Grammy died on Mardi Gras. She was the center of the party right to the end. Even on the last night, she held on while her family gathered around her laughing and joking. When the party was over and people headed home she let herself go home. The whole thing reminds me of Saint Francis constantly thanking God for Sister Death as he died.

I should have written all this sooner. At the time I felt utterly adrift. For my entire life the one thing that could be counted on was an unlocked door in Delanco and a barrage of words whenever Grammy realized you were there. I’ve seen both of my childhood homes sold. I’ve even seen my Dad move away from my home town after my Mother died. Life seemed fleeting and unanchored but always there was the absolute permanence of Grammy.

Now she’s gone. And for a moment I started to float away. But life is a circle, and an anchor appeared to root me again. I hate people that make death all about themselves. I’ll give myself a good kick in the pants later on.

I’m three for four on family eulogies. We’re so good at this funereal thing, the undertaker comes over to drink beer while we collectively make the arrangements. The Olympic year curse has struck again (2004, 2006, 2008, 2010). We soldier on as a family, happy to be together in sadness and in celebration, secure in the thought I had when Grandpop died:

If his only monument is our large, loud, happily scrapping family it’s still the best monument to any person I can think of.

I don’t know where I heard it but I’ve had stuck in my head for a while that life and death are a soul for soul kind of trade: conservation of energy, one out, one in and all that.

Kind of funny, my grandmother is on the way out and my friends are about to welcome their second child into the world.

One out, one in.

It’s snowing, my Grandmother is dying and I still haven’t had my annual fasnacht.

Happy Mardi Gras.

At last report, officially 26.7 inches was measured at Philadelphia International Airport, 3.5 inches more than was reported for the Dec. 19-20 storm and second all-time behind only the 30.7 of Jan. 7-8, 1996.

Before this winter, Philadelphia had never had two snowfalls of more than 14 inches in the same season.

So much for global warming.

Al Gore can suck it.

Outside the window, snow is falling on Philadelphia and I am settled, finally warm, in my new residence.

I am purely tickled with this place. It’s very high up. The downstairs neighbors leave their shoes in the hallway. And I have to park on the street. The advantages vastly outweigh these minor disturbances.

I have a washer and dryer. I cannot express how supremely delighted I am to have a washer and dryer. It really is the little things in life that make it worth living. Like not having to rochambeau itinerant hispanics for my turn at the soap choked pay washer.

This place is on a third floor which in most buildings would be somewhere around the 5th. This enables me to look down on the world. As that is my natural position even at ground level I am delirious with joy.

I have a bay window. From which to look down upon the world.

Five blocks to the east is the Delaware River. One block to the north my street dead ends at a purveyor of alcoholic slurpees. Five blocks over and less than two up I can get a full Irish breakfast on the weekends with a pot of very bad tea and a pint of very good cider. And proper football is usually on.

I am about to fix myself a gin and tonic using gin and tonic and my faithful gin and tonic glass that haven’t been touched since I left Gettysburg in May 2008. These are the small comforts of domesticity.

This may be my first live post from a bar. That is very peculiar considering the heroic amount of alcohol I consume on a nightly basis.

It has been a day of returns to my former life. My level of annoyance at fhe people I would call my own is deeply frightening.

Here we are. Here we go. As a wise man said, “Buy the ticket. Take the ride.”

There was a moment tonight when I was in the right place ecumenically and alcoholically to go properly ripping and tearing through the literary world. Those moments are few and far between. Sadly, that one is past. So I’ll groove on white people blues and contemplate the near future.

It may hold promise.

It’s been nearly nineteen months since I packed up my things and set out on the road. Since then, when I wasn’t living in hotels or visiting friends I’ve been relying on the charity of family.

Now that it seems I’ll be in the Philadelphia area for a while, it seemed appropriate to get my own digs. So I’ve done that. I’m going to try living in the BIG city for a while. That will be an interesting adjustment. I’ll have to cope with on street parking, very little green space, large crowds a block from my house – particularly on weekends – and an extended commute across the Delaware daily to New Jersey.

On the flip side I end up within stumbling distance of some wonderful bars and restaurants, a couple of blocks one direction from three grocery stores and a couple of blocks in the other direction from an excellent irish breakfast. I’ve got a bay window, a washer/dryer and plenty of space for a not obnoxious sum of money.

And best of all, I’ve got a legitimate address of my own. And a place for my stuff.

I miss my stuff.

So if anyone’s in town after Groundhog Day, you are very welcome. Even if I never actually bother to haul all the crap I want up the three-hundred and eleventy-three steps in the building the floor’s likely to be fairly comfortable.

Damn. It’s a New Year. And thanks to Carson Daly I know it’s a new decade.

I spent the birth of the current century in Gettysburg drinking a toast to the Queen. I wish I’d known better.

The last time I remember a change of decade I was celebrating the end of “my decade,” the 80s. Only to find out later that the really formative decade in my life was the 90s.

What a shitty time to use as your formative decade.

And now it’s the “teens.” Again. With our youth-oriented culture, how insufferable do you expect this decade to be?

Can’t be worse than what we’ve been through. And there’s always the hope that we’ll actually line extra-Constitutional traitors up against the wall and execute them. I’m looking at you, Speaker Pelosi. Aw, hell. I’m looking at the entire Congress. And the Executive Branch. And more than half of the Judicial.

Fuck it. Let’s just shoot everybody in the Federal Government and call it a day. OK?

Happy New Year.

It’s only 10 AM and it’s already been a day. A perfect end to this perfect year.

That would be sarcasm.

Woke up this morning with the alarm as usual. As I hit snooze and turned on the radio I thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny if this deactivated the alarm and I overslept.”

An hour later, it wasn’t so funny.

Got my shit together and scrambled out the door into a snowy wildland. Don’t know where my hat is. Know where my gloves and broom/scraper thing are but they’re buried under three feet of someone else’s Christmas gifts in my fully-packed trunk.

Fine. Head out with no fuel onto New Jersey roads that won’t be fully cleared of snow until sometime in July. Marvel at the pristine state of ALL the private lanes, driveways and parking lots along the snowchoked municipal roads. Deal with drivers doing 15 in a 50 with their hazard lights on.

And all the while think, this is the perfect end to this year.

I’ve spoken before about the themes each year seems to adopt. Typically the theme reveals itself earlier. This year waited until the very last minute to coalesce. But it’s so perfect, it was worth the wait:

It’s Murphy’s First Law — “Anything that can go wrong, will.”

I am absolutely hardwired to be a pessimist. I always suspected this of myself, it’s been confirmed in looking back at seven years of End of Year Reviews. I claim every year has been the worst year ever. I suppose that’s possible, but I doubt it. I wonder why I only ever remember the bad shit, and none of the good.

It’s been an interesting evolution. The world changed – we thought forever – in 2001. In 2002 we all waited on tenterhooks to see what direction things would go. In 2003 my life seemed to be moving in the right direction. 2004 was another year of anxiously awaiting developments. 2005 was up and down, very bad things^TM happened and yet I made a move and a change and thought that maybe things would improve. 2006 was, hands down, the worst of ‘em all. Culminating with all my efforts to make a move and a change dashed against the concrete wall of bitter reality. 2007 was a busy year at work but also a time to consider another future move. 2008 was a doozy. Started slowly, ended slowly, but was a hell of a hoot in the middle.

And now, 2009. Another truly shitty year. I really can’t find many high points. I took another trip in March which helped. But I ended up doing something I never wanted to do again in a place I loathe. And the fall saw nothing but death and destruction stalking the land. There must be something to these 3 year cycles. ‘06 & ‘09 – peas in a pod. Christ, what’s next?

January

• I skipped the Inauguration. Couldn’t bring myself to spend a very cold day with four million people who hate my guts.
• Watched it on TV instead.
• Saw some movies and otherwise had very little to say. Life in your Dad’s basement is not conducive to great inspiring adventures.

February

• I got a job. Perfect way to re-enter the work force: a part-time seasonal position. Sums up the economy nicely I think.
• It was an auspicious day.
• Spring begins. Just knowing that somewhere, someone is playing baseball in the warm sunshine makes it easier to deal with the general snow and icy foulness of your average northeastern February.

March

• On the road again!
• I precipitously fled New Orleans. ‘Cause if I didn’t, I wasn’t sure I ever would. Funnily enough I met a guy later on in the year who didn’t leave. Until the storm.
• “It’s all Blood you see.” — The Player, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. A week or so of death. I visited the death scenes of JFK, MLK and the King. The X in the middle of the street still gives me the creeps.

April

• I moved too fast to keep track of all the neat stuff that happened in April.
• Went to a Tea Party.
• Made a decision.

May

• Moved to New Jersey and started some work.
• I saw a very disappointing Phillies game.
• Another month with nothing to say. Maybe because I didn’t have internet for half the month?

June

• I managed to dodge a job.
• Philadelphia disappointed me.
• What the hell did I do all this year? I didn’t write about anything!

July

• Oh! That’s why I didn’t write anything. I disappeared.
• “Now there’s another dirty word, ‘Job’.” — General Melchett, Blackadder Goes Forth. And then I got a fscking job.

August

• I officially abandoned football. Funny, ain’t it?
• New Jersey.
• More New Jersey.

September

• My favorite month. . .
• Bit me in the ass. In more ways than one.
• Another sleepless October begins in September.

October

• What happened to our nation?
• Pretty much all baseball, all the time.
• And I went to the World Series!

November

• High Hopes.
• And Bottomless Despondency.
• A momentous month.

December

• Another birthday. Another trip to Walt Disney World. Another hangover.
• The Great Blizzard of 2009 was yet another epic New Jersey FAIL!
• Christmastime again. Thank Christ it’s over. Only 362 shopping days until next Christmas!

And finally, the year is over. Good riddance. Another year of limbo to look forward to with the consolation that, Hey! At least it can’t be worse.

Right?

This is the limbo week. The best week of the year.

All the Christmastime niceness is past.

The New Year offers a fresh start only a week later.

So you have a whole week to be a complete bastard to everyone you meet and then wash away your sins with a midnight toast.

Go forth my friends and do evil. Empty your mind and blacken your soul for rebirth and renewal are coming soon.

How to safely drive to your domicile in the People’s Republic of New Jersey:

• Stop somewhere for 46 oz. of beer and a light supper.
• Casually toss your dog-eared copy of The Modern Drunkard: A Handbook for Drinking in the 21st Century in the passengers’ seat.
• Carefully place a six pack of Old Milwaukee in the center console to ensure it doesn’t get shook up.

Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

How did I miss this? This year is 1789. According to Wikipedia “a common year starting on Thursday.” Rather a momentous year for the United States and to think I didn’t realize the correspondence until this grand year was mostly over. I refer you to the Wikipedia entry for the full story and leave you with this:

On Thursday, November 26, 1789 the United States observed a day of Thanksgiving proclaimed by recently inaugurated President George Washington.

By the President of the United States of America,
a Proclamation.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor– and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be– That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks–for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation–for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war–for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed–for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted–for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

and also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions– to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually–to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed–to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord–To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and us–and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

G^o Washington

The national celebration of Thanksgiving was spotty from 1789 until Lincoln’s similar proclamation in 1863. And we’ve gorged ourselves on turkey and stuffing ever since.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody.

Executive Mansion,
Washington, _________________, 186 .

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought
forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived
in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that
“all men are created equal”
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing
whether that nation, or any nation so conceived,
and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met
on a great battle field of that war. We have
come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final rest-
ing place for those who died here, that the nation
might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But, in a
larger sense, we can not dedicate _ we can not
consecrate _ we can not hallow, this ground _
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled
here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power
to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long
remember what we say here; while it can never
forget what they did here.
It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedica
ted to the great task remaining before us _
that, from these honored dead we take in-
creased devotion to that cause for which
they here, gave the last full measure of de-
votion _ that we here highly resolve these
dead shall not have died in vain, that
the nation, shall have a new birth of free-
dom, and that government of the people by
the people for the people shall not per-
ish from the earth.

The Nicolay Draft of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Delivered (in somewhat modified form) by President Abraham Lincoln at the Dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. November 19, 1863

What a weird week. Monday was the anniversary of the end of the 1848 Revolutions, the founding of the Weimar Republic, the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Kristallnacht and the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

Wednesday, of course, was the 91^st Armistice Day.

And now it’s Friday the 13^th.

That’s a flat-out wacky week.

I am ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy ‘em all. — H.L. Mencken

Found a long interview with Mencken whilst on a 1920s kick (looking at W.C. Fields bits on You Tube). Bloody brilliant stuff. Nearly as good is the Greatest Drunks of All Time series.

Whilst half plastered on bourbon, homemade hard cider and gin and tonics I managed to beat out the following list.

I think my heroes are:
Hunter Thompson
Henry Mencken
Groucho Marx
W.C. Fields
Eeyore
&
Snuffleuppagus

Those gentlemen are the finest philosophers in history. Even the ones that aren’t real.

For lack of anything better to do, I started playing around a little bit with Faces in iPhoto.

Generally I don’t like iPhoto. Like iTunes, it forces you to drink Apple’s Kool-Aid and let them do what they want with your files. Unlike iTunes, iPhoto doesn’t even offer you the option of doing things your way. You’re forced to import your files into a monolithic database which takes up half again more space than the photo files all by themselves.

Where iPhoto rules, however, is in its unintentional, purely comedic application.

I don’t take many pictures of people. They ruin my photographs of perfectly silent, inanimate objects. I had to dig pretty deep to find pictures of real, living people that I could tag and let Faces do its thing. The results are pure comedy gold.

For instance, I apparently look like a truck tire, Johnny Damon, a dead horse, the Blessed Mother, Steve Jobs, and a young Negro statue. Among other things.

Of course, I am tickled to be compared to Pedro Martinez, Abraham Lincoln, Machiavelli, Queen Victoria, Napoleon and the Coliseum.

Unexpected hilarity. I need more of that in my life.

This country is f**ked up.

You can be tagged for DUI if you catch a glimpse of a beer in your peripheral vision but all the bars are built on major highways. In a just society, we’d understand that if you crash your car while drinking you’re held liable for the crime you’ve committed: property damage, personal injury, etc. Why do we need an additional penalty layer? It smacks of thoughtcrime. Like hate crime laws.

In a rational society, if we were actually concerned about drinking and driving we’d make it illegal to operate a bar that didn’t have a critical mass of pedestrian drinkers to support it. We’d outlaw parking lots at bars. We’d outlaw endless suburban casual dining chains nowhere near population centers. Surely the urban planners can get on board with that! Forced density, drawing people downtown on public transit, blah blah blah.

But no, we’re not a rational society. We’re a society of goddamned puritans. There is a sizable portion of the population who lives in abject fear that someone, somewhere is having fun. So they collect revenue from taxes on businesses and alcohol sales. Then they collect revenue from fines and penalties levied against people who consume alcohol. Then they spend that revenue on parks where your dog can’t shit on the grass, bike paths where you have to wear a helmet and skate parks where you can’t skate on account of the danger.

When did the home of the brave turn into the Fiefdom of Sir Robin?

In keeping with the theme, I face a dilemma. Each time I establish a home I learn something else I desire in a home. One of the absolutes of my existence is that I must live within stumbling distance of a bar. I don’t like to drink and drive. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want to hurt myself. I like to walk. I love to drink. I like to walk to drink but not so far that I can’t slither home. This is not a joke, this is a real concern. I have spent several nights sleeping at various inexplicably short distances from my house. Sometimes on a hillside within sight of my back door. Sometimes on the stairs to my apartment. Once, I actually made it through the door and ended up sleeping headfirst on the kitchen floor with my feet out the door.

All of which brings me to my latest search for a suitable home.

It seems the optimal place to live in New Jersey is somewhere on the Patco line: close to work, convenient for having a vehicle, plenty of services, 24-hour access to the city. Given those requirements, Collingswood and Haddonfield present themselves as highly desirable candidates. But there’s no booze. Goddamned Quakers.

So I have to live in the City. With high taxes. And no place to park. And an hour long commute in heavy traffic to work. What an incredible pain in the ass.

Which I can at least partially heal with a trip to the many, MANY bars that will be within comfortable walking distance of my future home.

And if there were 7-11 hot dogs or Wawa hoagies between the bar and my front door, that wouldn’t hurt either.

I am not glad to be back. On several occasions throughout my weekend in Denver I thought about staying. “The hell with it,” says I, “I’ve got nearly a week’s worth of clothes, I’ve got a suit and a tie, I’ve got my computer and some entertainment options. If I can’t stay in Golden I can be in Cheyenne in two hours, Rawlings in four, Reno in ten or so. Maybe I could even cross into California and settle in Auburn or Colfax or down in Sacramento. Too many lovely places to choose from, too many reasons not to go back to dirty Jersey.”

Hah.

Herein a short list of reasons not to come back:

• The air’s cleaner out West – Breathing clean, dry air is a forgotten pleasure after a few hours of inhaling the East Coast miasma of exhaust, unwashed humanity and death that’s called air.
• Driving is more pleasant in the West – Every time I get into the car in the East I think, “We’re off to the races.” Fast starts, exceeding the speed limit, quick stops, no turn signals, impatience at every turn. In Denver I held strictly to the speed limit and – even on the Interstate – was the fastest car on the road. People stop well back of the line at traffic lights, almost always use their indicators and never seem to be in any particular hurry to get anywhere.
• People are calmer in the West – There are some rabid Colorado Rockies fans but nobody yelled obscenities at the large numbers of Cardinals fans in the ballpark. I didn’t see any fights. I didn’t hear any cussing. Just a good, mellow, beer soaked day at the ballpark.
• The sun is brighter in the West – I slather myself with sunscreen most days as a matter of course. I got flat-out cooked on Saturday sitting in the sun for a couple of hours. That delightful combination of cool, breezy air and hot, bright sun is sadly absent anywhere back East.

Man, I wish I got that job on the railroad. I could be somewhere in Wyoming, windburnt and sun scorched drinking a Fat Tire and thanking the Good Lord above that I don’t have to fight harried drivers, rude salespeople, macho barflies or guidos any time soon.

No, no. Just a little bandage is all I’ll be needin’ And a few minutes off my feet. Me brogans are killin’ me. — Buster Kilrain, “Gettysburg”

I dunno if a very real descendant of Protestant Huguenots would appreciate being honored with the words of a fictional Irish Catholic soldier but it’s the first thing that came to mind when I heard the news:

Another one of the finest human beings on this Earth is gone. Killed by cancer. Taken, I suppose, by God for his own inscrutable reasons.

This is getting ridiculous. There better be one hell of a party going on in Heaven because all the good people seem to be already there.

Jed X. Hastings was the first friend I made in Civil War reenacting. I stood by him on a dusk-bathed hillside in Waynesboro nervous as hell in my first “battle” while a Coehorn mortar shook the very ground beside us and howling secessionists swept out of the gathering darkness towards us.

He was family. We were Hastings – militant Yankees who always wore blue and stayed up late just so we could participate in a TP raid on General Lee’s tent. I’ve run out of fingers to count the laughs. There were the jello shots to celebrate Wellys Hasting’s name. The year of “LUMPS!” WEEZIL’s initiation. The night of Gretchen’s leak. The 23d Fiji at Little Round Top. Jed and Doc and family standing in the boiling heat of my graduation day in full woolen kit.

I lose track of the number of times I drank “Very Northern Comfort” with the man, or shared a case of American Light pounders, or those ginormous 22 oz. bottles of Yuengling Lager you can only get near the Mother’s Teat in coal country. I’ve no hope of numbering the jokes, the memories, the brotherhood, the affection, the love.

That’s family. Brothers from another Mother. And my mother is dead.

And so is my brother.

And all I can do is remember him and pray he’s in good hands, welcomed by those who have gone before him to a richly deserved reward.

Requiescat in pace.

Well Lawrence, he died. Yeah. He died this morning ‘fore I got there. Couple of the fellas, they was with him. He said to tell you goodbye. And that he was sorry.

I tell you Lawrence, I sure was fond of that man. — Thomas Chamberlin, “Gettysburg”

Today I bought a refurbished MacBook Pro and a just-announced iPod Touch. Because I’m always nervous after I spend enormous amounts of money I went back to see what I’ve spent on similar stuff over the years. It blew my mind!

Here’s a very interesting breakdown of how things have evolved.

mid-May 2004: Used 2G iPod 20GB with a broken headphone port: $260

late-May 2004: Refurbished 3G iPod 20GB with Dock and AC Adapter: $299

late-Dec 2004: Refurbished PowerBook G4 12″ 1.33GHz/256MB RAM/60GB Hard Drive: $1349

mid-Feb 2008: 80GB 3.5G iPod 80GB with no accessories: $189

early-Sept 2009: Refurbished MacBook Pro Core2Duo 13.3″ 2.26GHz/2GB RAM/160GB Hard Drive: $999
early-Sept 2009: New iPod Touch 3G 32GB no accessories: $299

Un-friggin-believable! The last generation of the old-style plastic iPods was the best deal of them all; but Holy Christ! Five years after my first Apple purchase I can get a 32GB, solid state, touch sensitive, movie, music and photo player with WiFi capabilities, a web browser, email functionality and the processor and memory capacity to play mobile games at the level of a Nintendo DS PLUS a dual-core notebook with the ability to run both the latest Mac OS and the latest Windows OS for less than I paid for a slightly outdated road warrior machine in 2004?

And I can have the laptop on my desk within 20 hours of placing the order?

Sign me up, please!

I’ll even forgive Steve his god-damned shiny f**king screen.

The iPod, however, is coming directly off the factory floor. It left China yesterday. That’s what you get for buying new gear within an hour of it being revealed to the world.

A true story, which demonstrates the futility of hard work.

I was told I was a smart guy. I’ve been told I do a good job. I’ve even gotten a couple of gold stars.

My reward for exceptional ability – someday soon I’ll get to work nights and weekends!

Four weeks down.

A typical night out in New Jersey. Try to stop and get some grub and a beer and watch a little bit of Pedro’s second appearance in a Phillies uniform.

End up talking to a unemployed, crazy, suicidal Yankees fan while the game gets rained out.

To say the Garden State is not amongst my most favorite places on Earth would be a slight understatement.

“Now there’s another dirty word: `job’!” — Black Adder Goes Forth

Today is officially the last day of my vacation/temporary retirement. Monday morning I start a new job.

I face this eventuality with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. Not to mention a healthy dose of irritation with myself for wasting all this perfectly good time that I could have been using to find a different career. C’est la vie. A job’s a job. A check’s a check. And I’ll be getting a healthy one.

Plus there’s the extra added bonus of having a much more interesting thing to say when asked, “What do you do for a living?” In the past I usually mumbled something like, “I fix computers.” And might include, “For a cardboard box company.”

Now I can proudly say, “I work for the NFL.”

Holy Hannah, was that a pain in the neck.

First I decided I’d transfer my domain registration to someone else to save 50%. Of course, that didn’t work because the dishonest wankers I have it current registered with claimed they couldn’t transfer it out. In effect, they held my domain hostage against the day when it expired and I HAD to renew with them. Then, when renewal came around I paid the extortionate fee they demanded only to have them claim they never got the money.

Four weeks later we’re finally back online. Back where we started. With the high probability that next year, I’ll have to go through the whole nightmarish process again.

Word of advice, don’t ever register with OnlineNIC.com. They’re crooks.

One year ago I had a massive hangover and a plane to catch. Twenty-four hours later I was dashing around London on an empty stomach looking for shoes and planning travel arrangements for a train, ferry and taxi that would land me in Normandy on June 4.

To celebrate this momentous day I got offered a job that I refused, visited some sites from the “Jersey Trilogy,” drove along the beach, saw the Stone Pony in Asbury Park and paid a late afternoon visit to Monmouth Battlefield.

I do not know if I have another free calendar day to devote to commemoration. Amongst days like March 17, June 6, September 17, December 13 and all the rest, June 2d as a personal holiday seems pretty pitiful. I suppose it will all depend on what the future brings. If there’s un-ending adventure and excitement like there has been for the past three hundred sixty-five I’ll be content with what the future present brings. Otherwise, June 2d may have to be a lifelong commemoration.

Hopefully the beer will be colder.

Today I did my first day of real manual labor since my college years. It’s funny how quickly all your skills and your knowledge of the tricks of the trade come back to you. I remembered some of the tools I needed – like a good paint scraper, a small bucket for cleaning brushes and that goofy little S hook for hanging a paint can from a ladder. I also remembered spoken lessons.

Back in my laboring days my Dad taught me lots of stuff. Don’t drive off the men’s tee with a 5 iron. Measure twice, cut once. Don’t throw away the nails with the head on the wrong side – they can be used on the other side of the house. Important stuff like that. Of all the things my Father taught me whilst laboring the best and worst was this:

A job worth doing is worth doing well.

We’ll call this Dad’s First Law. It’s a wonderful concept. It binds you to always doing your best. If you’re going to undertake a project, do it right. Take no shortcuts, permit no half-measures.

It is also a horrifying concept. It means taking no shortcuts and permitting no half-measures. That little voice can be a real pain the arse sometimes. Which brings me to the second best and worst thing I ever learned laboring. I call that Little Brother’s Corollary to Dad’s First Law:

But what if the job’s not worth doing?

Admittedly my brother was never cut out for the laboring life. I may not have liked spending eighteen hour days in August hunched over on a black asphalt roof nailing shingles in but I also was willing to bow to the inevitable and make the best of an accomplished fact. My brother fought all the way. If he thought it an unwise use of his time and resources he’d be as bitter as his waking moment from dawn til dusk seven days a week no matter the task.

His corollary to Dad’s First Law, however, is brilliant. It doesn’t give you a license to slack off. It does, however, demand that you evaluate each task to determine whether it’s worth doing. Not in a petty – I’d rather watch TV than sweep the sidewalk – sense, but in a real test of efficiency and worthiness. I cannot tell you how many times in my former, computer-centric life, I did not hear the irritating voice of the First Law demanding I do the job, the whole job and nothing but the job followed by the blessedly meek voice of the Corollary demanding that I examine my plan and make absolutely sure that I wasn’t wasting any motions. Making sure I was acting out of sheer necessity and with utmost efficiency to do right the job that really needed to be done at all.

It’s a different world, earning your bread by the sweat of your brow. I rather like it.

But then again, I only worked for one day out of five and slacked two days to indulge myself in other entertainment. So, I might be following the Corollary more strictly after all.

What do you do when you don’t know what to do, you don’t want to be where you’re at and you don’t want to spend any more money travelling?

This is/was my conundrum. After some timely suggestions from family and friends the solution presented itself: Move to Jersey.

I’m actually excited about the prospect. I’ll be near Philadelphia which I hope will offer both the possibility of entertainment and employment. I’ll stay with my Grandmother and be able to help out around her house. And I’ll get to experience a place and a crowd that I’ve only experienced while passing through over the years. For the first time in my life I’ll actually live in Jersey. And maybe I’ll gain some perspective on the life my family leads and my Mom experienced. Maybe I’ll be able to better share the point of view of some folks that are pretty important to me.

And maybe I’ll be able to get a job. A job would be nice.

This meeting can do nothing more to save the country. — Samuel Adams – December 16, 1773

What did you do to preserve the Republic today?

I went to the local Tea Party. I’d reckon there were more than 150 citizens, standing together in the cold rain to positively protest the very bizarre turn our affairs have taken.

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. — Thomas Jefferson – 1800

I will admit to being terribly disappointed that the only speakers the organizers could drum up were a wordy preacher and two state delegates. The entire thing threatened to become precisely what its opponents claim it is: a front for Republican Party propaganda. Happily, some in the audience were – as their signs pointed out – as disgusted with those politicians as they were with those who actually voted us into this mess.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. — First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States – 1789

I don’t know how all this will turn out. I’m sure we’re all on some list now as right wing hatemongers. I fully expect to be lumped in with all the whackadoos (like the guy passing out Ron Paul literature). Regardless, it did my heart good to see that Citizens can still stand up and peaceably assemble to petition their Government for a redress of grievances.

A very positive experience. There’s hope for us yet.

Almost an entire week back on the East Coast was about all I could handle. I am a perpetual motion machine. Never stop moving. The small green men in the toaster will catch up with you if you stop moving. Get on a plane, man. Go somewhere. Anywhere. Just keep moving.

As I have spent approximately the last three weeks drinking heavily without a night’s sleep in the entire stretch my changes of location very rarely affect me. I can’t even remember where I’ve been, let alone where I’m going or why I’m there. To think, this time last week I was drinking heavily in the honkytonks of downtown Nashville. And now I’m in Seattle, WA.

The long flight didn’t register. It rarely does. You know what made me realize I was a long way from the old and familiar? The radio station call letters on the desks in the Press Box of Safeco Field. Anything starting with a ‘K’ means you’re across the Mississippi. There you go. Odd the things that engage your peabrain.

Oh, and Happy ANV Surrender Day! Stupid Confederates.

It’s official.

Baseball is back.

And in celebration of this momentous harbinger of spring I am heading south next week to absorb as much Spring Training action as I possibly can before trekking north for pre-St. Patrick’s Day festivities.

The short list includes seeing the Nationals in Viera, the Phillies in Clearwater, the Red Sox in Fort Myers and maybe something from the Yankees/Tigers/Tampa Bay-type folks in the Tampa/Lakeland/Sarasota area.

Hot damn. I wore short sleeves while snowboarding today and am all about soaking up the warmth. I have a short-term plan and a roadtrip to look forward to.

I friggin’ LOVE spring.

If I told you in 1995 that we’d be nearly to the end of the first decade of the 21st century and the following things were true, you’d tell me I was nuts.

• The New York Yankees haven’t won a World Series

• The Boston Red Sox have won two.
• The Philadelphia Phillies have won one.
• The Tampa Bay Rays had the second best record in baseball in 2008, and beat the Red Sox to advance to the World Series where they were in turn beaten by the Philadelphia Phillies.

And the craziest/best thing? Starting today the teams gather in Florida and Arizona to get ready for the season in which your Philadelphia Phillies will be the Defending World Champion Philadelphia Phillies!

Everytime I hear that, or write that, or think about that – it brings a tear to my eye.

If buttercups buzz’d after the bee,
If boats were on land, churches on sea,
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows,
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse,
If the mamas sold their babies
To the gypsies for half a crown;
If summer were spring and the other way round,
Then all the world would be upside down. — “The World Turned Upside Down”

today is my friday. tuesday will be my saturday. and thursday, the traditional day or drinking in preparation for the weekend is now my sunday.

if i told you that i spent all day working alongside a bunch of college age brazilian chicks you’d probably want to treat me like tom sawyer and offer money and booze to trade places with me. and then you’d find out that not all brazilian girls are mouth-gapingly delicious.

i left a fifty-thousand a year job to spend nearly six months on the road, another two months lounging around and ended up busting ass for minimum wage.

i’m still here. spring is still a ways off. and i’m almost out of bourbon – again.

up is down.

i am officially a member of the underclass. i accepted a minimum wage job – starting today – to partly assuage my conscience about being a bum longer than intended and hopefully to ease my father’s potential concern about me being a bum longer than intended.

now i work my tail off with no benefits for slightly less money than needed to purchase the drugs and booze required to get through the day. christ, minimum wage isn’t even enough to cover the pain of getting out of bed in the morning.

i suppose i could join with my new class comrades and become a fan of obama. then i consider that of the pittance i am paid something like thirty percent goes to support our beloved overlords. and that makes me want to buy more bullets.

so no, it’s guns and booze for me. both come highly recommended.

Is nothing sacred? First they screwed up Star Wars with those abominations called “prequels.”

Now they’ve turned G.I. Joe into a mealy-mouthed action movie about some sort of un-American Interpol hit squad.

And they cast Will-f@*king Ferrell in Land of the Lost? WTF?

Damn it all to hell. As if growing up with 80s hairstyles and fashions weren’t frigging bad enough – now you leeches have to take the only good memories of that horrifying decade and crush them into tiny little bits.

Nostalgia. You are a cruel mistress.

Like gravity.

There’s this fellow named Dicky. He’s a useless fuck. And he says his life revolves around MessoftheDamned.org and demands that I update this very minute.

So, I’ve done so. See how you like that BIATCH!

It’s warmer outside than it is inside on this December 24th. Sorry, that don’t make no sense.

And I went to a Protestant church service with a Jew and thought, “Betcha this seems like a lot of fuss to be making over the birth of a carpenter’s son.”

I watched three versions of “A Christmas Carol” this week and every time convinced myself that it was time to be merry, to start giving back to the community – and then I’d go out amongst humanity and hear the goddamned incessant Salvation Army bell and have my typically homicidal pavlovian response.

Happy Christmas to all. “Peace on Earth to men of goodwill. All others, stand by.”

As of 11:01 AM this morning (looked it up on my birth certificate last night) I am officially thirty-five years old.

Hooray for me!

It’s been an uncharacteristically mellow day. Went out to breakfast, took a short drive through the country to see the Washington Monument on South Mountain and am now in Hanover to do a little partying with the locals. It’s the mellowest birthday I’ve had in a long while. See the list:

2007 – Went to Disney World for the weekend with a couple of folk.
2006 – Saw The Nutcracker in the old Philly Opera House.
2005 – Had my parents and grandmother drive to Nashville, saw the Grand Old Opry at the Ryman
2004 – Flew to Dublin for the weekend with a friend.
2003 – Simon and Garfunkel the night before, followed by cake at midnight and lots of good meals during the day with a blowout party – culminating in Saddam’s Sunday morning capture.
2002 – I think I actually worked this day. Stupid.
2001 – Partied in two Washington locations Friday night, Philly on Saturday night and South Jersey on Sunday night. Seventy-two hours of partying.

Ad infinitum.

Birthdays are kind of a big deal hereabouts. Tribute is welcome.

Today is December 9. The Day of Preparation in the Feast of My Birthday. Some years it’s been a great day of travel, of anticipation for the delights of the Tenth. Some years – this one in particular – it’s been kind of a lag day while I scramble to figure out what to do with the one day a year when I really am – and not only in my own head – the center of the universe.

This is kind of a stupid year. There have been some stupid years in my existence. Most have been pretty entertaining. I can remember most of the birthdays in the past ten years and most have been whirlwind-y, madness festivals. Just the kind I like.

But tomorrow is likely to be almost normal. Aside from some semi-restrained partying with the locals. I guess I did all the entertaining stuff already. Might have to be normal for a spell.

Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In future years, when December 10, 1973 is celebrated as it should be – as one of the premier dates in history, on par with July 4, 1776, September 17, 1787, April 9, 1865 or June 6, 1944 – it will likewise be known as the first day of the triumvirate Feast of My Birthday.

Mark your calendars for next year. The party starts on December 8.

Watching Pirates of the Caribbean for the umpteenth time just now and thinking how I’d really like one of those compasses that points you to what you want most in this world. Given my current state of mind it might come in handy to follow the path and know exactly what the devil it is I do want most in this world.

Then it occurred to me: that damned compass wouldn’t do much good as it got sidetracked by every liquor store along the path.

July 2, 2008 and I am officially back in the United States of America. It’s a good day for it, being the day Congress voted Independence in 1776. It simply wouldn’t do to be in HM’s Kingdom on this day of all days.

“The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward for evermore.” — John Adams

Take that you bitter English immigration agent!

Thirty days in the hole over and done with. Bizarrely, after spending thirty days on the road amongst pickpockets, rakes, gypsies and all manner of various foreign urban predators I lost absolutely nothing until someone nicked two tour books from my suitcase between the time I left the suitcase at airport check-in and the time I picked it up at Dulles Airport. Christ, I hate Dulles. Happily they didn’t get anything important. Sadly, they swiped my very excellent map of Paris – my constant companion throughout my adventures in that city – which had a certain sentimental value.

Fucking wankers. I hope God curses them eternally for their sticky fingers. And God damn whoever searched my suitcase for security or thievery. Bastards.

That’s it then. That part of the adventure over and done with. Honestly, I’m about ready to go back to being a productive member of society. Don’t worry, I’m sure if I actually got a job that feeling would go away very swiftly. It’s left to me then to decide what I want to do next. Circumnavigation of the good old USA is the original plan, maybe after a week or so of rest it will look as appealing as it did when I started this crazy plan. On the other hand, a look at the old finances may convince me otherwise.

Cast adrift again, then. A man without a plan. Hey, I’m getting pretty damned good at this. No worries. No worries at all. Wouldn’t have it any other way.

It is only mildly disorientating to begin your day amongst the medieval splendor of Westminster Cathedral, wander over to the preserved World War Two relics of the Cabinet War Rooms and finish up with a tour of the Napoleonic memorial of Apsley House.

One doesn’t know quite which century one should be concentrating on.

I am in love with the sea.

My fondest memories of this entire voyage are my time in Normandy and my time in Portsmouth. It could be argued, I suppose, that what I really value about those two places in particular of all the places I’ve been are their calm relative to the big cities (Paris, Rome, London) in which I have been spending my time. But I think it’s the sea. I loved Tuscany, up high in the mountains with the hot summer sun and the cool valley breeze. I loved the people and the colors. I have intensely fond memories of that short weekend. But my time with the sea has been the crowning highlight of the entire voyage.

I wonder…can a man still sign on to a merchantman for a year’s or more sea voyage? Could I do a Herman Melville? A Nelson? I’ve figured out fore, main and mizzen masts. I know where to hoist the main, top, togallant and royal sails. I haven’t the foggiest idea what the bewildering maze of blocks and rigging do in the grand scheme of things. I am a quick learner.

What a sad world we live in. There’s nowhere to escape to anymore. No place a rootless man can make his rootless existence worthwhile.

Hurrah for the days of sail. Guess I’ll just wait for the EMP to wipe out modern surface fleets and I’ll get my chance.

Ah London. The Smoke. Shan’t miss you. Probably won’t be entirely chuffed to return Friday.

Had kind of a lost day yesterday ( Tues.) Went off to find Soane’s Museum – which was pretty close to where I was staying – and ended up taking nearly 90 minutes to find the place. Went for the tour – which was surprisingly short although well worth the visit – and was then somewhat at a loss for how to spend the rest of the day.

I thought I might do Apsley House to get that off my list with the half day remaining so I walked down through Piccadilly Circus and along the Mall to Buckingham and up to Apsley House at Hyde Park Corner to find out it’s closed Mondays and Tuesdays. So much for that idea. And now I’ve wasted the vastly greater part of a day tramping all over London with little to show for it. And what do you do with only two or three hours left in the day all the way down in Knightsbridge?

I chose to wander further down the street to the Victoria and Albert Museum. After about an hour of looking at very pretty things I determined that a museum of design and style wasn’t quite the best use of my time. A little further down the road is the Natural History Museum. I wasn’t overly excited, you can see a Natural History museum anywhere in the world and they’ve all got basically the same exhibits.

Hah! There’s no museum in the world housed in such a magnificent space. Intricate 1880s Gothic Revival with monkeys clambering up the columns and mosaics covering the suspended surfaces. Grand staircases, random overhead bridges, the whole thing. Wonderful place. I could have sat in the main hallway for an hour and been perfectly satisfied with my day.

Plus they had dinosaurs. Skeletons suspended above exhibits viewable from a catwalk, little animated Velociraptor types perched on top of a case following you with their heads, screeching at your with bloody teeth and foul chicken-y cries followed as you walked by. And the piece de resistance hidden at the back of the gallery, a 3/4 scale T-Rex howling and gnashing its teeth. Kind of spooky actually.

So far I hope I’ve covered the north of London. I’ve walked by Madame Tussaud’s and Sherlock Holmes’ Baker St address. I’ve covered 95% of the British Museum. I’ve wandered through Charles Dickens’ remaining London home. And I’ve done a LOT of walking and one thoroughly miserable Tube ride.

So now I’m ready for a break. Down to Portsmouth for a view of the channel, the sounds of seagulls and hopefully at least 75% less humanity. Ought to work out perfectly, I think three days of London is about all any normal person ought to tolerate.

In truth, I think two weeks is the ideal length for a vacation. Three is tolerable if you build in some relaxation. Four is one too many. I suppose if you could find a good place to settle for some period of days and relax, get some sleep, take a break from perpetual motion, it might be easier to handle long trips. But four weeks with the only breaks being planes, trains and automobiles is an awfully long time to function at peak efficiency.

I never thought I’d say this and I am certain the feeling will wear off in less than twenty-four hours but I think I am ready to go home. Wherever that is.

Two days down in Paris. Oddly, my left foot has entirely given out. Tomorrow ought to be entertaining.

Yesterday I tramped all through the Louvre in the heat and the smell of tourists. French museums are interesting, there’s no attempt at catering to foreigners – though I suppose there shouldn’t be – nor is their any appreciable attempt to direct people through the museums in anything like a logical path. You seem to be meant to wander. Which is, I’ve discovered, very French. Time doesn’t seem to mean a whole hell of a lot here. You really just need to enjoy the moment and not get so wrapped up in where and when it is.

Following the Louvre I walked through the Tuileries Garden and down the Champs d’Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe just in time to see some sort of ceremony presumably involving the 6:30 relighting of the eternal flame over the tomb of the unknowns. All I know is that I had to stand around in a security zone for about an hour until the speeches were done. On the bright side, I did get to hear a brass band play La Marseillaise under the Arc. So I’ve got that going for me. And then I got to go up top for a spectacular view of Paris.

On the way back, happily, I found an Irish pub where I actually understood the food, beer and language. So that too was a plus.

Today I walked over to Les Invalides, wandered (again) aimlessly through the Musee de Armee, paid tribute to Le Emperur at Napoleon’s tomb and then mosied over to the Eiffel Tower. I didn’t go up. Didn’t feel like standing in line and wrestling tourists for the opportunity. Instead, I walked across to the Trocadero and stood where Hitler did in the famous photo. I would have liked to have my picture taken in the same spot but I didn’t hear any English speakers around to ask nor was I willing to leave my camera several metres away for ten seconds. It was that kind of place.

So, I buggered off, braved the Metro to the Bastille, wandered aimlessly again and went home to Rue de Richlieu.

Tomorrow: Pantheon, Notre Dame, St Eustache, Ile St Louis, Pont Neuf, and Montmartre.

I like to cover ground. While whistling old marching songs. I could use some suggestions, I’m just about out of good ideas. When you’re humping eight or more miles a day there are only so many times you can whistle “It’s a long road to Tipperary” or “Marching through Georgia.”

All experiences teach lessons. My experiences have generally taught lessons like: don’t drink Guinness and gin half and halfs after you’ve been doing straight shots of 100 proof whiskey out of a steel musket barrel on a freezing balcony. Those lessons – heeded or not – have stood me in good stead ‘lo these many years.

And then Mom died, much too young, relatively suddenly, and definitely horribly. And that taught a new lesson; but this lesson was different. This lesson was: live in the now. And I don’t mean some sissified, Dead Poets Society, Carpe Diem crap. Live now. Because life is finite and you damned sure don’t know when the finiteness will take effect. So there’s no point in planning and hoping, scrimping and saving, expecting and waiting. You had better goddamn well accomplish what you want to right goddamn now because there may not be a later.

Or as my Grandfather used to say, “Take your time, you got two goddamned seconds.”

Naturally, being me, I took a careful and measured approach towards the implementation of this new lesson. I considered my options, weighed my opportunities, determined how I could simultaneously fulfill my many responsibilities while adapting to this new reality.

Nah. Not my style.

I’m chucking it all. My job of eight years? Over as of tomorrow. My home of fifteen plus? Abandoned next Friday. My life, family, friends, routine? Sorry folks, I hope you’ll forgive me but I’m buggering off. Responsibility never rested easy on my shoulders anyway. Time to try living without some for a change.

I’m taking a summer vacation. I’ll start by being on the Normandy beaches for the anniversary of D-Day on June 6. Then I think I’ll be a bohemian in Monmartre for a few days and maybe ogle the Mona Lisa whilst sampling French cuisine in the City of Lights. I have a standing invitation to visit my cousin while he summers in Cortona, Italy which visit almost necessitates at least a short visit to Rome. I’ve several friends to visit then in Portsmouth and somewhere in the vast English countryside not to mention some time reacquainting myself with the pubs of London.

I’ll be back for the sacred Fourth – have to be on United States soil for that one. And then, praying that gasoline is not $20 a gallon, I plan to circumnavigate the country. Down the East Coast to Daytona by way of Nags Head, Savannah and St. Augustine. Across the Florida peninsula to Tampa, then west along I-10 by way of Tallahassee, Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans, San Antonio, Phoenix, and all the way to Los Angeles. Some quality time in Santa Monica, Hollywood, and LA followed by a trip up the West Coast to Sacramento and the start of the Great Transcontinental Railroad. I intend to follow the track of that road back to Council Bluffs, Iowa by way of the Great Salt Lake and the Golden Spike and Promontory Point.

After that, who knows? Where will I end up? What will I do? Right now I’m thinking someplace warm and close to the water in a state with low taxes. Somewhere on the Gulf Coast presumably. And what will I do? I’m thinking teaching. I expect I’d enjoy it and be good at it. And a three-month vacation every year is not a thing to be taken lightly.

Brothers and Sisters, I have had all I can stand and I can’t stands no more. So, I’m not gonna. I’ll be seeing you.

I am running out of family.

Dad grew up in household of six: Mom, Dad, four kids. There are only three left now.

Mom grew up in a household of eight: Mom, Dad, six kids. There are only five left now.

My Uncle Ed was a man of exquisite taste: he liked Pig and Rat, sang “Puff, the Magic Dragon” better than Peter, Paul and Mary, and opined at length on the greatness of Predator.

He opined at length on many things. He left me a ten-minute voicemail on my birthday. He talked for two hours to my brother on his. He kept me entertained for an hour at Thanksgiving with stories of the soccer playing days of his youth.

He was a man of enormous strength. He used to be able to vault himself out of his wheelchair and into the driver’s seat of his old station wagon, then disassemble his wheelchair and toss it into the back seat of the car. And he could do this as many times a day as was required.

He was a man of enduring faith. His unfinished doctoral thesis was on the subject of relativism. He once told me a quote, which I misquote, and which seems to be the foundation for his thesis, “One day science will break through the final wall and find that religion had been there all along.”

I have a friend with a Crazy Uncle Ed as well. Let us drink to Crazy Uncle Eds. They are such a large presence that they leave an awful gap when gone.

Hurrah! It’s finally officially spring!

I just wanna go out and roll around in the brown, brown grass. And pretend it’s green. And it’s warm. And dry.

I have an active imagination.

In celebration of this most auspicious day enjoy this bad phone camera picture of the first flower I’ve seen this year.

Hey, it’s Pi Day! Sadly, it’s not 1915 so the numbers don’t really work out. But I suppose you could celebrate at 1:59:26.

It is also Steak and BJ Day. Which is far more entertaining. Unfortunately it’s Lent so I can’t even have a steak today, let alone the second part.

All in all, a pretty damned disappointing day. I’m tired, sober, just got through a sideways endorsement of de debbil herself, can’t look forward to a good “steak” and couldn’t even recall Pi to more than 2 decimal places.

Happily the Feast of St. Patrick started last Friday – because I said so – and even without a pre-planned itinerary I think I’ll manage to make it entertaining. I’ve got a three day weekend – because it’s a religious holiday – and suspect Guinness is in my future.

Drink more beer! Stay away from the green shite. Say rude things in Irish to people you meet, if you speak Irish. If not, my favorite standby is to howl “Mis gatos son locos!” in crowds.

Want to know why the record industry is dying?

I went to the mall today to pick up Flogging Molly’s latest – Float – on release day. I figured I’d pay a slight tariff above the online price for the pleasure of having it in my greedy little hands today. There aren’t many bands I’d do that for, Flogging Molly is second on that illustrious list.

Imagine my surprise when the local record store had it on the new releases rack priced $1.00 OVER the suggested retail price. No discounts. Not even an opportunity to buy it at MSRP. No attempt to compete with Amazon (who was selling it at almost 50% off). Oh no, not FYE. Bunch of greedy scumbags.

Good-bye record industry. You can’t die off quickly enough. Hello independent labels and batch distribution. Long may you keep the fans happy.

Remember, Flogging Molly – Float. In Stores Now!

We get a whole extra day once every four years. Shouldn’t that day be a national holiday? Shouldn’t every place of business be closed. Shouldn’t that day be an extra day to relax and drink beer? To spend time with friends and family?

Isn’t it the height of injustice that rat bastard employers get the sweat of your brow for 261 days instead of the normal 260?

When I am in charge – besides the necessary burnings, incarcerations and outright executions – we’ll all get our birthdays off, we’ll all get Leap Year off, we’ll all take a decent allotment of holidays (at least one per month) and we’ll still outproduce the damned French!

Well, the day came and went I never said Happy Birthday to the website.

It was on Feb 8, 2002 that I decided the whole world needed to be able to read my voluminous blatherings. I was, of course, wrong as usual. But it was a nice idea. And once in a while – when I’m not totally numbed by the meaninglessness of life – I think I even have something interesting to say.

On a note of personal history, the bar mentioned in the very first post is now home to two plastic skulls, two brass candlesticks, a whole pile of CDs that won’t fit on the rack, at least two months of junk mail, the entire comic series of V for Vendetta and War Tales, a bottle of 17 year old Bushmill’s whiskey and many, many tiny iPod nano parts from my continuing attempts to make the thing live, damn you, live!

Elvis irritates me.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gopc3fgnXDw[/youtube]

But Mojo Nixon makes me unreasonably happy. And I like birthdays.

So, Happy Birthday Elvis! I hope the space aliens are extra nice to you today.

I woke up New Year’s Day and felt better than I had in over a week.  This is a new sensation for me.  It probably means I didn’t have as much fun as I could have but it also means that for once I start a new year without a crushing hangover.  The possession of which is probably the stupidest way to start a new year possible.  However, with the enforced good times expected on the Eve, it seems impossible to avoid.  Yet avoid it I did.

I will try harder next year.

New Year, same old crap.  From one perspective, the new year eerily resembles the old.  From another perspective it’s ripe with possibilities.

One thing is absolutely certain – good or bad – the new year will certainly be interesting.

Another year gone.  Hurrah.  And stuff.

This was supposed to have been the year of Sweetness and Light.  A break from the horrible, very bad, no good at all two years preceeding.  Despite all the hassles in the early part of the year – long days, little sleep, lost weekends – things went along pretty decently until the end of the year.  Even then, I cannot put my finger on what changed, I just know that I spent the last several months irritated beyond measure at the world and everything in it.

So I give up trying to set a tone for the year to come.  The tone will be whatever it chooses to be and I will float along on the currents of fate like the lazy bastard I am.  There are possibilities afoot in the New Year.  Life-changing experiences to be experienced.  This could be good.  It could also end with me sleeping in a gutter somewhere.

Things to look forward to.

Lately, ever year has a theme.  Since I have acquired the memory of a goldfish, I can no longer remember with crystal clarity the theme of each year.  For instance:

2003 was a year of high hopes

2004 was, I think, the year I felt great things were in the offing and great forces were moving towards great achievements.

2005 was the year the wheels fell off.  The great forces ended up sticking said force right in our collective backsides

2006 was worse.

2007 has been a year of absolute grey limbo.  Nothing exciting happened, nothing exciting seems on the horizon.  But decisions have been made, plans have begun to take shape and 2008 could turn out a very interesting year.

One can hope.

So, here’s the annual Year in Review for 2007.

January

• I bought a brand-new car.  First in my family to do so.  Act impressed, dammit.
• Da Iggles lost.  Again.  Goddamn New Orleans.
• General Lee’s 200th birthday was celebrated.  By somebody, somewhere.  I mostly think – in concert with Henry Adams – that he’s a damned traitor who ought to be hanged.

February

• Another birthday for this increasingly bile-spewing place.
• Worst day of the year.  As usual.
• Spring Training!  Nuff said.

March

• The Limbo-ball really started rolling.
• I mulled my true legacy: curmudgeoness.
• After worrying about the weather, I spent a St. Patrick’s Day for the ages in Philly.  Saw the finest example of precision projectile vomiting I’ve ever witnessed.  You shoulda been there.

April

• I spent most of this month working extraordinarily long hours during the week and slightly normal hours on the weekend.  I missed Opening Day, damned near missed Easter, did go to some ballgames, but didn’t write about it.
• The house next door caught on fire, though.  That was entertaining.

May

• Went to the movies, like clockwork.
• Got to see the Phillies.  On Mother’s Day.  And some dingbat damned near ruined it.
• Star Wars turned 30.  Since I can remember seeing it in the theatres that officially makes me old.

June

• Did 1,000 posts.  In five years.  Impressed yet?
• Did the Greatest Movies Ever Made!  If you disagree, you’re an idiot.  Have to update that list in a couple of years to make sure I haven’t missed anything.
• Finally got to bum around Birmingham, Alabama and went back to Nashville for the first time in a year.  Thoroughly enjoyed myself.

July

• There was, apparently, a lot of baseball to be seen this month.  Including the Phillies’ 10,000th loss.
• “Maybe you want to put some [pants] on, or something, if you want to continue to fight evil today.”
• Our glorious German Pope finally acknowledges the grave mistakes made during Vatican II and begins the restoration of the One True Church to her former Glory.

August

• Vacation!  In the Bronx!  And Camden!  Fifth Avenue at the end of the day is pretty sweet.
• Lots of Red Sox goodness.  Or would have been, if I hadn’t been there.
• “Life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it.  Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true.”

September

• I lost everything.  Five years of building a web presence, gone in a flash.
• The Red Sox won the division.  No surprise.  But, SURPRISE!  So did the Phillies.
• Un-friggin-believable.

October

• I went to the friggin playoffs.  I still can’t believe it.  What an entertaining day.
• Today was a shitty day.
• Coors Light, my baseball beer of choice, was banned for the duration of the Series.  The first quaff after a Colorado got a well-deserved beat down was all the sweeter.

November

• Here we go.  Whee!  Urp.
• This really is a horrible place to live.  Good place to grow up.  Even better place to flee from.
• MVP!!!  MVP!!!

December

• The Hot Stove season has officially begun!
• Evel, we miss you already.  The world is a lesser place without you.
• Teddy!  Oh, I’m sorry, Theodore.  Mr.  President.  Send out the Fleet!

Like I said: There’s always next year.

“If I could work my will . . . every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.” — Ebeneezer Scrooge, A Christmas Carol

I hate Christmas.

It’s nothing but a bunch of pissed-off people, irritably dashing about, overextending their credit buying crap that nobody needs. It’s raw wind, sleet and slush, wet shoes, frigid tiddlies and a gigantic natural display of death everywhere you look. ‘Tis the season of trampling crowds, incessant bell-ringing, gaudy displays of consumerism and pure, unfiltered hate for your fellow man.

Every year I say to myself, “This is the last year.” “I’m not fighting streaming mobs of drooling mouth-breathers to spend my hard-earned scratch on anyone but my damned self.” “I’m not tolerating the bell-ringing jackassery I have to fight past in every doorway.” “I’m going to kick Santa right in his cranberry-sized jollies the next time I see that fat bastard.”

NORAD tracks the sonofabitch across the North American continent. Can’t someone send a SAM up Rudolph’s furry nether regions?

“Christ, this goddam noise. Medicine is required.” — Spider Jerusalem, Transmetropolitan

Here we are again. I braved the idiot masses, I bought the goddamned stuff, I didn’t even spend very much money on myself. See, I am generous. All that’s left is hours of back breaking labor wrapping the bloody things up just so all that work can go to waste leaving you with more hours of back breaking labor cleaning the goddamned paper up.

I hate Christmas.

Wake me when it’s Saint Patrick’s Day.

What the fuck is wrong with the human race?

What would possess someone to drive twenty miles under the speed limit while braking on every tiny variation in incline on perfectly dry and straight roads under reasonable driving conditions?  I can accept driving carefully, maintaining the speed limit and adding an extra level of alertness.  No problem there.  Anything less would be irresponsible.  Even more irresponsible is driving like Granny Gruntcakes on her fucking Sunday drive in the eighty year old Model A when there’s no appreciable reason to do so.

Modern human behaviour is governed by four words: “It’s not about you.”

Meaning, of course, it’s all about me.

I gotta get away from here.  Away from the goddamned country bumpkins.  Away from the goddamned elderly.  Away from the ignorant wigger hicks.  Sadly, there’s no place better.  All places are shite.  And they’re all filled with goddamned people.

Christ, I hate the Christmas season.  I want to be nice.  I want to be kind, and generous, and full of love for my fellow man.  Christian charity and all that.

But it’s goddamned hard to do when people drive like untrained apes, the Salvation Army has legions of drooling asylum parolees ringing that thrice-goddamned bell in every fucking doorway in the nation, people in the stores are downright offensive and the blaring klaxon of commerce is screaming in your fucking face.

When the day comes, and I snap, and I start skinning people.  Let it be known that it is completely justified.

It is officially the fifty-second week of my thirty-fourth year.  I am now somewhat older than Jesus and am no closer to comprehending my life’s mission than I am to completing that life’s work on this Earth.

I have learned a thing or two over the past year, most of which can be summed up in the three most meaningful words even uttered:

Drink More Beer.

That, my friends, is a philosophy.  Words to live by.  It means have more fun.  It means relax.  It means laugh in the face of frowning publicans while vomiting on their shoes.  It means, “I’m not going to live by their rules any more.”

We all are blessed or cursed – depending on your point of view – with a hideously short time upon this hurtling rock; most of which isn’t much fun.  What we do with our time ought to be completely up to us, not determined by parents and teachers, friends and neighbors.

I have decided the entire human race can take a flying leap into the shallow end of the gene pool.  I’ve bloody well had enough.  I am not going to scrimp and save, slave and toil, boil and bubble to make a decent life for the next generation.  Bugger the next generation.  Hell, there is no next generation.  Just me and the time I’ve got left.  I intend to have a good time and die with a grin on my face and both middle fingers rigor mortised into an eternal salute.

Jefferson and I agree on one thing: “. . . I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Nature loves balance. For instance, here in La Florida you have sunshine and warm weather all year ’round but you have to deal with hurricanes, tornadoes and old people.

In Alta California the weather is even better but you have to deal with earthquakes, wildfires and Mexicans.

Meanwhile, back in hell, a state of perfect balance exists.  There’s nothing to recommend the area and yet no reason to stay away.  The weather is uniformly uncomfortable: too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry.  There aren’t many wildfires, fewer tornadoes and no earthquakes or hurricanes.  There is no culture, no excitement and no reason to live.  And old people and Mexicans are just a mild annoyance.

Mother Nature’s balanced paradise.

Slut.

We are officially entering the crowded time of the year.  If the post-season is mellow, then October is usually pretty calm.  Starting in November, things rapidly accelerate.  Usually, it gets so hectic that there are only two non-preplanned weekends between early November and the New Year.  This year, there is only one.

The list goes: Dad’s Birthday, Veteran’s Day (generally not hectic), Remembrance Day, Thanksgiving, Scottish Walk, the Feast of My Birthday (December 8 – 10, inclusive.  Gifts are accepted year ’round and should consist of loose women, booze and cash.  Not always in that order.  Combinations are acceptable.  A cash-rich loose woman who owns a bar would be delightful.), off/shopping weekend, Christmas, New Year’s.

And then you sit back and wonder where the hell the old year went and what the hell you’re supposed to do with all the dark dead time of January and February.  Start counting the days to “Truck Day,” Spring Training, St. Patrick’s Day, and SPRING!

I am not looking forward to another winter in the asshole of the world.  By this time I was supposed to be looking forward to a long winter’s rest on the beach, under a palm tree with a fruity drink.  Someplace where a cold snap was a sixty degree day and settling in for the winter meant closing the windows occasionally.

Here we go.

Apparently, “Free Tacos for Everyone in America” means that this little slice of redneck hell isn’t part of America.

That’s no particular surprise to me.  It is, however, disappointing.

Oh well.  I got to watch most of the Rolling Rally courtesy of the miracle of the internet.  I saw Papelbon in a kilt with Oki and Timlin joining him and the Dropkick Murphys in a rousing jig in front of Scollay Square.

And because I called and complained about not getting my free taco, I am supposedly getting something else for free from Taco Bell.  Hopefully it’s not the runs.

But I won’t be using the coupon locally.  That rotten hole now joins the Gettysburg Gingerbread Man, TGIFridays, and the entire cities of York and Mechanicsburg on my lifetime ban list.

Nobody messes with me.

If the entire goddamned universe doesn’t revolve around me it’s only because it hasn’t learned what’s good for it.

Everybody knows the MLB playoff schedule this year was laid out by a drunken man on a merry-go-round. Long layoffs, inexplicable breaks during series, 10:00 PM start times for significant games, Tim McCarver doing color commentary. No excuse, man. None.

I will, however, give mad props to the drunken man and give him another spin on his merry-go-round for planning the two off days between Sunday’s Game 7 and Wednesday’s Game 1. I needed the sleep. I wasn’t sure I could make it through another series of 1 AM bedtimes after dumping truly heroic quantities of alcohol down my cake-hole.

So here I am, only down 21 hours of sleep in the past twelve days. Raging, raring to go. 8 o’clock can’t come fast enough. Please God, let the world hold itself together at least until next Thursday. Because I am unavailable until then.

Today is a day of commemoration. A damned dismal and disappointing day.

God failed to repeat his unleashing of the Fourth Plague on the Yankees and let them survive to play another day.

RIP:
the Phillies Season
April 2, 2007 – October 6, 2007

Which Phillies will show up next year? The pissed off and revved up ones that went into the playoffs? Or the depressed and silent ones that exited?

RIP:
Jeanne Anne Rader
June 27, 1945 – October 8, 2006

My cousin used to have a signature on her email I find most appropriate for this particular anniversary: “Miss You. Love You. Bye.”

On the bright side, the Red Sox won a three-game sweep of the Angels. The last time that happened was? Oh magical year! Does this mean destiny intends another titanic seven-game anti-Yankee battle? One way or another we’ll know by Wednesday night.

And tomorrow will be a better day.

Don’t ask me what happened. It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma revealed as a riddle. The long and short of it is that the company that hosted this magnificent site vanished into thin air taking with it the site, the pictures, the email, everything. All gone.

That was depressing. But just another blow in what’s been a relatively horrible September. Which is a pity, because I really like September.

However, I had migrated the site to new authoring software in August and had, at that time, made a backup of all the posts back to the beginning of time. And most email had been downloaded to the various PCs I sit at each and every day. And, best of all, because I developed for the new authoring software on a local PC I had a local copy of the various templates, scripts and plugins required to make the pretty.

Unhappily, I lost a month or so of occasional posts.  I have to remember all the movies I saw since August 14.  I lost all the images that had accumulated over time – most of which are replaceable if I choose to take the time to dig them up. I lost some email. Worst of all, I damned near lost the rights to www.messofthedamned.org

But all comes right in the end. New host, new times. It’ll take some getting used to but after sleepless nights since Labor Day trying to figure out the ins and outs of the internet and the fly-by-night web hosting world we’re back.

And we’re the same as ever.

Life is unfair. It’s arranged idiotically backwards.

Let’s look at things logically. Assume you live 80 years. Seems a nice round number. If you lead a relatively normal, boring life you spend about 1/4 of your life preparing to live life. You go through school, childhood misadventures and the horror of being too young to do anything fun.

Now you’re 21, life is beginning to get interesting. Hopefully you’re getting laid, you’re drinking more beer, you’re having fun. So it makes perfect sense that just as things get entertaining you’ll be expected to spend the next half of your life working. Not having fun. Working five or six days a week, making virtually no impact on anything or anybody and squeezing what living you can into the 28% of the time per week that you’re not working. Which, when you subtract sleep is only about 24% of 50% of your life.

Finally, after a misspent 40 years during which you’ve had to put life on hold to make enough money to live life, you come to the last 1/4 of your life. Freedom. Which, of course, now that you have the experience, money and time to really enjoy you find you haven’t the desire, interest or stamina to do anything with. And, as a great big cherry on top, there are the hovering, malevolent, perpetually, exponentially increasing odds of dropping instantly dead at any moment of any day.

It’s patently unfair, completely wrong-headed and whoever came up with it ought to be hung.

I think I will now go and beat my head against a brick wall until my brains are thoroughly scrambled. I feel sure the brain-scrambled – of which there are many – don’t think of things like this and are perfectly content to live their lives from Budweiser to Budweiser with an invigorating round of wife-beating every so often for kicks.

Oh! How I wish I could convince myself that Budweiser really is the King of Beers. Then I’d be well on my way to complete and blissful ignorance. Secure in the belief that all is as it should be, the Sun revolving around the Earth and the Earth revolving around me.

Is there an epidemic of public pantslessness?

Trousers down and tackle out in Alabama I can understand. It is Alabama after all, people should have a right to be themselves in their own homeland. Today, however, I saw an anthropomorphic water ice standing on the sidewalk along a state highway in the business district with his green drawstring trousers around his ankles.

And there was a fellow helping to pull them up.

Which might have been the most disturbing part of the whole affair.

I’m off to spill salt, smash a mirror and walk under a ladder.

There’s no hope, no hope at all, when a black cat crosses your path on Friday the 13th.

I wonder – if I’d hit ‘em with my car, would that have negated or enhanced the bad luck?

I am a negative, cynical, curmudgeonly bastard.

I blame it on NPR.

Normally I am woken to the grating voice of one or another Stalin-nostalgist declaiming our utter hopelessness of purpose in this, that, or the other war/initiative/three-legged sack race.

Today, not only do I get my daily dose of unremitting negativity but one revoltingly cheerful bastard actually announced that it was Thursday.

Damn his eyes. Damn his duck-pond! Thursday would be delightful. Thursday is a beer-drinking day, and a night of high revelry.

It’s small wonder I start every day pissed off. How could I behave otherwise when the world starts f**king with me before I even get one eye open?

It’s a beautiful, sunny day. Hot as the Devil in a sauna but gorgeous nonetheless.

My Mom would have been 62 years old today.

What a drag.

Happily, this is a day that offers many comforts. For instance, my maternal grandmother is apparently indestructible, today is the sixty-second anniversary of the Enola Gay’s departure for its historic mission, there are the memories of many many excellent birthday parties and at least one baseball game complete with confetti, people singing Happy Birthday to Mom and her name on the scoreboard.

And, of course, there’s always Pig & Rat.

Happy Birthday Mom. We’re all doing just fine. So enjoy the day.

Whee! I passed 1000 posts! It’s four days shy of five years and four months since this site’s birthday. Since I don’t do much posting on weekends I calculate roughly 1380 opportunities in that time for the internet to stroke my admittedly massive ego. Depending on how you look at it that’s either 3/4 of a post per day or a post every 33 hours.

I like 33. It’s a good number. It means I’ve outlived Jesus.

Now, to piddle on my own cornflakes: there are 37 entries floating out there in limbo. They’re ideas that never went anywhere, reminders I set myself that I never followed up on, or posts I started, then rewrote completely but kept the drafts around for historical reasons.

I guess that makes the proper celebration due for post 1037. But how many hours and days from now will that be? Will my average suffer? Is this a game of statistics? Who the hell cares anyway?

Like I said, it’s a big ego, it needs appeasing. And constant amusement.

Life is good. You work yet another in an interminable series of 12+ hour days. You get a sandwich for a late night dinner. You plan the annual tribute to the 142d anniversary of the demise of the Southern Confederacy. You plan, especially, a very large toast. Two very large toasts, in fact, one to yourself and one to the men who whipped hell out of those uppity wanna-be cavaliers. You motor down the street, get ready to swing into the homestretch turn to find flashing lights and every species of puffed-up authority figure cramming your street.

So, you make a few more turns, you manage to find a way around the endless roadblocks and get within spitting distance of your destination. Then you’re stopped by another handlebar mustachioed knuckledragger with a radio and a sorry attitude. Turns out the hippies/Mexicans/potheads/crack dealers – or whatever style of undesirable lives in the slum next door to me these days – burned out their friggin’ apartment.

Thankfully there was no damage to my building. Thankfully it’s cold, so the windows were closed and my pad doesn’t smell like a late summer barbeque. Thankfully the lights, noise and authority figures managed to pack it up and move on their way before I was really ready to settle down. I just don’t have enough bullets for all of them.

I was slumming last night: drinking PBR on the roof and staring out towards the backside of the old protty church northwards across the alley. As I stood there musing on the bent lightning rod atop the church cupola I thought of something I said to a friend the other day while standing in the same spot.

God and I are having a disagreement. We’re not talking. I think he owes me an explanation. He disagrees.

I looked at that bent lightning rod and I said, “See that bent lightning rod?

He missed.

Wanker.”

Irish dance may be a migraine set to music, and Irish cuisine is banned by international treaty from Guantanamo Bay. But when an Irishman orders a drink, my first instinct is to call out “For two – and make mine a double.”

– Michael Graham

I can’t remember a St. Patrick’s Day when I hadn’t made detailed plans. If I wasn’t travelling I had rounds to make hereabouts. I’ve marched in the New York City parade. I’ve seen the Dropkick Murphys in their St. Pat’s evening show on Landsdowne St. I’ve ridden the high speed line into Philly to wander South Street amongst the revellers. I’ve done the local Gettysburg rounds.

For the first year in recent memory, I am without a plan. And what minor plans I had – go to Philly, maybe train it up to New York – have been thwarted by an unloving and arguably malevolent God.

So we’ll try again on the day itself. Try to get somewhere with some action. Some place with a fire and ice cold Guinness. Some place worth being in on one of the finest days of the year. Some place to hoist a pint and proclaim a toast to Holy St. Patrick and the Race he brought to God.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

I am a failed physicist. I couldn’t do an integer to save my life – so much for three years of higher mathematics.

But I can still celebrate Pi day. And so can you.

I think today, today I will have cherry. Or peach. The bitch of it is the place I’m thinking of cuts their slices in squares. And that will never do.

Happy Pi Day.

Once again, it promises to be a year of weddings and funerals. Just this week my landlord and John Vukovich died. And I have a wedding invitation to reply to.

On my Mom’s tombstone we inscribed the words, “Be Good to Yourself!” Those were always her last words, “Be good to my Scott.” Be good to my whoever.

What do I want to put on my grave? I’m very much the type who wants to be buried upside down so – you know the old joke. If I were a crass man I’d put “Get Bent” or something equally unfriendly. But I’m better than that. Or at least have a little more stylish wit. For now, I think I’ve settled on the following:

“Wish you were here.“

I have maintained three rules in my life:

1. Never work in fast food
2. Never live in Florida
3. Never let work become your life

I’ve adhered pretty religiously to these rules over the years.

I worked one night in the hamburger line at Whitetail and even volunteered to clean up afterwards. But I never worked at McDonalds or Hardees or Wendys or anybody else-ys – I’d eat from their dumpsters before I’d deign to take a job in those rotten places.

I’ve never lived in Florida. Still not particularly excited about it – too many old people, too many Mexicans, too many damned people – but it might be fun for a while. And it might be nice to have warm feet all the time. You know, just for a change of pace.

That last, well, that last has been dodgy of late. Something has gone terribly awry when you arrive home with barely sufficient time to eat and fall into bed so you can get up tomorrow to do it all over again. Things have gone wildly off-track when the work week is extended to six days instead of five. There’s decided rotten-ness in Denmark when you can’t plan ahead, can’t take vacations and can’t expect a moments peace any moment of any given day.

Damn my indefatigable sense of good form, loyalty and honour. The reason I’m not a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher is that I never liked the hours, nor the sense of responsibility. I’ve never had to work hard in my life for anything and I will be damned to hell if I’m going to start now.

No surprises here. I was looking back through five years of entries a week or so ago and invariably the entries for Feb. 14 dealt with massive amounts of negativity as God and the entire human race seemed to conspire to make sure I had as miserable a day as possible. Today follows the general trend.

At least there are some things that can be depended on in this ever-changing world.

I hate Windows Vista. Certainly I’ll buy it within the first year or so if I can be convinced it won’t run like an asthmatic chihuahua with a limp on a six month old dual processor system with a Gig of RAM. But it will still be a piece of crap.

This article covers a lot of my complaints; everything from merrily abandoning any pretense of UI familiarity to evil, evil User Annoyance Control. I loaded up Vista with Beta 2, then Pre-RC1, RC1 and ended up using RC2 from the first week of October until this past weekend. I’ve given the thing a test spin: external drives, Media Center with a TV Tuner, photos, videos, the works. And it sucks. It sucks hard.

Why the devil do I have to wade through eleventy-hundred menus to change my screen resolution? What the hell was wrong with the little plus signs in Windows Explorer so you knew which folders had subfolders? Why can’t I, as a local Administrator, expand files to the C: drive? What the hell is going on?

Bah. So it’s back to XP with its dynamic drive issues, its inability to let me watch Live TV in Media Center two times in a row without a full hour dicking with drivers, and its pretty Candyland scheme.

Christ, if it weren’t for the fact that touching a mouse for pedestrian tasks makes my teeth itch I’d go entirely to OS X. But that’s a whole ‘nother bitching essay.

Caspar Rader set sail for America in 1750. He traversed Pennsylvania – from Lancaster to Harrisburg to Carlisle – until finally pulling stakes and settling near the southwest corner of Virginia. His children migrated further west and settled in the eastern corner of Tennessee. Their children kept migrating until another Casper Rader settled in western Indiana. Many generations later my father migrated back from Indiana to the original Caspar’s stomping grounds and I was born back in the same neighborhood of central Pennsylvania where the whole adventure started.

Two hundred fifty six years of Raders in America and, in my particular line, I am the first person we know of to buy a brand new car.

Somehow I convinced my miserly self to plunk down a heart-stoppingly enormous amount of money in order to purchase something that is absolutely guaranteed to break either the day after the warranty expires or, better yet, two days after the final payment is made. Hot damn!

There were only two things that made this experience bearable: 1) that it will not have to be repeated before my 40th birthday and 2) that it’s a damned sharp looking car that gets good gas mileage and will give me very little trouble.

I told you I was a miser. And I’m old. So there.
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Happy New Year!

Hot damn, I’ve been waiting for yesterday a long time. A damned long time. A fresh start. Let the past be the past. All those other cliches.

And now it’s here. And it’s good. This year is the year of sweetness and light. No worries at all. Peace and calm and a lack of all strong emotions. And you’re on notice, if anyone disturbs my peace they are out of the will.

Next year the world can go back to merrily heaping shit on my head. But this year there will be peace.

Hurrah!

I feel a great need as this most miserable of years draws to a close to point out one of the very few bright spots I’ve encountered during the previous twelve months: Pig & Rat. If you are not reading this comic, you should be. If you don’t find it funny then I don’t know how you tolerate me at all.

Well, I’ll be damned. I was absolutely certain that money would win out over good sense. Gettysburg is, after all, the crookedest little town I’ve ever known in the most corrupt state in the Union. Surely Mr. High-and-Mighty Harleyman would manage to persuade the needed folks and the typically green-greased wheels of state and local government would turn in the direction wished.

I am struck dumb. Absolutely besides myself. This is, in fact, the first news that has made me smile in a very long time. Power to the people and all that. Hurrah for our crooked gaming commission. Thank goodness there are people with deeper pockets to corrupt our infinitely corruptible officials.

Boy, I bet the folks in Gettysburg building hotels like they’re going out of style feel pretty goddamned stupid right about now. Good. They’ve roundly earned their dunce caps.

Another birthday feast begins. Only me, in my arrogance and self-centeredness, would turn a birthday into a three-day feast. Hah! But I am me and you are not. Happy Birthday to me.

Today is the feast of the Immaculate Conception. My Mother always regarded this day highly and I think I recall some discussion about it either being the day she went into labor or the day she prayed to go into labor. Either way I was a month late and it was about damned time.

Today also marks two months to the day since my Mother died. I had planned to write independently of that event as part of my “Why I hate humanity and God and you in particular” series but given the date, now seems as good a time as ever.

Mom died on a Sunday; October 8, 2006. Given the nature of her long illness and her steady decline everyone was trying to get a feel for when the supreme moment would come. Partly it was to ensure we’d be available for the myriad tasks demanded of the survivors, partly to prepare ourselves for the inevitable. I figured she’d go with the full moon. The full moon has always played merry hell with her – and my -state of mind. It seemed appropriate. My cousin thought she would die on a Sunday, as her father had two years before. Of course, since one only seeks coincidences in these things I only remember the predictions that came true. But the full moon one, that’s the truth.

Mom was a fighter. Quite possibly the most vibrantly alive person I’ve ever known. Whatever goofiness I have, I inherited from her. I had almost forgotten in the year she was sick but looking through photos, preparing for the funeral, there were hundreds of pictures of her in all sorts of poses and locations. Always smiling. Usually posing. Generally being a goofball.

Mom died from complications caused by Ovarian Cancer. She was diagnosed in October, 2005. As legend has it, she got the diagnosis the same day her mother got the word that her cancer was in remission. Sadly, I don’t know the date of her diagnosis but I know she didn’t quite live a full year from the day we heard the first bad news until the day we heard the last bad news.

Ovarian Cancer is a nasty disease. It has no obvious symptoms, no reliable way to test for it and it’s deadly as hell: in the United States in a given year one woman will die every hour. In 2006, 20,000 women will contract the disease and 15,000 will die from it. The five year survival rate is not quite 50%. It’s bad. It is very close to as bad as it gets.

Mom never lost hope. She cheerfully submitted to long hospital stays, stomach pumps, distant travels for treatment, strong chemotherapy, experimental drugs, and all the other incidences of a long and punishing disease. And still she managed to keep her household together, to travel on her normal schedule, to see weddings, graduations and birthdays and always, always maintained her smile.

Tomorrow is the annual observance of Scotchtoberfest. Every year, a bunch of the lads get on their best Great War Scottish kits and go for a walk/pub crawl through the Yuppie infested environs of Alexandria. I’ve gone most years since I heard about it, each year in some different and bizarre kit. One year I went in modern DPM and claimed I was in the SAS. Another year I did my best IRA impersonation in civvies and battledress jacket. Several times now I’ve gone as Australian. It’s a day of walking in the cold, sweltering in the heat of bars and drinking until you want to fall over. Should be a recipe for a perfect day.

And yet, I ask myself, why do I keep going to this thing?

Every year – every blasted year – something negative happens. I don’t think there’s a year that’s gone by that I didn’t lose the crowd for at least an hour. One year I spent half the evening opening doors for patrons at various bars around town and holding out my hand for tips like a bellhop. Once I kept curling up on park benches and in spare doorways trying to get some sleep and constantly being rudely awakened by the police. Another year I set up shop as some sort of wool-enveloped homeless guy with a glengarry panhandling for spare change. If it isn’t something like that it’s something else: women, yuppies, Santa Claus. It just ain’t any fun after the first two or three hours. It’s exhausting and it’s expensive.

And you know what? I don’t even like the Scottish – or at least Scots-Americans. If I am ever asked, “Have you ever had a homosexual experience?” I will have to answer yes. I once stood in a room full of men in dresses while they all held hands and swayed gently while singing some gentle and loving tune. It was exceedingly spiritual and deeply gay.

God bless the Irish. At least they have the good sense to wear normal clothing and drink heavily. And I think, given the circumstances of the various Irish diasporas, they don’t spend a whole lot of time moaning drunkenly about the dirty wet hell they left behind. Nosirree. In America the beer is cheap and plentiful, the women don’t all dress like two-dollar whores, cheeky bastards don’t pinch arses in American bars without getting knocked down and you get to see actual sunshine once in a while. It’s the Promised Land, I tell you, the Promised Land.

On July 1, 2003 I met a girl.

It is important to know the highlights of this story because the stratospheric highs and hellish lows I experienced over two years and one day color everything else that happened during that time.

If someone had asked me to describe an ideal mate, this chick would have come close: beautiful, intelligent, cynical, creative, sexy, stylish and an incredible cook. The first time I tried to describe her I said, “She’s a female version of me.” I later concluded that she was the right brain version of myself: where I am relatively logical, punctual and think in black and white, she was creative, imaginative, perpetually late and fairly willing to force reality to adjust to her perception. I always figured that made us complementary. I learned a great deal during time spent with my female counterpart: to relax, to be patient, to let the freak flag fly, to be spontaneous, to force your environment to deal with you.

And now we come to the story of my life: I fell in love. She didn’t. Rinse, repeat.

For two years we did entertaining things: traveled to Philly, New York, Boston, Baltimore and Washington, rode the train, went to museums and concerts, hung out with rockstars and artists, drank lots of varied alcohol, abused yuppies, were kind to children and animals and generally enjoyed each other’s company.

By the spring of 2005 I had finally concluded that there was no future. More than that, I decided that to leave her I would have to leave my home, my town, my state and everything and everyone I knew. By that point it was them or me, I was either leaving under my own power or I was leaving feet first. Real and immediate crisis. The goal was just to keep from seeing her but since I have the backbone of a chocolate eclair I had to head in the general direction of away. Far enough away that I’d be able to resist the temptation to further contact.

I started making plans, I’d leave by mid-summer 2005. First I planned to quit my job, live on some cash I had stored away and start a new life in a more rough-and-tumble environment: Memphis, New Orleans, Savannah. Somewhere with a river, and docks, and burly stevedores drinking and brawling in equal measure. That morphed into keeping my job but rejiggering it to put me somewhere else on a permanent basis and keep me traveling, keep my mind occupied. Which worked out very well in the short term. Hah.

Let me tell you how happy I am to be back precisely where I fugging started. That willpower thing I mentioned above? It’s a thin, thin membrane. I struggle every day to keep from picking up the phone. I’ve set myself a lifelong ban on traveling to or through York, PA. Which makes it kind of interesting when you’re trying to get to Lancaster from Gettysburg, or from Baltimore to Harrisburg. But it’s been more than a year and I’ve stuck to it so far. Maybe good bourbon stiffens a chocolatey backbone.

When the bad times began all depends on how you measure it. For instance, in some of my more self-pitying moments I’d probably argue they started at birth. I suppose it could be argued they started in November of 2002 with a friend’s severe illness. Nobody ever knew what was wrong with him, one day he was whisked away to the hospital and the next thing we knew he was dead. That’s how 2003 began: my buddy died and the Eagles got their asses handed to them in the playoffs.

Now it’s November 8, 2006 and I’m hoping that the bad times are over. At least the overwhelmingly-negative-no-good-very-bad bad times. As time allows I think I’ll start to fill the Intar-net-web in on the bad times from 2003 to today so everyone and their mother knows why life’s been such a bowl of peaches and why, in future, my cynicism gear is likely to be stripped from overuse.

I heard a quote on the radio the other day. A writer complained that he had, “had the kind of childhood which is death to a writer.” I’ve had that kind of a life. No pain, no suffering, nothing to write about. I’ve still got it pretty easy but I am beginning to see what can go wrong.

So, I’ll write about what could go wrong and did go wrong. My tales of woe from three years of constant cock-punches. Then you’ll all know why I have $100 in very hard liquor in the trunk of my car.

O Halloween! That finest of kid’s holidays, calculated to arouse only slightly less greed in the mind of youth than Christmas.

In halcyon days of yore I put a great deal of effort into Halloween. I was never permitted to buy one of those nifty plastic jumpsuits with accompanying masks o’ flimsyness. Man, how I wanted one of those el-cheapo deals. Instead I suffered year after year with spectacular homemade gear limited only by my imagination. One year I went as a Spider-Man robot because we couldn’t figure out how to do a jumpsuit and happened to have an oversized cardboard box lying about. I went as an Indian, a cowboy, a Biker Scout in an righteous homemade uniform, a scarecrow, a headless LtCdr USNR and I’m sure many other things I have forgotten in the intervening years.

I’d plan my night, figure out how to blanket the entire area to ensure the largest possible stash, spend hours poring over my haul, sorting and dissecting all the things in my treat bag and lustily cursing whichever thrice-damed idiot thought an apple was a suitable piece of Halloween plunder. CANDY! People, CANDY! Stupid jackasses.

And then, the entire haul – generally minus the Smarties – would go in the garbage by Christmas. Because, after all, I’m not really a fan of sweets.

Now I have done it all. I’ve been in movies and on TV, been photographed and written about. Now I’ve posed for a painting.

Is there a “cutting room floor” in the fine art industry? Regardless, I suppose some part of my anatomy will be forever immortalized in oils.

I am having troubles.

There was a time I wanted to write. I wrote every day, sometimes more than once. I had lots to say – most of it utter crap – but it did me good to get it off my chest and out of my head. If nothing else, it helped keep my alcohol intake level to somewhat below the merely ridiculous and helped me sleep. It helps to put the voices in your head to paper. Someone ought to try that therapy for schizos.

My problem is that I have too many voices in my head. Not only do I have entirely too many interests: politics, traveling, movies, books, music, history, wearing funny clothes; but I have too many voices through which to express various thoughts on various interests. For instance, there’s the little Mencken/Thompson/Jerusalem voice for politics which says that all politicians are thrice-damned liars who ought to be spigoted or tarred and feathered as swiftly as possible and, what’s more, that none of these richly deserved fates will befall any of them because We the People are far too tiny-minded and complacent to consider even mild revolution. Of course, it’s pretty tough to give expression to that voice when you’re trying to self-enforce a ban on the word fuck. That voice likes that word. But there’s the other political voice, the well-mannered, thoroughly reasoned pundit who has many fine and rational things to say and deep-down believes in the will of the American people and of their mission in the world.

How on earth does one reconcile the various personalities and still create something that one is proud to present to the world? Absolutely f**king impossible. So much for self imposed bans.

And as if all this weren’t complicated enough there are the things that I don’t know how to write about. The things that I want to say but probably shouldn’t, or can’t, or want to/don’t want to. It has been a decidedly shitty couple of years. From July 1, 2003 to October 8, 2006 it has been one body blow after another: the month of September 2003, December 19, 2004, July 2, 2005, October 14, 2005, April 2006, September and October 2006. I think I’ve seen the end of the truly bad times, provided death – even metaphorically – comes only in threes. But, of course, if I go back to January 2003, then we’re at three literal and one or two metaphorical deaths. Wheels within wheels.

So, now what? What’s next?

That, my friends, is the million dollar question.

The things that are presently occupying my mind are not things I think ought to be shared with the internet. Hell, I can’t even muster a decent commentary on the very silly films I’ve seen lately (Crank and Invincible were beyond cool). But I found time to offer a less orange website. It’s a damned shame I can’t find a font or decent base picture to make letters out of wet girders – I’d go totally Steampunk if I could find that essential piece.

Allow me to give a quick rundown of my mental quandaries of late:

• Twins / Dodgers in the World Series. I’ll watch just to see Red Sox West (Blue Sox?) but they’ll get the pants beat off ‘em.
• I need a nap. Several naps in fact. In all truth, I’d like to sleep through at least one full day. If not a full week. Or a month.
• Anyone who tells you God has a plan is full of shit. If there is a plan it’s a damned obscure one, obviously beyond our mortal ken. I think He just rolls the dice and watches what happens with that slight smirk of someone who knows what the outcome will be before the dice are rolled. You know, like Yankees fans before the 2004 ALCS.
• How’s that for mixing theology and baseball?
• Did I mention I need a nap? How about a drink. I could use one of those too.

Hey, now that I’ve broken the ice, maybe I won’t feel like such a schmuck anymore. We’ll see.

A peek inside my subconscious is always an unpleasant experience. I don’t dream often and remember clearly what I dreamt even less often. I must have had a rough night last night.

In the first episode of our late-night triple feature I was doing precisely what I’d been doing that evening: practicing drill with some pals. In the midst of that happy activity the world was suddenly invaded by Recognizers from TRON. Apparently some mad genius was looking for someone and decided the most efficient way to do that was to have Recognizers descend from the sky, smash everything flat and scan every inch of the world’s surface. Damned frightening. It was like being in the first – good – half of the most recent War of the Worlds.

From that we segued to playing hide and seek down the side of a mountain with a guy from work and a witch. Somehow that turned into a chase, scrambling down through a steep woods with this sorceress throwing rocks at me in a vain attempt to tag me “out.”

The last episode somehow involved a footrace, my car left at work and needing to bum a ride – with my family – from a relatively attractive, elfin blonde in a minivan. That turned into a mad dash through the streets of State College, a near accident and my arriving in the office at 7:30 in the morning unaware of what I was doing there.

I can see some themes that make sense in that mess: being hunted, the presumed deaths of family members, State College. Overall my subconscious strikes me as being like the guy’s brain in Strange Days after it’s been overloaded. Static-y, and badly in need of a horizontal hold adjustment.

I have made some bad decisions in my life. Once, I quit a job that raised my pay 50% in eight months with an offer of additional money and the use of a car if I’d stay. I left them for another gig at a 20% pay cut and no vacation where I was fired after 90 days while lying in a hospital bed.

That was a damned bad decision. The aftermath of that decision was a six month unemployment vacation, barely scraping by and gaining fifty pounds by sitting around all day, every day, drinking Red Dog and surfing the intarnetweb.

Last year I decided something had to give, so I moved. I told a beautiful woman that I couldn’t be around her any more. I packed my stuff into storage in the middle of a blazing hot summer. I gave up my apartment of seven years, abandoned my friends and drove to Nashville arriving in the middle of the night with no knowledge of the city or the people.

That was a good decision. Granted, in 8 1/2 months I was only in town one third of the time. I effectively missed October and entirely missed all of February, April and May. From Mach 26 until May 25 I only went back for three days over Easter and that only because a friend had made arrangements to visit. I didn’t know anyone in my neighborhood. Hell, the barmaids generally recognized me but we never on a first-name basis. I spent my time alone, keeping to a schedule of drinking, movie watching and aimless wandering. I was responsible to none but myself. The telephone never rang. Nobody pestered me just to shoot the shit. Nobody expected me to come to events or parties or anything other than meaningful, one time, life changing occurrences. I loved it.

At the end of April things were looking bleak, I was stranded up north with no end in sight. I could continue to maintain the apartment that – based on my spring occupancy – was costing something like $850 a day – or I could knuckle under to the ugly reality of the situation and move back north.

That is proving to be the worst decision ever. If the general annoyances associated with this rotten place weren’t bad enough it costs $200 a week just to live in this godforsaken state and this crooked little town.

I often consider the idea that God hates me. That I’m stuck on some kind of bizarre Groundhog Day-esque hamster wheel. Seven weeks here has weighed as heavily as seven years prior. The blissful eight months away fades like a particularly delightful dream cut short by some great Satanic alarm clock. But as a waitress reminded me during a late-night, post-drunk cholesterol fest, “God doesn’t hate you. He hates everybody.”

On Tuesdays not too long ago I’d be looking forward to sitting in a great open room, soaking in the warm southern breeze, drinking two for one beers and chowing down on bar grub before hitting the movies at the super-bizarre, neon-drenched, UFO theatre. Now what? Red Lobster before settling in at a perfectly normal beige movie house? Bah.

At least it’s D-Day. So there’s a partial viewing of (Pick One):

• The Longest Day

• Saving Private Ryan
• Band of Brothers: Day of Days

to look forward to.

By the way, that quote above is from a British sailor serving on an American hospital ship on June 6, 1944.

“Les Americains avaient de courage et je les admire.”

Ready for a string of numbers? Nine months, forty-eight hours, seven-hundred miles, three months, three days.

It’s been nine months since I boogied south. In forty-eight hours I’ll be boogying north over seven-hundred miles of mountain roads. When I moved out it took three months to pack and store everything. This time I have three days to pack, load, travel and unpack.

And all this to come back to a place I don’t want to be around people I happily abandoned last fall.

The hell with it. I’m about to be a Pennsylvanian again with all the taxes, bad roads, corruption and oddly pronounced “o’s” that implies.

Life is funny sometimes.

It’s official. I should be banned from Red Sox games. Thirteen games in a row they beat the Orioles. The fourteenth? Well, I was there. Naturally they lost. Sonsamahbitches! But I did get to see Papi lift one that almost saved the day for the Sox. And El Bencho cranked one into right center that did save the day for the Os. This makes me happy.

I miss El Bencho.

As if the bizarrely entertaining trip into Baltimore to see the boys of summer lose pitifully wasn’t enough of a psychic blow, my adventure down south is about to end. Everything’s all set, now it’s merely a matter of actually transporting my gear north. The entire prospect is highly depressing, but the fact of another relocation to a place I fled and have no interest in returning to is not the really weird bit. The really weird bit is that the likeliest living quarters upon my return are the same delightful lodgings I vacated eight months ago.

Same people, same place, same job, same issues. It’s like a crime film where the bad guy loops the security camera footage so you’re missing the good stuff while the same thing that happened five minutes ago replays endlessly.

God has a plan. Even if it’s only a good belly laugh.

***Time Warp Alert***

My ingenious plan to become Tyler Durden proceeds apace. I’m down a full night’s sleep for the week past so naturally, what happens during my only weekend in Tennessee in six weeks? On night one I sleep in shifts – part of the time on the living room floor – and end up with maybe eight hours on the night. Night two I get my eight hours but that’s all, precisely eight hours. I wake up at 6:30 AM on a Saturday and vacuum the apartment and wash the dishes.

I am your humble narrator.

And I have an IKEA catalog.

Surely it’s only a small step from here to planning the downfall of the world’s financial infrastructure.

It gives me a peculiar sense of happiness knowing that New Orleans pulled off yet another Mardi Gras. To know that, if I left right now, when I arrived at the St. Charles Tavern for a beer at whatever ungodly hour of the morning it would be the beads would be hanging from the trees along the avenue as they have for unnumbered years past.

At the same time, there’s an unavoidable sense of melancholy sitting here writing at 8:30 on a Fasnacht Day evening knowing that for the first time in remembered history I haven’t had a doughnut all day. And more, that for the first time in recent memory I’m not gathered among friends, gnawing fasnachts and drinking beer to celebrate the beginning of the Lenten season.

But I did find some New Orleans beer. So I’ll make do with the blessings I have.

And a full moon, how perfect.

Life can blindside you sometimes, like the Seahawks in the first quarter. Last year I was lost in Chelsea with the most beautiful woman in the world while the Eagles were embarrasing themselves. Every year in recent memory prior to that I was in Gettysburg surrounded by pals, eating freshly grilled steak and watching the game on a massive TV.

This year I’m in Nashville, Tennessee, surrounded by nobody in a small apartment on the west end of town wondering what the hell happened.

One thing’s for sure: while I am cheering loudly and lustily for the Steelers (East Coast represent!) I cannot be certain I’d have the same warm feelings toward western PA if I’d been in central PA surrounded by insufferable Steelers fans.

Those western wankers better pull this out. If not for the honour of PA, then do it for one of those insufferable fans with whom I passed many a Superbowl Sunday suffering through wrestling at halftime. He’s probably pounding Warsteiners with Jesus from the best seat in the house.

If I sat down and made a list of the top 101 places I’d like or expect to spend the momentary dawning of a New Year, the intersection of Broadway and Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd in Camden, NJ would not be among them. If the time had sunken in to my Stout addled brain I’d have known what was about to happen. As it was, the honking of horns, ringing of bells and booming of fireworks caught me slightly by surprise.

Oddly, I didn’t hear any gunshots. Maybe the fireworks drowned them out.

Even with the little Camden adventure it was a grand time. I miss Philadelphia. What a great town. If I lived there I’d probably be a jaded old hermit but visiting once in a while brings out only the best in the City.

And where will I be next year? That’s a ponderable.

Happy New Year to everyone. Even if your year past was not half so miserable as mine may the year to come be nothing but sunshine and happiness.

Wouldn’t that be a change?

The birthday feast annually lasts three days. As of now, there are 25 hours and ten minutes remaining. Hope you’ve got your shopping done.

So far, I’ve found a bar with so many taps they stack them two high on the wall and serve some pretty swanky cajun grub as well. I’ve been inside the Parthenon to see Athena Parthenos painted like a “lady of the evening.” I’ve seen the Friday night performance of the Grand Ole Opry in the Mother Church of Country Music, given the pitiful tour I can manage to folks from out of town, received my first birthday greetings, and finally walked around the downtown happening district.

Tomorrow, Grand Ole Opryland and then what? Larger amounts of alcohol are demanded. Wonder if Cooter sells Dixie beer?

Yes, I am still alive.

No, I don’t actually have a home. I do, however, have a place where my stuff is.

I have stories to tell and pictures to prove it. But first, I’m putting entries in for all the films I’ve seen since the silliness began as baseball season ended. I’m not commenting on them, just posting them, because I’m an anal-retentive arsehole and it bugs the living shite out of me that my little list at the right is all wrong.

And if you don’t like it, well, there’s a reason I moved seven-hundred miles away.

Man, I love saying that. Bridges are built for burnin’.

Doctoring might be a better racket than lawyering.

In the space of ten minutes he tells me I’m a fat bastard, pokes a hole in me, makes things hurt worse than they did before, writes a bill for nearly $200 and tells me I’m entitled to spend $10 on medicine and another $25 in a couple of weeks so he can have another look and either tell me things are peachy keen or cause more pain.

And people wonder why I’m so reluctant to go to the doctor.

But where’s home?

Back in the old stomping grounds for four days so far and all the reasons I decided to bugger off have loomed large. I’ll be damned happy to put that long stretch of interstate between me and the neighborhood at the end of the week. It’s better for the brainpan.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, hopefully the electric that worked even though it wasn’t actually connected is being installed as we speak. Hopefully the refrigerator which sorta didn’t work is still unplugged or the breaker’s off so it’s not chilling the place with the door hanging open. Hopefully there will still be a nascent home to go back to.

But if not, I wouldn’t lose anything desperately important except my complete series of Transmetropolitan and surely eBay can come to the rescue once again.

What I wouldn’t give to be able to go down the street to Sam’s, ogle some mind-bogglingly attractive Vanderbilt girls, drink a few pints and watch whatever the sport du jour is. Instead it’s probably Damon’s and what passes for a bed at HoJo’s.

It’s like going home to Mom and Dad’s and having to eat cold chinese and sleep in the backyard. I wanna go to new home.

I hate pre-midlife crises. What a pain in the arse. I knew it was coming, I just didn’t know how bad it would get.

How would you deal with being slightly suicidal, feeling trapped, and being a more generally miserable bastard than usual? You know what? Who the hell cares how you would deal with it. As in all things, I deal with things in my own patented, slightly askew, deeply insane manner.

How to deal with a pre-midlife crisis

Step 1: Be increasingly miserable, surly and develop an intense dislike for everything and everyone. Stew in this mix of juices for months or years.

Step 2: Decide, at last, that drastic measures must be taken. Decide what those measures are, dawdle for more months while you get your brain bent around the reality of the situation and finally, wisely abandon all hope.

Step 3: Implement those drastic measures in a modified, not totally insane, way.

Step 4: Ditch everything and fuck off to Nashville, Tennessee.

Step 5: I’m still working on this step but it will involve dawning realization that you’re just temporarily insane, that it’s probably hormonal, that it will pass in time. But, in the meantime, it’s probably best to have a seven-hundred mile cushion between you and your bridges. Just in case you get drunk with a Zippo in your pocket and several barrels of gasoline nearby.

So, here we are. Nashville – by God – Tennessee. Still living a transient existence of hotels and strip malls while desperately looking for anything that even barely resembles a neighborhood in which a civilised human being would want to live. Half of this damned place looks like the false suburban strip mall towns of New Jersey and the other half looks like the wasted old boom towns you see in spaghetti westerns.

But I’m here. For a while anyway. If I can swallow hard, bend over sufficiently and take the pain I might be able to find a decent, if overpriced, home in the only thing I’ve seen approximating a neighborhood. At the end of that block is a small strip of tony shops and restaurants and a pretty damned nifty bar with every football game in the world on about eleventy-hundred TVs and every Red Sox game they can get. I suppose that will have to do for a home for now.

The shame of it all is nobody in that neighborhood is southern. Ah well, I’ll just have to hang around the Ryman and throw construction debris at country music fans.

Oooh! Even better yet! I’ll stock up on construction debris and drive out to Opryland. Then I can hit tourists that are country music fans! Damn, it doesn’t get much happier than that.

Maybe I’ll make it after all.

It could be worse:

Hey, if it’s all we can get I’ll take a Wild Card spot. Even if it means facing the mighty Cardinals in the first round of the playoffs. Hell, the Red Sox made them look like idiots in the World Series – do you really think the Fightin’ Phils won’t have a chance?

It annoys me continually that I don’t know the Phillies roster the way I know the Sox. Part of it has to do with the horrendous Phillies telecasts. Harry Kalas may be some kind of a Philadelphia tradition. He may be one of the last of the old school, five packs a day, play by play men but he is godawfully boring. And to hear this old cat try to use all the stupid nicknames (Wheels? J Ro? J Mike? Who the hell comes up with this stuff?) while droning on incessantly and barely concealing his distaste for his color man makes me nuts. Not to mention that all the broadcasts look like crap with washed out colors and poor commercial cutting and they skip the National Anthem in every game which means I didn’t get to see my bro’s big moment Thursday night.

Comcast – you’re a bunch of wankers.

But I’m learning. I know who Leiber and Wagner are. I am starting to tell Burrell and Bell apart. Urbina has probably the best name in baseball so he always makes me laugh. I’ll have to see more Pratt at bats to cement his face and the smattering of new guys boggles my mind.

But this, this brings a smile to my face:

A smile that gets even bigger if you look at the AL Wild Card standings and see how far back the fuggin’ Yankees are. I consider it a blessing unsurpassed that I haven’t had to watch that bunch of strutting, grinning fools once this season and likely won’t have to watch them at all in the post-season.

But Oh! My beloved Red Sox. Having made a good showing of themselves this season they keep losing to pathetic teams. The Tigers? The fecking Devil Rays? So, betting is open: I’m going up to see the Tigers at Red Sox on Saturday evening: will it rain or will the Sox lose in some sort of cosmically laughable spectacular blowout?

And I’ll have to drink a beer for Bellhorn. I’ll miss that guy, even if he’s sucked like an amped up Hoover this season. You gotta love a dude who looks like Booger from Revenge of the Nerds but can smack ‘em out of the park when the occasion demands it.

Maybe he’s got a career waiting as a movie body double? What a shame.

OK, I just checked the news so I feel pretty confident the Shuttle made it into orbit. Given the track record of Shuttle flights that means no worries for something over a week.

It seems sometimes as if our generation has been treated or cursed with more than our share of “Where you were and what you were doing” moments. For our grandparents’ generation their big moment was probably Pearl Harbor. They may remember the Crash of ‘29 and later the Moon landing and Kennedy’s assassination but I suspect Pearl Harbor was the big one, the one that defined their existence and never went far from the old frontal lobe.

Our parents would probably class Kennedy’s assassination as their generation’s defining moment. It was certainly from that moment that things started to fall apart.

I suppose my generation will have to look back at September 11 as our moment – the day everything changed. That is, of course, provided things keep on changing. But I can clearly remember 1986 when Challenger went up and I can clearly remember 2003 when Columbia came down. Those moments hit me hard. I can see the day of the Columbia disaster even more clearly than September 11.

In tribute to those who went before and those who are out there carrying on the grand tradition I guess I’ll go this afternoon and do what I did on February 1, 2003 and drink a toast. It’s the least I can do.

I’m lazy, and I haven’t the inclination to fill pages and pages with all the bollocks I haven’t mentioned lately. It has been an extraordinarily rough year replete with peaks of unparalleled delight and valleys of suicidal gloom. At least things are back to what passes for normal in my personal version of the game of life. So, we move ahead:

• I don’t want to be left out in commenting on the British bombings of last week. I know that area. The tube train that went up was the line my brother rode every day to work. The bus that went up was one I had ridden once upon a time. Despite our best efforts at ignoring reality it always comes along and bites us in the arse. Sure seems to our enemies like we’re at war, doesn’t it?

• But it must not seem so to us. I find it curious how quickly the London bombings are slipping off the front page in order to bring us the latest on hurricanes, dead kiddies, stupid blonde tourists and other worthless krep. Pity. I was really looking forward to the “CIA blew shite up to keep up the war!” theories being splashed all over the front page of the New York Times.
• I love the Red Sox but they’re going to have to do something about ticket scalpers. I don’t blanch entirely at paying a hundred bucks to sit in right field at Fenway. It is Fenway, after all. But selling out four games at Camden Yards with the lowest available ticket going for fifty bucks? This I have a problem with. I hate scalpers.
• Started packing and moving over the weekend. I am floored by the sheer amount of crap I have accumulated in only seven years. I’ve taken a carload and a truckload out of the house and have barely registered a dent in the detritus. Why do I have two gutted PC towers, a Performa, a PPC, two broken printers and assorted bits and pieces lying in corners? Where did all of this stuff come from? Where the hell am I going to put it? Who knows cheap help that likes to spend their days climbing stairs laden with boxes?

I am going to be a very happy man when life is slimmed down and manageable. I am going to try very hard to keep things slim. I don’t ever again want to feel trapped by my stuff. One vanload. That’s where I want to be. Can I keep it there? Where will I be without all my books?

Dammit. Tyler was right.

Losing all hope was freedom. — The Narrator, Fight Club

I try to live a life without regrets. Regret always seemed pointless. If you’ve screwed up – particularly if you’ve hurt someone – you apologize. Don’t regret your actions. All that does is assign blame: apologize, mean it and move on.

Where I think I’ve gone wrong the few times in life that I’ve made wrong turns was in having hope. Hope is the most powerful of emotions. It certainly outmuscles negative things like hate and anger and generally shoulders aside – even while engendering – the positive things like love and joy. Hope can make you believe and do anything. Hope is the utter abandonment of logic. Hope has caused more horror throughout human history than any other impulse in the human heart. I am firmly of the opinion that hope ought to be classed in the negative column of emotion. I cannot think of one example where it alone has done good.

It certainly doesn’t jive with my personality.

So, once again I make a resolution to never hope again. For anything. I resolve never to put any effort forth in any endeavour where I do not have one-hundred percent control of the method and outcome.

This does not mean I won’t take risks: both the good and bad kind. I like risks. I like calculated risks. I can jump off a cliff and have some idea of my odds of survival. I don’t have to hope I grow wings or land in a soft patch of grass. I can drink ten cases of bourbon in a sitting and know the pain I’ll be in the next day as well as the possibility of massive bodily harm. I don’t have to hope for a liver transplant.

I suppose that’s what I resolve: I resolve to always know. Uncertainty is the thing I really can’t deal with. Uncertainty breeds panic, questions, paranoia and hope.

Those I can deal without.

So, the hell with it. Time for a reappraisal. If you’ve made an utter hash of your first go-round at life, admit the failure and move on. I figure I have nearly sixty more years to endure on this worthless rock. If I can stomach two years per place I have eight years covered, or ten if I can bring myself back east. Any suggestions?

Ahh, the Black Stench of Despair. How I’ve missed your warm embrace; like driving by the sewage plant on a warm summer’s day.

. . . when Bampf has lots more to say than I do. I am a bit disheartened that nobody asked if I was still alive. So much for faking my death to see who shows up at the funeral – I suspect the crowd would be small.

I am sure you’ve all been breathlessly awaiting my pronouncement on Episode III: Revenge of the Bad Melodrama but we’ll have to see how the day goes. I thought instead, as I steal a few minutes this very early morning, to give a quick rundown of life in the fast lane.

• Thought I’d go to Reading a couple of weekends ago and lend a hand setting things up for the big Air Show hoolie next weekend. Stopped on the way to have a tire fixed and a balancing. Everything was running smooth as silk until I stopped for beer and came out to find the entire contents of my cooling system spreading across the parking lot.

  It took me over an hour to find out one place couldn’t help me, two hours at another place who wanted $650 to replace a water pump and timing belt which was less than two years old. Two hours after that I had managed to coax the rapidly over-heating beast a bit over three miles along and finally slumped into an overpriced hotel in a miserable part of a miserable town. On the up side, the hotel did have a bar and restaurant filled with the cream of Reading’s party crowd. On the down side, the cream of Reading’s party crowd probably wouldn’t have gotten past the velvet ropes at a dirt bar in Gettysburg.

  Thankfully my Dad came up with the brilliant idea of towing the car back ourselves, which we did at 40 to 45 miles per hour for two hours on the Turnpike. I hear the car is fixed, the water pump and timing belt were under warranty, the bill is less than one-third of what the buggers in Reading wanted and life is good. Except that I don’t trust the damned thing to get me to the end of the block, let alone on any of my usual mad dashes across the nation. Time for a new (ish) ride.

• Speaking of usual mad dashes across the nation: the weekend past was Blast from the Past 2005. Cruised into Louisville Friday night to visit a friend from many years ago. What a hoot. Swanky Irish bars, nifty lounges along the Ohio River and the happy discovery that my friend had done very well for herself: High powered job, nice home, odd dog and nifty husband.

  Saturday I spent an hour or two kicking around central Kentucky and looking at Lincoln’s Birthplace and Boyhood Home. Hopefully I’ll have some time to post a photo or two. Then it was off to Lexington for the wedding of a friend from even more many years ago. Had a fine High School reunion with two of my best friends from that era, even if I did miss the Maker’s Mark toast to the old Alma Mater.

  Then I cruised back through Cincinatti, Columbus and Washington, PA. In case you’re ever thinking of travelling that way, allow me to warn you that even after 20 or 30 years, Washington, PA is still under construction.

• Ahhh, home. By 10 PM on Sunday I was whipped. So, I get two nights in my own bed and then I catch a flight for Birmingham, Alabama. All the cities of the new South are mildly depressing. For the most part they’re clean and well laid out but deserted after the business day. Birmingham reminds me very much of Indianapolis, only smaller. Drove past the Civil Rights Memorial, the Sloss Works and finally found the bohemian part of town for a bar-b-q dinner. Worked Wednesday, caught a plane home, got no sleep and that pretty much brings us up to date.
• Now, it’s Memorial Day weekend. Travelling tonight, tomorrow, Sunday and only a little on Monday: three parades, one race, one live radio show and with any luck, a little sleep.

Sleep? Who am I kidding?

If Wednesday and Thursday are this bad – what will Friday the 13th be like?

I shudder to think.

I am reminded of my situation while reading one of my favorite all-time comics:

“I want eight-thousand words. Eight-thousand printable words. Not like the time the Beast got elected and you wrote f**k eight-thousand times.”

I may be apathetic and coasting just now but I think I could muster the discipline for an eight-thousand word copy and paste job. It might help to pass the time.

God dammit! I knew there was something else I wanted to do yesterday.

OK, so, 27 years and one day ago the Good Lord gave me a baby brother. Since I’m not a very nice person and he’s a bit thin-skinned, I made his childhood mildly hellish. I like to think I’ve somewhat made up for that in adulthood.

Once I managed to pull my head out of its firm lodging in my arse I grew to greatly respect and admire him.

So, Happy Birthday to my little brother – even though he towers above me. Hope this one was good and I look forward to many more.

I got new spectacles the other week. I’ve been told they don’t change me, they just enhance me. I like the idea but I’m just not so sure of the enhancement.

I’ve mentioned before that I thought I looked like a deranged Muppet . . .
Read the rest of this entry »

and I will go to Opening Day!

In 139 hours, barring utter catastrophe – weather related or otherwise – I’ll be sitting somewhere out in left field watching the only sport truly worth the effort.

Of course, that does not imply that I won’t still look at true football and rugby when the opportunity permits. It just means that I don’t have to think about no-necked wankers smashing each other to shreds, or gang-bangers somehow managing not to slaughter each other en masse in order to bounce a bitty ball about or silly Americans pretending to be Canadians while pretending to swirl daintily around a false lake.

Jaysus. It can’t come soon enough.

My genetic lineage has perhaps an over-abundance of maladies. In my dotage I can look forward to: coronary problems, diabetes, obesity, cataracts, cancers of various digestive organs, or probably some combination of all of the above. Despite this delightful disposition of diseases I am likely to be long-lived; probably surviving – despite the apparent odds – into my eighties.

That’s all for the future. What bothers me now are the multifarious incidences of sinus trouble I confront daily. On occasion, when it gets to the point where breathing became less a necessity than a trial and my melon feels like the packed powder bags in a 16-inch gun I could always count on a certain medicine to sort things out. This isn’t the sort of drug I like to take on a regular basis but it works well in a pinch. No more.

It seems that after a few days of consuming and accumulating a level of this wonder-pellet in my system it shifts gears and does rude things to my psyche even as it soothes my sniffer. Instead of the blissfully long snooze I so desperately needed this weekend I was subjected to bouts of paranoia, nightmarish dreams and morning vertigo.

So much for that experiment in self-medication. If I wanted to feel that weird there are far more interesting ways of achieving such a state.

Incidentally, I am coming to the conclusion that God is conspiring against me: He doesn’t want me to sleep. To what end, I don’t know, but I suspect I’ll find out.

Allow me just a moment to note that the newest team in baseball managed to win the first Spring Training game of the season against the team with, arguably, some of the highest expectations.

Allow me also to note I actually got to watch a bit of the game due to fortuitous lunch-time timing and the good taste of the local deli in having the game on opposite financial news.

Lastly, allow me to bend my knee and thank the Good Lord Above that football is over, basketball is winding down, hockey never was and baseball season is upon us again.

Life is good. Spring is shortly to be in the air. And I can’t stop watching 61*.

Life begins on Opening Day.

Love is a burning thing

and it makes a firery ring

Yeah? Well, so is ringworm.

Love is a queer thing. I can remember many years ago, in the throes of the first pangs that I asked a friend for a definition of love as a comparitive test. I wish I could find her answers now. The only item I remember is something about being willing to hold your love’s hair back as they tossed their cookies.

Very romantic. But very accurate.

What a shite day. It’s not the hypocrisy and consumerism: there’s nothing wrong with Valentine’s cards, nice dinners and a dozen roses. The problem is only doing that once a year because you feel compelled by societal obligation. It’s a shite day because love has become a shite thing: too complicated with too much riding on it. What ever happened to affection? To contentment?

Gone the way of the dodo, the oath of the marriage vow, and a decent macro-brewed American beer. More’s the pity.

Fuggin’ Danes.

I said repeatedly I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for the Superbowl and I meant it. It’s only now, after the fact, it becomes clear how really close Philadelphia did come and what might have been.

. . . amazingly, Owens is breaking free. The clock has only zeros. The noise in the stadium is the solid wail of a siren. His knees are high as he comes all the way back to the left sideline and, there on the mezzanine level, standing in the open booth, Merrill Reese says the words we have heard incessantly since and will hear for the rest of our lives: “They won’t get him. No flags. No flags. No flags. The Eagles win. The Eagles win. The Eagles win the Super Bowl. Philadelphia – get ready for a parade!”

So, instead of just another day on Broad Street, another miserable day with people grousing about what would have been three interceptions by the inexplicably groggy McNabb, about another example of egregious clock management by Andy Reid, there was a parade to authenticate the 27-24 win. Better late than never.

I didn’t feel anything after the loss: too tired, too ready to accept disappointment. This article hammered home the magnitude of missed opportunities. What a drag. The Phillies better do damned well this year. The Red Sox had better win. There had better be a Philly/Boston sports dynasty developing.

That would make it all worthwhile.

Allow me a brief moment of self-congratulatory enthusiasm if you would: today is the third anniversary of this wonderful site. How things have changed since then. In those heady days of early 2002 we were a nation newly at war, I was a man with very little to say.

Maybe things haven’t changed so much.

Just think, in three short years this place has gone from being hosted and linked to an ISP’s granted webspace to being hosted and controlled on its own site. It’s gone through innumerable stylistic changes to the point where I honestly don’t remember what it looked like to begin with. It’s gone from two blogs: one politics, one your typical mumbly jumbly, to whatever mishmashy sort of mess it is today.

Best of all, you occassionally get longer, more coherent posts.

At least when I’ve not been drinking.

So, happy anniversary to my little home on the web. I’d have lots more to say but it’s been such a day that I didn’t even get to read my comics until nearly five o’clock this afternoon. And, yet again, I made a wonderful road trip and never took the damned camera out of the bag. And the great pity is I saw actual hippies actually singing! And I saw John Lennon’s bloodstains on the sidewalk!

OK, neither one of those things is one-hundred percent accurate but there was an eedjit with an acoustic guitar strumming Beatles songs in Imagine circle, which is just west of Strawberry Fields, which is just east of the Dakota where Lennon was shot.

John Lennon, that is. Not Vladimir Ilich. You know, the one who did sing “I Am the Walrus.”

Some thoughts on yesterday:

• Did someone pass a law banning turn signals? I may have mentioned this before but it bugs me every damned time.

• I hereby refuse to turn right on red unless I am either: drunk and have to find a place to take a slash or not drunk but on my way to a choice drinking establishment. I would be perfectly happy if we swapped the apparent ban on turn indicators for a ban on turning right on red. The former is too effective whilst the latter is overly abused.
• I can not muster one ounce of excitement for the Superbowl nor can I determine the cause of this disinterest. Surely the Eagles’ appearance after twenty-odd years ought to be cause for celebrations, laments that I can’t trek to Jacksonville and travel plans to Philadelphia for the post-game riots but I just can’t rally to the moment. Either it’s the two week delay between the conference championships and the big show, the fact that it’s February for chrissakes, or that the NFC Championship game was the real hurdle for the Eagles and that it may be expecting too much for them to conquer the Superbowl this year. Maybe after three or four tries: it seems to take them that long to get it in gear.

It may seem an odd statement but I have had some really good Groundhog Days. Many years ago there was a fine drinking Groundhog evening with some rarely seen pals. Two years ago, despite the Columbia disaster I had a very fine drinking weekend in town.

This year there’s bugger all to do except watch the State of the Union and pray for time to accelerate toward the weekend.

It is a damn shame to wish for the rapid passing of five sevenths of your life on this Earth but that’s the size of things.

And now, the news from Gobbler’s Knob:

HEAR YE! HEAR YE! HEAR YE!

On this Groundhog Day, February 2nd, the year 2005 on Gobbler’s Knob, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, Punxsutawney Phil, King of the Groundhogs, Father of all Marmota, Seer of Seers, Prognosticator of Prognosticators has been summoned by Groundhog President William Cooper. Phil gleefully exited his burrow at 7:31 a.m. to be greeted by his longtime friend and handler, Bill Deeley, who held him high so he could greet the large throng of Faithful Followers. He wished them all a “Happy Groundhog Day.” Bill placed him atop the old oak stump where he surveyed his surroundings. He then turned to President William and in Groundhogese directed him to the scroll which reads:

Natural disasters have been a terrible thing; tsunamis,
downpours, floods, landslides, heavy snowstorms, avalanches,
frigid temperatures, sleet and freezing rain.
They all cause much destruction, suffering and pain.

When it seems like too much with which to cope;
The coming of spring brings us new hope.
Changing seasons is a wonderful thing.

Now it’s Groundhog Day and we think of spring.
Will Spring come early or will it come late?

It’s time for me to prognosticate.
As I study the sun
It’s all about fun.
But I’m sorry to say
I see my shadow today.
When my shadow I see,
Six more weeks of winter there will be!

Guess I’ll have a few more weekends on the slopes after all.

With the events of the past couple of months a lot of time has been spent discussing the family tree. It occurs to me that God has chosen my immediate family line for extinction. There are many reasons I came to this conclusion, most of which I will not discuss here.

Being bored the other day, as I so often am, I took a little test on Yahoo. I’m not entirely sure what the point was but the results were: I’d fall in love with well over one-third of the women I meet while they held little or no interest in me, something around a quarter of the women I meet would fall in love with me while I held little or no interest in them, and only four percent of the women I meet would find a mutual attraction.

Those are pretty damned bad odds regardless of who you are. For someone like myself who cannot be bothered with the vast majority of wasted humanity they’re nigh unsurmountable. Quick calculations will lead you to realize one in every twenty-five women would be as interested in me as I am in them. Given a track record of approximately one new acquaintance every two to two and one half years over the past ten years I’ve only got to wait forty more years to find all twenty-five and have half a decent prospect.

Either I’ve got to get out more or my original theory was right: Natural selection is a bitch.

• Snow! – ’bout gol-danged time we got a real snow storm hereabouts. Even better, it stayed cold but not bitterly cold so the powdery snow actually stayed powdery. If winter sports out west are anything like my experience on the slopes this weekend I may be adding a new destination to my annual travels.

  And, despite the fact that Liberty Mountain is basically a dump it has a pretty killer bar with relatively attractive wait staff and Guinness on tap. I can snowboard and drink Guinness and possibly – albeit rarely – fall down on account of both activities.

  Paradise.

• Iggles! – ’bout gol-danged time we won an NFC championship hereabouts. I fully expected them to lose but uncharacteristically for a Philadelphia sports team they didn’t really try all that hard to collapse. Damned if they’re not going to Jacksonville! Damned if I don’t intend to be in Philly to watch the Superbowl and maybe light the mayor’s car on fire under cover of the expected riots – win or lose.

  Stupid mayor.

• Superbowl! – enough of the cowboy-speak. The Steelers couldn’t pull it out and Cowher ought to hang himself for that bone-headed punt. The Patriots are going to the big game; again. A Turnpike Superbowl would have been grand but I was secretly praying for the Pats vs. the Eagles. The good Lord loves patterns and this gets me one coincidence closer to my dream of a Red Sox vs. Phillies World Series.
• American Football! – Hurrah! The season is nearly over thus putting us all one week closer to the start of baseball season. Thank God.

Everybody else has a nifty new design. Hell, Lileks changes his every damned week. So, I decided it’s time to do something a bit less psychotic twenty-something and more adventurously mature thirty-something.

I wanted steam punk but couldn’t find any fonts or graphics that made me happy.

This makes me happy.

And in other news, mammals now officially rule the planet. At some point we even ate dinosaurs.

That too makes me happy.

Funerals generally have nothing whatsoever to do with the dead. They’re all about the living: the selfish, worthless, annoying living.

I am happy to say that I had more fun at this funeral than any other I’ve been to. Naturally the shindig was about those of us left behind but I could feel that the entire affair was a celebration of my grandfather’s life. Maybe it’s because he suffered so terribly for so long. For whatever reason, tears were few and, at least in my case, any urge to weep wasn’t because of my loss or because of pity for my mother, aunts and uncles but because I was so happy Grandpop was well-remembered and went so calmly and that everyone bore up so well.

In my family we never do anything easy. Dying’s no different. But for a man who had been paralyzed for most of my life and entirely bedridden for the past several years he slipped away about as gently as one could have wished.

If you knew my grandfather you’d know why I had this thought after the viewing: Grandpop was travelling the great highway to the sky and Saint Peter was standing atop a shining cloud yelling down, “Yo, Ed! Take your time. You got two god-damned seconds!”

Man, heaven’s going to be a good time.

There are days when I feel old. I had pretty much gotten used to being 30 and gaining another year didn’t seem like a big deal. Going from your 20s to your 30s seems like a big deal. Ending the first year of your third decade shouldn’t affect you as much. Oddly though, filling out 31 as my age on various and sundry surveys and the like is bugging me.

Maybe it’s just that I’m sick, it’s colder than Jesse Ventura at a gay bar outside and it’s the dad-blasted holidays.

What a weird week-end. The week to come holds the promise of innumerable peculiarities.

It’s a little eerie to hear the cold wind whistle outside your kitchen door when you get the word that your grandfather has finally died.

Then again, if you had known my grandfather and the state he’s been in for uncountable years you’d probably think, with me, that he’s been dead for a long time – his heart just hadn’t stopped yet.

The wonderful thing is that now we won’t have to face the reality of a blasted body and we can instead begin to create a memorial in our minds to the whole of the man. He and my grandmother were married for more than 60 years. They had six children and eleven grandchildren. He served in World War II and worked hard after the war in a variety of respectable jobs. He always put food on the table and, even if he was unpleasantly gruff from time to time, he genuinely loved his family.

If his only monument is our large, loud, happily scrapping family it’s still the best monument to any person I can think of.

One by one the older generations pass away, leaving us only memories as a tenuous link to the distant past. We’re all patients in the terminal ward but knowing the fact doesn’t make it any less difficult when one or another of us slips away.

Oh well. C’est la vie. Here’s to grandpop: Edward Hagarty, Sr. May you rest in peace; you have certainly earned it.

Today is the feast of the Immaculate Conception. When I was a child I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how Mary conceived on December 8 and gave birth on December 25. Seemed a bit short but then again, when your baby is the Son of God I expect he can take a miss on the whole gestation thing. It was many years before someone told me December 8 actually celebrated the Immaculate Conception of Mary – that is, the beginning of Mary’s mother’s pregancy. Oddly, we celebrate the conception of the Lord’s mother and the birth of the Lord but not the birth of the former or the conception of the latter. I guess that would give us Arnhem Day for Mary’s birth and, my personal favorite, St. Patrick’s Day for Christ’s conception.

One thing I was never confused about was that my mother was especially devoted to Mary and that, to Mom, today was a particularly special day. Again, only later I found out why. The story is long and sordid and involves the innumerable hassles I caused before I was even born but the upshot of the entire thing is that today is the day I started stirring in the womb. Being a bit of a late bloomer and a late riser I took my sweet time about being born: that didn’t happen for two days.

So, this is the beginning of my birthday feast.

Today I relax. Tomorrow begins the mad dash across the Pond. Friday I’ll be catatonic and hopefully drunk and Saturday I can start to enjoy myself.

I hope you all have a very happy My Birthday (See what a nice fellow I am!). I’d like to remind you that as of Friday you have only two weeks and one day to buy me stuff. If I don’t have anything to say tomorrow I’ll blow great honking rasperries at you on my return from the Emerald Isle – even though I’ll be the one wallowing in misery.

After a very pleasant evening of too much drinking and not enough sleep some evil bastard on my radio announced that it’s December First.

Christ. December 1. Already.

I do not think I am ready for this. In my current state of absolute apathy I can not muster any excitement for the month/time of year/upcoming adventures. Let’s run the list:

• In eight days I leave the country for a short jaunt to Dublin. Much hilarity will – hopefully – ensue. Of course, having spoken of this potentiality: serious injury, snow, ice and/or rain, the flaming destruction of airports/airplanes, etc will surely prevent me from actually going anywhere.

  Oddly, I am at peace with that. It’s just the way things are.

• In nine days I’ll be thirty-one years old – wrap your mind around that one – thirty-one friggin’ years old and not one damned thing accomplished since I turned thirty years old.

  Or, for that matter, since birth.

• In sixteen days Black 47 plays again in Harrisburg. Hopefully I can get tickets (like that ought to be difficult). They’ll play some good stuff and some bad stuff and probably raise the roof with the tune about that damned commie. I like that tune.
• In twenty-four days it’ll be Christmas with all its attending hassles and miseries. Only one, solitary soul has made any mention of what they want for Christmas. Fine. All of you lazy buggers are getting NOTHING. I will spend the Christmas money on myself. I deserve it.

  That’s THREE eight-day WEEKS you useless buggers. Go forth. Buy me things.

• In thirty-one days it will be a New Year. Another year over, another year closer to death and another year stuck in neutral with my foot on the gas. I suppose I’ll have to do a retrospective of titanic 2004 at some point. Bah.

And strange as it may sound, I am perfectly at peace.

The slight hangover and decided shrinking of my normal sleep cycle may have something to do with this. Sorry, I forgot to take my morning dose of bourbon.

Not really, but I couldn’t think of anything else to bellow.

And boy, do I feel like bellowing.

Thanksgiving was, well, meh. The day itself is always grand fun: parade in the morning, madness and insanity while people try to cook midday, and finally the big meal and catatonic conversation in the evening. Lovely. The big drag was that after Thanksgiving Day the only people I saw were my own immediate family and my grandmother.

If it weren’t for my grandmother I’d have hitch-hiked home. She, at least, is something different and entertaining.

All in all, not a bad weekend: went to the Constitution Center again, went to see Titanic stuff at Franklin Institute.

At least I got to sleep in a lot. I needed that.

I have remarked many times on how very peculiar a year 2004 has been and promises still to be. As I think back it occurs to me to give thanks in accordance with the big day approaching for the many good things this year:

• For finally mastering the art of exiting a ski lift on a snowboard thereby exponentially increasing my winter enjoyment – even if I did break a rib having too much fun.

• For the wherewithal to travel far and wide this year and all the grand people and things I have seen in: Washington DC, Boston, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Chattanooga, Miami, Key West and Rader, Tennesee. We will withold judgement on Dublin for another three weeks.
• For many beautiful days of baseball: watching the Phillies at home on a sunny Father’s Day, the Phillies and the Red Sox in Fenway on a gorgeous June afternoon, the Marlins at home from an air conditioned skybox on a muggy August night, and the Orioles in Camden Yards in the shade on a boiling August afternoon.
• For the Bell in Hand, McGillin’s, O’Rorkes, the Generals Bar, the Livery and all the other watering holes that make life happy and complete.
• For the victory of the forces of light against the staid defenders of the failed past.
• For loud goddamned music and many pints of beer at venues all around this great country.
• For the AL division series, the ALCS, the World Series and the complete and utter collapse of the top two winningest teams in baseball; clearing the way for a deliriously happy October Wednesday.
• For the delightful collection of madmen, misfits, and oddballs I am proud to call my friends and family.

Remember, there are only 30-odd more days to buy me Christmas presents.

To everyone out there in Intar-net-web-land:

Happy Thanksgiving.

Want to know what sort of twisted monkey I am? Tomorrow I catch a plane for Miami and will probably spend my weekend in Key West. The weather forecast is low-80s during the day, 70s at night with scattered showers. Typical weather.

Here, it might snow Thursday night.

I am inordinately depressed. I’ll be stuck in the warm sunshine while missing the first snowfall of the season.

This sucks. This is an incredible bite in the arse. I don’t want to go.

It’s a queer feeling. Knowing from the fourth pitch that the Red Sox would win and yet all the time not allowing yourself to say it out loud. Waiting. Waiting for the inevitable collapse. Waiting for the Cardinals’ bats to wake up. Waiting for a Buckner-style error. Waiting for a Bucky Fucking Dent homer. Waiting . . .

Waiting . . .

Three outs to go.

Come on Foulke. Come on baby.

Two outs to go.

Just a couple more.

One out to go.

Oh hell!

Goddamn! What a beautiful play! Waitaminit . . . was that it?!

Of course, in retrospect it all makes perfect sense. We should have seen it at the time. It was all as inevitable as the collapse anyone with sense was waiting for. Naturally nobody will admit to it. Everyone will happily crow about the ‘Team of Destiny’ and how they knew it was the year. I may not have been a member of Red Sox Nation very long but I’ve followed the Phillies since I was a kid and I can deal with reality.

In the end, they had to make it all look easy.

It’s all so obvious now:

• They had to go through the Yankees to get there. That’s a given.

• Naturally they’d be the only team in postseason history to come back from a 3-0 deficit.
• Of course a fellow who led the team in strikeouts would rediscover his power and be the deciding factor in game after game.
• Why wouldn’t a pitcher who’d been benched due to piss poor performance make the start in all three clinching games?
• Certainly they’d have to play the best team in Major League Baseball to win it all.
• Isn’t it clear that they’d hold the middle of the lineup for the best team in the MLB to virtually no hits and a .190 team batting average overall?
• Who wouldn’t have thought you could pitch even more dominantly with your ankle sewn together?

The list goes on and on, ad infinitum.

Maybe there is something to this ‘Team of Destiny’ bollocks after all. Maybe the 21^st Century will be the Red Sox Century in the way the 20^st was the Yankees Century.

I’m still waiting for the Red Sox/Phillies World Series. Then I can die happy.

Does a Patriots/Eagles Superbowl count?

That post last night was the 666^th on this site.

I said from the very beginning that 2004 was special, that great things were afoot. Now look where we are: Iraq is being rebuilt, Afghanistan is holding elections, the last stand of the 1960s will very probably lose on Tuesday, Arafat may be dying, Saddam is in jail, Castro is incapacitated and the Red Sox just won the World Series.

Things could go either way: either the Apocalypse is nigh or Utopia’s right around the corner.

86 years “are a myth, they never happened.”

I don’t know what to think. Like Bill Simmons said after Game 7 of the ALCS, “I keep waiting for them to say there’s a Game [5].”

A sweep.

A damned sweep.

I wish this stuff happened in the middle of the day when I am even partially awake so I can comprehend what’s happening.

God is good.

Nothing happened in 1918 but the end of the Great War. Nothing’s happened since.

Jesus.

. . . until the end of the game.

It’s bad luck to draw any conclusions from that fact.

I’m just saying. That’s all.

I swear to you I just sat here and said, “Come on Jesus. Crank one out of the park on the first ups.”

Damned if he didn’t hear me.

Jesus will sit at the feet of Schilling on the great Bunker Hill Mount Olympus.

Is this the year?

An excellent comment below makes the argument. Still, my natural cynicism and contrariness forces me to point out that at this point in the ALCS the presumed winner’s offense and defense fell apart and, for the only time in history, a team rallied from a 3-0 deficit to win a postseason series.

It’s been done. We all saw it. We all cried and yelled and prayed and hoped and it happened. Is there any reason to think that Cardinals fans aren’t doing the same things right now? Incense and peppermints and the ritual slaughter of pairs of red stockings in great street conflagrations?

Still, a sweep. A World Series sweep. By Boston. Away. Against the best team in Major League Baseball.

Think of it.

If it were spring I’d find me a cardinal and try to divine the future in its entrails.

Hey, it couldn’t hurt.

Writing is an odd thing. Some days you’re so full of ideas your fingers can’t move fast enough. Other days, you’ve suddenly got nothing to say. Sometimes the dry spell lasts nearly a month (*cough* Bampf *cough*).

After last week’s wildly exhilarating highs and lows I’ve been so worn out I haven’t had time to really concentrate on this week’s exhilarating highs and lows. Besides, except for a small blip in Game 1 of the World Series the contest between the Red Sox and Yankees/Cardinals hasn’t even seemed competitive since Game 6 of the AL Series. Now, I suspect the probable one-two punch of Pedro tonight and D-Lowe tomorrow night might make for some excitement but precious little real suspense.

Unless the World Series is a reverse of the AL Series and the Cardinals’ bats wake up on the same schedule the Yankees’ went to sleep.

Bah. Faith is running high, but I’m a natural contrarian. There’s less pleasure to be gained by watching a winning team than there is by hoping and praying year after year for just a ray of light: hence my love of the Red Sox, Phillies and Eagles. It’s why, I think, Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees fans are such pricks. The thrill is gone, baby. When a team is that good most of the time – excepting the occasional slumps – there’s just nothing to do but gloat. No hope. No suspense. No sudden surprises.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the teams don’t make the fans pricks, maybe the fans were always pricks and thus gravitated to the teams.

Hey, I wear my loser colors proudly.

Oddly enough, there’s an election in seven days. We’ll have a World Series Champion and a President. All in the space of three days – barring lawsuits – at the beginning of next week.

I suppose I’ll have something to say about the election once baseball has cleared my field of vision.

As if that will happen. Particularly if the impossible occurs.

The Cardinals, eh? I guess that’s about right. They are, after all, the best team in baseball. Still, I would have loved to see Clemens and Martinez chip away at each other. I guess we’ll see.

In a more general sense, I thank Baseball Jesus for this past couple of weeks. For the first time in a long time I thought about the upcoming election and suddenly realized we were just under two weeks out. Since there’s so very much at stake, the anticipation would have been unbearable – if not for the delightful distractions of post-season baseball.

Hell, by the time the Series is over I’ll only have to suffer through a couple of days and one very long night and then we’ll know who’s in charge (barring any last-minute Democrat shenanigans). Then I can relax and either prepare to sail blissfully through four more years or suffer and rant and rave for four long years.

It’s a knock-down, drag out, fight to the finish: the Boston Brahmin vs. the Texas Cowboy. Pity the Astros didn’t get into the Series; it would have made a nice parallel. Although in that case, given who I root for, I’d have to hope life doesn’t mirror baseball.

At least until Saturday night, I mean.

Here’s one for you, not quite a ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ headline but I liked it:

Screen capped from a ticket broker’s site late this morning. I have been, and still am, considering dropping a grand or two on tickets to the Series at Fenway. It’s just too perfect. If things go to Game Six, I may yet.

It’s a beautiful thing, going to the World Series. If I weren’t so wrecked from two nights of chewed fingernails, too many gin and tonics and not enough sleep I’d be happier than I’ve been since 1993. Can you imagine how terrible it is to celebrate alone in the middle of the night when you want to kiss every pretty girl in sight and gobsmack the first wanker you see wearing Yankees paraphenalia?

I guess there’s something to all the superstition after all. Last year the Sox lost when I wore my ballcap. This year I didn’t wear it for the first three and did for the last four. I thought about taking a shower mid-way last night and then thought, “They’re winning. If I change my clothes it might change the game.” Odd. But, the Babe’s house in Roxbury got knocked down a month or so ago and the Dropkick Murphys revived “Tessie,” the old Royal Rooters battle-cry.

Should we exhume Honey-Fitz and NufCed and send them to the Series? Would it help?

Still, I don’t buy into the ‘team of destiny’ stuff. I don’t hold much with the whole destiny concept and I think you mostly generate your own luck. Besides, it’s bad for the team. Anyone who doubts that the Yankees could have easily won that game, even with two outs in the bottom of the Ninth, is an idiot.

Every team should play every game as if it’s Game 7. Even up 8-0 in the Fourth you should play like you’re behind. Play conservatively aggressive. The Sox did that; the Yankees did not.

Notice who’s going to the Big Show.

I can’t believe it. I don’t think it will sink in until sometime midway through the Series. There are no more doubts.

1918 was a very good year. 2004’s not bad either.

I ask myself, are these things real? Did they happen? Are they being inacted today? Or are they the fancies of the imagination in forgetful reverie? — Sam Watkins

That is exactly how I feel today. I still can’t believe I saw it. I blacked out for a little bit in the top of the Ninth and came to while Foulke was battling for his outs. My heart was thundering so loudly in my chest I could barely hear the game.

I want to hug [David Ortiz for Game 4]. I want to get [Millar, Varitek, Cabrera and Bellhorn] drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small man and lick him. — Henry Adams

Pity it was after midnight.

Not that there weren’t some scary moments. The Yankee Buddha giving up a homer in the Fourth. A-no, really, this is my natural girly stride with the arms and the flailing and the knocking the ball out of the pitcher’s glove-Rod in the Eighth.

But it all came out in the wash. I’ll let the good old Dropkick Murphys sum up this rollercoaster of a week for you:

Boston, you know we love you madly
Hear the crowd roar to your sound
Don’t blame us if we ever doubt you
You know we couldn’t live without you
Boston, you are the only, only, only
Don’t blame us if we ever doubt you
You know we couldn’t live without you
Red Sox, you are the only, only, only

Game 7!!!!

This guy lays it all on the line. If I had half the history, half the writing talent and ten times the time he’s got I might have tried to put feelings into words like this.

Apparently we got out of this mess. I’m pretty sure I blacked out. I’m not even kidding.

(My last three notes of the game: “13th inning oh my God Varitek and Wakefield” … “Stand up sit down bad back” … “Central nervous system shutting down.” If they found me dead outside Fenway after the game, they would have looked at this thing and assumed I had died of natural causes.)

By the time we were rallying again in the 14th, Francona needed to go to the bullpen for 35,000 new fans. We were spent. We were cooked. We were finished. Even with Johnny D on second and Manny on first, with two outs and Hendu-Hobbs-Ghandi at the plate, we couldn’t rise to the moment. . .

Go read it all.

Ain’t it the truth – and not just for Yankees fans.

I went to bed after the 11^th really not knowing what I would read about in the morning. After Francona’s Grady Little moment, after the stupid sacrifice attempt by Cabrera that ended up with Damon tagged out at second, after Damon’s damned-near-an-infield-fly-rule bunt, after watching the Sox struggle through inning after inning trying to stay alive I really didn’t know. That’s aggravating.

My friend says she can’t sleep. I can sleep, I just dream about the Red Sox all night.

I gotta tell you, I think Johnny Damon is the only man I’ve ever seen who actually looks good with long hair but given his performance thus far – excepting a clinch hit last night – I think we ought to try a reverse Samson and see if a shorn Damon can do any better.

It’s killing me, but it’s suddenly a very good way to die.

Jaysus. That was damn near Francona’s Grady Little moment.

But Pedro pulled it out. Watching that man pitch in mid to late innings is like watching Mitch Williams back in the day. Will he be the hero or the goat?

Even when the sonuvabitch pulls it out it’s still a nail biter.

I was growing comfortable with my depressed numbness. Now there’s hope.

Hope is more painful than despair.

I’ve never liked the feeling of being in love: I hate the butterflies, the sleepless nights, the hassles. This . . .

This is worse.

If you don’t hear anything from me for about a week don’t worry too much. If it lasts past next Thursday you better come and make sure I’ve not dehydrated myself by weeping at the kitchen table.

I’m already apoplectic and it’s only the bottom of the first.

I have hope though, the Star Wars lead might be what it takes.

Schilling is a god.

The Sox will drop one in NY, one at Fenway and come back to NY 3-2. They’ll lose the sixth game and force a seventh.

What happens then, I don’t know. I don’t even want to think about it.

These predictions will change almost hourly depending on:

1. My blood alcohol level
2. My fragile mental state
3. Which side of the bed I get up on
4. John Kerry’s e-ville^TM eye beams

I can’t watch baseball anymore. It’s like bad crack: you know it’s bad for you but you can’t stop smoking the shit.

God damn the Red Sox.

You watch, they’re going to lose this goddamned game after being up 6-1 and then I only give them 50/50 to even get to the ALCS.

What a bunch of goddamned schmucks. Worse than the Phillies.

Dammit.

Update: I don’t take back anything I said. God damn the Red Sox. It must be me. I hate surprises, despise waiting and can’t stand suspense. My poor heart can’t take this. Someone just put me to sleep until the World Series is over and then tell me who wins.

Looks like Space is open for business. SpaceShipOne made it well over the required height in far less than the required time and ought to claim the X-Prize whenever the check gets written. With Virgin Galactic ready to sign contracts on the dotted line I’d say we’re off and running.

Too bad we live in such jaded times. This is an achievement every bit as momentous – if not necessarily as impressive – as Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. A new era has begun; even if nobody realizes it yet.

Chicken wings, great quantities of beer and a decent flick is one definition of a good day. An old-fashioned shave and haircut at a proper barbershop with hot lather and a straight razor, followed by lunch at the counter in a 1950s corner grill joint on a sunny, blue sky sort of day is another.

It’s all about the little things.

Today it’s a mad dash to and through Boston to see a show. Can we really land at Logan Airport, go crosstown to Dorchester Ave, eat something and be in the shadow of the Green Monster on Lansdowne Street in less than two hours?

We’re going to find out.

Let there be rejoicing throughout the land! We are only one step away of expunging baseball’s greatest mistake and cleansing her of filthy Canadian influence. Fortunately the baseball gods didn’t further exacerbate their original expansion error by sending the Expos to Mexico. No, Washington, my most hated of all ‘tons’, gets a baseball team again.

I don’t like DC but I would rather hop the Metro to see a game in Washington than run the gauntlet to Baltimore and watch the horrendous Orioles. At least when I was growing up the Senators were gone so I never associated them with the redneck fans of my youth. The Baltimore Colts, Dallas Cowboys, Washington Redskins and Baltimore Orioles are forever ruined for me. The Colts somewhat redeemed themselves by moving to Indianapolis but they still need to change their name and team colors. Who thinks of colts and Indiana? The only horses out there are workhorses. I know. I have pictures.

I would also like to point out the heinous error of allowing a team such as the Expos to exist at all. For one thing, nobody even knows what their name refers to. For another, their website is bilingual. I think this headline: Les Marlins compl