The Young Bachelor and the Tarp

Aw man. Nothin' ever goes right for me. Lately, the damage has been manifold. To wit:

My lapped-top computer box had parasites, causing me and mine to be unable to do much of anything internetted, over the last several weeks. My praise, as always, to the good folks at Fix My Dead PC.

Then, my phone stopped doing what it ought. It kept on making the noise it made when it was about to power down. This, even when it had plenty of juice and was in a place with decent coverage. It just lost the will to live.
The man at the Cingular store (well, a pasty, acne-d boy: let's be fair) sadly noted that though I had the most reliable of all LG phones (why had I not heard of this company until a year ago? I'm askin'), they had been phased out by the company, and could not possibly be replaced.
This is untrue. I got another one just like it, but run by my old employers, AT&T. When I worked there, they were AT&T, and shortly before they were to be purchased by Cingular, they went on a hiring spree. Now, lo these three years later, no one trusts Cingular at all, and they've decided to break out that old Death Star logo that everybody trusts so much; that of AT&T Wireless.

Then the brakes on my brand new truck decided to start squealing at me. This is odd, since supposedly those nice people at the used car dealership I bought The Squeezle from claimed to have just redone the brakes right before I bought it.
This was untrue. But now they work, and all I gotta do is deal with the leakin' tranny. This brings us to my knee.

My knee was injured the other night, getting rid of the Disney On Ice (or, 'Mice On Ice') tour. Dig, if you will, the picture: About 150 stagehands are wandering around, carrying heavy/expensive things...On Ice. There is no graceful way of going about this, and people are falling on their asses left and right.
I understand that my employers cannot just buy 150 sets of ice spikes just for one night of work, but this just seems like a massive workman's comp claim waiting to happen. At one point Del, the amiable bossman around the Rose Garden, comes out with a mop, which I find deeply funny.
"Yeah. Somebody spilled ice all over this place. You'd better get that," I said.

I didn't fall, but slipped-and-then-caught-myself a couple times. Then, two days later, I'm laying around watching Buffalo Bill and The Indians (an only so-so Altman flick), when my knee suddenly starts to hurt.
After a day or so, I can barely walk, and I'm limping embarrassingly. I've always said; you can be the ugliest motherfucker in the world, but with charm, all things are yours. But if you have an irregular gait, forget it.

At least this finally got me to go to a doctor. I've been wanting to get myself a primary care physician for a couple years, and I think I may be on the road to one. I have been set up on what amounts to a Medical Blind Date with a doctor about my age, by the doctor who examined my knee.
She had asked, "What do you do for fun?". I said, "What do you mean?"
Before long, we got it sorted out. I just want a medical professional who will listen to me, is empathetic, and the younger the better, since the closer to med school they are, the more they still give a shit. I have an appointment with someone who seems to fit this description, the day before Thanksgiving.

Then, the big windstorm of Yesterday hit. I love windstorms, particularly when I am free to lay in a warm bed listening to the damn thing, and not having to work in it. But I had awakened around 2:30 A.M., because I knew damn well what I was hearing.
Yep, the Improvised Tarp Shelter I'd constructed in the driveway was done violence by the gale force winds. The meaningless, cheap tent poles that came with the thing were laying on their sides in the rain, not even somewhat ballasted by the cinder blocks filled with cement poured by me, dammit, that they were sunk into.

So I found myself out there yesterday, tying knots (clove hitches, if you must know) and trying to settle what amounted to a giant sail...In gale force winds, I remind you. It was the most frustrating couple of hours I've spent in a good long while.
In my mind, I could hear any number of old-school stagehands giving me shit about my crap knot tying ability, and my only so-so construction skills. But hey: most stage construction is modular. It comes off the truck in the same way in each city, to be assembled in stages, in exactly the same way each time, with creativity kept to a minimum. I'm not building a house, I'm building a temporary structure.
Unfortunately, this translates to my relative success with around-the-house projects: they're temporary. But I was just trying to make a place for Bee and I to be able to go smoke when it's raining, so it will only need to last until oh, say, the middle of next June.

Well, various alter-egos of mine have been hard at work:
Satan, over at The Darkness Reaching Out For The Darkness (how E. Howard Hunt described Richard Nixon, I needn't remind you), is tired of having to explain how he's not gay, despite what those bastards in the advertising game might have you believe. His evil girlfriend Stacy, as always, finds the whole thing fiendishly funny, which worries Satan, a bore of the highest stripe.

Mister White (whose actual name is Loyalty P. Manhood), after already having apologized to The Women, the Blacks, the non-Christians, the Indians, the Gays and the Other White Men and for the Money and the Popular Music, finally gets around to sort of apologizing to his ex-wife, the Earth. Catch it all at Your Weekly Apology From The Man.
Most people seem to have not caught this one. The only person who has ever commented was a guy from Denver named Alex Headrick. He has a pretty funny blog called It's What's Between, which is entirely about sandwiches. It sort of reminds me of The Impulsive Buy, except that it's only about sandwiches, or perhaps the late, lamented 'zine, Beer Frame, except that it's only about sandwiches.

Rear Admiral Dick Wheeler and his sister-in-law/co-editor Mrs. Dr. Florna Boddington have been doing a crap job, of late, keeping up the Obituaries. We'll try to keep up on that. People just keep on dying, and they will be missed.

Matter o' fact, it's been a while since we've heard from either Aunty Christ, or The Agony Antagonist. What the fuck?

I've thought lately about actually starting the "Periodic Table of My Favorite Albums" blog, since I've already written several pieces on it for one, and for two I don't like to take up all the space that it takes to thoroughly assess one's feelings about an album in this one.
Also, I've had an idea, probably not a good one, for a blog written by a fictional woman named Rachael, possibly called "This Is A Very Important Time For Us In Our Lives". It would be me finally speaking from the narrative voice of a woman, and even better, me writing down the thoughts of an awful woman.

The problem with that though, of course, is that it's hard to do this particular character without actually using audio. And, for that matter-without being sexist about it-the way women are terrible versus the way men are terrible are pretty different, generally, though you wouldn't think so to hear most people tell it.
I think that I would have to make the Rachael character (surnamed 'Concomitant', I think, for no particular reason) be one of those women who injects many 'Uhhhmm' s into her speech, to show how deeply she is thinking. She is at least partially inspired by Maria Bamford's thoughts about Portland women:
"Yes, I work at J. Jill, and my evening hours are my own." Heh heh.

Maybe it was just what she said about any women in any city she happened to be in, but the indication was strongly in favor of Right Here, since whatever she was parodying was spending half of its time stuck in fatuous generalizations and the other willfully not making any sense at all, and so very proud of itself the entire time.

Oh hell, let's give you some of that, on our way out:



You're welcome.