If I’m semi-conscious, it must be Wednesday.

Paul just had three days off in a row. I love the little rug rat, I really do (although, given that to me, in my heart, like Harlan Ellison’s Jeffty, Paul is always around 5 years old, he seems much much too tall) but 3 days straight of him just had me thinking seriously of taking up drinking. For most of yesterday he was straight, too; out of pot and becoming increasingly irritable with each passing minute… and he wanted to play TITAN, which is never something guaranteed to create an atmosphere of loving bonhomie. What’s worse, he’s learning to play far, far too well. Oh, I whipped up on his ass about halfway through and never looked back, but still, he’s become distressingly good at calculating his movements and recruitments, and he’s even learning his way around the tactical maps as well.

Today we’re going to try something a little different, namely, breaking this thing up by vaguely related topics and posting comment threads every little while… so if someone wants to comment, say, on Paul being a pain in the ass, or how annoying it is when your baby brother either (a) stops being 5 years old (which shouldn’t be allowed) or (b) becomes good enough at games you taught him to defeat you, they can.

Musical Madness

Paul wanted to listen to the radio yesterday, but his ‘new’ stereo (which came off the Wal-mart markdown table with several defects and no instruction manual) baffled his attempts to find a station, and I couldn’t pick up anything on my cheap-o in the back room. So we wound up listening to tapes, and when I put in my Emmylou Harris mix (selected tracks off LUXURY LINER and QUARTER MOON IN A TEN CENT TOWN) Paul rolled his eyes and made gagging noises all the way through it. Now I am for the most part a rock n’ roller (albeit a hopelessly ancient one to modern sensibilities like Paul’s), but people who roll their eyes and gag at Emmylou, especially off those two albums, need a public horsewhipping. He didn’t really listen, I think he just heard some stuff he noted as ‘country’ and shut down his brain entirely. (At one point, as Emmylou was softly crooning through “Leavin’ Louisiana In The Broad Daylight” he commented “Jesus, this is just SO Confederate”, which indicates staggering ignorance on Paul’s part… but then, I think that’s what this is all about.)

I’m currently listening to that same tape again and, well, normally I’m not much for country, either, but Emmylou has perhaps the best female voice ever put on vinyl, and her song choice is generally immaculate, and those two albums are, from what I’ve heard, generally agreed to be her best EVER, and anyone, regardless of their musical tastes, who listens to Emmylou and gags has no right to call themselves a music fan, or, for that matter, a sentient creature.

Paul also commented that he’d heard “The Ballad of Pancho & Lefty” about a million times at karioke bars, which makes me sad, because nobody should be allowed to karioke that song but me.

Other people probably think it’s a Willie Nelson song, though, and they’re just stupid.

Let’s all go to the movies

As noted on the Monday entry, we all (well, Pat, Kyle, Paul and I) went off to New Tampa to watch purported zombie film 28 Days Later Monday night… late enough Monday night that cuz Chad had to cry off, something for which I previously erroneously blamed cuz in law Mel, and for which I believe I already apologized once, but what the hell, I’m not proud, I’ll do it again, sorry, Mel.

28 Days Later was fun to watch, and a far better viewing experience than the previous movie expedition with this same group to see Hulk… much more comfortable theaters for one thing, no goddam kids for another. And I was surprised to discover that this is, apparently, the movie theater where Rebecca and I had our one movie date, long long ago (we saw A Civil Action, or I did; she slept).

28 Days Later suffers from a lot of problems. They don’t intrude horribly while you’re watching, but afterwards, they make for an unsatisfying film. For one thing, and the major thing to me, was that there are no zombies in the damn movie. Most of the populace has caught a virus that is never fully explained, but which seems to make its victims insanely angry at all non-infected folks, to the point where they simply attack like berserkers whenever they get a chance. One drop of blood is enough to infect you if it gets into your mouth, an open cut, or an eye, and once someone gets infected, you have about fifteen seconds to kill them before they turn into a berserker, too.

Personally, when someone tells me there’s going to be a zombie movie, I want a goddam zombie movie. I want “when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth”. Paul and Pat were both bothered by the fact that the ‘zombies’ in this film moved very very quickly when they attacked, instead of slowly, like sleepwalkers, but I just thought that was a nice change and made them seem very threatening… but the fact that they weren’t really zombies, just people suffering from a mind altering disease, annoyed the shit out of me.

Less annoying, but still rather exasperating, was the director’s obvious decision to do a reversal of the usually exploitative nudity pattern, and show several completely unnecessary nude shots of his male hero, while never giving us more than a bra shot of either of the two heroines. I realize every guy who watches the film will be bitching about this, and the women will be all ‘YEAH, baby’, but fuck that. Men still run this planet, and men still make up the majority of the audience that’s going to see an R rated ‘zombie’ film, and men want TIT, goddamit. Chicks have their own movies; if someone wants to strip down Hugh Jackman in some goddam romance film with Meg Ryan, well, I’ll just avert my eyes and not look at the Wonder from Down Under. But in an R rated action horror movie, we don’t need to see a shower scene featuring the HERO, we want to see the good looking black chick naked. Take a note, future film makers.

One of the film’s minor interesting points, to me, was when I realized about a third of the way into it that, since it’s set in Britain, our protagonists couldn’t do what any American heroes in similar circumstances would have immediately done… namely, gone to the local pawnshop and gotten guns. In Britain, only the cops and the military have guns, and they’re normally kept locked up in vaults and only issued in extreme circumstances, so these guys wandered around the entire movie with baseball bats and such… a truly depressing handicap when you find yourself in a post-Apocalypse urban landscape populated with fast moving berserker non-zombies that want nothing more than to take a chunk out of you.

Game Boy

As noted, I finished the new rules for Killquest, which no one had a goddam thing to say about in my previous blog post so I shouldn’t bother writing any more about. However, cuz Chad, showing a remarkable enthusiasm for something that most likely sucks out loud since I came up with it, printed up sets of rules for six different people at his work yesterday, and came over to give them to me and ask questions so he could set up his own team.

At one point, he tried to get me to let him set up Smurfs. SMURFS. I ask you. Now, I’d stretched a point to let people take cartoon characters (who would be defined like any other character, mind) because Paul had asked about The Simpsons and South Park, but Smurfs? Oh my no. Chad seemed disappointed, but I think he’s probably even more so now, since I set up a team last night and realized I was simply insane, setting $5,000 as the budget to do so with. Everything is REALLY expensive in that game. I managed to set up… well, never mind, Chad reads this blog and a big part of KILLQUEST is surprise, so I’m not going to say what I wound up setting up. But my characters have very little in the way of equipment, to say the least.

Chad deserves special kudos for doing some badly needed formatting on the KILLQUEST doc before he printed it, namely, he threw the stats, skills, and weapons into Table formats, making them much much easier to read. Hail, Chad! We whose KILLQUEST characters are about to die salute you!

I gave copies of the rules to Pat and Kyle last night, but they didn’t seem that interested. Paul and Chad really want to play, though, so I guess this will just be a Kelly Klan thing. (Chad is a Mason, Paul is a Bathrick, and I'm, by name, a Madigan, although Steve Madigan, thank GOD, is not my biological father… however, our mothers are both Kelly girls, so we are the Kelly Klan. At least in my demented mind. I was born a Kelly, anyway, since I’m illegitimate, and sometimes I’d like to just take the Kelly name back… but a legal name change costs too much and what the hell, I’ve been a Madigan, in name, all my life anyway. Names really don’t matter all that much. But ‘Darren Madigan’ sounds a little more like the protagonist of an Alistair McLean novel than ‘Darren Kelly’ does, although both are pretty good pulp hero names, I think.)

Last night, Pat and Kyle showed up and we sat down to play STAR WARS MONOPOLY, since none of this particularly sub literate group of geeks wanted to play SCRABBLE with me. (They are wise. I would destroy them utterly. I destroy everyone at SCRABBLE, even my ex girlfriend Kristy’s haughty Aunt Margie.)

I hate MONOPOLY; there’s no skill involved, it’s simply a question of luck with dice. After going around the board ten times and managing to buy a grand total of pretty much NOTHING while everyone else divided up all the properties because they rolled better, I quit in disgust and came in here to watch movies.

Just put the bullet here

We had a couple of power outages during a big thunder boomer yesterday, which was annoying. Worse, when I came in last night to watch a movie, I found my VCR wouldn’t power up. My whole world went dim; without a working VCR, I might as well just stick my head in the oven (I’m a GEEK, okay? I NEED A VCR!!) However, Paul came in, and wise in the ways of technology after a Zephyrhills power failure, he had me unplug the thing and plug it in somewhere else. Why, I don’t know, but it powered up nicely and now it works, except I haven’t reset the clock yet. But for a moment, my whole life flashed before my eyes. No VCR would suck profoundly… and I don’t even want to THINK about a life without, you know, electricity. CHRIST.

Adventures of Super-dog

Chewie (Paul’s dog Chewbacca) has filled us both with despair lately, as he has become The Hound Of A Thousand Escapes, learning how to quickly get out of various different harnesses and collars we’ve bought for him. This is annoying, because the neighbors dislike Chewie and will call Animal Control if they see him out running around loose, so we can’t put him outside on his leash if he’s just going to slip out of his harness or collar, which he’s been doing with aggravating regularity lately.

Yesterday he did it again, so nonchalantly, while I was watching him, that it just infuriated me, so next time he came home, I put superglue on the clasp of his collar (which had simply been popping open whenever he contrived to put any pressure on it at all, which he’s learned to do) and then put the collar back on him. That gave us an afternoon blissfully Chewie-free; we put him on his leash outside and kept the door open, so he could go in and out, but he couldn’t get far enough over to disturb our TITAN game by wandering around the kitchen and laying wherever he was guaranteed to be the most inconvenient. (This isn’t a coincidence, I know; dogs and cats do this because they’re attention whores and they guarantee frequent attention hits from their humans by putting themselves in places where they know they are going to be in the way. But it’s AGGRAVATING.)

It was even humorous, watching Chewie out the door, walking out to the far reaches of his leash and then tugging at the leash with this comical cartoon look on his doggie face, clearly thinking “WHY won’t this come OFF?”

However, eventually he managed to work the collar up over his head and get loose again. He was so proud of himself he didn’t run off, he just came inside and panted at us in an exuberant and gloating fashion. But now we can’t put him out any more, at least, until we get yet ANOTHER collar that won’t work.

Paul says he’s going to get a choke collar for the worthless mutt next, which, since Paul adores and worships Chewie, will show you how aggravated Paul is with the goddam dog.

I figure Chewie will manage to get out of a choke, too, and in the end, Paul is just going to have to… well, I don’t know what. Get Chewie fixed so he doesn’t want to roam around as urgently any more, or something. We’ve suggested having a grommet surgically implanted in Chewie’s shoulder to hook his leash too, or encasing his hindquarters in cement, but Paul doesn’t think those are workable solutions.

Bank robbery

What with one thing and another, I’m now $33 in the hole at Bank of America. ‘One thing and another’ being the fact that although I made a payment of $75 to Paul’s power bill on July 3, the cocksuckers at SpeedPay didn’t bother applying it until four days later (one assumes their entire credit department took off early for the holiday weekend, the slugs). Worse, SpeedPay also charges a $5.99 processing fee, which, frankly, sucks, and they should all be flayed with cheese graters and then rubbed with garlic for. Due to that combination, and an emergency grocery run on Sunday where I forgot to allow for the goddam service charge, my bank account wound up overdrawn by $3 when the credit finally got processed… and then, of course, the vampires at Bank of America had to pile on, hitting me with a $30 penalty. This is why I used to hate having a debit card and checking account; you make one little miscalculation and suddenly you’re $30 in the hole. Which is where I currently am.

Hopefully, my next Unemployment check will hit later tonight, but that $30 charge really pisses me off. Like Bank of America is in any way damaged when someone’s account is $3 in the hole for a day or two. I mean, I have direct deposit, for God’s sake; it’s not like this isn’t going to get made good.

Well, being pissed off at credit companies and banks is a good way to get an ulcer and not much else, so I’ll just vent it here and then let it go.

It’s all good

To date, Paul’s friend Pat has told me he can definitely score me some antibiotics to take care of this goddam sore throat by, I believe, five different dates, and to date, he’s failed every single time. His mom was on vacation all last week. Then she didn’t go to work Monday. Last night he still didn’t have any because ‘he forgot’. Pat is like third level reliable; he tells you he can do something and eventually he will, but you have to take any times or dates he gives you with a very very large grain of salt.

I’m still very grateful he came through with the Uhaul rental to get me the hell out of Tampa and out here as soon as possible… the $580 I did not pay my treacherous scumsucking former landlords made a big difference to mine and Paul’s quality of life in my first month here. But even there, the ‘definite’ dates I was going to get moved changed a number of times in process, and I’m still personally amazed that I didn’t end up with a nasty confrontation with Sondra, the apartment company’s onsite manager, when I wound up moving out in the middle of the day (something I’d dreaded and tried hard to avoid, but moving me on the weekend or at night just wasn’t going to work out for these guys).

Anyway, no antibiotics yet, but the sore throat felt somewhat better last night (after being horrible during the movie on Monday night) and seems okay today… but it always seems okay during the day, it’s at night that it’s really annoying.

Eventually, Pat will show up with some antibiotic samples, probably the day I no longer really notice the sore throat. But hey, if that happens, It’s All Good. I’ve been worried I have tonsilitis, or something else that will turn out really expensive.

The above bitching should not be in any way taken as my thinking Pat isn’t a good guy. So far, out of Paul’s group of friends, he’s the only one I really, genuinely like, and he seems like a good guy and a good friend, generally. You just have to learn that when he says he’ll do something, he will do it… eventually. You just can’t take seriously WHEN he says he’ll do it. Which can be frustrating, until you understand it and learn to roll with it. But he’s a pretty good guy.

The appalling glare of daylight

Getting back on something remotely like a reasonable sleep schedule is more difficult than you’d think, when people come over to play games every night from 10 to 2 a.m. These guys have been surprisingly considerate about trying to keep the noise down on nights I’m just too tired to stay up, but usually I hang out with them, and then watch movies or work on this thing for another couple of hours, getting to bed around 4 a.m… and maybe to sleep by 6 a.m., if I’m lucky and my sinuses stay clear.

Today I slept through, with a few interruptions of dreadful wakefulness, until four in the goddam afternoon… which is really disgusting; even I don’t like to sleep THAT late. And I still don’t feel really well rested. Ah, well.

The anti-social contract

I’ve gone around and posted on a lot of new blogs lately, and so far, I don’t seem to have had any notable traffic increase here. I guess people just don’t believe in returning favors any more. Of course, I clearly recall being told that the ‘look’ of my blog was repellent to most bloggers and if I didn’t change and conform to the general template-driven herd look, I could expect few people to bother sticking around. And I suppose that’s true. And the few regular posters I do have here are all class acts… not something that can be said for a lot of the blogs with big audiences, many of whom seem to be quite trollish. So I guess I’ll just, once more, try to embrace the notion that Any Reader Is A Gift, and stop whining.

Oh fuck, no I won’t. I want more attention. I want it NOW. GIVE IT TO ME.

Er… positive attention only, please. No IRS audits or emails suspending my Unemployment benefits, please.

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.