I got a book in the mail earlier this week from Brother Nick. It is BAD ASS. It’s called 1,000 Robots, and it’s a book that catalogues tin toys from the WWII era-forward. I’m into mostly the 50s – 70s stuff myself, and Ava loves all things Robot.
THANKS A BILLION BRUTHA NICK!
The thing about these toys is that the recently produced ones are designed to evoke some sense of nostalgia. Oddly enough, I feel that nostalgia for them even though I never had any when growing up. Odd that I would link myself, my childhood, and my free-wheeling dipstick days to variety of toy which came and went several years before my life was sparked.
Is this marketing at its best? Or is it that some crap (like, say, some really simple and not-very-fun-to-play-with painted-tin toys) actually taps into some shared-consciousness that transcends generations? Shared memory? Collective nostalgia for a “simpler time” which never, never-ever existed in the first place?
If so, it would help to explain why these things are both "collectible" and really only of interest to grown folk. Beyond the pretty colors and possible antiquated wind-up "movement" any these tin-cans might have, children seem pretty unaffected. Good thing, too. 'Cause even the replicas aren't cheap, and I don't know if you're aware, but kids BREAK shit. Constantly. Especially if its not theirs.
We kids are cool like that.
Regardless, the toys are mad-cool, and this book is mad-cooler.
Milk shakes make me poop nowadays. And that’s splendid.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Friday, April 21, 2006
Phone Doody
I used to work for this non-profit profiteering company when I was in college. They had this truly dreadful “mission statement” that read something along the lines of
Or some shit like that.
The main problem with this organization, as good-intentioned as it might have been, lay squarely in the management of the “mission”. To begin, it was a weak concept, full of emotional potholes, pointless vagaries, wispy platitudes, and hair-trigger issues. And the controllers of the inflows/outflows of resources weren’t down with the cause. They weren’t terribly interested in actually making good on any promises, because those shifty promises were not only fraught with plan-less loftiness, but executing on them would surely spell out the outright financial demise of the organization itself.
Non-profits are nothing if they aren’t self-perpetuating.
So the books went into full-on profit-hording mode. Fuck the “clients”, as they were pretty much screwed no matter how you viewed it. Might as well shelve as much cash as possible and treat the non-profit like a real business: invest long-term, buy property, start other satellite for-profit businesses, and keep up a good face for the donating public.
Actually DOING any good is just too fucking hard, apparently.
I knew all this because I worked in the accounting department. I saw all the money movement. Sure, it was all fair and legal, but none of it matched the true spirit of the organization, or the intent of its “mission”. Out of the thirty or so employees, I would estimate that only three, maybe four were actually dedicated to resolving anything remotely related to the stated purpose of the organization. The rest of us were there to either bring in revenue, or count it as it came in. Our contact with the “clients” was limited, if not non-existent.
Except when you worked the phones at the front desk. And man, how I fucking hated doing that.
Customer service has never been an interest of mine. “Sales” and the “customer service” that go along with it directly equate to “bullshitting” and “defending the bullshitting” in my mind. For some reason, answering phones in any scenario, whether it be in a call center, midnight message service, or acting as a receptionist, is all “customer service” to me.
Man, fuck that noise.
Answering people’s rambling-ass questions about whatever-it-is-that-they’re-senselessly-confused-about is not my deal. I don’t have the patience for that nonsense. Oh, but I’m highly hypocritical about it. I have no qualms about being on the OTHER end of that phone, calling up my cellular provider to ask shit like “so, my plan says I get 100 text messages free, which is fine. But I’d like 1,000 text messages free, for free. Is there like, a button you can just push to do that? ‘Cause like Easter candy, I’m both cheap and stupid.”
While I was counting beans in that job, as a lowly bookkeeper, I would get assigned this “rolling” receptionist duty. The full time receptionist, bless her heart, would want to eat lunch at some point during the day, which inevitably left the front desk, along with the phone lines, abandoned. So three or four of us lowly workers would have to take turns covering phones over that period.
Understandably, none of us had any interest in the activity. First of all, we would have to have our lunches extra-early or extra-late on those days to accommodate. Second, it fucking sucks to sit retard-prone by a crappy fax machine and sketchy-internet-connection computer terminal for an hour, praying some half-wit from bum-fucking West Texas doesn’t call in to make you miserable with wandering questions about shit you aren’t equipped to answer questions on. Third, and most important, to sub for the receptionist is to pretty much admit that your position is actually LESS important than theirs (your job can wait, you need to go do some truly important work like answer phones or paint your nails).
What made it even worse was that we didn’t have a full five low-lifers to simply pick up a day of the week for phone duty. At most there were four of us. So we had a goddamn schedule… it was like scheduling lemon-juice enemas. The weeks where you KNEW you’d be working the phones on Monday AND Friday were destroyed well before they actually arrived. You knew those weeks would suck something awful. They were scheduled that way.
After a few weeks of suffering through the same five douche-balloons calling in with questions about services we had promised to deliver, but (surprise!) hadn’t gotten around to, I was seriously contemplating cutting my hands off to avoid further phone duty. The experience, for me, was excruciating. No one else there liked doing it, but I don’t believe they loathed it like I did. I would have preferred to throw myself down a flight of cement stairs, repeatedly, over that very same hour, rather than answer those blinking, crying, chat-chat-chattering phones. Man, FUCK those phones.
So I set myself to finding ways out of doing the work. In life, it’s important to figure out what you like, what you don’t like, what your fetishes are, and how to avoid doing any sort of god-awful bullshit that you hate more than the poetry of lame teens.
Lucky for me, I was in the accounting department, where the money got counted and organized. And like I explained a bit earlier, we weren’t an organization that focused much energy on shit like “justice”, “fair work environment”, or “equality”. In the accounting department specifically, under the direction of our most-frightening CFO, such quaint phrases or concepts were more of a hindrance in our march to amassing the wealth of the free world in a “building fund”. And since I was counting the beans that would eventually add up to the girth of that stalk, I received some special treatment.
Short story long: by explaining to the CFO that working the receptionist desk over lunch was impairing my bean-counting abilities, I not only got out of slaving away in that wretched desk, I also got more smoke breaks.
This, understandably, made me a target for many complaints from my fellow low-lifers, as it was obvious what had gone down. But I like to think that in reality, they were just hating on my self-made fortune because I no longer had to smell the stankin’ ass mouthpiece of that phone while desperately trying to explain to some Prime-Number-Of-Chromosomes from Tyler that “even if we did receive your request for reimbursement of expenses for the last Director’s Retreat, it wouldn’t matter because you aren’t a Director, and you weren’t supposed to be there, so we won’t be sending you or your four cousins a check. So fuck off.”
And I will read this post as a reminder to myself of what has passed, so that I may again respect what I have at present…
Our mission [brilliant opener] is to deliver the best-of-breed services to our clients and their families in order to maximize their efficiency as productive members of society, and to fight for their rights to establish themselves as such.
Or some shit like that.
The main problem with this organization, as good-intentioned as it might have been, lay squarely in the management of the “mission”. To begin, it was a weak concept, full of emotional potholes, pointless vagaries, wispy platitudes, and hair-trigger issues. And the controllers of the inflows/outflows of resources weren’t down with the cause. They weren’t terribly interested in actually making good on any promises, because those shifty promises were not only fraught with plan-less loftiness, but executing on them would surely spell out the outright financial demise of the organization itself.
Non-profits are nothing if they aren’t self-perpetuating.
So the books went into full-on profit-hording mode. Fuck the “clients”, as they were pretty much screwed no matter how you viewed it. Might as well shelve as much cash as possible and treat the non-profit like a real business: invest long-term, buy property, start other satellite for-profit businesses, and keep up a good face for the donating public.
Actually DOING any good is just too fucking hard, apparently.
I knew all this because I worked in the accounting department. I saw all the money movement. Sure, it was all fair and legal, but none of it matched the true spirit of the organization, or the intent of its “mission”. Out of the thirty or so employees, I would estimate that only three, maybe four were actually dedicated to resolving anything remotely related to the stated purpose of the organization. The rest of us were there to either bring in revenue, or count it as it came in. Our contact with the “clients” was limited, if not non-existent.
Except when you worked the phones at the front desk. And man, how I fucking hated doing that.
Customer service has never been an interest of mine. “Sales” and the “customer service” that go along with it directly equate to “bullshitting” and “defending the bullshitting” in my mind. For some reason, answering phones in any scenario, whether it be in a call center, midnight message service, or acting as a receptionist, is all “customer service” to me.
Man, fuck that noise.
Answering people’s rambling-ass questions about whatever-it-is-that-they’re-senselessly-confused-about is not my deal. I don’t have the patience for that nonsense. Oh, but I’m highly hypocritical about it. I have no qualms about being on the OTHER end of that phone, calling up my cellular provider to ask shit like “so, my plan says I get 100 text messages free, which is fine. But I’d like 1,000 text messages free, for free. Is there like, a button you can just push to do that? ‘Cause like Easter candy, I’m both cheap and stupid.”
While I was counting beans in that job, as a lowly bookkeeper, I would get assigned this “rolling” receptionist duty. The full time receptionist, bless her heart, would want to eat lunch at some point during the day, which inevitably left the front desk, along with the phone lines, abandoned. So three or four of us lowly workers would have to take turns covering phones over that period.
Understandably, none of us had any interest in the activity. First of all, we would have to have our lunches extra-early or extra-late on those days to accommodate. Second, it fucking sucks to sit retard-prone by a crappy fax machine and sketchy-internet-connection computer terminal for an hour, praying some half-wit from bum-fucking West Texas doesn’t call in to make you miserable with wandering questions about shit you aren’t equipped to answer questions on. Third, and most important, to sub for the receptionist is to pretty much admit that your position is actually LESS important than theirs (your job can wait, you need to go do some truly important work like answer phones or paint your nails).
What made it even worse was that we didn’t have a full five low-lifers to simply pick up a day of the week for phone duty. At most there were four of us. So we had a goddamn schedule… it was like scheduling lemon-juice enemas. The weeks where you KNEW you’d be working the phones on Monday AND Friday were destroyed well before they actually arrived. You knew those weeks would suck something awful. They were scheduled that way.
After a few weeks of suffering through the same five douche-balloons calling in with questions about services we had promised to deliver, but (surprise!) hadn’t gotten around to, I was seriously contemplating cutting my hands off to avoid further phone duty. The experience, for me, was excruciating. No one else there liked doing it, but I don’t believe they loathed it like I did. I would have preferred to throw myself down a flight of cement stairs, repeatedly, over that very same hour, rather than answer those blinking, crying, chat-chat-chattering phones. Man, FUCK those phones.
So I set myself to finding ways out of doing the work. In life, it’s important to figure out what you like, what you don’t like, what your fetishes are, and how to avoid doing any sort of god-awful bullshit that you hate more than the poetry of lame teens.
Lucky for me, I was in the accounting department, where the money got counted and organized. And like I explained a bit earlier, we weren’t an organization that focused much energy on shit like “justice”, “fair work environment”, or “equality”. In the accounting department specifically, under the direction of our most-frightening CFO, such quaint phrases or concepts were more of a hindrance in our march to amassing the wealth of the free world in a “building fund”. And since I was counting the beans that would eventually add up to the girth of that stalk, I received some special treatment.
Short story long: by explaining to the CFO that working the receptionist desk over lunch was impairing my bean-counting abilities, I not only got out of slaving away in that wretched desk, I also got more smoke breaks.
This, understandably, made me a target for many complaints from my fellow low-lifers, as it was obvious what had gone down. But I like to think that in reality, they were just hating on my self-made fortune because I no longer had to smell the stankin’ ass mouthpiece of that phone while desperately trying to explain to some Prime-Number-Of-Chromosomes from Tyler that “even if we did receive your request for reimbursement of expenses for the last Director’s Retreat, it wouldn’t matter because you aren’t a Director, and you weren’t supposed to be there, so we won’t be sending you or your four cousins a check. So fuck off.”
And I will read this post as a reminder to myself of what has passed, so that I may again respect what I have at present…
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Hollabackcaucasian!
Alright. So my blog was dead for a week.
It happens. Sometimes, the blog gods look down and say: “man, fuck you and your bullshit navel-gazing. We’re letting this crappy online word-vomit get caught up in your work’s firewall, so that someone in upper management can spend an hour cruising through your stories of covering yourself in various human humors and materials. And they’ll read about how you almost seem proud of it, you idiot.”
And then the gods will add, quite obnoxiously, “Ha. Plus you’re a dick.”
And if you happen to be on your way out of town as you receive notice that your place of paycheck has banned your blog site, specifically, by the admin’s own hand-coding into the firewall/gateway software… well, you might go ahead and cloak your ramblings for a minute or two as well.
Now, well, I just don’t see how it matters.
I just got back from Guanajuato today, and went straight into work, wondering whether or not some sort of shit was going to end up hitting some other sort of fan. Instead, I got hit with a rather tremendous project, which my direct boss, quite understandably, is not interested in tackling alone.
Keep in mind that in my job, rarely am I given truly interesting problems to solve. This problem, however, is fascinating. So it appears that me and my little online graffiti board here, are in no danger of being asked to put together a box. Not anytime soon, anyhow.
Honestly, I try very hard to avoid being fired for anything I do outside of work. My place of business is rather conservative, as it should be, so I do my best to keep the brightest and most blinding (read: obnoxious and offensive) parts of my personality in check.
But I don’t check them here. So, as long as they read this with a sense of humor, then I’m cucumber. Otherwise, I’ll be dialing Houston and shit.
Lot’s of insider commentary there. Like Navajo code. But not even close.
Travel journal to come in the next few days. Lots to ramble about. Word be bond.
It happens. Sometimes, the blog gods look down and say: “man, fuck you and your bullshit navel-gazing. We’re letting this crappy online word-vomit get caught up in your work’s firewall, so that someone in upper management can spend an hour cruising through your stories of covering yourself in various human humors and materials. And they’ll read about how you almost seem proud of it, you idiot.”
And then the gods will add, quite obnoxiously, “Ha. Plus you’re a dick.”
And if you happen to be on your way out of town as you receive notice that your place of paycheck has banned your blog site, specifically, by the admin’s own hand-coding into the firewall/gateway software… well, you might go ahead and cloak your ramblings for a minute or two as well.
Now, well, I just don’t see how it matters.
I just got back from Guanajuato today, and went straight into work, wondering whether or not some sort of shit was going to end up hitting some other sort of fan. Instead, I got hit with a rather tremendous project, which my direct boss, quite understandably, is not interested in tackling alone.
Keep in mind that in my job, rarely am I given truly interesting problems to solve. This problem, however, is fascinating. So it appears that me and my little online graffiti board here, are in no danger of being asked to put together a box. Not anytime soon, anyhow.
Honestly, I try very hard to avoid being fired for anything I do outside of work. My place of business is rather conservative, as it should be, so I do my best to keep the brightest and most blinding (read: obnoxious and offensive) parts of my personality in check.
But I don’t check them here. So, as long as they read this with a sense of humor, then I’m cucumber. Otherwise, I’ll be dialing Houston and shit.
Lot’s of insider commentary there. Like Navajo code. But not even close.
Travel journal to come in the next few days. Lots to ramble about. Word be bond.
Monday, March 20, 2006
SxSW 2006: Day Two and The Book
Whoa, snap. I’ve been mad-behind on my updates, but that’s because my internal organs were crying foul, and there are portions of my brain which may be permanently deceased as a result of all that went down this past week.
My word, what a mess. Always.
Tuesday night marked the second day of my SxSW 2006 bender (man, there must be a better way to entertain myself, right?). But in reality, the prior Friday was the first day (where I attended a somewhat lame-ish poetry reading at Deville, where I spiraled into a drunken, confused oblivion by the time the third rhyme-mangler took the stage). Saturday was a clutch of events and parties, which caused me additional drunkitude. I never really got a break between the weekend and the week of SxSW. Sunday night was rather tame, but the dealings of Friday and Saturday were strong enough to keep me soused well through.
Tuesday hit with a relative calm. Still holding down the day jobby-job. So I had the great fortune of being allowed to plod through my absolutely crippling hang over from the night before whilst staring at endlessly linked spreadsheets, pained in a shitty swivel chair, under the humming lights of a fluorescent hell… wondering whether or not my misty perspiration was booze-scented. One never knows how long it takes to stop sweating out the prior night. Could take weeks.
After work, I actually went for a jog. To aid in getting the toxins out of my system. I believe it worked rather well, since I felt like a thrice-used prison condom before the jog, and about a five dollar bill after.
That makes absolutely no sense, whatsoever. Suffice to say, I felt much better after my jog.
After the jog, it was over to Allen Chen’s crib to bag shwag for the Austinist parties. Magazines, stickers, pins, hand-written notes of random sexual description, and other unnecessary budget-sucking marketing garbage which will necessitate the hiring of hundreds more street sweepers to clean off the cobbled tops of our downtown streets.
The notes were written, but only in my mind. And they were REALLY random. Like, bat-on-stryrofoam-duck-decoy sex. Screwdriver-in-light-socket-bucket-of-water type shit. Goat asphyxiation. And I don’t even know what that last one means.
Never got penned though, and that’s assured to be best for the population. Specifically for the individual shwag-grabber, if not the general population as a whole. Plus, there’s the whole Austinist rep to consider. I doubt Allen would appreciate the bat-on-decoy humor if some successful, unfortunately religious label exec were to have been the one to nab and read it along with the newest copy of Urbland Taist magawhatever. Might have been a tragedy.
Allen treated those of us there to stuff bags, by stuffing us with a couple of cocktails.
That sounds like some sort of sexual double-entendre, and if I meant it that way, it would be hilarious. But a blog is no place for inside jokery. It’s a place of mild embarrassment and platitude-laden navel gazing. So there’s no way I’d be talking about him here.
Back to me.
Few drinks into the evening, and I breezed out to meet up with Ceeplus (Eric) over at The Peacock for his pre-SxSW party. When I got in, Richard Henry was spinning.
Richard’s good people. He’s worked with Ceeplus before, and I definitely see him around town. We have a host of friends in common. That, and he’s a founding Feedback partner. Interesting to hear/see him on the decks. I knew he was known for spinning around town here and there, but I’d never run across it.
Starsign (Dave) got up on the tables after Richard, and dutifully did his thing. People weren’t drunk enough to really get down yet, so he was holding it all up on musical merit alone. There are songs that people WANT to dance to, there are songs that people WILL dance to (if: drunk, at a country wedding, or violently coerced), and there are songs people ONLY listen to (usually because they don’t dance at all, or they really, really, really love the song and prefer to kick back and dissolve whilst listening). It’s hard to nail that third variety without blowing straight past it into muzak/background music territory. Takes a delicate touch, and a mastery of music purpose. I could never manage to pull that off, but Dave’s pretty capable. I know he prefers to maneuver crowds that are up and moving, but admittedly, it’s much-much-much easier to keep an already-excited crowd than it is to build one. Them’s just facts.
Cee did his thing, and then Klassen showed up to finish off [my] night. I had to leave in the midst of Klassen’s set because I had reached a level of buzzed where I will talk almost incessantly about a single thing, and what I say about that singularity
Will
Not
Change,
Ever.
At some point in a night of hard drinking, I’d say hour 2, I usually make some unconscious and almost arbitrary decision concerning what pointless topic I will be beating the living shit out of for the remainder of the night. And on that Tuesday, it was my book. The book that I finished weeks ago, but have yet to do anything with.
And that’s what makes it so obnoxious. If the topic I had chosen had been something like “how brittle and useless those fucking apple crates from Fiesta are,” then I’d be alright with bothering strangers about it. But you can’t go around blabbing like a goddamn string-pull doll about shit you’ve either never done, are in all probability aren’t going to do. That’s just insincere bullshit. Unless you’re talking about being a ninja, becoming a wombat wrestler, or how you’d totally take a bulldozer through the drive-through at Popeye’s Chicken if you had a pink one, and that’s perfectly acceptable bullshit. Or, as in this case, if YOU’D NEVER WRITTEN A BOOK BEFORE.
If you’ve never written a book, well, then you’re just lying. And drunk people lie all the time. Comes with the territory. That’s why it’s best to only hang around other drunkards, because they won’t remember what ridiculous lies you slobbered out the night before. That, or they’ll confuse their lies with yours and just chalk it all up to hang over delirium, which is equally safe.
But I was actually chatting with people who actually READ what I write every now and again. They didn’t know it was me, necessarily, because it was out on the anonyrnets, but they had read my shit somewhere online. Then, I go and ramble on about how I’d finished a project which is still, clearly in the infant stages of development.
So now there’s added pressure and shit. Not much extra, but still. I mean, who needs extra pressure for purely creative endeavors, eh?
Goddamn alcohol. You’re supposed to hold me down and help me scuttle my potential, not whip me forward and force me to produce.
Not cool.
Tomorrow is the official beginning of the SxSW reporting thing. It may be here, it may be up on the Austinist site. Depends on my mood, and that of the editorial staff. They may pull what I write. Plus, the material’ll be a week old by tomorrow.
Meh.
Yeah, I’m late, but so fucking what? I haven’t taken a shit in two days. Being blackout drunk for a good three out of seven nights of binge drinking coupled with fevered bouts of half-sleep really, really fucks with the standard operation of even a healthy man’s colon. Whatchu got on that? Huh?
Nothing. You’ve got NOTHING.
My butt hurts.
My word, what a mess. Always.
Tuesday night marked the second day of my SxSW 2006 bender (man, there must be a better way to entertain myself, right?). But in reality, the prior Friday was the first day (where I attended a somewhat lame-ish poetry reading at Deville, where I spiraled into a drunken, confused oblivion by the time the third rhyme-mangler took the stage). Saturday was a clutch of events and parties, which caused me additional drunkitude. I never really got a break between the weekend and the week of SxSW. Sunday night was rather tame, but the dealings of Friday and Saturday were strong enough to keep me soused well through.
Tuesday hit with a relative calm. Still holding down the day jobby-job. So I had the great fortune of being allowed to plod through my absolutely crippling hang over from the night before whilst staring at endlessly linked spreadsheets, pained in a shitty swivel chair, under the humming lights of a fluorescent hell… wondering whether or not my misty perspiration was booze-scented. One never knows how long it takes to stop sweating out the prior night. Could take weeks.
After work, I actually went for a jog. To aid in getting the toxins out of my system. I believe it worked rather well, since I felt like a thrice-used prison condom before the jog, and about a five dollar bill after.
That makes absolutely no sense, whatsoever. Suffice to say, I felt much better after my jog.
After the jog, it was over to Allen Chen’s crib to bag shwag for the Austinist parties. Magazines, stickers, pins, hand-written notes of random sexual description, and other unnecessary budget-sucking marketing garbage which will necessitate the hiring of hundreds more street sweepers to clean off the cobbled tops of our downtown streets.
The notes were written, but only in my mind. And they were REALLY random. Like, bat-on-stryrofoam-duck-decoy sex. Screwdriver-in-light-socket-bucket-of-water type shit. Goat asphyxiation. And I don’t even know what that last one means.
Never got penned though, and that’s assured to be best for the population. Specifically for the individual shwag-grabber, if not the general population as a whole. Plus, there’s the whole Austinist rep to consider. I doubt Allen would appreciate the bat-on-decoy humor if some successful, unfortunately religious label exec were to have been the one to nab and read it along with the newest copy of Urbland Taist magawhatever. Might have been a tragedy.
Allen treated those of us there to stuff bags, by stuffing us with a couple of cocktails.
That sounds like some sort of sexual double-entendre, and if I meant it that way, it would be hilarious. But a blog is no place for inside jokery. It’s a place of mild embarrassment and platitude-laden navel gazing. So there’s no way I’d be talking about him here.
Back to me.
Few drinks into the evening, and I breezed out to meet up with Ceeplus (Eric) over at The Peacock for his pre-SxSW party. When I got in, Richard Henry was spinning.
Richard’s good people. He’s worked with Ceeplus before, and I definitely see him around town. We have a host of friends in common. That, and he’s a founding Feedback partner. Interesting to hear/see him on the decks. I knew he was known for spinning around town here and there, but I’d never run across it.
Starsign (Dave) got up on the tables after Richard, and dutifully did his thing. People weren’t drunk enough to really get down yet, so he was holding it all up on musical merit alone. There are songs that people WANT to dance to, there are songs that people WILL dance to (if: drunk, at a country wedding, or violently coerced), and there are songs people ONLY listen to (usually because they don’t dance at all, or they really, really, really love the song and prefer to kick back and dissolve whilst listening). It’s hard to nail that third variety without blowing straight past it into muzak/background music territory. Takes a delicate touch, and a mastery of music purpose. I could never manage to pull that off, but Dave’s pretty capable. I know he prefers to maneuver crowds that are up and moving, but admittedly, it’s much-much-much easier to keep an already-excited crowd than it is to build one. Them’s just facts.
Cee did his thing, and then Klassen showed up to finish off [my] night. I had to leave in the midst of Klassen’s set because I had reached a level of buzzed where I will talk almost incessantly about a single thing, and what I say about that singularity
Will
Not
Change,
Ever.
At some point in a night of hard drinking, I’d say hour 2, I usually make some unconscious and almost arbitrary decision concerning what pointless topic I will be beating the living shit out of for the remainder of the night. And on that Tuesday, it was my book. The book that I finished weeks ago, but have yet to do anything with.
And that’s what makes it so obnoxious. If the topic I had chosen had been something like “how brittle and useless those fucking apple crates from Fiesta are,” then I’d be alright with bothering strangers about it. But you can’t go around blabbing like a goddamn string-pull doll about shit you’ve either never done, are in all probability aren’t going to do. That’s just insincere bullshit. Unless you’re talking about being a ninja, becoming a wombat wrestler, or how you’d totally take a bulldozer through the drive-through at Popeye’s Chicken if you had a pink one, and that’s perfectly acceptable bullshit. Or, as in this case, if YOU’D NEVER WRITTEN A BOOK BEFORE.
If you’ve never written a book, well, then you’re just lying. And drunk people lie all the time. Comes with the territory. That’s why it’s best to only hang around other drunkards, because they won’t remember what ridiculous lies you slobbered out the night before. That, or they’ll confuse their lies with yours and just chalk it all up to hang over delirium, which is equally safe.
But I was actually chatting with people who actually READ what I write every now and again. They didn’t know it was me, necessarily, because it was out on the anonyrnets, but they had read my shit somewhere online. Then, I go and ramble on about how I’d finished a project which is still, clearly in the infant stages of development.
So now there’s added pressure and shit. Not much extra, but still. I mean, who needs extra pressure for purely creative endeavors, eh?
Goddamn alcohol. You’re supposed to hold me down and help me scuttle my potential, not whip me forward and force me to produce.
Not cool.
Tomorrow is the official beginning of the SxSW reporting thing. It may be here, it may be up on the Austinist site. Depends on my mood, and that of the editorial staff. They may pull what I write. Plus, the material’ll be a week old by tomorrow.
Meh.
Yeah, I’m late, but so fucking what? I haven’t taken a shit in two days. Being blackout drunk for a good three out of seven nights of binge drinking coupled with fevered bouts of half-sleep really, really fucks with the standard operation of even a healthy man’s colon. Whatchu got on that? Huh?
Nothing. You’ve got NOTHING.
My butt hurts.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
SxSW 2006: Day One and The Rock
So, the yearly disaster that is SxSW started on Monday, really. Last year was a beautiful accident, which I documented here, for anyone interested/willing to read. This year, I’ll be doing the meat of my daily journal-type-shit on Austinist because, quite frankly, I really enjoy it when all the anonymous dickhole commenters crawl out and say really ridiculous shit like “hey asshole, this writing is really stupid, plus you’re a dumb gay”. They’re so brilliantly witty, that it makes my clenched fists tighten yet further.
But the first two days so far, Monday and yesterday, I’m gonna fuckin’ write here because this is where I like to spill my guts to no one in particular. Into the void, one might say.
Plus, my hit count on this blog went abysmal since I’ve seized-up on posting here, so I feel totally comfortable with the resultant anonymity. The ten of you who read this won’t judge. Except you, mom. But you were always a hater, so we’re cool like that.
Let’s do this shit. Right? Right.
On Monday night I was a bit intimidated by the whole thought of doing what I did last year, again. It really is abusive to the system. Drowning useful lucidity with waves of liquor, for hours on end, only to eat some really awful food at four in the morning before drifting into a booze-hammered five-hour nap, for three…
-- Fucking cell phone. Man, I’ve been trying to type this for four hours now. FOUR HOURS and I’ve got FOUR measly paragraphs done, and there’s no fucking story yet. Phone. Keeps ringing. But I’ll stop answering. Fucking cell phone. --
So Monday was the Consumating party. If you’ve never heard of Consumating, that would be because it’s fairly new and is overshadowed something serious by the myspace disease. That, and it’s been a word-of-mouth sorta viral marketing campaign to date. Like, links on blogs (ahem, even lame blogs). Ben Brown, ½ of the Consumating creation team threw a party in honor of Consumating at The Velvet Spade. My favorite word coupling was involved: open bar.
So I intended to get sweaty fucked up, while my girlfriend intended on going home early so she could do real, productive work. Such is the ironic way of relationships.
And we both achieved our private goals. The open bar did me well, as I stayed double fisted the entire night, up until the open-bar tab was closed out. Then I was single fisted, and missing more cash than expected.
There was lots of drunken conversation between strangers, and strange conversation between drunkards. I got to see lots of people that I don’t normally run into, which can be almost awkward. Especially if I haven’t seen them in a while and I’ve managed to drink myself into the “pretty tossed” stage of boozery. Because I get all huggy and shit. Not that I don’t want to hug people all the time, because I do, but because when I’m stone sober, I understand how uncomfortable it makes some people, so I keep the hugs to a minimum.
But when I’m drunk, I just don’t fucking care what everyone else is crying about. If I’m down to hug, then hugging is what fucking happens, damnit.
So some of these people hadn’t seen me in a year or so. They were obviously unsure as to whether or not we’re even friends anymore, really. Which is ridiculous in my mind, but I understand how some people can get touchy about not being contacted on an hourly basis. Better yet, that they think I hate them because I don’t “reach out” and “make an effort” to contact them more often. Again: utterly ridiculous, with an added element of silly hypocrisy. Anyway, all friendship-fires got rekindled, and hugs got distributed.
Did I mention that I was pretty fucked up? Because I was.
Ben Reed sent me a text from next door at Deville: “Frodo’s here”. That’s all it said. Fucking Frodo is back for some SxSW action! I ran into him a couple of times last year, at the Fader parties. Never said a word to him, because a) I don’t know the guy, b) he was usually asking me to get out of his way so he could get past, and c) he’s a really, really fascinatingly tiny fellow. Like, nymph tiny. Like… a fucking hobbit. Dude’s mad petite.
Plus, I knew if I talked to him that I’d call him Frodo, and that’s really lame. He’s heard it a billion times, and it was never funny to begin with. But I just know I’d be “that asshole” who’d say it anyway, just because I can’t seem to wrangle my id.
Moving on.
So the open bar at Velvet Spade closed out, and Ben Reed came over from Deville and offered that we join him for drinks instead. So we did.
Halfway through my beer, Ben mentions that earlier in the day he had seen a n’er-do-well in the parking lot beneath I35 and 8th Street, writing on a rock with a marker. What was fascinating about the whole thing was that the bum was laying down to do this, in broad daylight, and he had a fake leg. The idea of this was completely insane to me. What would posses a one-legged homeless man to lay down in a parking lot and wax poetic on a chunk of rock? What could possibly be that important or interesting? Would it have to be interesting, if the circumstance in which it was written was so fascinating?
I had to see whether or not Ben was bullshitting me, so we went looking for said bummetta stone. We walked from Deville to the freeway, to the exact spot where Ben claimed to have seen the stone.
And there it was. A triangle of crumbling concrete, presumably lifted from a curb somewhere, with a paragraph of nonsensical bum-scribblings which concerned some confusing story about a frog and a scorpion. I kept referring to it as a proverb, while Ben gave it the fable label. In retrospect, the term “fable” is much more fitting, in the Aesop tradition.
Whatever it is, Ben intends to photograph it and pass the physical rock on to me. I want that rock. It’s quite possibly the most interesting thing I’ve come across in the past year. I don’t why I picked a year, but it seems like a safe bet.
Fuck I’m much more hung over from last night than I thought. And I barely even described what went on Monday night… but, fuck it. Next, is the Tuesday breakdown…
Gotta get that rock.
But the first two days so far, Monday and yesterday, I’m gonna fuckin’ write here because this is where I like to spill my guts to no one in particular. Into the void, one might say.
Plus, my hit count on this blog went abysmal since I’ve seized-up on posting here, so I feel totally comfortable with the resultant anonymity. The ten of you who read this won’t judge. Except you, mom. But you were always a hater, so we’re cool like that.
Let’s do this shit. Right? Right.
On Monday night I was a bit intimidated by the whole thought of doing what I did last year, again. It really is abusive to the system. Drowning useful lucidity with waves of liquor, for hours on end, only to eat some really awful food at four in the morning before drifting into a booze-hammered five-hour nap, for three…
-- Fucking cell phone. Man, I’ve been trying to type this for four hours now. FOUR HOURS and I’ve got FOUR measly paragraphs done, and there’s no fucking story yet. Phone. Keeps ringing. But I’ll stop answering. Fucking cell phone. --
So Monday was the Consumating party. If you’ve never heard of Consumating, that would be because it’s fairly new and is overshadowed something serious by the myspace disease. That, and it’s been a word-of-mouth sorta viral marketing campaign to date. Like, links on blogs (ahem, even lame blogs). Ben Brown, ½ of the Consumating creation team threw a party in honor of Consumating at The Velvet Spade. My favorite word coupling was involved: open bar.
So I intended to get sweaty fucked up, while my girlfriend intended on going home early so she could do real, productive work. Such is the ironic way of relationships.
And we both achieved our private goals. The open bar did me well, as I stayed double fisted the entire night, up until the open-bar tab was closed out. Then I was single fisted, and missing more cash than expected.
There was lots of drunken conversation between strangers, and strange conversation between drunkards. I got to see lots of people that I don’t normally run into, which can be almost awkward. Especially if I haven’t seen them in a while and I’ve managed to drink myself into the “pretty tossed” stage of boozery. Because I get all huggy and shit. Not that I don’t want to hug people all the time, because I do, but because when I’m stone sober, I understand how uncomfortable it makes some people, so I keep the hugs to a minimum.
But when I’m drunk, I just don’t fucking care what everyone else is crying about. If I’m down to hug, then hugging is what fucking happens, damnit.
So some of these people hadn’t seen me in a year or so. They were obviously unsure as to whether or not we’re even friends anymore, really. Which is ridiculous in my mind, but I understand how some people can get touchy about not being contacted on an hourly basis. Better yet, that they think I hate them because I don’t “reach out” and “make an effort” to contact them more often. Again: utterly ridiculous, with an added element of silly hypocrisy. Anyway, all friendship-fires got rekindled, and hugs got distributed.
Did I mention that I was pretty fucked up? Because I was.
Ben Reed sent me a text from next door at Deville: “Frodo’s here”. That’s all it said. Fucking Frodo is back for some SxSW action! I ran into him a couple of times last year, at the Fader parties. Never said a word to him, because a) I don’t know the guy, b) he was usually asking me to get out of his way so he could get past, and c) he’s a really, really fascinatingly tiny fellow. Like, nymph tiny. Like… a fucking hobbit. Dude’s mad petite.
Plus, I knew if I talked to him that I’d call him Frodo, and that’s really lame. He’s heard it a billion times, and it was never funny to begin with. But I just know I’d be “that asshole” who’d say it anyway, just because I can’t seem to wrangle my id.
Moving on.
So the open bar at Velvet Spade closed out, and Ben Reed came over from Deville and offered that we join him for drinks instead. So we did.
Halfway through my beer, Ben mentions that earlier in the day he had seen a n’er-do-well in the parking lot beneath I35 and 8th Street, writing on a rock with a marker. What was fascinating about the whole thing was that the bum was laying down to do this, in broad daylight, and he had a fake leg. The idea of this was completely insane to me. What would posses a one-legged homeless man to lay down in a parking lot and wax poetic on a chunk of rock? What could possibly be that important or interesting? Would it have to be interesting, if the circumstance in which it was written was so fascinating?
I had to see whether or not Ben was bullshitting me, so we went looking for said bummetta stone. We walked from Deville to the freeway, to the exact spot where Ben claimed to have seen the stone.
And there it was. A triangle of crumbling concrete, presumably lifted from a curb somewhere, with a paragraph of nonsensical bum-scribblings which concerned some confusing story about a frog and a scorpion. I kept referring to it as a proverb, while Ben gave it the fable label. In retrospect, the term “fable” is much more fitting, in the Aesop tradition.
Whatever it is, Ben intends to photograph it and pass the physical rock on to me. I want that rock. It’s quite possibly the most interesting thing I’ve come across in the past year. I don’t why I picked a year, but it seems like a safe bet.
Fuck I’m much more hung over from last night than I thought. And I barely even described what went on Monday night… but, fuck it. Next, is the Tuesday breakdown…
Gotta get that rock.
Friday, March 03, 2006
Life Liquid Makes Me Want to Blow Chunks
Giving blood has always scared the living hell out of me. Actually, it’s the blood part that bothers me. I don’t care if it ends up in bags or on a Luby’s restroom floor. The idea of bleeding profusely, whether controlled or not, makes me want to vomit.
But it goes even further than that. Back in my fourth-grade days, we used to sit on the floor, in a big mass, with our health books splayed out in our laps, and read about health-type shit. Disease. Bones. Internal organs. Vaginas and penises.
Not that last one. But that’s what we really wanted to learn about.
Anyhow, we would be chosen, individually to read sections of that day’s chapter, aloud. Well, whoever wrote/edited/published those evil goddamn health books must have been some sort of gothic Satanist, because every fifth fucking word was “blood”. It was as if they were making a concerted effort to squeeze it into any and every place they could. Almost autistically so. Sentences would go something like:
“The human blood is blood red and the blood flows through blood veins to get the blood into the organs which need blood because blood is the bloodline of all blood using blood creatures of blood-dom. Blood is really bloody when it bloods out of the blood system. I love blood. Bloody, bloody, blood-blood.” And then I’d vomit all over some girl with pigtails sitting in front of me.
Perhaps not that ridiculous. Take off the last sentence and I bet I’d be damn close though.
So I had the great pleasure of going to give blood the other day. It was for a very worthy cause, so I would never complain about why I was at the blood bank. But shit, it wasn’t cool.
The entire drive there was nauseating. I felt like I was about to go on stage to sing in an arena concert. For a band I didn’t actually sing for. With words to songs I’d never heard of.
So my stomach was doing all varieties of acrobatics, threatening to push material out of every orifice about my person, as I drove my fevered-self to the vampire cave.
When I walked in, they greeted me, had me sign in, and then handed me some laminated sheets with a bunch of “if you do heroine with aids patients while getting fucked in the ass by Australian spider monkeys on your weekly sex-trips to Nigeria, then your blood might be compromised” type shit on them. Actually, speculating on that, because every fifth word of the text was BLOOD. For fuck’s sake, these assholes need a thesaurus, as there HAS to be alternate ways of describing the system of red shit which courses through our veins. Alternate languages, or something. Anything.
That’s not nice of me, actually. In reality, I understand that this is my issue, not theirs. I haven’t googled it yet, but I doubt there’s a name for my particular phobia. There’s all sorts of blood phobias, but probably not ones related to passing out like death just from reading the word. But then again: whatever.
They “interview” me by asking exactly 53 questions (they tell you the number before they start, so you can prep yourself, or something) about my sex life (HELLO!), illicit drug use (hello?), and a shit-load of true/false questions about my contracting (or having “contact” with someone who might have contracted) of various diseases and maladies that the Cambodian nurse could not pronounce. And she had no idea what the diseases were.
I should have said TRUE. To everything. Hell, I might have “stifhlectimicoidal anotrophelia” or whatever.
We have a few laughs at the 53 question quiz, as I tend to crack jokes when I’m pants-pissing frightened. Then she ushers me into the bleeding room. A circle of pleather lounge-y chaise things is the focus of the fluorescent-lit room. Two other nurses are stealing blood from two other dudes. One of the guys, probably in his late forties, is looking pale and cross-eyed, while the other is a recent high school grad who may very well be afflicted with Downs, if not a social-interaction disorder of some sort. The older fellow complains that he feels really sick and he needs a cold compress for his forehead. The kid rambles on about how often he gives blood (way often), and that he doesn’t particularly like soda.
I really wanted to leave. The act was already scaring me, but the participants weren’t making the deal any easier to seal. But I decided to stop acting like such a pussy about it, and I sat obligingly, in a plastic-tough lounge-y chair.
Finger pricked, vein found, needle stuck, one pound of blood removed.
I stared at the ceiling tiles, opposite of my left arm where the robbery was taking place. So I never actually saw anything of the heist. But I did feel a little light-headed, and my exit from the establishment is a bit hazy. So I assume that they took whatever they needed.
And I got what I needed.
I got to mark that little deed from my “list of shit Craig fucking hates/fears but everyone else does all the time so he needs to suck it up and do it already”. Awesome kickasstastic sweet.
But it goes even further than that. Back in my fourth-grade days, we used to sit on the floor, in a big mass, with our health books splayed out in our laps, and read about health-type shit. Disease. Bones. Internal organs. Vaginas and penises.
Not that last one. But that’s what we really wanted to learn about.
Anyhow, we would be chosen, individually to read sections of that day’s chapter, aloud. Well, whoever wrote/edited/published those evil goddamn health books must have been some sort of gothic Satanist, because every fifth fucking word was “blood”. It was as if they were making a concerted effort to squeeze it into any and every place they could. Almost autistically so. Sentences would go something like:
“The human blood is blood red and the blood flows through blood veins to get the blood into the organs which need blood because blood is the bloodline of all blood using blood creatures of blood-dom. Blood is really bloody when it bloods out of the blood system. I love blood. Bloody, bloody, blood-blood.” And then I’d vomit all over some girl with pigtails sitting in front of me.
Perhaps not that ridiculous. Take off the last sentence and I bet I’d be damn close though.
So I had the great pleasure of going to give blood the other day. It was for a very worthy cause, so I would never complain about why I was at the blood bank. But shit, it wasn’t cool.
The entire drive there was nauseating. I felt like I was about to go on stage to sing in an arena concert. For a band I didn’t actually sing for. With words to songs I’d never heard of.
So my stomach was doing all varieties of acrobatics, threatening to push material out of every orifice about my person, as I drove my fevered-self to the vampire cave.
When I walked in, they greeted me, had me sign in, and then handed me some laminated sheets with a bunch of “if you do heroine with aids patients while getting fucked in the ass by Australian spider monkeys on your weekly sex-trips to Nigeria, then your blood might be compromised” type shit on them. Actually, speculating on that, because every fifth word of the text was BLOOD. For fuck’s sake, these assholes need a thesaurus, as there HAS to be alternate ways of describing the system of red shit which courses through our veins. Alternate languages, or something. Anything.
That’s not nice of me, actually. In reality, I understand that this is my issue, not theirs. I haven’t googled it yet, but I doubt there’s a name for my particular phobia. There’s all sorts of blood phobias, but probably not ones related to passing out like death just from reading the word. But then again: whatever.
They “interview” me by asking exactly 53 questions (they tell you the number before they start, so you can prep yourself, or something) about my sex life (HELLO!), illicit drug use (hello?), and a shit-load of true/false questions about my contracting (or having “contact” with someone who might have contracted) of various diseases and maladies that the Cambodian nurse could not pronounce. And she had no idea what the diseases were.
I should have said TRUE. To everything. Hell, I might have “stifhlectimicoidal anotrophelia” or whatever.
We have a few laughs at the 53 question quiz, as I tend to crack jokes when I’m pants-pissing frightened. Then she ushers me into the bleeding room. A circle of pleather lounge-y chaise things is the focus of the fluorescent-lit room. Two other nurses are stealing blood from two other dudes. One of the guys, probably in his late forties, is looking pale and cross-eyed, while the other is a recent high school grad who may very well be afflicted with Downs, if not a social-interaction disorder of some sort. The older fellow complains that he feels really sick and he needs a cold compress for his forehead. The kid rambles on about how often he gives blood (way often), and that he doesn’t particularly like soda.
I really wanted to leave. The act was already scaring me, but the participants weren’t making the deal any easier to seal. But I decided to stop acting like such a pussy about it, and I sat obligingly, in a plastic-tough lounge-y chair.
Finger pricked, vein found, needle stuck, one pound of blood removed.
I stared at the ceiling tiles, opposite of my left arm where the robbery was taking place. So I never actually saw anything of the heist. But I did feel a little light-headed, and my exit from the establishment is a bit hazy. So I assume that they took whatever they needed.
And I got what I needed.
I got to mark that little deed from my “list of shit Craig fucking hates/fears but everyone else does all the time so he needs to suck it up and do it already”. Awesome kickasstastic sweet.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Last Week On Other Internets...
Good ol’ Truesdays…
I get all upset about that crazy fucker up in New England who went apeshit in a gay bar, and then went off to kill his online girlfriend and whatever. Dude needed some serious help, but found the internet instead.
Last week I kinda poked some good fun at the SxSW debacle that’s heading our way. The disaster that is… The Austin’s Lifeblood Festival… it’s a tempered disdain though. I always have a good time when the douche-balloon circus rolls into town. Always!
This week’s Truesday focused on that good-time holiday that we just breezed through. The most Hallmarkish of all Hallmark Holidays: You’re A Shitty Boyfriend Day! And that's AWESOME!
I swear I'll write up more on the Birthday Bender, but I'm behind on other shit. So there's that.
I get all upset about that crazy fucker up in New England who went apeshit in a gay bar, and then went off to kill his online girlfriend and whatever. Dude needed some serious help, but found the internet instead.
Last week I kinda poked some good fun at the SxSW debacle that’s heading our way. The disaster that is… The Austin’s Lifeblood Festival… it’s a tempered disdain though. I always have a good time when the douche-balloon circus rolls into town. Always!
This week’s Truesday focused on that good-time holiday that we just breezed through. The most Hallmarkish of all Hallmark Holidays: You’re A Shitty Boyfriend Day! And that's AWESOME!
I swear I'll write up more on the Birthday Bender, but I'm behind on other shit. So there's that.
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