Mr. Jones and me

Past the halfway mark in September. I honestly do not know where the time goes.

I think I was a bit of a dick to Paul this morning. I think it was justified, but it’s one of those things where it doesn’t seem quite cut and dried.

We have a tiny little convenience store a few blocks from our house named J’s. I tend to head up there every day because I read both local papers and J’s is the closest place to get them, and about every other day while I’m there I renew our soda supplies (Paul drinks Mountain Dew pretty much exclusively; I drink Pepsi and usually a 2 liter of something cheap, like Fanta Orange). I also get my Lotto tickets there (one per drawing, I’m not nuts). So I was heading up there this morning on my usual run and Paul said “Hey, if I give you a couple of bucks, will you pick up some cigarettes for me?”

Reasonable request, right? I’m going to be there anyway, and I was planning on buying soda for both of us, which isn’t exactly health food.

I said “No, I’m not gonna buy cigarettes for you”. Paul kind of looked startled and said “Well, I was going to pay for them myself”, and I said, “I don’t care, I’m not going to facilitate you getting cancer. I’m your big brother, I love you, I’m not going to help you do something horribly unhealthy.”

Paul is the very soul of affability so he just shrugged, and I think and feel I was, more or less, morally and ethically justified. But honestly. He’s just going to walk up there later and buy cigs for himself, and I was going there anyway. So I expect I was just being a dick.

Perfect blue buildings

Sometimes, though, even when nothing melodramatic or drastic happens, your life gets incrementally better. You make a mild but discernible difference, and that feels good.

Today we got our first water bill since I had Paul’s buddy Chad come over and fix the constant drip in the bathroom. This was facilitated by me offering to do some word processing for a nebulous home business of Chad’s that will probably never actually eventuate in the future, in exchange for Chad’s handyman competence on the pipes, so it’s one of those things that for all Paul’s bitching, would most likely still be an ongoing problem if I hadn’t stepped up.

Now, very briefly last month, for a few hours, we had our water turned off, because despite the fact that Paul had trekked over to the Zephyrhills City Hall the day before and given the water folks $60 and gotten an assurance that would tide (heh) us over until next month, they just went ahead and shut us off anyway, because the next day the new bill came out and it was for over $100. Paul called and got them to turn it back on by reminding them of their promise (they were, apparently, quite surly about it, but eventually agreed) but, well, the water bill, with the constant drip in the bathtub, had been high. Let’s just leave it at that.

Today’s water bill: $48.71.

As I’ve noted before, in a life like mine (or, I suppose, much of yours) where no one is exactly nominating you for Academy Awards, you take your victories where you find them. And after several months of $100+ water bills, I’m going to take this very much as a victory.

So I still have no job and email is still apparently paralyzed by weird African pygmy venom and no one, ever, will give me any money for any of my writing that doesn’t include explicit sex scenes, and it seems pretty obvious I am for the most part doomed to turn into one of those colorful cranky elderly bachelors with several cats whom no one ever voluntarily visits and whose family rolls their eyes around holiday time over and moans “Do we HAVE to invite your goddam weird cousin/uncle/brother again, CHRIST, that guy creeps me out?” (Which would be better, I suppose, than turning into one of those people who sets out tea service for the characters in my favorite soap opera just before the show starts every day… an action I myself understand to a truly frightening degree.)

Nonetheless, I fixed something in my immediate environment and now things are discernibly and measurably better and, hey. It ain’t like a blowjob from someone who loves me or a big fat check from an editor, no, it is not. But I’ll take it.

In the service of the queen

And, just random meanderings…

I’ll get to watch the West Wing Season Premiere next week, since Angel doesn’t start up until October 1, the week following. So tonight I can once more watch John Goodman sworn in as Acting President, and next week I can watch him blow shit up. After that, I’ll have to wait until times when Angel isn’t on and West Wing is, or for summer re-runs, which are no longer even remotely anything one can rely on, as most networks would rather run cheap reality shows over the summer instead, the bastards.

My current wallpaper is a nice little mosaic of various Mariah Carey pics I threw together in PhotoWise from some stuff I downloaded. I have no desire to listen to Carey’s music, but I have to admit, she is one hot mama-jama. I could look at her all day. And sometimes I do.

My computer occasionally does disturbing stuff. For example, AOL has recently gotten hinky on me… whenever I start it, it has to reload itself (for whatever reason) and acts as if it hasn’t been fully installed… lately, in fact, it wants me to reboot, but I’ve done that a few times, and it still never seems to get to where it needs to be, so every time I start it up, it has to rebuild its driver database or some shit, which requires a wait of a few minutes while a load bar creeps from left to right across the screen. This isn’t something that had ever happened before in the years I’ve used AOL, or the year or so I’ve used it on this computer, but still, it’s happening now.

More annoying, sometimes when I start up the computer the monitor stays dead. I know it’s on (remember, this monitor is superglued to the ‘on’ position, and the light is on whenever the power bar it’s plugged into is on) but nothing shows up on it; it remains black. Generally, if I shut off the CPU and reboot, the monitor will activate, but today, I had to do that three times before the monitor displayed. This seems ominous to me, especially since we no longer have any spare monitors around the house; Scott took all that computer crap over to his buddy quite some time ago. So if this one goes, I have no fix until I find a way to get another working monitor in here. That’s nothing I like to think about much.

However, if I seem to stop updating this for a long time and I’m not answering my email, well, it may be that I have no working monitor.

Dickhead from the local lousy Zephyrhills comic shop called me again today, whining once more about when I’m going to come in and pick up these comics he ordered for me. I reiterated that I don’t have a job or any goddam money, and I guess he perceived some exasperation in my tone because he got defensive about it. And, you know, he’s got a point; I went in and ordered the comics from him. But I don’t like him and I don’t like his shop, and hell, even leaving that aside, I don’t have any goddam money right now. If I get a job I probably will stop by and pick up the damn comics, although I’m sure my guys at Demolition are wondering when I’m going to call them and have them mail the steadily increasing pile they must be holding for me, too. And honestly, I would like to know the answer to that question myself, but life is an enigma sometimes.

I’m not writing well today. Not being amusing, not making anybody laugh, not being entertaining. Well… it’s just that kind of day, I guess.

Oh, yeah. Mom’s platelets are down again, so she’s starting up therapy once more. I probably should have mentioned that sooner, but it’s grim and depressing and I don’t like to think about it. Mom and I have a deal with each other that neither of us are allowed to predecease the other, and sometimes I don’t think her metabolism takes that seriously enough.

And of course goddam John Ritter has to have this whole reminder of mortality thing hanging over my head right now. Of course, I’m sure he’s not all that thrilled about it, either…

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.