Tuesday, February 28, 2006

List Tuesday: Fat Tuesday


Here at A Ton Of Bricks we like to go all out. Sometimes. Sometimes we just half bakeit. Really it's like a crap shoot. Anyway, today we're having a list smorgasbord. A smorgaslist, I guess.

Reviews of Three DC Blogs: By the Way, Did You Know That There is a Blog Cadre in DC Who All Know Each Other and Have Happy Hours and Think They Are All Around Cool People But Really They Are Just Bloggers Like Everyone Else And Their Writing Pretty Much Sucks Too Just Like Every Blog Except For A Few?

  1. Why.I.Hate.DC. - This one used to be great. James F. had perfected the art of going off on long, angry rants about seemingly minor annoyances. And then he moved away. Of course, before he moved away, he found a replacement: someone named Rusty. Rusty just doesn't have it yet. But that's okay. He's new at this and he gets at least a 6 month period during which he needn't be great every day. Ah, who am I kidding. No blogger is ever great every day, otherwise they wouldn't be just a blogger. Also, I'm a sucker for DC hate, so I'll keep reading no matter what. Heck, I'll recommend it.


  2. DCeiver - Don't be put off by the overly clever name. You can't blame someone for going with the really obvious. Fortunately, the rest of the blog is better than the name. Mainly, he writes random stuff that's heavy on the local music scene. Come for the relentless 9:30 Club Forum Hipster bashing, stay for the spot critiques of local culture and lengthy, postmodern, slightly off-kilter playwrighting. Leave for the gratuitous 24 and Lost recaps. But come back, because it will get good again, I swear!


  3. DC Bachelor - I don't know what to think. I don't know if the whole thing is one big adventure in trolling. I don't know if he actually thinks he's cool. I don't know if he knows how absurd his posturing is. I don't know if he knows how much his attitude does nothing but make the state of things (mainly M/F relations), about which he complains so vociferously, even worse. I also don't know how I stumbled across his blog in the first place. What I do know is that anyone who so awesomely hated on the CPMC (the only other DC blog I've ever read with any regularity, outside of my own friends' that is) can't be all bad, and for that reason alone I will continue to read his grating, ill-conceived, uncharitable, and somewhat funny blog. He's at his best when he's not writing about women, for instance, his recent series of posts on ridiculous housing ads that he put on Craigslist. I wish I had thought of it first.




Laws That Should Be Passed That Would Make DC A Better Place


  1. Pedestrians should be allowed, nay, encouraged to tote around baseball bats and take swings at cars whose drivers do not let pedestrians cross the street without fear of legal reprisal. This would work wonders for the street crossing folk who regularly try to cross upper Connecticut and/or Wisconsin Aves. It's already illegal for drivers not to stop for pedestrians in a cross walk, but this doesn't seem to be working. I have actually stood in the middle of Wisconsin at Ordway RIGHT NEXT TO A BIG YELLOW PYLON IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD THAT SAYS "DC LAW: VEHICLES MUST STOP FOR PEDESTRIANS IN CROSSWALK," only to have over a dozen cars totally ignore me, the sign, and the fact that I was pointing at the sign.


  2. Any time a DC City Council member does any brazen political grandstanding, they should be summarily kicked off the council and replaced with the next person to successfully register their vehicle at the C St. DMV. This could not possibly make the City Council any worse than it already is and then we wouldn't have to put up with those hosers campaigning for Mayor three years before the next election.


  3. I'm not sure if there already is an ordinance, but not cleaning up your dog's crap from a public park or private lawn not owned by you should be illegal. If it already is illegal, let's enforce it. We should hire a team of enforcers to spot the offending parties, follow them to their homes and take giant dumps on their lawns. You wouldn't even need to do this very often before people got the message. It's a win-win!


  4. Every mayor, regardless of sex, should be required to wear a bowtie.


  5. For a fee, regular citizens should be allowed to purchase diplomatic tags



Notes That I Enjoy

  1. Bb

  2. C#

  3. F

  4. A

  5. G#


Notes That I Do Not

  1. Eb

  2. D

  3. F#

  4. B




My Favorite Books To Pretend That I Have Read In Order To Sound Smarter


  1. Finnegan's Wake (Ulysses is for chumps)

  2. The Bible

  3. Remembrance of Things Past

  4. Gravity's Rainbow

  5. The Tin Drum

  6. Anything Dickens

  7. Perry's Chemical Engineer's Handbook. Actually, I have read some of it. It is not a page turner



Books That I Have Read That Might Have Actually Made Me A Little Dumber

  1. The Da Vinci Code

  2. Jurassic Park

  3. Red Rabbit

  4. Atlas Shrugged

  5. The Way Things Ought To Be

Monday, February 27, 2006



Every day at lunch....Scratch that. Every day that I go out for lunch (more often than strictly necessary) I sometimes take the metro. Actually, I really only do that if I'm going to meet the Brickfam somewhere for lunch (usually CalTort which runs tasty, messy circles around Chipataplay if you want my opinion (and why else would you be here? (are you ready for this: triple parenthesis!))). But every time I do ride the Metro, I walk by a guy selling Street Sense. I almost never carry cash, which means I almost never buy Street Sense, which can lead to the vendor looking at me and saying things that I just have to ignore. Like, once, he said "Oh, you graduate from college and you go all Wall Street on us?" I think he was trying to say that I should give something back. I know I should, but can he take credit cards? No? Shoot. And then, every time I'm at lunch with the brickwife, I intend to ask her for a dollar so I can buy a copy on my way back, but I always forget.

All this to say that last Friday I did have some cash on me so I bought a copy. And since I was in a good mood, I chatted with the vendor a little. He introduced himself (I don't remember his name) and said he was the house photographer and asked if he could take a picture of me for their Cheerful Givers piece. I said sure, and then a reasonable facsimile of the following conversation took place.

Me: That's a nice camera you've got there! (Speaking of his Nikon D-SLR)

Street Sense Guy: Yep, digital, cost two grand.

Me: Wow, pretty pricey. Out of my price range at least.

SSG: But now I don't have to pay for a whole roll of prints, just twenty-nine cents each! I been takin' pictures since about '70, but I just went digital last year. I was all used to cropping and dodging and that s---, but now I don't got to do none of that.

[aside: if you don't know, "dodging is the practice of, well, dodging your hand in and out of the projector/print maker thing in order to lessen the exposure on certain parts of the print. Just goes to show, I've learned more of practical use from one High School photography course than from all of my high school science classes. Oh, wait. That's not true. In physics I learned about audible beats in slightly different frequency sounds which is very useful when it comes to tuning a guitar.]

Me: It must be pretty convenient for you since you take so many pictures for the paper.

SSG: Yep, now I don't have to worry about getting 36 pictures that are all no good. But it's bad news for the little mom-and-pop developers. They aren't gettin' much bidness any more.

Me: Yeah, too bad. Do you like the camera though?

SSG: It's great man. Cost about two grand.

Me: (thinking that I'm pretty sure he already said this) Wow!

SSG: About two years ago I was crossing the street when this woman waiting for me to cross yells at me "Move it you slow motherf****r!" So I looked at her and said "You dumb black b****, I got the right of way, so you just better wait." (ed. just so you know the vendor was African-American, so he wasn't racist, just a little crude) And then she yells back at me that she doesn't care and she'll run over my a**. So I said "Kiss my sphincter!" She didn't know what I was talking about, so I look at her and say "You dumb black b****! The sphincter is the muscle that controls your a******!" You should have seen the look on her face! And then she steps on the gas and runs me over! Felony hit-and-run! Then this other woman who saw the whole thing says to me "I can't believe she cussed you out and then ran over you!" I made sure to get her license plate number. I ended up getting a three thousand dollar settlement, and I spent two on this camera!

Me: Um, I gotta go meet my wife for lunch, okay?

So we shook hands, I walked down into Metro Center, and that was that. Just goes to show: if you want an interesting conversation, talk to the Street Sense guys.

By the way, does every city have a homeless newspaper? I know that Seattle does. Here's a shout out to anyone who shopped at the Roosevelt Ave Safeway in the U-District back in the day (so, basically just me and the brickwife among all those who read this)...

"Real Change? Have a great day ma'am. Have a great day, sir."

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Poetry Thursday



Friday Night At The Royal Station Hotel
by Philip Larkin

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is -
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Through a Glass, Darkly

So, as I was reading through the book of Zechariah last week and thinking to myself “whoa, this is one weird book,” I remembered something that happened to me a couple years ago, back when I lived on the other coast. It’s a pretty weird story that really only makes slightly more sense now that I’ve read Zechariah. So if the story I’m about to tell you doesn’t make any sense, just read Zechariah and it might make slightly more sense.

Anyway, at the time, we were living in Moses Lake, Washington, a little town of about 16,000 I worked as a quality engineer at a chemical plant. If you don’t know what a quality engineer does, please do not ask because I do not want to be held responsible for involuntary manslaughter when you die of boredom during the explanation. Well, I wasn’t the only one that worked at the plant (duh!) and there were a few guys I am pretty good friends with. The plant was way out by the old Air Force base and the only way to get there was to drive by Papa’s. Papa’s is the ubiquitous small-town bar/card room/off-track gambling facility/restaurant/bowling alley (every small town has one, right?) and as such, we would stop in for a drink on the way home one or two nights a week. (Actually, Maggie doesn’t know that we did this! Sorry honey!) I guess we were what you might call regulars. There were some people that were definitely more regular than us and the story that I am slowly getting around to is about one of them.

I’m not sure that I ever learned his name. For some reason I think it might be Bruce, but maybe I just thought he looked like a Bruce because I never remember him actually telling me that his name was Bruce. He was probably about 50. He had a shaggy salt and pepper beard that always looked as though he hadn’t trimmed it in over a week, but never looked like he just gave up on trimming it. His hands looked like mechanic’s hands, all scarred and dirty, but his hair was impeccably neat. Every time we stopped in after work, he was already there relaxing with the Bruce Special: one beer (Miller, I think), one scotch (I don’t know what kind) and a mass-market paperback book. Usually the book was science fiction or fantasy, but every couple months he would switch it up with a serious piece of literature by Thomas Pynchon or Tom Delillo or the like.

I’m pretty sure that Bruce (let’s just keep calling him that for lack of a better name) worked as some sort of handyman/electrician. I know that he drove a truck that had an ad and phone number on the side of it for “The Hand-E-Lectrician.” It was one of those older little Toyotas with a white canopy that had no windows over the bed. I have no idea what he kept in there, but I assume it was tools and stuff. Probably a little sheet rock too, since I heard, well, everybody heard eventually, about his misadventures in remodeling. After everything went down the way it did, I was really tempted to look in the back of his truck. It wasn’t parked in the garage, so it survived the fire. But in the end, I decided against it. I decided that, really, I didn’t even want to know what was in there.

I think it was about in April of 2004 that things started to get a little weird with Bruce. The first complaint/rumor came from a couple of snowbirds who returned from their yearly 5-month excursion to Arizona in mid-March. They had hired Bruce to be caretaker, for lack of a better word, for their huge lakefront house out on the peninsula. I guess that this was pretty much business as usual and that they had hired Bruce for about 6 years in a row and he had always done a good job. So good, in fact, that they had even recommended him to their snowbird friends and by the winter of 03-04 he was actually looking after 5 or 6 houses. Anyway, shortly after all the old folks returned to town, rumors started to fly about Bruce going crazy or something like that. Usually, rumors are enormous falsities with just a hint of truth. This one however, was dead on. At least it sure looked that way when put together with everything else.

It turns out that when Doris and Robert returned from Arizona, they found something really strange about their house. They had asked Bruce to paint their dining room while they were away. They left him the paint and everything, and when they returned, the dining room was that perfect color of rusty red that they had wanted. The only difference was that where the door to the kitchen had been, there was now just a plain, flat wall. A perfect wall, mind you, with a perfectly placed electrical outlet and everything. Apparently Bruce was a pretty good handy man. When they contacted him about the problem, he claimed that there had never been a door there and what were they talking about? So, to prove him wrong, old Robert took a sledge hammer to bust down the wall where he thought the door was supposed to be. He found it on his second try. His first try left a huge hole in the wall about three feet to the left of the door. He did not hire Bruce to fix the new hole. Anyway, back to the kitchen. When Robert finally managed to bash a hole big enough to climb through he saw his regular old kitchen. It looked like nothing had changed in months, except that all of Doris’s plants were dead. On second glance he noticed something weird. Before I describe it, let me assure you that I have seen actual pictures of this kitchen, so I know that Robert’s story is true. Bob is a friend of a friend and our joint friend showed me some of the pictures that Bob showed him. Hey it’s a small town.

Lying on the floor in the center of the kitchen was a microwave that had been totally disassembled. And when I say totally, I mean totally. Every single little bolt had been removed; every single tiny piece of electronics had been disconnected. Each and every piece was laid out nicely on the floor, all organized by size. It was obviously the work of someone with a lot of time on their hands and good attention to detail. I mean, even the individual capacitors and resistors were disconnected from each other! While this is weird in and of itself, the weirdest part was that, hanging from a beautifully installed hook on the ceiling (which hadn’t been there before), was a beautifully framed cross-stitch picture with several flowers (mums, I think they were) and the frilly words: “What is to die let it die. What is to be annihilated let it be annihilated.” Yeah, they fired Bruce right quick.

Turns out that the other 4 or 5 houses he was taking care of had similar things done to them. There was always a room that had been completely walled off, though it wasn’t always the kitchen, a totally disassembled piece of electronics on the floor and an elegant cross-stitch picture with a disturbing message hanging above the pieces. I think one of them even mentioned cannibalism or something about the eating of flesh. Bruce didn’t work much after word of this weirdness got out.

From then on, I started seeing Bruce’s truck in Papa’s parking lot at lunch, too, not just after work. Seems he was starting to spend a lot more time there. Still, our relationship, if you want to call it that, didn’t really change. We still just said “hi” or whatever at the bar.

One day, on my way home from work, I stopped in at the bar by myself. This was starting to get to be a regular occurrence, drinking alone. I am so glad we got out of there only a few months later, otherwise who knows what would have happened. So I went into the bar and I saw Bruce sitting at his regular table. Well, I should say that I smelled Bruce before I saw him. I think the whole restaurant could smell those fumes wafting off of him. Mmm, nothing like the smell of gasoline to make you hungry. Even weirder than the smell was the fact that he didn’t have a book with him that day, just a notebook.

I let my curiosity run away with me and, after I paid for my pint of Fat Tire, I went over and sat down at Bruce’s table. Before I could get a good look at what he was writing or drawing in his notebook, he flipped it shut and put it on his lap.

“Hi Bruce,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Oh, not much. Just sitting here, working some things out, you know how it is, right?” he asked.

“Yep, I do. Same old same old. Run of the mill, just trying to make it through. I hear ya,” I said, thinking that I would just go back to my table since I get enough small talk at work.

Suddenly, Bruce got a gleam in his eye and said, apropos of nothing, “So, Harry, do you want to hear about my misadventures with the old folks.” I figured he was talking to me even though my name is not Harry, but whatever.

Well, this was exactly what I wanted to hear about, so I nonchalantly replied, “Oh, okay. I mean, if you feel like talking about it, I guess.”

“Okay. So, round about November, I got this idea in my head to conduct an experiment. I decided that I would cut off my favor from one room in each house. You know, not show any concern for it anymore. I stopped watering the plants, I stopped cleaning the floors, I stopped killing the bugs, just gave up on the whole thing. I actually sealed it off completely from the rest of the house. It wasn’t just the wall; I sealed all the HVAC ducts. I disconnected the water supply. I cut the wiring to all the outlets. I wonder if they’ve found all that yet? From what I’ve heard, though, the experiment worked out about like I thought it would”

“Oh,” I said. “That makes sense.” I said this even though my mind was reeling, I mean, who does that kind of stuff? So I decided to press further, to really try to figure out what was up with him. “So what was the deal with the disassembled electronics and the cross-stitch things?”
“Hey, the owners asked the exact same thing!” he said with a little bit of excitement in his voice. “And do you know what I told them?”

“No,” I said, and before I could say “what did you tell them,” he interrupted me.

“I told them ‘This is the word of the Lord, man! If you like it, pay up and if you don’t then just forget about it!’ They paid up alright. Three hundred bucks per month, just like we’d agreed,” he said with a little “harrumph” of satisfaction.

I didn’t say it but I was thinking that they probably paid up because they were terrified of him and just wanted him to get the hell out of there.

Then, Bruce looked at me and motioned for me to bend down and lean in a little closer, so I did. “Do you know what I did with all that money,” he asked in hushed, conspiratorial tones. “I took that magnificent prize and I threw it to the potter!” And then he burst out laughing as though this was the most significant and hilarious thing he had ever heard. I still have no idea what he meant by it.

Looking to change the subject back to something I could maybe understand I asked him what he was working on in his notebook. He gave me an appraising look, with his eyes half closed, his head tilted a little to his left and his mouth in a little bit of a smirk. “Okay, Arnold,” he said. “I guess I can probably trust you. You look respectable, but don’t tell anyone what I’m about to show you. It’s top secret.”

He opened the notebook and showed me a crude drawing of, well, this thing. “What is that?” I asked.

Falling back into his conspiratorial voice, he whispered “it’s an automatic, personal, rejudgmedemption device!”

“A what?” I asked a little incredulously.

“An ah-to-ma-tic, per-so-nal, re-judge-mah-demp-shun dee-vice,” he said, pronouncing each syllable as though he were talking to a five year old.

Trying not to be offended by his condescension, I told him that I understood what he said, I just had never heard of anything like that before.

“Well, it is patent pending, that’s probably why,” he said. “Here, I’ll show you!” He then proceeded to pull out what looked like a used page from a children’s coloring book upon which he had written ‘Patent Pending.’ “See?”

“Oh, yeah, that must be why,” I said with more than a hint of sarcasm. I don’t think he even noticed.

“Well, do you want to see it then?” he asked.

Figuring that this would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to find out exactly how crazy he was, I, of course, accepted his invitation.

We walked out the door of Papa’s and into the parking lot. When we got to his truck, whew, if you thought he smelled badly of gasoline, you should have smelled his truck. It smelled as though he had pumped gas directly into the cab instead of into the gas tank. I didn’t mention it though, so I rode with him in his stinky truck down the hill into Cascade Valley, the not-so-nice part of town. He pulled up in front of one of the strangest houses I have ever seen. Well, the house wasn’t that strange. It was a typical little bungalow, maybe 1000 square feet, 2 beds 1 bath was my first guess when I saw it. The weird part was the garage. It was freaking huge, like twice the size of the house, and into the garage is where he headed, so I followed.

The first thing I noticed upon entering the garage was his car collection. He had four beautiful late 60’s Pontiac Firebird convertibles. Two were red, one was white, and one was a sort of light brownish color. “Wow,” I exclaimed, “those are some beautiful cars!
What do they have in them, a 427 big block V-8 with dual exhaust?” I asked. I don’t really know that much about cars, but I have learned how to talk about them so that I sound like I know a lot.

“I don’t know,” he said off-handedly as though he didn’t even care.

“Oh. Well, where did get them,” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said again. “They just showed up on my lawn one day back when I used to have trees. They patrol the world to make sure everything is going along smoothly. As of last night, it’s all good. Okay come check out my device!”

I was quickly learning to ignore things he said that didn’t make any sense, so I just followed him around the cars toward his device.

It looked pretty much like what he had drawn in his notebook. It was made entirely out of what appeared to be brass and looked like a big bowl on legs with some thingies attached to the top. I couldn’t tell exactly what they were, but they each had some sort of little spout or something. There were seven of them. All in all it was probably 5 feet tall and the main bowl could hold, maybe 10 gallons.

“That’s where all the gasoline goes,” said Bruce excitedly, pointing to the big bowl. “It’s supposed to use lamp oil, but that stuff is way too expensive. I can get 10 gallons of gas for like 17 bucks compared to the 50 or so it would be for the oil. Then, the gas flows from the bowl through these pipes up into these seven thingies here. Capillary action, man!”

“Oh, well, then what? What does it do, exactly,” I asked.

“I don’t know yet, isn’t that cool,” he said. Now, I was really starting to feel uneasy. Just how crazy was this guy. “I’ve dreamed about this thing ever since I was at Fuller back in the day. It came to me in a vision,” he said with awe.

Not wanting to show my ignorance, but not being able to help myself, I had to ask, “Fuller? What’s Fuller?”

“Fuller Theological Seminary in southern California. That’s where I got my Doctor of Divinity,” he said matter-of-factly, as though this was perfectly normal and everyone already knew that anyway.

“So, wait. You’re a pastor? Or you were a pastor or something,” I asked trying to hide my derision and disbelief.

“Hmm? Oh, yeah. For awhile. I was an associate pastor at some evangelical church in Idaho for a couple years, but the Senior pastor fired me when I preached a sermon that said his tongue would rot in his mouth and his eyeballs would rot in his eye sockets. I don’t know what the big deal was.

“You’d be shocked to find out how many of the handy men around the country are actually burned out pastors. I can’t think of more than three guys I graduated with that are still in the business. I am personally not too fond of pasturing a flock doomed for slaughter.

“So, what do you think of it, the device,” he asked before I had a chance to say anything.

“Wow, I, uh, don’t know what to say. It’s really…..something,” was all I could manage.

When he realized that I really wasn’t going to say anything else he said “well, I guess you’ve seen it. I’ll take you back to Papa’s now.”

Just as we were about to walk out of the garage, I saw, sitting in the corner, something that looked like it used to be a washing machine but was now completely disassembled and set out piece by piece. Chuckling under my breath, I asked Bruce “so, further experimentation on removing your favor from electrical appliances?”

“Oh, that,” he said, looking at the remains of the washer. “No, that’s part of a different experiment. A better experiment,” he said with that same strange gleam in his eye that I’d seen earlier. But he refused to say more, and five minutes later, I was back in the parking lot, standing by my car trying to think of an excuse I could give Maggie for why I was coming home so late.

That was the last time I ever saw Bruce at Papa’s and the last time I saw him at all until about a month later in the hospital. Before we get to that, I’ll tell you what I think happened with Bruce in the meantime. Now, please keep in mind that this is all pretty much hearsay and speculation. Some of it is from Bruce’s journal that one of the firemen found and asked me to give him, so that part might be accurate, but knowing Bruce, it could just as easily be crazy talk.

Bruce had become obsessed with the idea of “union,” the reliance of one thing on another. I guess he even got a cat and named it “Union,” before he, uh, um. I don’t know how to say this, but as part of his experiments with the idea of union, he decided to see if his cat “Union” could function after he, um, removed her limbs. The answer, as he quickly found out, was no. No for the cat, and no for limbs.

But let me back up a little here. According to his journal, Bruce began to experiment with things about a week before I saw his device. It started with what would probably best be called a vision, or a prophecy, though Bruce wrote that he adamantly refused to call it a prophecy, saying that he was no prophet. Anyway, the vision or whatever, was of a plant falling apart, little bit by little bit. From this vision, Bruce got the idea to start experimenting to see what happens when different things are taken apart, piece by piece.

He started small by taking the batteries out of his TV remote, and found, lo and behold, that it no longer worked. But that wasn’t the whole experiment. He also wanted to see what happened to the things after they had been taken apart. So he started to document the changes he saw each day in the things he had disassembled. It looks like he went pretty quickly through the electronic/mechanical things in his house, culminating with his major appliances, so he was pretty much done with that phase of the experiment when I visited him. It’s probably why he only showed me the garage and not the inside of his house. According to the firefighters, the floor was covered with pieces of electronics, all blackened and stuff, but still identifiable.

It seems that this part of the experiment was pretty boring to him since not much changed after he took the stuff apart. Plastic and metal don’t really rot, you know? So after that first week, he started to try other stuff. He plucked each leaf off of all his plants and cut of each branch, laying them in neat piles next to the plant pots. Each day he would describe the changes to each leaf and branch and to the plant itself to see how taking them out of union with each other would affect them. They rotted, duh.

Then he moved onto to his furniture. He took the screws and bolts out of the screw holes and documented how his chairs and his bookcases fell apart. He cut open each couch cushion and removed all the stuffing to see how that affected the couches ability to seat people comfortably. The answer? It ruined the couch and made it unsittable. He took the light bulbs out of each lamp in his house and found that neither could work on their own.

So now you can picture his house as it was about a week before the fire, just completely filled with disassembled junk and rotting flora. It was about this time that he started his um, cat experiment. Then, he moved on to himself. First he took apart his clothes, you know, took the zippers and buttons and elastic off of everything. He found that he couldn’t wear it any longer. So now he was walking around naked, not having showered since he took apart his plumbing two weeks before. Sounds like a pretty sorry sight altogether.

Bruce’s last journal entry was dated two days before the fire and all it said was “Nothing left but me and the device. Me first.”

Two days later, his house and garage practically burned to the ground. The first responders found Bruce, naked, unconscious on the front yard pretty badly burned with an acetylene torch in one hand and well, no other hand. I guess he cut it off from its union with the rest of his body and sealed up the wound with that same acetylene torch.

The investigation showed that the fire started in the garage, and was fueled by about 10 gallons of gasoline in a strange brass structure. They think that he tried to take the, what was it, The “Rejudgmedemption Device” apart with the welder’s torch. Bad idea. Anyway, the cops found out who he was and asked around until they learned that I was the last to talk to him. So I got questioned a little, nothing serious. I think that they decided it was an open and shut “insane guy burns down his house” case. But they did give me his journal that one of the firefighters found, somehow unscathed among all the rubble.

A couple days after the fire I went to visit him in the hospital. I asked how he was and gave him his journal. He asked about the house, and what had happened. I told him.

“Well, it looks like a fire started in the garage with all that gasoline you had, and then it spread from there. The fire department responded pretty quickly to rescue you before you got caught in the fire. They put it out pretty quickly too, but it still burned about two thirds of everything you own. Sorry.”

He looked off into space and mumbled, “Oh. What about my device? What happened to it?”

“Well,” I said, not sure what to tell him. “They think that your device was actually the source of the fire. I’m really sorry, man.”

His eyes grew to about the size of saucers and I saw a vaguely familiar gleam in them. “Sorry? Sorry? Don’t be sorry! It worked perfectly!”



Inspired by the book of Zechariah and in part by the works of Chuck Palahniuk and Russell Rathbun

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Lazy List Tuesday



It's been awhile since I posted a "random thoughts" blog, mostly because it's a stupid blog cliche, but I don't care. I'm doing it today because I feel like it, and for some reason my head won't stop spinning long enough for me to make a cogent post about anything else. So here....


  1. Okay, the song “Fix You” off of Coldplay’s X&Y album may be ridiculously trite, but it still is one of the best produced songs I’ve ever heard. Here’s the thing. On X&Y Coldplay are shooting for Epic (with a capital E) on every song. Unfortunately, they usually miss. On Fix You, however, I think they hit it. I love that they have about a half dozen tracks of guitars, another half dozen of piano/organ/keyboard and another half dozen of vocals. I would ad a little more reverb and echo to the drums, but other than that, the production is top notch. It’s just too bad that song also contains both of the following lyrics: “Tears stream down your face, and I will try to fix you,” and “When you lose something that you can’t replace, when you love someone and it goes to waste, could it be worse.” I’m sorry, but those are terrible, terrible lyrics. It would be bad enough if they were in two different songs on the same album, but to be in the same song? That is just unbearable.

  2. Holy crap! Is it Tuesday already?

  3. I have a good job and all, but working is stupid. It’s especially stupid when your little son is awake and you have to leave for work and he’s sitting there on his mother’s lap looking at you with the saddest eyes and screaming “No, daddy! Stay here, stay here,” and you have to look him in the eyes and say goodbye and walk out the door. That sucks.

  4. I wonder if I could dunk on a 9 foot rim? Probably not.

  5. Mmmmm, Gushers!

  6. Why not make Lenten practices/disciplines a year-round thing?

  7. After helping to move a bunch of high-quality/high-cost audio equipment, I have to wonder: are there people that can truly hear the difference between a shielded cable and a non-shielded cable? Those tiny, tiny fluctuations lie so far below my JND threshold that I would never notice in million years. And if those people do exist, how do they not get distracted to the point of anger constantly by the imperfect aural signals we are all bombarded by every day?

  8. My favorite pen in the whole world is the Vision Uni-ball Fine in Black.

  9. Whenever I read arguments on the whole Objective Vs. Subjective mélange, be it about truth or art or whatever, I can’t help but find myself thinking that there should be a third option for certain people on both sides: Sobjectivity, meaning that you are both objectively and subjectively an SOB.

  10. Whoa, I’m dizzy! That is so weird!

Friday, February 17, 2006

Geez, I Almost Forgot


RANDOM PICTURE FRIDAY!!!!!!!



So does this mean that, now, when you buy a Mac, all you're buying is a prettier box to put the same computer in? Oh man, what a bunch of suckers. Me included.

The One Campaign For That One Thing

Did you know that if you search Google for "Bono is a pretentious blowhard" you get zero results? I find this shockingly hard to believe. I mean, I can't be the only one to think this, right? There have to be others that think that Bono is a pretentious blowhard. I would guess that there are millions who think as I do, and now, whenever they search for "Bono is a pretentious blowhard" they will be sent to my site! See how that works? Thank you Bono, for being a pretentious blowhard and sending people here so I can make no money off all the banner ads that I don't have.

As a service to those of you that don't think that Bono is a pretentious blowhard, I am providing you with a picture you can print out (stolen from one.org ha ha) and sleep with and fawn over. Nail it to a cross if you want, and see if it rises from the dead!





Ha ha ha. This is all in good fun. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Especially Bono's. I bet all his pretentious blowhardism is just a cover up for his severe lack of self-worth. It's okay man, we still love you. Say, can I have a hundred bucks?

A Ton of Mathematical Confusion

Okay, okay okay. I know it's Friday before a long weekend, but I have to post this. WARNING: MATHEMATICAL TOPIC TO FOLLOW



There, that should have weeded out the non-math inclined. Anyone still here? No? Oh well, I'll carry on anyway.

Can you figure out what is wrong with this proof? And explain it? Simply?

Thursday, February 16, 2006

The Bad Poetry Train Rolls On.....




201 posts, can you believe it?

Fire in the Hole
by Schuyler

Black lines on a blue sticky note
tell the whole story
a story of life, love, hate, death
and music
melting chocolate and creamy nougat
A fingerprint and a streak
of brilliant black blood
mean that it's over now
And a crude representation of a sound wave
bounces from one side to the other
frozen
at that one moment in time
And a swoop of hair like lines
vanishes into the oblivion of no paper
Life's trajectory is traced out
squiggles disappearing into nothing
flaming out or fading out
it all ends the same way
when the pen
is lifted from the page
All that's left is an echo
a hole reflecting nothing
except smiles and stories.

Bad Poetry Thursday (200)



200 posts, can you believe it?

Upon the Dawning of the Time of Your Life
by Schuyler

When a milestone is reached
it means a thousand different things
to different people
it's a time for celebration
it's a marker of acheivement
it's the mark of someone with way too much time
To me it's just a symbol
of some forgotten notion
of a time when life was simpler
and we didn't have to
juggle chainsaws
while riding unicycles through a
flaming ring of fire
on a taut and thin high wire.
You start to think that when it's over
when the milestones are miles behind
and you're waist deep in mud
and trapped between two fallen trees
that fell in front and back while you were sleeping
that maybe now would be a good time to have
a chainsaw
and a fire at least could keep you warm.

Poetry Time in the Neighborhood




For the Dead

by Adrienne Rich


I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Another One Bites The List




So, I've written a couple of lists about Washington State, and I figure, why stop now. So........

Towns/Cities in Washington State Whose Names You Are Probably Mispronouncing


  1. Sequim

  2. Wapato

  3. Buena

  4. Naches

  5. Cle Elum

  6. Cowiche

  7. Issaquah

  8. Tukwila

  9. Ephrata (hint: it's NOT U-phrata!!!)

  10. Long Beach. It's actually Lung Bay-atch.




And now, the award for most ironic place name in Washington State goes to.....




RITZVILLE!




Wait, I know it's around here somewhere!








Oh, there it is!

Monday, February 13, 2006

An Apology in Advance

I know, I know. Back in the day, shortly after the nascence of this blog, I claimed that I would never write about politics, but today I can't help it. Actually, I'm not going to write about politics per se, so this is really a half-hearted apology. But to those of you who have always come here in the expectation that you will not see the words Dick and Cheney used consecutively, I'm sorry. The situation this weekend is too funny not to mention.

So, Dick Cheney, our VP, shot someone in the face this weekend. Sure it was just with birdshot and those little pellets couldn't kill an albino invalid, but he shot someone nonetheless. This opens up so many possible jokes I can't even fathom it! Here're a few that I've been thinking of.


Vice President Cheney Shoots Friend to Prove Toughness
AP Newswire

In an effort to prove to "the terrorists" exactly how tough on terrorism he is, Vice President Cheney shot his friend's face off. The "accident" occurred this weekend during a quail hunting trip. "Let this be a lesson to all you terrorists out there; If I'm willing to shoot my friend's face off, just think what I'll do to you! That's right, I'm crazy!!!! Like a FOX!!!" said the VP in a statement made to the press early Monday morning. Shortly before the press conference, the White House released documents that referred to the carefully planned shooting off of whatever-his-name's face as "Operation Shoot His Face Off." [editor's note: We believe that this is the most dense use of the phrase "shoot his face off" or something similar in the history of the Associated Press. Of this, we are very proud.]


Or how about this one?

Cheney Claims Intelligence Failure In Hunting Accident
Reuters

Vice President Cheney has placed the blame for this weekend's quail-hunting mishap squarely on the shoulder of either the CIA, the FBI or the DIA. According to his statement "[o]ne of those organzations had something to do with it. Maybe the NSA did, too." He claimed that at least one of the aforementioned governmental agencies provided him with faulty information that his buddy Texas Lawyer McLawyerson was actually Osama Bin Laden in disguise. It was not until Mr. McLawyerson said, upon being shot in the face, "Cheney, you bastard!" that Cheney realized his mistake. Shortly after this story became public, the Democratic National Committee responded with a press release stating, "Vice President Cheney is stupid, just like Bush. That's it, we don't ever have anything else to say, you know that!" To which the Republican Speaker of the House responded "Four more years! Four more years! Yee-haw! I love guns!" In a related story, a new video of Bin Laden has surfaced on the internet claiming that he was not in fact with Mr. Cheney at the time of the shooting. Instead he claimed that he was "in Pakistan."


NRA to Hire Cheney as Gun Safety Spokesman
The National Rifle Association announced today that it will hire Vice President Dick Cheney as a gun safety spokesman following his "safe, and mostly harmless" shooting off of a friend's face this weekend. According to the statement by the NRA, "Mr. Cheney's long running dedication to only shooting his friends with birdshot is a strong statement on how important gun safety is to our Vice President." In his first public comments since the shooting, Mr. Cheney said, "guns don't shoot peoples faces off. I shoot peoples' faces off." He then made a weird sort of grimace and pointed a rifle right at the camera.



Cheney Shooting Victim Inks Deal with Roc-a-Fella Records
Harry Whittington, the latest victim in Vice President Cheney's face shooting off binge, has signed a deal with high-powered Roc-a-Fella Records and plans to release a solo rap album under the name Whitty Ca$H. The 78-year-old, Austin-based lawyer hopes to parlay his multiple gunshot wounds into international fame the same way that 50 Cent has: through ridiculous thuggish posing and mediocre to poor rapping skills. "Yo, yo check it. Ca$H is H-O-T hot right now, y'all," said a Roc-a-Fella spokesperson. His first album is tentatively titled "Riches and B**ches: the Whitty Ca$H Lyfe." The first single will probably be "Death and Texas (C-H-E-N-E-Y)"


Okay, I could keep going, but I think that's enough for now, don't you? Dick Cheney: Never ending source of comedy gold. For other people. For me, it's comedy bronze at best.

Friday, February 03, 2006

Wet Hot White Trash Summer

Last night, the brickwife and I were talking about a dog we once had. Wait, let me go back one step. Last night, we were just sitting around and the brickwife looked at a book lying under the coffee table. It was a handsome hardback, boxed edition of the complete works of Shakespeare that I bought for her years ago. What can I say, I’m a thoughtful guy. Anyway, one side of the box opening is completely chewed up. She noticed this and we had the following exchange:

Her: Remember when we had a dog?

Me: Yeah, June was really cute.

Her: Remember how she chewed up my Shakespeare book?

Me: Yeah, she was a good dog.

Her: Remember how she used to chew everything up?

Me: Yeah.

Her: Remember how she used to sleep on our bed but eventually learned that her place to sleep was on the pile of stuff at the bottom of the bed?

Me: Hmm, yeah I do remember that.

Her: We were pretty white-trashy that summer weren’t we?

Me: Indubitably.

So here’s the lesson. We may look all sophisticated with our euro-style shoes and our name brand clothes from outlet stores and our DC condo and our Volkswagen, but really, we’re just a couple years from living in true white trash squalor. It was the summer of 2001 and this is what our house was like….

1) We definitely had the rusting out (not all the way yet) car sitting in the driveway/lawn. It was a 70’s Corvette, so that makes it a little cooler.

2) The house we were living in was still full of dead guy stuff when we moved in, so we had a yard sale and sold a bunch of dead guy stuff to random people for money that we so desperately needed.

3) The dead guy stuff that didn’t sell we left sitting in the yard (which was overgrown with weeds) for several weeks before finally having St. Vincent’s come pick it up.

4) Our dog was a mangy, scrawny, deaf Australian Shepherd that the bricksister-in-law (who was living with us) found on the street. We named her June.

5) Our doggie door was home-made. We kicked out the bottom panel of the back door so she could come in and out.

6) When we moved in, the refrigerator was utterly disgusting. It reeked. So we threw it in the back yard.

7) We never did anything with the dead guy’s huge box of porn. We just left it sitting there by the back door. Do people collect 20 year old Playboy’s? Maybe we could have made some money.

8) We never unpacked our boxes, we just used them as furniture.

9) We had a little mirror-art thingy in the kitchen advertising Tijuana Gold with a picture of a guy smoking a blunt. It wasn’t ours, but we left it up.

10) When I would play fetch with June it was usually at night, out front on the rickety wooden wheelchair ramp (the dead guy was in a wheel chair). I would throw an empty milk jug down the ramp and she would freak out and bat it back up the ramp. I usually just left the jug out front over night.

11) We didn’t have a garbage man, so we just took our trash to work with us and threw it in the dumpster.

12) Our car was a beat up 93 Ford Escort. Okay, that one is not that bad, we were just in college.
13) We did our grocery shopping at the Canned Food Warehouse. It’s like a grocery outlet. Wait, no. It is EXACTLY a grocery outlet.

14) We often ate dinner at the taco bus next door. It was awesome.

15) We did our laundry in a Laundromat. This seemed perfectly normal at the time, as did the other patrons of said Laundromat, but after a recent conversation we had with some friends, we learned that those people that used the Laundromat are actually poor souls and we should feel sorry for them. I apologize to you other Laundromat users who were there with us. I apologize for not having the correct pitying demeanor and condescension towards you. I hope you’re not mad. Oh, wait. You probably don’t have internet access, so never mind.

Well, that’s all I can think of right now, but I’m sure there’s more. Ask us about it sometime. It was quite the summer, though I think the brickwife enjoyed it more than I did. She tells me that going back there to get all our stuff and move it into our cool new loft apartment in Seattle made me physically ill. I don’t remember that, but I’m sure she is right.

Random Picture Frida







I love this cat. Not only does it look evil, as all cats truly are, but it is also guarding beer. This picture shows the fate of the universe in a nutshell.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

More Bad Poetry




See, I was serious about cranking these suckers out fast. This one took maybe 7 minutes.


A Walk in the Park
by Schuyler


He turned around three times
Like a dog looking for a place to sleep
Only he wasn't sleepy
Just convinced there was someone
In the room with him
But there wasn't
And there never had been

The room was known
To him alone
And how even he learned of
It's existence
Is still a little hazy
The walls all painted gray
Were painted gray as they always had been
When he saw the room
Before today
In dreams or in real life
He didn't know
But it all seemed different
Now that he was on
The inside
Of a room
He didn't know was there
When he walked past the blank wall
Where the door
Was hidden by a cloud
In his eyes
Just yesterday

Bad Poetry Thursday, Fast!



Okay, here's the deal. I realized that it's not as much fun as it sounds to write poems with arbitrarily decided lengths or structures. Instead, my new policy, which may only last this week, is to write bad poems as quickly as possible. This first installment only took about 5 minutes. Also, it happens to be exactly 45 words, but that wasn't planned.


A Shot In The Dark
by Schuyler


When a blue spark jumps
Across the long divide between
A finger
And the door knob
A million tiny hands
All strain for something they'll never reach
And grasp at nothing
And then
Each hand one by one
Evaporates
Before you can even say ouch.

A Thursday Full of Poetry




Imagining Defeat
by David Berman

She woke me up at dawn,
her suitcase like a little brown dog at her heels.

I sat up and looked out the window
at the snow falling in the stand of blackjack trees.

A bus ticket in her hand.

Then she brought something black up to her mouth,
a plum I thought, but it was an asthma inhaler.

I reached under the bed for my menthols
and she asked if I ever thought of cancer.

Yes, I said, but always as a tree way up ahead
in the distance where it doesn't matter

And I suppose a dead soul must look back at that tree,
so far behind his wagon where it also doesn't matter.

except as a memory of rest or water.

Though to believe any of that, I thought,
you have to accept the premise

that she woke me up at all.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

A Ton Of Bricks: Solving the Energy Crisis

Okay, all you politicos and such should listen to me on this one. I know what I'm talking about.

So, we're going to have to face it, we're addicted to crude. Oil, that is. Black gold. Texas tea. What are we going to do about it? I'll tell you (bet you didn't see that coming!): Hydrogen. And now you're thinking "Blah, blah, blah. Hydrogen, fuel cells whatever, it's a pipe dream man! A moo point (you know, like a cow's opinion, it just doesn't matter, it's moo?). A fantastical concept dancing its way to oblivion in fantasy land, just riding the Matterhorn over and over, not going anywhere but remaining seated at all times." But I think hydrogen is a feasible power source for all sorts of things. Cars, heat, electricity, rocket fuel etc.

The biggest problem with hydrogen is, where do we get it? You can't just mine it out of the air like you can oil. Wait, I'm not saying that you can mine oil out of the air, you got that, right? So, where will it come from? Can anyone think of a very common substance that is made primarily of hydrogen? Anyone? You, there in the back? Water? That's right, water. H2O. Two parts hydrogen for every one part oxygen. And the beauty of it is that all it takes to separate the H's and the O's is a little electricity. A little simple electrolysis and there you go. This also has the added benefit of producing pure oxygen that can be used in all sorts of applications from the medical industry to um, the rusting industry.

So, now that the hydrogen source problem is solved, where do we get all the electricity needed to do this on a huge industrial scale? Again, I'll tell you: nuclear power. Think about it, what's wrong with this idea? We build a bunch of nuclear power plants to generate electricity to electrolyze water to make hydrogen. We build a hydrogen infrastructure and distribute the gas all around the nation to power our fuel cells and the only pollution that comes out is, that's right, water! It's perfect! Well, there are the considerations that hydrogen is intensely flammable and might be difficult to transport safely, but whatever. If you want my opinion, hydrogen is safer to deal with than gasoline. But that's just me.

Wait, wait, wait. I know what you're going to say, "but, but, but, we can't do that! Nuclear power makes nuclear waste and nuclear waste causes cancer and we don't have anyway to get rid of nuclear waste except bury it in the ground! I don't care that coal fired power plants actually emit more radioactive material into the atmosphere every day than all of the nuclear power plants generate in a year and contain in bomb proof shelters." Okay, those are valid points, but consider this option; instead of burying it here on earth, we could load it up on rockets and fire the nuclear waste into the sun! It won't be here to cause cancer and a tiny little bit of stuff won't hurt the sun. Well, if you're not comfortable with that, why don't we just fire it off into the deep reaches of space? I mean, the chances of it ever hitting anything are infinitesimally small! We could even use the hydrogen we made to fuel the rockets!

And there you have it. That is the solution. QED, or Sine Qua Non, or Quid Pro Quo or whatever you're supposed to say after you've conclusively proved a theory for all time and eternity.


P.S. Don't worry about the rockets blowing up on take off or something and spreading radioactive waste everywhere. We won't let that happen.