Manic Oppressive

When I got to my aparment tonight, I found a huge pile of dog crap in front of my door. Not right in front of my door, but close enough that I could see me getting into some trouble when I left for work the next morning.

First off I think that someone hates me. Or maybe it was a girl who was to cheap to send me flowers. Then I realized that it was more in front of my neighbor’s apartment then mine. Not My Problem, in other words. Then I got a whiff of that stuff and I shuddered. I don’t know what people are feeding their dogs these days, but geeze. It smelled worse than my garbage disposal (which hasn’t worked correctly in weeks).

So being the Good Neighbor, I picked it up. Then I was considerably lost on what to do next; I mean, it wasn’t rightfully mine to throw away. I briefly entertained packaging it and keeping it in the freezer. I would then post signs, “Found: 15 oz. of Dog Poop! Call me, my number is 8″. If I didn’t get a response within a week, I would go Dog to Dog taking samples. After all, there is a $50 fine for folks that don’t pick up after their dog.

Instead I threw it away in the dumpster. Some things lost were never meant to be found, I guess.

Whilst walking to the dumpster, whistling, I passed some girl walking her dog. Even in the dark, her cuteness was obvious. “Hi!” She says. I replied without thinking, “I hate dogs.” Not to worry, I’ll never see her again.

The fine art of insulting, or “Jonesing” as Dick Gregory called it, has become a lost form. The insults of today are neither derogatory nor funny. In an attempt to correct this before it spirals completly out of control, I am writing this guide to insulting. This will prevent the average person from resorting to really boring insults, such as those generated using (not a good link at work:) this tool..

The first rule is that unless you’re really trying to be hurtful, you should avoid the truth. So if you are trying to really bring someone down, then this guide is useless to you.

Moving on.

The “Easy” trick is to come up with a physical characteristic, and then make a random statement about its origin. A lame example:

Is that your body, or have you been shopping at the morgue?

Another example:
Was your makeup applied by a five year old with a Sharpie?

Both of those were off the top of my head. Given more time, obviously one can do better. However, “Give me twenty minutes for a snappy comeback” isn’t really all that helpful on the front lines. Sometimes it does make sense to come up with a few in advance and save them for when they can be useful.

For example: (You can ues these, I have others)

One can also take the “physical attribute” and make a remark that doesn’t even mention it. This method is best not to be used on strangers, due to their obscurity.

Example:
Is the dog taking you for a walk? That's rough. (The bad pun on the end helps…)

More examples:

Another method of creating insults is massive contradiction. The idea is that you state what the reader expects, and then step back and give them the “unexpected opposite”. This works really well when describing something or reviewing something. Example: The band review:


The band had a lot of talent. Unfortunately, none of it was musical. You know that sound that the hyenas at the Zoo make when they're starving? Well, for the cost of these tickets you could easily bribe the zoo keeper to keep them starved for a long time and listen to that instead. When the sound of someone moving a rake across a chalkboard is the de-facto sound in today's music, it's no surprie that people who dropped out of school failed to create their own sound. Oh well, at least the lyrics were Ok; it's good to know that some people are still creative enough to plagiarize cereal boxes for their songs.


I was at a party last night. It was really loud. I kept telling people, “Hey, shut the door. Someone’s gonna get irritated!” And they would reply that it was really hot inside and that the only neighbor who cared lived below them, and she was on sleeping pills.

Hmm… I wonder why she was on sleeping pills.

Any, the cops did eventually show up, although I’m not entirely sure who invited them. Maybe it was the sleepy neighbor. This doesn’t bother me, they ask for my ID and make me go home, and I never drink enough at these parties for that to be a problem.

However, I saw one kid hide in a closet. Some other kids jumped over the balconey. I saw one kid jump off and take off running like he was in a Nike commercial. (By “kids”, I mean that they were mostly around the 19-20 age group, not horribly underage…) Had there been anyone under 18, I think that we all would have been screwed, but I’m not sure.

The folks that stayed around and blew over the legal limit git ticketed, of course. The worst part of the ticket is that they have to attend lectures by MADD. But it was ok for the people over the age of 21 to leave without a ticket, and drive home, no matter what their condition because this is America.

I do know that there won’t be another party there for a while, which is probably a good thing.

My typical Friday night involves me going to an Aurora bar for Kareoke. (Or ã?‹ã‚Œã?Šã?‘, as the Japanese would tell you). Now, because it’s been so long, tonight, I decided, I would be rejected by the prettiest girl in the bar. I was looking for that harsh feeling of rejection, the kind that Sartre would write about.

Occasionally, I tell people that “the last time I asked a girl for a number, she gave me a ‘7′”. This would be different. This would be me “passing out in a gutter” afterwards.

In preperation, I went a week without shaving (mostly because I was afraid to), so that I looked more like a down-trodden reject from the 20’s then an individual. Then, casually dressed in tattered clothing, I set out on my mission.

Now, here’s the deal with rejection. It’s all about finding the right person. People that already have significant others are too easy, and best be avoided. Same thing with folks that have wedding rings, because… welll, either they have a significant other, or they won’t reject you and starting an affair is totally “out of scope” as they say in my industry. So finding the right person can be difficult, and it takes an experienced people-watcher to see who is capable — and worthy — of a proper rejection.

So there I am, sitting at a table. Writing horrible poetry in three different languages (as if mangling one wasn’t bad enough! But I digress…) This really hot girl (emphasis her’s) walks up to me and we have a brief conversation, which ended with her stating “We’ll be back!”.

In the end, my rejection was that she didn’t come back. Not text-book perfect, but it was good enough for me.

Today, I took peek at Coke Zero. All the ads say that it has zero calories, which I find pretty impressive.

This takes me on a quick discussion of my physics class… When I took the class, I ended up getting the lowest grade in the class. Yet I spent a great deal of time helping my fellow students pass. Goes to show… something, I guess. Anyway, in physics, a “calorie” is the unit of measurement for the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 cubic cm. (1ml or 1 gram) 1 degree centigrade. A match, they say, has 50 calories, although I have yet to prove that.

Hence, a kilocalorie is the amount of energy required to raise 1 kilogram of water 1 degree centigrade. A kilocalorie is known to nutritionists as the “Calorie”. Notice the capital ‘C’.

Pepsi One, they claim, has 1 Calorie.

So my hacker intuition tells me that something’s up. It’s probably all marketing, and this time next year Pepsi will start test marketing the Pepsi -1. Or maybe they will start throwing math into it, Pepsi e^-pi(i). That will really impress the masses.

My concern, in case you were wondering, is that people will assume that it takes more calories to digest it then it gives back. My answer to that is I saw a dog eating wood off a playground, and that was one of the strongest looking dogs I’ve ever seen. The owner told me that his [the dog's] diet was 1 can of alpo with stones and wood chips on the side. I suspect that rock would be an especially good choice for the Low Carb people, because, well… birds do it. And rocks taste a lot better then super glue*. Probably tastes better than Coke Zero, too, but I’m afraid to find out.

* I’m afraid that I’ve become famous in certain circles for asking a hapless Walmart employee where they kept the low-carb superglue. This is akin to asking where they keep the bicycles at Victoria’s Secret, yet he didn’t get it.

When people hear about how often I call the police, and with my late night trips to the emergency room and whatnot, they assume that I lead an exciting life full of adventure. And Ninjas and wizards and strawberry pie.

But no, my life is mundane. This is what my “Official Schedule” looks like for a typical weekday:

1. Get up around 6:00 AM, grab a shower.
2. Surf the internet until around 7:30. Leave for work, maybe grabbing a bite to eat somewhere.
3. Leave work at 4:30, get home between 6:00 and 6:30.
4. Write the daily blog.
5. Practice Japanese, reading/writing and listening. (1 hour)
6. Practice Music, 1 hour.
7. Practice my Shodo.
8. Go to bed around 9:30.

That’s my schedule. What normally happens, though, is something like this:

1. Wake up suddenly and turn off that damned alarm. Think about getting into work by 9:00.
2. Wake up again at 9:00. Grab a shower and leave for work. Get there around 10:00.
3. Leave at 6:00. Get trapped in traffice and contemplate holding up a bank so I can get a police escort somewhere. Get home around 7:30.
4. Get wrapped up in something in Japanese for two hours.
5. Play about an hour’s worth of random music (not practice, per say, but close enough).
6. Meet a friend for a brew.
7. “Perform” some shodo. What should be a beautiful art form turns out to be something like “Jackson Pollock does Japanese Calligraphy”. Some of that’s kind of delibrate, but it’s generally bad form to break every rule of something (such as calligraphy) without having fully mastered the rules in the first place.
8. Read a little something. I have trouble stopping, so it’s usually 1:30 or 2:00 when I finally do stop. Then I set my alarm and start all over at #1, but first promising to actually get back on to my schedule.

See? Weren’t you bored just reading that?

First off, I had another chance to figure out how to get my cell phone out of Emergency mode, and nowadays I can do it without submerging my phone in boiling water.

Secondly, what I did last weekend. Well, I went to a friend’s house to play some music, and ended up in the emergency room (I wasn’t the patient, just a patient visitor).

I between, I was at a bar “people watching”, which is my term for staring at people when it’s too loud to actually start a conversation. I remark to my friend that one of my problems was that I hadn’t been rejected by a girl in years. I swore that I would get rejected there, that night.

Later on though he wanted me to take him to the hospital, so I did, without talking to anyone. That’s what usually ends up happening, I try and get rejected and I can’t even accomplish that. So we go to the hospital and arrive at, oh, 1:30 in the morning. On a Saturday. Not a good time to be at a hospital, especially an Aurora hospital (but better there then downtown Denver).

While I was waiting for him to be dischared (and while he was sleeping) I enjoyed the chaotic atmosphere. People coming in with all sorts of problems, most of which were to graphic to really mention here. But there were two (2) separate instances of someone being hit with a glass bottle. Both occurred downtown outside of clubs. One was a group that was Girls Night Out, and the other was more of a mixed crowd.

The story is in the girls’ night. I guess that they were at a club around 1st and Broadway, and someone tried to get one of their numbers. The subject in question rejected him, so he got pissed off, and while they were walking back to their car, he sucker punched the girl in question with a glass. So she drove to the emergency room where I saw her covered in blood.

I remember a phrase I heard a while ago, maybe it was a Mark Twain quote. I don’t remember. “Never hit a man with glasses. Use your fist.”

At that point I suddenly realized why I haven’t been rejected in so long.

So there is this house near my apartment that has developed an odd reputation over the years. According to one of my neighbors, two brothers killed themselves there a few years ago instead of going to court for financial fraud. At least they say it was suicide, because they found them in the jaguar in their three-car garage.

I suspect that if they were brothers, they may have taken too long in figuring out where they were going to go for breakfast before court. But I digress.

Anyway, after their exodus, the house was unoccupied for several years. Then it got bought by some dude, who recently put it on the market. This is where my neighbor’s story began…

I guess that he was driving back home from somewhere, and when he passed the house, he saw fire trucks, police cars, a bunch of day laborers and some lowly press-folk looking for a story. And he saw a couple of hazardous waste barrels in the driveway.

It turns out that the current owner was behind on his payments for a storage shed somewhere, so the owner of the storage lot evicted his belongings, not suspecting that some of the contents were evil looking barrels. Eviction, these days, means that you hire day laborers who wait forever for the eviction and get a couple of bucks for moving everything out into the street. Usually, at any rate. I think the laborers got more than they bargined for this time.

To make a long story short, this guy’s neighbors freaked out when they saw the barrels, and called the cops.

So I’ve been thinking recently, of maybe considering the possibility that I might be contemplating the purchase of a house at somepoint, possibly in the future. (This sounds odd, I know, but that’s how I think; and I’ll probably conclude that I should have bought a house in the past. But I digress…)

So I say, “hey, a cursed house! Cool, I bet I can sweet talk a deal!”. I mean, a double suicide and a radioactive driveway. What more could happen? So my thinking was that any old house in this neighborhood should be in the low 300’s. So my thinking that this place would be around the mid 200’s given its happy reputation.

The next morning, as I was leaving for work, I noticed that myy neighbor scored me one of those flyers that they put in the little boxes in front of houses to scare little people who don’t have brokers away. It worked. Asking price: $479,000.12. (The twelve cents is for telling 6 neighbors that they smell like the unabomber…)

So about half a million dollars, and the place doesn’t even have a backyard. Not cheap at all. I’m considering it though, because the ghosts that used to live above me moved away, and I have no one to play chess with anymore.

This really is a rant.

I’ve got this habit where whenever I see something bad while driving, I tend to call the police. Unless, of course, the police are already present or I hear sirens. In which case I do what everyone else does, and just worry about me.

A few weeks ago, when I was coming home, there was some heavy traffic on the highway. After about 30 minutes of moving along slower then one could push a car, I got to the problem. Stalled volvo, center lane. This is a bad thing. The driver was younger (I would call him a kid, but another habit of mine is to refer to everyone who could have been younger then me as kid). He had no idea what to do, and seeing as he couldn’t get out of his car, he was destined to be there forever.

Or, until the police arrived, to you know, give him a hand. So I called the police (non-emergency, mind) and told dispatch the problem. They had no idea. “We’ll send someone right over!” they said.

So I wondered why presumably hundreds of people drove by this guy, and no one cared to tell anyone. Nobody cared? This is why I always call them, because sometimes it seems like no one else will.

Anyway, I was driving home from work on Friday, and noticed a screen of blue smoke on 36. I said to myself, “Self, someone has a fire somewhere.” I glanced down at the puny little fire extinguisher that I’m still driving around with, because I’m thinking this is a car on fire and maybe I can do something about it. The fire extinguisher ran under the passanger seat. It knew what was up.

I get around the bend and I see the biggest fire I’ve ever seen. The fence on the Westbound side of Highway 36 to Boulder was, well, hot. At least 30 yards of the entrire fence were burning.

Funny thing is, this didn’t slow down traffic much at all. I think my average speed dropped to around 45. Granted, in the opposite direction.

So I called the police. This wasn’t “non-emergency”, this was 9-1-1, like they taught me in highschool; somewhere between “The Man Hates You” and “Smoking is Cool”. The lady that picked up didn’t even say ‘hi’, she said, “Fire on the highway? –On it”. (I have GPS enabled on my phone, so they know where I am).

It then took me 20 minutes to get my phone to work again. Whoever designed had no idea just how often I have to use the damn emergency feature, and what a pain it is to turn it off.

Anyway, I was glad to see that I wasn’t the only one who called the police when the highway was burning like crazy, but I guess I wish that the same people would call them when there was an accident, stalled car, or whatever where someone may be in danger or yadda yadda blah blah blah.

*splat*

So, strange things happen to me all the time. I’ve rather gotten used to… occurrences.

Anyway, I found a pitcher (that isn’t mine), full or some orange something that has no smell, half frozen in my Refrigerator. I have no recollection of it at all, and no formal idea who the owner would happen to be.

Ha. Silly aliens, trying to bribe me with gifts.