Gimp's World

2006-09-01T00:04:00.000-05:00

In case you didn't know yet, I've ditched this blog.

I am now at my own domain...

www.gimpsworld.org

Also, I am importing these posts with me as soon as Wordpress fixes whatever it is blogger beta fubarred with the post importing system.

2006-08-27T18:05:00.001-05:00

Test. Jesus H how long is this going to last? Apparently I'm posting blind.

2006-08-26T01:03:00.001-05:00

Is this broken?

2006-08-25T16:49:00.000-05:00

Ok, I changed my profile picture back, Severine. Are you happy?

2006-08-25T16:07:00.001-05:00

Have you ever blindly defended a loved one who often faces unwarranted and unfounded, biased criticisms? They know nothing about it, of course, but you do. You could never tell them about some of the stupid things people have said about them because it would destroy what precious little dignity they have managed to preserve. You don't want them to inadvertently give the rumormongers more fire to fuel their lie factories, so you tend to micromanage the loved one in question. You tell them when they're out of line. And, of course, they do what you expect: They insult you, tell you that you're obsessed with them and that you just need to shut up and stay out of their life. All the while you are carrying around baggage from your most recent bout of defending this person tooth and nail.

And yet, if they only knew what you were going through - - if they knew how you feel when you hear the crap people disseminate far and wide about them...then things would be so completely different. This person would then somehow realize how deeply their words hurt you when you've only been trying to help them all this time. They would give you thanks from the innermost depths of their heart for being a caring family member and an overall decent human being.

And yet, this will never transpire. Since you don't want to damage them anymore than they've already been damaged, you maintain a painful silence about the rumors. You try and help them, but you're constantly yelled at and cut by one stinging accusation or insult after another. You resolve in your heart to continue your cursed vigil, hoping that someday, just someday, that they see what you've been doing for them.

2006-08-24T22:28:00.001-05:00

In case ya'll didn't notice, Staincastle is back. HELL. YES.

2006-08-24T12:25:00.000-05:00

Nice. Self-righteous fools, you just ruined the solar system as we knew it.

My
Very
Elegant
Mother
Just
Served
Us
Nine...

Now what? Pizzas are out of the equation.

2006-08-24T02:41:00.000-05:00

Can someone explain to me why I am installing a toilet seat at 2:41 AM?

2006-08-24T01:01:00.001-05:00

Before you start reading this, I suggest you start the following video at youtube in another window, due to its recurring appearances in my life as of late. It's Ryan Adams' La Cienga Just Smiled...a song I want played at my funeral, by Gnif if at all possible. You know, should the unfortunate need should arise. Anyway....

Today I was struck by something. At first, it would seem so simple, such an obvious sentiment, that would at first seem unworthy of even mentioning to another due to its mundanity, but at the same time so profound that it's hard to grasp. If you're wondering what on earth I'm getting at, I'm referring to the fragility of life as we know it. It is indeed a seldom occasion when I am smitten with this recurring thought, but as of late I am all but obliged to meditate on the subject. After Mr. Reeves blowing his head off...after seeing several car wrecks...after the Vietnamese shrimp boats laden with dead families in the storm debris left by Katrina. It's something that even though I am not constantly dwelling upon every waking moment manages to stay in a dark corner in my mind.

Last night Mrs. Gimp had a bad bout with the bronchial spasms that have been plaguing her lately. She is forced to sleep in a semi-sitting position, propped up with every available pillow and cushion (including my own, forcing me to sleep with a rolled-towel to support my neck). This position permits her to sleep without choking on her own phlegm. That didn't remedy the situation last night. She began choking with severe bronchial spasms at 01:00, 03:00, and 06:00. I held her hair and shook the albuterol spray and reassured her that she was indeed alive...

In case you don't know what a bronchial spasm is, do this -- exhale, and I mean HARD. Let all the air out of your lungs, then force the last few dribbles out. Now, pinch your nose and close your mouth and make a hard, determined effort to breathe back in. Fight, but don't let yourself inhale. Mrs. Gimp is doing this an alarming number of times as of late due to her bronchitis and previous childhood asthma. I feel rather helpless when I watch her fight so hard for the simple pleasure of breathing air. I sat in my living room the other night and silently cried because of what I had just seen. I've never lived in close proximity to an asthmatic, so I don't know how to take all of this...it's so overwhelming when I see her colour change and watch as tears stream down her face as she struggles. When the air finally fills her lungs I say a silent prayer of thanks. I refuse to sleep at night, opting to watch over her. I wet a finger in my mouth, and place it near her nose to reassure myself that she is still breathing. That she is still my wife, and that she's not dead.

The doctors have increased her albuterol to every 4 to 6 hours instead of twice a day. She's decided to stop the advair steroid due to the fact that it gave her a disgusting thrush infection in her throat (read: yeast infection in your friggin mouth) that necessitated another $50 visit to the doctor, followed by a $40 Rx for an antifungal mouthwash. (Is Ryan Adams hitting it down on the end of this song yet? It's awesome live. It's also key to this post, so start the damn song already if you haven't, and if you have, make sure it's still going).

I bought her a cushion with arm rests today, to keep her from having to use all those pillows. I also bought her 2 red roses surrounded by baby's breath, and a card that has a pit bull on it. It says "I like you so much that I wag my tail til..." and when you open the card it says "...my butt hurts." I also bought her a copy of Troy on DVD so she can get a Brad Pitt fix tomorrow.

I was thinking about last night and how scared I was. It began to rain this afternoon at around five, and of course my windows were down. La Cienga Just Smiled was on the ipod, and for some reason I felt gravitated to the cemetery where my grandpa's are, along with Holly (see my July post about Holly, my beloved cousin who has attained legendary status). It was raining, and I pulled up at Lake Park Hills, rolled through the iron gates where I skated and played street hockey at night so many times before. I drove past the spot where I downed my first beer as a teenager, and around the curve to the second lake on the 'back 40' where I played fetch with Crouton Sherwin recently. I drove past Devan's grave, with its black lab puppy statues on it (Devan was murdered by a vengeful husband who was too stupid to know he shot the wrong damn person), then walked past Dottie's brother Paul's grave. Paul went to sleep at the wheel coming home from Miss. State I understand...don't recall for sure but know for a fact it tore her up and I felt sorry but unable to express it to her at the time.

I walked through the rain, with La Cienga Just Smiled going in my headphones, and then I passed them. First grandma's vacant and morbid-as-hell stone waiting in silent testimony of how creepy it is for the living to purchase a stone beforehand...no deathdate, only the birth date. Then I passed TuTu's grave (my paternal grandpa)...and there was Pa buried right below him (my maternal grandpa). I thought about how both grew up in a difficult time, but one had a lawyer for a dad and the other one's dad made him quit school to pick cotton, something he always resented because it delayed him learning how to read. And by them was Holly...and the song in my ipod declares "How'd I end up to feel so bad for such a little girl? / I hold you close in the back of my mind / It feels so good, but damn it makes me hurt." It's a romantic song, but that one line in a familial sense just described my entire being in that given moment, then it goes "La Cienga just smiles and says 'I'll see you around'." I squatted down and cleaned some bird crap off her stone, it was covering the 4 of July 4, 1989. By then I had been rained on to the point of being wet down to the socks, but I still stood there, admiring my loved ones: Holly, Pa, and Tutu. I kissed two fingers and placed a tender kiss on each of their stones then walked back to my car in the rain, thinking about how a life can be snuffed out in an instant.

I would be depressed, but a close friend of mine is helping me to stop living for the past. I have stopped reaching back and purposely holding on to painful snippets of my life, striving better yet for the present and the unpredictable future.

La Cienga Just Smiled and said "I'll see ya around..."

Holly, I'll see ya 'round one day, and we'll have a whiskey sour with Tutu and talk about all the things ya'll have missed. Ya'll have missed my beautiful wife and my three kids who fell from the sky and into my life. Ya'll missed my first house, which I sold, and my second, which is less than two miles from where ya'll are resting, but only a mile from where we played football in Tutu's yard. I'll pick on you for the big 80's hair you had when you left us, and I'll tell you all the things I was too scared to tell you due to my youthful bashfulness, like how I wanted to tell you to stop hanging out with those drunk whores who you called your 'friends', and how I didn't like you drinking so much, or how I missed you on Saturday nights when you stopped coming over to our house to eat a steak and a salad like we had all done as a family since decades before you or I had ever entered into the equation. I'll tell you about how me and your little brother used to stay up all night watching music videos when they were still a novelty, and how much I miss him too ever since I'd lost touch with him and he'd gotten into the same drug trap that ultimately brought about your demise.

People, remember your families. If you have problems or divisions, it doesn't matter. One day you could wake up and realise that in an instant your loved ones are no longer a part of your day-to-day lives.

And, for the lazy fool that didn't bother to start La Cienga Just Smiled, here:

2006-08-21T20:28:00.001-05:00

Edit: You know, I just heard prez say something on CNN that wigged me out. He yelled at the press corps and basically said that as long as he was president that no one is leaving Iraq until the mission is accomplished. Can you explain to me what exactly the mission is and when it will be accomplished? Is it depleting the entire population of 30-somethings? Nothing's changed in that part of the world, except a lot of us have friends who have come home as emotional wrecks. Do you know what it's like to have a friend talk to you in the wee hours of the night on a weeknight, wasted and crying? Babbling about stuff and not wanting to go into detail about the guts, the bodies burned to a crisp, the bones snapped off, the compound fractures and extremity stumps, the natives who take shots at you when you aren't even save on your own base?

I hate bringing up politics, because they're useless, but...I mean. C'mon.

In case the video in my earlier post was lost on you, check the lyrics to Dead American from Lars Frederiksen and The Bastards. It's how I feel everytime the news comes on now and they announce that another young person has been blown to bits.

Trench warfare dug in deep brutal bloody No retreat
American dead better than red another politician with a debt on his head
Bodies ripped covered in shit Napalm blitz the City is lit
Bombs blast mustard gas throat slash truncheon smash

Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey Another story about another dead American...
Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey Another story about another dead American...
Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey One more story about another dead American

Blitzkrieg flames buildings ablaze killings fields where the bodies decay
Torture racks machine gun racks never surrender it's an all-out attack
Money whores open sores plan quiet wars behind closed doors
Clandestine games human remains cyanide genocide

Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey Another story about another dead American...
Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey Another story about another dead American...
Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey One more story about a dead American

=============================================================
Yo G-nif, here's a video for you and I to derive some inspiration.

:-)

2006-08-21T20:01:00.000-05:00

I have changed over to Blogger's new system, still in its beta infancy. I must admit I was terrified at first, but I'm feeling more confident for now. I'm still wanting to get more hosting and buy back my domain from those stupid snipers from New Orleans who took it from me. They said they'd give it back to me for a handsome three digit fee, which seemed ri-damn-diculous to me. My Co.Uk domain was sniped up too. Oh well.

My American comrades: If you have not heard them, please take the time to listen to the Kooks and the Dogs, two UK groups who currently hold very dear places in my heart. As we have all figured out by now, unless you have an ipod or satellite radio, you aren't going to hear good music, at least not in our rural area of the dark, dusty and cobweb-infested corner of the world.

I must say I am concerned about Mrs. Gimp. Yesterday, she decided to leave the house for the first time in two weeks after dealing with a long bout of bronchitis and other bronchial maladies. I think she was attempting to show us how much stronger she felt now that she's been taking care of herself. Well, she did make a point at least: she passed out and I ended up carrying her to the car. The doctor says she's going to be ok, but it still doesn't make me feel any better after I was scared half to death.

I still want to know who in God's name you are in or around Hammond, LA. You aren't going to get off easily with only one mention. The paranoid self-critic in me thinks it's some class who is using my blog as a teaching tool on how not to behave like a mongoloid in public view.

By the way, nice going G-nif, you finally updated for the first time in January. Hence, you get your very own link again. ;-)

2006-08-20T15:39:00.000-05:00

2006-08-20T09:51:00.000-05:00

==========================
When horseplay goes terribly wrong
==========================

It's still a bit touchy around this house. Mrs. Gimp can't sleep very well and as a consequence, I don't sleep either. The bags under my eyes are quite voluminous these days, representing almost a complete month of 3-5 hours sleep a night, beginning in Mexico. The asthmatic choking spasms are claming down slowly but surely, and as long as I don't sit up in the night terrified my better half is dying, that's a plus.

You know, it's kind of funny that all of this transpires the month after she is officially insurance-less.

Yesterday, she informs me that she wants something to eat and that I needed to go to the store for her. I get in my car, put on my headphones, and start down the road. When I get there, a brief flashback of what it's like to trounce about in public completely oblivious to one's surroundings (thanks Petite Anglaise!) convinces me to leave the ipod in my pocket as I'm doing my shopping.

The shopping experience was much, much better to the Clash, Pink Grease, and Paul van Dyk. along with a generous smattering of the Sex Pistols. Normally I get to the point where I want to run out of the store screaming and pulling my hair out when there are that many people there, but somehow, I just ignored them, lost in my own personal world. No borderline panic attacks, no rudeness...nothing but the music, and the groceries...

Except now Walmart has stopped selling rueditas ... you know, the wheat chicharrones that you throw in hot oil. Here:

So I ended up having to go to one of the local Mexican markets, which is really hell on a weekend. I think everyone and their momma was there. Since everyone kills themselves working during the week, the weekend is the time to get out and do the typical lavar hablar comprar mandado mandar dinero pa'la casa thing, so everyone was there buying fajitas, pan, and of course sending money back home to the house. While I was in line I counted maybe 8 grand changing hands...about eight guys and each one sending between 800 and a thousand bucks home. That represents a lot of sweat and work...I hope they're doing something worthwhile. Most of the guys I know usually do...it's all about putting your little sister through private school, getting her a laptop and internet access at home, paying off your mom's huge hospital debt, or the classic building a house one friggin room at a time...the construction literally depends on homeboy's paycheck up here at the plant...when he sends a little more home, there goes another room, and then another and another, and before you know it there's a two story house to move into, with decent plumbing and fixtures...and when that's finished...time for dude to come home after saving up another few thousand to maybe open up a family business to ensure they don't ever have to go through the whole mojado thing ever again.

What a tangent...

Anyway, I got the Duritos home, we heated up some oil, and fried the suckers. They expand to maybe 6 times their original size (about the size of a quarter)...and when they're done you arrange a nice pile on a plate, squeeze some lime juice on them, bathe liberally in hot sauce, and maybe a little crumbled fresco cheese, and there ya go...the best junk food money can buy. I LOVE these things. We ended up eating that for dinner since no one felt like cooking.

After watching A Very Long Engagement, I decided to go to bed. Somehow or another, a bit of rough-housing ensued between the missus and myself, she thought it was funny...and I thought it sucked. I went and locked myself in the bathroom, and when I cracked open the door to see what was happening, she sprays FEBREEZE into the partially opened door, not caring where it went. (In this case, my eyes)

I ran to the sink and desperately began pawing at my contacts to get them out of my eyes. "Clean Linen" smell and many tears later, I finally got them out, but now there is a major drawback. I hate to admit it, but I am one of those people who doesn't really take his contacts out like he should. So it hurts to put them back in...really, really bad. I have to wait a couple of days to let the eye gunk and protein fairies clear out before I put a new pair in. And now I can't find my glasses.

So I'm sitting here typing this blindly, squinting at the screen and hoping I didn't make any typo's.

Word to ya' moms.

2006-08-19T18:26:00.000-05:00

My Idol.

2006-08-19T16:34:00.000-05:00

While we're on the subject of ABBA...

As one commenter posted about this video, go brush your teeth after watching this. It's too sickenlingly-sweet.

Or...

This is worth putting up with just for the opening synth diddling.

This is on the same lines of singing a catche anime theme that's in Japanese...it's just...I dunno. Novel.

2006-08-18T21:28:00.000-05:00

You know, I turned on the TV just now, and to my horror there was...Agnetha and Bjorn from ABBA backstage at a concert. WTF?

I was so shocked I was captivated. I watched, and it ended up being a live from Wembley show back in the day.

They sang some touchy feely song with a chorus full of children...and Agnetha was hugging a little boy with snot running out of his nose saying he was an angel crossing the stream.

Of course, it started with 'gimme a man after midnight'...

I...just...don't know what to think.

Ugh.

2006-08-18T15:42:00.000-05:00

Texas Ranger just came in, reeking of cigarettes and with another unlit Pall Mall already in his hand yet again, discussing how difficult it is to add a shortcut to his windows desktop. He has come in four times now, making his trademark in-and-out-and-in-and-out loops in my doorway, pointing and gesturing at me with his lighter and ciggie. And, as always, just when I think he is gone, he comes back in and brings up something I could really care less about, like horses, tobacco, or what the local salvage store got from an ailing and out of business discount store God-knows-where in Iowa, or something just as silly.

Today has been one of those days where I am forced to ask myself, "If it's so dead around here, why do I have to sit here at the phone?" I feel like those nuke jockeys, always on duty, always sitting there by the controls to the Minuteman missles, waiting for the improbable word to launch the suckers across the ponds whenever the powers that be get nukey. I am sure those guys are killer at sudoku and crosswords, or something at least. I'd go crazy if every single waking moment of my career were this boring. Oh well, at least next week seems to be bringing the promise of actually doing something. Apparently some machines broke in random directions around my work district. Time to snap out of Maytag Repariman mode and and spring into action.

As I am desperately picking my brain for some final witty comment, Walker has traipsed back into earshot, this time with StinkyFart Lady in tow. They appear to have stuffed their ears with cake icing, which is the only excuse I can come up with to explain why they are talking in voices so loud that I'm quite sure an old deaf man somewhere in rural Asia can hear their conversation and is wondering to himself what the hell is happening to his peaceful solitude.

And, as I post this, Walker has come back in and thus the cycle is complete. Pass the air freshener, will ya? It reeks of flavor country (tm) in here.

2006-08-17T22:06:00.000-05:00

Start the weekend off right people. I love ya'll.

2006-08-17T12:48:00.000-05:00

I feel that I must borrow a story from an acquaintance of mine for this post. I will call him Zigfried. Zigfried is a road warrior. He is one of those people who truly dominate all forms of asphalt and air to get from point A to point B.

In this instance, Z. was travelling to the west coast on business. He happened to be in the air when the unfortunate incidents of a couple of weeks ago insured that countless innocent people will be uncomfortably thirsty as they wait to board their flights due to a few woolie-bearded zealots wanting to blow up airplanes with a mixture of gatorade and religious fanaticism. Well, he gets off the plane and begins the process of having his baggage scanned and checked to get on another flight. Z. dubbed one of the gate guards "Differently-abled angry knife-wielding sikh in a turban" for obvious reasons. In case the reader is unaware, sikhs go nowhere without this ominous-looking knife called a kirpan by their sides. So in summary there's this angry dude in a wheel chair with a knife. Here's a snippet of info from a googled site for the curious:

Sikh men wear a traditional knife, called a kirpan, as a symbol of baptism. Traditionally, the knife can be used only for self-defense or in defense of those who cannot defend themselves.

Check out a Sikh priest from a BBC news article:

Well, it would certainly give an air of "Don't mess with me, beyotch," wouldn't it?

Anyway, there's is the Sikh and his small army of Homeland Security drones scanning baggage, and behind Z. is a man. A loud man, mouthing off due to the delays. A mad, mouthy Palestinan man, carrying a duffle bag of sufficient size to carry a dead body in, to be exact. Z. awaits his turn at the xray machine, and he puts his jacket on the conveyor belt and passes through. For one reason or another, the guards put his jacket BEHIND the duffle bag. As he awaits on the other side for his jacket, the duffle bag comes through, and the Sikh's eyes grow to the size of saucers as the bag goes through, stops, goes backwards, and then fowards in several repetitive, jerky movements. Z. is immediately surrounded by fed drones who erroneously thought the bag belonged to him. They formed a circle and all had their hands on their pistols. "Don't move," one of them says. He looks at them in a mixture of shock/surprise and says "I don't even know that asshole." He then watches helplessly as ANOTHER group of drones on the OTHER side of the gate surround the loud, incensed Palestinan gentleman, who by this time is screaming in Arabic at the guards.

Finally, Z. is allowed to leave after the Sikh orders one of his henchmen to hurl his jacket back to him.

Later, after they were safely boarded onto the plane, Z. learned why the guards wigged out.

Loud, spittle-spraying Palestinan angry man had built...a robot. Yes, a homemade robot and was attempting to bring this aboard the plane. Why the HELL would you try to do something that stupid when you can't even drink a soda in peace now days.

You know, I remember the day I left JFK London-bound and carried a SWITCHBLADE on the plane with no problem. These morons have really ruined flying for the rest of the sane world.

2006-08-16T12:19:00.000-05:00

Today, I committed a faux pas of epic proportions.

Despite my best efforts to be silent and 'hidden', I had a random saleswoman come in my office with no warning and start proffering crap on me. It wasn't normal "My midget goat boy child in Chad has AIDS and needs your help so buy this pencil" type soliciting. This woman had "AS SEEN ON TV" type items. Wireless battery-powered alarms. "Sassy Scissors". And God knows what else...I was too horrified to properly pay attention. The first thing I thought was "How did she get past the sleeping lummox at the gate?" She was just making totally random ninja visits to the offices. Fortunately, I had no cash or checkbook, so I told her to come back next week, something I am actually rather sincere about. Some of the crap looked, well, appealing.

I send her on her way and immediately dive for the MSN window to a coworker, warning her "of the lady selling alarm crap"...

Well, my coworker didn't minimize the window, and guess who got hit next. Yep, you got it.

And guess who read the comment.

Yep, you got it.

And guess who had a short, angry saleswoman in his office all defensive about her products being called 'crap'.

Guilty as charged.

Sigh...

========================

I also did a very bad thing, papa Smurf.

I got it out of lay away with all the accessories.

=========================

You know, I'd really love to know why I seem to have a fan base (or group of haters) in the Hammond Louisiana area. You guys are hitting my page more than the home town people. I'd love to hear from you...drop a comment.

2006-08-14T20:27:00.000-05:00

I'm going to make this short and sweet, because I'm still in shock.

But those of you who went to school with me...who know me.

Our band director committed suicide Sunday.

I'll miss those Disneyworld trips with the band even more now that the man who tirelessly fundraised and honed our skills to get us there in the first place is gone.

This is the man who taught me to play three octaves on the trumpet...the man who eventually let me do the opening to 'Chameleon' because I could nail that E flat that was twenty miles above the normal range on the scale...

This was the man who let me sneak out of school without permission to go on runs to the local nearby deli and bring back lunch for he and I.

This was the man who helped me send my Bach stradavarius to be completely rebuilt. He didn't want me playing a cornet because he said it "didn't do me justice"...heh.

So next time you watch a football game, and you're thinking 'halftime stat rehash'...remember what it's like to feel those lights burning on your face as you stand at ease. Then, you hear TEN HUT!!!! and you snap to life...MARK TIME, MARK UP 1..2...1..2..3..4..

Mr. Reeves, we'll miss you.

:-(

2006-08-13T20:34:00.000-05:00

Funny...

I saw a blind man with a blind-persons' stick...coming out of LENS CRAFTERS. I still don't get it.

Nothing of note today.

2006-08-12T10:23:00.000-05:00

I am sincerely hoping that another one of my friends is reading this at this very moment. I gave them the address to my blog and told them that this is soul-baring ground. So, if you are here...welcome and receive a bearhug from me.

Now, on to better things.

==============================

I don't know how many of you have aquariums at home, but if you do, AVOID flourescent bulbs like the plague. Maybe it's my own ignorance, or lack of ability, but I bought those things at walmart. $5 apiece, along with a promise of 'intensifying fish colors'. Yeah, that wasn't the only thing that was intensified. You see, my fish were plagued with an outbreak of algae that ended up eventually killing even Fred, my catfish who was 6 years old. I found two fish remaining out of like 10, put them in a tupperware bowl as I exiled them from their home, and proceeded to completely siphon dry the aquarium. I scrubbed, boiled, scrubbed, wiped, sprayed and eliminated all traces of that crap, which eventually had formed sheets on the walls. I then bought new gravel, conditioned 10 more gallons of water, and put them back in their home, coupled with a pair of new catfishes and a couple of more tetras to add to the original school of 10 which had become 2.

Up until now they seem happy...a little weirded out but content.

Such are the trials of owning an aquarium. :p

2006-08-10T09:21:00.000-05:00

============================
Gimp, on Injusticia and Economy
============================

First of all, if you are a ninny from the local paper, I am going into, what did you call it? Ah yes, 'multicultural hippie wantabe [sic] mode'. This is your queue to get the hell out of my blog unless you want your brain to melt.

I have been thinking a lot about this particular post. I wanted to make something meaningful, but at the same time I began to feel that I would have taken an eternity in wording it. Hence, I decided to go ahead and splatter the wall with my brain, as it were.

A couple of days before I was set to leave Matamoros, I was sent back to the store. My sis in law and I pile in the hooptie and we head to Soriana for whatever it was we needed. While there, we happened upon another bottle of New Mix. Here, take a look:

While we were getting our things, I noticed a couple of typical rubber-neckers and a uniformed guard running towards an aisle. As I passed, I turned my head and locked eyes with the perpetrator. He was...guess. CD's? Cigarettes? Liquor? No...he was in the baby section. He had a carton of milk and some diapers hidden in his shirt and he was being taken down HARD. As I watched him get handcuffed and roughed up, I continued walking, but that scene stuck with me the rest of the day and for some time after that. It was almost as if it had happened in slow motion.

I don't condone shoplifting. It's a horrendous wrong in society and I think people should be caned for participating in it. But then again, it wasn't like the shoplifting you see here so often. You know, the opened pregnancy test box at Walmart, stuck in the drink aisle. Or the empty cd case in the beer section. This guy obviously had a child, and he didn't have a way to provide for it. It just...hurt.

That same day, I was walking to the centro to do some last-minute shopping (fake Ray-Bans anyone?), when I happened upon another scene that bothered me.

You see, there is no middle class in Mexico. There's an upper class, and then there is the lower, dirt-poor class. There's not a neighborhood with families using two minivans to ferry kids to soccer practice. There's not the proverbial picket-fenced yard with two cats in the yard and a golden retriever named Riley. Nope.

There's what I saw. There's the large house, with marble steps leading to the front door. It had golden bars to keep the 'riffraff' out. There isn't really concertina wire, but there's something a helluva lot more sinister. When your brick wall is still setting, you smear mortar on top. While it's moist, you break up any glass bottles you have, and you set them in the mortar. I really pity the bastard who tries to climb one of those at night.

Anyway, there was a family with a setup like that. They had a jeep grand cherokee, and a H3 hummer. They were outside grilling on their porch, laughing and drinking sodas. It was the mom, the dad, and the kids. They had a dog, but he was on a chain to keep him from being stolen. They had a really nice house...but on either side, their compound walls formed the border for another scene. On one side, you have a house made out of old wood, with cardboard patches here and there. You have a well in the yard because you don't have water. And on the other side of the compound, you have a very similar scene, but with an old woman sitting on a broken water heater, sobbing. As the grill smoke wafted over the wall and into this woman's world, I have to ask myself if the smell turned her stomach because she didn't have enough to eat.

You can call me a hippie for thinking about things like this, but it doesn't change the fact that suffering in the world, well, sucks.

2006-08-09T21:28:00.000-05:00

G-nif, left handed guitar playing done on an upside down gibson for ya my man....made me think of you.

One day, we will rock the mic. Being on the same continent would be a start. :)

2006-08-08T21:16:00.000-05:00

I'm still around...been super busy. Getting a post together for (hopefully tonight)...in the meantime...enjoy Puya.

2006-08-07T17:30:00.000-05:00

2006-08-05T18:17:00.000-05:00

I was planning on doing some tech support work on the side this weekend, but I got cancelled on…so I am going to sit here in this horrible rainstorm and type up a little about Tootie and her wedding.

When we got there, Tootie was obviously VERY pregnant. Her dad won’t have anything to do with her since she left home…he says she robbed him blind and she doesn’t say anything in her defense. Since Mrs. Gimp raised Tootie from when she was a baby until about four, she has a bond with her…so it was looked over that she came over during the duration of our stay, but her dad threatened her about taking things and her shackup had to sit outside on the curb, which he dutifully did for hours at a time.

While Mrs. Gimp and Tootie talked, they tried to find a point they could use as a defining moment in Tootie’s downfall from a young teenage girl to a young teenage mom twice over. During the talks, Tootie came forward and said she felt she needed to get married, because (in her own words) in spite of everything she had done she still had a conscience that bothered her when she thought about just living with curbthief. So we called him in, and I had never seen him without his cap on…dude looks like the Mexican version of Bert from Bert n Ernie, so I will call him Beto from now on. Beto came in and we asked him how he felt about things, and he looked at the floor for a while and then finally began to talk. She’s 16, he’s 20, and he said he felt bad about how they were living too. He looked up and asked what he should do, and we asked him how he felt about getting married, which he said he was willing and actually happy to do. So, in front of us, Bert proposed to Tootie. She started crying and of course said yes. So we went, had blood drawn, and got the funds together to help them out with their marriage costs.

That Wednesday morning, we got up early after only a couple of hours’ sleep and went to the downtown registro civil office, and they asked us some questions…when they found out her mom wasn’t to be present (yeah, her. The bitch.), they said she couldn’t get married. Then my brother in law storms past the receptionist into the judge’s office, with the receptionist behind him clucking and screaming about ‘who did he think he was’ etc. What happened next surprised even my jaded soul.

The judge appeared, in blue jeans and reading glasses, and put the receptionist out. The judge and my bro in law talked for about ten minutes, then my bro in law comes out, shades still on, and whispers in my ear, ‘prepárate para una mordida’…get ready for a bite. It was just like the Clint Eastwood spaghetti western: For a few Dollars More, the wedding was in our grasp sans bitches’ signature. So we coughed up his vacation money, and they got married.

We spent the afternoon swilling Tecate and grilling chicken, and Beto came into the house without my bro in law kicking him in the teeth. It was obvious he doesn’t trust them though, because he never pried his eyesight off them the entire time they were celebrating.

Here’s a picture of Beto and Tootie along with Gimp Jr. and Gimp’s nephew buying popscicles from, who else? Nevería y Productos Helados ‘Beto’ :-)

2006-08-05T16:11:00.000-05:00

To the goob who thinks he's super-sleuth for slathering my myspace and blog addresses all over our local bumpkin newspaper forums: Thanks. I needed some attention and PR. You've mastered the internet...great. Now master common sense and I'll applaud you.

Now anyway, we're going to be telling a story here shortly, I'm working it up in Word to post later on tonight. Tootie got married while we were there...that girl is a walking contradiction I swear to God above. I'm gonna post some details from the wedding later on tonight. I haven't forgotten ya'll...

2006-08-04T13:55:00.000-05:00

2006-08-02T21:42:00.000-05:00

Food for thought, guey.

2006-08-02T18:57:00.000-05:00

Oigan gueyes:

No tengo cable.Cuando me iban a decir que salio' la nueva rola del Gran Silencio?

Jeez.

More on the travel diary to come. I'm still recueprating.

2006-07-31T03:39:00.000-05:00

I've not been on due to the fact that I've apparently brought back a biological souvenir. I've officially lost count how many times I've thrown up, had an attack of the runs, or an interesting combination of the two simaltaneously. I would love to drink some water or gatorade, but I'm throwing it up still cold to give you an idea of how long I can tolerate it. Sigh...

Cross your fingers boys and girls. This promises to be a fun ride...maybe more fun than my famous three month Montezuma's Revenge I brought back in '02.

2006-07-29T15:36:00.000-05:00

==================================================================
IT CAME FROM UNDER THE PUENTE NUEVO aka The "Geeve heem a doll-ahr" Syndrome
==================================================================

Dateline:
Martes 24 Julio 2006 - 22:00 horas

Monday started as an uneventful day. Over the bridge again, back to the stores, more crap purchased, then back before 16:00 in time for my bro in law to get off work. Hot damn, it got better though. When he got there, we changed clothes, hopped on Lauro Villar, and then the evening was spent at Playa Bagdad consuming Tecate and some rather rad peach-flavored 5% liquor soda (¡¡Nuevo!! ¡Contiene Jimador(TM) Tequila! ¡Ponte Bien Pedo Ya!). We got to the beach, turned right at the shanties, and drove about twenty minutes down the beach until we found a place with a relatively low amount of dead fish and garbage on the seashore. Incidentally, you gotta love PRI: Corrupt as hell, robbed a country blind, but damn they could keep some beaches clean back in the day.

As you can see, we swam, acted like fools, found shells, fed stray dogs, and enjoyed a bucket of KFC chicken I nabbed in Brownsville on the way back over. It was one of three things my bro in law asked for that day I went over: Dr Pepper, KFC, and a Def Leppard album...things he devoured in his brief couple of years on the otro lado. Then, at 20:00, the thirteen of us (yes, you read right) hopped into my mini van and came back home. We chilled until an insane hour yet again before finally retiring for the evening.

Tuesday, we decided that Wednesday (bro in law's day off) would be spent grilling chicken and hanging around the house. We decided to go back to Brownsville yet AGAIN (sigh) for chicken. So Tuesday evening we head across the border, but in a classic spazz moment my wife and sister in law decide to visit some old friends of theirs who happen to live in Villa del Sol. Postizo abuelos of theirs, if you will.Now I don't know if you've seen Villa del Sol, but it's a 14-story complex for invalids and elderly folks. Nevermind the fact that it looks like it might fall in at any minute...what bothers me is how they have 80-year-old abuelitas walking to their apartments on windy outside walkways that high in the air. I found a couple of thumbnails of the place but nothing else...so I condensed them into one equally-crappy quality image and here you go:

The place is one of the first things you see as you come towards the US from Matamoros. Well, we get to where the people we know live...and as my bad luck would have it, they live up there. The top floor, to be exact. Jeez, I almost had a fit when I walked out onto the walkway. I have seriously bad height issues folks. Well, after we got there and I let them hang out with their friends, I decided to go confront my phobia by standing at the balcony rail. The view of Matamoros was...spectacular. I don't like using that word in describing Matamoros at all, but the view from that place is unparalleled. You could see La Copa out in the distance, and all the downtown areas. It also put into perspective what a border is. Check it out for yourself:

A manmade piece of crap that doesn't exist. The world wasn't created with chalk and paint outlining places. There is one street, some water, and another street. But between those two streets is something that dictates how people live, what language they speak, and in some cases, separates the 'haves' from the 'have-nots'. If you click the picture and zoom in, you can see the gateway at the Puente Nuevo.

I thought for a long time about how less than a mile from me, there were men with machine guns and fences with razor wire that keep my family apart. People talk about how this immigration system works, but how do you explain the fact that usually only crooks, thieves and drug dealers get visas? I was rather shocked to find out that a young man I won't describe in detail has a visa. So do his parents and his brothers, who incidentally are in jail in the US for participating in the family business: stealing SUV's, passing them, painting them, giving them a new identity, then selling them. HOW do these people get visas and my loved ones don't?

Now here comes the bad part:

Well anyway, we got done with our visit at Villa del Sol and we got on with the business at hand, going to Walmart (I HATE THAT STORE!!!). We made our purchases, and finally around 23:00 we head back home. We are coming across the bridge and I get the green light at the station. Gravy, right? WRONG. This moronic guard starts flashing a flashlight at me telling me to stop. I complied, and he comes up and starts grilling me about crap like he was a gringo 200 yards north of his border station. I give him vehicle insurance, my license, even my passport. He keeps asking me for my registración vehicular and I am steadily telling him that I don't carry a vehicle title in my car with me. I also make a valid point by pointing out that as long as I stay in the zona fronteriza he really has no right to stop and harrass me for being in Matamoros, as I am not nationalizing my vehicle. He keeps going on and on and even goes "Ehy needth tu si jew rreg-ees-stray-shyun." My first reaction was "you patronizing cunt", but since I didn't want to spend the night in jail (or worse), I replied in typical bilingualese: "Que no entiendes que no traigo lo que pides it's not necessary in Mississippi dude."

I finally hit him where it hurt. I asked him for his name and badge number. This is the proper thing to do when being held captive by a mordida-hungry moron. You can put him on Azteca 7 as being corrupto and he'll be strung up. People are getting tired of putting up with that crap. He looks at me with a deer-in-the-headlights look, and sends me on my way. I got REALLY pissed off the further down the street I drove. Instead of being scared (Which I was at first, but it disappeared), I got into this blind rage.

If he knew who our neighbors are down there. If he knew. And I was told by a rather creepy and over-friendly neighbor that if I had problems, to 'just let him know' and he'd take care of it.

The 'geeve heem a dollar' phrase is popular in my family because it was thrown at my great-uncle when he drove from Mississippi to Juarez to get my other great-uncle out of jail for God-knows-what moronic crap he pulled. My uncle was held up at the bridge, and he didn't know what was going on until another cop walked up and informed him. GEEVE HEEM A DOLLAR. Yeah, right.

So, in the off chance your dumb ass reads blogs, tu madre es una ramera, Mr. Border guard.

2006-07-29T00:02:00.000-05:00

I'm home. And have I got a wad of crap to tell you.

I'm going to bed now. I literally walked in the door 10 minutes ago, got here in LESS than twelve hours, from Matamoros to South Mississippi. I am GOOD.

Look for update this weekend. In the meantime, enjoy a bit of Jesus on the Bus, featuring eight of Gimp's family members and a cameo by yours truly.

2006-07-24T12:44:00.001-05:00

Sunday, 23 July 2006 - 19:06

Yesterday was a slow day. It started with the cellphone alarm going off and my brother in law's repeated jabs at it to turn it off, then all of a sudden realizing he was about to be an hour and a half late for work. He finally took off like a bolt out the door and went to work. I had a splitting headache and no pain medicine so I laid in bed until about 16:00, when my wife and sister in law decide they want to go to the otro lado, so we piled in the van with sis in law's kids and headed to the international bridge. We sat in line, and I called my dad while we were waiting to cross. He asked where we were, and I told him my butt was technically in Mexico, but my feet and the van motor were in Texas. Borders are a manmade piece of crap if you ask me.

We finally got to the stop sign where they make you wait until the person in front of you gets the 3rd degree interrogation, and then you go ahead and get your turn in the meat grinder. Well, the light turned green, but out of nowhere this chipper looking US Customs turd comes bounding out in what looks like a postal workers' summer outfit. He then began to put on this "My penis is bigger than yours" air. I swear to God before he took up residence in his guardshack he cracked his neck and fingers. Then he put an authoratative hand in the air for me not to proceed. Ok, fine. I waited. Then the light turned green, and I went ahead. Here he came out of his little toll booth monkey enclosure throwing me the "My penis is much, much bigger than yours" gesture and I sat there frozen. After about three minutes I FINALLY get to stop. I did, and all of a sudden I saw a camera flash go off. WTF? They're taking pictures of car tags now?? I pulled up to him, he opened every crevice in the van, asked ME for my papers (and me with a rather pronounced southern Mississippi accent. Yeah, I'm a credible threat, pal), and finally let us through after a bunch of asinine questioning. Over the next two hours, I finally find a way to somehow relax my sphincter muscles from the silent fear I was carrying that somehow my family would be separated by a fence with razor spikes on it. The border protection agency's name should actually be US Customs and Intimidation Disservice....

We end up at *gasp* Walmart, and I get out of my van slightly excited to be on home soil again. The roads are striped, the streets are (relatively) smooth and the traffic lights are actually hung over YOUR lane so you can tell where to go. We went in, when all of a sudden the stomach cramps hit me. I took off sprinting towards the mens' room when I suddently remembered the event that ruined the trip last year. I had sent my mother a text message in this very mens' room and left my phone behind, where it instantly found a new owner. I was very careful this time, and left with my phone actually in my posession. We bought our crap, paid for it, and dove back across the border 4 hours later, making it through customs with a green light and over $1,300 worth of merchandise in our posession.

We got home, ate some dinner, and finally my brother in law got off from work. He came up and told me his girlfriend's brother in law or some other nondescript distant relation had died. So after grabbing a couple of tallboy Tecate Lights at Oxxo, we headed through saturday night Matamoros traffic to the funeral home. When we got there I realized this wasn't just any person who had kicked the bucket. There were RayBans and cowboy hats everywhere. There were Hummers and Escalades and Navigators. But more importantly, there was the perrenial favorite among the Mexican elite: The tricked out black Chevrolet Suburban. I got kind of nervous when a group of men started staring over at my minivan. Picture this:

I was sitting there, in flipflops, drinking beer at 12:40 at night in a funeral home parking lot in Mexico, when my brother in law advises me with a serious look not to get out of the van or unlock the doors. I looked up from my beer and said "Narcos?” To which he nodded his head quickly as he got out of the van and disappeared into the night. I sat there and did what any sane person would do. I chugged that 24oz of nerve medication completely dry and began to play a game on my cellphone to act like I wasn’t disturbed at the sudden flashes of ill-begotten luxury, or the sunshades in the middle of the night, or the stench of marijuana in the air.

After what seemed like an eternity, he finally came back to the van and we left immediately. I asked to stop at Oxxo again, where I purchased another 24oz can, this time of regular Tecate. I love how beer down here is so much stronger than the crap over across the border. It felt like I had been kicked in the forehead by a mule on crack.

We got home, flipped the A/C unit back on, and went to bed watching Smallville.

2006-07-24T12:44:00.000-05:00

2006-07-24T12:43:00.000-05:00

Friday, 21 July 2006 - 23:30

Ok, so after the first 6 hours things began to get pretty monotonous. Same highway, same cars, same scenery, same stupid drivers, even the same friggin' songs on the satellite radio. Due to my incessant blabbing, we failed to take a turn and alamost ended up in Corpus Christi, TX. After realizing what had happened, I decided to stop and fill the tank up one last time. I stopped at an Exxon where this odd gentleman was selling flowers. He kept talking to us at random and saying crap about hot dogs and women. He kept nodding with his eyes at some invisible person and furrowing his brow at him, as if he didn't understand what he was being told. He took the vase he had his flowers in and drank the water out of the vase. On that note, I peeled out because he started walking towards us.

We finally left there and eventually got to the border, albeit the wrong bridge. I hate Ave. Lauro Villar and trying to travel through that part of town, so I said HELL NO to the Tomates bridge. Hey, if you drove 14 hours nonstop on 3 hours' sleep with no help you'd be delirious too...
I followed the banks of the Rio Bravo until I got to the Gateway Bridge (known as El Puente Nuevo to you fellow bilingual types), where I paid the ridiculous $2.25 toll to cross and drove into....a very tranquil, laid-back town. I was shocked. It's like everyone in Matamoros had been put on horse tranqulizers and Wellbutrin. My crew got the green light at customs, we drove past the guards, and proceeded to do our thing. The arrival was very uneventful until we pulled up at the curb, where the usual tearful hugs and salutations were given.

We talked a little while, and my nephew (here known as Tater Chip Thief, or TCT. If you need more explanations see my November 2005 archive) came in to tell me that someone needed to park and for me to pull my van up. Parallel parking is an art here in this town. I went to pull it up some more, and the bitch who lives upstairs wanted to park. To make matters worse, there was some old dork in a beat up van that looked like the kind we all imagined kiddie fiddlers as driving around in offering puppies back when we thought everyone in the 80's were part of three different scenes. They were either:
Satan worshippers who sacrificed children and goats while listening to Slayer (20/20 specials anyone? Baba WaWa was SURE there were babies being skint alive. NBC followed suit thereafter with a 'newsmagazine' where the offered alleged footage of a human sacrifice. Riiiiight.)
Cocaine snorters....OR...*drumroll*
Kidnappers who drove around in vans of the aforementioned style, offering puppies and sweets to kids.

Well, the wiry bitch from next door, who from now on will be called Olive Oyl, came out to demand that our van be moved for the time being, as the dueña of the apartments was here. Was she referring to the woman in the Explorer? I hope not, because this woman was a nobody. Olive Oyl ignored me, like I didn't even exist, and told TCT that we should move and go around the block or something. I looked at her and asked her if she was going to give me gas money for this jodida trip around the block, and if not to keep her mouth shut and to next time direct her comments to me. Olive Oyl blinked at me in disbelief for a few seconds and then went back in her house. The whorehouse. I guess the chubby gringo with a mohawk and sunshades confused her by actually speaking better Spanish than her. I think Olive Oyl is some kind of madame of the night pimpstress Queen Bee type. It's funny, because she has the door slathered with the "Este hogar es católico" stickers everywhere, along with a piece of Aloe, to keep the bad vibes out of her house. I ignored her, and the guy in the van blew the horn again. I was just about to yell at him to go screw himself when he beat me to it. He leaned out the window and told me to 'ignore the old witch and just pull up further towards the broken down pesera microbus'. I looked in disbelief for a few minutes at someone I hadn't seen in three years. It was my paw-in-law, Chewie.

Chewie brings out mixed feelings in me. He's a smart, cultured man. He knows the romantic poets, can read music, and is a trained chef. We can talk the Who, the Doors, Lez Zeppelin, or politics and he won't skip a beat. He's an accountant as well, did I mention that? Yet he lives in a hovel and just got out of jail. Why? He just stole a refrigerator. You see, he's one of those hardcore alcoholics that can't physically get started without a caguama in the morning. If he doesn't he gets D.T. episodes and the shakes and stuff. He lost his family, his home, and every job he's ever come across due to his illness. Rehab isn't an option down here...not for people on this rung on the social ladder. Our family is pretty much as close to the bottom as you're going to get financially. I walked over to him and gave him a dutiful hug and brought him inside. As he got out of his van he reached for his already-open and half-gone caguama of the nasty Corona they sell down here and he limped into our house. I thought Mrs. Gimp was going to cry when she saw him...she really loves her dad despite what all he's done to the family and she goes and gives him a hug. He sees my kids who he hasn't seen in a good 7 years and meets Gimp's smallest one, Chewie's namesake. He talks to them a while, although they really don't know who he is or what he's all about. He has a couple of hours here with the family, almost as if nothing was wrong. Almost. Then, he gets up and limps out to his old van and gets ready to leave...after mustering up the testicular fortitude I told him as I always do that things aren't too late. He nods as he always does, I told him not to get arrested while driving around drinking, and he left in that back-firing van.

I was just getting calmed back down when I heard the door open again. It was my niece SnortTooter and dengue baby! She was summoned to come over and socialize for a little while, under close supervision of course, lest she make off with a wallet or something. As we're opening presents, my bro in law looks and says "Aww look mom, another stereo so they can steal this one too!" and stares intently at his daughter. When she ignores him, he sticks his tongue out at her and whispers for me to put my cellphone in my pocket. I comply gladly and ask her if she's about to pop, since she is very, VERY pregnant. She lacks a month still, but that kid is gonna be a setemecino I can feel it. (That's a kid born in 7th month of his gestation...a preemie)

I asked her if she was walking, and of course she said yes. So I offer to take her home with her new clothes we brought her. She accepts, and we start loading the van. All of a sudden, I'm standing on the sidewalk near WhoreMoan Pointe and I smell a sickly sweet smell I haven't smelled in ages and began to look for whoever was blazing the reefer. I didn't say a word, but my niece nodded over towards a dark corner in the courtyard. Sure enough, there was a bright orange cherry glowing and suddenly an unseen voice yells "QUÉ?" I said "Nada guey, nadie te habló." We left, and I was told street-by-street where to turn until we pulled up at a gate. I looked at between the gate and the door was a sea of mud that this child picks her way through every single day. I help her with the bag, but I could tell she didn't want me to see how she lived, because she told me to leave it on her porch. I did, gave her a hug and a kiss, and told her to take it easy. With that mud and standing water, it's a wonder Dengue baby didn't get malaria. She lives on the corner of Zafira and Aqua Marina...sapphire and aquamarine. Jewels for streets with mud and standing water everywhere.

My bro in law and I stopped at Oxxo after that, bought a couple of Tecate Light tall cans and had them finished before we pulled up at the house. We went to bed, waiting for the next day to come along.

If I didn't call or text you guys it's because my phone isn't working down here anymore. The Mexican signal out-does the American signal now. I called you sleepydirty, but the other guy at your place of employment answered...and the feeble analog signal was lost shortly after that. Sorry...But just know that we arrived safely.

2006-07-22T19:24:00.000-05:00

Well we are here. I am keeping a travel log and will post at first opportunity. I am posting this via cellular phone near the border because my phone has decided to not cooperate three miles further south. This phone typing thing sucks so i'm leaving to catch my bus now. Peace.

2006-07-20T12:38:00.000-05:00

There is an ongoing struggle in my town. A struggle between the forces of good and evil. It has been going on for some while. Today I have officially declared war. Trash dog, your ass is mine.

I will update with this struggle after I return from Mexico.

2006-07-20T12:31:00.000-05:00

This clip will change your life.

2006-07-20T09:11:00.000-05:00

I added two blogs to my links... Le Petit Anglais and ManaMania. Check them out. Mana is in the middle of that crap going on in the middle east.

2006-07-17T23:43:00.000-05:00

If ya'll ain't heard of it, head over to www.allofmp3.com before the RIAA gets it shut down. It's a Russian site (yeah, you heard right), but it's legitimate. Less than a buck fifty per COMPLETE ALBUM for mp3's. It's legal.

I've spent twenty bucks today and can't begin to tell you how much friggin music I have now.

2006-07-17T15:00:00.000-05:00

Frist of all, let me get this picture out of the way for M.A.S.H.’s benefit (you know who you are). From the ‘looping with S.S. file…’
These stump scoggins are displaying crazy mad hardcore scariness.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was really touched by a couple of comments that some of my folks left recently (you too know who you are). That meant a lot to me and dried up that nasty little puddle of negative sentiment in a hurry…sounds cheesy I know but it did.

I am currently listening to a lot of Wu-Tang again and am re-delving into the mysteries of the special technique of shadowboxing.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

You know, I remember I posted previously about having the non-compliant sex offender busted. Now, I am really sickened. I don’t know why I keep running into these people in town, but it’s sickening. When I went with sis in law to try (again. sigh.) to get her license, I saw this guy. I won’t say anything other than the fact that his last name is Cox. Huhuhuh. Anyway, he’s there getting his license. You want to look at him and yell “Hi! I know you! You’re _____ Cox and you were convicted in 1998 under Mississippi Criminal Code ‘touching a child for lustful purposes!!’ I want to kick your teeth in. Can I have your picture?” Knowing that people walking the streets sitting on that website I’ve since dubbed the ‘Hall of Infamy’ gives me the absolute heebie jeebies.

Now I leave you with a couple of nice pictures I’ve snapped.

First: What were these people thinking?

Secondly. Seen in Hattiesburg. I love whoever did this. SO MUCH.

2006-07-15T21:41:00.000-05:00

2006-07-14T21:23:00.000-05:00

I still remember the day when I realized I would never change the world.

Why the hell do kids think at a certain time in their lives that they will actually make a difference in the grander scheme of things? Jews and Muslims will continue to kill one another. Kids will continue to die of hunger in Africa, and there will continue to be castes in India.

Angstiness should be over with once one reaches 'almost-30'. I don't know why it continues. Jeez.

2006-07-13T17:55:00.000-05:00

I don't know what the hell is up with the templates but I had to switch over to an emergency template for the time being.

Sorry.

2006-07-12T16:37:00.000-05:00

My parents are out of town, so I have come over to Ma and Pa Gimp's homestead to check on the cat. While I was here, I naturally took off shoes and shirt because my car has no A/C and I just commuted 40 minutes in the sun, so I am understandably baked. Besides, I used to live here and no one is home...

I am on dialup, which is very traumatic to me. It feels weird...from another time. Almost as weird as the fact that I am sitting in an office. There's a desk, bookcase, futon, and of course the guitars for which my family is known. I have been picking a minute, and I begin to notice how much this office has changed since it was Gimp's bedroom.

There used to be a bed right here, and a phone...MY phone line, paid for with Burger King money...which I used to talk on til indecent hours of the night with friends after football games and innumerable fabulous halftime performances. Over there, by the bookcase, was where my 'Dead Presidents' poster was, which usually was bathed in a blacklight and incense while I listened to Sly and the Family Stone and Isaac Hayes in the darkened room. Beads there, glow-in-the-dark posters there...a Wu Tang poster of the ENTIRE clan over there behind the door. Right there was the mirror that had the pictures. Yep, the pictures of SleepyDirty with his hair messed up...of the Whyzeman making a peace sign and wearing an ear-to-ear grin while Violet the OrganGrinder aka Hellfire aka I'll-beat-your-honkey-ass-if-you-ring-that-cowbell-again-Cockerell was doubled over laughing. DoughBoy was saying something in ghetto speak, which was always fabulous, him being a doctor's kid and all and living in the affluent neighbourhood. And of course Luther's in it, in a varsity jacket and medals pinned to it like he was a soldier or something. Actually Luther is. He's a lawyer now, straight out of the hood too and will sue you to oblivion. He signs his name Luther (Lastname), Esq. now!

You know...we dwell a lot of times on the negative impact that school had on us. On the depression, on the failed relationships, the never-was relationships, and the depression of life as we unfolded into adults. It's been 10 years now, and I try not to think about those things. You know what I remember?

I remember Squirt's mom coming to pick him and WhyzeMan up, and the next day Squirt, who was in my trumpet squad, mouthing off to me, Mr. Squad Leader. I said "Don't make me call Cuda to come pick you up," and he looked at me in disbelief for a few minutes then ran around shrieking, intermittently cussing and yelling "NAW YOU DIDN'T MAN!" I remember WhyzeMan with a very brief "you talkin about my mom?" look, then busting out laughing at his kid brother who was still hopping around like a boxer on speed.

I remember untold games of spades during lunch, using the half-assed excuse of a drum-major's platform as a table. I remember ya'll trying to teach me and clue me in, but me constantly re-negging and getting the back of my head slapped. I remember ya'll hopping up and screaming "BOOK, BEYOTCH!!!" and everyone running around clapping.

I remember Kenny G Church Boy with his "Gospel Gangstas" cd trying to spread the love and message through the power of organized religion corporate 'gangsta rap'...and how everyone looked at him just long enough for him to remove it and re-insert Raekwon back into the cd player.

I remember Mary picking her nose and making a booger pile in her hand during pep rallies. I remember the constant thumb sucking and intellectual conversation. I remember being pulled over by the cops and asked why I was in Queensburg at night when I left her at her house.

I remember Mario being kicked out his own home by his mom, and him taking up with a woman he described "as a whore. She moans and EVERYTHING! Wanna come over?" I remember him showing up at school under the big oak tree, plastered, which was always fantastic to me.

I remember WhyzeMan and I going on band clinic excursions and coming home with the usual red-white-blue or yellow/gold medals after reprazentin' the LHS.

I also remember BASIC programming class, and a certain kick ass russian roulette game someone made. And chameleon programmed by hand. And GAPPER, ho's!

Remember them breaks and standing around at the gas meter over by the tavern? And them good candybars they don't make anymore. BarNone's.

Remember when they found the vo-tech bathroom rolled floor to ceiling in toilet paper? Hehehe.

Remember burger king nights and flippin burgers and screaming "I DONT CARE" at the top of our lungs? And them telling Rico to dress better, and him showing up with a clip-on tie with his burger king uniform?

We had good times, guys. Focus on those and not on the bad crap.

Love ya'll.

2006-07-11T11:33:00.000-05:00

Now playing: "Online" - Gnarls Barkley and random Soda Stereo songs.

==================================

Well friends, the time is coming soon. Time to pack a van, get letters notarized, and spend a good $500 on gasoline. Yes, it's time to go to Matamoros.

We have stocked up on clothes, household stuff, and about 4,000 packets of Splenda and Equal (for the diabetic suegra), not to mention enough coffee and filters to caffeinate a small village. So it's time to make a Mexico run to drop that off, and bring back gangloads of Jimador and Victoria beer and, of course, antibioticos to avoid the doctor's office.

Example: You're sick and you know it's an infection.
$60 for a doctor's consultation
$40-100 for medicine, namely, antibiotics and some other crap.

By contrast,
One (1) complete round of antibiotics at Walmart in Matamoros: $2-10 depending on what you get, with no prescription.
Yeah, for real though. That's what I say too.

I am at work again for the first time after a week off. Today has been a rough day, lots of catching up to do, etc etc. It's not so bad, seeing as I only have to work today through next Thursday, then I am leaving the country.

Say it: leaving the country. Fun, huh?

Maybe more cows on the beach at night? More gun shots? Wrecks? Army? Police? I am rubbing my hands together in expectation of whatever adventure I get into this time.

2006-07-11T10:09:00.000-05:00

We'll miss you Syd. Thank you for music. Hope your garden stays tended.

2006-07-10T22:40:00.000-05:00

Yay!

Kyle did it!

2006-07-10T14:17:00.000-05:00

To sum the whole issue up:

NOTE: This video has a couple of ugly words in it and someone flips the bird. If you can't put your big girl panties on and handle that, maybe you shouldn't hit "play".

2006-07-10T14:08:00.000-05:00

After I posted the entry below, I happened to cruise over to a friend's blog and it just blew my mind: he actually updated. Not only that, but he decided to drag his long-windedness on a subject that grates.

I love it when a friend you see every day tries to hash out his storebought logic on a subject of which he has no grasp whatsoever.

This person, who took approximately 20 paragraphs on his blog to explain his take on immigration, grabs the talking points off the radio. (This is what hair metal cassettes are for, sir, you have no idea what you are getting into!)

He claims illegal immigrants don't pay taxes and get benefits. The fact is that illegal immigrants don't get benefits. They pay their taxes (or at least the vast majority do, which is a higher number than US citizens who do so), and they earn their keep all the while staying under the radar.

Just because Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh on the Jesus station you listen to tell you something doesn't make it true, dude. Nor does you actively supporting the corraling of the populace into a corner with freedoms being taken away, one by one.

The person who is espousing his takes on the issues is guy who comes from an affluent suburban family and has had everything dropped in his lap in life. Sorry bud, but you gotta admit you have.

He keeps talking about legal immigration this and legal immigration that, but if it's almost friggin impossible to immigrate here legally unless you're from a fellow we're-white-rich-honkeys-too-let-us-in country, you can't get in without years of deliberation and paying a small fortune. (I'm a honkey so i can use the term, ahem.)

Yes, it's fun when you've been helping people and doing something with your life in your spare time, and then working with friends in the daily grind who like to invalidate and tear everything you stand for down to the ground in theirs.

I don't think you have anything to offer on the subject, case closed.

This family is still torn apart thanks to our wonderful immigration 'system':

You'll notice Mr. Gimp on the far right. We were at playa bagdad outside of Matamoros. The gulf of Mexico flows and ebbs without a border check. Man has truly dominated man to his own injury.

2006-07-10T11:04:00.000-05:00

Today a bittersweet event happened:

I am still technically off after getting home late, so I checked my company email being the worrywart I am. My check stub is available. So I log into the corporate payment entity that pays all the state employees their miserable salary, and yep, her insurance deductions are gone. After 4 months of haggling and another $1,000 taken away from me by Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Mississippi for insurance she couldn't even use, they've stopped. Great, right? Just got a $140 a check raise.

But it still underlines the fact that Mrs. Gimp has no insurance. I've managed to cover her for eyes, dental and cancer, and she's set for life if I ever croak, but there's no health insurance safety net. Hasn't been since that moron Thelma B. in Jackson decided to destroy the migrant program. Not only did everyone get direly poor, but the migrante kids in this state have no voice anymore. No one to tutor them. No one to help them learn the subjects their teachers (the majority anyway) could care less about teaching them. No after school programs with other kids who speak their language, laughing, playing a while, eating pizza and then getting to the grindstone of catching up and learning English so they can defend themselves. No one to take them to the doctor and translate what ayy me duele la panza comi demasiado anoche means.

It's been a year. Are the migrant kids better off, Thelma? Are they thriving and advancing? Nope. If you know so much with your pHD and all about managing programs, why do they still call me on my cellphone (And Mrs. Gimp's too), desperate for tutoring, translation, and scholastic services? Why do they tell me that the girl you left in charge, with her B.S. degree in marketing or whatever it is that is entirely not pertinent to the work, "que no sirve para nada esa guera pendeja"? She claims she's hispanic, yet she's steady speaking German to her mom on the phone all the time, or French, and the Spanish she does speak is jumbled up central american mochao spanish that no one here understands because everyone is from the country and barely speaks Spanish. When she helped us with classes for teaching English, whenever someone asked questions, she would heave this tremendous sigh and roll her eyes. She sighed like Napoleon Dynamite whenever someone would ask her to explain things. She flirted with migrant womens' husbands when on home visits, giving them advice about acting 'more american' when all it did was disturb families with advice that went against their culture. As one man once told me, "If I had wanted to marry an American, I would have." Not to say that she was giving them advice that was practical on things like family violence, etc. It was about going and getting drunk with girlfriends on Friday night, and cutting hair etc without asking the husband for his opinion beforehand, basically ignoring him and being a total bitch. This one lady in particular got really good at it too. I was willing to learn Mixteco. Were you, Thelma? Was the bitch you left in charge willing to? I don't think so.

It all basically boiled down to one minority being in charge of a program designed and FEDERALLY FUNDED to help migrant workers, and that ruling minority decided that too much aid was going to the other minority, for whom the program was designed. So she cut the body off the head by letting all the advocates, translators, and tutors go.

WHY, in this world where people have suffered so much due to racial violence and persecution, does this continue? I know the answer, it's mainly a rhetorical question. But it's horrible man.

To use a cheezy 60's expression,
Can't we all just get along?

All the while these kids are dropping out of school at 14 to go work at Marshall Durbin and Tyson because no one is equipped to teach them English now and the administrators actually look forward to them leaving school.

2006-07-07T21:07:00.000-05:00

I don't know why...well actually I do.

Thing is, I was thinking a lot about a cousin of mine the other day and how I loved her to death.

Holly, as much as I'm ashamed to admit, is a romanticized memory in my heart and mind now. No everyday occurences come to mind, just special events and trips together. Like when we went to see E.T. together when I was just about five years old. Or how I rode her horse Prince out at the farm and held on for dear life. Or when we built sand castles together and watched wrestling together in Florida on vacation. I remember we dug a hole that must have gone to China! It definitely went over my head, and she had to help me out of it. She built me a little chair in the sand, a ledge to sit on while we dug and dug and dug some more. They took a picture that trip, a picture that everyone has probably seen in my family. It was when we all went to the aquarium thingie in Fort Walton, and she had been splashed by the dolphins flipping and splashing. She had her back turned to you, and she was looking over her shoulder smiling. Hair dripping wet, cute smile, and braces.

I remember when we went to Tennessee and I fell in the creek with her little brother and we ended up in indian moccasins from Cherokee.

I sort of lost touch with her somehow. My cousin turned from an everyday play pal to a person I rarely saw who it seemed grew a foot between visits. One of the last times I saw her was in the parking lot at sunflower. She had turned into a full-blooded adult, and was gorgeous. She wasn't stuck up either. She actually stopped, left her friends, came over, squatted down and kissed me on the cheek which made it burn like fire from blushing. I must have been maybe 11 at the time. She winked at me, made a pistol sign at me, and said 'take it easy babe'.

Then shortly after that, on the night of the 4th of July, the phone rang in the wee hours. It scared me to death, and shortly after the phone rang, I heard my dad come running out of his room sobbing and screaming, which until this very day has been the only time I've heard him cry in my entire life. It took 30 minutes to find out what happened. Holly was coming home from one of those typical parties in the eighties, where people snorted, X'ed, and drank themselves into a more pleasant state of mind. She and two other friends were coming home in a 2 seater sports car, with cuz sitting in the middle on the console b/c there wasn't anywhere else to sit. The t-tops were out. And they took a curve at over 100mph coming into town, flippin that car and snuffing her young, sweet life out of existence in the blink of an eye.

Holly was buried that same day, before midday. Her funeral was attended by hundreds of the finest kids, weirdos, friends and family that the dying 80's could provide. Martika's "Like Toy Soldiers" was the hit du jour. I had cousins my age there and two cousins who were still not even in kindergarten at the time.

The pre-schoolers are out of high school now, the my-age'ers are pushing 30 and Holly is eternally 19 somehow.

Holly is still missed, and as much as I try, I can't keep her memories from slowly fading as the days, months, and years pass. I loved her so and hope that the new generation of kids in this messed up family learn from her tragic death.

Holly Melissa Clark
1970-1989

2006-07-05T23:17:00.000-05:00

2006-07-05T11:49:00.000-05:00

The other day my sister in law was involved in a car pileup. Now, don't get me wrong, it wasn't entirely her fault. Anyone who has driven down the interstate recently will have noticed how bad the debris removal crews are in their ignorance of right away and traffic control practices. They block off not ONE lane, but a LANE AND A HALF. They leave limbs in the half lane that is left for a car to pass by.

Well anyway, to make a long story short, some dumb blond chicks were on their phone, didn't notice the bottleneck, and slammed on brakes at the VERY last minute, leaving my sister in law (aka the tailgating queen) to force her hood and motor to make sweet love to the rear of the car in front of her, and causing that one in turn to do the same to the other dumb blonde in front of HER. Naturally, legality dictates that my sister in law is culpable for all three cars' damage.

*flashback to a few months ago*

"No es necesario tener aseguranza! Nadie en Laurel tiene licensia!" (It ain't necessary to have insurance, and besides no one in Laurel has a license! [meaning in the Hispanic community, but she obviously ignores the fact that her own sister Mrs. Gimp has a license.])

*fastforward to today*

I didn't sleep until 4 am this morning. I finally got in bed but was roused out at 7:40 to take sister in law to take the written (it's touch screen now) test ONE more time today. She gets three chances then has to wait a month. Well, she waits until the date with justice court to go try to take it the third and final time, just getting off the night shift, and naturally fails it by two questions AGAIN. Incidentally, even I don't know how much a spare title costs but damn, how many times does it take to pass? And plus she ended up being tended to by Big Momma, aka the geriatric bizzitch who will actually FLING papers back to you. She got there 20 minutes late and acted like it physically pained her to shuffle back to start taking numbers.

We got to justice court, and the no license/no insurance fines total in theory over $1,000 or thereabouts. The judge got there exactly one hour late, made the rubes and white trash take their NASCAR caps off, and then made us sit down.

The first case he took was a fat chick in stirrup pants who had a gait not unlike the fat cow at the drivers' license bureau. She gets up there, LEANS on the bench, yawns in the judges face, answers 'YEAH', 'NAW', and when he calls her on it and puts the gavel proverbially down her throat, you can tell she got stressed .Why? Becase the skintight Luther-esque red stirrup pants got bunched up in that monstrous butt crack. She made her pants look like they had a sideways smiley face. Everyone in the courtroom behind her was snickering, and I had to look down to chuckle to myself in silence.

I don't know how she does it, but my sister in law went to court dressed nice, still tired-as-all-getout looking, but she said 'yes sir', 'no sir', and showed where she is actually trying to get her license. He bumped the $600 insurance fine to $150 and the license fine to $80. I was SHOCKED. She took me to Signature's afterward and we got home. Since I didn't sleep until 4, I am going to bed.

Whyzeman, I know exactly who you're talking about. I saw him outside Texco hitting people up one day and thank God I had a hat pulled over my brow. He didn't recognize me and I feigned being hispanic, giving my trademark "No es-peekeen thee eenglis senor" reply, which sent him off muttering.

By the way, two of you readers, Whyze included, will appreciate this. After court, I took sister in law to drop off some paperwork at a local couny office. This short, petite and angry looking woman comes outside to smoke a Kool. She looks around, and I begin to recognize some angry hand gestures. I flashback to the days of flippin burgers, and realize I see 'Momma'. She sees me lookin at her, and proceeds to yell "GET YO A** OUT THAT CAR AND COME SEE ME!" I get out and she bear hugs me. Yep, it was Cindy. She's working at a local county office and we caught up on 12 years of gossip about every single person we all worked with. She said to tell both of you two hello.

2006-07-05T03:19:00.000-05:00

I was thinking today about how my intellect has managed to go down the tubes. I used to be bright, intelligent, and above all creative. Somehow, with the passage of time I have noticed that all of these qualities have diminished to a level that is barely perceived.

Could it be a part of getting older? Perhaps due to the fact that I work with complete ninny dodo's at work (save maybe 2 or 3 other smart individuals)? Or, could it quite likely be that when a brain is programmed into survival mode that it has no other time or resources for pleasurable pursuits of an intellectual nature?

I dunno.

I'm staying awake at 3:20 AM thinking about it though.

2006-07-01T20:49:00.000-05:00

2006-07-01T12:50:00.000-05:00

2006-07-01T11:14:00.000-05:00

Who are we cheering for today? I have no idea.

Cross your fingers boys.

2006-06-30T13:07:00.000-05:00

Today wasn't good at all. Apart from Stinkyfartlady's constant hounding and following me, I had to put up with a 3PM lunch.

I go to Quizno's and successfully avoid a side trip to the liquor store for small individual bottles of Jaeger to go with my sub, and get back to the office. As I close the door to eat, my other office neighbour, Walker Texas Ranger comes in. Now, Walker is a thin, wiry old man with a Texas Ranger belt buckle. He has a crew cut and smokes Marlboro reds, and nonstop coughs like he does too. He always wears aviator shades and talks in this hoarse Hank Hill voice. He came in with his boots on, talks, leaves, comes back, talks more, leaves *thankfully*, loops right back around and comes in and keeps going, and goes on more and more and somehow gets on the subject of interracial marriage and how it upsets him so bad and how he is against it. I endure this with my lunch in hand for maybe 5 minutes, and finally he leaves. But then, he comes back and realizes he's messed up in my eyes, and starts these justifications about how it's not wrong, he just doesn't like it personally and he actually likes Mexicans more than white peopple blah blah blah *insert the standard "I have a LOT of (____insert minority colour____) friends!" cop-out*

He came in after that. Let me get on a tangent and say that this person is quite annoying because he'll talk for a few minutes, lean on your cubicle partition and blow I'm-a-short-crewcutted-moron-who-just-smoked-and-smell-my-"I'm in flavor country, biotch"-breath-while-I-act-like-a-retard then turn around and leave, only to keep talking outside your doorway and make a loop back in. Kind of like the old hags that walk in the mall but a lot closer to you and a hell of a lot more annoying. He comes back in and apologizes if "I was offended, but he just figures if he has it on his mind it's better to speak it." How this came up in conversation I don't even recall because I turned my ears off as soon as I heard his voice coming into my office. He said he loves Mexicans (In case any of my minority friends haven't dealt with hispanics before or the similar but at the same time different stereotypes they face, calling all hispanics Mexican is the same as the equally retarded "ya'll all look alike" gag) and don't understand why people in Texas would rather have their daughter "Marry a colored man instead of a Mexican."

Take in mind I am trying to eat my lunch as he's doing this, and I am surrounded by photos of my family and Mexico. He rubs his arm and says he may be darker than my wife "cos I ain't never seen yore wife", I said "Turn around and look at the entire wall behind you, moron." I then said "Oh, close the door when you leave. Thanks."

Classy.

2006-06-30T00:36:00.000-05:00

Damian Marley in the background. The reggae beat is gently nodding me off to sleep although I should have been asleep long ago, but the pain meds are keeping me awake stilllllll. SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH.

I found my cousins on mypsace tonight...kinda freaky. We'll see if they add me as friends.

Nacho Libre=the bomb if you haven't seen it yet.

nothing to say...substantial update coming this weekend sometime.

Oh, Mexico trip coming this month...so more stories from drug dens, sex shops, army checkpoints, and spectacular car wrecks.

2006-06-28T18:58:00.000-05:00

Hmm. Notice anyone odd in the local Hicktown, USA Police docket?

The Police Department reported 16 arrests and 106 charges.

— Brandon Lewis, WM, 07/13/79, xxx N. 17th Ave., forgery, controlled substance

— James Bond, WM, 02/06/72, xxx Highway 590, open container-first offense =====================================

So what do you do when you get pulled over and you're that guy?

Cop: Let me see some ID

guy: Bond, James Bond?

Hith parenth were THO ORIGINAL!

2006-06-28T01:55:00.000-05:00

So, the verdict is in:

I won't have to have surgery. I have severe tendonitis and plus he threw out that common buzzword that freaks me out, 'myalgia'. Whatever.

It means I have to be extra easy with my hand when I work, but that it will heal on its own.

Needless to say, my pain medication has me awake and scratching at my back with a pair of scissors.

2006-06-26T23:43:00.000-05:00

It was awful. AWFUL.

Imagine having a shock electrode placed on your FUNNYBONE, then being spazzed into submission, allthewhile having a nice, professional Egyptian-accented doctor telling you "I doonut wunt toe torrrturrre youuu" and then jabbing a needle into your elbow. Not any needle, mind you. A needle with a microphone plug attached to one end.

The shock part was the worst, I think. Jumping to and fro involuntarily.

And then, after all of this is done, the doctor telling you that "for an accurate reading, we must do the other arm as well." :-(

It's finally over, and I won't be operated on...(rest and more rest is in order, according to doc).

But jeez.

2006-06-26T10:32:00.000-05:00

First off,

OpenOffice.org is friggin hot. (Sorry, Whyzeman heheh)
I forgot my Office 03 disc at work and downloaded it in desparation. It's the ENTIRE friggin office sweet in clone format, 80MB download, and plus it's FREE. God bless open source communities.

I am home again today. My appointment was finally scheduled for today...neurologist will do whatever monkey tests he's going to do on my arm, shocking electrodes and all. Will post later if I can be bothered.

Also, the Atlantic Rhythm and Blues 47-74 boxed set is IT man. Eight discs of the Stax/Atlantic merger era, including Aretha, Booker T and the MG's, Sam Cooke, Sam and Dave, etc.

Hot buttered sex.

2006-06-25T17:05:00.000-05:00

http://www.godhatessweden.com/index.html

would someone care to explain that website to me?

If this is what the U.S. is represented by now, I side with the Dixie Chicks. I thought it was something funny from the satyrical LandoverBaptist website. But no...guys, this is serious. These are the morons that are picketing soldier funerals with "God hates fags" signs. Read the link about commentary on the Swedish royal family.

Jesus.

Oh, here's an interesting puzzle game: Save the children from sodomites:
http://www.godhatesfags.com/fags/fagsvskids.html

2006-06-22T14:04:00.000-05:00

Lately I've found myself in the pharmacy with increasingly alarming frequency. No longer satisfied with being confined to the waiting area, I became bored and started perusing the aisles. I don't know what their problem is, but it seems like I couldn't focus on anything due to the skinny rooser-esque general store manager following me from aisle to aisle. On more than one occasion he asked me if I needed help finding something. The third time he asked me, I looked at him and repeated my previous answer from the first two occasions, only this time more forcefully:

"No, ass monk. I told you earlier, I am waiting for a prescription and I don't want or need your help, nor anyone elses'. When I do, I can find you. Until then, do me the favor of LEAVING ME ALONE."

I was crabby, what can I say. Poor guy. :-I

Well the other day I was looking at magazines. You know, pretending to be interested in what I'm looking at while ignoring Maxim beckoning at me tantalizingly from the top shelf. I ignored it and looked at the Crayola stuff. I came across a rather funny contest the Crayola company is holding. It's a contest to have a new color named after your home state. Check it:

Ok, well as some of you know, I hail from Mississippi. The first thing that came to my mind was what our official state color should be. I've run through it over and over, and I've finally decided Klan White is sufficiently tasteless. I am going to send it in and see what response (if any) I get from Crayola.

Or maybe 'suicide bomber red' should be Iraq's new color.

==============================
We went to Chili's at lunch, and I can't for the life of me ever manage to remember that when you order a drink there at lunch, you actually get TWO. I ordered some random carribean-themed puffter drink with orange juice, spiced rum, grenadine, peach schnapps, and voddie in it. And I ended up with not one, but two. It was fun going in the toy stop just now to walk some of that off.

I'm going to take a midafternoon snooze now under my desk.

==============================

Oh, by the way: Stinkyfart Lady is a grandma now. Gag. she passed out pink "It's a girl!" bubble gum cigars here at work the other day, and they are so weird I don't so much imagine the cigars being manufactured and purchased as i do actually being secreted by the woman.

2006-06-20T16:29:00.000-05:00

You ever wonder why they expect people to donate to retarded people? I mean, I love helping charity causes when my financial capabilities permit, but I hold serious doubts about a camp that claims to allow blind children to ski. Have you thought about that? Wrap it around your brain. Blind kids skiing. The place in question was called SunShine Mountain, which sounds like an amusement park in the swamp somewhere.

"I just love being able to use my See n Say to solve complex problems such as the meaning of life, time travel, curing cancer or unstopping Jim Bob's septic tank on the travel trailer! Gimme money! More money!"

Also, I'm not sure how to wear this yet, but this is for you Alan:

Note the Columbia Sportswear (tm) shirt that goes nicely with the red and white pattern of my new keffiyeh. Somehow I ended up with a white prayer skullcap too, but no way I'm taking pictures in that. I almost had a cross burned in my yard by redneck neighbours for even being seen with the keffiyeh on. :p

More to come.

2006-06-19T09:40:00.000-05:00

I've not been around lately, as if you couldn't notice. Things have been so hectic with my family and real life, I've had little time for anything else.

I have been playing Star Wars Galaxies again. That submarine was not a widowmaker. No sir, it wasn't. SWG is. It's the game you play and before you realise it you've been online for 8 hours straight and your eyes are crusty.

The world cup has been exciting to say the least. As long as Mexico, England, or the US win it, I'll be content.

I supposedly have all these pictures to put up for the day when I finally sit down and post an update, but guess what: they're at work on another pc. :-(

I have nothing to say really, but I figure if I force myself to come in here and put an update up, I'll start unleashing spastic, multi-update days here today or tomorrow.

Stay Tuned.

2006-06-15T18:44:00.000-05:00

Blah blah. I am still hurting, the clinics and insurance messed up my appointments, and I am still gimped.

Strangely, it's not hurting as bad these last couple of days.

2006-05-30T18:13:00.000-05:00

Didn't go to work and spent the morning relaxing. Guess I deserved it, since I took sis in law to work at 2 AM today.

Money situation is reportedly going to get better, but it's getting worse before that happens. I am a bad person for wanting my kids to enjoy a pizza on Friday nights I guess. That's the only real luxury I allowed myself this last week, but somehow still don't have enough to pay my house note. It will get better. It has too. Gotta.

I have some pretty weird pics I've snapped I need to put up this week. The only thing that comes to mind when I see them is WTF...

I'll be more regular in posting now, although I am prohibited from using my left hand for pretty much anything.

Right handed asswiping is hard.

2006-05-28T18:05:00.000-05:00

Yep, the time has come: a visit to the neurologist on June 12.

Stupid nerve damage.

Sigh.

2006-05-22T23:48:00.000-05:00

Here's a "Gimp's Spanish 101" lesson for you all today.

Note the camphone pic of my satellite radio:

There is a gross error here. The radio should say 'All year'. But instead it says 'All Anus', due to the blatant abscense of the tilde symbol (~).

Can you imagine a radio station based on the concept of 'All Anus, All the Time (tm)' ?

Scary.

Nephew's been sick down south. Typhoid.

Little bastard got a good chunk of my savings to heal him. Better not eat street food again.

2006-05-18T19:59:00.000-05:00

I have had so much crap going i can't even begin to think of where to update. I have pictures i need to put up, stories to tell, but this arm won't let me. I am in the middle of a cluster headache, but two lortabs have numbed it to the point where instead of wishing for death, I merely wish to contemplate it in a room, face-to-face.

Money is a very serious problem, and i find myself making up excuse about 'important' errands i need to run during the lunch hour to avoid telling people "No, can't go because I'm broke."

Water Department claims i still owe $400 and will likely cut off the water very soon. My anniversary was last week, i wanted to get the wife tickets to see Ricardo Arjona in August but I'll be lucky to have $3 at the end of the month for a card. It'll be sold out anyway by the time i get cash. Yeah. Cash.

It won't be a problem soon, I took her off my health insurance, so it will be like a $500 a month raise. But when the hell will things level out?

sigh.

2006-05-09T22:57:00.000-05:00

Arm has been too hurt to type.

Just a quick update -

Severe weather tonight. I am ok, but my folks took a hard hit that destroyed half their house.

Photos, bibles, guitars, furniture, the entire living room in essence.

Mom and dad weren't there tonight. Had they been, dad would have taken a beam through his head, since his easy chair was crushed and all under the weight of a longleaf pine and a house beam.

Jesus. Hurricane season hasn't even started yet.

2006-04-29T21:12:00.000-05:00

We love you Whyze Man. Remember that.

2006-04-27T21:48:00.000-05:00

2006-04-27T01:41:00.000-05:00

Got a really interesting postcard in the mail recently from a good friend in Europe. I love seeing creepy royal families in full colour. Thanks Sev! :-)

========

The saga with my family is hilarious. I've got an uncle in rehab, a cousin snorting crystal meth, and the cousin just had a wreck. He was sent by ambulance to the hospital and got all pissy with the doctor or whatever and was sent to jail. This is a guy that has a degree from a nice college. Yet somehow he's wearing wifebeaters and has long hair. He's friggin living a Drive-by Truckers song now.

========

I saw a rattlesnake yesterday. A friend and I stopped and there was a conveniently-place stick on the ground near it. We used it to prod and harrass the viper until it scurried off. Before we could try and pick it up by the tail (damn you steve irwin!) it went into the S position. (Pronounce it "Oi! Naaaooo! Eeet's een thih ESSS piss-ishin!") Started rattling like the end was near.

So we left it alone and continued to listen to Manowar, whom I take very seriously as a band now. Any band with an album cover like what you see here must be taken extremely seriously. They are brothers of steel and constantly talk about stuff like Thor, thundering horses, and galloping into a victorious battle for metal. It's the greatest thing. EVER.

=============

I hate talking about me and health stuff, but I can't get my wrist to get well. I finally found a doctor that didn't herd me through an urgent care-type facility and actually stopped to talk to me for a few minutes. He figured out what's going on...

On top of the embryonic-stage carpal tunnel, I tore a friggin ligament in my wrist when I was working on that damned water heater. He told me it's just going to take a long time for it to heal. And as for the carpal tunnel, he scared me poopless with the description of a nerve coduction test and what it entails:

Nerve conduction test / NCS

The patient will be asked to lie on an examination table. Electrodes are placed on the skin over the nerve to be studied. These electrodes act as microphones to pick up any electrical signal that goes by them.

An electrical stimulator is then placed on the skin near the electrodes and is used to create an electrical current strong enough to fully stimulate the nerve.

A computer is used to record responses as various nerves are tested. This allows the physician to measure and calculate how fast the nerve is sending the impulses to the muscle and measure the size of the impulse.

EMG

The muscles are assessed by inserting a pin electrode into the muscle with the computer then recording the muscle response both at rest and with movement. The sensation is similar to that of being stuck by a pin as the electrode is inserted into the muscle. (That is if sensory awareness is not a problem.)

It is important for the patient to stay as calm as possible to reduce discomfort and to achieve accurate readings. (You may bring a pacifier or bottle to help soothe an infant).

Umm. Did you read that far? Needles? Pin electrode? We had a saying in high school when something was not no, but 'HELL NO'. It was to simply sing the word "NAAAAWWWWW". And in this case, I'm screaming it ad nauseam.

Manowar is like the greatest ever.

I leave you with the lyrics to "Thor":

Black clouds on the horizon
Great thunder and burning rain
His chariot pounding,
I heard the heavens scream his name

I watched as he shouted
To the giants that died that day
He hehd up his hammer high
And called to Odin for a sign
Thor the mighty, Thor the brave
Crush the infidels in your way
By your hammer let none be saved
Live to die on that final day
Gods, Monsters and Men
We'll die together in the end

God of thunder, god of rain
Earth shaker who feels no pain
The powerhead of the Universe
Now send your never ending curse

Swing your hammer to crack the sky
Lift your cape so that you might fly
Back to Odin and the Gods on High
And leave this mortal world

Hell. Yes.

2006-04-21T23:51:00.000-05:00

I've had a lot I could write about, but just no time to do so.

I could start with a silent reminder of an old friend of mine who was deported three years ago today. He was late for work and was speeding to his place of employment and was eventually sent him. Four months later he was back here with us.

Or maybe how yesterday was the one year anniverary of my wife's wreck where the dumb cellphone bitch hit her from behind. TWICE.

Or perhaps that I've been 28 for over a week now officially. Feels odd and bad.

more tomorrow.

sigh

2006-04-11T11:39:00.000-05:00

We are going to discuss my vehicular troubles now. It started long before week before last.

*dreamy music and swirling water puddle effects to a time long past*

Sometime over the Christmas holidays 3 years ago, my car tried to overheat while in the middle of the line to cross over the Río Bravo back into the United States. I had to pull onto a sidewalk to get out of the increasingly-angry drivers’ paths until my car cooled back down. This happened a couple of times, so when I finally got back into Mexico, I took the car to a man I’ll call Juan (Because that’s his real name. He can go screw himself, frankly. This is the man that shows up at your house at 10 AM to get some breakfast uninvited and downs it with a beer in hand).

Juan played around with it in his ‘garage’, which was actually something out of stock footage for urban warfare in Iraq. It was a compound surrounded by a large concrete block wall. For added security, he adhered to the time-honoured Mexican tradition of breaking glass bottles and embedding the shards in a layer on top while the concrete was fresh, guaranteeing a new rectal malady for the poor thief who dared cross over without observing first. Inside this compound there were abandoned cars everywhere, with a few weeds growing between them for colour. Everything in this place was/is permeated by that damned dust that seems to infest all of Matamoros. In the middle of it all there is something that I would maybe call a shed if I squinted at midnight through a haze of alcohol. It was just about to fall over and probably just might do so given a determined shove or two. The ‘mechanics’ sit around this building at night in a circle of rusty car wheels and drink beer while warming themselves in a fire ignited with old motor oil and God-knows-what-else. I later found out there was a lot of illicit monkey business going on in this place, but that’s beside the point and can’t make me not smile at the usual roundup of calendars with chimpanzees deformed in human clothes and bikini posters. The graffiti was good too. This guy had a graffiti specialist come in and tag his ‘logo’ on the wall…a skunk with a wrench in his hand. By that, there was a baby’s head with “Chato Cagón” written below it. Chato means snub, but it’s like ‘baby boy’. Cagón means ‘crapper’ or ‘shitter’, as a pronoun and not a noun. So translate it “baby boy crapping machine” if you want. Sigh.

Well, to make this long story (somewhat) shorter, Juan and his band of beer swilling dust dwellers couldn’t do anything with it. He told me to go the day-after-next to a place where they work on radiators. Said I’d see a sign by the pharmacy and Oxxo on calle dieciocho. Couldn’t miss it. I couldn’t go the next day because it was ‘nochebuena’, which is Christmas Eve and is actually the day the Mexicans get their so-called Christmas-but-is-actually-a-pagan-Saturnalia-type groove on. Guns. Machine guns, actually. They shoot the things in the air in a raucous orgy-type affair, unaware of the gravitational pull of the earth on lead projectiles and the inevitable consecuences upon re-entry.

I found my mechanics shop 2 days later. It was 4 poles with tin over them in a crude roof, and a hand-painted sign on cardboard that said “radiator work”. Whereas Juan’s goons drank at night, this guy and his friends had quart bottle ‘caguamas’ in the morning and were obviously hung over. They worked on my car, charging me $450 pesos to clean out my radiator and put things back together. Wasn’t too bad, considering that in USD it’s about $45 bucks. They handed me a package wrapped in newspaper when I got back. It was all the rust goop they had extracted from my cooling system.

For literally years after that, the car leaked water little by little and I often blamed it on them, but in actuality it was the goop they had freed. Rust had begun to consume the impeller wheel on my water pump.

*flash to week before last*

I was flying down the road listening to Maiden when I noticed my car wasn’t doing the normal overheat-cha-cha. It was ACTUALLY overheating, pegged in the red zone with a ‘check engine’ light flashing at me murderously. I pulled over, ironically at Exit 69, a favourite of the locals, and listened with sick anticipation as the motor hissed and smoke went everywhere. I waited 45 minutes for a coworker to arrive with water, which we tried to add but noticed it was FULL (wtf). We tried cranking and driving, getting past the highway to the office and getting down to the suburban “Let’s go to Bestbuy and head west into the sunset at 5 PM sharp, toward the golf courses and expensive eateries because we’re white folks and we can do so” exit. It died there, so I called three wrecker services, eventually finding one named Peanut’s that came for my car and took it to a radiator shop. Okaaaay, fine. Carless now. I was disturbed but it was a temporary feeling, like when Empire Strikes Back ended on a bittersweet note, but you knew a third installment was coming out and the good guy would prevail.

The radiator guy called me and said my motor was shooting radiator water three feet in the air on the compression stroke, which means basically the head was warped beyond recognition.

Then I realized my motor’s head is made of aluminum and I began to cringe involuntarily as a sick feeling creeped into me.

Dad and I went with a trailer, got the car on it, and hauled it to a shadetree mechanic’s house 3 counties away. Earl (huhhuhh, Earl) said he could fix it but to give him some time. No problem my dad says as he hands me the keys to his ’97 land yacht. It has dual air, dual stereos, tv, vcr, and a Nintendo all wrapped up in wood grain and a leather interior. It also takes $60 to halfway fill it up. I started using this van to go to work for a week. The last day I use this van, my father calls me in the afternoon to inform me of a slight water leak and to maintain a strict vigil over its water consumption. Sure, fine whatever, I tell him. I was in the middle of a phone argument with my wife who was in another city at the time and had just hung up on me.

I start the long commute home a little late that day, and as I’m going down the road, I’m jamming to the cd’s I had put in the changer, thinking of how I was going to relax when I got home. I passed my work colleague friend who I’ve mentioned previously as being the last bastion of intellectual prowess in his office where stupidity reigns supreme. I tooted the horn in the land yacht and watched him veer off at his exit, with his family in tow. He didn’t recognise me in the brown bomber so didn’t acknowledge me. Hell, I wouldn’t acknowledge me either in that van. I watched him pull off, obviously heading to his home.

Then it happened.

The CHECK ENGINE light on my dad’s land yacht came on and it was overheating! I pulled off immediately, getting out and cringing in the same exact manner from the week before. Same hissing, same smoke. I sat there, desperate. I looked for water in the ditches, under a bridge, and after that proved itself futile, I called my wife. She brought several gallons of water in kitty litter buckets, Dasani bottles, and a milk jug sans top. I ran across the interstate, got the containers, filled it up, and nursed it home. It turned out the van was ok, but the water pump on it is shot as well. I drove it to work like that one more time, nursing it back home with no ill effects as long as I remembered to COMPLETELY refill the radiator and reservoir before departing for any destination.

It has been repaired, but the good news is that it was dropped off at the mechanics. And the blue bomber was driven home for the return journey. Yes friends, my car is back, in a new, improved format. Sure, it cost a couple of grand, but it’s cheaper than a new car. A/C be damned, as long as my car works and gets me from point A to point B, I’ll be forever elated.

Car problems are a thing of the past. For now.

2006-04-06T22:58:00.000-05:00

What's getting me now is this crap about how tightening the borders are going to keep people up. Do you know what it's going to do? Know those guys you see with big vans with Arizona plates? They are going to get richer. I know immediately offhand 5 coyotes here in town who I could pay to bring loved ones. These smuggler guys will make a killing. They will never disappear, people.

I had a fun argument with a moron at my place of work concerning immigration. I understand there are those who are against immigration who are not anti-hispanic in sentiment, but this guy was a true winner. He obviously knows nothing about me and my family, my in-law culture, or my language capabilites. So he starts in on the "[insert blasphemy]-damned Mexicans" today. He went up one side and down the other about them. Then he went on to proclaim how great the Germans [whiteys, yawn. I'm white so i can say it.] are, and the standard GAWD BLESS AMURIKKKA sentiments about Black Americans, East Indians, the entire country of Bangladesh, and the DuPont corporation for hiring engineers from said countries.

People were looking for me and expecting a juicy retort. I just smiled and said one or two simple but painfully obvious things that made him look like a total moron. Later on, I got the following email from an associate of mine who I consider a fine person and a friend around the crazy place known as the office. I've sanitized it so the innocent will remain protected:

It was sad to watch Mr. [Moron] bloviate at length about a subject which he apparently has utterly no comprehension of this A.M. I love that word. Bloviate. Sounds like something a blow-hard might do. Your replies were well thought out, constructed with an intimate understanding of the issues, and therefore ignored because they do not acknowledge the simplistic world view which he espouses. Everything is not hunky-dory in Estados Unidos! Would that it was. It is hardly the place where I grew up anymore. I blithely informed him today (he was not aware of it of course) that our lifestyle was something like 23rd best in the world. This isn't the 60's, 70's, or even 80's anymore.

As you know there are third-world countries with economies based on bananas, bat guano, and tourism that take better care of their own. As far as immigration goes Ben Franklin feared a wave of German immigrants. He was right The wave happened and the sky didn't fall. Same with the Irish, Italians, Orientals, and every other group that wound up here.

Oh well. It was nice to here him get refuted with such a clarity and I hope I helped.

The mail's sender is one of the few sea-oats who are keeping the dunes of humanity from blowing away into the winds of stupidity. Damn that's poetic.

2006-04-05T20:00:00.000-05:00

I still haven't forgotten you.

2006-03-30T08:38:00.000-06:00

A friend has recently brought up "raindrops keep falling on my head" in his posts. I must also bring up every other song in the genre.

I have been stressing over my financial situation with increasing nail-biting and antisocial behaviour. Well, after a fun day riding around the national forrest listening to Iron Maiden and Phil Collins, I was barrelling to work Tuesday morning when I noticed that the temp gauge on my little blue car's indicator panel was lit up. I immediately pull over and pop the hood, half-heartedly chuckling at the fact that it was in front of the very sign I took a picture of for my first web site so long ago.

The motor is smoking. Gag.

(By the way, if you are going to travel out of the country, why the HELL would you go somewhere like Sandal's? That stupid commercial was just on. I could invent a 'resort' in my back yard. Jeez, people. Enjoy the country you're in, not some prepackaged American tripe where the locals are kept out by fencing and armed guards. Pahh...)

I waited an hour and my boss showed up. He helped me nurse my car 2 more miles down the road before it re-overheated. I called a wrecker named Peanut to drag it to a radiator shop, where I received the news that my motor is blown.

I now have no way to go to and from work. I don't know what I'm going to do. Oh well.

2006-03-24T14:05:00.000-06:00

Today's been eventful, but painly boring. Lots of phone calls, lots of footwork and remote controlled admin crap today. But...as the old and painfully worn-out cliche' goes, it's FRIDAY.

This is me right now in my office, waiting for it to be time to go. I'm looking around, propped up and relaxed since I've gotten all my work done. If you click the picture, you can see how random the north wall of my office really is. In case you didn't know, I work out of a doublewide trailer (not kidding!) for right now since my office is torn down and a new one is being built in its place here in Buttholeville, MS.

By the way, hey Jenn!! :)

==================

By the way, I thought this picture was rather telling...

You can babysit for me, clean my house, and mow my grass, but I want you gone! Hurr hurr...

2006-03-23T22:08:00.000-06:00

Want to read something funny?

Ok, now that you have that, look at what this fat ass had to say:

Sensenbrenner said in a statement last year that his bill would help "regain control of our borders and prevent illegal immigration" as well as "help strengthen and promote our compassionate and welcoming legal immigration system."

This is LAUGHABLE. How he DARES to call our so-called "system" of snared-up (and jacked-up) laws that could also pass as a reader on "How to be a Xenophobic butthole" is beyond me. I also appreciate, once again, that the loudest mouths on the anti-immigration issue have the most foreign sounding screwed up names. Stupid Kraut... (I'm part German, i can say it.)

I am SO mad at this article I can't even think objectively or coherently. I am leaving it be and going to attempt to eat dinner.

Jesus, what a stupid, ignorant fat ass.

I apologize for the profanity, but those close to me appreciate how passionate I am about this issue and how close to my proverbial family jewels it hits me.

2006-03-21T22:17:00.000-06:00

You know, I never thought I'd see something more funny that the banana crotch man. I really didn't. But now, I've found someone even better....I present to you...without further delay...

Moustache Man.

The Camera Gods were not on my side today as I visited chik fil-a, but it was hilarious to watch this guy dig crumbs out of that...nest...on his top lip. Not since The World Beard Championchips have I seen a more horriffic display of facial hair.

I applied for a second job. We'll see how this goes.

2006-03-17T12:21:00.000-06:00

I have been busy trying to stay sane and to not stay busy. I’ve failed miserably at both.

I haven’t heard from my friend the Whyzeman in a few days - I fear the worst with his current family drama. I remember as kids he’d tell me that his grandma would call him from down the street, he’d come running, and she would tell him to go in the kitchen and bring her a glass of water. I would understandably be upset and can only imagine that frustration of a young man in the 80’s trying to save the world from the Decepticons and C.O.B.R.A. (Or go-bots, if you were Ghetto like me and your mom bought you dollar-store transformers. I had to school her with a quickness.)

That made me remember my own situation with my grandpa that died in 1987. He bought this computer that cost thousands and thousands of dollars back then. It was a TRS-80 Model 4 Microcomputer, from good ol’ Tandy. (Tandicapped? Definitely. By today’s standards it was a 100lb calculator) I would ask could I play with the computer. He would reply, somewhat annoyed, that I could, but only if I asked if I could “Work with the computer.” I would do that, boot the thing up off a 5.25” disk, and enter any pre-1982 date so it would boot up properly. I could run the ‘BASIC’ command and start basic, and somehow magically print out stuff, but only if I included the command line statements, like 10 PRINT and then ended it. Dad could never figure that out. IT DIDN’T HAVE A WORD PROCESSOR PROGRAM, OKAY. NOW I UNDERSTAND, 19 YEARS LATER.

Anyway, I got tired of asking to ‘work with the pc’. I didn’t have extended cable, so I had to watch MTV and Nickelodeon at my grandparents’ house because I only had channels 1-13 like a good cheapskate. So when the MTV top 20 countdown would end, with Bon Jovi’s ‘living on a prayer’ inevitably winning #1 as usual, I would leave their living room and head down the hall toward the computer room. Now at the end of this short hallway, the right turn was into grandpa’s bedroom, with him in it. He was a severe arthritic and was bedridden. Smart as a whip, a professional engineer even. But cripply and withered and deformed. Looking back, maybe it depressed me on some subconscious level to see him like that. So I would belly-crawl to the left, into the computer room, without him seeing me. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes I would hear that “HEYYYYY BABBBYYY” call, which meant I had been discovered. I would go in there and lay with him in his bed and watch tv and then after the obligatory time frame, would ask the inevitable question about working with the computer. To a fat kid who was aspiring to be a hacker, convenience was the more important issue in this case.

And now, to look back on it, I would give my life up to have just an hour or two at my grandpa’s bedside. I would tell him about school, how I didn’t relate well to my parents during my teenage years and how I was depressed for so long. I would tell him how bad I suck at math and could never have been a great engineer like him. I would tell him that after he died that December I sneaked into the cemetery every afternoon after it closed and cried at his grave. I would sneak in and lay by his grave, choking on my tears and snot and sobbing, beating the tomb stone until my knuckles ached for days afterward. Once, I cried myself to sleep and the caretaker woke me up and told me he had been watching me for days and told me it was time to go home.

I would tell him how much I missed him growing up, how much I needed him and how I had become a musician at heart. I would show him how far I’ve come because of his Trash-80 Model 4 computer, and I would show him my wife and three wonderful kids. I would die in peace to have a weak embrace from those deformed, arthritic hands just one more time. To see him in his pj’s, working notes out that were indecipherable because his handwriting and coordination had deteriorated so bad. To see him studying his bible intently, explaining things to me, and to drink ice cold coca cola with him, eating frozen cool whip (his weird favourite treat, which surprisingly tastes great in a cone) and talking about Eucutta, Mississippi, our ancestral pasture grounds.

Enjoy your family while they’re with you, people. The “What if’s” are too frequent in this life.

2006-03-14T14:46:00.000-06:00

Since the Clarion Ledger ("Mississippi's Newspaper", yeah right.) is too cowardly to print an opposing view on their current xenophobic stance on immigration, I submit the following, which they have ignored:

(Editor: I graduated from college and am quite confident that my grammar usage is correct. The last two letters I have sent were butchered in such a way that their message was muddled by someone on the CL staff. I humbly ask that in taking my letter into consideration you refrain from altering its contents. Thanks.)

================================

In observing the debate on immigration from the perspective of a fly on the wall, it has become obvious to me that there are passionate participants on both sides of the issue. A common sentiment in both camps has been that immigrants need to "Go through the proper channels," so to speak. There was a time when this worked. All one had to do was show up on a ship at any major port and sign a registry. This is how the majority of our ancestors came to this country, in case any of us have forgotten the fact that unless we are of Native American blood, we too are seventh and tenth generation "anchor babies".

Then there came a moment when the very laws that govern immigration became a tool to keep people out. They are designed in such a way that it is nearly impossible to come here unless you fall into a very narrow set of circumstances and, of course, have a lot of money. (We won't even get into the need for an attorney, since the language of the paperwork is purposefully indecipherable.) I have tried for over 5 years to bring my mother in law from Mexico. She is completely alone and has no family members there. Yet these laws have kept her (and countless others) away from her loved ones. She hasn't been able to even get a visa to come on vacation for a few weeks! She has two grandchildren that she only knows from pictures and occasional phone calls. I agree there needs to be immigration reform: reform to make it easier for families to reunite!

There is a human side to this debate that is not being given the scrutiny that it so clearly deserves. The emotional cost of being separated by a miserable trickle of water called the Rio Grande is one that is too great to bear for many.

===============

There we go, Clarion Ledger, and a big 'screw-you' for not publishing that due to your small, narrow minds. Commentary, unless it is serious and sympathetic in nature, is unnecessary and for this post will be axed. Thank you. That is all.

2006-03-11T08:29:00.000-06:00

Ok, I have no dignity left to salvage after this.

I had a training classroom to set up today at 7:00 AM SHARP.

The alarm rang at 8. I got up hysterical, got dressed, upset, nervous, thinking of the impending disaster at hand. I called the office to apologize profusely, and no one answered. 'great' I thought to myself.

I got on the road, and as I barrelled down the road, I tried again to call the office. Only this time I noted the time/date on my cellphone as I slid it open.

Today is Saturday, and there is no training classroom to set up. I am a moron.

Until Monday.

*sigh*

2006-03-10T11:47:00.000-06:00

I am majorly stoked at this point. I have been a victim to web censorship in the name of the greater good for a couple of years now. Yes, the wonderful Websense. Well, today I was removed from Websense bondage and actually read the Onion for the first time in 2 years here at work during my lunch break. It was like…beautiful man.

I had been feeling SO much better with my arm. I was regaining feeling and didn’t feel pain as often anymore…

…then the witch complained about a monitor sitting in her office and she had never even told me about it or asked me to remove it. I had it gone within five minutes of her trouble ticket, and even dragged it back to my office, putting it up on a file cabinet. BIG MISTAKE. My arm was asleep all night, and when it did manage to perk up, all I felt was stabbing pain. Does this crap end? Sleep/pain/sleep/pain/sleep/pain. It sucks. I can’t play guitar like I’d like to, the rumble pack in the console controllers HURTS when it goes off. It’s all miserable man. I can’t write normally, or drive normally. IT SUCKS.

Too caffeinated to think clearly so I’m ending this.

Live and unblocked from the place of employment…

Gimp, for Gimp’s World News.

2006-03-05T20:56:00.000-06:00

Watch my counter.

If you're the 1,000th viewer, then congrats, I owe you my undying affection.

I'm running out of meds, my head hurts constantly, and my wife is beginning to thing I have migraines like she does. (I'm not so inclined to think it, but when you have a headache that is the size of a hangover headache and 1>tranquilizers 2>tylenol 3>tranquilizer/tylenol combo 4>opioid lovliness won't kill it, I wonder what kind of friggin headache it is.)

------------

Reading friends' blogs, you learn things you didn't know about people you've spent half your life around. I got that feeling today reading about a dear friend who also suffered water heater troubles. As long as his dad doesn't like force him into handing back my SegaCD again, we're good. It's in better hands with him anyway. :-)

2006-03-05T00:03:00.000-06:00

It really, REALLY irks me when I pay a doctor almost $100 and he can't produce the goods. I mean, I could take ibuprofen at home. I pay him for GOOD medicine.

I finally got some and it's been an interesting week to say the least. I have been incoherent, moody, dreamy, and just all-around off kilter and NO ONE CAN SAY ANYTHING ABOUT IT.

We gave up trying to make the English subtitles work on Final Fantasy VII - Advent Children. We are currently watching it with nothing other than the fast-paced Japanese dialogue. Whyze, I still owe you a copy. Get with me on that.

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They opened a new pizza joint in town. It's amazing how a new eating establishment can bring the hill scoggins out in droves. It's PIZZA, for God's sake. By the wait in line, you'd think they were handing out locks of Dale Earnhardt's hair.

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My neighbourhood is slowly but surely going to the dogs, as did my previous one. I grew up here. Over the holidays, a dillhole going down the street threw out a beer bottle IN FRONT OF MY DRIVEWAY and it shattered all over the entrance to my crib. I've got gangsters in front and NASCAR-loving PWT (That's 'poor white trash' for the uninitiated) next to them. I don't care who you are, where you're from, what you look like or who you worship, just BE DECENT.

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Nothing fun tonight.

Get Cakewalk Guitar Studio, Fruit Loops, and Sony ACID. I've gone recording-gaga this weekend.

2006-02-25T20:55:00.000-06:00

Ok, so if I make a grammatical or capitalization mistake, I thank the English police in advance for not coming out en masse. My carpal tunnel is acting up after a bout of unergonomic typing and wrenching on my water heater, so I have this immobilization brace on my hand.

Anyway, I have some really bad pictures I'm going to share with everyone.

FIRST off:

I took my kids to the ol' elementary school the other day. I have found a new and innovative way for hands-free wireless voice communication. Note how the school crossing guard does it:

I almost ran over her from laughing so hard.

I was in walmart just now. There was an old man buying bananas. He stood RIGHT behind me, almost close enought to breathe on me. Creepy? Not as creepy as the fact that he was buying TWO bananas, and HOW he was carrying them. I submit to you the following camera pics:

Is that a banana in your pants, or are you glad to see me?

Hello, I love you won't you tell me your name?

Our secret signal for meeting outside the chat room was supposed to be like this. I don't know WHY she hasn't found me yet.

Poor old man, never knew he was going to be on the internet. I SALUTE YOU!

2006-02-25T15:21:00.000-06:00

Thank you, Mr. Whyze.

The Texaco pizza was fabulous, as were the chicken gizzards and beer. All consumed to Ludacris.

I swore off modern rap, but dang it, Need for Speed had me crunkin' this weekend. *sigh*
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This is a mighty miserable weekend. The weather is cool and wet, and there are small lakes in my yard.

I am without hot water for the 4th day in a row now. I have spent $100 on parts, and the @#$#@@ heater still doesn't work. My plumber is sick and won't be here tomorrow, but he's quite flighty and it's possible he won't show up tomorrow. In the meantime, I have two angry women and five whiny kids all clamoring for water that I can't produce.

Oh well. Cold water will have to make my lil boys shrivel up as I yelp in the freezing shower again today.

2006-02-24T08:32:00.000-06:00

For the sake of new readers, I am going to go back to something I posted in my defunct diaryland blog years ago. We are going to revisit the story of a day that started off bad and could only go downhill.

Great. As I try to get dressed, CNN is running in the background. I am informed by Sanjay Gupta that I am sorely in need of a testicular exam and a digital rectum test. I didn't know it was possible to cringe on both sides of the continental divide. Horrified at the thought of ball cancer, I turn it to the local channel and its funny locally produced ads in between news about Jimbob's lost cow and the local 4-H scandal involving the sheeppleaser of the century. At one point I misheard an ad and thought I heard them say something about Hick Mustang driving CountryThug of the Year but I must have heard wrong. Doesn't make it any less true though.

I finally get out of the house and am heading towards an even smaller, more depressing town 30 miles west of mine. I must pass the entire gammut of wonderful "Dont run out of gas hear because yo' purty mouth'll get busted" areas along with their red lights where you can't be left alone from all the morons in Camaros with their hats on backwards, fitted cap right down low enough on the ol' unibrow just in the right way to point out how stupid the retard is in the driver's seat. You know the kind, wears overalls by day, FUBU by night and uses a dialect of English that isn't entirely the one he uses with momma and daddy come Sunday morning at little church in the country. Tupac was alright, but he was ruined by these people in my eyes. I can never listen to him because I think of a school called West Jones. (If you need to understand that, you'll get it.)

Anyway, I finally get to the sad, little depressing town 30 miles west of my own sad, little depressing town and stop at the local breakfast den. Now, I'm not sure if all of you are familiar with these joints, but it's usually the local clone of McDonalds or Dunkin Donuts. No sir, the Starbucks crowd has most definitely NOT infiltrated these corners of society. Electricity is still magical in these areas, and the wheel still posesses a fond sense of novelty among the locals. If you were to walk in these joints, you are expected to know everyone, know where they sit, who they are kin to, and the employees are supposed to summon a plate of biscuts, grits, gravy, bacon and sausage, along with coffee and water to whomever looks at them and declares "Ah'll huv the reg'lur, sweethaaart. How's yo mommer n 'em?" If you aren't a local, expect necks to creek and go Excorcist on you as they gawk with mouths hanging open, often with a cigarette hanging from the corner of their puckered, sun-wrinkled mouths. Expect worse if you are of the minority persuasion or are accompanied by someone who isn't as hideously pale as your lilly white ass. You can almost hear the proverbial needle go screeching off the record as you walk in and actually LOOK at the menu as you decide what to order.

It was at one of these very establishments I stopped at. It had that quality a buzzard tree does after the years of fetid buzzard feces finally kill the tree, and it's a dead reminder to the world of what happens when one is chosen as 'roost of the year' by buzzards. I get out, and after ordering my food three times to get it through to the cashier what I wanted, sat down. Food was good, but on the greasy side and sat in the stomach like a medium size bag of quickcrete. As I was eating, a man came in on what can only be described as flesh-toned stilts. He didn't bother to get the good prosthetic legs. Nope, he violated some poor manequin, and in his haste didn't even get the feet. These were just oval-shaped cylinders he had, with his shorts, suspenders, and tshirt. It's something I'll never forget, watching him leap to reach the Equal sweetener and cursing anyone who tried to help him. Horrified, my stomach began to hurt as I waited on my coworker to show up.

I felt the need to go to the restroom after three minutes, and after sprinting to the back, sat down to do the inevitable. While in the safe confines of the large stall, I heard the sound a deckhand must hear at night as the pirate captain paces the length of the deck. Only this was in double time since both legs were gone OH MY GOD MIRANDA BEARD MAKE IT STOPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

Wait. Sorry. I had to turn off the TV because a monster appeared. (My grandma calls her 'queen bee'.)

Anyway, the Second-Offense Pirate comes clackety-clacking into the bathroom. My innate macabre sensibilities go the best of me, prompting me to peer nervously through the crack in the door frame with a sense of perverse anticipation of the following series of events. But wait, what's this? He doesn't need the urinal? What then? NO! Here he comes to the Handi-stall to my left (which I normally choose due to the sink. Glad i didn't that day...). He gets in, doesn't even attempt to close the door, and BAM! There went one leg skittering across the floor of the bathroom. I heard a sound similar to a suction cup coming unstuck, and POP! BAM! SSSSSSSHHHZZHAHAHA...there went the other leg. Then the shorts with the suspenders. While on the floor, he apparently grabbed the parallel bars and vaulted himself into a 180 twist, landing squarely on the toilet. I didn't know whether to cry, to triumphantly applaud him, or to run out with my pants still down. Then the most monstrous evacuation I've ever heard in a human being ensued. I whimpered "Dear God, what is happening here?!"

Then I opted to run.

I made a hasty wipe, ran out to the sink, CRAP! no soap. I find a can of powdered comet, and wash my hands raw with the scrubbing power of bleach (Tm). As I'm running out, I slip on a paper mat they put on the fast food trays and almost go face first into a garbage bin. Somehow, my cat-like fat kid reflexes went into overdrive and I pulled off a miraculous save as I ran out the door and sprinted towards my car. I didn't want him to recognize my shoes when he came out, you know, just in case he had a gun.

As I run toward my truck, I notice that a pig farmer has decided to pull in alongside my truck. He's standing there with straw literally poking out of his mullet. Overalls, no shirt, tattoo on his mantits, the works. Then, when he finally walks past, the smell hits me. His animal cargo REEK.

Then the pig's wang points toward my truck and arcs this perfectly round stream of steaming pig urine onto my truck, satisfying his urges for at least twenty seconds. Then I notice the pig feces all over the ground and the other puddles of pig piss. I decided to get out of there as soon as possible.

Boring meeting, no lunch money, and got back home to find out my wife had received a speeding ticket. 52 in a 30. Said she was late for work.

Sigh.

2006-02-21T13:03:00.000-06:00

Last week I had an outing to eat at my one of my favourite digs down the road, Panino’s. It was, uh, interesting to say the least. Mrs. Chulo and myself went in and were eventually seated. I ordered diet coke, and being the gentleman I am, sized up my wife’s PMS demeanor and immediately decided that she needed a double Tom Collins, which the waiter promptly produced. While we were waiting, I couldn’t help but overhear the conversation to my right. There was a group of four people seated at the table. Two couples. The kind of slimy, disgusting couples that scream ‘wife swap’ for some strange reason. Anyway, they hadn’t even gotten their salads yet when I noticed that they were asking for a second bottle of wine. The tubby guy was bragging about having to work in New Orleans for a time, and about the hurricane and God knows what all else. His voice became sloppier and higher in volume with every sip of pre-food wine.

At the outset, he was the only one talking, with everyone else nodding in that fake ‘OH I LOVE YOU’ type of feigned interest in his slurred absurdity. Then after the second bottle was being finished, the woman to his left started up like a gassed up Weedeater. Then the man in front of him. Then his alkie wife who had finished her fourth glass of wine. They got their salads and asked for a third bottle, and then I got my bread and asked for another diet coke. After bottle number three was gone, they were talking about sewer lines, and then Weedeater blurted out something that has accompanied me in all my travels these 7 days since the incident:

SIZE DOESHHH MATTER, AND DON’T LET ANYONE TELL YOU OTHERWISHE.

She thought she was being astoundingly witty, but I stared at her for a minute in disbelief, then proceeded to translate the conversation to Mrs. Chulo, who as a current English learner still has a hard time understanding what I term ‘fringe English’, e.g. drunks, thugz, and inner-county rednecks. She had a completely empty stomach when we got there, so she was getting rather giggly as well. At least she didn’t start up with the ‘size’ comments too.

A good friend of mine recently quit his job at a store I frequent quite often for want of choice in my little crap town. I used to see him quite frequently, as he was the electronics god. The people that replaced him are sub-par, to say the least. I asked one a question regarding the possible arrival of game consoles, and I got a “We get a truck every day.” I asked a second drone, and she gave me the same answer. How do you explain to someone their uselessness? I eventually looked at the second drone and muttered “mmumblemubmle tits on a boar hog.” She heard it but didn’t say anything. My God, I’d prefer to deal with the other woman that worked with my friend. The woman in question had tattoos on her arm so I dubbed her ‘jail momma’ in my mind. She wasn’t even there. Just these new, unfamiliar people. I went last night to get a hard drive for my 360 (note my subtlety here in proclaiming my purchase. HAHAHAHAHA), and I had a hand put in my face. No explanation, NOTHING. It turned out to be due to a moronic kid wandering off and triggering the OMG FIRE ALARM CODE ADAM DEAR GOD MAN FIND THE KID alarm. I saw the back of a Walmart badge once, and saw the color coded alarm scheme. Was ‘Code Brown’ for like a monster turd attacking the store? I don’t recall. ‘Code Pink’ a gay dude stealing something? Or maybe an assasin ballerina?

Oh well. I’ll miss him. By the way, he reads this blog.

Mind if I link to your own so people can read of your plight? Msg me.

2006-02-19T21:10:00.000-06:00

This man could kick your butt:

Wanna chip in and get me an XBox 360 hard drive? I'd be appreciative. :p

Something of substance coming tomorrow hopefully.

2006-02-17T10:08:00.000-06:00

My mother is beyond all words.

I had to stop by the municipal Water Department and argue that there is no way in you-kn0w-where that I've consumed 29,000 gallons of water this month. My water bill went from $50 to $350. Yep. I don't know how either.

But I'm here in my mam's office checking my email before i hit the road to the office. Mam, Dad and aunt are across the way walking in an abandoned scheme, sorry, subdivision. It is rather sad. They paved these nice streets, set up individual lots for homes, even built a home in the middle of all this emptiness...and...no one came. It's a ghost town. Gives me the creeps but for some reason they enjoy walking there immensely. Whatever...

It's been a while since I posted one...so...

Weird purchase list from trip to WalMart last night:
Beer
Donuts
Meat
a length of steel chain
a glass vase
a small statuette of a monkey
a wireless router
and two Mexicana cd's.

Gotta go now mam's walkin in