I learned how to drive a forklift today.

And then I came home, and ate some Chinese food, and watched some stuff.

and a whole bunch of

A GLORIOUS EVENING.

Where the hell HAVE I been?

Well, I've been working. When I haven't been working, I've been writing with this fly motherfucker pasted into my earphones:

because fuck Ginsberg and fuck Howl, fuck Naked Lunch and William Borroughs, Jack Kerouac is my man.
(I allow that Gregory Corso is also face-clawingly good, but Ti Jean just has a way about reading his own stuff out loud that just... I love it.)
(And fuck On The Road. It's a good book, but fuck that. Come back and talk to me when you've read The Subterraneans and The Book Of Dreams and Satori In Paris.)
(I could wax poetical all right about just how much I love listening to Kerouac talk into a microphone, but we'll skip that for now. Let's talk about some other stuff.)

***

I saw On Stranger Tides tonight, and I was..... sadly underwhelmed. I loved Keef and Swearengen, as predicted, but the rest of the movie seemed largely unnecessary. And the things that weren't unnecessary.... I didn't quite... get.
For example: Blackbeard randomly has a magic sword that controls... ropes? And he can... zombify people? I... where the fuck are you guys going with this?
And Jack's been to the Fountain of Youth before, and knows where to find all of the hidden doodads necessary to get there, but he doesn't actually really know how to perform the ritual to get to the Fountain?
And why the fuck am I supposed to care about this Random Guy and his Random Mermaid Girlfriend who... go off to swim the seas forever together? I think?
And Jack and Barbossa have this bizarre buddy-cop moment midway through, but not really, and...
Penelope Cruz, you were a mess.
There's a moment that I wish to hell I had a screencap of, because... going back to the theme of Blackbeard Is Randomly All Kinds Of Magic... they discover that Blackbeard has a cabinet full of ships in bottles. Not like... model ships in bottles. Like... real ships, shrunk down, stuffed in bottles.
It feels like a bad Xibit joke that never pays off.
(Hey bro, I heard you like boats, so I put these boats in bottles on your boat, so you can gloat about how much better your boat is?)
I don't get it. I think that what they were trying to say was that Blackbeard was actually The Devil, but... still desperately wanted to find the Fountain of Youth?

Shit, Tyrone, get it together!

I propose a do-over. Just have Keef and Swerengen glare each other down and mock each other mercilessly for an hour. Flat-out. I'd watch that movie. I'd watch the SHIT out of that movie.


***

Speaking of Shit, Tyrone, Get It Together.

Gaga, what the fuck is going on here?
The Fame was alrightish. Monster? Was fantastic.
Way to completely drop the ball on the third try, dude.
Born This Way kind of blows.
Not all the way. Just mostly.
Judas has grown on me, but it mostly has to do with the video rather than the song itself.

(Ivan and I actually had a conversation about Why That Video Is Good, and our conclusions jointly go something like this:

"Let's look at what the MacManus brothers have been up to lately. The good-looking one has done... fuck all in the past decade. The fuggo? Has... done approximately the same fuck-all, but has managed to kick around with zombies and pour a beer on Gaga's ass in a jacuzzi. I.... think we have a winner here.")

***

I also had to keep Ivan from dying today. While I was off being trained, he decided he was gonna infect himself with strep some way or another, and he kept... just sucking on cough drops, as though they were going to cure an infection.
Shockingly, the cough drops proved not to be enough, and he finally decided he needed to see a doctor. I even made the appointment for him and drove him there.
He tells me that when the nurse finally looked down his throat during the exam, she pulled a horrified face and asked if he'd SEEN the state of his throat.
Needless to say, he has a round of antibiotics in a bottle in his possession now, and shall live to see the summer.

(Fact: If you don't have insurance and are deathly sick, urgent care centers are cheaper than a hospital visit. If you have a common variety of infection, they should be able to shuffle you in and out pretty quick and make sure you get the cheapest prescription possible. Just puttin' that thought out there.)

This had BEST be the fucking Rapture.

Look, I understand completely. Any job in customer service involves people taking metaphoric (and sometimes literal) shits on you.

But today? Had best well be the fucking Rapture.
There was flooding bad enough on the tracks in and around Albany that everything got delayed by hours.
Which is fine. These things happen.
But when 84% of Rochester decides to evacuate to Chicago for the impending cleansing of the Earth at the same time, and they all seem to want to take all of their Earthly possessions with them on said trip....

This had best be the actual fucking Rapture.

If it's not? I'm getting the fuck out of this job as fast as humanly possible, because this is not how I'm going to spend every Friday night for the rest of my working life.

On that note, I feel like I've spent a very comfortable amount of time pantsless in this life, and that I'm quite perfectly happy with how not-to-Heaven I'll be going... and that while I have regrets in life, at least I'll go out with my pride.
If this is the Rapture.

If.

(I don't have a song epic enough to honor the Rapture, should the crazies be correct about today.
Sadly.
I like to imagine it would be like David Bowie and Iggy Pop backing up Nina Simone and Freddie Mercury with a good healthy dose of Tom Waits on the piano. Or something to that effect, anyway.)
(We should make it happen, though, should the world continue.)
(Hint: It's probably going to.)

A Trifecta Of Thoughts

Huh. Well, looks like I'll be finishing off that series of music posts once I'm on the way home / once I am home.... yes, the blog will indeed continue.

With music, likely of the 1980's, and possibly some humorous selections.
And bears? Whatever.
Tomorrow's the final exam, and we all know what that means: Tuesday afternoon drinkin'.

 

(Thematically appropriate?)

Oh, and by the way? There's nothing more irritating than an instructor who simply will not admit that he sped through the course too fast and truly has nothing left to give us.

This is the face that all of us were making today -

- for about eight hours. (There were no bullshit Bob Dylan references telepathically linking any of us, as far as I am personally aware. Thank goodness.)

At lunch, we all pretty much managed to agree about how none of us have really been paying attention since Thursday, at least.

This is a half-assed excuse for a post at best right now. All I know is that I'm tired, and going to nap and/or actually sleep with some Netflix to lull me.

In the meantime, I bring you the only thing I could think of to tie this post together.
(Points go to whomever can name the theme I was going for here.)

Goodnight, everyone. I will likely inform you of my progress sometime tomorrow afternoon.

We have definitely done something to piss off Mother Nature.

Between all of those tornadoes a few weeks ago, and the rain that's going on now...
Obviously, the flooding is not as debilitating as a bunch of tornadoes just ripping shit up, but it's still kind of scary.
The creek at the end of my mother's street in Michigan is already level WITH the street, and they have a significant amount of water in their basement. This is Sunday. The rain isn't supposed to stop for another two days, at least.
One of my friends from back in Buffalo mentioned that they were having trouble getting home last night because of how the roads were flooding.
Various people in Rochester (including Ivan and Turtle) have mentioned that they have at least minor amounts of water coming into their basements.

I just want to be home to be able to deal with things.
I want to clutch my pillow and cuddle with mah boyfrenn and mah rommie (yeah that's right, I like her enough to cuddle her on the couch, come at me bro) and even Archie (that dumb, adorable feline).

Fook.

This would be depressing if it weren't so fucking hilarious.

Maybe it's because I've only gotten about five hours of sleep, or maybe it's hilarious because my subconcsious refuses to let this wreck my day.

I can't say for sure.


Quite, quite early this morning (quite, quite late last night?) a very strange thought occurred to me: I am now older than either of my parents were when I was conceived.

In my tired state, I decided to share this with the gang over on Ye Olde Book of Faces.

I phrased it in a way that acknowledged how weird of a thought it was to be having ("Thought that is vaguely creepy on many levels"), and ended it with a joke that was meant to seem as though I were phrasing it hesitantly to try and break the weirdness ("#reasontoparty?").

But then I went upstairs to bed. I thought to myself... does anyone in my life really wanna think about my parents doin' it? I don't really wanna think about my parents doing it.
So I did the only thing I could think to do: I pulled my laptop back out, logged on to Facebook, deleted the status. Nobody had even acknowledged its presence. No harm no foul. Right?

WRONG.


I went about my business... by which I mean I promptly fell asleep.
I woke up about 45 minutes ago, unable to go back to sleep.
Nothing was amiss in the world. I woke up in one of the comfiest beds ever, in one of the nicest rooms ever. Still tired, yet refreshed... nothing amiss.
Grabbed my phone.

Oh, come on.

Just when I think my father's proven himself mature enough to see my Facebook updates, things like this go down.
Essentially, his texts lead me to believe that he felt that the status (which was only posted for... what, 15 minutes, tops?) was a personal slam against him in a public forum. He even text forwarded me a copy of what I'd deleted.

Okay, first off... he gets specific text message alerts whenever I post anything?

Second... that wasn't... I... how the fuck is that a personal insult? It was a random late-night musing that I decided not to leave up for the eyes of my friends and family at large. Is it a personal slam to acknowledge the fact that everyone in the world is aging?
Well then, you know what?
FUCK YOU, WORLD. FEEL THOSE AGE LINES ETCHING THEMSELVES IN? 'CAUSE IT'S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.
CLUTCH THEM PEARLS, BITCHES, AND MAKE YOUR REMAINING SUMMERS COUNT. 

In fact, though, it was indirectly inspired by this page, and when I realized that wow that is actually true isn't it,I decided to post about it. But then that got scrapped.

Five texts later, he's still not getting how I wasn't trying to insult anyone.

Normally, this sort of thing irritates the living hell out of me, but I cannot for the life of my figure out what part about that pissed him off.
Thus, today, today, it's just...

Breakfast time now, if I do say so myself.

(And if anyone could explain to me why it was so insulting to him, I'm listening.)
(I also realize that discussing this in a public forum has morphed into a personal insult all its own. I'm simply laughing at the reaction, not the imagined offense in regard to the initial comment.)

Some thoughts before sleep, and that's about all I'm good for right now.

I've been working on legitimate writing the whole time I've been away from home. If anything good has come from all of this, I actually have managed to get a decent bit of work done on my book - there were fundamental problems with the setup, and I think I might have hammered them into something usable.

I can't even begin to explain how tired I am, mentally.
I'm ready to come home, patch things up where it matters most, sit down on my couch, dogpile with Ivan and Turtle, and watch movies.
I'm ready to have my car back, to get in and pump some music, and take everyone up to the beach.
(I don't even like beaches. I just know that that is where we need to end up.)
I'm ready to sleep with my own pillow, in my own bed.

I have some more pictures of the Casa to share with you tomorrow, as well as the rest of DC - I have been down here for a third (and, for this trip, final) weekend.

There's going to be a third music post up. (And, likely, a fourth and a fifth.)

I started this as a way to distract myself in Delaware. It'll likely continue once I'm home...
Likely.
I'm enjoying it too much to see it die.

On that note?