Moon's Day May 12 2003

Ah, how quickly the days flee. And yet, simultaneously, the minutes and hours just drag.

After another mostly sleepless night, it seems I have to resign myself to never really sleeping again... at least, not for longer than a few hours at a time. I lay down when I'm really tired, conk off for an hour or two, then get back up again. It lends itself to an odd perspective on life.

When you're waiting (desperately) for checks to come in the mail, this also makes things interesting. Normally the snailmail isn't something I trouble myself about overly, but the stress of being absolutely broke is, well, absolute. There's the constant annoyance of not having any money to spend... of not being able to walk over to Wal-green's, say, and buy a 2 liter of Pepsi, because, you know, they'll demand that ubiquitous currency crap and, well, you don't have any of it. Beyond that, there's the low grade but equally constant terror at the back of your head: How am I going to get more? What if I don't ever get work again? What if something goes wrong with my Unemployment claim? What if my check gets lost in the mail? How in the name of God am I ever going to get to feel that wonderful sensation of cash in my pocket once more?

It makes you understand, if only vaguely, how a junkie must feel. If you're at all introspective, it also makes you understand the various philosophers in the past who have stated, quite fervently, that money is, in and of itself, a deeply evil thing.

Anyway, I myself am under the three o'clock curse... which is to say, everywhere I have ever lived in my life, at any point when the mail mattered to me in that I can remember, the mail has always come at or around 3 o'clock in the afternoon. When I was still a kid in Holland, N.Y., our mail came around 3 in the afternoon. Back then generally all I was looking for in the mail was the monthly issue of MARVEL TEAM UP my Uncle Fred gave me a subscription to for Christmas one year, although, generally, for about a month or six weeks after Bible camp every year, I'd get a couple of subliterate, badly scrawled, one page pity letters from the various girls I met there who'd promised me they'd write. (I always faithfully wrote back the same day I got their letters and, nonetheless, the correspondence rarely stretched to two letters and never to three... truly, I am a rare bird, someone who will actually keep promises and maintain a relationship once one has started. This may be the heart of many of my social problems; I simply don't see things like 'promises' or 'relationships' the same way other people do... which is to say, as pointless and meaningless expenditures of breath and time and emotional energy, respectively.)

When I left home and went to SU, the three o'clock mail curse first manifested itself... the RA's who worked in the office at my dorm didn't get around to putting the student's mail up until around 3 o'clock in the afternoon. (I can remember seeing the mail carrier bring in the mail sacks sometimes as early as 9... he or she liked to get the dorms out of the way first since there wasn't much sorting involved, just dumping off a big canvas sack of mail... but nonetheless, it would, maddeningly, just sit there in the office until around 2 p.m., when whoever was stuck on duty would take their thumbs out of their ass and, often looking really sullen and put upon at having to do so, finally open the mailsacks, sort the shit out, and put it into the appropriate mailboxes... occasionally even doing so correctly.)

I lived in two dorms at S.U. before moving off campus, and at both of them, the mail got put up around 3 o'clock in the afternoon every day, regardless of when it was brought in. After moving off campus, I lived in... hold on, let me add them up... six separate buildings in Syracuse before I moved down here. And in every single one of those houses or apartment buildings, the mail arrived around 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

And, here in Tampa, I've only lived in one place... right here where I'm currently typing... and the mail gets here... yes, indeed... at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

So common has been my experience with the mail arriving at 3 o'clock in the afternoon that honestly, it's come as a surprise to me in my life when at various times I've had it made known to me that other people (quite a lot of them, actually) get their mail sooner than this... some of them remarkably sooner. For example, when I lived on North Salina Street in Syracuse (I swear this is true) I lived in the 600 block, and such were the vagueries of the postal routes in my neighborhood that the 500 block of North Salina was at the edge of one particular mail carrier's route, and the 700 block was also at the edge of an entirely different carrier's route, and both of those carriers delivered mail to the two blocks on either side of my address at around 10 in the morning. I asked one of them about it once, and he told me that it was because it was a commercial area (I lived in a second floor apartment over a small first floor shop, as does everyone who lives on North Salina, pretty much) and commercial customers like to get their mail early, so the post office tries to accommodate them.

However, as you will have figured out by now, the mail carrier who handled the 600 block, and who also handled a wide swath of other adjoining streets, delivered his mail in such a way that North Salina pretty much came last, and there was a good reason for that, too, which I also later found out... but what that meant was, I got my mail... yes... at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, or thereabouts.

(The reason my mail carrier up there delivered the mail the way he did, with North Salina coming pretty much last on his route, was that there was a bar two doors down from the building I lived in, and my mail carrier liked to spend the last two hours or so of his working day soddenly holding down a stool there.)

When I was working for the post office call center here in Tampa, I once got a call that made me realize that, honestly, there really are some people in the world (actually, I know there are many of them, in fact, most of you are like this) who simply have no sense of proportion. It was from a woman who was complaining to me that her mail delivery was coming too late in the day. Now, we got those complaints sometimes, especially from the suburbs of Atlanta and the surrounding countryside, where, due to the population density and, I don't know, apparently a spectacularly inefficient local postal staff, in the outlying areas sometimes people don't get their mail until 6 or 7 p.m. This is, technically, a violation of regs; all mail for the day is supposed to be delivered to home customers by 5 and business customers by 3. So we would write up those complaints and send them over to the local post office (where, presumably, they take them off the fax machine, pass them around while pointing at them and laughing hysterically, and then throw them out).

So I asked the woman complaining about late delivery exactly when her mail was getting there. And she hesitated (proving that in fact, she actually did have some small vestigial sense of shame) and then said "Um... well... lately, sometimes it doesn't get here until 11 o'clock in the morning..."

I imagine she must have heard the utter and outraged astonishment in my silence, because she hurried on "but you don't understand, for years and years, as long as I've lived here, we got our mail by 9 o'clock every morning. I could get up and eat breakfast and go outside and my mail would be there. I counted on it. First thing in the morning, I'd have my mail. Everybody in this neighborhood was used to that. And now there's a new carrier and sometimes the mail doesn't get here until 11 and it's just really inconvenient. And I was just wondering if there was something you could do to get the old carrier put back on the route, he was so good..."

I did not actually laugh at this woman, well, not out loud, but I did advise her that as long as she was getting her mail by 5 p.m. every day, I really couldn't pass along a complaint, and I also advised her that there were people in the world, many of them, that generally got their mail much, much later than 11 a.m... like me, for example.

So, at 3 o'clock today, maybe, the Unnamable Website Paycheck will arrive and I'll be able to take it over to my bank and cash it and then, wow, I'll have money, just like a real human being. I can buy food, and sugary snacks, and pay the TECO (Tampa Electric Company) bill and maybe even go see a movie, just like, you know, the rest of you people do.

Or, maybe it won't, and I'll just be sitting here still waiting and hoping the Unemployment check comes through later this week.

In the meantime, though, you people can hang some comments on the two articles below or you can just brace yourself to look at them until you do. Don't test me on this. I'm not bluffing. They'll stay up until someone shows me some love. Or something.

On the subject of showing me some love, or something, my email drought continues, except, annoyingly, it doesn't... ever since I set up this 'public' blog, my spam bombardment rate has gone up by an order of magnitude, and honestly, it's annoying. We don't need a United Nations task force to invade sovereign nations and restore human rights; we need one to go over to Spain, track down the fucker who keeps sending me ads for vacations there and blow up his or her goddam computer. And, honestly, having gotten about 15 'your dream vacation in Espanol' ads in the last week, I wouldn't mind if they burned his or her house down, either.

And let's not get me started on these assholes who keep sending me the emails that are supposed to be from someone somewhere in Africa who needs my bank account information in order to safely get millions of sequested dollars out of the country. Used to be I'd get one of these a month, roll my eyes, and say "my god, do people FALL for these?" Lately, though, these things have gone into a frenzy and seem to be approaching some kind of critical mass. The world badly needs for someone to track down the people sending these and slap them really, really hard.

Honestly, someone needs to invent a program that backtracks spam and burns out the hard drive of the computer sending it. Cost people a thousand dollar PC several times in a row and they'll go get honest jobs. Or so I strongly suspect.

ONLY WE CAN DO THAT TO OUR PLEDGES

I normally leave the political stuff alone, because there are so many people out there who do it so much better than I do. But I have to mention how amused I am at the current Republican initiative to change the Senate's rules of procedure to allow a gradually decreasing majority to override a filibuster.

See, as things stand now, to get to cloture... i.e., to override a filibuster... the Senate needs 60 votes. With 51 Republican Senators and 49 Democratic Senators, any time things are sharply divided on party lines, there's no way the Senate is going to get those 60 votes. This means that lately, the Dems have been very effectively stalling the confirmations of Dubya's judicial appointees (all of whom, from what I've read, are really scary people I personally wouldn't want working as dogcatcher in my particular neighborhood, much less sitting on a Federal bench somewhere) with filibusters, and the Republicans can't override them. This annoys the Repubs no end, of course, because if they could just get the confirmation hearings to an actual vote, Bush's insane nutjob appointees would slide through 51 to 49, and then there they'd be, sitting on the Federal bench for life, where they could do everything in their power to make sure that civil liberties and Constitutional rights are only enjoyed by good, decent, proper, right thinking Americans, who won't abuse their freedom of expression by questioning Christianity or our sacred Government, or abuse their right of privacy by having sex with someone of the same gender as them, or their right of free association and assembly by organizing a goddam atheist's society.

See, what the Repubs are currently trying to float is a modification to the rules, so that only the first vote to overrule a filibuster needs 60 votes. Then each succeeding vote would require fewer votes... 57, then 55... until, eventually, it gets down to a simple majority, and those really annoying Democrats won't be able to filibuster any more, and we can get this show on the road... the road to a God fearing fundamentalist Christian theocracy where every citizen is absolutely free to do whatever they please at any given time, as long as whatever they please doesn't offend Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, or Jerry Falwell.

What amuses me most about this... well, there are so many things that amuse me about it. One is contemplating just how long these new rules would last if somehow the Repubs managed to pass them, and then, at the next election, the Dems regained a majority. How quickly do you think the new Republican Minority Leader would jump up on his or her feet and DEMAND that those revisions be expunged immediately, and the original glorious traditions of the Senate be restored?

But the most amusing thing is that the Dems are going to keep this proposed rule change from ever coming to a vote... by filibustering it. And to overcome a filibuster blocking a procedural change, you need 67 votes. Heh heh.

NOT IN THE BUFF

I want to hold off on really lengthy comments on Buffy until the season (and series) comes to a close in a couple more weeks. But I just had to say here... never in my life have I seen more people have sex while fully clothed (some of them in bed and under mostly concealing blankets, too) than I have on the last episode of BTVS.

Now, I know that there's give and take; any time you want to show something even remotely 'adult' in an 8 p.m. time slot, you have to give a little... and I also know that the network nearly had a collective corporate aneurysm when Willow first kissed Tara on the lips back in the 5th Season, so the incredibly intense make out scenes (prominently featuring Kennedy's heretofor unnoticed tongue stud) between Willow and her latest same-sex paramour were going to have to be visually bowdlerized somehow.

But holy mother o' god! Xander and Anya are getting skippy on the kitchen floor... fully clothed. Faith and Mr. Principal are rolling around rutting like crazed weasels in Buffy's bed... fully clothed. (Okay, Faith was in a bra. But I'm here to tell you, I may not ever get laid again in this life, but I have been there and done that a few hundred times at least back when I was still moderately attractive, and there is NOTHING more aggravating than a bra when you're trying to do the dirty deed with a willing and eager partner... a bra, by itself, is far more uncomfortable to both partners involved than a bra under at least one outer garment, because you're thinking the whole time, 'okay, we ditched the damned blouse, now can we please get rid of this scratchy stiff cotton thing with the wires and the clasps?')

Upstairs, Kennedy is all over Willow, but... hands outside the tank top, please... like if I had Alyson Hannigan flat on a mattress, back arched in uncontrolled libidinous pleasure, moaning her adorable and sexy little head off, she'd be wearing anything except a coating of my various bodily fluids... but for God's sake, if for some reason she really wants to keep that top on, my hands would certainly not be on my side of it while I was running my neatly bisected tongue up and down the underside of her pretty little chin.

Now, off in some other house, it made perfect sense that Buffy and Spike stayed clothed, since they weren't having sex, they were just doing the 'hold me' thing, and that's kind of nice, and a good, character defining moment for them, given the way they've tended to interact on a mattress (or a carpet, or in a fresh grave) prior to this.

But everybody else seriously needs to learn how to work a zipper and a snap, and if the Fonz wanted to lounge on by and give Xander, Kennedy, and Principal Wood a quick lesson in the function of the bra clasp, it appears such instruction would not fall on deaf ears in the Summers household.

I mean, come ON now. This is just silly.

Also, I want to protest on Dawn's behalf. I was 16 once and I know what the libido is like. Furthermore, everyone else in the house was getting laid, she and Andrew had been making cow eyes at each other for weeks now, and he's obviously not going to survive the season... and Buffy, Xander, and Willow were all indulging in sexual behavior back when they were 16, right there on the small screen in front of my staring eyes. It seems deeply unfair that just because Michelle Trachtenberg looks more convincingly adolescent than the older crew ever did, she doesn't get to steam up a camera lens like they did. In fact, other than sucking face with a vampire (er... no pun intended, that just happened) early last season, Dawn's been pretty much a nun. It's tough to be a living energy being when you're sister's the Slayer, I guess.

Beyond that, I'm just going to say, if they really blew up Faith, I'm gonna be so pissed off at the world, you don't even want to know.

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 with, style, and/or panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.

NOTICE

There is such a thing as a social contract. Even among bloggers. And I pay attention to it.