Tomorrow’s jam-packed with meetings and furious catch-up, then on Tuesday, it’s off to Chicago for the rest of the week for work-related classes. The nights, however, will be devoted to stuffing myself with the finest foods the town has to offer. Friday night, I’ll be dining with folks from the RRC message board, then it’s back to Pigspittle on Saturday in time for Superbowl Sunday.
Pictures and stories upon my return.
The photo’s got fuck-all to do with this post. I found it in a Google Image Search and thought “Double you tee eff?” It reminded me of a friend saying in the mid-nineties that he was going out on Halloween dressed as Bill Clinton and he was going to dress his four-year-old daughter as Monica Lewinsky just to see the looks on his neighbor’s faces.
So Uck and I went to church last night. Praise Jebus! No, I didn’t find myself filled with the holy spirit after a week of the Mehs. Uck was scouting an organ player to do some recording with his band and the outing fell under the category of “living life” so I tagged along.
Here in our tiny college town, there is a small church (Methodist? Episcopalian?) that puts on a weekly event they call “Bread and Jam” (or “Jam and Bread”, I don’t remember.) They put out a big buffet of Italian food in the basement then a jazz/blues combo jazz-and-blues-es out for a couple hours. The organist Uck was checking out is the pastor of the church, if I remember correctly.
I’m just not feeling it today, for some reason. Could be that I’ve got a trip coming up next week for which I am not at all prepared.
I’ve got to clean my apartment from top-to-bottom, get my oil changed, buy some stuff, load a bunch of software and files onto the laptop, and clean out my car (I’ve had my car for nearly three years and the trunk has been full of junk the entire time. I haven’t used my trunk once. Man, that’s lame-ass.)
It started a few winters ago. There is a house on a route I only take when I go to the grocery on my way home from work. The owners of the house make large, plywood cutouts of seasonal icons—Easter bunnies, snowmen, etc.—and prop them up in their yard. When I passed the house a few winters ago, they had a constructed a silhouette of a kneeling soldier accompanied by a sign that read “PRAY FOR OUR TROOPS.” I said—aloud, in my car, to no one at all—”No, YOU pray for our troops.”
My belief that the best way to protect “our troops” is to bring them home and my belief that praying for anything is futile not withstanding, I have become increasingly short-tempered with any slogans TELLING ME TO DO STUFF and find myself answering—aloud, in my car, to no one at all.
We have learned that when you make fun of children being molested, your dog dies.
Let that be a lesson to you.
I talked to my dad this morning at a little after 7:00AM. He told me unless something miraculous happened, it would be Katy’s last day on earth. Nothing miraculous happened. He emailed me just after noon to tell me they’d put her to sleep.
Katy was an eleven-year-old “black lab.” I put her breed in quotes because she was the freakiest looking black labrador I’d ever seen. As a pup, she looked just like every other adorable black lab puppy. As she grew older, however, it seemed almost as if her legs stopped growing. Her body grew, but her legs were short. She looked more like a miniature cow than the pure-bred sporting dog she allegedly was. Considering the time she was purchased and that black labs were one of the dogs to have, I have no doubt that she was the product of puppy-mill inbreeding.
Attention Moms, Dads and Survivors of Molestation: Don’t Read This Post.
While talking to my dad on the phone last night—as I do most every night—he told me about my cousin and her son. Her husband plays XBoxLive with pals and her son wanted to give it a go, so she cut him loose and let him have some fun. After he’d played a couple games, it dawned on her that he’d been playing—and talking via headset—with what my dad would say are “grown-ass men.” My cousin thought it would be a good idea to teach her young son a bit about “Stranger Danger.” However, he is a young lad—around seven, I suppose—and she didn’t want to blow his mind by explaining the real, Michael Jackson-type stuff to him. So, she simply said “You’ve got to be careful when you play online like that. You can’t play online when mommy or daddy aren’t around. There are bad people out there who want to—um—win really, really bad, OK?”
This explanation elicited peals of laughter from both my dad and I. “Yeah! You’d better watch out! Those guys want to win all over you!” I said, in hysterics. “Hey, how ’bout I come over and teach you how to win.” said my dad.
Those Pickards. So terribly droll.
The culprit!
I walked out the door this morning to find a cat I’d never seen before making a hasty retreat from the bowl of food I leave out for a “stray” that hangs around my building. Busted, disgusted, cannot be trusted!
As she hustled away, I called to her and was able to coax her back close enough for me to take a couple shots of her. In the shot above, she’s looking directly at the bowl of food.
A few more shots after the jump.
It doesn’t matter who does this song—a cover band, a glee club, Wayne’s World, or an Austrian brass band. I always get goosebumps when they get to “the part.”
Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me. For me. For Meeeeeeee.
By 1978, my mother had settled down with a groovy mustachioed guy by the name of Bob. Bob was a good egg. He had an enthusiasm for my sister and I only a man who hadn’t raised us could have. He lavished us with praise and showed genuine interest in the things we did, especially my sister’s burgeoning sports career. When he moved in, he brought with him all sorts of records we’d never seen or heard before: Marvin Gaye, Rod Stewart, Queen, Eagles. One night, we even spied what we later told my dad were “funny cigarettes” in a box under the coffee table. Bob was a groovy dude and since my mother had checked out in the parenting department, it was nice to have the guy around.
I continued to advance on the guitar despite having stopped my lessons. I was able to pick up songs by ear fairly easily. It wasn’t like I was listening to Genesis at the time, so it wasn’t tough to play KISS using “cowboy chords.” I remained utterly flummoxed by what I later learned to be “distortion.” I figured out enough to know that I needed an electric guitar. I don’t remember how the subject was broached but, sure enough, Groovy Bob bought me my first electric guitar. It was a Vantage, just like the one pictured above, and with it, I was going to rock.
Once I’d gotten the guitar home, it took me a few hours to work out the fact that the electric guitar alone was not enough. I needed something to, I don’t know, amplify the sound somehow. I managed to rig up a way to plug the guitar into my stereo. Blasting the stereo through the headphones made the headphones distort. (I didn’t have them on my head. I used them as a very crude amplifier.) I played that electric through my rigged-up headphone amp for at least a year. I inched a little bit closer to the holy grail.