One of Those Days

You ever have one of those days? We all do. I'm not talking about the my dog got hit by the garbage truck, grandma's turning tricks on the corner of Howard and Pratt and your sister just lost her virginity and got pregnant by the 25 year old loser you graduated with who did nothing but work on his 1988 Camaro back in school. I'm talking about the average everything seems to be going wrong day. That day where there's no big thing that pisses you off but a bunch of little things annoy the hell out of you. Prepare for a rant.

First, the office smelled like burnt rubber from the time I got to work this morning till lunch, took a two hour break, and then returned promptly at two and stayed for the rest of the day. It must have had a doctor's appointment or something. I have no idea where it originated from considering the office is new but my bet's on either the copier was engulfed in flame or an old fashion tire fire. If I didn't have a shit load of work to get done I may have stopped to enjoy the fumes in a vain attempt to get high. However, as luck would have it, I had to push through the enveloping smell and work through it. I wonder if anyone else smelled it? I didn't even think to ask. Maybe I have been working too hard.

Second, I took three shits between the hours of 1 pm and 8 pm. This may not seem that bad to you, but it's highly irregular for me. I have a tender ass. One that I baby as much as possible. The ass tissue - toilet paper to the laymen - at the office is good for one wipe session only. Any more and prepare to use band aids because you will be bleeding. I've often debated whether to have my own roll of TP with me at work and today was the closing argument. Two times were at the office and once at home. I like going at home. I'll hold it to go at home. But by the time I arrived home today and was forced to deuce number three, I might as well have been wiping with a two by four. It was like the civil war back there. North, my hand, verse South, my ass, and just like history, my ass ended up taking a beating.

Third, and this one is truly the shit icing on the crap cake, VT's men's basketball, who until tonight were in first place in the ACC, lost to NC State. NC State is the last place team in the ACC in case you were wondering. I actually had a premonition about the game while I gingerly sat in the driver's seat on the commute home. I told myself, the way things are going today, Tech will probably lose tonight just to finish things off. And look they did. The hope of pulling out a decent day was mauled by a pack of wolves.

The only thing to do now - other than drink myself into oblivion, which would automatically create another bad day tomorrow - is to head to bed and thank god for another day. Today may have sucked and tomorrow might too, but I'm optimistic enough to think that one day things will turn themselves around.

Even Frosty Couldn't Take This

First, let me apologize for the lack of post over the past couple of weeks. Works been stupid and I took a trip to Vermont for most of last week to snowboard at Killington. To the five of you who read this, I'm sorry. I'll try to pick things up over the next couple of weeks.

Second, I'm going to keep this post short because: a) I have a broken finger on my left hand that still hurting, b) I cut the tip of my right pointer finger tuning my board over the weekend and the band aid is annoying to type with. Would I have injured myself if I had been sober when I undertook the wax job? Probably not. But, honestly, who waxes a board sober? I mean, it's just not done in this day and age. And finally, c) I want to talk about the Killington trip but recaps tend to be boring, self gratifying ego boosters designed solely to make the writer's life look more interesting then it actually is. I don't have to prove how cool I am. I have a blog. Enough said. Besides, I've got enough people blowing smoke up my ass on a daily basis, I don't need to do it to myself. So, I'm going to leave out all the sex, drugs and rock-n-roll stuff that comes natural to a ski house packed with 18 mid-twenty-somethings and copious amounts of alcohol for an extended weekend and instead talk about how fucking cold it was.

I wish I could have seen my nose. The part that I see when I crossed my eyes still looked normal. Maybe a little more red than normal but that just meant the blood's still flowing. However, everything in nasal land was not right. An invisible monster was slowly eating at my nose. His breath was hot but his bite was painless and I never saw it coming.

"Dude, what the hell happened to your nose?" J addressed me as we stood at the bottom of Bear Mountain ready to get back in the lift line after a long run.

"What do you mean?" Was my reply. Everything felt fine. My face had gotten pretty cold at the end of the last run but I didn't think anything of it.

"The end of your nose is completely white."

I took my hand out of my glove and felt the end of my nose. It was hard as a rock and had a texture similar to very dry skin but wetter. Visions of the discovery channel and arctic explorers with black noses or no nose at all flashed through my head as I continued to play with the odd shaped lump located where the fleshy tip of my nose formally resided.

It seemed that the negative five degree high that day had caught up to me. At that point in the morning it may have been more like negative ten but I couldn't say for sure. The night before it was negative twenty two without the wind chill. That was the coldest weather I've ever been outside in. It was bone chilling cold just standing still, but traveling downhill at forty mile an hour made it nothing short of unbearable. Which left me, being the smart guy that I am, without a face mask to contend with the frozen air.

My nose had literally flash frozen. The cell walls bursting as ice crystal expanded and punctured through the membrane. Mitochondria and ribosomes spilling over their borders only to be imprisoned the next instant in ice. The first layers of skin had died an instant death at the hand of old man winter and only thing that may have saved the others was my hand stimulating the region back to life. The stark white faded back to blood red and I decided that instead of become a discovery special myself, I better get my ass inside the lodge and warm up my sniffer before it revolts and leaves me for the greener pastures of the afterlife.

Long story short, my nose hasn't fallen off as of yet and the skin resembles that of burn victim in the area of damage. To remedy the situation I bought a mask in the lodge, which turned out to be one of my personal best purchases of all time. So, if there's a lesson to be learned from my blunder, it's that if weather outside is frightful, at least buy as face mask. Bundle up, my friends, because it's cold outside and you could lose a finger, a toe or a nose.

Down with Oh DP?

Anything can happen at a bar. Loves found and lost. Friendships formed and broken. A random heated fistfight, an intellectual debate of seismic proportions, a celebration of a hard earned victory or accomplishment, or a sympathy party to ease the pangs of defeat. All these can happen at any time, sometimes all at the same time. The constants are general drunkenness and casual idiocy, but it's a bar for Christ's sake. However, one of my personal favorites, and it is a rarity, is the dynamic prolific conversation.

A dynamic prolific conversations can spring up any time, but it seems they're more apt to in the presents of alcohol. They don't require a certain number of people, save at least two, and often involve groups. They can be about anything from the wildly extravagant theories to the simplest and most mundane hustle and bustle of everyday life. The main stipulation, which defines this type of conversation, is that it can't have sides. If people are of opposite views, a debate is sure to emerge. Another fun form of conversation but one I don't find quite as fulfilling. I think the lack of winner or goal, yet the willingness by the participants to genuinely interact and immerse is what set the DP conversation (as I'll be referring to it henceforth) on the highest level of pleasure you can achieve without touching yourself.

Now, I know that DP conversation can happen anywhere. Most of the time, they seemed to be fostered in small groups sitting and drinking over dinner, a game or just plain sitting and drinking. But having one at the bar adds an element of exclusion that brings everyone on the inside closer together. Feeling the world slip by, time standing still in that one perfect moment, forms bonds and brings happiness that are not easily forgotten.

So, to all, I hope you have a DP conversation sometime soon. And when your in that immaculate bit of history, let a twinge grow in the back of your mind of the words I've written here. Silently thank me and let yourself appreciate, with new clear sight, the rest of the chat until the moment passes. Then order another drink, hold it up to the light in a fitting cheers to my indomitable intellect and pass it to the guy next you because he's probably me and you've left me out of another conversation.

Know How I Know You're Gay?

How someone can not love music is something that I’ll never understand. I live with a person like that and I still don’t understand. If I had the talent, music would be my life. I often think about ways that it could be since my physical attributes lack in the subject but I have some ideas. Either way, how a person isn’t moved by music is a greater mystery than the origin of the species.

Know how I know that I’m gay? Because I listen to Coldplay. That’s right, I really like them. In fact, the event that inspired this in-prompt-to foray was the broadcast of Coldplay’s VH1 story teller’s episode on INHD. I might even stay up for Dave Matthews at 12am. I’m intrigued, though more like captivated, by the stories of those who’ve made it in the music industry. I want to know what made them successful, what inspired them, how they came up with a certain chorus. I don’t think that I could be one one-hundredth as successful if I knew their secret, because I couldn’t. I can’t even play the guitar right now because my middle finger on my left hand, the hand that plays the strings since I’m a righty, is broken and when I tried to play tonight it hurt more than a bit. At the heart of it, I just want to know how they came up with great music – music that fills a room with harmony and melody so perfectly in tune that you barely realize they are separate.

It’s sad to say, but I could have cried sitting alone on the couch listening to story tellers, not because it was Coldplay, but because of the overwhelming emotion that music invokes in me. I can’t remember the last time I cried. I think it all starts from childhood. Raised in a house where playing the piano was a legacy, I began exploring music at a young age, thanks largely in part to my mother. Breezing through the boring history of my musical career, I began my training on piano, moved to trumpet, because that makes sense, and finally settled on guitar, which I’ve been playing to this day. As I’ve moved on from instrument to instrument, I’ve slowly lost the theory behind the notes and chords but had a great obligation to study those things. I feel sorry for people who didn’t grow up in musical homes. They may have missed out on a part of life that’s so fulfilling it can take your entire life to figure out.

One goal, not a new year’s resolution, was to write more songs, and I’ll be damned if I don’t. Really, I need to carry a pad of paper around with me everywhere I go because I come up with lyrics and thoughts that need to be written down but are forgotten by the time I get home. I’m not sure how jotting notes while driving on the beltway at rush hour will go over but I’m willing to try. Maybe those damn hippies did get it right. There’s a power in music, with or without the help herb, that no other creative outlet or appreciation can hope to match. Flower power may have turned to power broker but I’m still here and always will be.

The Old House

This is one of my attempts at serious writing. I apologize in advance. Please feel free to verbal kick me in the balls next time you see me:

The door swung open with the creakiness that comes with age, waking dust settled on the floor long ago and turning it into clouds filtering the light that gently wafted through the bare windows. Ryan stood in the doorway of the tiny cape cod unable to traverse the threshold he had past through so many times. The memories came flooding back, though patchy and incomplete. The nights alone and huddled in his room while his mother pulled the night shift at the local diner. The bitter winter days without a working heater when his mother would take him into the blanket she had draped across her shoulders like a female hen sheltering her chick and read him stories until he fell asleep. The nights he had snuck through the back door after a night of a raucous drinking with his high school buddies while his mother slept, exhausted, upstairs.

A wave of resolve stirred him and the feet that once felt nailed to the timbers of the front porch he stood on broke free of their bonds. The ancient hardwood floor yawed and groaned under the weight of each step, begging for release from the pressure they had once yearned for in their younger days. Footprints trailed his pace, echoing his steps like the ghosts that had haunted him ever since that day. He wished that they weren’t there, that no one would know, that he could be alone. One day he would join his ghosts, but who would he haunt.

An old cobweb blocked the stairs to the second floor, and Ryan brushed them away like a man trying to find his way through a heavy fog. Nothing could survive in this house, not even a spider. He ascended the stairs where he sat the time the police came to the house, unable to quench the tears that streamed like glisten rain drops down his tiny cheeks and convulsions that turned his insides on end. He grabbed the worn handrail to brace himself against the overbearing dank atmosphere that hung thick in the hallway. Shuffling across the floor like he did as a child, he approached a door, formerly a castle gate, and pushed it open without ceremony. The door could no longer shield him from the troubles of the world. Exposed and defenseless on the plane, he was an open target for the scum of the world.

The room was just as he’d left it, though it seemed smaller now, as if it shrunk with time. The bed frame, covered in a thin layer of dust that replaced the sheets, was nestled into the far corner framed by a single window, with the dresser opposing it on the other wall next to closet. There were still a few hangers left on the closet bar, a moment frozen in time like a picture. Without hesitation, Ryan moved to the closet, the motivation of a child on Christmas morning propelling him into frenzy, and searched the floorboards until he found one that was loose. Slowly, he pulled a small unassuming box from the hole left in the wall and sat on the floor, his pants covered in dust, cradling it like he had done in what seemed like another life. For a split second he was five again – no sense of fear, loss, loneliness or abandonment, only the pure joy of an innocence that can only be felt by children. Little by little, he carefully opened the box and unfolded its contents. The photograph he clasped in one hand was color faded but discernible. Staring back at him were the faces of a young man and a boy wearing a baseball cap. Tears welled in his eyes as a piece of his memory slipped softly into place. He could see his father again.

Tap for the Cap

Sometimes the most mundane of daily activities can produce the most surreal situations.

So I hop into the car after leaving work to head home and I realize that I need gas. Only a slight inconvience, I took it in stride and re-routed my course home to pass the nearest Shell Station. Traffic's light and I make it to the gas station with plenty of time and gas to spare. Once the tank has been topped off, I reclaim my rightful seat behind the wheel, start the engine, put the car in gear and take off with a whoosh of acceleration.

As I'm waiting for traffic to clear allowing me to make a right and continue on my way, I hear a clunk come from the back of the truck just before I pull into traffic. The sound wasn't one of some part breaking and the truck was running fine. It was more of the sound of something hitting the exterior of the truck. If I hadn't been in my normal state of preoccupation, I might have stopped and checked the truck out before entering the road. As it was, I was a half a block way before my brain had finally registered the sound and decided it might be a good idea to check it out. I followed the protical handed down to me by the man upstairs and checked the side view mirror in an attempt to locate the source of the sound. As luck would have it I didn't find the source of the sound in my mirror and instead saw that I had forgotten to put the gas cap back on.

That's when it all hit me. The man walking out of the gas station as I pulled away had seen the unattached cap and had tapped the back of my truck in an attempt to bring it to my attention and possibly to get me to stop and take care of it. The brain was back on the job and deducing like nothing had ever happend. Grateful, I pulled into the next the parking lot I came across, which was a block from the gas station, and put the cap in is proper place. As I'm twisting the final revolution to drive the cap home, a man drives up to my truck, rolling down the window as he slows to a stop. I recongize him as the man who was walking across the gas station parking lot as I left.

"I've lost three or four of those things," he begins in good but heavily accented english. He's a man of middle eastern decent driving a beat up toyota corrolla.

"Yeah, thanks for letting me know about that," I responded in a truthful tone. It really was a nice thing that he did. Satisfied the cap is properly secured, I walk around the back of the truck towards the driver's side door.

"Let me know if you ever want to sell that," he says as I pass his car.

I stopped and stared back at him blankly. Sell what? The gas tank cap? My shirt? My body? What the hell was this guy getting at? I don't normally get propositioned, for anything, in the parking lot of a taco bell. I couldn't figure it out and the grin on his face was only making me feel more uncomfortable. I guess he could read the confusion on my face because he repeated himself.

"Let me know if you want to sell it," he said, this time gesturing towards my truck with his hand. "I'm right down the street past the McDonalds."

"Oh, ok," the anxiety must have drained from my face like a plunged toilet. "I'll make sure I do that." I gave him the thumbs up, my only defense against confusing foreign people, as he turned his chariot around and drove away.

I stood for a minute in the empty parking lot, unable to do anything but shake my head. What made him think that I wanted to sell my car? How was I supposed to know what he was talking about. Either I need to become more intuitive, or someone's got some 'splaining to do.

The Lack of Scare

Lately, I've been jonesing(?) to watch a good scary movie. The problem is that I don't feel like they make good scary movies any more. What happend to the good old days of freddy, jason, Aliens, and The Shining? Sure, some of those aren't technically good movies, but the first time I saw them I was scared shitless. I can still vividly remember, while in middle school, sitting in the basement of Adam's house, the lights turned off with nothing to see by but the glow of the television, watching New Nightmare. We had seen it earlier that year at the movies, snuck into the theater after our movie had ended, and it still terrorized my dreams for years to come. Gremlins scared me for life. I couldn't go into a room without the lights being on. I'd take the first steps into my dark bedroom with trepidation, working my way with trembling hands and unstead footsteps towards the light switch, each night before I got into bed. It was/is awesome.

However, now, I feel like no movie can strike that type of fear in me and, being realistic, I don't expect them to. I'm older now and things, especially movies, shouldn't effect me as much as they did when I was a kid. Maybe it's not the movies then, it's me. I guess the movies always sucked - that freddy was more laughable than scary, that "it" looks more like a retarded clown on acid than he did evil, that the special effects of the 80's looked like something a D&D kid constructed in his backyard - but despite all that, I still feel like they had a quality that's lacking today. Everything today is all about gore, bloody and carnage. I'm sure it gives the special effects and makeup artist boners every time they get hired for a modern slasher flick, but a good horror movie needs more than just a lot of blood, it needs a good story, with suspense, action and a little humor thrown in for good measure. Today's horror movie script consists of "Man covered in blood runs around aimlessly (or not?) with knife" printed over and over for 200 pages. Or, if for some outlandish reason they do try to come up with a plot, it: a) is so obvious you know what's going to happen after the opening credits or b) has so many preposterous twists that any chance at believablity is blown away like Nagasaki.

Of course, there are always exceptions like the Scream trilogy, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (only because of Jessica Biel in a wife beater), Leprechaun 4: In Space and most of the movies based on Stephen King novels. A good horror movie needs a good story to go with it, which in turn requires a good writer to write the script or novel. The problem must therefore be a short fall of good writers in the genre. Someone needs to step up, put M. Night Shamalamalama back on the bus next to the guy who coughs all the time with the one crazy eye, and write something intelligent, witty, scary, and/or suspenseful. We need an Albert Hitchcock for the twenty-first century. He's got to be out there somewhere, I just hope he shows up soon. At least Stephen King keeps churning out books like a well oiled machine. A giant, man eating, van beating, carpet munching machine. Go Stephen! Go!

A Plea for Colognsanity

Your bottle of cheap and/or horrid smelling cologne is not substitute for the cleansing properties of water. Please do not wash your hands/face/entire body in the stuff. Honestly, and I think I speak for everyone in the room, you're killing us. I'd rather go through tear gas training in the marines than have to smell whatever that putrid liquid you're rubbing all over yourself is. I think the mustard gas of world war one must have been sweeter smelling. At least had the decency to kill you after some period of time instead of subjecting you to endless agonizing torture that only ends when the hammer of the gun is released.

I liked my nose hairs to a point. They haven't overgrown their bounds and were doing their god given job, protecting my nasal passages from dust and germs. Why did you take them away from me? Why did you feel the need to light them on fire with your stench and do a tribal Indian dance around them screaming, death to the follicle! Leave my noise alone, asshole, or I'm bring a can of gasoline with me next time.

An Irish showers, not to be confused with a golden shower, is one thing, which I can't deny I've employed on more than a few occasions, but let's practice a little moderation, shall we. Water down the cologne if you don't think you'll be able to control yourself once that top pops. Or better yet, we'll fill the bottle with water or liquid fire, to cure your of your disgusting disease.

I feel that maybe you an unable to recognize when you've gone overboard so here are a few telltale signs that you've fallen into the grip of the evil stench junkies: 1) You can taste the cologne in the air, though you may already be immune because you've been drinking it for years, 2) Your eyes are stinging like someone just pissed in them, 3) Everyone around seems to be sleeping (They're really passed out or have asphyxiated), 4) Your feet no longer are touching the ground as you are floating on a cloud of saturated funk. There, of course, are others but the best thing is to check yourself into rehab. You're addicted and you need the help that only a professional counselor can provide.

Take pity on the rest of humanity. When we all get our own planets you can do whatever your want. But, since the rest of us have to live in close proximity to you, do us a favor and put the bottle down or we may have to raise the gun. I'll fight for the freedom of my noise if I have to, so don't back me into a corner. I'm like a ravenously insane Tasmanian devil when I feel trapped. I'm sorry Jim. Rest in peace my brother.