So it Goes.

Hi blog,

I know, I know, it has been a while, but it really wasn’t my fault this time. Life has been less than good as of late. I will spare you the gory details, but here are the highlights:

My cat is very slowly and very expensively dying. I am working with the vet, but the vet always gives me that stink eye look that seems to say, “This wouldn’t be happening if you were a better cat parent”, so that always feels good. Also, holy shit is the vet expensive!

My car has been slowly falling apart for awhile now. I did the math not long ago and figured out that I need it to get me through another year. At that point I will have some important things paid off and I will have been able to save some money, and also I think that about a year from now I should be able to make some big life decisions (job, location, some new goals, a revised plan for the future, all that good stuff). But my car is kind of a beater, so I have been trying to give it a little more TLC and as soon as I did, the wheels started to come off the wagon (almost literally) and it has all snowballed: get it serviced, get new tires, get the brakes fixed, stop that god-awful squealing noise, etc, etc, etc. If I really, truly believed in karma, then I would have to guess that this is all happening due to the hubris of my saving money in the first place. I was very proud of myself, I was able to save some money for the first time in a long time. Made me feel like a grown up; like a man. Well all of that is gone now and I will be living on minute rice and boiled dirt for awhile. But so it goes.

Finally, a few people in my life who are (or were) important to me have (separately and without provocation) gotten in touch with me to enumerate the ways in which I am an asshole. These are people for whom I still care deeply, regardless of the ways in which the winds of fate have battered us about. So that just plainly sucks. Though they did make some good points and it does make me think, “Shit, maybe they’re onto something!” And who knows, perhaps they are.

But I will be honest with you dear blog, I’m getting my ass kicked here. Like Mark Wahlberg for the whole beginning half of The Fighter. Seriously.

But I have weathered these types storms before. And some of them were much worse than this one. Much like all of us, life has moods and sometimes it can be kind of a bitch. But so it goes. That was a refrain that Kurt Vonnegutt used in Slaughterhouse-Five and it comes to mind a lot. So it goes.

However, I don’t want you to get the impression I’m spending my days sitting around in a puddle in soiled britches, clutching a dead cat and crying into my beer. Some days are quite good. Running is feeling better each time I go and I have been reading a lot and writing some. I’m impatiently looking forward to NANOWRIMO next month, even though I have yet to lock down a … oh, what’s the technical term … plot. But who needs a plot? That’s my refrain, who needs a plot?

I have a new backpacking bag I really like and I am itching to use it. I want to find a thru hike! I think I may have finally gotten my Base Pack Weight down to ten pounds! (I know, I’m a dork. Please feel free to Google “Base Pack Weight”). I bought a scale recently and I was happy to discover this is the least I have weighed since high school! And it’s not even because I got all binge-and-purge-y or anything! I’m slowly getting in shape! Which is maddeningly ironic because I also haven’t had sex or been naked in front of anyone in a completely unacceptable amount of time. Seriously, I’m starting to understand why people marry conjugal visit-capable inmates (What? Every movie I have ever seen about women’s prisons made them seem like pretty sexy places!)

Meet-an-Inmate.com

Anyway, there’s an update for you. I’m sure you were just dying to have all of that information. So it goes!

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Retractions, Apologies and Best Wishes.

I would like to say that my thoughts and best wishes are with the people of Norway, especially since their otherwise peaceful society really wasn’t prepared for the kind of awfulness that was unleashed on it last week. I would also like to offer my apologies for making fun of Norway on Facebook when I initially heard about the explosions, though in my defense, that was before we knew that anyone had been killed. Additionally, I would like to retract the jokes I made about how that’s what Norway gets for invading Denmark at the end of Hamlet, as that was not only not funny, given the circumstances, but also – apparently – made me look like a pretentious douche. Furthermore, I would like to apologize for mistakenly identifying the country of Finland on a map when one of my coworkers asked where Norway is. And while we are on the topic, I would like to apologize to my Norwegian coworker Svensen for berating him when he politely tried to correct me as to the location of his homeland; Svensen I am very sorry for the things that I said to you about Norwegian men’s well-known lack of sexual prowess and about your mother’s well-known lack of sexual morals. Obviously I was making those things up because I was embarrassed.

So anywhoo, sorry everybody. I will try to keep it together a little better next time.


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Just as Melville Intended . . .

This commercial came up the other day in conversation with some of my dashing and literate friends, so I wanted to post it here because we were all so impressed with what a good commercial it is.

See, even if you're whoring for Blackberry and AT&T, you can still do work that transcends just the bare necessity of schlock advertising (do I sound like a pretentious douche yet? No? Did I mention it is basically a commercial about Moby Dick? Which I have read? NOW do I sound like a pretentious douche?)

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A Haiku For You

So I came in to work on a Saturday to get a jump on next week, but it turns out that the stuff I need in order to start working was not done by other people last week. So I called a guy - yeah, apparently I'm the kind of asshole who ruins other people's weekends (sorry Curt) - and he is uploading some stuff from home.

So while I am here waiting for my files to upload, I am writing Haikus about the experience:

I am here at work
but my work is dependent
on people not here.

Waiting for files
to upload to the server
on a Saturday

Writing a Haiku
on company time is much
more fun than working.

I'm totally a rockin' Haiku poet. Henderson and Blyth and Yasuda can all suck it!