 664 southbound; this involved an off ramp with an acceleration lane that eventually disappears. Now, I have a slow car. A 1999 Toyota Corolla is probably the slowest car on the road besides a 1998 Toyota Corolla with four fat men inside of it.

So I'm trying to make it from my house to Bed Bath and Beyond and back in less than an hour. The time is 3:06PM. It takes 30 minutes to get to Bed Bath and Beyond from my house on a near-perfect day. I am trying easing off the off ramp and actually obeying the yield sign, which most drivers here ignore with a "WHUT'S THAT I CAIN'T THINK 'BOUT READIN' CAUSE THIS KENNY CHESNEY SONG IS ON THE RADIO!!" Unfortunately, such ghastly lack of foresight has caused the right lane to back up from people forgetting to obey the rules of the road, so countless magnetic ribbons, Calvin pissing clings, Bush/Cheney '04 stickers, and vans pockmarked with mailbox decals about Saunders Motorsports and their top dirt bikers Cody #45, Jimmy #9, and Wayne #22 are now sitting at a stop that would make a dead man lose his patience.

The left lane is quite open. So I make a move. And that's when I realized I was going to die.

For one reason or another, my car has no gauge to indicate my RPMs. I understand that such a gauge is largely superfluous in a car with an automatic transmission that is not intended to go faster than quick chickens, but on this occasion it might have been useful. I have changed lanes into the left lane when suddenly the Hound of the Baskervilles in the form of a Ford Explorer is rocketing my way at what felt like Mach 3. I put my pedal to the floor and hear that 750cc engine wheeze for its life. 35...40...42...43...and this car is still baring down on me with a vengeance. Finally, the Corolla rockets forward after an unprecedented 120 seconds of acceleration to reach 61 miles-per-hour...and then I have to come to a dead stop. Why? My fellow motorists saw a special need to inspect the quality of work the convicts were doing at picking up trash and mowing the median on the highway.

When it comes down to it, I can't imagine what the DMV is thinking. I wonder if they're in cahoots with the Virginia Department of Transportation to make everything a living hell for anyone who has actual things to do and isn't driving on the road for fun to check out the hottest rims or truck lifts running the streets. I've seen people in this area read novels while driving, physically fight, drink liquor, sleep, and pick vicious boogers. There is literally a void of accountability on the roadways as people don't accelerate when the light turns green, but they slow down as if I'm trapped in the Bizarro World. Merging, a simple concept, has been transformed into rocket science for most. Speed limits are regarded as a dangerous precipice where no one dares to tread.

"Forty-five through here!? Are you insane? It's much safer to maintain twenty-five."

Welcome to paradise.

Oh, and I made it back from Bed Bath and Beyond at 3:58.

Clock Punching

Don't lie to me. You've been wondering, and I can't say I blame you.

What does such an esoteric young man do for a living? Certainly not on the assembly line at the modesty factory, that's for sure. Let us not beat around the bush here. (But let's beat bush lol!!!) This one will be heartfelt, and you'll never want to read another one so mind-numbingly personal again. You can just read everyone else's blog every day for the rest of time.

I have been unemployed since the start of this blog. Is that shameful? Mostly. Almost entirely. It's akin to burning all of the money in your checking account, depositing the ashes into an empty hourglass, and turning it over. The stereotypical "moths in the wallet" routine turns into the moths leaving because they haven't felt the warmth of dolla dolla dolla bills ya'll in ages; on occasion, when I turned out my pockets, they disintegrated and blew away. Whatever. I have been telling lies here for the sake of hyperbole. People do it all the time.

Folks have asked me how I have spent my days as a shiftless vagabond, though I haven't exactly been sucking on the teat of the state just yet, peanut gallery. I will break it down for you, and honestly, it doesn't seem so bad at first glance. I wake up around 9:30 every day, run about three miles, eat breakfast, shower, (I used to) tool around on the Internet and newspaper classifieds looking for any sort of reasonable opportunity, complete any sort of errands or housework designated for me, and after that, the day was basically a free-for-all. In between, I went on a couple of vacations, read a lot of books, and saw a lot of movies. In between that, I went as a hanger-on with other hangers-on to places where anyone else might be hanging on. No wire hangers, though. So really, I have rarely been bored, and yet...

Quite simply, being unemployed sucks. I mean, things never got down to me turning into a Dollar Menunaire, or worse, kicking it with haggard and bloated versions of David Faustino and Jeremy Miller. Are we supposed to know who they are when they appear on those McDonald's commercials? Or is our intelligence being insulted when their names appear at the bottom of the screen, as if to say, "Oh that's who it is. Jesus, he let himself go." Or, additionally, are they that desperate for work? Reality television has all but guaranteed that former child stars and one-hit wonders have an eternal place in posterity. Why don't they just resort to that and stare at Flava Flav's nipples or something? Can I get a what what, Corey Feldman?

Hold on, I think I hear Huey Lewis and the News. There is a bar called Bugsy's (look, tying in old material, it's hip to be up on your continuity) in Old Town Alexandria that had to have been the inspiration for Sports, only dirtier and dingier, as if the Hold Steady themselves had left because the barflies were too scurrilous for their liking. Great place, really. Anyway, as Ellen DeGeneres once titled a book My Point...And I Do Have One, I was getting at something here at some point. Ah, yes, as the Kaiser Chiefs once titled a record...

Basically, employment means new adventures. New chances for people to cough when some secondhand smug gets in their lungs. It means that no longer will I have to consider magnetic ribbons or those inane faux baseballs that look like they're smashing through a car window as legitimate topics of discussion. I don't care how much you like baseball, because for one, you probably know nothing about it. But I'd like to take you up on something. How about I start shattering your back windshield with baseballs, because obviously such a destructive car decoration is alluding to your wildest fantasies. Maybe you have a suction cup fetish. I don't know. Take the stupid thing off your car. However, they are still not as bad as Dale Earnhardt memorial window decals. Would you do the same for a hit man who was killed while on a hit?

Once Knew a Guy Who Named His Dog Whiskey...

What is it about bars?

I haven't been to very many. The number can probably be counted on both hands and maybe a few toes, since I am lucky that my parents did not live close to Three Mile Island therefore do not possess mutated hands with irregular digits. Every time I walk through some busted wooden doors with dirty chamber of commerce stickers on them from decades past, bartenders and clientèle look at me I'm Wonder Years-era Fred Savage, completely out of my element with some sort of hyperbolic all-knowing monologue over my head; sadly the dramatic irony is lost on them. Maybe it's my "I swear to God I'm not 19 anymore" driver's license that I take out of my velcro wallet or the Starter jacket I wear in the winter. Look people, I know I'm green, and I like it. Why?

Chances are, you've been to bars too, and you've seen this guy. He was that drunk and put that much hair gel in his hair. Why is that? Why are dudes so concerned with putting gel in their hair before they go some place? Is gel a requisite accessory to the untucked dress shirt and really shiny shoes? I don't understand. Help me.
I prefer being Bambi to a barfly. Less chance of wearing a shirt that says something like "If It's a Race Issue, Settle It at the Track!" and thinking that it's funny. Less chance of taking or purchasing some sort of alcohol decor and putting it my home as a conscious decision...

Conversation about said decor:

Man, that neon inflatable Corona seaplane is fuckin' rad man, where'd you get it?

Oh, at the bar man. Terry was gonna get rid of it on Sunday but I told him I'd take it off his hands.

Man, that's so sweet.

Yeah, it hides the holes where I used to have the dart board.

Good thinkin', dude!

Less chance of appearing in pictures raising a glass/bottle/hands in stupid "Rock on!!!" sign. Less chance of the bartender not needing to card me. Less chance of hearing "Here Without You" by 3 Doors Down. You get it.

You have the wrong impression though, I think, from all of this. Bars are fine, unless we're talking about The Barrel, a watering hole's watering hole in Portsmouth, which looks like a 7-Eleven with bricks covering the front and must be like drinking in the trunk of a Cadillac that's been sitting at the bottom of a river for 30 years (finally put that wisecrack to print). Anyway, what makes these places worthwhile are the intangibles. They never stir during the day, and if they do, they always look like that scene from The Big Green when Jay O. Sanders says he's an auditor for the IRS. You know what I'm saying here. Bars are nocturnal. When the bad moon rises, the doors swing open and the stools and tables fill up. Soon, the Industrial Revolution is put to shame by the amount of cigarette smoke that pollutes the air and even the bricks in the wall start to wheeze. The same old barflies waft in and swap war stories with other domestic beer-fueled patrons. Eventually ashtrays start to look like Sodom and Gomorrah instead of an advanced fifth grade art project. Glass starts to crash like Stone Cold Steve Austin's theme music is skipping over the PA on Monday Night RAW. The booze-laden zombies walk the earth for a while before things get kaleidoscopic (a shameless purloining of a Bill Veeck phrase there) and fade to black. Rinse and repeat.

In the end, what matters are the stories, and the stories create history between people and culture. Yeah, here I go again with a point or something. Sitting around, tall tales and short stories start pouring out as everyone sips stutter milk and stun gravy. Blah blah blah about alcohol and losing inhibitions and blah blah blah. I don't think it has 100% to do with the old sauce. It is more of an environmental thing.

What?

People talk at bars. They discuss ideas (mostly bad ones) and people and gossip and the most meaningful and meaningless things in the world. They might not say a word in the car on the way there or the way back, but amidst the decay, they chit and chat and chatter and everything else. I think it's because it's expected. You can't get away with watching SportsCenter the whole time. The ticker moves fast enough for you to get what you need in a few minutes, pending ESPN not telling you how many times Barry Bonds put on pants. Contributions to conversation are expected, and that determines the flow of the evening. Ultimately it's a culture based on oral traditions and unwritten rules. No one tells you how to act or what to order. You basically follow the lead of those that came before you. (Sort of, I mean, easy on the hair gel) No one gets Jack Daniels' Big Book o'Cocktails two weeks before his or her 21st birthday to memorize and look like a pro. That's idiocy. You pick it up as you go along, and before you know it, you're not as green as you thought. Unless like me, you just can't bear to part with that Starter jacket...

People Still Listen to "Free Bird" for Fun

I have returned, and with a new look. I don't know how less than ten posts merits a considerable redesign...attribute that to a certain restlessness of spirit.

I don't profess to be a world traveler, because I haven't traveled the entire world, or even that much of it. I have jumped off cliffs in Greece, seen women breast feed on the streets of Italy, seriously considered purchasing an all-leather Toronto Blue Jays hat in the SkyDome, and even settled for ramen in Tokyo because that's what you eat when the only thing you know how to say in Japanese is "Hey Junichiro Koizumi, I'm lookin' for the can." Yet there is much soil I have not set foot on and much contaminated water I have not gulped.

Perhaps the most appealing of vacation destinations, to me, is not anywhere that has been featured on MTV Spring Break or The Da Vinci Code or the Fear Street series (Goosebumps represent). Rather, I reserve a special corner in my heart, right next to the guy ahead of me in the line at Best Buy, who, at some undoubtedly low point in his life decided it would be a good idea to get the symbols from Led Zeppelin IV tattooed on his forearm, for the lake town in the vein of Dirty Dancing. Usually a loose confederation of backwater metropolises held together by an economic rush that comes with the changing of the seasons, you know these places. You've been there. Or worse, you like Dirty Dancing with its time-traveling soundtrack. Each vacation spot has its own hijacked OBX regalia and countless microscopic vendors that pepper the landscape with goods of negative value, which include the zenith of all decorative items for one's lake house, Margaritaville-inspired phrases with corresponding artwork. Personally, Jimmy, I don't care how great the lake is, I'm crying with the saints about the state of the sinners.

What is it? Nostalgia? The something-for-everyone idea that more exclusive locales like East Timor lack? The relative proximity of lakes in some states? Imagine the aggravation Minnesota residents endure when picking which lake to go to every summer. Actually, after some research, I have come up with a few things. Minnesota is a land of lies. It is not the "Land of 10,000 Lakes," but more like the "Land of 11,842 Lakes." This means one thing: the Minnesota DMV is clearly against the War on Terror and is loaded with insurgents. We should really put all of our eggs in one basket at this point, and that basket lies with the last bastion of hope, Alaska, land of over three and a half million lakes. Good God. Incidentally, the growers cooperative Land O'Lakes, is in Wisconsin, which has never made any outrageous claims regarding the enumeration of small bodies of water within its borders. Lakes have more prominence in America than any one of us originally thought. Back to "Free Bird"...

It is the timelessness of the whole scene that has won me over. Not in the "nobody puts Baby in the corner" sense, but in the weather-beaten, wooden signs dotting the road that are stained green from overgrowth, and the gas stations, houses, and restaurants that haven't had fresh coats of paint since that moon landing hoax thing. The appeal lies in water and the possibility of Fortean creatures roaming the depths, although "Fortean creatures" and "depths" are terms used most liberally here. Everything has been held back decades, almost as if time only chooses to advance three months per year. At these lake resorts, Mr. Gorbachev hasn't torn down any walls and Elian Gonzalez isn't a twinkle in anyone's eye, thankfully. Sure, the ways to get to these places and the methods of transportation once one is on the water have changed dramatically, and thankfully so. I can attest to that personally, having used herculean strength to save a Sea Doo from joining Davy Jones' Locker and Marina. Read: it almost done sunk.

These places will never lose their luster. Why? They don't have any luster, and they never did. They are the most primal and basic destinations for fun of any sort. It is essentially like going to someone else's house for a while. Which is true, unless you have a house of your own, and then I must cast judgment upon you for any Jimmy Buffet sayings attached to the walls of your abode.

Tangents have formed their own tangents which have formed rival tangent clubs in this entry, I know. Allow me one last attempt to distill the principal idea here.

Change is certainly a constant. I have watched my hometown fall to the mercy of developers as worthless sprawl engulfed a place that had enough sprawl anyway. These lake towns are different. When time beckons them to proceed into the future, they calmly resist and retreat to the past. There is a certain element of escapism in them. You can see it in the rickety wooden structures, in the glass ketchup bottles, in the analog gas pumps, and in the long miles of greenery dotted by the occasional home. These are places where people do, in fact, still listen to "Free Bird" for fun, where the irony of the disasterpiece has not quite reached some locales. They oblige progress only at the slightest increments, and unfortunately that has come with OBX lookalike merchandise and big box stores, but life is not perfect. But it might have been with that leather Toronto Blue Jays hat. If only.