Random #3

New NGV5 is up. The Slug Zombies have arrived!

Um... What else? The weekend was hawesome! Jen's parents came up to Stilly to watch Jackson for the weekend so we could get a break. We thought we were going to go to Wichita to pick up a drafting table that I had bids out on ebay, but some fucker outbid me by a buck at the last second. So instead we went to Tulsa and just stayed in Jen's parents house. They were up here with the boy, and we were down there on our own. It was glorious. We ate out, shopped, and slept in. Basically became slugs because we could. So nothing really to report, which is a very good thing.

Random thoughts:
-This whole Jonbenet thing is retarded. I knew from a mile away that guy was a) a creepy little shit, and b) not the killer. If he was so gung-ho about confessing, and felt so bad about it, he would have done it a lang time ago. And BTW, a known pedophile goes on the run and nobody thinks to check Thailand? Idiots. He was even using his real name. And there was something very Lee Harvey about how they kept parading him around.
-A year after Katrina and nobody has learned shit. Bush said yesterday that he's not giving anymore money out and that it is up to the locals to make it work with what they have. What they have is Jack and Shit. And Jack left town long ago. dick.
-We finally saw Brokeback Mountain last night. I was waiting for the hoopla to wind down, and to forget about what I had heard about it. It was a very good movie. Being in the middle of Homophobistan, which is full of cowboys, I thought it was a nice comment on tolerance.
-This is the most disturbing thing I have ever seen.

That is all.

Esquire.

So this post by ELB, (take your time, I'll wait...) made me have a pang of nostalgia. Though I never worked in a video store, I did work in a movie theatre. An art-house one at that. Most of the people in the neighborhood were convinced that we were a porn theatre.
I started there the week reservoir Dogs opened, and left the week, years later, that reservoir dogs was re-released for some festival or double feature or something, making for good book-ends to that career. For a bunch of kids on minimum wage, we sure had a lot of fun. We threw parties every few weeks centered around the arrival of new movies, these started as employee screenings, but degraded into debauchery until every few months the management would tighten the reigns, and only allow employees for a while, but it would always go south sooner rather than later.
And the sex. Holy shit was that an incestuous bunch. It seemed like every body was banging somebody else who worked there. For a while, we had the honor of having the most gay employees, and were dubbed "the Esqueer". There was even one infamous instance where one girl joined in on a couple's wedding night.
I got held up at gunpoint there once. We had just emptied the lock box, and these two guys came in, waving guns. By "waving", I mean discretely hidden in coats, and held low, but hey, a gun is a gun. They got the a night's cash for some French movie, and my manager's wallet, who in his gay little way went prancing after them, and they shot at him. They didn't hit him. Or his giant Freddy Mercury mustache.
Erin's post concerns, partly, getting really stoned and fucking with the customers. This was a fond past-time of ours as well. The projection booth must have had a permanent layer of THC on the walls. The upstairs theatre was converted from the old balcony, and the screen sat in front of this little curtained area that we had a bunch of junk in. For a while we had a James Bond Standee up there, positioned so that when the light on the screen was right, it looked like a guy with a gun was hiding back there, behind the curtain. That lasted about a week before somebody complained. I think the projectionist adapted the idea to have a head on the film platter, so that if you happened to look up there while the movie was playing, it'd look like somebody was up there nervously pacing.
We had this massive stock pile of movie posters in the basement of the Mayan (part of the same chain, and although we technically worked for one theatre, we really worked at all of them.), My brother was put in charge of getting them in order one slow summer, a daunting task, given the piles and piles on posters there, form every movie any of the theatres had shown for the previous 20 years or so. Jeff decided to exact his revenge for such a menial task by alphabetizing all of the posters by the second letter of the title. Jeff could find any poster you wanted in a matter of minutes, but it took everybody else hours. I'm not sure they ever figured that one out.
By far, our favorite people to fuck with were the Rocky Horror Picture Show people. I mean, come on. They're asking for it. They're like the nerds of the band fags. How can you not? We did some really horrible things to them.
First off, the last movie of the night usually went in about 9:30 or so. It would take us about 20 minutes to do our side work, then we would lock the doors, file into the booth and get fucking shit-faced. Every once in a while, we'd poke our heads out to see if anybody needed to be let out, and to make sure nobody in line was setting anything on fire. To minimize their exposure to "real" customers, we started the line around the corner on 6th ave, and every week, we'd inch that velvet rope back just a little more, till the line almost started in the alley. The show was supposed to start at midnight, but we would rarely venture out of the booth before 12:30. THEN we'd let the "cast" in to set up for a while, THEN we'd start letting the idiots who actually paid good money week after week in, and start the show around 1:00, pushing back the 2:00am show, if we had one, even further. NOBODY was let in before we said so. That meant that if some poor sap was in his Frank-N-further garters and it was -10 degrees and snowing, he still had to wait. He should have brought something other than a cape to cover himself. We'd make them go get us pizza or send them to the grocery store for stamps. One of our favs was that even though we had a cleaning service, we'd make them clean the theatre of rice and toast and toilet paper before they left. The weird thing was that they were happy to do all of it, because we were the cool kids, and they desperately needed our approval. The even weirder thing is that in the circles we ran in, we were NOT the cool kids, and we desperately sought approval from everybody else.
It was a fun job. No responsibilities, very little politics. If it weren't for the appalling pay, I probably would have left later than I did. For a while I worked there in the evenings and at the coffeeshop in the mornings, but I was making far too much at the coffeeshop to warrant a second job, so I quit. After a while, they stopped calling me for employee screenings, and that was that.

The Nothing and a rant

So usually at the begining of the week, I regale my two readers with tales of weekend shenanigans. But this weekend we didn't really do anything interesting. At least not to you two.
Jack had some live viruses injected into his chubby little thighs on Friday*, and that in conjunction with the three teeth that are cutting made for a very cranky baby indeed. For the most part, he either slept or whined all weekend. This was also the first weekend in a while that we didn't have a major obligation an hour's drive away, so we spent a lot of it cleaning a very dirty house, and trimming the yard's hair.
So what should I write about? How about a few little things that are creeping and crawling around in my head. 1) I am slowly getting more confident in the country. More and more people are starting to see that the Bush administration in paticular and the Republican party in general have been corrupted by absolute power. These mid term elections will be a good test to see how much total bullshit the country can take. That is, of course, if the Democrats don't fuck it up like they usually do. The thing about the Dems is that they hardly ever really fuck up them selves. They just don't fight back when attacked, so the general populace figure whatever the GOP said was true. And they don't have any balls. The Repubs went after Clinton so hard for a seemingly crooked land deal in Arkansas that they ended up being exonerated for, yet they cried impeachment because he got a hummer from tubby. Bush has done so many horrible things that are WAY worse, and the deems sit on their haunches afraid that if they say anything they will be called a traitor. But they are pulling out of that. They are gaining ground as the Repubs slip.
That being said, 2) I really don't want Hillary to run in '08. Not a good idea. I think she's a good politician and that her heart is in the right place, and she would make a good president, but she's not electable. In the same way that Obama isn't. They are too green, and the demographics of the people who actually vote are still to old school** to open their minds that much. So I think Gore should run again. Stop laughing and hear me out.
-He's already beat Bush, and anybody that they put up (except McCain, whom I would totally vote for) wouldn't be anywhere near Bush's crazy crazy, tipping the odds heavily in Gore's favor.
-In the 2000 election, all of Gore's mud was already slung. They already dug up whatever they could dig up on him, and nobody seemed to care that much.
-I really like what he's been doing with his time off. The web stuff*** and the environmental stuff have been top notch, and I think a lot of people have seen that.
- He's tall, good-looking, and Nader isn't running.
- He's not in the pocket of the oil companies.

I don't think he'll do it, but if he did, and if he was for some reason up against Hillary in a primary, I think the same thing that happened to Lieberman would happen to Hillary. She'd get swooped by the one guy more left than her. I would totally vote for him. Again.



* He also went to his first day of pre-school. He wore a dinosaur outfit. He was really cute.
** (racist redneck chauvinists)
*** The only beef I have is that he fired Layla Kayleigh, who was a correspondent on Current, after she did a Maxim shoot. That wasn't cool, but she's on AOTS now, which is cool.

Bowling and Sleep Deprivation

Here is an actual conversation I once had with one Aaron Taylor, after showing up unannounced at his house, and finding him in the back yard:

J: What the hell are you doing?
A: Well, this tree died.
J: So....?
A: So I'm painting one half of it red, and the other half blue.
J: Okay.

Man. As some of you know, Jackson does not sleep through the night. Never has. He only recently decided that naps were a good idea. For ever he just didn't sleep. Not at night, not during the day. There were a few times when we had to take him to the grand parents for the weekend, just so we could catch up with our friends in dreamtown, but it never worked, because our minds have programmed us to think that if he doesn't wake up every few hours than something is wrong. Well, he is making slow progress to remedy the situation. He sleeps now, but likes to get up around 4:30 or 5:00. Jen the saint usually gets up with him and lets me sleep for a little while. So once she's up and moving and has some caffeine in her, Jack decides it's time to take a nap. Usually around 8:45 or so. I think just to piss off his mommy. He's a sly one.
The point of all this is that before, if we wanted to go out, we knew he wasn't going to sleep anyway, and if he did sleep, it'd be from 3 to 9 or so on the weekends, giving us about 5 hours, which is pretty good for us. So we went out this weekend thinking that. We roll in from the bar at 2:30 or so, a little tipsy, pour ourselves into the bed, and get a whoppin' 2 and a half hours of sleep before he wakes up. Jen the saint once again took care of it, and made his some early morning eggs. I love that woman. She got a little nap later in the day, but I think she needs about three days of uninterrupted sleep to really catch up. I'm implementing a new thing where, on Saturday, I get him up and fed and out of the house as soon as possible, so Jen can sleep. We'll be spending Saturday mornings at the coffeeshop now, so if you want to come keep me company, please do so. I'm the guy with the funny glasses and the sleepy mug.
That isn't to say that we did not have a lovely weekend. This we did. Friday, Cookie joined us for some Chinese food and what we call "porch time", which is exactly what it sounds like. Saturday we dragged cookie kicking and screaming to Tulsa to attend another one-year-old's birthday party, and for that, I am truly sorry. We had a good time inspite of the heat.
We then met up with him and his new girlfriend to eat some awesome Italian food. It was muy yummy. The off to go disco bowling for Gretchen's birthday. There were about 15 of us, and we were all really bad at it, which made it a lot more fun. Jen and Alison were the surprise winners. Who knew? On to Caz's to finish up the night. There was some sort of event going on. They raffled off a Heiniken chimenia during a burn ban. I don't know why. I did walk out with a little pile of PBR swag.
Sunday was spent recuperating and eating red meat.

Robot with knick-knack

I missed the calendar thingy this month, but here is a detail because it was the only thing I drew on it. That robot's gonna mess you up.
So we finally had a weekend at home. A three day weekend for me due to an uninvited migrane. I got to work Friday morning, and felt pretty crappy, and had a bit of a headache, but I just could not stop sweating. It wasn't hot in the AC, and I was pouring buckets. Then a mythical being hit me in the back of the head with a sledge-hammer and I almost passed out. So I decided to go home and sleep it off. That took till 2:00, and I was pretty groggy the rest of the day. Jen was having a garage sale, so I just stayed inside with the boy, so he wouldn't get heatstroke, and I wouldn't fall over.
Friday night, we ended up having dinner with a bunch of sorority girls. I'm still not sure how. But, we got a lot of offers to babysit Jackson, so that was good. We now have this massive list of girls to call when we need to go get shit-faced. Always handy.
Saturday was the rest of the sale. We got totally cleaned out, and that was including a bunch of stuff that cousin Ryan dropped off. We had to close down at 12:30 because it was 106 degrees. At 12:30. Not even the hottest part of the day. Fuckin' sun. God hates us. We spent the rest of the day trying to stay places that were air conditioned. We finally got to leave the house and go for a walk around 9:00, when Jack should have been in bed and right when all the bugs come out. I'm still itchy. I think all we did on Sunday was housework. We were really starting to get cabin fever. Poor Jack would look out the window at his little swing that I put up in the tree for him, and whine. It was very sad.
In other news, the Cheerleader comic that Jeff and I did got published. It is in a cheesy goth themed rag, but hey, published is published. Always nice to see yourself in print.
I leave you with this random thought:
Why the hell can't Fruit Stripe Gum last longer? So good. So fleeting.

Whiners

So NPR did this story this morning about the awful heat wave going across the country. They were making this big deal about how some place was having trouble coping because for 10 days the temperature had been above 90 degrees.
Above 90! That's horrible!
If you click the pic to the right, you will see that Stilly had exactly zero days under 90, and only 5 that were under 95. Oh, and do me a favor and click here.
You see that? Forecast is another week of above 100, and another month of above 90. John on KEXP Seattle's morning show was so happy because the intense heat (88) was finally over and it was back into the 70s for the rest of the week. I wanted to leap through the internets and throttle his throat.
This heat makes me cranky and sick to my stomach. My electric bill may as well be another car payment. It would probably be cheaper to get another car, and just sit in it with the engine idling, blowing the AC all over me. It can't be any more expensive. I wish I had the money to go live in Australia or New Zealand where it is winter right now. We need to make a really cool city somewhere where it is really cold year round, like Siberia or in ANWaR. If millions will flock to Vegas, they'll come to my new city.

Who's with me?