Archive for the 'nostalgia' Category

The death post

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Anonymous Coworker
on February 18, 2008 @ 9:52 am
in atheism!, beer, family, nostalgia, potty humor and suhmuhmuh bitch
. 38 Comments

It’s been a bad morning.

At some point last night I decided it would be an AWESOME idea to have a big, fat Screwdriver at 11:30. Sure, I’d started with some scotch at 6:30, then moved on to red wine, then on to a porter, then on to white wine, then back to red wine, then back to porter. It was at that point that I should have stopped, but my stupid drunk brain was like, “Dude. Dude. You know what would be awesome right now? A screwdriver! Yeah! Dude, it’s like, healthy ’cause it’s orange juice. Yeah, we should totally have one. Dude. Have I ever steered you wrong? Yeah. Awesome.”

And so there I was on the couch, screwdriver in one hand, remote in the other, barely able to focus on Ace of Cakes.

It should have come as no surprise to me that I had chest melting heartburn a few hours later, but upon waking I was like, “How on earth could THIS have happened?”

Nearly 8 hours later and the heartburn still isn’t completely gone, and I’ve got, as Angy Hangy put it so succinctly in a somewhat related email from last Friday, “liquid Drano” in my guts. I already dominated the bathroom in my house so thoroughly that when Sherlock poked his head through the door he immediately turned around and walked out. Before this morning I would have sworn that it was impossible for cats to gag.

Anyway, as I’m trying to pull my stupid, hungover ass together this morning, I got a call from my dad that my aunt had just died. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a few weeks ago, and the cancer was extremely aggressive, so it’s kind of good to know that she’s not in pain anymore.

I know I deal with death differently than other people, and my aunt is no exception. It’s hard to say right now if I feel sad. I feel bad for my dad, of course, as well as my other aunts and uncles, my cousins, and their kids. I know they’re really upset. And I feel bad for my Grandmother, because it’s got to be painful to lose a child. But I’m really hard pressed to describe my emotions as sad. I’m contemplative, somber, and pensive, and I sympathize with my relatives, but I’m not sad. And now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever been sad to hear about someone dying. I always express my condolences, because I know death can really tear other people apart inside, but sadness eludes me.

I’ve never had someone extremely close to me die, like my brothers, parents, or my wife. But even when I was a little kid and my grandfather died, I kind of just accepted it. And I think about people that have died, and I miss them, of course, but my mind never dwells on it. It’s kind of like, “Oh, I miss the way he used to joke about how we had three kinds of stuffing at Thanksgiving.” And then my thoughts move on.

I speculate that part of my lack of reaction is because I don’t believe in an afterlife. I’ve accepted death as an inevitability, so the deaths of others, or thinking about my own death, don’t cause me discomfort. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want my loved ones to die, but there’s nothing I can really do about it, so there’s no point in worrying over it.

I’m interested in having a frank discussion about death in the comments if anyone else is interested. How do you react to death or loss? Do you believe in the afterlife? If so or if not, does this comfort you? I hope it goes without saying that today most necrophilia jokes won’t be tolerated, but humor is always welcome.

Live Music Meme

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Anonymous Coworker
on September 20, 2007 @ 9:15 am
in music, nostalgia and the worldwide information super-tubeterwebs
. 24 Comments

Typically I have zero interest in memes, with the one exception being music memes. I think music is a decent indicator of one facet of someone’s personality, so I like to read about what music other people are into, and I like to share what music I’m into. In the end, music is like food. If you don’t like something, you don’t like it. But if you try something new and you like it, well, then you’ve just got a bigger menu for the future. Ya heard? Anyway, here’s the meme, courtesy of the Slender Reed:

Copy this list, leave in the bands you’ve seen perform live, delete the ones you haven’t, and add new ones that you have seen until you reach 25. An asterisk means the previous person had it on their list. Two asterisks means the last two people who did this before you had that band on their list.

Here’s my list (in no particular order). Play along if you like, and let me know if you do.

1. Bob Dylan***
2. The B-52’s*
3. Mighty Mighty Bosstones*
4. Soul Coughing
5. De La Soul
6. A Tribe Called Quest
7. Talib Kweli
8. Dave Matthews Band
9. Roots
10. G. Love and Special Sauce
11. Long Beach Dub Allstars
12. Cake
13. Pete Yorn
14. The Toasters
15. Toots and the Maytals
16. The Pietasters
17. Eric Clapton
18. The Beastie Boys
19. Tori Amos
20. Counting Crows
21. Ani Difranco
22. Talking Heads
23. Outkast
24. George Clinton and the P. Funk Allstars
25. Sugar Ray

(Bonus Sugar Ray anecdote! When I was in college Sugar Ray and Orgy came through as part of some MTV nationwide college concert promotion bullshit. Tickets were free, so I said what the hell and went. As you may have guessed, it pretty much sucked all the ass in the universe, but an acquaintance of mine was really into Sugar Ray, so my friends and I hung out with her while she diligently waited outside his tour bus for a glimpse of him. After about 30 minutes of waiting two skanky chicks stumbled out of the bus and were followed closely by some douchey manager type guy. He pointed at my acquaintance and her female friend and said, “You two. On the bus. Your friends can leave.” So I told her I’d see her in class, and when I did a few days later she told me that the band bought the four pills of E that she had, plus the dime of marijuana, plus the joint she had. Apparently their douchey manager had failed to find any drugs in the area, so they paid out the nose for what she had. However, the really amusing part of the story is that apparently on entrance to the bus, Mark McGrath stumbled out of the back bedroom portion of the bus, grabbed my acquaintance’s friend, and proceeded to rail her so vigorously that the bus was rocking back and forth while my acquaintance sold drugs to the rest of the band.)

That makes me think of…

Published
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Anonymous Coworker
on September 13, 2007 @ 9:43 am
in food, nostalgia, potty humor and work
. 11 Comments

This morning I scoured the fridge and freezer to find something to eat for lunch today. Our cupboards are rapidly growing bare, so my only choice was an Hot Pocket from the freezer. On the way into work the Hot Pocket made me think of one of my new favorite websites, passiveaggressivenotes.com.

The Hot Pocket thievery made me think of my youth as a lifeguard where we had to go to extreme lengths to protect our food. It started with simply hiding food in the back of the fridge, and when that didn’t work it led to increasingly disgusting notes written with indelible ink onto the food containers. A sample progression of food defense messages over the course of the summer would go something like this:

ACW’s food

Do not eat

Medically prescribed lunch- do not eat

I already ate some of this an I have a cold, so unless you want a cold, don’t eat it.

I licked all my food.

I farted on this food- don’t eat it unless you want to eat my fart.

I hid a pube somewhere in this sandwich.

My pubes are all over this food.

I rubbed my nuts on this.

We were a well-adjusted bunch. Anyway, all that nonsense reminded me that some of the most frequent attendees of the pool were employees for the Entenmann’s company. Every day they’d walk in with their arms loaded with baked goods from their job and they’d dump everything on us, encouraging us to eat as much as we wanted, and assuring us that they’d be bringing more the next day. It didn’t take long for the two fridges at the pool to become packed with cheesecakes, crumbcakes, donuts, muffins, cookies, and other various and delicious baked goods. So we stopped bringing our lunches in and instead gorged on bakery products instead. We usually had about a half dozen cheesecakes at a time, so there was no need to try and fight over who got what. We all got whatever we wanted. It wasn’t uncommon for me to eat an entire cheesecake over the course of a few hours. Or to just eat a coffee cake. Two-thousand-plus calories of sugar and fat. But what the hell did I care? I was 18 and had a ridiculous metabolism.

We finally reached the point where we just couldn’t eat another thing from Entenmann’s. To this day I have no interest in pretty much all of their food. I found their mini-chocolate-glazed donut holes leave a waxy, strange tasting film inside my mouth, and their muffins make me cough. I have no idea what the hell that is about, but I think I’ve become allergic to their food.

This is what I thought about on the way to work today.

I’ve been screwed out of too many birthdays

Published
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Anonymous Coworker
on September 11, 2007 @ 10:55 am
in bitches, nostalgia and suhmuhmuh bitch
. 20 Comments

As I creep ever closer to 27, my age becomes paradoxical. On the one hand, I spent the past weekend power-washing my deck and the side of my house, doing homework, and completing general chores around the house. Is this where I expected to be when I was 27? I don’t know, but I can assuredly say that I thought homework would be a thing of the past. On the other hand, I could really not give a douche about how old I am. 27? So the fuck what? I’m no different now than I was a year ago, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be no different a year from now. Time is relative. Einstein, bitches! What what!

Anyway, I was perusing the old blog posts around my birthday to find that I hadn’t told a birthday story that really explains a lot about who I am, so here it is:

When my brothers and I were kids our parents had purchased a pool membership for the family, and we joined the swim team, and pretty much spent all day, every day at the pool. Our friends were all there, and my mom didn’t have a job aside from the three of us, so it was a pretty decent time had by all… except in one regard. As you should know by now, my birthday is September 14th. (Memorize it, bitches.) That falls outside of the Memorial Day to Labor Day pool season, so the option of me having a pool party on my actual birthday was impossible. My younger brother, Mokie, on the other hand was born on August 27th. Just a week or so before labor day and the perfect date to get the whole extended family from both sides together for a birthday party/end of summer party at the pool.

So every summer for about 6 years we’d have Mokie’s birthday at the pool, and we’d invite all his friends, and all the aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, and, oh yeah, ACW’s birthday is only a few weeks later, so why don’t we combine his party into Mokie’s party? A good idea in theory, but terrible in execution.

Everyone would show up to the party, arms laden with gifts, Mokie’s eyes wide with childlike wonder. Every now and then someone would toss a card in my direction before moving on to pile Mokie with more gifts and I’d open the card to find a message like, “Our condolences for your loss” scratched out and replaced with “Happy Birthda” as the “y” trailed off in a clear lack of interest. Sometimes they wouldn’t even take the time to scratch out the name of the person to whom it was initially addressed.

We’d look at the gifts to see which one was for whom, and invariably there would be no gifts for me. None. Eventually people would realize their error, take one of Mokie’s crappier presents like the tiny squirt gun with a broken trigger from the 12 Gun Squirt Pack of Awesomeness and wrap it in toilet paper and stuff it into my hands. Then in the ensuing squirt gun fight I’d find the contents of my gun leaking all over my hands as Mokie and my cousins would round the corner with Mokie’s arsenal of water cannons ready to give me a non-consensual super-soaker colon-cleansing.

Every year I had to grin and bear it while Mokie got a massive three-tiered cake and I was allotted one square inch into which half of my name would be squeezed. They’d sing to him and then “forget” to sing to me. Carrying him off on their shoulders with the cake leaving me to dig through the mountain of wrapping paper in the hopes of finding an accidentally discarded accessory from one of Mokie’s brand new action figures. I’d find the sheath to a tiny bowie knife, or an infinitesimally small pin to a tiny grenade, from one of his new action figures, and I’d treasure it because I knew full well that it’s the best I could hope for.

The day would end with Mokie beaming, belly stuffed with sugar and soda, and me preparing to loathe the following weeks, because the pool party wasn’t the worst of it.

On my birthday, sometime around 6 or 7pm someone would realize that not only had no one said “Happy Birthday” to me all day long, but no one had bought any gifts, or a cake, or ice cream. So my parents would pack us all into the car and head over to my grandparent’s house. They’d get some old-people ice-cream flavors like pistachio, milk, and cod-liver oil down out of the freezer, where it had been sitting since my previous birthday, as well as the birthday before that, and they’d carve out a few grey, icy chunks onto a plate and serve it to us on a piece of stale bread, a single, broken candlestick dug out from beneath the china closet, now flickering wanly before me, on which to make a wish. This was my birthday party. These are the things that crush the souls of children.

So 6 years ago when I turned 21 and everyone was still thinking “Jeez, is it okay to smile yet?” I was thinking, “FUCK YOU. There is no way you’re going to ruin my fucking birthday. I’ve been through that shit. I’m done with it. Fuck it, let’s party.”

I have the same attitude today, so keep that in mind when Friday rolls around. Also, you have four days to buy me some crap, so get to clickin’.

Who’s hungry for sushi?

Published
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Anonymous Coworker
on August 21, 2007 @ 9:55 am
in Glen Burnie, art, nostalgia and sex
. 20 Comments

Back when I started this blog I had just moved into an apartment in Baltimore with my good buddy Kmart. We’ve since moved out of the apartment; I chose to move into a house in Glen Burnie, and Kmart chose the life of a hitchhiker, befriending and beheading travelers (though not always necessarily in that order) as he aimlessly wanders the US. As an apartment-warming gift my parents bought everything fish-related that they could find in Walmart. They thought it would be nice for my bathroom to have a theme, or something. I don’t know, all those Trading Spaces shows were big at the time.

So they gave me a shower-curtain with an aquarium scene on it. And a bathroom rug with an aquarium scene on it. And towels with fish on them. And fish-shaped candles. And wall stickers in the shape of fish. If I was surrounded by that much fish in real life, the mercury would have killed me a long time ago. And I probably would have smelled bad, more so than normal.

Anyway, over the years I’ve lost or lost use for most of the stuff they gave to me, except for the bathroom rug. Every morning I wander into my bathroom, take a shower, and step out on to this mat:

bathmat

At this point you’re probably thinking, “Man, I liked it better when he wasn’t blogging.”

Oh really? Well you can go fuck yourself then.

Right, so anyway, you’re probably thinking, “Why the hell is he blogging about his rug? This blog is boring.”

Again, you’re cordially invited to go fuck yourself.

I’m blogging about my rug because I have a problem with it. Like one of those magic eye pictures where you stare at it and see nothing but squiggles and colors until suddenly BAM! a schooner appears as if from nowhere. Then after that every time you look at the thing you immediately see the schooner. No matter how hard you try, your brain immediately focuses on the image as opposed to the colorful squiggles. Every time I look at the rug my eyes immediately go to the lower right section that I’ve taken the liberty of blowing up and posting here:

rug close-up

So what’s the big deal? One day I was looking at the colorful aquarium scene and them suddenly BAM! the sea anenome in the corner becomes a giant, erect sea-penis that’s about to violate the bejeezus out of that poor fish. Now I can’t see anything else. My eyes immediately go there, and the innocuous organism becomes an engorged organ. I look at it and think, “Swim little fish! Swim like the wind! Swim as far and as fast as you can! That ocean-wang is about to WRECK you! There’s no way you’ll recover from a full-on diddling from that deep-sea dong! You’re a goner! You’ll be fish-sticks in minutes! Noooo fish! NOOOOOO!”

The worst part is, it looks like that sea-wiener is just COVERED with some type of horrible Atlantean STD. I don’t know whether it’s from undersexed merladies, or curious merboys, or filthy merpedophiles, but that sea-wiener is in rough shape. (By the way, if your wang, or your partner’s wang looks like that, you should probably get that checked out.)

Finally, what the hell is wrong with my life that almost invariably one of my first conscious thoughts every morning is about a textile fish getting reamed? I need to get a new rug.

VEIP, now scammier than ever

Published
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Anonymous Coworker
on July 13, 2007 @ 11:26 am
in bitches, money and nostalgia
. 19 Comments

This morning I went to get my vehicle emission inspection and was happy to see that, for once, I hadn’t showed up at a time when the entire world was getting emission inspections. I only had to wait behind one car before being non-greeted by the surly high-school dropout working my lane. She swiped my credit card and then drove my car to the far end for the “inspection”.

In days of yore they’d hook up a tube and funnel system to the exhaust to test for pollutant levels higher than normal. Those were the days. As long as the exhaust system on the car worked, the tube’n'funnel seemed like an honest way to test for pollutants. The last two cars I drove, however, did not have exhaust systems that worked. My parent’s van had a problem with it’s exhaust, I think the manifold was cracked when I took it in to be tested, and because no exhaust was going into the tube’n'funnel there were no pollutants going into the tube’n'funnel, so I passed. My next car, an 87 Accord, had an exhaust system that was completely rusted from tailpipe to manifold, and wasn’t even connected to the exhaust manifold anymore. It sounded like I had one of those stupid fart-pipes on my car, but I didn’t have to pay $200 to get it to sound like that. Idiots. It also passed with flying colors.

Today they only use the tube’n'funnel system for cars with 4WD, AWD, or trucks over 10,000 pounds. All the other cars get a little gadget plugged into their dashboard or engine to take a reading from the onboard computer. The surly young woman who was checking my car was kneeling on the ground leaning into my car trying to find a place to plug in the gadget. She was contorting herself in every direction to try to find a place to plug this thing in. I guess she didn’t know I was watching her because she eventually gave up without ever plugging the thing in. Then she printed out my receipt, told me my car passed and said I didn’t have to come back for two years.

Now I have a dilemma. Do I call someone to say, “Hey, your employees are idiots. My car wasn’t even tested.” and wait for them to tell me to come back in and be tested again? Or do I keep my mouth shut and consider the $14 fee a lost cause?

Stupid goddamned state government.

Are we having fun yet?

Published
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Anonymous Coworker
on May 25, 2007 @ 10:01 am
in bitches, food, nerd stuff, nostalgia, school, suhmuhmuh bitch and work
. 20 Comments

Well, it’s the Friday before a long weekend, and all is right with the world. Almost. Sort of.

My next class starts on Wednesday, and I feel compelled to pack as much fun into the weekend as humanly possible before I start doing the simultaneous school and work thing again. But packing fun into the weekend isn’t fun. It’s like work. Because when you spend any amount of time beyond 5 seconds trying to plan your fun, you’re not having fun anymore. It’s like trying to force clowns into a clown car, and then when the clown car is full, stuffing the clown car with sausage making equipment and forcing the clowns to make sausage. Stuffing minced-meat into miles of sausage casings, and then stuffing those sausages into a mini-fridge in the center of the clown car. That is not fun. It is sweaty, and un-hygenic, and disgusting, and I applaud the FDA for shutting down Buttons & Bingo Brand Sausages- The Sausage Made from by Clowns.

I can’t seem to relinquish the undergraduate lifestyle; the desire to do whatever I want, whenever I want, damn the consequences. These days everything has to be planned, and everybody wants advance notice, and nobody wants to do things at the drop of a hat. It’s for those reasons that every weekend of my summer is already booked. It makes me feel like such a Poindexter to have such a delicately scheduled social calendar.

And I know what you’re thinking: “Don’t be such a whiny little bitch ACW. The world is full of socially-retarded, maladroit ultranerds who don’t even buy calendars anymore because they never get to use them anyway. You should feel positively honored that other people want to hang out with you.”

Believe me, I am. I’d just rather hang out than have to go all douchey and pull up my calendar every time somebody says, “Hey wanna hang out on Friday?” Admittedly though, part of the problem is my poor memory. If I wasn’t so bad at remembering things, I could probably just say, “Yeah, I’m free”, but I’ve got the memory of a 5 1/2 inch floppy disk, so I have to consult the calendar every time. But the other part of the problem is other people. In college, everybody played it by ear. Whatever happened, happened, and a good time would be had regardless. These days fun is the imperative, and if we don’t have a fun-check every five minutes, we might accidentally let precious fun-time go by without consciously acknowledging that we’re having fun, and then we have to get out the balance book for our fun-time and make a little frowny face between 2:38 and 2:41, and then make a note that we made a note that we weren’t having any fun.
But once the fun-time balance book goes away- watch out! Fun times will be had. It’s guaranteed in our Terms of Use.

I imagine we’re going to reach a point in our society where people are fully dressed in business clothes, bluetooth headset firmly lodged in our ear, power-walking down the street, leaving one Starbucks on our way to another one, bellowing, “I AM HAVING FUN! THIS IS FUN!” over and over again while chugging energy drinks, and high-fiving strangers that look like us- eyes bulging out of their heads, forehead veins throbbing mightily, mouth pulled into a rigid rictus that balances tenuously between terror and insanity.

That’s not what I want! I just want to hang out! Fuck! Relaxing shouldn’t be so hard.

GoBots make Transformers look like a pile of puke

Published
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Anonymous Coworker
on May 4, 2007 @ 10:12 am
in food, nerd stuff and nostalgia
. 30 Comments

I’ve been trying for weeks to make a subtle reference to the GoBots in one of my posts, but the opportunity just hasn’t presented itself. So in lieu of any actual content, here are some links to a bunch of GoBots crap, and a quick anecdote.

GoBots on Wikipedia
GoBots on IMDB
GoBots on ebay
GoBots on Amazon
GoBots intro on YouTube
GoBots in France

In the first grade I was a huge GoBots fan. I watched the show religiously, had the toys, and knew all the character’s names. I even had a GoBots lunchbox. It was red, and I had two tiny smiley-face stickers on the front in the “O” of “Go” and “Bots”. In fact, it was this very lunchbox.

In the first grade I went to Catholic School (by the way, if you want to ensure you have an atheist child, send them to Catholic school), and there was a little cubby hole cut out of the wall next to the radiator, and that little shelf was where we kept all the lunch boxes. When lunch time would roll around the kids would all make a mad dash to the cubby and grab their lunch box before heading back to their desk. So one day I plop down at my desk with my GoBots lunch box and open it up to the cornucopia of delight contained within. I surveyed the bounty: sandwich, snack, drink, dessert. What more could a little kid want?

I always ate my sandwich first. I don’t know why, but that’s what I did. I took a bite out of the sandwich and gagged. It tasted horrible! It was like somebody had made lunch meat out of old cat food and feet and then stuffed it into my sandwich. Just as I was looking for the teacher to let her know that something was wrong with my sandwich, I saw her looking for me. She was standing next to my friend Steve, and he was holding a familiar-looking red lunch box. I walked over with the lunch box that I thought was mine and said there was something wrong with my sandwich. Steve was complaining that the lunch box he was holding wasn’t his because his lunch box didn’t have stickers on it. Our teacher, Mrs. Decker, quickly realized what was going on and got the right lunch boxes into the right hands, and everything looked like all would be right with the world.

I quickly had my 6 year old dreams crushed.

Mrs. Decker insisted that Steve get something from my lunch box because I had taken a bite out of his sandwich. “But it was an accident!” I pleaded. Mrs. Decker was having nothing of it. “Go ahead Steven, pick anything,” she said, pointing into my now open lunch box. My gut was in knots. I felt like I was being choked by the tiny maroon clip-on tie they forced us to wear. I could feel the cold metal of the clip pressing against my throat.

I managed to stammer, “I didn’t even like his sandwich!”

“Hush! Steven, go ahead and pick something.”

When he reached for the peppermint patty I almost threw up. I could barely hold back the tears. I managed to make it to my desk before I actually started crying outright. It wasn’t fair! I had only taken one bite of his sandwich, and it wasn’t even good! For that he got to take my whole peppermint patty?! The classmates around me tried to point out the relative benefits of my peanut-butter and jelly or my Cheetos, but it was no good. I was inconsolable.

The details escape me after that, but I believe I was sent to the nurse to calm down a bit. I think I may have fallen asleep. I remember my mother telling me later, after having spoken to Steve’s mom, that Steve’s sandwich was braunschweiger; that pasty mash of rotten-tasting meat that my father like to eat on toast. I had my peppermint patty forcibly taken from me for eating braunschweiger. What kind of fucked-up world was I growing up in?

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