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McLogic

I work in a new location now.

Same company (sort of), new name on the door, new geography.  For the last three weeks I've been going insane at work dealing with learning the new equipment, printing on stuff that's totally new to me, hitting deadlines, finishing lists, and getting everything from meetings to phone lines taken care of so that the doors can officially open at 8 am on the 2nd of November.  For the most part, it's just me and this one other guy in a couple of big rooms all day long, yelling to be heard, moving furniture & fixtures, putting up giant graphics and attempting to do what would be our regular job under any other circumstances.  All this with an endless stream of vendors, insurance people, electricians, potential customers, people off the street, state auditors, crazy folks and corporate interference coming in the door, over the phone, and via email.  It might be fun without the giant NOV. 2ND looming on the horizon - as it stands, well - see above entry.

My new route to work takes me past a McDonalds.  Every morning.  Due to this, I have been collecting McMonopoly pieces and playing the game online with Max, and also scoring McBreakfast on the way in.  I confess, the latter is definitely incidental, and thus subordinate in importance to the former.  I mean, I'm hungry, but I could have had toast or something.  When Monopoly's over, I plan to explore the bagel option.  Or perhaps a nice cereal.

Most of the reason why would have to do with the shit customer service offered by my McDonald's.  Let's start with hash browns.  A little while ago, McFood decided to sell two hash browns for the price of one, or one dollar.  Essentially, the hash brown costs so little to make, you can sell one for fifty cents and still make a profit on it.  Because of this, you never seem to have any idea what you will get when you get an "order of hash browns."  Might be one, might be two.  If you order two orders of hash browns, thinking you might share one with someone else, you could end up with four hash browns.  A fucking bag of grease sopped fried spuds.  But, you might not.  That's consistency in service, yeah?  Oh, but there's more.

"I'd like a mocha."

"An iced mocha?"

"No, a regular mocha.  Large."

"With ice?"

"No!"

"So, a hot mocha?"

Why do I have to fucking say "hot?"  Isn't the default for coffee hot?  I don't have to order cooked food hot, because that's how it ends up anyway.  Coffee is boiled water filtered through crushed beans, and in my case, with a shot of fake chocolate in it 'cause I'm a big floppy pansy.  Are there people who start their day with iced coffees?  In October?  Again, McAssholes - What the fuck?

Finally, there is the affair of the check card, wherein faced with a transmission error, three grown people turned into retards, but it is too boring to recount here. Suffice it to say, that unless I win a million skillion freaking Monopodollars, I will count the Icelanders as better off.

Burnout

I can think of a lot of things I'd rather do on a drizzly chilly Fall morning than get up and go into where I work.

I'd rather watch a book or read a movie, or listen to rainfall on the rooftops and windowpanes with my kids on the couch inside under a bunch of cushions.  Perhaps a nice fort would be in order.  I'd rather throw a football back and forth in a field, eventually fishing it out of the creek with rocks and sure footholds.  Feed the ducks, maybe.  Bread.  I'd rather sit in my car listening to Ira Glass and fogging up the windows with the sweet vapor breath from a cup of too-hot chocolate.  I'd rather listen to my wife's even exhalations as she sleeps, enjoying the cool side of my pillow (I can flip it without truly waking), or enjoying the endless annoying repetition of two and a half minutes of music on a DVD menu  while I braille hunt for the remote - a phenomenon with which anyone who has ever fallen asleep to a DVD movie is familiar.  I'd rather go field screaming or a'bockwursting or filing out an entire crossword puzzle with the phrase "massive unyielding death."  Whether it fucking fits or not.  Yonk.  Ngyah.  I'd rather have a cigar, or a grilled cheese, or a quiet look at some balding trees.  I could take a picture, or hang out in a bookstore and read a whole book.  I could people watch, and more importantly, listen.

I could maybe pretend to be someone else for a whole day, or just hang out in places and apply for jobs I don't want.  There's all kinds of things I never do, and it makes me wonder just what "bank robbing weather" might be.  There's all kinds of harvest, right?  Alternately, there's just drinking a whole lot of soda.  I could do that.  Or blog, I could blog.

What I wouldn't do - given a choice, you understand - is get up when it's still dark for a while and shower and cook and wake other people up and dress and drop off my kids at schools in a big hurry, drive into work in a big hurry, and then spend the next eight and half to nine hours fighting with phone guys and computer guys and property managers and dumpster people and going over corporate guidelines over lunch that doesn't feel like lunch.  I wouldn't go round in round with a digital printer over which shade of red it would like to print today, and I wouldn't be getting solvent on the carpet.  I wouldn't even interact with solvent.  I don't think I would cut myself, I don't think I would chase a deadline, and I might not even talk to anyone.  I think I would be a lot more engaged with what I would choose to do, and my apathy wouldn't subsume my other emotions.

JP Bardwell: Racist Liar

"My definition of a racist is to hate black people, or treat black people different that anybody else..."

The words of a poor excuse for a human being, someone who creates neither justice or peace, Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell, who last week refused to issue a licence allowing a black man to marry a white woman.  It's nice, isn't it, that not only does he not consider himself racist, but that he has his own definition of racism on tap and ready to go?  I suppose by referring specifically to black people, he hopes to sort of cover his ample cracker ass here, (physically impossible for him to do literally when you regard his disturbingly tiny little T-Rex arms, the result of probably generations of good old deep South bayou sister-fucking, one can assume) completely ignoring the fact that he treated a black guy differently, and focusing instead on the potential, as-yet-to-exist mixed race child of this couple, by denying that theoretical kid the right to exist.  Which is okay, because technically, unborn kid wouldn't be black.  Completely.  I guess.  So he doesn't hate black people, just the ones who fuck white women.  And the half-black kids that would result from a pregnancy.  He goes on to say that his big objection here is that mixed race people often have troubles with acceptance, so he does not accept their very right to exist, by attempting to prevent the situations that might result in them.  Solid logic, no?  Sounds a lot like a racist to me, but then, I am a simple man and not given to overly sophisticated ideas.  A cowardly racist fuck, no less - one that ruins the lives of people and pushes them around and then, when he becomes an international symbol of how stupid we as humans still are, he tries spewing this insipid bile out at the world.  What a little bitch.

Let's be truthful, you hateful, poisonous little drip on evil's thigh; you have essentially retired, you don't like the idea of what you probably still think of as miscengenation, there's probably a pointy white sheet in your closet, and you decided to take one last little "fuck you" swipe at the world making strides toward equality by vomiting this little travesty out upon it.  Sound about right, you half-intelligent sponge?  I know, you're making the talk show circuit and hoping we'll buy the lie, but fuck that noise - just admit that you're a retard fueled by hate, and we can all move on as a people.

Seriously, what is the Louisiana standard for Justice of the Peace?  I know it's an elected position, but you guys rose up out of the swamps and voted for the Waterboy, here.  He's like if Kuato and a Klansman had a child.  Of course, a person like that would likely have trouble being accepted by anyone.  Including me.  Fuck you, Mr. Bardwell, and your abuse of power.

BrainSounds

This is me boiling stuff out of my head so I don't have to keep it in there anymore.  (not the pic - that's a Bell Labs guy) As such, it has no form, no flow, and little to no function or use.  Enjoy that.

I've been sick most of the week, and taking a perverse enjoyment in other people's swine flu-related discomfort at interacting with me.  Swine flu, by the way, is not what I have; however, by reading my blog today, you have been inoculated against H1N1.  Salud!  I'm okay coming clean about my internal schadenfreude as I watch others squirm simply because I have only this week embraced the truth that blunt honesty is only another form of antisocial behavior in which I indulge.  Truth is a social disease, and the only one worse is falsehood.

The best dreams are fever dreams.  True.

Today I got to iron out kinks in a brand spanking new digital printer that I can only assume costs more than I do.  It has been completely installed no more than three days and is the anchor of the new franchise store that I will be managing, and today during its first print run witnessed by someone besides me, the installer, or my second at the store, it made big bloody smears across the row of decals it was working on.  Just to give you an idea of the complexity of this machine, it turned out that the problem was that I had the vacuum on the platen set too low, so that when the print carriage traveled across the media, vinyl contacted the print head before the front row of heaters could cure the ink.  This fouled the head, which had to be manually cleaned, and I did a nozzle wash and normal clean just to be safe.  After that, I had to adjust the settings in the ICC profile and re-send the job after exchanging the media.  Bleagh.  I used to throw vinyl at plotters and hope for the best, using only the force and time-and-a-half.

Sickness came after a weekend spent in and out of rain and chilliness, where my kids and I spent a lot of relative quiet time together.  "Relative quiet time" here means that there were no parties, no games, not a lot of bullshit - more time to listen to each other.  I learned that Max is exasperated by the inability of his friends to read at his level, and that Abby's hands are called Todd and Steve and that they argue with each other a lot.  Mostly, they make up and everything's okay.

I've only sporadically been in touch with people, and those people seem to always remind about how bad I am at staying in touch with them, and they're right.  I like that they care enough to remind me.  I don't like that at least one person is lying to me about stuff I can contradict with five minutes of Internet research.  You know who the fuck you are.  Also - if you're my friend on Facebook, I only join things like Farmville and Yoville to help other people meet quotas, and after that, I don't even read requests before their inevitable deletion.  Nothing personal, it's just that games eat my brain, and my brain is becoming sparse.  And I have other games.  I had to look up Rampage: Total Destruction cheat codes just this evening.  Before my five minutes of Internet research!  Dammit!

I'm going to watch Silence of the Lambs, now.  I find that I can still remember parts of the book that aren't in the movie as their absence passes. 

Cockroach Thoughts

The cockroach irks me.  It vexes me.  I'm terribly vexed.

On the one hand, it seems to be an excellent argument against Creationism.  (I can get that out of almost anything.) Here on this whisk broom is a creature that survives on filth, thrives on human death and debris, is most comfortable in the dark, and can live through almost anything.  Shit - they go on without their heads, revive from 30 minutes underwater, and have (I think) 15 times the resistance to radiation of a human.  I've stepped on one and had it cling, alive, to the bottom of my sneaker like Indy Jones on a Nazi truck.  I wear Chucks, so I can feel it when they do that.  They just go on for interminable lengths of time, food and water optional.  The argument here is simple: If there were a God, and he created man in his own image, and man was meant to inherit the Earth, the Kingdom of Heaven and ultimately, the afterlife (in whatever religion), why assemble such a flawed construct - the fragile beast known as man - when a better model, the brutally effective cockroach, was available?  Presumably, because the deity is not a roach, and thus they are not made in His image, but rather in the image of what hides behind the drywall of Paradise.

On the other hand, why has Mother Nature, nay, depersonified evolution selected the lowly cockroach to be among the toughest motherfuckers on the planet, like Samuel Jackson bugs, and furthermore, why aren't we smart enough to wipe their asses out entirely?  Before they became termites, for instance.  We haven't even capably evolved enough to not be harmed by them - they can make us sick unto death by passing shit through their skin into ours.  Who owns the Earth?  The fucking cockroach, that's who.  I mean, we can control smallpox, and that's microscopic.  But cockroaches run rampant whenever the goddamn lights come on.  So evolution would appear to have selected them to eventually become the next dominant species, assuming the planet lasts another nthillion years, yeah?  This also bothers me, probably just from the competitive angle.  We use gobs of poison, spoiled food and sulfur on them, they walk on us.  Fuckers.  I know nature isn't logical, but it is - sort of by function - natural.  It feels unnatural to me for creepy little shiteaters to inherit the Earth.

And thoughts like this are why I often don't share what's in my head.

Obama's Nobel

Okay, okay, okay.

Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."  Efforts.  Not a result - efforts.  That's going to be important here. Do I think he "deserves" a Nobel Peace Prize?  Well, my initial response was, "no."  But I decided not to get nuts about it because I realized something very important: It makes no difference to me whatsoever.  I don't care.  People all over the world went nuts when this august body of Norwegian politicians randomly decided that our President deserved a Nobel Peace Prize.  For his efforts to create peace.  Whatever.  Who cares?  Rush Limbaugh does, 'cause he can get a week's worth of press out of it.  Obama's opponents, because they hate him and wish him only ill.  But ultimately, why do we care about the Nobel?  They're essentially a grant distributing body elected by the Norwegian Parliament to hand out money left in trust in a private fund.  Why do you even care what they think?  Or is this one of those things people get worked up about solely because it's on the news?  I spend a lot of time around people and still find myself consistently confused by their behavior, so this might need to be explained to me again.

"Deserve's got nothing to do with it," as a wise man once said.  It's all about effort, folks - not results.  Look at some of the past winners of the "peace" prize.  The IAEA took it 2005, because of their work trying to "prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way."  A resounding success, obviously, since the rollback of a nuclear world is one the things the Nobel's recognizing Obama for, four years later.  What about Henry Kissinger being in there, 1973?  Or Arafat, Peres, and Rabin (sans Clinton)?  For that lasting Middle East peace they pulled off?  It's not about the success rate, people.  And it can't be about motivation.  It's hard to say what DeKlerk would have done with his life if Botha hadn't had a stroke, and yet, there he is, on the list, sharing a prize with a man who spent 19 years in jail for his convictions.  Hmmm.

Peace is an elusive thing.  Technically, true peace would be an absence of conflict of any kind, but the Nobel committee rewards pacifism as a virtue, and often, that looks like doing nothing.  I for one, am a little lost on what the Dalai Lama actually does.  But I assume that's because I'm godless Western scum.

Politically conservative dickheads in this country need to understand something before they continue with one of their current arguments about this thing - "liberal" thinking, in the classic sense of the word, is more inclusive, and features ideas that are groundbreaking, at the outside edge of what can be achieved and even conceptualized.  Because you are conservative, it will often seem like the intellectual rest of the world is turned against you.  They are.  They reject conservatism - keeping a status quo, valuing traditionalism over the reality of the present and future - as a backward obsolete way to be, and refuse to participate.  When the rest of the world hated us while Bush was in office?  That should have been your first giant-ass clue.  You're wrong.  Not just in your ideas, but in the very process that allowed you to arrive at them.

Finally, the biggest problem with all of this Nobel / Obama mishigas is that we overlooked the fucking clown in space, people!  Cirque du International Space Station!  Priorities, guys.  If we get so caught up in hating on the President and a bunch of Norwegians that we can't appreciate the Space Clown, then I don't want to play anymore.  Unless it's some of the games on the Nobel site.