We haven’t got an official obit yet, but I wanted to put news out on the internet because I know my dad’s friends and fans are far and wide and largely citizens of the web. My father Craig Jarratt, aka Careful the Clown, aka Eddie Sehota, et cetera, longtime Mars enthusiast, died in Dayton, Ohio the evening of Monday May 19, 2014, after a protracted and spirited battle against lung cancer.
Category: life
Things that happen In Real Lifeâ„¢
Categories
make it worth something
Life is so precarious. Everything – literally, everything – hinges on making halfway smart choices. People every day lose their footing and slip under the ice and are never seen again. A good job today is no guarantee of safety, food, health, or shelter tomorrow, especially when the realization suddenly thumps you in the chest that your ninth life isn’t going to come with any second chances.
The worst thing imaginable is living a life that ends when one dies. When i die, i want to have done something important in some way, even small. I want to pass that along to somebody. Any sort of legacy, just some evidence of a brief but intentional, earnest, meaningful ride on this hurtling rock.
I guess what i’m saying is this: it’s just about impossible to reach for the stars when you’re tied to the tracks. So give yourself a little elbow room and use it well – don’t merely use it.
Categories
The Ultimate List of E-Cig Studies
Pretty much the all-in-one resource everyone wants and needs… Look no further than onVaping
Categories
How i traded smoke for vapor
Here’s my tobacco harm reduction success story I shared at CASAA:
I started smoking around age 16; I am 41 now. When I quit smoking three years ago, I had been smoking for 22 years. That’s nearly a quarter of a century. In fact, that’s very close to a full third of my projected lifespan. For the first year, when I would run around telling people how I was “not addicted,” I would smoke a pack in a few days. By a couple of years later, I was smoking a pack a day. Within a couple more years, I was up to three and a half packs per day. At my peak, in my early twenties, I could easily be into my fifth pack of cigarettes by the time I went to bed. For the last several years of my smoking life, with great effort, I got myself down to about two packs a day. For the longest amount of time however – well over a decade – I averaged two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half packs a day.
I have on several occasions attempted to quit smoking cold turkey. This was always most convenient when I was sick with a flu. It never worked for more than perhaps a day at most. About seven or eight years ago, and over the course of the next few years, I tried lozenges (yuck!), gum (difficult to find cinnamon flavor), Chantix, nicotine patches, and so-called “zero-nicotine” cigarettes. Mostly, it was a combination of at least two, sometimes three, of these methods. The most I was ever able to completely live without smoking was a couple of days. I was a nervous wreck.
Finally, I decided to take a chance on a new idea. A personal nicotine vaporizer, also known begrudgingly as “e-cigarettes”. I can’t even remember where I got the idea or what I knew about them then. I did a ton of research into price-versus-effectiveness, and settled on a brand (Joye) and a vendor (Cignot) which seemed like a satisfactory and trustworthy combination and took the plunge with about $100 – roughly the cost of a week’s supply of Camel Filters. I got two medium-sized bottles of e-juice, a USB passthrough device, a car charger, a PCC (Personal Charging Case), and a box of two Joye 510 personal vaporizers, plus cartridges.
The moment I took it out of the box and assembled my vaporizer, I quit smoking tobacco. I am not kidding. Well, I tried it first. It felt like smoking. It really did. But it wasn’t. It was just delivering nicotine via atomized infused liquid. But the sensation – from the inescapable muscle-memory of hand-to-mouth which all smokers adhere to even after quitting, to the feeling in the back of my throat and in my lungs – was close enough to inhaling tobacco smoke (minus the coughing and burning and infamous “eye-hits” of the secondary smoke wafting about) that I did not have to light another cigarette ever again. I started at around 26mg nicotine; within a few months I got down to 18mg. Generally, I puff all day, when I am thinking about it. Often, I don’t even think about it; sometimes for an hour or more, such is the loosened grip of my addiction.
In one day, I quit smoking cigarettes completely. In three years, I have not had to smoke. I have smoked maybe five times since then, but only to see if I could discern a difference. I could. Compared to vaporized nicotine, burning tobacco was horrible. I could not believe I smoked up to five packs a day for over twenty years. So, maybe five times I tried to see what I had been doing. Five times I only got halfway into a cigarette before I was done. The last one was probably two years ago now.
The biggest changes since I stopped smoking in favor of the low-risk alternative of vaporization has been the lack of waking up with what I call “lead-lungs,” which for years daily caused me to self-medicate with that horrible subtly-pain-relieving smoking tobacco. Every morning I used to wake up and the first couple of cigarettes would eliminate the pain I felt breathing. Now I have zero pain in my chest.
I can smell things – including cigarette smoke, when it’s around (wow – sorry, non-smokers!). I also no longer burn holes in clothing or cars, or singe my hair, or accidentally set small fires by carelessly letting my cigarette burn unwatched in an ashtray. The stigma is gone. I’m no longer a social outcast because of my stupid “cool” addiction. In essence, I’m free, or nearly there.
I do still use my vaporizer frequently, but it’s causing me no perceivable negative health effects at all. If anything, I can run short distances again. As an asthmatic smoker, that used to be impossible. Exercise is something which is no longer practically impossible for me. It has changed my life in so many positive ways. And, as long as this method is legal and safe, I will never have to go back to the slow suicide of smoking, ever again.
Categories
Getting Ahead by Wanting
I sent this to a dear old friend late last night on Facebook and thought i might share it here too:
I’ve only found two ways of getting anywhere: either know somebody, or keep plugging away until you’ve run clean out of failure.
The first is the hardest to achieve, unless you’re naturally social and hang out at places where the people you need to meet are.
But the second is the hardest to endure. That’s the way i had to go, because i’m a nasty person with a big fat mouth and most of the people i know who are in positions to help me get to that next rung don’t want to associate themselves with me – and i’m fine with that, because their type are largely assholes, as far as i’m concerned. However, i’ve long been treading water, both financially and emotionally, and it really was right when i was just about to drown that my current job fell into place, EVEN THOUGH i flubbed the interview and honestly wasn’t qualified and nearly failed out of training.
So i think the third thing might be the secret way: want something as hard as you fucking can. If you’re not totally sure what you want yet, that’s cool. Just find something small, and want the ever-living shit out of it. Then want something a little bigger, once you’ve had that small thing for long enough that it’s not enough anymore.
You know about Intent. You know about Will. I don’t think there is anything magical about it at all. I think that whatever it is that a person wants, if they want it bad enough, they will subconsciously find some way to get to it. Even if it’s blood from a stone.
Don’t get me wrong: i’m still in the shits financially, and one of these days i’m going to be doing jail time over it (yes they can do that), and when they ever finally start garnishing my paychecks i’ll certainly be living somewhere even less desirable than where i’m at, and i’ll lose my beloved, cherished dogs to boot. But for right now, i’m surviving as best i can, and in between serious, jolting freak-outs over money woes, i’m pretty happy about where i’m currently at. Because i wanted something really, really hard, and i got it.
I also wanted to lose some weight and get in better shape, and that started to happen, despite my solid history of terrible, crippling laziness and chronic mental and physical exhaustion… because i wanted that so goddamn bad i actually started making it happen all by myself. I am telling you, this shit works! But you got to want something roughly obtainable, and you absolutely gotta want it like you’ve never wanted anything else in your life ever before. I mean, you got to want it so bad you start really punching above your weight class. You gotta get mad to get even; you gotta get motivated by the sheer mind-erasing sadness of existence to start digging in with all of your might and claw furiously at anything in your way so you can get into a spot just clear enough that you can make a break for it. And then run like hell for the other side; don’t fucking pay attention to the bullets or the enemy or anything else. Tunnel vision. That’s what you need to get. Fury. Sheer WILL.
p.s.: This isn’t about wishful thinking, or the so-called Law of Attraction (aka “The Secret”). This is about applying your will to action.
Categories
Who am i?
Lately i’ve been thinking of the central question which occupies all of us who seem to be lost: who am i? It’s something which, i think, every great person probably knows, or which every person who would like to have been great, once they reach their end, should know if they want to have accomplished anything at all in their lives. Now i am getting older, i find i need to know who i am, because i never really figured it out; hence, i never finished college and never collected any sort of work history which would qualify me as having ever had a thing like a career. So: who am i?
I have come to the conclusion that this important question boils down to two factors: what makes me who i am, and what is my hidden talent?
So, what makes me who i am? Is it the deaths of loved ones, which forever haunt my ravaged, ragged psyche? Is it that backpacking jaunt around Europe in my twenties? Is it my childhood passion for visual art, now long-since nearly entirely abandoned? Piano lessons, for fuck’s sake? Trips to Kansas with my grandfather to visit his Alzheimer’s-stricken father? What made me?
Was it discovering i’d been born of some woman whom i’d never met? What about when i finally met her, and learned she was a junkie? Does it involve the infant brother my mother killed, or the sister she abandoned to the father’s family?
What made me who i am? Was it my grandparents raising me in the absence of my alcoholic, often homeless father? Or the times he showed up and we rode his yellow ten-speed around before the police arrived to take him away from me again?
Does it have something to do with the period from my late teens to my early twenties, when i expanded my consciousness far beyond the usual, rational psychic horizon with mind-altering chemicals? Is it because i figured out, on long nights with friends, staring into a fire, that the universe is all one thing, and us humans merely a small part of that one single thing?
Is it the terrifying asthma (seemingly a hereditary gift from my father, who suffered from it so greatly it became part of what makes him who he is), or the terrible allergies, these things which caused me to practically grow up in Dayton’s Children’s Hospital, surrounded by doctors with names and specialties i still can’t pronounce?
Is it simply the odd quirk that i consciously avoid using the word “that” wherever possible because i view it as the most superfluous word in the English language?
Was it something terrible, or something wonderful? Is it something equally both?
Does one (the cause) have something to do with the other (the talent)?
When i was in my late teens, i noticed i had a gnashing pain in my left fourth finger. At the time, it took whacking it against, or with, something to make the pain appear. It was like a toothache then. Within a few years, it would be an on-and-off constant pain, triggered by anything from an imperceptible change in g-force to temperature/humidity changes, to tactile pressure. You could feel it, like a hard pea under the skin, although all you could see was a slight mound which you had to stare at to perceive. But the pain… I remember thinking there was no way any woman could feel much more than that during natural childbirth. The pain was sheer; it was literally mind-erasing. Many times i’d end up collapsed on the ground, writhing in powerful agony and curled into a fetal position, grimacing like a victim of some horrible wartime violence. The only pain reliever i’d ever found to have any effect at all was Orudis KT, which was discontinued in the U.S. just a few years after my discovery of it. Just as well; it was negligible at best.
For over twelve years i carried this thing around with me. There was rarely a day without intense pain. Eventually i nearly totally gave up playing the guitar, although i also re-strung a twelve-string guitar with six strings, leaving enough space between the strings so i could play a little bit more comfortably. When i did play, i played Django style, with two fingers, throwing in my fifth finger as a lame substitute for my fourth. I could in fact play nearly anything that way, and when i absolutely had no other choice, i even used that fourth finger.
But the guitar was my greatest love and i had to let it sit for far longer than i wanted, or needed, between playing sessions. That alone did a lot to kill my spirit.
I had to adapt a lot to avoid angering It. Most activities i performed with my left arm at my side, or held up on my belly if too much blood caused throbbing pain. Driving was easy; i’d just hang my left arm out of the window and use my right arm for steering. I lived in Florida for much of this time, and i drove an automatic – no big deal. But i could not endure rapid temperature changes or excessive humidity. I often even stuck my arm out of the shower. Vigorous activity was out of the question.
Often times i thought – very, very seriously, i’m afraid – of cutting my finger completely off. At least the tip. There were in fact many times i was so painfully desperate that the idea seemed absolutely plausible to me. I’d do it myself, if only i could figure out how best to do it, on a practical level. But i’d always back down from it in the end, because i knew damn well i’d be permanently left with one less finger, and most likely a lifetime of phantom pain to show for it regardless.
Early on, i went to see a “sports medicine” specialist, who happened to be the brother of a famous talk-show host. I only went to see him once. His conclusion, lacking any real evidence (i’d only had an x-ray to go on then), was i had tendinitis; his treatment involved putting my whole arm into a stainless steel tub filled with cold water, and plugging the fucker into an electrical outlet. Essentially. It’s called electro-galvanic stimulation. Only i shouldn’t have been stimulating the goddamn thing! This only angered It.
The drive home was… difficult.
From then (sometime around 1992 i believe) until around 2005 or so, i didn’t see any other doctors about it. I knew damn well it was not tendinitis. Eventually i figured i had gout. After all, avoiding certain foods seemed to cause less pain, or to extend the period between “events.”
But at some point, the pain was just too much to be constantly bearing. I finally went and had some good images taken and the verdict was far more accurate. I had a glomus tumor.
So i had the fucker cut straight out of my finger. The pointed, mind-numbing ache i’d felt for a dozen years was replaced for two weeks afterward by the searing pain of rent flesh. But i got over it and finally started playing guitar like a normal goddamned human being again (although i still often find myself favoring my other three fingers). The doctor said glomus tumors often grow back. It is. I can feel it; it feels much the same as it did when i first began to notice that that finger seemed to be slightly more susceptible to pain than any other. Oh well. At some point, i’m sure i’ll have to deal with it again. However, i know better now, and i will deal with it much faster this time around.
Oh yeah, my hidden talent: i can do nearly anything using only one hand. Not incredibly useful, you might think, but it comes in very handy when i have both hands full and need to, for instance, open a two-liter bottle while simultaneously holding it. I can’t think of any way to capitalize on it though, outside of being maybe an astronaut or something (but my eyesight isn’t good enough for that i’m sure, among many other flaws in my character, detriment, and intelligence).
So i guess, until something better comes along, that’s who i am. My one-sentence biography is that i am a guy who stupidly lived for over ten years with the most painful and debilitating tumor a person could ever have, and adjusted as best he could to it, and tolerated it about as much as a human being could, and ultimately overcame it to live a normally-abled life again.
I’m pretty sure whoever reads this will immediately want to get into a pissing match with me over it, whether consciously or not. “That’s like the time I hurt my leg” (not, it is not), or “It couldn’t have been worse than when i broke my arm in half” (i bet it could), or whatever. That was a time. Mine was close to fifteen fucking years of horrible blood-curdling pain. No doubt a great many people have had much, much worse to endure than i. However i am not interested in comparing or contrasting my personal hell with anybody else’s. (So if you even start in with it, be prepared for me to just get up and walk away, or to say something unacceptably impolite about it to your face.)
Everyone has had something happen; everybody goes through shit. This, i’ll warrant, is precisely why we should all be kinder to one another, to think about each other’s stories, to consider how our actions might affect somebody else who perhaps may be going through hard times and not be completely able to cope with things as well. Perfectly good, decent people who may not have even done anything to deserve having to go through things worse than one might be prepared to imagine. So take care, always, to think of other people as not only having to go through the same horrible shit you do, but also having to endure very personal hardships of their own. Everybody has an intimate relationship with some form of personal inner torture, whether physical or mental, or both. Walk softly. And carry a big heart. Perhaps some extra ibuprofen.
(Hopefully something better than this will come along.)
Categories
Alms for beggars
UPDATE: Thanks to three extremely generous people, we now have enough funds to keep our internet and phone service going, pay a couple slightly-less-urgent bills, and even eat such things as non-peanut butter sandwiches and non-microwave burritos. In fact, i’ve removed the donation link. Cherryl, Pam, and Karla – you are our heroes. Thank you.
Holly and i are now sadly having to accept donations (see bottom of this post) to keep our internet and phone service going. I’ve landed a job, after several months of anxiety-saturated panic and applying… but i don’t start until June 11th; she’s still looking and interviewing places. Of course, we can always use the library, but we need a phone so potential employers can get hold of us, etc.
One of the reasons we’ve been so broke is that her medication (insulin, etc.) literally costs us hundreds of dollars each month (insulin alone is well over $280). Our rent is $650, which is paid from her rapidly-diminishing unemployment insurance of $700 twice monthly. The rest goes to medicine, and whatever is left over goes into (in order of importance) car insurance, our gas tank, our bellies, and lastly, whatever bills we can still afford after all of that. Which is usually none. That’s why we’re absolutely shit-broke 100% of the time, and hungry for half of it.
Thankfully, with my new job next month, things will get much better. But that’s next month, and i won’t get paid on Day One.
Our past due amount for internet and phone services is $180.89. So we’re just trying to scrape the money to keep internet and phone going, and survive for what will hopefully be one last month of being desperately, hopelessly poor.
Thanks most sincerely, whether you can help us out or not.
This works out to almost exactly $5 an hour – well below current (legal) minimum wage. No thanks, Hyatt! I am hungry… but not stupid.
Categories
E-cigarettes, a rough intro
I recently had a friend ask me about electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes (known to their users as personal vaporizers). Actually, lots of people ask me about them. I switched from traditional (“analog”) cigarettes back in August, and basically haven’t smoked since.
Mainly people want to know if they’re cheaper. There’s really no question about whether they’re healthier. They’re not healthy, it’s just that they’re far, far less dangerous. Basically, a traditional cigarette contains thousands of chemicals, a couple dozen or so of which are known carcinogens. The fluid you vaporize in an e-cigarette generally contains just a few ingredients: nicotine (in varying strengths or it may even be absent), food flavoring, and either propylene glycol or vegetable glycerin.
They’re extremely cheaper than regular cigarettes – however, there is an initial buy-in, and you do have to continually purchase replacement parts. I’d say that since August, i’ve spent maybe $200 – $250 in total on supplies. That includes extra parts (batteries, atomizers), fluid (what you “vape”), and accessories (some which i highly recommend having due to the extra convenience, some which are completely unnecessary but make vaping more enjoyable).
On the other hand, i was smoking 1-2 packs a day. One carton of crappy cigarettes in KY costs around $35 right now. That’s well over $100 a month right there, and that’s on the extremely LOW end – in practice, i was actually spending more like $160 a month; in Ohio that would have been over $200 every month! Compare that to the $200 or so i’ve spent on all kinds of crazy vaporizin’ crap in the past FIVE months!
HOWEVER, most people only think they spend $4.50 on cigarettes over the course of their entire lives, because that’s what a single pack costs them right now. Try to convince someone just how much they ACTUALLY spend and they just won’t believe you. But tell them they could spend all that money on something COOL (that still exists after one use), and they might pay a little attention. So, the price to start vaping scares the crap out of most smokers, unless they actually take the time to think about it and compare it to what they actually really spend on cigarettes.
The etailers i’ve used so far are:
http://cignot.com
http://avejuice.com
http://www.madvapes.com
http://route66vapor.com
I did lots and lots of research and wound up having extremely positive experiences with each one, especially Cignot, who are extraordinarily fast and helpful.
A great starter kit would cost around $35 (that’s for an “unboxed” Joye 510 model from Cignot), and that includes 2 batteries, 2 atomizers, and 5 cartridges, plus a wall charger for the batteries.
Extra batteries for the 510 model are ~$10. Batteries last a couple of hours, so eventually i splurged on a couple of batteries for the Joye eGo model (aka the Riva), which fits onto the 510 atomizer. They cost around $20 each. I just got it today and i can’t seem to make the damn thing die. It’s been well over 12 hours now. Batteries are said to last through around 300 charges or so.
Extra atomizers cost about ~$10. It’s always good to have a few on hand, as this is what makes the whole thing work. Atomizers should last around a month or more if you know how to take care of them. Many people complain that this is a big weak point and they often last just a few weeks before needing replaced. I’ve got a couple that i’ve had since August. It’s kind of a hassle to care for them, but i’m a cheapskate and don’t want to pay more than i have to!
Cartridges don’t really need replacing that often, but you can generally get a 5-pack for around $5 or so. Cartridges contain the fluid, and they need to be constantly refilled, but it’s not much more bother than taking out a cigarette and lighting it, and they should generally last a bit longer than a few cigarettes’ worth of time.
Fluid: this can vary pretty greatly. Expect to pay around $10 for a 10ml bottle, up to around $20 for a 30ml bottle. You can get different strengths of nicotine, and just about any flavor you can imagine (and i’ve seen some really, really weird ones). For me personally, i get ~18-24mg strength nicotine, and a 30ml bottle lasts me maybe a month or so.
As for accessories, i can’t recommend having a Personal Charging Case enough. These suckers will let you leave the house and still be able to charge your spent batteries while you’re on the go. One case can fully charge a battery about 3 times or so. That second battery comes in handy, but i recommend having at least three, unless you go with a big battery like the eGo. Then there are USB chargers, car adapters, and USB “passthroughs” (allowing you to hook up your vaporizer to a USB port and save your battery power). Then there are all the really crazy things like weird parts and add-ons and mod kits and stuff. Anything you can think of, somebody sells one, or the parts to make it yourself.
HOT TIP: never, ever buy from a kiosk at the mall, or in a convenience store. Those things they sell are HORRIBLE. And never get a “disposable” anything, ever. You pretty much have to buy this stuff online for now. Which is a great reason to stock up, because anything you run out of, you have to wait to have shipped!
For lots more information, see http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/
Hope this helps!
Categories
“librals are re tarted”
Here’s a recent discussion i had, or am having, over on Facebook. The gentleman in question apparently lives in my hometown, and (according to his FB profile anyway) graduated from the same school in the same year as me. I don’t remember him, but that’s probably because he was clearly still learning to use the slime he oozes to get around on his own. I’m guessing he was actually home schooled, because even my shitty cow pie-encrusted school would have had a hard time letting this horrifying intellectual vacuum graduate.
Click on the image to get a full-size view. Hopefully this business continues and i’ll be able to add more!
I was raised as an ordinary kid in a family that didn’t really attend church every single Sun-day but still did so frequently. My friend Mark Carper took me to an anti-rock & roll preacher sideshow at his church, the Colonial Baptist Church in the hills to the East of Nuke City. It was through that incalculably bizarre experience that i came to accept Christ the Redeemer into my heart, lungs, knees, ears, nose, and throat. I even destroyed some of my favorite LPs.
Later i became more moderate.
My grandparents (she a lapsed Catholic, i’m not too sure what he was before they became Methodists), right-thinking they were, didn’t have me baptized, reasoning that i’d do it myself if that’s what i truly wanted. So at the age of 14 i cleansed my spirit like good old St. John (but with just a dab of water, not a whole damn river).
But the whole time i was a devout Christian, i kept asking questions of our Sunday School teachers: Why are there so many religions? How do we know that Buddhism isn’t the one true religion? If killing is wrong, why does god kill so many people all the time when he gets in his moods? &c.
I’d also heard about how the Beatles found enlightenment in the East, and wondered how it could be that those four English chaps could make records so vastly incomparably better than our own Pat Boone, he of such good moral standing and strong Christian faith.
By and by, i grew up, started smoking cigarettes and screwing girls and reading books of dubious moral value. I got turned on to pot and LSD and started realizing that there is so very much more to the universe than this nice, tidy little story we’re all told in Sunday School. I realized that there are simply cultures that are incompatible with the overall Christian blueprint, much revised over the centuries as it had become. It seemed to me that Christianity obviously couldn’t be the One True Religion it heralded itself to be.
Then my uncle Stephen found himself dying from AIDS. Why should god be so incredibly crappy to us humans? After he died, my grandmother noticed that his name was no longer printed in the church directory under our family’s listing. She was understandably incensed, having taken that as an indirect denial of his continued presence as part of the hallowed twinkling in the Lord’s eyes. She pretty much lost her shit over that.
That was the final straw for me as well. I figured out real quick that Christianity, at least in its current incarnation, is about the most phony fucking gig in town.
I explored elsewhere: first Wicca, then paganism and other namby-pamby New Age spiritualities, then North American Indian shamanism, then Taoism, then Buddhism, then Hinduism, then various forms of the occult, then Qabala Judaism (not the Hollywood crap), then more occultism (including Satanism). When i finally found Eris and read the Principia Discordia (i am now a full-ass Pope*), and dove into the Church of the SubGenius (where i am a reverend), i realized what i should have known all along: all religions are full of crap. As far as i can tell, they all DO point to the same thing: lies and self-heresy. I took from all this only two things: the concept of WILL (Crowley) aka INTENT (Castaneda), and the simple damn idea that you should be nice to your fellow organisms, whoever they are, avoiding stupid, fruitless endeavors like hitting them over their heads with rocks (wherever possible).
Having had an interest in science from a young age, i always valued truth over fiction, lies, fabrications, or embellishments. I still see truth as an unalterable thing: all things being measurable, one must have mass and either be at rest or in motion. Relativity does not mean that these values are subjective. Killing another human being cannot possibly be “wrong” for one person, but “right” for another. It is either right or it is wrong. The fact that individual humans can measure the same thing and come up with wildly varying answers only points out the flaws in each of our lenses. There must be a correct solution which is not invalidated by any other.
Therefore, i reject god in all its forms, because it makes no sense in the context of the rest of nature which we have studied for the same number of millenia and have a pretty good grasp of in contrast.
*actually, my title is CounterPope
Categories
Frisch’s Big Boy sucks
Tonight, after i’d picked up Holly from her car pool in Bellbrook, we went to the Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant there on Wilmington Pike to grab a bite to eat.
Wow, was it icy out! Unfortunately, the worst ice we’d have to deal with was in their parking lot.
Have you ever seen one of those science videos explaining black holes, or gravity, by showing you a marble spinning around a drain? That’s exactly what it was like.
Their parking lot is so uneven. Iced over, it is absolute hell on earth. Naturally, there was not one speck of rock salt to be witnessed anywhere. Wet glass, indeed.
When we first pulled in, we started sliding immediately. We slid to a stop after a good 30 feet, narrowly missing other parked cars and the concrete-lined edge of the lot, which could have done a real number on my wheels and undercarriage. Mind you, i had been doing less than10mph!
Spinning my wheels was the only way to get any traction at all. But no sooner than i would start moving, but the car would start descending down the hill, sideways. We very scarcely managed to avoid hitting curbs and suchlike, but i don’t know how.
This lasted for around twenty minutes.
Did the manager come out to offer to help? Nope. Did i feel like risking life and limb to walk uphill in that unholy, slick, uphill mess of solid, wet ice to ask for help, or tell them off for not salting their Mt. Fuji-like parking lot? Well, yes, but i knew that i’d absolutely certainly slip and hit my head and kill myself at the exact moment the next motorist suffered a similar fate and ran over my still-warm corpse.
Helpfully, the drivethrough window offered employees a hilarious view, which they took in turns, laughing and pointing.
So if you ever see me at a Big Boy restaurant, especially a Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant, please shoot me in the face for it, because i declare unequivocally, right here, that my money will never again come into contact with their filthy, greasy (and very likely cockroach-infested) registers.
Holly adopted two new chihuahuas, named John and Zooey. They’re three years old. They were rescued from abuse, which is always the best way to get a dog. Never, ever get one from a puppy mill, or even a pet store (which are usually supplied by puppy mills). Always rescue, and always get them fixed.
Until i get my Flickr stream integrated here, you can click on over to see them.
So far, Speck has been pretty kind, and puts up no fuss when they share his food. John, on the other hand, guards the community food dish zealously. The big fatass.
Categories
the chasms
omfg where do i start?
today sucked.
preface: we are so poor. that is all about that. we are poor, and it sucks balls. Holly works so hard, and for what? what the hell do i do to make the world any better? not a god damned thing. especially not her world.
on to the viewing…
my old friend is dead. younger than me, dead and gone. i remember yesterday when we were all young and crazy with life and the ecstasy of the world being at our fingertips.
i got there, alone. i killed time rolling a smoke and killing it. i rolled a couple more and walked up. almost immediately some cat comes up for a light. he’s a friend of Jason’s. there is some small talk, then he reveals that there are internal social problems & factioning, a division going on. he calls it childish; “bizarre,” i reply.
after chatting with another of his more recent friends, i mustered up just barely enough guts to go inside. what awaited was hell.
so i go inside and i don’t see anyone i know. except for Susan and Mike, who passed by on their way in. i couldn’t tell if they were ignoring me or if they didn’t recognize me. that was sort of a theme of the evening. they have every reason to ignore me. when i was younger and stupider, i did stupid things and said foolish things to Susan, who i loved then, about Mike, who was actually a terrific guy, really. so there’s that.
i’m in line for about a half an hour, behind a small group of people who obviously bothered to keep up with him in his last years. suddenly i realize that the older gentleman standing idly by is Jason’s dad.
omg. it’s his dad, i thought. omg. is it better that he does or doesn’t recognize me?
see, we used to be really crazy teenagers. really crazy, just completely off the chain and full of joy and insanity. we used to bounce off the walls with energy. we also used to do some questionable stuff. nothing terrible, just not real virtuous behavior. all in good fun, we figured at the time. and it was.
but we got suspended from school once, toward the very ass-end of my senior year, which would have been Jason’s sophomore year, for showing up drunk at a school dance, with liquor and beer in my car to boot. crap. i got him in trouble. i hope they don’t remember that.
he looks at me and we chat, and he doesn’t seem to really remember me well. that’s kind of a big relief.
then the question i was dreading.
no, i said, even though i only live a half hour away, i didn’t really bother to go and see him, as he’s dying, because i just didn’t. because i don’t fucking know, right? i didn’t say it like that, but i certainly meant it like that.
i tried several times to gather a posse together. too many years had passed. i needed a buffer to fill up the empty space of time that had grown like kudzu between us. he and i talked on the phone a few years ago, and the net result of the conversation was, i felt at the time, that he was grown up and doing his thing, and though we were greatly cordial, there was a fairly vast chasm that had come up there in the middle. we weren’t those kids anymore. he didn’t need me in his life. we of course said “we should get together sometime,” and “give me a call anytime,” and neither of us really meant it. though i would have secretly loved to. but you know how it goes. it’s happened to everyone. two old friends, grown apart after too much time.
i loved him, though, and i never stopped loving him. it had just become awkward. that’s why i wanted help, someone to go with me to see him.
so i answered that question. no, i didn’t go to see your dying son in his last couple of years in life. fuck! i wanted to. desperately. i was too scared of that god damned void that had opened up its gaping maw between us to suck our friendship in. i pussied out.
finally, i see him up close.
no mortician on earth really ever makes a dead body look natural. not to me anyway. it’s always a horrific shock to see something that resembles someone you used to know very well lying before you like some kind of expired doppelganger. it was just too unreal. i knew it was him, he just didn’t look… real. that always happens.
the shock, the numbness of it all was overwhelming.
i go outside, roll a couple more smokes, pretend like i’m talking on my phone. anything to keep the questions at bay. thankfully, Travis shows up with his mom. i keep quiet and let them do all the talking. conversations get better that way.
Fred texts me that he can’t show up because he supposedly doesn’t have enough gas. me and Jason were pretty tight back in the day, but Fred and Jason were like peanut butter and jelly. completely inseperable. i am disappointed.
Kevin Holsinger shows up in a little while. the other day i practically cried at the thought of seeing that kooky lil’ kid again. we were never all that close, but i always liked him. you couldn’t not. and we always had terrific laughs together. he doesn’t seem to know who i am, and since it doesn’t really matter anyway, i let the matter be as it is.
later on, Travis and his mom and Kevin and his whole family go out to eat. i didn’t go, it was just too awkward for me. i had a bad day. plus, i needed to pick Holly up from a business meeting. it turned out she got a ride, a fact i knew at right about the same instant as everyone was driving away. not that it would have made a difference.
there was not one single moment of the day that i had any business being a part of. but i owe like hell.
it’s hard when it really sinks in how much you never really mattered in the end, when someone you loved so much and had so much fun with is dead and gone so many years after you last saw them.
Categories
Dead thing at the hell house
The house next door to us is abandoned and boarded up. It didn’t used to be. There used to be some middle-aged lady living there. She was an addict of some sort. There was often craziness over there, including one priceless Trailer Park Boys moment which i will leave for another time.
Then she moved out.
Squatters moved in. And out.
The place was boarded up, the brush and foliage have overgrown, and the place is a headache for all of us over here.
Today, there is a dead thing in the back yard. It looks like a dog from where i can see it.
First, i called Dead Animal Removal. They directed me to Animal Control, as it’s not public property and they don’t have jurisdiction to just wander onto the property and remove random dead things. Animal Control directed me to the police department – i guess the call was transferred to the county Sherriff’s office, because they advised me to contact city police, who advised that i should definitely contact Housing… who suggested that maybe someone (as in one of us neighbors) could just get a bag and a shovel and get it over with. I persuaded her to connect me with the inspector for that address, and left a rather terse message on his voicemail that someone needs to do something about this problem property and that either he needs to contact the owner or let me know how i can do so myself.
Square one.
So i contacted the Mayor’s office. I can’t remember the lady’s name, but she was wonderful and took the information down to pass along to whoever it is that needs to know these sorts of things.
Then i got antsy. I looked up the property info on the county’s web site (see here and here). A simple search on the name and address gave some interesting info, including the fact that the address is the same as that of a previous owner. Oddly enough, that same address in Dublin, Ohio also was the address of a defunct UFO organization called MORA.
So to you, mister Timothy Freidenberger TR (or mister Kurt Novak, whoever owns the goddamn place), i say this:
Come and get your fucking house under control, sir! I would burn the god damned thing down myself but your overgrown branches would no doubt catch our own place of residence, with ourselves inside, aflame to boot, not to mention the nasty legal ramifications of such an terrible but no doubt really goddamn enjoyable act.
UPDATE1: Mister Novak returned my call. I advised him that the property is a nuisance. He shifted blame to the city, which certainly bears some of the burden of responsibility. I advised that the owner is also a source of the problem, as there is brush and trees so overgrown that the bums who appropriated our television panel had no problem hiding in them. He seemed to be under the impression that someone he pays actually comes out to take care of the place. I further advised that it would probably be best to just raze the goddamn thing down and sell the land. He didn’t see that as an option, and the call ended on a note of pretend cordiality not long afterward.
UPDATE2: Someone actually came out, i know not from whence, and removed the dead thing.
Categories
Jason Stafford, R.I.P.
My old friend Jason Stafford died Sunday morning from ALS or complications thereof at ~7:45am.
The obituary will run tomorrow in at least one local paper (thanks Tillie and Travis and Kevin and Dani). You can find the obits for the Dayton Daily Nothing and the Springfield News Sucks at the following addresses:
http://www.legacy.com/dayton/Obituaries.asp
http://www.legacy.com/springfield/Obituaries.asp
Viewing Wednesday 6-8pm
Funeral 11am Thursday
Gilbert-Fellers in Brookville
http://www.gilbert-fellers.com/
Will be seeing you there, in blackest black.
I wrote an essay about my friend here:
Categories
In Memory of Froot Loop
Yesterday morning at about 7:45 in the a.m., the world lost one of its most gifted and talented minds. My old high school pal Jason Stafford died from ALS after a 2 1/2 year fight that brought his body to its knees.
I met Jason either through mutual friends or through the band program at our old alma mater, Tecumseh High School. Over the years, we became very tight, and performed a number of questionable but downright hilarious acts together. We used to drive fast down country roads and goof off after school. Notoriously, we got childishly drunk and attended a school dance, where we were all caught and suspended. For me, it was my first real taste of alcohol, and became a stupid end to an already faltering career as a high school student.
Jason earned the nickname “Froot Loop” for his unusually wacky sense of humor. You always knew he was around by his loud but always jolly laughter. I don’t think i have any memories of him where he’s not laughing the whole way through. Some of my memories of those times have degraded over the years, leaving just that sacred sound echoing through the fog. If somewhere in the world, something goofy was happening, you could have bet your very life that Jason was involved.
I also credit Jason with turning me on to Drakkar Noir, which was the scent of the day for bemulletted, Camaro-driving guys across the American heartland, and which was virtually guaranteed to get a teenager laid, which it did not in our cases. Or maybe just mine.
Jason played guitar. He had a beautiful gray Les Paul and an Ovation acoustic. He was so humble. He always downplayed his abilities, but he was an extremely capable musician. He also played trumpet. Along with Bill Davenport, we formed an ad hoc band at band camp my senior year called Homicidal Cat, for the sole purpose of playing “Helter Skelter” and freaking out the grownups. We were lousy, but not because of poor musicianship on anyone’s part. In hindsight, we should have had a drummer.
He and i both always ran around with the bad crowd, and by bad crowd, i mean drummers and saxaphone players. People who, instead of rocking out to Phantom of the Opera, were rocking out to Metallica, the Pink Floyd, and AC/DC.
We were in marching band together. That’s probably all i should say about that. Whenever you hear the phrase “this one time, in band camp,” you should bear in mind that high school students who are shipped far away from parental guidance make a habit out of having an absolutely improper amount of fun, and much of it highly questionable.
I can say with impunity, knowing whatever statute of limitations may have been applied has long gathered dust by now, that he was absolutely instrumental, no pun intended, in the creation and probably the transportation of the World’s Largest Spitball (unconfirmed), which had to be transported via industrial-sized trashcan lid, over to the girls building, where it was promptly dropped by the two or three giggling chicken-shits it took to do so, of whom i was among their number. He also assisted in the removal of an extension cord which was inconveniently supplying a camping site worker with electricity which would have otherwise caused him to wake up on time, and with a weather forecast that would have permitted our band director to make plans for us that day.
I only have a single memory of him where we didn’t get along for a few minutes. After school one day, he jumped into my blue 1977 Chevy Nova, started it, and proceeded to repeatedly test out the transmission by shifting it back and forth, back and forth, from Drive to Reverse, with myself on top, pounding vigorously on the hood and demanding angrily that he let go of my precious toy. Within about ten minutes (probably less), he was hugging me and calling me a teddy bear.
I’ve never in all my life, either before or since, met a more good-hearted or sweet-natured guy, and i probably never will again. And whatever happened between high school and now, i will forever be saddened that i wasn’t right there with him, because if there was ever a guy who you could count on to cheer you up no matter what the circumstances were, it was Jason Stafford.
ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, is a degenerative nervous system disorder that is always fatal. Treatments are available but there is no cure. Famous sufferers include Stephen Hawking, who has had it since 1963, and guitarist/composer Jason Becker. It is terrible, but with advances in stem cell technology, there may yet be hope for the future.
Categories
Not no news
- Just got back from the Emergeny Veterinary Clinic in Moraine. I had hit Speck full-force in the eye with his latest favorite toy, a Kong tennis-ball dumbbell. He likes daddy to throw it and bounce it off the wall at the top of the stairs so it goes bouncing all the way downstairs. So i threw it hard, but he’d gotten a head start and i popped him right in the eye. No permanent damage, just blunt trauma to the eye – mainly just discomfort. He seems fine now, but we’re out $164 – which digs into our rent, unfortunately. I feel like such an asshole right now.
- I’ve just started playing Anarchy Online. It’s pretty cool, and you can play the non-expanded version for free. I’m a froobie.
- I’ve STILL got that damn cough. It’s just not going away. It’s a little better now, though. And when i take my antibiotics, which i’ve been on for a couple of weeks now, i get nauseated and sleepy. I hate this.
- And i’ve been depressed as hell lately about my life. I’m trying so hard, but i’m going nowhere. I’ve applied at so many places in the last few months that it’s not even funny. I rarely ever seem to get any response. I’ve had a single interview in the last couple of months. It went well, but it looks as if that employer is going to be extending an offer to an earlier candidate.
- My voter registration has FINALLY been processed. I’m all set to help Obama get elected to the Presidency of the United States.
And, if you haven’t seen it already, check out the Sarah Palin prank call:
Categories
Hauntfest: The Exorcist
As promised, here’s a picture from Hauntfest 2008 of a couple of people dressed as a scene from the movie The Exorcist…
Brilliant!
This is the only decent picture of me as Satan.
And here’s Holly as a sexy-ass she-devil:
Hauntfest is like a micro-Mardis Gras in the hip, urban enclave of Dayton known as the Oregon District. Thousands of bodies, all drunken and becostumed, filling the street, cold swill in hand.
A surprising number of people actually got the joke. Only one didn’t – a McCain supporter, of course, who had to have her drunken Palin-obsessed girlfriend explain it to her.
I made a big deal out of shaking hands with a John McCain lookalike; judging by his nervous chuckle, he was actually a real live McCain supporter. Said i, “i’m a huge fan – let’s end the world together!”
Had photo taken twice by very nice Democrats, including one couple who had just voted earlier in the day.
(By the way, John[ny] Sidney McCain = 666 – not that that means anything.)
Best costume i saw, besides Lara Croft, awesome Batman, and Catwoman… i mean really creative and original… Linda Blair as Regan in the Exorcist, in bed and everything, with a guy in a priest outfit walking beside her. Wish i woulda thought to snap any pics!! *facepalm* Will try and remember to search the local sites for a photo.