squidbag

Holy Sheehan!

Not to upset my wife (or the millions of you who secretly pine for me) or anything, but I would totally kiss Cindy Sheehan.  I hear from Jim Lehrer's dead lips that she's been arrested for something or other right outside the State of the Union, and sure enough - once I am finished listening to the "better way" coming out of Virginia - I find this.  Well, hell.  I'm glad somebody did something interesting out there while I was listening to the most predictable State of the Union speech I've ever heard.  I could've Mad Libs'd that thing in a couple of minutes.  I called most of it, on paper, today while printing letterhead.  In the future, I will be sealing my predictions in a vault in Vatican City to be opened by John Turturro just after the speech,  instead of driving C butt-ass crazy by saying, "see, told ya!" about 500 times while flashing ersatz gangster signs at the President's simian, leering visage on-screen.  Max fell asleep while watching the S of the U.  I hope he doesn't have nightmares.  Nightmares about cutting the deficit while funding this new Competitiveness bullshit.  I mean, Max has about as much control over the budget as Monkeyface does.  Can't wait for that budget.  But back to Cindy!

Apparently, she got taken in (and wouldn't arresting the quiet war mom make you feel like a BIG cop schmucko) for wearing a T-shirt with an anti-war slogan on it, after being issued an invite to the speech.  Because you're allowed to express your opinions in a free society, and we like democracy, just as long as you don't vote for Hamas in your democratically handled vote (or we'll cut your funding, you stupid people) and as long as you don't wear a T-shirt to the State of the Union speech, because T stands for Terrorist, and that rhymes with Osama, and you'd have to be some kind of angry, partisan, non-helping patriots kind of person to protest Mr. Bush's war, for which he outlined the plan, just this evening.  Not well enough to wipe that look off of McCain's face, though, and sure as hell in highwaters not well enough to satisfy the Squidbag.

Wonder what the fuck kind of shirt it was?  She seems too classy to wear half the stuff I would've.  Anybody know?  Or want to guess?

(Oh, come on.  There have been less coherent entries.)

Suck Monday, Suck!

Not that I'm signing up for a major Greek tragedy or anything, but when you have one, everyone kind of knows.  They give you sympathy and pats on the back, helpful "there, theres" and maybe even advice.  If not, they at least give you a wide berth, staying out of your way and making things if not easier, then less present.  When you're just unhappy, having a uniformly crappy day, nobody knows.  You move through the same day as per usual, and all the same old bullshit you have to deal with all the time is there for you, to make things marginally worse for you.  People say all the same half-baked nonsense, and everything takes on heavy, grey aura of triviality that you suspect that it has all the time, it's just that today you can see it.  And feel it, right in the center of your chest, behind each eye, and in the sole of each shoe.  The air is thicker, everything is heavier, and stuff you would normally just do becomes a major bloody chore.  I find that I was continously focusing on non-existent shit in the bottom left of my field of vision, and that I baby-stepped everywhere.  Welcome to my Monday.

I have these unhappinesses (like today) that carry apathy before them, and then settle in after a few hours or so, into a seething melancholy which is a close cousin to pure rage.  Odd?  Well, this is what we have.  When in this mood, I can go from 0 to 98 in the time it takes to pull out in front of me, let go the door in my face, or dial your cell at the next table.  This will be what keeps me out of the really good jobs.

It doesn't help that Pensacola seems to be testing us.  Every Monday for about three weeks now we've had a heavy fog in the morning.  Not mist, not drizzle.  Fog.  It's like the typical Florida humidity from the whole day concentrated into the first half.  You drive through the fog to go to work, where you'd really rather not go.  Fucking Mondays are bad enough without waking up to a dank fog that lays on everything and blots out your sense of reality.  So.  I got up this morning with a sadness that we'll call a "functional gloom," (that came from something which is now resolved, so worry not, boys & girls) and I forced myself to cut throught the fog where I made 8500 envelopes or so.  The shade was everywhere.  The shade you can't find on a hot, sunny day?  Everywhere.  I went and sat in the ball park over my lunch hour and listened to batting practice happening, the endless repetitive CLANK! of pop flies off of an aluminum bat.  The air tasted salty, and it was no surprise when the radio announced that we would be under a severe thunderstorm warning for a while.

Today sucked.  It would have sucked anywhere, but this was a special agglomeration of circumstances leading to a special kind of true suckage, not the least of which was geography, and my desire to alter that which surrounds me.  People keep getting out before me, and there is a sense of pooling logistical muck which yanks at my shoes and slows me down.  Probably this is depression, which I have - since 2004, coincidentally enough - admitted to, but I have very little experience dealing with it.  Besides, I can walk around 180 off from everyone else emotionally for quite some time.  I've practiced that.  Meanwhile, the fire behind my eyes makes blog entries.

Terrible Use of a Day Off

I know a lot of blogs degenerate into this kind of thing - but I don't anticipate the opportunity to do this very often, and besides, today was my day off.  (I put in a lot of extra hours last week, and the University doesn't do overtime.) Anyway, here's what I did with my day away from the regular grinding;

6:40-7:31 AM: Got up, did the breakfast and lunch thing for Max, brushed his teeth, got him dressed and in the car seat.  Saw C and Max off to school, started a load of laundry, switched last night's load to the dryer.  Spontaneously fell asleep last night at elevenish, so actually had a good night's sleep for a change.  I think this is when I also decided I had had quite enough NPR, and so turned it off.

7:3?-9:58: taped off bedroom for a coat of paint to go on this weekend, listened to mix disks old enough that I forgot what was on them, and Ice Cube's Predator album.  (Matt, I am definitely going backwards.)

10ish-11:28: made a lunch date with my buddy Jim, called the bank and disputed the charges from when my card got hacked.  Also called the County Court Clerk's Office and settled my silly (tags expired) citation from back in December.  Remember kids: cops are stupid, cops lie.  A man stops people in traffic for a living, chances are, his procedural skills are minimal.

12:02-3:36 PM: Showered, ran tools and chairs over to C's folks house and dropped them off in the shed behind their house.  Which really isn't like a shed, it's more like an outbuilding.  Regardless, I parked on the lawn, which was kind of gratifying.  I then drove downtown to part of the Brandenberg Concertos, saw my old building.  The sign has been removed, which (surprisingly) stung a little, and the realtor who bought it seems to be making a go of it.  I hung out at a used bookstore for a few minutes (bought some Lemony Snicket) before meeting Jones for lunch.  Hightailed it back home after promising to help him lift some stuff at 10 (!) tomorrow morning, and got some packages ready for shipping.  Talked to EP for a few minutes about what Mabel's up to.

3:3?-4:32: Shipped packages (to Ben and my grandmother) through UPS store, had to re-pack one because apparently you can't ship anything a beer or wine container, even if all of the logos and relevant data are covered.  Fucking terrorist government.  Got back and moved into the front of the house to vacuum up all the sand and hamster food.  (Max's shoes are always full of sand when he gets home from school, and our hamster is psychotic, with the pitching things out of the cage.)

4:50-6:01: Max and C came home from school, we got the house ready for Stephanie the babysitter, and ourselves ready to see the Capitol Steps downtown.  After the "orient the babysitter" speech, we were off to the downtown area.

6ish to 9:40 or so: Had dinner at a Mexican place on Palafox after obtaining the best parking spot in all of Pensacola, went back to the theatre, avoided my in-laws after spotting them sitting a few rows up from us, watched the Capitol Steps help WUWF celebrate their 25th birthday by singing and dancing and entertaining up a storm.  Spent some time wondering what Ron & Carolyn could possibly be getting out of this - these are people who don't make fun of our chief executives.  When they're Bush.

10ish-11:45: hung out and chatted with the babysitter, sat down and updated this thing.  Got sucked into my book for awhile, then sat in the floor and folded the three loads of laundry I did over the course of the day while watching Hitchhiker's.  Came back to this at 1:28AM, called it finito.

It's diabolically hard to relax when you know that every effort that you exert towards getting things done, cleaned, put away, painted, fixed, out of your house - that's that many more steps toward leaving this place.  I was driving into downtown today, when I met Jim for lunch, and I came over the interstate bridge to the view of Pensacola's downtown spread out before me, and once again, I was underwhelmed.  "This is as big as this gets.  This is the biggest concentration of people, this is the metropolitan downtown bayfront area.  Man, I can't wait to go."  Aside from threatening to knock a guy's teeth out at the UPS Store though, (story if you need it) this was a great day, and I was in a good mood throughout the whole thing.

If you got this far, you must not be bored.  I promise not to do this again, though.

Cup & Straw Problems

I drink a lot of soda.  Also water, tea, and other things that might come in a cup with ice and straws.  I'm a huge fan of cold beverages, and probably drink about three liters of something every day.  I'm having a drink right now.  I like straws, despite their not being terribly masculine, mostly because when I drink a fluid, I want fluid, not ice chunks, or pulp, or seeds.  Anything floating around in my drink can pretty much ruin the experience.  So - straws.

I remember when I was a kid being taught by an uncle to take the paper-wrapped straw, gripped in one's fist, and bang it once sharply on a table.  This would rip open the top of the paper, freeing the straw, and also arm your restaurant weapon of choice, so you could blow the straw paper off at the unsuspecting.  (Eric P has a different straw game.  Be nice, maybe he'll teach it to you.)  I can't really use this technique anymore, because straw durability has taken a major slide.  I don't know if it's the war, 9/11, the lobbyists, bird flu, or just a general slippage in the workmanship of the strawmaker, but these fuckers break like eggshell when you try to anything but gently rip them open.  Unless I treat them with the utmost care, I find myself sipping a Diet Pepsi with little bubbles forming on the outside of the straw as soda escapes through the damn gap.

Alternately, I get these huge Thirsty Ass Buster Gulp Mega Ultra Tanker Irrigation Massive Fucking 55 Gallon Drum O' Beverages, (which seldom fit the cup holder in my car, and I got one of those big ones) and the damn straw is this dainty thing second cousin to a coffee stirrer.  Too small, too short.  I know size isn't everything, but I also know when the straw is simply too bloody short.  The above picture is an example of what happens.  If you expect to be able to use the straw to obtain all of the tasty beverage from the cup, esepcially once ice melt has occurred, then you have to be able to stick half your goddamn face in there.

The only people to have figured out how to make this thing work properly are running, appropriately enough, convenience stores.  The cups fit the cupholder, the lids are solid and grip the cup, and the straw has a good two inches of clearance past the lid.  I'm having a delicious fountain Diet Dr. Pepper right now, and have contemplated keeping the straw, which came wrapped in plastic, was easily removed, and did not break.  The Circle K chain actually encourages recycling, kind of, what with discounts on sodas in a re-used cup.  Everyone else is on notice - get the fucking straw/cup thing figured out.  It's basic physics, and I refuse to believe anyone is saving major fundage by switching to crap straws.  So fix it, everyone.  I'll finish with some Mitch Hedberg;

"I got two straws in here - in case one breaks down.  You know crazy straws - they go all over the place?  These fucking straws are sane.  They never lost their mind.  They're saying, "We're going straight to the mouth.  That fucker who takes awhile to get there?  He's crazy."

Fifty Words?

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Squidbag!

1. Fifty-two percent of Americans drink Squidbag!
2. By tradition, a girl standing under Squidbag cannot refuse to be kissed by anyone who claims the privilege.
3. The colour of Squidbag is no indication of its spiciness, but size usually is!
4. To check whether Squidbag is safe to eat, drop it in a bowl of water; rotten Squidbag will sink, and fresh Squidbag will float.
5. The Eskimos have over fifty words for Squidbag.
6. All gondolas in Venice must be painted black unless they belong to Squidbag.
7. If you break Squidbag, you will get seven years of bad luck!
8. Marie Antoinette never said 'let them eat cake' - this is a mistranslation of 'let them eat Squidbag'!
9. Squidbag was declared extinct in 1902.
10. It's bad luck for a flag to touch Squidbag.

I am interested in - do tell me aboutherhimitthem

Idiot Flu

(This really happened at the place where I work.  All names but mine have been changed out of paranoia.)

Marnie:  Vicky just called, and she's going to be out tomorrow, maybe the next day, too.  Her doctor says she has bird flu.

Jack: Bird flu?  Is that that stuff on the news?  The Avian flu?

Me: Yeah, H5N1.  She does not have bird flu.

Marnie: Well, her doctor says she does.

Jack: We're all going to have to get shots.  (To Me:) You've got a pregnant wife at home, you'll have to be extra careful.  She probably shouldn't even come in.

Marnie: Yeah, don't touch anything.  She's on the phone with Dan right now - I guess she won't be in for a awhile.  I think bird flu's pretty serious.

Me: She doesn't have bird flu.  And for the record, we've been touching stuff all day.

Marnie: Her doctor diagnosed it, and they're giving her Tamiflu.

Me: Her doctor's a quack moron, then.  This would make her the first documented case in the US, and I don't see that happening.  Also, in order to get it, she would have to have eaten contaminated bird flesh, had a chicken feces salad, or been in direct contact with someone who's here recently from China or Turkey.  That's the country, by the way, as opposed to the bird whose flu she doesn't have!

Dan: I just got off the phone with Vicky - she says she has the flu.  We might have to get shots.

Marnie: I thought it was the bird flu.

Me: She doesn't have the fucking bird flu!  As much as I couldn't find a better candidate than Vicky to become a modern-day Typhoid Mary, it's not going to happen!  A print shop in Northwest Florida is not going to become ground zero for a global pandemic!

Jack: (laughs)

Dan: Have you guys been talking about this for awhile?

Marnie: Her doctor said she had bird flu.

Okay...Who?

In all of this recent flap about the Monkeyface Administration spying on us, (it's not a Domestic Spying Program, you unpatriotic fuckers, it's a Terrorist Surveillance Program) the "President" keeps getting up in front of people, all flustered-like, and wondering how in Hell it is we could think - ever - that could break the law.  After all, if he wanted to break the law, he'd keep it a secret, right?  Not tell anybody?  Well then, why do you think he was briefing Congress?  I'm sure it had nothing to do with the old mushroom treatment, keeping them in the dark and feeding them shit - not at all.  Besides, you Osama-helpers, Bush consulted "legal experts" about whether or not tapping international phone calls without warrants was unconstitutional.

Leaving aside for the moment that this assertion omits not only the specific questions he asked them, but also their answers (we good Douglas Adams fans look for that shit) - who did he ask?  Were these real legal experts - like the ones on the Supreme Court, who would seem ideally suited for determining the Constitutionality of things, unless they're on the phone to Osama - or were they ones that the President consulted in his mind?  Play-friend legal experts?  Was Dick Cheney one of the legal experts?  Were the experts alive, or were they contacted via seance and Ouija board?  Any what qualifications did these "experts" have to have?  Does a Magic 8-Ball count as a legal "expert?"  What about someone who's watched a whole buttload of Perry Mason?  Or seen 12 Angry Men a bunch of times?  Does that count?  Shit, I could be a legal expert and not even know it.  I think we need a ruling on this one, refs.

If they are real people, why haven't they come forward to give us their rationale on this sticky question?  Would that give comfort to the terrorists, explaining the thinking behind raping the rights of Americans?

Anyone?

Something In The Air

There's something about a certain kind of weather, a certain time of day - I don't know what it is exactly, that fills me with an urge to urinate in the outdoors.  I have come to refer to them as "piss outside" days.  Perhaps it's something that we like to think we've evolved out of.  Or, maybe you were hoping at least that I had grown out of it.  I'm here to disabuse you of that, right now.  A crisp, fall day, or one like today - Northwest Florida in mid-January; about 57 degrees out, dusk, a slight wind, maybe a little rain in the forecast - just makes you (me) want to void your bladder, let your schlong peek at some trees, mark your territory - whatever.  Just something in the air prompting you to want to take out your junk and wave it at some shrubs.  If anyone else was around, that would ruin it, so it's not a flasher thing - it's just a "not going along with society" kind of a thing coupled with a cool 'nad breeze.  What could be better?  Presumably, it doesn't work the same way for the fairer sex - but I hope it does.  I wouldn't want anyone to be denied the transcendent joy and relief that accompanies peeing outside.  Perhaps going commando in a skirt would provide some of the same sensations, but I wouldn't know.  I don't even own a kilt.  I don't have the knees for one, anyhow.

What about it - am I alone on this one, literally out there taking a piss in the wind, or does anyone else get this?  While I wait for your comments, I guess I'm headed back outside.

Maniac Magnet

No one else I know seems to have as many encounters with maniacs as I have.  I think they smell me. 

Maybe not, but somehow, they detect something about me, some streak of anti-authoritarianism, some conspiracy-based gullibility, some kind of latent psychosis they they feel we have in common, and they wish to be with me.  They forget, however, that the functional, everyday maniac is like a Siamese Fighting Fish, and you can't have more than one in a very small place, or they will have conflict.  (Indeed, SFFs are so aggressive that they will attack their own reflections.  They are also apparently dumb.)  Regardless of the reason why, I seem to end up with more than my share of maniac interactions.  I have already told you famously of the sticker-rippers and the child-shovers, so let us now move to the person who made me late for work on Thursday morning.

The van was grey(ish), in front of me, and had one of those Christian fish on the back, eating one of the Darwin fish.  The fish was labeled "truth."  When your bumper art is a response to a response, it's time to fucking pull over and just discuss it.  It was weaving, often pulling slightly into oncoming traffic.  I backed off, in case this person decided that this was the morning to join Jesus.  The driver's head was shaved, and the rearview mirror featured a pair of pantyhose, tied in a knot and left to dangle.  Also dangling was something that kind of looked like Venetian blinds.  The driver kept pitching things over his shoulder into the back of the van, as if looking for something and not finding it.  And weaving.  Lots and lots of weaving.  Even more than this movie.  Finally, we got to the section in the road where it splits into two lanes.  My intention was to occupy wherever this guy wasn't.  As I passed, he waved pleasantly at me.  He caught up to me at the red light, and just as I looked over, he spewed some kind of beige liquid out of his mouth onto to the road through the open driver's side window.  His glasses came off in the process.  The light turned green, and he gunned it, veering into the grassy median.

He reminded me of the "fucking toothbrush" guy in the Courtyard Hotel in Georgia back in 1997.  I think it was the insane behavior and the vomit.  I'll tell the full story about that guy in the comments field if people want to hear it.  'Til then, read the Squidbag from a year ago today.

Bush Admits to Being a Punk

In this recent development, President Dubya Monkeyface Bush has gone ahead and just fessed up to being a punk.  And a liar.  At the Squidbag, we had long suspected that this un-elected momma's boy was nothing other than a lying punk-ass punk, and this gutting of the Iraqi reconstruction budget just cements it.  It was all about getting Saddam for Punk Senior, and wrecking Iraq because Afghanistan just didn't pull the American wang hard enough for us to ejaculate all of that pent-up nastiness we had over 9/11.  So we forged (yes) a connection between the loose coalition of people who did us wrong and a bad nasty man we wanted to invade, and we decided to do it.  All this bullshit about "spreading freedom" and "rebuilding Iraq" was just the prom dress and corsage on what turned out to be our sister.  I say all of that to say this: The President is a Punk.  Impeachment is too good for him, I'd like to call his ass out onto the White House lawn and hand him a straight razor to match mine.

Despite pulling most of the funding, Monkeyface insists that the reconstruction of Iraq will go forward, just as he had (not) planned all along.  That's going to work.  Sure.  I don't know how often you've seen Republican initiatives to do anything moving along without a monumental capital investment (with their friends pulling major profits), but yeah, I can see that happening.  Once again, I call bullshit on the President.  They funneled $20 billion dollars into this thing, only to make the country worse than when they started.  They blame the donors who pledged money for not ponying up to pay for this thing - but who wants to flush more dinero into a politically corrupt nation where the officials steal your money, where parts of it have to be rebuilt from the Stone Age, and where a quarter of your money goes to pay for security to stave off "insurgents" who don't want you there?  Yep, better just to quit, America, than the richest nation on the planet continuing to honor a promise (that no one, admittedly, ever thought out logistically) to rebuild something we broke down.

Man, I wouldn't let my four-year-old get away with that shit.